How did Keats speak?

Caleb Crain in the NYT:

So the movie Keats does talk the way the real Keats wrote. But does he talk the way the real Keats talked? Like most moviegoers, I expect early-19th-century characters to speak in sentences more carefully and elaborately structured than the ones I usually hear, but my expectation may be an artifact of the recording technology then available. Georgian English has been preserved only via the written word, and in the act of transcription, spoken errors may be amended — hemming and hawing edited, false starts pruned and simple phrases joined into complex ones. Keats himself was aware of the problem; a friend once charged that in “Endymion,” “the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown.” Indeed, although Wordsworth, a fellow Romantic, called for poetry written in “the language really spoken by men,” the diction and grammar in Keats’s poems is far from workaday.

Perhaps this is because Keats was self-conscious about his everyday speech. In August 1818, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine accused him of “Cockney rhymes,” pointing out that he matched thorns with fawns and higher with Thalia. In poems that he inserted in his letters, he rhymed shorter with water and parsons with fastens. The pattern suggests that he suffered from nonrhoticity — the tendency to drop “R” sounds from the ends of syllables and words. As well he should have, the scholar Lynda Mugglestone wrote in 1991, noting that nonrhoticity was part of “then-current educated usage.” In fact, Mugglestone observed, Blake had rhymed lawn with morn, and Tennyson was to rhyme thorns and yawns.

The rest here.