For expert comments on Greek and Latin texts my particular thanks to: Peter Jay of the Anvil Press; Barbara Goward; Wilfred Passmore, the Abbot of Downside; and Joanna Latimer, University of London, for her interpretation of Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium.
I should like to thank G. M. Matthews for an exacting reading of the book’s first draft; John Murray for his kind interest in its progress; and Dr Donald Reiman of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library for his courteous advice. I should also like to record, more distantly, the inspiration and anguish caused by two fine teachers and writers, the critic Dr George Steiner and the poet Peter Whigham.
My gratitude to Michael Ratcliffe of the Times for his earliest encouragement; Captain Livingstone Learmonth of Tan-yr-allt, Tremadoc for his hospitality; and Mrs Ismena Holland for her generous help. Best thanks also to Jo Foster, my visionary typist.
I have a primary professional debt to Tony Godwin, my first English publisher, for his editorial liberality and graceful patience; and to Hal Scharlatt in New York for the exceptional sympathy and intensely personal care which he gave to an author’s cloudiest aspirations. I have a more than professional debt to Peter Janson-Smith for his wise counsel, constant friendship and inexhaustible good spirits.
I do not really know how to thank Helen Rogan, who gave me so fully a fellow writer’s understanding and support; but I have tried. My very warmest thanks also to Margaret Amaral, David and Linda Griffiths, Jackie and Robin Clode, and my mother and father, under all of whose roofs or in whose gardens parts of this book were written, deleted, forgotten or dreamt.
Finally I would like to greet the unknown student of Calderón who bought me a glass of brandy one stormy October night in a crumbling bar overlooking the Arno at Pisa.
R.H.
Bibliography
It is the intention of this bibliography to be exclusive. I have selected from the vast field of works connected with Shelley’s life a very small number of books which throw a really penetrating and original light on either his background, his work or his character. I have also chosen books which are each in themselves exceptional pieces of writing, and many of them are classics of their period. This list is directed equally to the general reader and the student.
For more specialized and technical information, the reader may wish to consult my References which contain running discussion of source books and manuscripts, and the bibliographies set out in two pamphlets: Shelley by G. M. Matthews, ‘Writers and Their Work’ No. 214, Longmans, 1970; and Bibliographical Index to the Keats — Shelley Memorial Bulletin, I-XX, 1910–1969, compiled by C. Darel Sheraw, KSMB, 1970.
1 The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), 2 vols, W.H. Chaloner (ed.), Frank Cass, London, 1967.
2 The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854), Mary Thale (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1972.
3 The Autobiography of William Cobbett: The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament (1763–1835), William Reitzel (ed.), Faber & Faber, London, 1947.
4 Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792, Dent, London, 1970.
5 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1792. Abridged and edited by K.C. Carter, Oxford University Press, 1971.
6 Thomas Love Peacock: Headlong Hall, 1816; Melincourt, 1817; Nightmare Abbey, 1818, David Garnett (ed.), Rupert Hart Davis, London 1963.
7 Mary Shelley: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818, Oxford University Press, 1969.
8 William Hazlitt: The Spirit of the Age, 1824, Collins, London, 1969.
9 E. J. Hobsbawm: The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1969.
10 E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, London, 1963. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968.
11 Leslie A. Marchand: Byron: A Biography, 3 vols, John Murray, London, 1957.
12 Lord Byron: Selected Prose, Peter Gunn (ed.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972.
13 Robert Gittings: John Keats, Heinemann, London, 1968.
14 Howard Mills: Peacock: His Circle and His Age, Cambridge University Press, 1969.
15 Peter Quennell: Romantic England: Writing and Painting 1717–1851, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970.
16 Newman Ivey White: Shelley, 2 vols., Secker and Warburg, London, 1947.
17 Kenneth Neill Cameron: Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, Gollancz, London, 1951.
18 Neville Rogers: Shelley at Work, Oxford University Press, 1967.
19 James Rieger: The Mutiny Within: the Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Braziller, New York, 1967.
20 Roland A. Duerksen: Shelleyan Ideas in Victorian Literature, Mouton and Co., The Hague, 1966.
21 Judith Chernaik: The Lyrics of Shelley, Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972.
Abbreviated references
Letters
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by F. L. Jones 2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1964. (All Shelley’s known letters are now numbered in this edition, and together with an indication of the page on which a cited passage occurs, I have normally regarded this as sufficient reference. Where particular letters contain doubtful readings from the MS, or the provenance of the printed text is controversial, I give further details.) Professor Jones’s edition also contains a wealth of material in its footnotes, much of it drawn from Lady Jane Shelley’s Shelley and Mary, 4 vols, privately printed in 1882. Reference to this editorial material is similarly indicated.
Poetical Works
Shelley: Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, Oxford University Press, 1968. This has been the standard text since 1904, and includes all Shelley’s Prefaces, and much incidental material including Mary Shelley’s prose ‘Notes’, from the first collected Poetical Works of 1839. It will eventually be superseded by Neville Rogers’s 4-volume edition also from Oxford University Press, which is in the process of publication (Vol. 1, 1972).
Prose
Shelley’s Prose: or, The Trumpet of a Prophesy, edited by David Lee Clark, University of New Mexico Press, corrected edition 1966. (There is still no single complete edition of all Shelley’s prose, but I have used this as my standard text. Where transcription is doubtful, or more convenient sources are available for a particular work, I give supplementary references.)
Journal
Mary Shelley’s Journal, edited by F. L. Jones, University of Oklahoma Press, 1947. This contains many entries written by Shelley, especially during the years 1814–16, when Mary and Shelley shared it. For further discussion of the MS, see Chapter 10, ref. 1.
Mary
The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, edited by F. L. Jones, 2 vols, University of Oklahoma Press, 1944. Unless otherwise stated, all references are to Vol. 1.
Claire
The Journals of Claire Clairmont, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking, Harvard University Press, 1968. The MS 1814–22 is held in the British Museum, Ashley MS 394, and Ashley MS 2819(1–3). In my text Claire’s journal is referred to as her ‘diary’ to avoid any possible confusion with Mary’s journal’.
Bod. MSS
Manuscripts held in the special Shelley section of the Bodleian Library Oxford; these include most notably fifteen of Shelley’s working notebooks covering the period between 1816 and 1822, in which many of his major poems and prose essays can be traced from fragmentary conception to fair copy: MS Shelley Adds e. 6 — Adds e. 20.
Abinger MSS
Microfilm of Lord Abinger’s entire collection of Shelley Manuscripts, including most notably Mary Shelley’s ‘journal’, held on eleven reels at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, R.6.112. The microfilm was made by Marion Stocking in 1952, and a second copy resides at Duke University.
Murray MSS
A collection of manuscripts relating to Lord Byron, held by John Murray Esq. at 50 Albemarle Street, London.
Pforzheimer
Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, edited by K. N. Cameron, Vols I–IV, and subsequently by Donald H. Reiman, the Carl H. Pforzheim
er Library, New York, 1961. A miscellaneous collection of Shelley letters and Shelleyana printed from the manuscript, frequently showing small and significant variations from hitherto available printed sources, and including fifteen new Shelley letters. Some of the secondary material written by Shelley’s close companions and friends has not previously been published. The edition was planned in 1961 to run to ten volumes, of which six have currently been published. The editorial commentary also contains valuable material.
New Select Bibliography
As in my original bibliography, the aim here is to give an exclusive selection from a vast field of Shelley studies. I have followed developments closely from the mid-1970s, and these are the works which I believe will be particularly helpful and interesting to the general reader and student alike. More specialised and academic bibliographies may be found in the works of Donald H. Reiman and G. Kim Blank cited below. My choice includes a play, a novel and a poem.
1 G. Kim Blank (ed.): The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991
2 Harold Bloom: Shelley’s Mythmaking, Cornell University Press, 1969; ‘Introduction’ to Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark, new edition, Fourth Estate, London, 1990
3 Howard Brenton: Bloody Poetry (play), Methuen, London, 1985
4 Nathaniel Brown: Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley, Harvard University Press, 1979
5 Marilyn Butler: ‘The Cult of the South’ in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Oxford, 1981
6 Judith Chernaik: Mab’s Daughters (novel), Macmillan, London, 1991
7 Nora Crook and Derek Guiton: Shelley’s Venomed Melody, Cambridge University Press, 1986
8 Stuart Curran: Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision, Huntington Library, California, 1975
9 P.M.S. Dawson: The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Oxford, 1980
10 Paul de Man: ‘Shelley Disfigured’ in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, Seabury, New York, 1979
11 Kelvin Everest: ‘Shelley’s Doubles’ in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1983
12 Paul Foot: Red Shelley, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980
13 Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi: Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity, Oxford, 1992
14 Thom Gunn: ‘Lerici’ (poem) in Collected Poems, Faber, 1993
15 Desmond Hawkins: Shelley’s First Love, Archon Books, 1992
16 Terence A, Hoagwood: Skepticims and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx, University of Iowa Press, 1988
17 Jerrold E. Hogle: Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of his Major Works, Oxford University Press, 1980
18 William Keach: Shelley’s Style, Methuen, New York, 1984
19 Angela Leighton: Shelley and the Sublime, Cambridge University Press, 1984; ‘Love, Writing and Scepticism in Epipsychidion’ in The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, ed. G. Kim Blank, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1991
20 Jerome McGann: The Romantic Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1983
21 C. E. Pulos: The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism, University of Nebraska Press, 1954
22 Donald H. Reiman: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Twayne’s English Authors Series, updated edition, 1990. This survey also contains details of the continuing publication of Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822 running to 12 volumes from the Pforzheimer Library manuscripts; and the photofacsimile editions of Shelley’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, by Garland Publishing Inc., New York.
23 William St. Clair: The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family, Faber, 1989
24 Michael H. Scrivener: Radical Shelley, Princeton University Press, 1982
25 Stuart Sperry: Shelley’s Major Verse, Harvard University Press, 1988
26 Claire Tomalin: Shelley and his World, Thames and Hudson, 1980
27 Earl R. Wasserman: Shelley: A Critical Reading, John Hopkins University Press, 1971
28 Timothy Webb: The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation, Oxford, 1976; Shelley: A Voice Not Understood, Manchester University Press, 1977; (ed) Shelley: Selected Poems, Everyman’s Library, 1977
29 Art Young: Shelley and Nonviolence, Mouton, The Hague, 1975
References
Chapter 1, A Fire-Raiser
1. Field Place and the ponds still remain, though there has been considerable alteration in the layout of the gardens, and parts of the house have been rebuilt. Field Place is described in Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, 1866, 1, pp. 5–7; also in Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England: New Facts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Papers, 1917, pp. 22–7. Both these works are important sources of detailed information and documents for the first twenty-five years of Shelley’s life (while Dowden’s second volume follows Shelley into Italy).
The Sussex nurse and the Great Tortoise legend are mentioned in Hellen Shelley’s letters to Jane Williams; while the ‘Great Old Snake’ is described in Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, 1858, the edition used here and throughout being that edited by Humbert Wolfe, 2 vols, 1933, 1. Reference to the ‘Great Old Snake’ is on p. 22.
2. Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story, 1946, p. 23.
3. Dowden, op. cit., I, p. 5.
4. Shelley acidly refers to the picture of Christ in letters to Hogg, winter 1810–11; the ‘bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius’ is mentioned in Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1847, edited by H. B. Forman, 1913, p. 12.
5. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 23.
6. ibid., p. 22.
7. Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 vols, 1927, I, p. 30.
8. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, I, p. 28.
9. ibid., p. 25.
10. ibid., p. 22.
11. ibid., pp. 22–3.
12. Medwin, op. cit., p. 16.
13. ibid., p. 17.
14. ibid.
15. ibid., p. 20.
16. ibid., p. 24.
17. ibid., p. 20.
18. Sir John Rennie, quoted in Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, 1951, p. 7.
19. Medwin, op. cit., p. 27.
20. Poetical Works, p. 535.
21. Transcribed from Shelley’s working notebook, Bixby-Huntington Notebook II, in Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work, 1967, Appendix III, pp. 335–6.
22. Cameron, op. cit., p. 291, n. 1. It is interesting that Timothy first applied to the Royal College of Heralds for a pedigree in 1806. The somewhat spurious genealogy is discussed by Ingpen, op. cit., pp. 1–18.
23. ibid. See also John Cordy Jeaffreson, The Real Shelley, 2 vols, 1885, I, p. 21.
24. Ingpen, op. cit., p. 18.
25. Medwin, op. cit., p. 13.
26. Dowden, op. cit., I, p. 5.
27. Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries, 1828, vol. I, pp. 201–305.
28. Sir John Rennie, quoted in Cameron, op. cit., p. 7.
29. Medwin, op. cit., p. 23.
30. ibid., p. 16.
31. Bod. MS Shelley Adds. c. 4 f24. (c. 1822), which shows sketches of male and female faces in profile. ‘An Essay on Friendship’, Prose, p. 338.
32. ‘Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence’ (1819–20), Prose, pp. 347–8.
33. ‘Dedication to the Revolt of Islam’, stanzas 3–4; Poetical Works, pp. 37–8. See also ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, stanzas 5–6; Poetical Works, p. 531.
34. Medwin, op. cit., pp. 28–9.
35. Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 53.
36. The solar microscope is first mentioned in connection with Walker by Medwin, pp. 28–9; and several times subsequently by Hogg, pp. 55, 152–3, etc. Hogg says that Shelley’s ‘first care’ on entering new lodgings was to find a southern-facing window and cut a hole in the shutter for the microscope aperture.
37. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 23
.
38. Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 88.
39. Dowden, op. cit., I, p. 31, n. 1, who records the experiment at Eton; but Medwin, op cit., p. 72, locates the ‘electrical kite’ at Field Place, ‘an idea borrowed from Franklin’. Perhaps there was more than one kite, and more than one cat.
40. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 29. Poetical Works, pp. 838–9.
41. Letters, I, No. 1, p. 1.
42. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 23.
43. Letters, I, No. 2, p. 1.
44. W.H. Merle, article in The Athenaeum, 1848; reprinted in Edmund Blunden, Shelley and Keats as they Struck their Contemporaries, 1925.
45. Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, first printed as three articles in Fraser’s Magazine, June 1858, January 1860 and March 1862. Howard Mills (ed.), Peacock: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews, 1970, p. 24.
46. The Revolt of Islam, Canto V, stanzas 8–9; Poetical Works, p. 81.
47. Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 8 April 1825: Mary, I, No. 225, p. 317.
48. Mary’s ‘Notes’, Poetical Works, p. 835.
49. Mary Shelley, Lodore, 1835, pp. 72–7.
50. ibid., pp. 77–8.
51. Charles Grove to Hellen Shelley, 16 February 1857. Ingpen, op. cit., pp. 49–50. Grove recalls this as occurring when Shelley was aged 12.
52. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 24.
53. ibid., pp. 23–4.
54. The Reverend Robert Leslie quoted in Dowden, op. cit., I, p. 26 n. 1.
55. Hellen Shelley in Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 24.
56. ibid.
57. Medwin, op. cit., p. 34.
58. Walter Halliday to Hellen Shelley, 27 February 1857. Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 41.
59. Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 36.
60. Peacock, op. cit., p. 26.
61. Hogg, op. cit., I, p. 36.
62. ‘Oh! There are spirits of the air’, Poetical Works, p. 525.
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 109