Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), a Nobel Prize in Literature, was one of the British citizens who honoured the Keats-Shelley Memorial House with their attendance when the museum opened on 3 April 1909 in the presence of Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy. Kipling knew Keats’s poetry in great detail: he regarded lines 69 and 70 of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ as among the best ever written (‘Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’), while Shelley’s work had a more surreptitious influence on him, which was also due to the fact that, between the 1870s and the 1890s, Shelley witnessed an unprecedented moment of fame and his poetry was virtually impossible to ignore for an aspiring writer. Kipling writes to Miss Dunham on behalf of his wife, ‘who is anything but well just now’. The letter must have been written between the years 1892 and 1895. The reference to Mrs Kipling’s poor health is far from trivial as, following the death of their daughter Josephine in 1899, she would undertake a long period of nervous breakdown, which worsened when their only son John was killed in 1915 during the Battle of Loos. Also of interest is Kipling’s mention that, despite the illness, his wife seems determined to dine out. This would show strong determination on the part of a woman whose difficult relationship with her husband has aroused substantial interest amongst his scholars and biographers.
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