Keats was the son of a stable manager. Both of his parents died when he was young, but he received a good education. He was apprenticed in his teens to an apothecary surgeon and became licenced as an apothecary in 1816, but decided to pursue poetry instead and was first published by Leigh Hunt that year in the Examiner. He published his first volume of poetry the following year, and was attacked in Blackwood's by John Gibson Lockhart as a member of the "Cockney School" of poetry, which was castigated for the humble birth and allegedly boorish practices of its members as well as for poor verse. Keats associated with many other writers of his day, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Benjamin Robert Haydon, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb. Keats published Endymion in 1818, and his second volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems, in 1820 after a year of great financial worry. He went to visit Shelley in Italy later that year, and Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome the following February. Although he received some positive reviews alongside the attacks from Blackwood's, there was little indication in Keats' lifetime of the immense stature he would gain, on the strength of his poetry and his posthumously published letters, after his death.