Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings, Volume 1

Nora Crook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000748314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR OF ITALIAN LIVES

Mary Shelley’s Italian Lives comprise the first and second volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal, 3 volumes, in The Cabinet of Biography, Conducted by the Rev. Dionysius Lardner (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman; and John Taylor, 1835–7). The text was published at an important moment in British cultural history, during a decade when London society was enriched by the presence of exiled Italian intellectuals and literati and at a time when British sympathy for their national cause fostered a renewed interest among the English in things Italian. Longman and Taylor were responding to a demand for books and anthologies on the broad scope of the Italian literary tradition, not only amongst students of the language but by the general public. The Italian Lives also occupy an important place in Mary Shelley’s personal and professional history, offering a sweeping presentation of her deep knowledge of Italian literature and language and marking, along with the other Lardner Lives, the culmination of her activities as a literary critic and biographer.

Mary Shelley was to speak of herself as having accepted the commission after being ‘applied to’, but, as Nora Crook’s introduction has outlined, the only certain fact about this process is that she joined the project in mid-stream.¹ The title-page vignette to Italian Lives I suggests that in 1833 (when the engraving was first made) plans to include lives of Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio and Copernicus in the first volume were still current. Three of her favourite authors had already been spoken for: James Montgomery had completed ‘Dante’ and ‘Ariosto’ and had been commissioned to write ‘Tasso’ for the second volume. ‘Galileo’ (Sir David Brewster) had also been written. According to Lardner’s ‘Explanation of the a/c of Literary Lives’, written into a Longman Ledger of Costs and Sales in 1836, another four biographies had been ‘paid for but rejected as not being sufficiently good’. These were Lorenzo de’ Medici (‘By Thomas Roscoe’), Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machiavelli (‘by Dr Drake’).²

Mary Shelley’s freedom to choose her own subjects was thus circumscribed, at least for volume I. There would in any case have been no dispute about the major figures. However, we can assume she had some powers of veto and counterproposal and there is a point where we perhaps see this in operation. Scipione Maffei (1675–1755), historian, scientist, philosopher and tragic dramatist, is the subject of one of the portraits in the title-page vignette of Italian Lives II. Conjecturally, Mary Shelley rejected an existing plan to include him. The Florentine historian Guicciardini, whom she had studied for ‘Machiavelli’ and the dramatist Goldoni – or both – are possible replacement candidates.

Her progress on the Italian Lives and her work habits can occasionally be inferred. On 23 November 1833 her journal records that she was ‘going to begin the lives of the Italians’. By early December 1833 she had already established a daily pattern of work on the project: ‘I write the “Lives” in the morning & I read novels and memoires of an evening’ (MWSJ, II, pp. 533, 541). This schedule must soon have been interrupted by the impending publication of Lodore, for which she was reviewing proofs and completing copy from November through mid-March. She was dismayed to learn in early April that the printers had mislaid a significant portion of her novel, and she was faced with rewriting the text. (The publisher ultimately postponed publication of Lodore.) Her letter of 30 April 1834 protests ‘I am engaged writing for D^r Lardner & am very busy indeed […] Had I nothing else to do it were still rather hard to come upon me to rewrite a portion of Manuscript’ (MWSL, II, p. 201).

By 17 July 1834 she had finished work on ‘Petrarch Boccaccio &c’ and was writing ‘Machiavelli’ (MWSL, II, p. 209).³ If she worked chronologically (as seems likely) and if ‘&c’ stands for the lives between ‘Petrarch’ and ‘Machiavelli’ (i.e. Lorenzo de’ Medici and his circle, Boiardo and Berni) then she was perhaps on the final item. The exact completion date is not known, though there is a hint in a February 1835 letter from Moore that she had produced ‘short copy’. This may have entailed more writing after she thought she had finished and a delay in publication.⁴Italian Lives I was published on 1 February 1835 in a print run of 4,000 copies.

Mary Shelley probably began work on Italian Lives II well before the publication of Italian Lives I. Her research for ‘Machiavelli’ during the previous year would have led straight into ‘Guicciardini’. Her correspondence indicates that on 9 February 1835 she was reading for ‘Marini’, and, if she worked more or less chronologically through the lives she would have been nearly half the way through the volume (MWSL, II, p. 222). Her only other reference to the composition of individual lives comes in early April, when she was researching materials for ‘Alfieri’ and anticipating her work on ‘Monti’, and both are among the final lives of the volume (MWSL, II, p. 238). Volume 2 was published on 1 October 1835 in a print-run of 3,500 copies. Her contract with Longman has not been found, but it can be deduced that she probably received about £140 for each volume.⁵ The six author’s free copies were split between herself and Montgomery for Italian Lives I but she received a full six for Italian Lives II (while Montgomery received four).⁶

Five reviews have been located for Italian Lives I and four for Italian Lives II, the fruits of ninety-eight copies of each being sent to newspapers. Some – the Athenæum, the Literary Gazette, the Monthly Magazine – were the briefest of notices, the last offering merely a puff for the Cabinet Cyclopædia (a ‘Godsend’ of enlightenment second only to the Bible). Commentary on both volumes was mixed and often contradictory, but on balance positive; prose style, organisation and use of source materials were the three most often identified points of discussion. The Sunday Times said of Italian Lives I that the ‘style is pleasing and easy’, while the Athenæum thought that the ‘style wants simplicity’. Reflecting a general consensus, the Spectator declared the first volume deficient in organisation, which is perhaps unsurprising; reviewers did not make this complaint of the second volume, with the Literary Gazette characterising the work as ‘ very neatly compiled’. Finally, both volumes were alternately criticised and commended for the close use of source materials, with the Spectator liking the use of original material in Italian Lives I but complaining of Italian Lives II that ‘the compiler appears to be translating from different authors, and to be altogether dependent on his originals for manner as well as matter’.⁷

By far the most substantial reviews were two pieces in the Monthly Review; they included commentary and significant extracts from the work. The review of volume I was not particularly positive, with the author informing his readers that ‘we by no means think highly of the volume as a whole’, deploring its excessive reliance on facts and dates and the absence of any introductory contextualisation of Dante’s career. Yet the reviewer singles out two of Mary Shelley’s major lives for remark, ‘Petrarch’ and ‘Machiavelli’, virtually ignoring the rest, and highlights some of the most interesting parts of her text in his reading. He notes, in particular, her efforts to question conventional assumptions about Machiavelli by returning to autobiographical materials and credits her with originality on this point. The review of the second volume, seemingly by a different but equally Italophile writer, sympathetically notices her particular interest in the lives of ‘Alfieri’, ‘Monti’ and ‘Foscolo’ and observes that her emphasis on the relative ‘moral grandeur’ of the poets is associated with the resurgence of Italian nationalism. Both reviews acknowledge, at least indirectly, Mary Shelley’s political interests in biography.⁸

Of particular interest, also, is the notice of the Italian Lives I in the short-lived Leigh Hunt’s London Journal (1834–5). Hunt offers extracts to the reading public, focusing particularly on literary friendship, which he observes ‘the present writer of their lives has judiciously shown […] as much as possible’. In addition to noticing what was to prove a persistent theme in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives, Hunt concludes with a suggestive paralleling of the friendship of Petrarch and Boccaccio with that of P. B. Shelley and John Keats.

Finally, one 1841 American notice has been located (in Graham’s Magazine). It notices the two-volume pirated edition of the Italian Lives that was published by Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia in that year.⁹ The names of ‘Mrs Shelley, Sir D. Brewster, James Montgomery, and others’ appeared on the title page. (The ordering is identical to that found in the Cyclopædia’s post-1838 publicity brochure, the ‘Analytical Catalogue’, and probably derives from it.) Although the piece is very brief, the writer was probably Edgar Allen Poe, co-editor of Graham’s Magazine, upon whose works Mary Shelley seems have exercised a considerable influence. The notice suggests that the Italian Lives were positively received in the United States.¹⁰

Attribution has been confused by the designation of James Montgomery as titular author of all three volumes,¹¹ but with the exception of the Montgomery and Brewster items all the lives in the Italian volumes are Mary Shelley’s, by her own direct testimony. On 9 February 1835 she reported to Maria Gisborne that: ‘The Vol. of Lardner’s Cyclopedia with my lives was published on the 1^st of this Month – It is called Lives of Eminent literary men Vol. 1 – The lives of Dante & Ariosto are by the Omnipresent M^r Montgomery – the rest are mine’ (MWSL, II, p. 222).⁴ Writing to Maria Gisborne again on 13 October 1835 after Italian Lives II appeared, she attests that ‘all in that vol. except Gallileo [sic] & Tasso are mine – The last is chief I allow […] it had been engaged to the Omnipresent Mr Montgomery before I began to write – I am vain enough to think that I should have written it better than he has done’. In another letter to Maria Gisborne she identified ‘Galileo’ as Brewster’s (MWSL, II, pp. 257, 260).

The ‘Omnipresent’ James Montgomery (1771–1854), poet, journalist and literary historian, was best known for his long poems The Wanderer of Switzerland (1806) and the anti-slavery The West Indies (1809). His association with Robert Southey and the fact that many of his works were published with Longman perhaps account for his involvement with the Cyclopædia project. A pension of £150 a year was awarded to him in 1835 and he withdrew into philanthropic activity in Sheffield. His ‘Dante’, ‘Ariosto’ and ‘Tasso’ are noticeably distinct from Mary Shelley’s work both in style and emphasis. While her prose is succinct and energetic, Montgomery writes in a digressive though not unengaging manner. He offers details that he acknowledges to be factually questionable and develops extended parallels between Italian and English literature. His notices tend to place particular emphasis on the noble lineage and family history of his subjects, though overall they are actually less focused on biography and more concerned with the character of ‘the poet’ generally. His work is well crafted and he is considerably more consistent in identifying his sources than is Mary Shelley. He likewise includes significant autobiographical material.¹²

Sir David Brewster (1781–1868) was the author of the Cyclopæd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• General Editor’s Introduction
• ITALIAN LIVES
• Editorial Corrections