Keats and The Rev. Dr. Footnote.
June 2026 (long read)5 William Turton (1762-1835) M.B., conchologist, author of various medical and scientific books, whose collection of shells is now in the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. |
footnote to Keats’s letter to Reynolds, Teignmouth 27 Apr. 1818.
The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, Hyder E. Rollins (1958) v.1, p.274.
The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, Hyder E. Rollins (1958) v.1, p.274.
If you were to classify scholarly footnotes, this is the epitome of a tight biographical specimen, in this case, for a minor character in John Keats’s life. The subject, William Turton, tended to the ailing Tom Keats while he was seeing out the winter of 1818 in Devon. The same Turton occurs as an under-researched figure in the history of my own ‘pond’ of Swansea, south Wales. As it is, Swansea surfaces in Romantic biographies in rather negative ways: Robert Southey’s unsuccessful attempt to lease a house in the nearby upper Neath valley or the tragic end of Fanny Imlay.
Now, as I find that more information about Turton has become accessible, it seems to be a good time to cast about for more details of what turns out to be an engaging life. Indeed, so filled was his life that more information will inevitably be examined in time, but what we currently have has warranted Turton’s own following shoal of footnotes (in the case of this blog post, they are replaced by wiki links and parentheses).
Turton was a man of many talents, one of which was crossing paths with unexpected literary figures, including Keats. In passing, he had some influence on Keats’s thoughts and moods as recorded in the poet’s correspondence of the time.
‘Curious & Intelligent’
Turton’s footnote belongs to a letter Keats wrote during his stay in Teignmouth, Devon. Everyone was hoping to strengthen Tom’s constitution against consumption, which is what we know today as the bodily wasting associated with a tuberculosis bacteria infection. Despite the atmosphere being moist, an early town guide of Teignmouth declared that ‘in pulmonary complaints, the mildness of the air is esteemed a good restorative’. It was in a very wet mid-March that Keats took over from his brother, George, as a companion to their younger brother.
A Guide to the Watering Places, on the Coast, between the Exe and the Dart. 1817. (William Noble Books)
The town guide tells us that the location where the Keats brothers stayed in Teignmouth was considered one of the most desirable situations for lodging houses. The long street was then called The Strand all along its length. It stretched through the maze of alleyways out into the spit of land, which had the river-located harbour on one side and the open sea on the other. ‘The Promenade, Bathing Place, Public Library, and Theatre were near at hand.’ Towards the back of the guide, there is an advert for a select attraction for visitors, which conveniently opens a door to Turton’s extensive hinterland.
A Guide to the Watering Places, on the Coast, between the Exe and the Dart. 1817.
In 1809, Turton had been elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society, the country’s leading natural history institution. His knowledge was wide; however, his lifelong focus was centred on conchology. This was not just the collecting of seashells but divining, from the experience of examining many specimens, the relationships between their various forms. It can be compared to a multi-dimensional chess game, but, of course, it could be seen as an almost priestly task, as the perceived patterns of flora and fauna revealed in them the hand of ‘Him’ in creation. Turton moved regularly between coastal towns throughout his life, seemingly to keep extending his collection. The dates of his movements have been estimated from the title pages of his many publications. His first prolonged practice was in Swansea until 1808, after which he moved to Dublin. He must have been relatively new to Teignmouth when Tom Keats was his patient.
‘Dialogue between himself and an apothecary’
Portrait of Dr William Turton (1762-1835). Courtesy of The University of Melbourne Art Collection
If Oxbridge-trained physicians, such as Turton, saw themselves as the generals of the medical world, even with the new training requirements which Keats underwent, the apothecaries could be viewed as the foot soldiers. He had been a practising surgeon at Guy’s Hospital nevertheless Keats would have known his professional place in this increasingly outdated and complex hierarchy.
Turton’s attitude towards tubercular patients is detailed in his Some Observations on Consumption etc. (Dublin, 1813). This publication is in the form of a conversation between two unnamed figures, A and B, (as a precedent, Turton cites ‘The learned professor Brasavolus … who wrote his commentaries on Hippocrates … in a supposed dialogue between himself and an apothecary’).
The section on consumption starts with the honest but bleak words, ‘we can only prognosticate the most melancholy consequences’.
Some Observations on Consumption, Scrofula Or King's Evil, Gout…
Dublin 1802.
Admirably, he looks to the day when the disease is understood, warning against the eternal complacency, ‘argumentum ad ignorantiam’. In this case: ‘We know very little about it, and therefore very little about it is to be known’. After such clear thinking, the following contemporary moral view of illness comes as a jolt. The innocent victims may be guilty of a sin no greater than ‘thin clothing or indulgence of irregularities of appetite’. He continues, ‘I think I have never seen an ugly, nor a foolish person, nor a wicked person in genuine consumption’. Many tubercular patients, including Tom Keats, must have warmed to him. One trusts that the desperate patients may not have mistaken a sympathetic doctor as a cause for uncalled-for hope.
Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, ‘Tom has taken a fancy to a Physician here, Dr Turton, and I think is getting better – therefore I shall perhaps remain here some Months’ (27 April 1818). We do not know what the doctor advised Tom in Teignmouth, but he did benefit from rest. In his learned text, Turton summarises existing theories on the cause of consumption; a brilliant man searching in the dark, as others did at this time. In the night of general ignorance, all he could do is give what medications ‘such as may allay and soften occasional sufferings, and sooth the few remaining pangs of mortality’.
Doctor Turton
If Tom took a fancy to his doctor, this does not necessarily include Keats himself. If it were otherwise, I think we would have known. They had very different backgrounds, but there are, of course, superficially, areas of shared experience and interest between them. Namely, medicine, nature and poetry; however, these may have equally well distanced themselves from each other.
Born in Olveston, Gloucestershire, on 21 May 1762, William Turton was the fifth child of the family. His father was a solicitor, as two of his brothers were to become. His mother was a descendant of the 11th Baron Zouche, which appears as a given name down the family. In 1781, William entered Oriel College, one of the oldest in the University of Oxford. The year before his subsequent BA, in 1785, he was ordained a deacon of Gloucester Cathedral. Two years later, he was ordained as a priest of the Church of England. It is estimated that two-thirds of the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge became clergymen at this time. However, by 1791, he was granted, in addition to his MA, a MB, Medicinae Baccalaureus (Bachelor of Medicine). That a ‘Licence to practice medicine’ from the University of Oxford was awarded five years later suggests he had undergone some clinical experience during that period. But, typically for Turton’s life, this straightforward narrative can be cast into some doubt. In parallel with his presumed 5-year period of clinical experience, he had other calls on his time.
The Reverend Turton
In 1793, he was instituted as the vicar of St. Michael’s at Rendham, Suffolk. (As has been noted elsewhere, this is not mentioned in the usual biographical references). He had the good fortune that his immediate family were patrons of the parish, a role local squires typically performed (there is a suggestion that the family owned land around the village). At his institution as parish priest, he was presented by his elder brother, Zouch Turton, a solicitor at Chepstow, Monmouthshire. This brings to mind the possibility that his family were hoping for a clerical career for their clever youngest sibling.
Was he an absent incumbent? They were common at the time, when residency was preferred but not demanded; if need be, curates could perform parish duties. At Rendham, one of Turton’s curates was a certain George Crabbe, the rare poet of the unexceptional. At the time, he was preparing his most lasting work, the series of village portraits known as The Borough. One doesn’t necessarily look for a likeness of Turton in Crabbe’s character sketch of the vicar, but the first passage, beginning ‘To what famed college our vicar do we owe’, stands out.
The Borough, George Crabbe, 1810.
Crabbe appears to have been an absent curate. He did not perform any parish duties during his time at Rendham, as his name does not appear in the registers. In fact, he was using his time to finish off the long poem entitled The Parish Register. Turton would have admired Crabbe’s Linnaean interests, both in botany and particularly as a coleopterist, a recorder of beetles, but the fate of his collection is unknown.
Calosoma sycophanta, said to be first recorded in Suffolk by George Crabbe.
In fact, none of the literary figures that Turton came in contact with made an impression on him, it seems. It is useless to wish that Turton had written a memoir; he did not have the writer’s compelling relish for people.
The degree to which Turton was established in the area is revealed in his marriage in May 1794. The now-styled ‘Rev William Turton MD’ wed Jane Cole, the daughter of the Rev Denny Cole of nearby Pettistree Hall. (The usual biographical references state that he married ‘a Miss Salmon’, an error so old that it has been disseminated widely.)
Portraits of Dr William Turton and Mrs Jane Turton (née Cole) in silhouette, c1820. Courtesy of The University of Melbourne Art Collection, gift of Mr Patrick M Hamilton, grandson of Dr Charles Travers Mackin 1972.
It is recognised that there was a decline in the quality of clinical teaching at Oxford University into the 1800s to the point that it became a sinecure (Oxford Medical Sciences; Our History). Whatever the circumstances, when Turton received his licence to practise, he promptly resigned his parish. Freed from his incumbency, it appears that Turton felt he could broach whatever pursuit he chose. It could be the case that Turton had rather disappointed his family by leaving the clergy. Certainly, his Herculean efforts to establish himself outside the church could partly suggest that, even if at times he appears to have tried a little too hard.
A year into his new life, the long and thorough education led him to create, not a translation from the classical canon, nor a biblical concordance, but A Medical Glossary (622 pages (8vo), 1797). Here, the origins of medical and botanical terms are deduced from their sources, not only Latin and Greek but also Arabic and Hebrew, ‘properly accented and explained’. It was first published in 1797 by the noted John Johnson, whose wide list of authors had included Erasmus Darwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Turton’s Glossary was a late addition to the company’s parallel medical list. It was clearly aimed at students such as Keats, who ‘merely’ had apothecary’s Latin (even if this apothecary, as a schoolboy, had made a prose translation of Virgil’s Aeneid).
‘A Literary man of Universal Knowledge’
Turton was one of the most formally educated people that Keats had had prolonged exposure to. The Reverend Doctor’s education was of an elite level and of long continuous duration. A single meeting may have made an impression on Keats, nonetheless, there must have been several doctor’s calls on Tom over the six or so weeks they eventually spent in Devon. Significantly, it was immediately after the reference to Turton that the Reynolds letter turns to some reflections on his own future intellectual development. ‘I shall learn Greek and very likely Italian. ’ He writes that he eventually will look to Hazlitt ‘in about a year’s time, about the best metaphysical road I can take’. (In January the previous year, he had attended the influential lectures by Hazlitt on the English poets at the Surrey Institution.) He then asks Reynolds if he will read Greek to him, if he can. Did Turton dazzle Keats with his linguistic skills, quoting texts, perhaps Homer, in the original language?
Keats wrote to his publisher that after his upcoming walking holiday in Scotland, he would not write but retire to study for ‘some years’. ‘I know nothing, I have read nothing and I mean to follow Soloman’s directions of “get wisdom - get understanding”’ (Taylor, 24 April 1818). Keats was being made painfully, and repeatedly, aware of his lack of learning. As he delicately put it, ‘For although I take poetry of the Chief there is something else wanting to one who passes his life among Books and thoughts on Books’. (Reynolds, 27 Apr. 1818).
Not surprisingly, biographers have used this moment to explore the insecurity in Keats’s character. Gnawing at him was the concern about Tom’s sad struggle with a fatal illness. Turton, the physician, had observed how the disease crept through families, as it was very gradually doing with the Keats family; in the past, their mother, now Tom and in only three years Keats himself. On top of this, George was quitting the scene by emigrating with his new wife to America.
Many biographers focus on a verse letter sent from Teignmouth to Reynolds (25 Mar. 1818). The mood captured is much more than just a scene of dejection on the empty seashore. Did he not look out at, but into the calm sea with the acquired vision of his newly acquainted natural philosopher?
…'Twas a quiet eve;
The rocks were silent—the wide sea did weave
An untumultuous fringe of silver foam
Along the flat brown sand. I was at home,
And should have been most happy—but I saw
Too far into the sea; where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore:—
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it: and though to-day
I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see,
The shark at savage prey…
The rocks were silent—the wide sea did weave
An untumultuous fringe of silver foam
Along the flat brown sand. I was at home,
And should have been most happy—but I saw
Too far into the sea; where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore:—
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it: and though to-day
I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see,
The shark at savage prey…
Teignmouth was a long-established harbour for fishing, including deep-sea fishing. The fisherman’s flaying catches on the Teignmouth quayside displayed for all to see the gory attributes of the earthly portion of the ‘Great Chain of Being’; where the greater, above, eats the lesser, below. In The Boundless Deep (2025), Richard Holmes goes further, describing Keats's sceptical passage as the ‘pre-shock of evolution theory: a premonition of Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest”’. There is no god, nature is mean, and so is the world within it.
‘Asperity of Censure’
Turton’s experience of nature, like so many at the time, was as a strict disciple of the late Carl Linnaeus. The Swedish naturalist attempted to arrange each of the various sections of nature by a small number of attributes. Turton declared Linnaeus was ‘born to lift up the awful veil of nature and, to give a permanent systematic arrangement of her materials’. Despite this patriarchal tone, for Turton, like many of his contemporaries, Linnaeus’ infamous sexual imagery was beyond the pale. ‘For the grossness and vulgarity of language used, I know not what excuse can be made’, he observed disappointedly, like a headmaster reluctant to chide. Turton’s personal tone as a classicist, one-time vicar, physician and naturalist must have been unique. Read the conversational paragraph below (from A conchological dictionary). It may partly reflect his intricate mode of social transaction; at times courteous, contrite, high-minded, occasionally colloquial but ready to drop in a Greek expression (‘χάρη μιχροιτι’ – small grace?).
Turton first established his systematist credentials by translating Gmelin’s Systema Naturae as A General System of Nature (London, 1802-1806) in 7 volumes, intriguingly dedicating it to local industrialist Richard Crawshay. Gmelin’s work was the last and most comprehensive edition of the late Linnaeus’ classification of living things. Like his peers, the juvenile Keats would have once been happy to align to ‘the beauty of system’. It could be seen as progressive and, particularly in the field of botany, socially popular. Nevertheless, as far as the perception of nature went, Keats had jumped ship, signalled by his jovial disdain for Newton’s reduction of the rainbow ‘to the prismatic colours'. To phrase it in a way you can only get away within a blog post, Keats was now not so interested in how nature worked but in the ways it could be experienced, albeit in an attentive way.
In 1819, Turton published A conchological dictionary of the British Islands, assisted by his daughter (London, 1819). Of his three daughters, this is no doubt Linnea Crawshay, who would have been 17 at the time of publication. (Linnea is the delicate twinflower which Linnaeus named after himself.) The title page includes a mirrored silhouette of the author forming an ornamental vase. For many years, this was the only image we had of him, we can assume it is by Linnea’s hand.
Courtesy of The University of Melbourne Art Collection, Gift of Mr Patrick M Hamilton, grandson of Dr Charles Travers Mackin 1972
Linnea
What we know of Linnea's story sheds revealing light on an aspect of family life. While working on the collection, Linnea differentiated a new mollusc species. Her father proudly acknowledged this and named it after her, Turbo turtonis (‘Turton’s turban’), now officially called Epitonium turtonis. (A fellow conchologist had the temerity to correct Turton’s Latin form publicly, Turton’s response is a model of a restrained, but complete, demolition. A manual of the land and fresh-water shells of the British Islands, 1831. p.15.)
Turbo turtonis from A Chonchological Dictionary. London, 1819. Smithsonian Libraries & Archives.
We now move forward to 1840 when the will of Linnea’s late mother was proved. Within it, Jane Turton took immense pains to ensure the continued security of her 37-year-old unmarried daughter. Clearly intelligent, Linnea was eventually to live, with a servant, in a house adjoining that of Jane’s close friend Eliza (Chanter?). The will goes as far as to specify that Linnea was to be allowed to stay in her bedroom as long as she wished. In 1851, the census enumerator broke into this protected environment. Linnea is entered as the head of the household, her occupation is ‘Trustholder’ followed by ‘Insane’, which has been immediately crossed out by an unknown hand. Linnea may easily have been disregarded as a wayward child, but she appears to have been touchingly encouraged, nurtured and protected by both her parents. (Tellingly, the Turtons’ son William Zouche is explicitly described as suffering from insanity, ‘which malady he at present unhappily labours’.)
Turton’s Rather Bold Adventures
West View of Swansea, Samuel Middiman. 1774.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the well-set late-Georgian seaside resort of Swansea had a dual character having become an important industrial centre, a nexus for the nearby coal and the imported raw materials to produce copper, tin and pottery. This attracted entrepreneurs, the successful among whom became well-connected; one of whom had extraordinary access to Sir Joseph Banks, the country’s scientific patriarch. After setting up his first practice in the centre of the town, Turton appears to have been in feverish activity: making contacts, proposing to insert himself into projects, publishing, making music, fulfilling multiple civic functions, and pursuing his vocation in natural history in addition to his profession of medicine. Swansea, being on a large bay with an impressive tidal range, was clearly a place where Turton had the opportunity to make a mark in many ways. Ultimately, he was to express open disappointment when he did not get the intellectual access he desired, but it was not for the lack of effort.
At the very beginning, he set up his own short-lived printing press in a back room of his house to avoid the expense of printers. In addition to his conchological activities, Turton was now an informant for such botanical heavy hitters as Withering’s ‘Arrangement’ and Smith & Sowerby’s ‘English Botany’. (Both these physician-botanists, William Withering and James Edward Smith, were popular and scholarly models for Turton’s own publishing aspirations in conchology). However, there was a grumbling controversy after he erroneously claimed the first sight of a very rare flower on the south coast of the Gower peninsula. It was gracefully handled by the true spotter who explained that his friend Turton was badly informed, nevertheless people tended to remember these things (see RBGE Botanics Stories).
During his Gloucestershire youth, Turton was acquainted with the physician and experimentalist Dr Edward Jenner. The adult Turton was now impressed by Jenner’s published experiments, which proved that exposure to the mild disease of cowpox protected against the often fatal one of smallpox. In a ‘rather bold adventure’, Turton demonstrated the principle of vaccination on one of his own daughters, Jane, when she was under a year old. This replicated Jenner’s own first bold experiment on an almost anonymous boy called Phipps. Subsequently, Turton rechristened this daughter Jane Vaccina to mark the occasion, and needless to say that she thrived. Several writers have recounted this episode and brought up the question of what Jane Vaccina’s mother thought of this. From the wise and thoughtful testament mentioned earlier, we can believe Jane Turton knew exactly what her husband was doing. Notwithstanding the apparent drama of the procedure, the assessed risk was low given the integrity of Jenner and his prior experiments. What is more, the good that would come of the demonstration was great, as it would have been witnessed by local medical professionals who Turton wanted to adopt the new procedure. Jenner encouraged Turton to write the demonstration up. It was undeniably the first vaccination in Swansea, but we have only Turton’s account that it was the first vaccination in Wales. In his vividly written report, he rather loftily declares his influence on the acceptance of the procedure in Wales. (Contemporary local doctors have rather negative stories of the causes of the multiple smallpox outbreaks that occurred at the time. Professional jealousy muddies the water, and the truth remains too slippery to get a grip on.)
Edward Jenner House and Museum
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Aeronautics
Inflation of the first hydrogen balloon by Jacques Charles at Paris, 1783. Smithsonian Libraries & Archives. (Sulphuric acid & iron were placed in a barrel, the hydrogen produced entered the balloon thro' a lead pipe. The same process was used by Barrett at Swansea 15 yrs later.)
From vaccination to the observation of cuckoos, Jenner was a man to be watched, if not even bettered. A youthful Turton would have been aware that, in 1784, Jenner had launched an unmanned hydrogen balloon, which he followed for its 10-mile flight through the Gloucestershire landscape. In 1802, newspapers reported that Turton endeavoured to be a passenger in a planned flight in a hydrogen balloon, an example of his characteristic impetuousness in this period of his life. Its failure to get off the ground caused unrest in the immense crowd that had been raised at Swansea. An outright riot was avoided only when the podium holding the balloon and spectators collapsed. Sometime afterwards, Francis Barrett, who was behind the project and had previously performed two failed flights at Greenwich, successfully flew a very short solo flight in a second balloon. No more is heard of Turton in the newspaper reports, although he may have been the doctor who tended the boy who had broken his leg in the incident, which Barrett had to pay for. By chance, Robert Southey met Barrett in Swansea and formed a strong opinion of him: ‘A dog - he had better break his neck from a balloon to save the country the expense of hanging him’ (to his wife Edith, Sept. 1802. New Letters of Robert Southey, 1965). This stinging judgment was made before he knew that Barrett had cut out a career for himself in the supernatural; his handbook of the occult and ceremonial magic had been published the previous year. We can assume that Turton, like Southey, was ignorant of this at the time.
The Staffordshire Advertiser, 16 Oct. 1802.
The Long Arm of the Eighteenth Century
In Teignmouth in 1818, it would seem that the natural philosopher, Turton, extended the arm of the long 18th century to offer a formal handshake to the second-generation Romantic poet’s ‘living hand, now warm and capable’. Keats was at a pivotal point in his writing career. His Poems (1816) was relatively little known; now his apprentice piece Endymion, which retold the Greek myth of the Aeolian shepherd, was in its final stages of publication. While at Teignmouth, Keats, glad to have the long literary ‘experiment’ of Endymion behind him, was working on ‘Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil’, a retelling of the original story by Boccaccio.
‘This brother is an apothecary and writes poetry?’ - you can hear the conversation start. ‘How extraordinary’ - and, of course, it was. Here was the cue for Turton to bring up another past project of his. At Swansea, Turton would have cheered Nelson, if not banqueted with him, when the hero was touring the country in 1802. Three years later, the country was in a frenzy of national grief since Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar. Emboldened with patriotic vigour, Turton looked to his strengths to create something befitting a man who was the contemporary embodiment of an ancient hero. Turton advertised for poems written in Latin and English to mark the occasion; gold and silver medals were to be struck for the best contributors as judged by either the Cambridge or the Oxford professor of English (ultimately, neither seemed
to have been involved).
The Turtonian Medal. Portrait of Nelson with a view of the Battle of Trafalgar on reverse. (Inscribed WILLIAM TURTON DOCTOR OF MEDICINE AND FELLOW OF THE LINNAEAN SOCIETY HAS DEDICATED THIS TO HIS MEMORY), Timothy Millett Limited
The worthiest poems were published as Luctus Nelsoniani (Swansea, 1807). The copy I have seen has no preface and was unevenly bound, as if rushed. However, the compilation had gained the royal patronage of the then Prince of Wales (the future Prince Regent). His was a suitably elaborate presentation copy, the cover of was to hold an image of the prizes for the best entries, the imposingly named Turtonian medals. Such budding intellects of their times contributed to the competition, including the future Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield (Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Greek poem) and future cleric and theologian Thomas Smart Hughes (St John's College, Cambridge, a Latin poem). Both their pieces had previously won awards at their own colleges. However, the winner of the gold medal was Raleigh Trevelyan for 'Mors Nelsoni'. According to a late 19th-century reference, he was ‘an able classical scholar’, and his poetry was ‘marked by elegance and scholarship’. I cannot judge the Latin and Greek poems, but I can say that the two anonymous English specimens have not aged well. There was not much correlation between these scholastic pieces and Keats’s ‘purple phantasy’ of Isabella, which was his current undertaking. In Turton’s final conchology book, he mentions, in passing, the Latin poetry of Lord Byron whose qualities were ‘noble and very classical’. Could either Keats or Crabbe fulfil both lofty attributes?
Conclusion of a long and anonymous English poem from Luctus Nelsoniani. (1807)
In Teignmouth, Keats was keen to copy out a letter of Nelson’s for Reynolds (10 Apr. 1818). We do not know what the particular text was, but could it have come via Turton? The Turtonian medals were just the visible tip of his great enthusiasm for the hero and his patriotism in general. Significantly, the Teignmouth Local Museum points out the many admirals and captains who had retired in the town and its vicinity, not least was the great Admiral Pellew, whose house overlooked the harbour. (‘One of the most famous frigate captains of the Nelsonic era’, he was now Lord Exmouth). The town must occasionally have an atmosphere as if Trafalgar had happened only yesterday. Turton would have been in his element; it could very well have been here that he acquired a portrait of Nelson that is mentioned in his wife’s will.
Time and Tide
At Tom’s bidding, the Keats brothers returned to London in the first week of May in an excruciatingly slow journey due to Tom’s bad health, which was provoked by the rough coach travel. During their visit, the brothers formed a social group with the Jeffrey family; the mother and her daughters, Marian and Sarah. Back in London, the letters both brothers wrote back to the Jeffrey family refer to Turton in passing. Tom anticipated that he and Marian would have an emotionally difficult leave-taking. It turned out that Dr Turton appeared to play gooseberry; ‘at the time I cursed the Doctor’, railed Tom. The visit is usually seen as Turton politely bidding them farewell, but at some point medical bills had to be presented or paid. Maybe there was an exchange of borrowed books to be made. John’s letter to Marian and Sarah Jeffrey digs up petty local gossip, which must have filled their conversation, that had now probably been half forgotten. Slightly deflating the dignified Turton, he asks; ‘Has the doctor given Miss Perryman a little love powder – tell him to do so it really would not be unamusing to see her languish a little’.
In June, George Keats and his new wife Georgina sailed for a new life in America; from July, the poet started the long-planned walking tour of the North and Scotland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. Despite any inhibitions induced from encounters with Turton, he writes freely, engaging with Robert Burns’s poetical legacy of freedom and directness; both poets being of ‘full-blooded sensual natures’ (John Keats, Robert Gittings, 1968).
Keats had resilience in the face of being shamed. Both intentionally, as would be attempted later in the year by the partial critics, and unintentionally, as with the courteous but - as far as Keats was concerned - fundamentally unpoetic Turton. An essential part of this was the social circle he had built around himself. By 1818, Keats had a group of friends whom he could use as sounding boards, as in the verse letter sent to Reynolds in which he processed his dark feelings. The unfavourable alternative is very well described by Turton himself, standing alone on the Torbay shoreline with ‘no friendly glance to check our exuberances or supply our deficiencies’ (Conchylia dithyra. London, 1822). Indeed, Turton's failure to hit the highest level of his ambition could be indicated, or even explained, by the lack of a close self-regulating network of personal support and mutual respect, which at this time can be seen as a characteristic of high intellectual standing.
And what of Tom? Despite his desperate fantasies of travel, in December, he succumbed to his condition with his brother back at his side after cutting his tour short in Scotland due to his own ill-health.
Tom Keats by Joseph Severn. Keats-Shelley House website.
Turton was to move in 1822 to nearby Torquay, a famed location for British conchology. There, he dredged the English Channel twice as far as the Channel Islands. Now he seems to have been more isolated and reflective. ‘Far removed from learned books and learned men’. In 1831, he seems to have come to rest at Bideford, where he was to die suddenly on 28th December 1835. A year later, his widow had the plain funeral she requested, ‘like my husband’s’.
‘Poor old Turton’
Like all serious conchologists, William Turton benefited from the assistance of others in collecting specimens. In Bideford, there was a young Charles Kingsley (future clergyman and author of The Water-Babies: a fairy tale for a land-baby, 1863), whose father had the living of nearby Clovelly. During the breaks from Helston Grammar School (whose headmaster was Coleridge’s son, Derwent), Kingsley dredged not only beyond the shoreline but also grubbed for land snails within the woods. Later, riding the wave of popular interest in conchology, Kingsley acknowledged his old instructor in his own guide: ‘searching in the Devon woods for poor old Dr Turton while he was writing his book on British land shells the present writer learnt more of the art of observing than he would have learnt in three years desultory hunting on his own account’ (Glaucus, Or, The Wonders of the Shore. 1856). In a letter to a fellow naturalist, Kingsley filled in some missing details; ‘poor dear old opium-eating Dr. Turton’ (quoted in multiple biographical sources).
Linley Sambourne’s illustration for The Water-Babies.
This small indiscretion opens a yawning abyss of conjecture. For how long a period of his life was Turton a consumer of, undoubtedly, laudanum (the pharmaceutical preparation of opium)? Did he first experience it as a medicine, as apparently did Coleridge? Two loci can help clarify the situation to our modern addict-fixated eyes. Kingsley’s allusion is to De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), however the constantly active Turton apparently shows none of that author’s recorded ‘intellectual torpor’ in his eventually uncontrolled use. A better comparison would be within the pantheon of 19th-century self-regulating, if ill-advised, ‘middling sort’. Possibly a greater number than we will ever be aware of. Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh was the deviser of the popular Brunonian system of medicine. A student witnessed a morning ritual where, at his request, the doctor’s daughter dosed her father with ‘a moderate stimulus’ consisting of a precise amount of laudanum in whisky. (Dr. Chisten, Opium historice, chemice atque pharmacologice investigatum. 1820).
An event towards the end of Turton’s life indicates a forced retreat from the activity that had been his lifelong obsession. The gifting of his collection three years before his death could indicate a debilitating condition or just bad eyesight in a study that increasingly needed the use of a microscope. His last publication was the catalogue of his, soon to be relinquished, collection, which was now extensive enough to be a complete manual of British shells. Despite his best efforts, it was only towards the end of his life that public interest in the subject had grown to such an extent that the publisher accepted this book on normal commercial terms. The next generation of British conchologists described the Reverend Doctor as ‘clever but eccentric’, and his works ‘monuments of attention’, at the same time giving him the honour of a genus name Turtonia. After passing through several hands, his collection is now in the Smithsonian Institute.
William Turton. A manual of the land and fresh-water shells of the British Islands: arranged according to the more modern systems of classification; and described from perfect specimens in the author's cabinet: with coloured plates of every species. London, 1831. Smithsonian Libraries & Archives.