John Keats was born in London in October 1795. Amongst the many myths that came to surround this circumstance was the belief that he was born in a coaching inn, the Swan and Hoop at 24 The Pavement, Moorgate, and that his father, Thomas, was an ‘ostler’ in the inn. This supposed humble origin was to play its part in savage politically inspired attacks made on Keats by Tory reviewers during his lifetime, and it deeply coloured the nineteenth-century biographical tradition. It is difficult to translate the nuances of social class from those familiar to us today. But Keats's parents were not impoverished, and there was certainly money on his mother's side of the family. There is in fact no evidence that Keats was born at the Swan and Hoop. His first demonstrable connection with it was at the age of 7 in 1802, when his father was installed as manager of the inn by his father-in-law (Keats's maternal grandfather), who owned it together with neighbouring properties.

Keats had nothing approaching the privileges enjoyed, for example, by his slightly older contemporaries Shelley and Byron, who were both born into landed aristocratic families. Neither did he enjoy the kind of patronage that made a writer's life possible for William Wordsworth, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But it would be a mistake to think of Keats's family as ‘working class’. His circumstances are in marked contrast with those of William Blake, for instance, who had no formal education other than a trade apprenticeship, and who had to work long and hard all his life as an engraver simply in order to support himself. Although Keats's financial affairs were tangled and obscure, he was not without means of his own.

The question of Keats's origins made for serious difficulty in the development of his reputation. The critical attacks launched against him by Tory Reviews in 1818, and that notoriously but very effectively attached to him the pejorative label of ‘Cockney’, were prompted in the main by Keats's association with the radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt. These attacks played on the supposed obscurity of Keats's social background, and introduced a dimension in public discussion of Keats that was further confused by various statements made by his friends and acquaintances after his death.