Thomas Keightley

Did You Know?

• Keightley's Fairy Mythology was one of the books Dante Gabriel Rossetti pored over until the age of ten.
• A pen and ink likeness of Keightley's nephew and adopted son, Alfred Chaworth Lyster, was drawn by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1855.
• Keightley attended a spiritual séance at his own home in Belvedere on 4 January 1866, where two Misses Keightley and the spirit of William Samuel Keightley were reportedly present.

Life and travels

Keightley was born in October 1789, the son of Thomas Keightley of Newtown, County Kildare, and claimed relation to Thomas Keightley (1650?–1719). He entered Trinity College Dublin on 4 July 1803 but left without a degree; poor health forced him to abandon the legal profession and admission to the Irish Bar. In 1824 he settled in London, engaging in literary and journalistic work. He contributed tales to Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends of South Ireland (1825), though not properly acknowledged; one tale, 'The Soul Cages,' was largely his own fabrication. Having spent time in Italy, he translated tales from Pentamerone and The Nights of Straparola for Fairy Mythology and befriended the Rossetti household. He claimed literacy in twenty-odd languages and dialects, publishing translations of medieval and foreign works, including expanded prose versions of Ogier the Dane and Swedish ballads on nixes and elves.

Folklore and mythology

Keightley is regarded as an early and important comparativist collector of folklore, and Fairy Mythology set high standards for an early book of the field. Published in 1828 in two volumes with illustrations by W. H. Brooke, a German translation appeared the same year, and Jacob Grimm is said to have praised the work. It was popular among Victorian folklore researchers and literary figures; an expanded edition appeared in 1850, and a newly prefaced one in 1860. The work has been reissued intermittently into modern times, vindicating Keightley's own 'high hopes of immortality for his work' despite an early biographer calling this 'pretentious.' Keightley began by tracing fairy myth to Gothic and Teutonic roots, as the Grimms had done for elves, but eventually concluded that it was implausible to trace a myth to an ultimate single source, explaining parallel myths by the Enlightenment idea that human nature is uniform and similar experiences are shared across mankind. His contribution to Croker's Fairy Legends (1825–1828) stimulated him to write his own book, though he was peeved at Croker for not acknowledging his aid; in the 1850 preface he addressed Croker more cordially as 'one of my earliest literary friends in London.' The Irish mermaid story 'The Soul Cages' in Fairy Mythology was a hoax: Keightley later added a footnote confessing that except for a kernel adapted from the German story 'The Peasant and the Waterman,' the tale was entirely his invention.

Historical works

Keightley was long occupied in compiling historical manuals for instructional use. His Outlines of History was an early volume of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia (1829), and his History of the War of Greek Independence (1830) formed volumes lx and lxi of Constable's Miscellany. Urged by educator Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, he undertook a series of mid-sized histories for schools: History of England (1837–39, 2 vols.), based on John Lingard but intended to counteract that writer's Catholic tendencies; History of Greece (1835); Rome (1836); Roman Empire (1840); and India (1846–7). His History of Greece was translated into modern Greek. He compiled study tools such as Questions on Keightley's History of Greece and Rome (1836) and one on English history (1840). Keightley stated he sought to improve on Oliver Goldsmith's History and found his proof when his titles were adopted immediately by Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and most other great public schools. In 1850 he wrote immodestly of his historical output as 'yet unrivalled, and may long be unsurpassed.' His History of Rome was derivative of the German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and Arnold was a subscriber to Niebuhr's approach. Samuel Warren highly praised his historical work, but Keightley ludicrously overestimated all his performances. During his last years he received a pension from the civil list and died at Erith, Kent, on 4 November 1872. He also authored The Crusaders (1834) and Secret Societies of the Middle Ages (1837, initially published anonymously).

Literary criticisms

Keightley edited Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics (1847), preceded by Notes on the Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil (1846). He also edited Horace's Satires and Epistles (1848), Ovid's Fasti (1848), and Sallust's Catilina and Jugurtha (1849). He produced an annotated edition of Milton (2 vols., 1859) and a critical biography, Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of John Milton (1855). His insights have been occasionally invoked, compared, and contradicted in studies into the 20th century and beyond, and he is listed among the 'distinguished file' in a survey of past commentaries on Milton. Keightley meticulously tracked Milton's mythological sources, though some of his commentary has been flawed: he argued that Milton erred in speaking of 'Titan, Heaven's first-born,' there being no single divine being named Titan, only a race of titans, but Milton could have used alternate sources such as Lactantius's Divinae Institutiones. Regarding Milton's angelology, Keightley made correct observations but constrained the source mostly to the Bible and mistakenly identified the angel Ithuriel as a coinage. He also published an unannotated edition of Shakespeare (6 vols., 1864) and Shakespeare Expositor (1867). Keightley is credited with first noticing that Chaucer's Squire's Tale may have drawn from the Old French romance Cléomadès by Adenes Le Roi. He wrote of Henry Fielding's use of 'hath' and 'doth' in Fraser's Magazine (1858) without acknowledging a commentator who made the same observation before him.