Shelley’s Work

1824

Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1824)

1839 i.−iv.

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 Vols. (London, 1839)

1840

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs Shelley, 1 Vol. (London, 1839, distributed 1840)

2016

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London, 2016)

BSM i.−xxiii

The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al, 23 Vols. (New York, 1986–2002)

Cenci

The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts (London, 1821)

CPPBS i.

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume One, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London, 2003)

CPPBS ii.

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume Two, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London, 2004)

CPPBS iii.

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume Three, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, with Nora Crook (Baltimore and London, 2012)

MYRS i.−viii.

The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics [Percy Bysshe Shelley], ed. Donald H. Reiman et al., 8 Vols. (New York, 1985–1997)

PE

Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (London, 1811)

PS i.

The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 1 (1804–1817), ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London, 1989)

PS ii.

The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 2 (1817–1819), ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, with Jack Donovan, Ralph Pite and Michael Rossington (London, 2000)

PS iii.

The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 3 (1819–1820), ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington, with Laura Barlow (London, 2011)

PS iv.

The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 4 (1820–1821), ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Kelvin Everest, with Andrew Lacey and Laura Barlow (London, 2014)

PWS i.

The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1811–1817, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford, 1993)

SL i.−ii.

The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1964)

SMW

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 2003)

SPP

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn. (New York, 2002)

St.I

St. Irvyne [see Zastrozzi]

Zastrozzi

Zastrozzi, A Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance , ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Ontario, 2002)

Biographical and Scholarly Material

Bieri

James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Biography (Baltimore, 2008)

BLJ i.−xiii

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 Vols. (London, 1973–1994)

CC i.–ii.

The Clairmont Correspondence, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 Vols. (Baltimore and London, 1995)

CCJ

The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge MA, 1968)

Dowden i.−ii.

Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1886)

Elopement

H. B. Forman, The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin (Privately Printed, 1911)

Enquiry

William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793], ed. Mark Philp (London, 2013)

Fraser’s lvii.

Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Part I, Fraser’s Magazine, lvii (June 1858), 643–659

Fraser’s lxi.

Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Part II, Fraser’s Magazine, lxi (January 1860), 92–109

Gisborne

Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. F. L. Jones (Norman OK, 1951)

Guitar

Shelley’s Guitar: A Bicentenary exhibition of manuscripts, first editions and relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, catalogue by B. C. Barker‐Benfield (Oxford, 1992)

Hearth

Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth (Durham, NC, 1938)

Holmes

Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 1974)

Hogg i.−ii.

Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1858)

Ingpen

Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England: New Facts and Letters (London, 1917)

K‐SJ

Keats‐Shelley Journal

K‐SMB

Keats‐Shelley Memorial Bulletin

LB

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992)

Med.33

Thomas Medwin, The Shelley Papers: Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1833)

Med.47 i.−ii.

Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1847)

MSJ i.−ii.

The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott‐Kilvert, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1987)

MSL i.−iii.

The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 Vols. (Baltimore & London, 1980–1988)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

OHPBS

The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford, 2013)

Oxford

Robert Montgomery, Oxford: A Poem, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1835)

Peck i.−ii.

Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 Vols. (Boston, 1927)

Robinson i.−iii.

Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 Vols. (London, 1938)

Rogers

Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1967)

SC i.−x.

Shelley and his Circle, ed. Kenneth Cameron et al., 10 Vols. (Cambridge MA and London, 1961–2002)

Seymour

Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London, 2000)

TLS

Times Literary Supplement

Trel.58

Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London, 1858)

Trel.78

Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author [1878], ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, 1973)

Trel.Letters

Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford, 1910)

White i.−ii.

Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 Vols. (New York, 1940)

Names

CC

Claire Clairmont [originally Mary Jane Clairmont, also Clare and Clara: Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont on her tomb]

LB

Lord Byron

LH

Leigh Hunt

MWG

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin [until 30 xii 1816]

MWS

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [from 30 xii 1816]

PBS

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Texts

There is (2019) still no authoritative complete edition of Shelley’s poetry, nor a complete edition of his prose. PS, with conventionalised punctuation, has published four volumes out of five; CPPBS, with three volumes published of eight planned, is more authoritative but less complete. Of the three easily available scholarly selections (SPP, SMW and 2016) the last is textually the most comprehensive and reliable, and contains a good selection of Shelley’s prose. In‐text references here are therefore to 2016, giving page numbers and, following a colon, line numbers and where appropriate section and Act numbers. e.g. (90), (591:57–58), (272:IV.570–578). Other references – to Shelley’s letters, to poetry only appearing in CPPBS and PS (with preference given to CPPBS), to manuscript readings, editorial emendations and all other material – appear in endnotes. Oddities in original spelling (e.g. ‘Appenines’, ‘embarassed’) and non‐standard grammar (e.g. ‘not one of whose opinions coincide with mine’) have been marked [sic] only when confusion seems likely (e.g. ‘sive’ for ‘sieve’).

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems, and new!’¹

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

Seeing Shelley ‘plain’, as Browning put it in 1851, is harder than one might imagine. The best‐known portrait of him, painted in 1819 by Amelia Curran, was – the artist herself admitted – ‘so ill done’ that she nearly destroyed it (it was never finished).² There exist, however, life‐drawings by Shelley’s friend Edward Williams, including a profile confirming just how ‘boyish looking’ he appeared, together with a ghostly back view (see Figure 1). His brown hair was always wild, his face freckled when he caught the sun; he grew tall but, as the pictures suggest, remained slight, with something of a stoop: small head, narrow shoulders, long legs.³

Readers of this book will find a concentration upon the actual: pistols fired in enclosed spaces, books printed in signatures, pieces of paper tightly folded. Shelley has so often been seen as an evanescent, barely human soul – his wife Mary remarked after his death that ‘I do not in any degree believe that his being was regulated by the same laws that govern the existence of us common mortals’ – that we need to ground our understanding of him in what he called ‘the difficult and unbending realities of actual life’.⁴

This is a biography shorter than most of its predecessors:⁵ the man who writes (poetry, letters, pamphlets, discursive prose) is the central subject. Not because the works are autobiographical, but because they focus the most intense concerns of the life: and because they are what makes Shelley extraordinary. He wrote so much that being comprehensive is, however, not an option.

It is tempting to assume that he must always have known where he was going as a writer, but he took a long time to locate the styles and the approaches that suited him. As Julian Barnes has remarked, an artist’s career is ‘likely to be a matter of obsessional overlap, of ferrying back and forth, of process rather than result, journey rather than arrival’.⁶ Shelley came to the end of his journey so very suddenly, at the age of 29, that it seems entirely natural for him not to have known exactly where he was arriving: if, indeed, he was going to be a poet at all.

He had started to write very early: in his penultimate year as a schoolboy at Eton, 1808–1809, when he was only 16, he began a highly coloured gothic novel, Zastrozzi. He had explained to a potential publisher in May 1809 that he expected no money for it (music to a publisher’s ears): ‘I am independent, being the heir of a gentleman of large fortune.’ The book came out in March 1810, when he was still at school. It got into print because he could afford to have it printed: he could even lay out £10 to bribe potential reviewers.⁷ And what followed was not just a stream but a flood of writing. His second book, Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, written with his sister Elizabeth (1794–1831), was printed at his own expense, though he failed to settle the printer’s bill (a massive £75) for some while. His third book, the novel St. Irvyne: or The Rosicrucian: A Romance, would be printed in December 1810, again at his own expense, and appeared in 1811, when Shelley was 18.⁸

But having his work printed and published privately became necessary, as he grew more critical of government, monarchy and Christianity, and as his reputation grew worse. Three pieces of political (in fact treasonable) writing had to be printed anonymously in 1812; copies identified as Shelley’s were nevertheless passed to the Home Office. In 1813, he realised that his poem Queen Mab could not be published as it stood, while the Notes he was planning would make it doubly impossible. Paying the real printer himself, he added his own name as printer, at his father‐in‐law’s address (the law demanded that a printer be named), but even then the book was only distributed to friends, often with name and address removed. In 1816, Shelley had his poem Alastor printed at his own expense, as he did his poem The Revolt of Islam in 1818 (which must have cost him near to £130⁹). He sent printed copies of his play The Cenci to London from Italy in 1819; Adonais, too, was printed in Italy and the copies sent to London for publication. On the other hand, two of his greatest poems, written in 1819, The Mask of Anarchy and his sonnet ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King’, would only be published in the 1830s, years after his death, and long after the time when they made political sense.

Such publishing – or failure to publish – was not conducive to Shelley’s making money. In one way, that was not a problem. As a gentleman possessed of a private income – in practice, an allowance awarded by his father Timothy Shelley (1753–1844) – and with a future which looked financially assured, he made a point of not writing for money. For much of his life the idea was repellent to him. In February 1821, he would actually insist on not being paid for an essay which, he declared, he had ‘determined to write’ before learning of its potential publisher’s ‘liberal arrangements’¹⁰ for payment. On 25 January 1822, nearly 12 years after his first book had been published, he would tell his friend, the London critic and editor Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), that he had no idea how well his books sold: ‘I have never until now thought it worth while to inquire.’ Back in 1811, he had instructed the bookseller responsible for his second gothic novel: ‘Will you have the goodness to inform me of the number of copies which you have sold of “St. Irvyne”.’¹¹ But by 1822, Shelley knew how pointless it would be to enquire how a book of his was selling – because so few sold. It seems likely that he never in fact earned a penny from any of his books.¹²

What makes this more startling is the fact that, by April 1822, he was in debt for over £20 000: in modern terms, over £1 million, as for rough equivalence 1800–1822, sums can be multiplied by 50.¹³ He coupled his remark in 1822 about book sales with a question about his newest work, a play. A fortnight earlier he had given his usual publisher, Charles Ollier (1788–1859), an opportunity to buy it: now he asked whether Hunt might be able to find a publisher who would take it for £150 or £200. His questions to Ollier and Hunt seem to have been the first occasions in his life when Shelley had actually put a price on a piece of his writing.

For, despite his constant, at times awful, local difficulties, he knew that he would – one day – be rich. But because he lived his entire life in the style appropriate to the eldest son of a gentleman, his income from his father never proved adequate. His unpaid bills dictated where he could live; eventually his debts were crucially important in his decision to leave England, in 1818, and to settle in a country (Italy) where his income would go further and his old liabilities could not be pursued.

His doctor’s warnings had also directed him to a warmer climate. Another necessary biographical topic – an often under‐rated problem – is that, from his early twenties until almost the end of his life, Shelley was beset by illness; in January 1821 he called himself a ‘feeble mass of diseases & infirmities’ dragged through the world by a ‘vapid & weary spirit’.¹⁴ He was frequently in severe pain: perhaps kidney stones, quite likely kidney damage and recurring infection. He was believed tubercular by an English doctor who examined him in 1817, though his life in Italy brought him a period of remission which lasted until his death. His astonishing achievements as a writer, along with ‘his habits of temperance and exercise’, confirm his ‘remarkable degree of strength’. But because he was slightly built it is, rather bizarrely, possible to compile seven accounts of his being knocked or thrown to the ground, as an adult.¹⁵

There is another reason why this book is shorter than many Shelley biographies. Myths about Shelley are still being created and distributed. The idea that, at Tan‐yr‐allt in North Wales in 1813, Shelley ‘claimed’ to have ‘twice fought off an intruder … perhaps a devil’, which he never at any stage claimed to have done, was repeated authoritatively in 2013.¹⁶ Because it remains problematic, and is likely to remain so, the Tan‐yr‐allt episode has become an opportunity for biographers to locate in it the Shelley they want: a man who narrowly escaped being murdered by a political opponent, a man who saw the devil, a man with acute psychological problems, a man not entirely sane, a man subject to what Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) would influentially call ‘semi‐delusion’. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2013, after stating that Shelley exchanged pistol shots with an intruder, came down firmly on both sides of the fence by adding: ‘This may have been another delusional episode.’¹⁷

Shelley biography needs to prioritize contemporary and documentary testimony. This will not always produce what is reliable, but some kinds of evidence are better than others and they should be identified. This book will, for example, depend as little as possible on the recollection of conversations or remarks written down many years after the events they describe, even by close friends or relations. What we now know of the waywardness of autobiographical memory, and the extent to which all memories are reconstructed memories, should stop us hoping for any accuracy in such accounts. They reveal the teller and his or her changing relationship with Shelley: they are hardly ever reliable. George Eliot was aware of this as early as 1870: ‘The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.’¹⁸

It would be as well, too, not to be distracted by the siren calls of psychological analysis which proved so tempting to those writing in the second half of the twentieth century. Shelley himself beautifully described how reflections in the waters of a canal manage to ‘surpass & misrepresent truth’.¹⁹ They may reflect the actual, but they embellish it into the alluring.