BROWN, CHARLES (ARMITAGE) (1786-1842) was born in South London of Scottish parentage, his father having made a competence on the stock exchange. At 14 Charles entered a counting house, and at 18 he became a merchant in St Petersburg, in partnership with a brother. Owing to the substitution of whalebone for bristles, and fear of a war with Russia, business failed (1808) and he returned to London, where he acted as agent for another brother, a local resident of the East India Company.

This brother's death placed him in enjoyment of a modest competence, which enabled him to cultivate the society of literary people. He became the associate of Dilke, John Hamilton Reynolds, Walter Savage Landor, Hood and Keats; and himself at the age of 23 composed a comic opera Narensky, or the Road to Yaroslav, which was produced at the Lyceum and yielded him £500 profit. Brown was a bon viveur, rather quaint in appearance; stout, bald and spectacled. His friendship with Keats became very close. They spent the summer of 1818 on a 600-mile walking tour of England and Scotland (where Keats developed the first symptoms of consumption). In 1819 they spent the summer at Shanklin, Isle of Wight, sketching and writing the tragedy Otho the Great, for which Brown supplied the fable, character and dramatic conduct. He left Keats at Winchester and found time to run across to Ireland where, unknown to his friends, he married a peasant woman, Abigail Donohue. Summoned back to Winchester, he brought Keats to London in a serious condition. Brown then employed himself sketching and copying Hogarth's heads. In 1820 he went to Ireland for the birth of his son (Charles, q.v.) while Keats went in search of health to Italy, where he died on 23 Feb 1821, before Brown could reach him. Brown then remained in residence in Florence, enjoying the company of Byron, Dilke, and Monckton Milnes, and later watching the education of his boy. He continued his studies in art, wrote for London magazines and translated admirably the first five cantos of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. In 1829 the publishers rejected his life of Keats. He made many sketches, including a portrait of Keats which came to New Zealand and was not made public until his granddaughter sent it to Sir S. Colvin. In 1834 he returned to England, settled at Plymouth and edited the Plymouth Journal. He lectured a good deal on Shakespeare and published his lectures as Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems (1838).

Brown's interest in Shakespeare and in Keats was almost scholarly. He made an exhaustive collection of his friend's remains for publication, but had not found a publisher when he happened to attend a meeting in Plymouth to consider establishing a colony in New Zealand. He was at once infected with colonising enthusiasm, handed over his Keats task to Milnes with a biographical notice written by himself, and prepared for his migration. He sent his son in the Amelia Thompson, which sailed on 25 Mar 1841, while he sailed in the Oriental on 22 Jun, arriving in New Plymouth in Nov.

The change from good living and select artistic surroundings to colonial fare and fortune was a severe test for one no longer young, and a few months after his arrival in New Plymouth he had an apoplectic stroke and died (on 5 Jun 1842). Brown adopted the second name 'Armitage' in publishing some of his Keats papers in the Plymouth Journal.

Walls; Amy Lowell, John Keats (1925); A. Erlande, Life (1929); Taranaki News, pass.; S. Colvin, Life of John Keats (1918); H. Bolitho and J. Mulligan, The Emigrants (1939).

Portraits: E. V. Waller's Autobiography (1933); bust by L. A. Holman in Lowell, op. cit., i, p. 286.

Reference: Volume 1, page 66

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