The Neglected Shelley

Alan M. Weinberg, Timothy Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317023197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

New editions and facsimiles of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works are changing the landscape of Shelley studies by making complete compositions and fragments that have received only limited critical attention readily available to scholars. Building on the work begun in Weinberg and Webb's 2009 volume, The Unfamiliar Shelley, The Neglected Shelley sheds light on the breadth and depth of Shelley's oeuvre, including the poet's earliest work, written when he was not yet twenty and was experimenting with gothic romances, and other striking forms of literary expression, such as two collections of provocative verse. There are discussions of Shelley's collaboration with Mary Shelley in the composition of Frankenstein, and his skill as a translator of Greek poetry and drama, reflecting his urgent concern with Greek culture. His contributions to prose are the focus of essays on his letters, the subversive notes to Queen Mab, and his complex engagement with Jewish culture. Shelley's considerable corpus of fragments is well-represented in contributions on the later narrative fiction, 'Athanase'/'Prince Athanase', and the significant group of unfinished poems, including 'Mazenghi', 'Fiordispina', 'Ginevra' and 'The Boat on the Serchio', that treat Italian topics. Finally, there are explorations of subtle though neglected or underestimated works such as Rosalind and Helen, The Sensitive-Plant, and the verse-drama Hellas. The Neglected Shelley shows that even the poet's apparently slighter works are important in their own right and are richly instructive as expressions of Shelley's developing art of composition and the diverse interests he pursued throughout his career.

Chapter 1
An Uncelebrated Facility: The Achievement of Shelley’s Letters¹

Timothy Webb

I

Like many of his contemporaries, Shelley was an assiduous and inventive writer of letters. For 50 years now, we have had the resource of the two-volume edition of his correspondence edited by Frederick L. Jones, which runs to 721 letters (including fragments, postscripts and accompanying notes, although not the five fragmentary letters to Emilia Viviani in Italian, which Jones prints as an appendix); subsequently, this core has been slightly supplemented and partly revised,² but the correspondence is still too rarely recognized in its own right rather than as a mere corollary, or corrective, or supplement, to contemporary letters and journals, or as a useful tool for critics and biographers.

Jones’s edition of the letters provides enriching insights into Shelley’s life, especially his intellectual development, and establishes indispensable contexts for his frequent travels in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, in France and Switzerland and, from April 1818, in Italy. In the early letters, particularly, it allows us to observe Shelley struggling to understand and articulate the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology and the challenging facts of English society and contemporary politics. These letters enable us to reconstruct, at least partially, the circumstances of his day-to-day existence in Oxford, London (at many addresses), Cwm Elan, Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tanyrallt, Bishopsgate, Geneva, Bath, Marlow, Milan, Bagni di Lucca, Este, Naples, Rome, Livorno, Florence, Pisa and neighbouring Bagni di Pisa (San Giuliano Terme), Ravenna, and finally in Lerici (at numerous other locations, such as Como, Venice or Bologna, he produced little or no surviving correspondence). They trace his attitudes to the writing of numerous philosophers and influential thinkers such as the French sceptics and the historians of the French Revolution; and writers of other generations and sometimes of other cultures, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Boccaccio, Tasso, Ariosto, Calderón and Goethe. They capture his changing critical assessments of celebrated literary contemporaries such as Godwin, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, Peacock, Keats, Byron and Hunt (all, except Scott and Wordsworth, known to him personally and receivers of his correspondence). And, recurrently if incompletely, they illuminate, directly and indirectly, his complicated and frequently disappointing relations with publishers and critics, his literary intentions and plans for publication and his own progress as a writer, primarily of poetry and plays but also, significantly, of essays and prose.

The record of letters is necessarily partial, imperfect and sometimes misleading. Even a quick glance at recent discoveries indicates how unpredictable is the discovery of letters which were previously unknown and how, although they sometimes confirm what we thought we knew, they also may disturb the established surface of the canon. Writing from Pisa in August 1821, Shelley gently and jokingly chides his cousin Thomas Medwin for a failure to be realistic about the inevitable postal frustrations and inadequacies (II: 341). The disconcerting rule of the arbitrariness of what letters survive certainly applies to the whole of Shelley’s life, not least to the correspondence of earlier years when there was no difficulty with Italian post offices or leaving letters to be collected; for instance, Nicholas Joukovsky records that most of Peacock’s English letters to Shelley have disappeared, some perhaps used as paper boats, others left behind among Shelley’s papers at Marlow.

Not surprisingly, the principle also holds good for the years in Italy, when communication was necessarily more precarious. Joukovsky calculates that, although on 24 August 1819 Shelley very gently reminded Peacock that his letters had still not reached Livorno, ‘it would appear that even since 13 January Peacock had written him a dozen or more letters’. Conversely, but entirely as one might expect, some of Shelley’s letters to Peacock have also disappeared. Joukovsky soberingly concludes that, although Peacock claimed that Shelley had written him ‘scarcely less than fifty’ letters from Italy (Peacock’s own figure), most have never appeared in print, while others were probably done away with by Peacock himself since they referred to business matters. In addition, says Joukovsky, ‘he is likely to have destroyed his own letters for the same reasons that he destroyed some of Shelley’s. Thus Peacock appears to have succeeded in manipulating both sides of the epistolary record of his most important friendship’.³

Surviving correspondence is always subject to these and other distortions; yet, even with the proviso that the testimony of letters must always be approached with exceptional caution, Shelley’s extant correspondence is of great value. At the least, it supplements the letters and journals of Claire Clairmont (an intimate though occasional member of the Shelley party, the exact nature of whose closeness to Shelley still remains controversial) and especially of Mary Shelley, whom Shelley had first addressed as Mary Godwin (14 extant letters) and later as his wife (18 extant letters), who usually stayed at home in various parts of Italy to look after their child or children and did not accompany him on his expeditions; to this arrangement we owe his first description of Venice, his detailed account of Byron at Ravenna and of parts of the city, the report of his visit to Allegra (the young daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont) at the Convent of St Anna, and his thoughtful but unknowingly final letter from Pisa (II: 34–5, 321–4, 334–5, 443–4).

Underneath all these letters, as in every collection of correspondence, there is the graph of the writer’s own life, unknown and still evolving at the time but now unchangeable (even if subject to a variety of interpretations), which leaves its mark on his day-to-day existence. This can reflect both private life and public; sometimes, as with Shelley, this distinction can often be maintained only with difficulty.

Few readers can be ignorant of Shelley’s final destiny or fail to recognize the retrospective irony of a passage written in a letter of 18 June:

Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain thou, thou art so beautiful’. (II: 435–6)

Less than three weeks later, Shelley and Edward Williams were to drown in the same bay, while the suddenly widowed Jane Williams, whose guitar had recently been purchased for her by an admiring Shelley,⁴ was soon to play a tragic and unrehearsed part in Mary Shelley’s bewildered reactions. Shelley had been filling his notebook with sketches of sailing boats and translating Faust, and the recipient of this letter appropriately was John Gisborne, who had been his chief instructor in German. In themselves, these facts assume a contour which is inevitably bittersweet, even more so when the tense is irrevocably past and the recorder so innocent of his own immediate future; what provides them with an even sharper definition is the consciousness and skill of the writer, with which they are so vividly and unforgettably informed. These qualities are evident in letters reporting on a wide range of matters; for instance, there is his expulsion from Oxford; his brief engagement in Irish politics; his gradual disenchantment with Harriet Westbrook, followed shockingly by her unexpected suicide; his attraction and eventual marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; his legal loss of two children by Harriet; his imaginatively energizing visit to the lakes and mountains of Switzerland; his translation to Italy, not intended to be permanent but ultimately leaving a shaping impress on many of his works and achieving an irrevocable finality; his sojourns in and visits to various cities in Italy; his responses to the distant echo of British disturbances and his alertness to the immediacies and changing pattern, with all its hopes and disappointments, of European, and especially Italian, political life.

Shelley’s letters often exhibit qualities of their own which are strongly distinctive: a gracious consideration for his correspondents and a diplomatic intuition, almost a special dimension of sensitivity (closely connected, perhaps, with what Shelley himself might have described as a chameleon quality),⁵ which sometimes caused him to be chosen as go-between in difficult situations, such as the tangled relations between Claire Clairmont and Byron; an unmistakable charm and elegance but with no sense of self-consciousness or assumed social superiority; an unusual metaphorical capacity, sometimes combined with an acute metaphysical intelligence; a descriptive immediacy in reporting on persons and places which brings them vividly alive; an active political curiosity and an informing set of determined political opinions (‘You know my passion for a republic, or anything which approaches it’, II: 180); a disarming self-deprecation often aimed at his own rhetorical excesses (‘So far the Preacher’, II: 191, following a denunciation of Ollier, his publisher), or ‘But not to ascend in my balloon’ (II: 192, after he explains a theory to Peacock according to which everything a man does contains ‘an allegorical idea of his own future life’); a recurrent good humour (not without moments of sadness) and a strong sense of humour (see, for example, the prolonged description of John Gisborne’s nose – ‘it weighs on the imagination to look at it, – it is that sort of nose which transforms all the gs its wearer utters into ks’, II: 114). The letters often throw an illuminating light on his character, not always instantly evident from his prose and his poetry, and also enable his readers to reconstruct what it might have been like to share his experiences in the early years of the nineteenth century. Many of these letters are necessarily connected to Shelley’s work as a writer (especially as a poet) and register with melancholy exactness the fluctuations of his own attitude and his responses to the recent successes of contemporaries and the unmatchable achievements of their predecessors. This catalogue of attributes (which could easily be extended) suggests that Shelley’s correspondence deserves careful consideration and might profitably be compared not only with that of Byron, Keats and Coleridge but often to his credit with the letters of Blake, William Wordsworth, Southey, Godwin, Moore, Hazlitt, Peacock, Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley and many lesser writers of the period.⁶

II

The evidence of early letters clearly suggests that, at least at this stage of his life, Shelley used his epistolary opportunities with playful and dramatic skill.⁷ For example, under the name of ‘an elderly clergyman, highly-beneficed, and signing himself Charles Meyton’, he gave spiritual guidance to Rev. George Stanley Faber who had been troubled by a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. The irony of this position and its potential for strengthening his own argumentative position must have been evident to Shelley. In spite of his emotional commitment, he was capable of assessing the situation with acidulous clarity: once in a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg he classified Faber as one of ‘the Armageddon-Heroes [who] maintain their posts with all the obstinacy of cabalistical dogmatism. How I pity them, how I despise, hate them’ (I: 45).⁸ As Bruce Barker-Benfield has discovered, in the assumed character of Meyton, Shelley offered Faber detailed advice, part of which Faber reported, with obvious discomfort, as follows:

a sixth enormous lie consisted in his saying, that he had himself visited Palestine; that it resembled a stone-quarry more than any thing else; and that neither angels nor martyrs should ever convince him, contrary to the evidence of his senses, that it had ever been a fertile land.⁹

If he was ‘Meyton’, Shelley was also, rhymingly, ‘Peyton, which will be my nom de guerre [and] will easily swallow up Mr. Shelley’. The assumed identity must have pleased him since, shortly afterwards, he told Hogg, who was living in York, ‘I shall come & live near you as Mr Peyton’ (I: 118, 131).

As Frederick Jones explains it: ‘he adopted various pseudonyms, and often had his letters posted by [Edward Fergus] Graham in London and the replies addressed to Graham’s lodgings. The subjects at Oxford seem always to have been matters of religious doctrine and faith, and the victims of this hoax clergymen, both eminent and ordinary’ (I: 22 n. 2). There were other targets and other gratifying ingenuities. For example, on 21 November 1810 he informed Graham of his latest impersonation: ‘The letter I sent t{o} be put in the Post, is a most beautiful Joke, it is from a French girl to the king of the Methodists’ (I: 22). Again, on 13 March 1811 he wrote a long and remarkable letter to the young poet Felicia Browne (now better known by her married name as Felicia Hemans); this letter was signed ‘Philippe Sidney’, a signature which carries Shelley’s own initials but is mysteriously translated into French. As Bruce Barker-Benfield argues, it is also ‘mere cheek’ because, although Shelley was genuinely related to the Sidney family, he has ‘tricked Felicia and her mother into believing that they are indeed corresponding with a family of Sidneys at an address in London’.¹⁰ The content of this closely argued letter is also designed to be provocative; among other things, the supposed Philippe Sidney confesses: ‘I examined the grounds upon which Theism is founded, they appeared to me weak, thro’ deficiency of proof I became an Atheist.’¹¹ This sentence is doubly autobiographical, since it provides an account of intellectual positioning which clearly applies to Percy Shelley (whatever may be said of Philippe Sidney); even more pointedly, although the unsatisfactory nature of theism is not directly articulated in the pamphlet, the final formulation (‘Thro’ … Atheist’) had recently appeared on the title-page of the anonymous The Necessity of Atheism.

Shelley’s role-playing is often linked to a variety of factors or interests: the Regency practice of ‘bamming’ (that is, hoaxing or tricking), an excess of youthful high spirits and an impatience with conventional questions of ‘identity’. Especially, it shapes the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, a sequence of poems attributed to the deranged woman who had attempted to assassinate George III (discussed elsewhere in this book by David Duff, who has much to say about Shelley’s proclivity for the ludic, for deliberately confusing impersonation and for provocative literary jokes and games). All these connections may be significant, but the direct link of the Felicia Browne letter to the pamphlet and the recurrent need to argue with clergymen and bishops also suggest that, at least for Shelley, a process of apparent indirection may be associated with the most serious concerns. As Hogg and other students of Shelley have pointed out, there may also be a link here with the lessons about influencing the reading public which Shelley had absorbed from Dr Lind at Eton. Although there seems to have been no further attempt at role-playing through the medium of correspondence, Shelley retained, at least for some years, a more than usually acute sense of the power of individual readers to influence or even alter public opinion; see, for example, the long and carefully itemized list of influential politicians, public figures, newspaper editors and political organizations he selected to receive copies of A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom (I: 533–4), or the much shorter list of those who should automatically receive copies of all his publications (II: 118; a catalogue of supporters which has much in common with the list of friends in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’). It is worth noting, too, that the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty was published under the name of ‘Elfin Knight’ while the slightly later review of Godwin’s Mandeville employed the initials ‘E.K’. Probably for political or legal reasons, the author of A Proposal did not identify himself as Percy Bysshe Shelley but chose the evasive title of ‘The Hermit of Marlow’, a name which he retained when he published An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte. At the end of March 1822, when Shelley wanted Claire Clairmont to communicate ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• 1 An Uncelebrated Facility: The Achievement of Shelley’s Letters
• 2 Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms: Observing the Body in Percy Shelley’s Gothic Fiction
• 3 Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires: The 1810 Poetry Collections
• 4 The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
• 5 ‘His left hand held the lyre’: Shelley’s Narrative Fiction Fragments
• 6 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
• 7 Shelley’s Second Kingdom: Rosalind and Helen and ‘Mazenghi’
• 8 Shelley’s Work in Progress: ‘Athanase: A Fragment’ and the Unfinished Draft of ‘Prince Athanase’
• 9 Satyr Play in a Radical Vein: Shelley’s ‘Cyclops’
• 10 The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
• 11 ‘Infinitely comical’: Italianizing the ‘Hymn to Mercury’
• 12 ‘Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream’: Shelley’s Art of Ambivalence in Hellas
• 13 Shelley, Jews and the Land of Promise
• 14 Shelley’s Italian Verse Fragments: Exploring the Notebook Drafts
• Bibliography
• Index