Schmid, Susanne, and Michael Rossington (eds), The Reception of P. B. Shelley in Europe (London: Continuum, 2008)
Scrivener, Michael Henry, Radical Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982)
Shelley, Bryan, Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
Sperry, Stuart, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Stock, Paul, The Shelley–Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (London: Palgrave, 2010)
Ulmer, William, Shelleyan Eros (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Wasserman, Earl, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971)
Webb, Timothy, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)
——, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977)
Weinberg, Alan, Shelley’s Italian Experience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991)
—— and Timothy Webb (eds), The Unfamiliar Shelley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)
—— and Timothy Webb (eds), The Neglected Shelley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)
Weisman, Karen, Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994)
Online Resources
www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/news/2015/nov-10: Shelley’s recently recovered early verse satire Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (see Chronology: March 1811) may be read online at this website.
www.rc.umd.edu: The Romantic Circles website provides a wide range of scholarly and pedagogical resources and comment on Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley and their circle.
www.shelleygodwinarchive.org: The Shelley-Godwin Archive, now in progress, will eventually make available in digitized form some 90 per cent of the known manuscripts of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
Acknowledgements
Any editor working on Shelley’s texts at present necessarily owes a large debt to two series of manuscript facsimiles with commentary: The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and the volumes containing material by Shelley in The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, both under the general editorship of Donald H. Reiman. In addition, we have benefitted particularly from the documents and commentaries in the volumes of Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822, edited (successively) by Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fisher, as well as several recent editions of Shelley’s work: by Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook for Johns Hopkins University Press; Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest and others for the Longman Annotated English Poets series; Timothy Webb for Dent; Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat for Norton; and Michael O’Neill and Zachary Leader for OUP World’s Classics.
For valuable advice and help over many years the editors wish to thank especially Bruce Barker-Benfield, John Barnard, John Birtwhistle, Nora Crook, Elizabeth Denlinger, Kelvin Everest, Doucet Devin Fisher, Michael O’Neill, Michael Rossington, Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg.
Kate Parker’s meticulous and patient copy-editing has been exemplary.
The following institutions have kindly allowed us to take manuscripts in their possession as the basis of our texts, for which detailed references are supplied in the notes to the relevant poems and prose: the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the British Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Edinburgh University Library; the Provost and fellows of Eton College; Special Collections Centre, University of Aberdeen; the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library; the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc.; the Library of Congress; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny-Genève, Switzerland; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and the John Rylands University Library of Manchester.
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Cover: Detail from Mont Blanc Massif, near Chamonix, ca.1825–27
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ISBN: 978-0-141-39522-7
* See Nicholson’s Encyclopedia, art. Light. [Shelley’s note]
* The first Christian emperor made a law by which seduction was punished with death: if the female pleaded her own consent, she also was punished with death; if the parents endeavoured to screen the criminals, they were banished and their estates were confiscated; the slaves who might be accessary were burned alive, or forced to swallow melted lead. The very offspring of an illegal love were involved in the consequences of the sentence.—Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, &c. vol. ii. page 210. See also, for the hatred of the primitive Christians to love and even marriage, page 269 [Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (London: 1776–88)]. [Shelley’s note]
* The necessity of resorting to some means of purifying water, and the disease which arises from its adulteration in civilized countries, is sufficiently apparent—see Dr. Lambe’s Reports on Cancer. I do not assert that the use of water is in itself unnatural, but that the unperverted palate would swallow no liquid capable of occasioning disease. [Shelley’s note]
* Lambe’s Reports on Cancer. [Shelley’s note]
* It has come under the author’s experience, that some of the workmen on an embankment in North Wales, who, in consequence of the inability of the proprietor to pay them, seldom received their wages, have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile ground by moonlight. In the notes to [Samuel] Pratt’s Poem, ‘Bread, or the Poor’ [1802], is an account of an industrious labourer, who, by working in a small garden, before and after his day’s task, attained to an enviable state of independence. [Shelley’s note]
* See Mr. Newton’s book. His children are the most beautiful and healthy creatures it is possible to conceive; the girls are perfect models for a sculptor; their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating; the judicious treatment, which they experience in other points, may be a correlative cause of this. In the first five years of their life, of 18,000 children that are born, 7,500 die of various diseases; and how many more of those that survive are not rendered miserable by maladies not immediately mortal? The quality and quantity of a woman’s milk are materially injured by the use of dead flesh. In an island near Iceland, where no vegetables are to be got, the children invariably die of tetanus, before they are three weeks old, and the population is supplied from the main land.—Sir G. Mackenzie’s Hist. of Iceland. See also Emile, chap. i. pages 53, 54, 56. [Shelley’s note]
* The Papal Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the MS. had become, until very lately, a matter of some difficulty. [Shelley’s note]
* An idea in this speech was suggested by a most sublime passage in El Purgatorio de San Patricio of Calderon: the only plagiarism which I have inten
tionally committed in the whole piece. [Shelley’s note]
* The oldest scholiasts read—a dodecagamic Potter; this is at once more descriptive and more megalophonous,—but the alliteration of the text had captivated the vulgar ears of the herd of later commentators. [Shelley’s note]
† To those who have not duly appreciated the distinction between whale and Russia oil this attribute might rather seem to belong to the Dandy than the Evangelic. The effect, when to the windward, is indeed so similar that it requires a subtle Naturalist to discriminate the animals. They belong however to distinct genera. [Shelley’s note]
* One of the attributes in Linnaeus’s description of the Cat. To a similar cause the caterwauling of more than one species of this genus is to be referred;—except indeed that the poor quadruped is compelled to quarrel with its own pleasures, whilst the biped is supposed only to quarrel with those of others. [Shelley’s note]
† What would this husk and excuse for a Virtue be without its kernel prostitution, or the kernel prostitution without this husk of a Virtue? I wonder the Women of the Town do not form an association, like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for the support of what may be considered the ‘King, church and Constitution’ of their order. But this subject is almost too horrible for a joke. [Shelley’s note]
* This libel on our national oath, and this accusation of all our countrymen of being in the daily practice of solemnly asseverating the most enormous falshood I fear deserves the notice of a more active Attorney General than that here alluded to. [Shelley’s note]
* Vox populi, vox dei [The voice of the people is the voice of God]. As Mr. Godwin truly observes of a more famous saying, of some merit as a popular maxim, but totally destitute of philosophical accuracy. [Shelley’s note]
* Quasi, Qui valet verba.—i.e. all the words which have been, are, or may be expended by, for, against, with, or on him. A sufficient proof of the utility of this History. Peter’s progenitor who selected this name seems to have possessed a pure anticipated cognition of the nature and modesty of this ornament of his posterity. [Shelley’s note]
* A famous river in the new Atlantis of the Dynastophilic Pantisocratists. [Shelley’s note]
† See the description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonising death of a number of trout, in the 4th part of a long poem in blank verse, published within a few years. That Poem contains curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic-stricken understanding. The Author might have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet and sublime verses. This lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she [Nature] shews and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. [Shelley’s note]
* It is curious to observe how often extremes meet. Cobbett and Peter use the same language for a different purpose: Peter is indeed a sort of metrical Cobbett. Cobbett is however more mischievous than Peter because he pollutes a holy and now unconquerable cause with the principles of legitimate murder; whilst the other only makes a bad one ridiculous and odious. If either Peter or Cobbett should see this note, each will feel more indignation at being compared to the other than at any censure implied in the moral perversions laid to their charge. [Shelley’s note]
* This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. [Shelley’s note]
* See the Bacchae of Euripides. [Shelley’s note]
* Ἵμερος from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonym of Love. [Shelley’s note]
* In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to science. [Shelley’s note]8
* Milton stands alone in the age which he illumined. [Shelley’s note]11
* ‘Your death has eyes in his head—mine is not painted so.’—Cymbeline. [Shelley’s note]7
* These expressions are taken from the Examiner, Sunday, Nov. 9. [Shelley’s note]23
* These words inefficient & metaphorical—Most words so—No help— [Shelley’s note]
* I follow the classification adopted by the author of the Four Ages of Poetry. But Rousseau was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners. [Shelley’s note]80
Selected Poems and Prose Page 110