Keats House counts among its collection several first editions of Shelley’s published works, including Posthumous Poems, and an autograph letter, c.1839, from Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, detailing her anxieties surrounding a new biography of Shelley.
Conference attendees will receive free admission to Keats House Museum during 28-29 June.
A selection of Shelley relics, including the items mentioned above, will be on display. Dr Andrew Lacey’s interpretations of these exhibition items can be read below.
Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Edited and with a preface by Mary Shelley. London. John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824
After the death of Percy Shelley in 1822, his wife Mary Shelley intended to write his biography to console herself over her loss. However, Percy Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley, threatened to remove her allowance if the Shelley name appeared in print.
In 1824, Mary Shelley edited this edition of Percy Shelley’s poems to promote his work, including a preface as a memorial to her husband. The volume contains much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’.
Only 500 copies were printed, and the book was withdrawn from sale and the unsold copies destroyed after Percy Shelley’s father objected to publication. This copy may have belonged to John Keats’s friend Charles Brown.
Extract from Mary Shelley’s preface to Posthumous Poems:
‘No man was ever more devoted than he, to the endeavour of making those around him happy; no man ever possessed friends more unfeignedly attached to him. The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as quickly over his memory as the murderous sea above his living frame. Hereafter men will lament that his transcendant [sic] powers of intellect were extinguished before they had bestowed on them their choicest treasures. To his friends his loss is irremediable: the wise, the brave, the gentle, is gone for ever! He is to them as a bright vision, whose radiant track, left behind in the memory, is worth all the realities that society can afford. Before the critics contradict me, let them appeal to any one who had ever known him: to see him was to love him’.
Autograph letter from Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, [undated, but c. 23 December 1839]
This autograph letter from Putney to the literary editor and friend of John Keats, Leigh Hunt, details Mary Shelley’s anxieties surrounding a projected biography of her late husband Percy Shelley. The author George Henry Lewes had approached Mary Shelley to verify facts; she politely declined Lewes’s request, describing it as ‘indiscreet’. Mary Shelley never remarried, and her continuing pain, nearly two decades after Shelley’s death, is evident:
‘Time may flow on – but it adds only to the keeness [sic] & vividness with which I view the past […] I cannot write or speak of Shelley to any purpose according to my views without taking a seal from a fountain, that I cannot bring myself yet to let flow’.
Lewes’s biography of Percy Shelley, though advertised in the National Magazine and Monthly Critic in 1838, did not appear.
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Edited and with a preface by Mary Shelley. London. E. Moxon, 1840
After the publication of Posthumous Poems, several pirated editions of Percy Shelley’s poetry were published. Some of these editions, such as Galignani’s Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829), were ‘a near approach to a collective edition’ (CPPBS, vol. 7, xxxv).
By the late 1830s, Sir Timothy Shelley’s attitude to a ‘Collected Shelley’ had softened, and Mary Shelley’s The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley was first published, in four volumes, in 1839. This volume collects the four volumes of 1839 into a single volume, with some editorial changes. Although the title-page gives 1840 as the publication date, this single-volume edition was published in late 1839.
Poetical Works presents Percy Shelley’s longer major poems first, followed by shorter poems grouped by year; each long poem or grouping is accompanied by a ‘Note by the Editor’, replete with Mary Shelley’s recollections of her life with Shelley and the circumstances surrounding the composition of the poems. Editing the poems and drafting the Notes caused Mary Shelley considerable distress: in her journal, she writes: ‘I almost think that my present occupation will end in a fit of illness’, adding ‘I am torn to pieces by Memory’ (12 February 1839). Further editions of Poetical Works followed in Mary Shelley’s lifetime, in 1846 and 1847.
Extract from Mary Shelley’s preface to Poetical Works:
‘Obstacles have long existed to my presenting the public with a perfect edition of Shelley’s Poems. These being at last happily removed, I hasten to fulfil an important duty, – that of giving the productions of a sublime genius to the world, with all the correctness possible, and of, at the same time, detailing the history of those productions, as they sprang, living and warm, from his heart and brain’.
Essays, Letters From Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Edited and with a preface by Mary Shelley. 2 volumes. London. E. Moxon, 1840
This two-volume edition of Percy Shelley’s prose, like the single-volume edition of Poetical Works, was published in late 1839. Volume 1 presents, among other works, Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’, his translations of Plato, and philosophical essays including ‘On Love’, ‘On Life’, and ‘On a Future State’. Volume 2 presents a selection of journals, including ‘Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour’, and letters from Geneva and Italy.
Writing to Gideon Mantell in September 1839, Mary Shelley observed ‘A defence of poetry […] is truly magnificent & places [Shelley] very high in the scale of prose writers. Its diction is exquisitely harmonious & the imagery grand & vivid’. In a letter to her publisher, Edward Moxon, of December 1839, Mary Shelley responded with ire to a review of Essays, Letters… in The Spectator, which averred ‘now the chief consideration with any one possessing manuscripts seems to be whether the author’s name is enough to sell them’.
Extract from Mary Shelley’s preface to Essays, Letters…:
‘Let the lovers of Shelley’s poetry – of his aspirations for a brotherhood of love, his tender bewailings springing from a too sensitive spirit – his sympathy with woe, his adoration of beauty, as expressed in his poetry; turn to these pages to gather proof of sincerity, and to become acquainted with the form that such gentle sympathies and lofty aspirations wore in private life’.
The Fortune of Eternity, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Taken Through the Clairaudience of Shirley Carson Jenney, Psychic
Ilfracombe. Stockwell, 1950
Two prose pieces, ‘The Fortune of Eternity’ and ‘The Script of Christ’, and several poems, including ‘Memory of the Skylark’, supposedly ‘transmitted wholly thro’ clairaudient dictation’ by the spirit of Percy Shelley to self-professed psychic Shirley Carson Jenney (d. 1953). Originally published in the USA in 1945, following, in similar vein, ‘The Great War-Cloud’ (1938) and ‘Moments With Shelley’ (1941).
While of limited scholarly value, The Fortune of Eternity stands as testament to the fact that Percy Shelley remained a subject of occultist interest well into the twentieth century. Commenting on the volume, Newman Ivey White dryly observed that ‘Shelley’s voice is considerably altered in the transmission’.
The Shelley Conference 