John Keats’s love letters returned to owner after being stolen in the 1980s | John Keats
Eight original letters written by romantic poet John Keats to his muse and “only passion” Fanny Brawne were returned to the family of former U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom John Hay “Jock” Whitney on Monday after they were stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s.
Keats’s letters, including his first letter to Brawne, date from 1819 to 1820. The 37 letters, valued at approximately $2 million, are kept in a gilded Moroccan-bound portfolio. Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead; He fell in love with her and was elevated to the status of muse and goddess.
Keats’ most famous poems include the 1819 odes, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn, which form the cornerstones of romantic poetry. However, the letters he wrote to Brawne, in which his romantic longing combined with melancholy, are among his most unforgettable.
Brawne became Keats’s fiancee but died of tuberculosis in February 1821, aged 25. At his death in 1865, Brawne bequeathed the letters to his children, who sold them at auction in 1885. These sales inspired Oscar Wilde to write a sonnet. Keats’ Love Letters Up for Auction.
The portfolio was discovered among 17 rare books that resurfaced in Manhattan in January 2025, when an anonymous person who later claimed to have inherited the books from his grandfather attempted to sell them to two separate rare book dealers, B&B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books. After discovering that the books were listed on the Registry of Art Loss, they reported the attempted sale to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.
“Manhattan is the cultural capital of the world, home to museums, galleries, and dealers displaying incredible works of art and antiques,” Bragg said in a statement. “However, when stolen items are exhibited, the integrity of this marketplace is damaged. We will not allow our district to become the center of the art and antique trade.”
The books were later seized pursuant to search warrants, and earlier this year a New York Supreme Court judge allowed the books to be turned over to the heirs of John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Whitney.
The books include a copy of James Joyce’s 1939 book Finnegans Wake, four letters by Wilde not included in De Profundis, letters Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Prison while he was imprisoned for “gross indecency”, and a copy of occultist Aleister Crowley’s 1898 book White Stains.
Whitney’s heirs said the books, with a total value of approximately $3 million, would be sold and the proceeds would be donated.
Little is known about the theft, but at least 28 books were stolen from Whitney’s Long Island mansion between 1982 and 1989, and police were contacted. Whitney, who served as U.S. ambassador from 1957 to 1961 and was publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, was known as an avid art collector and had inherited hundreds of rare books from his mother.
The discovery and return of the books was carried out by Manhattan’s antiquities smuggling unit, led by Matthew Bogdanos, a former Marine colonel who headed the office for more than a decade. ATU has rescued more than 6,200 cultural treasures, including rare books, works of art and antiques, valued at over $485 million, and returned more than 5,900 of them to their owners or countries of origin.
In 2017, Bogdanos ordered the seizure of a 2,300-year-old vase known as the Python Ark from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two years later, more than a dozen works linked to smuggler Subhash Kapoor were seized from a gallery at Yale University.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2022, Bogdanos said dealers, private collectors and museums had been on the fence for years about illegal antiques.
“They’d say, ‘It’s a little dangerous, but who cares? Nobody’s looking.’ But people look and say it’s not worth it.” He added that dealing in stolen antiques “used to be a gentleman’s sport performed by gentlemen for gentlemen.” Now the gentlemen and gentlemen of this trade are being handcuffed.
