Charles Armitage Brown
| Charles A. Brown | |
|---|---|
| Born |
17 April 1787 Lambeth |
| Died | 5 June 1842 (aged 55) New Plymouth, New Zealand |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | businessman |
| Known for | friend of Keats |
Charles Armitage Brown (14 April 1787 – 5 June 1842) was a very close friend of the poet John Keats, as well as being a friend of artist Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Walter Savage Landor and Edward John Trelawny. He was the father of Charles (Carlino) Brown, a pioneer and politician of New Plymouth, New Zealand.
Brown was born in Lambeth (London). He had very little formal education and to a large extent was self-taught. He began a career as a merchant, starting as a clerk at the age of fourteen, earning £40 per year. At eighteen he joined his brother in St. Petersburg, Russia in a fur-trading business where they were to accumulate the sum of £20,000, only to lose most of it in an unwise speculation in bristles. They returned to England almost penniless, though Brown capitalized on his Russian experience by writing a comic opera, Narensky, or, The Road to Yaroslaf, which was produced at Drury Lane in January 1814, earning him £300 and free admission for life to this theatre.
Brown is best known for his close friendship with the poet John Keats. When Charles Brown first met Keats in the late summer of 1817, Keats was twenty-one, and Brown thirty.
Shortly after their meeting, Keats and Brown were planning to see Scotland together. Their famous tour was described in their letters and in “Walks in the North”. In 1818, after Keats's brother died of tuberculosis or consumption as it was called in his day, Keats moved into Brown’s half of Wentworth Place, taking the front parlor, where he lived for the next seventeen months. During this time Brown collaborated with Keats on a play, Otho the Great, which was not staged until the 1950s.
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