Shelley: The Pursuit Read Free

her life work to establish an unimpeachable feminine and Victorian idealization of the poet. The main obstacles were the irregularities of Shelley’s love-life, the radicalism of his political views and the philosophic difficulty of much of his major work. She substituted for them the image of the gentle, suffering lyric poet, a misunderstood man more sinned against than sinning, whose reputation and social standing were gradually rehabilitated. Suppression, alteration and even destruction of certain journals, letters and papers here began in earnest; though to be fair these were not much worse than those already carried out by friends like Hogg. But the cumulative distortion became large. Moreover, the vetting and control which Lady Jane exercised over the chosen scholars who were allowed into the sanctuary, notably Richard Garnett and Edward Dowden, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, was strict and to some degree ruthless. This is witnessed most particularly by the entirely unscrupulous handling of the Harriet Shelley material; but there are many other places where the record was intentionally falsified, and details of the more significant ones are discussed in the course of my narrative for they frequently throw much light. They may also be gathered from the Garnett, Dowden, Rossetti correspondence which has been published, and a wild but spirited polemical attack by Robert Metcalf Smith in The Shelley Legend (1945). This crucial period of Shelley studies was crowned by Edward Dowden’s two-volume standard Life (1886), whose damaging influence is still powerfully at work in popular estimates of Shelley’s writing and character.
    The decisive modern reinterpretation of Shelley began in America. It may be said to date from the biographical work of Newman Ivey White, and the textual scholarship of F. L. Jones. Together with a third American scholar, Kenneth Neill Cameron, who became the first editor of the Shelley Collectionin the Pforzheimer Library in New York, these men began a movement which has started a complete transformation of the assessment of Shelley’s life and work. Their monuments are White’s two-volume Shelley of 1940, and Jones’ two-volume Letters of 1964; full details of the rest of their work appear in my references. They returned everywhere to original manuscript sources and contemporary material, meticulously comparing printed versions and frequently having recourse to infra-red equipment, and launching a new younger generation of researchers. Any modern English biography must be profoundly indebted to this scholarship, and for me it has been both the indispensable foundation of this book, and an inspiring example.
    While the biographic material of Shelley’s life has taken more than a hundred years to begin its re-emergence from the penumbra of Victorian proprieties, many of Shelley’s actual writings have suffered from an equivalent languishing fate. This too has led to a great distortion in the literary estimate of Shelley’s importance. The publishing history of many of Shelley’s major poems is a curious one, while the last reasonably complete edition of his prose in England was in 1880. His most important political essay was first published in a limited private edition one hundred years after it was composed, while several of his best poems have only been authoritively edited and printed in the last decade. With the exception of Carl Grabo’s The Magic Plant (1936), and an essay by W. B. Yeats, there is virtually no literary criticism or critical commentary which is worth reading before 1945. Again, details of the history of Shelley publication occur in the body of my narrative where they throw light on Shelley’s reputation, as in the extraordinary case of Queen Mab . Probably the most faithful, effective and discriminating of Shelley’s earliest publishers were the band of radical pirate printers who fought the battle for a free press in the 1820s, and later the battle for