
In 1818, when Keats was 22-years old, he & his friend Charles Brown embarked on a walking tour through northern Engl&, Ireland & Scotl&, starting in Lancaster & finishing 44 days & over 600 miles later, in Scotl&, just north of Inverness. The book recreates Keats' tour & consists of three sections. In an informative introduction, Carol Kyros Walker discusses Keats' circumstances & places his trip in the context of the social & political events of the time. At the centre of the book are over 150 photographs, many in colour, taken by Walker as she retraced Keats' footsteps & tried to simulate the circumstances under which Keats would have viewed the scenes, photographing on the date & time of day of his arrival. Finally there are the letters & poems that Keats wrote during the tour & the journal that Brown later published, all annotated to relate them both to Keats' other works, & to the contemporary circumstances of the journey. The tour, which Keats envisaged as a prologue to his future writing, had dire consequences for his health & probably hastened his death three years later. Yet it inspired a sequence of lively letters & poems that reveal a high-spirited, curious, reflective, occasionally bawdy & immensely gifted young writer.