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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
A few scholars have long puzzled over the fact that some of the unauthorized editions of Shelley's poems which were published after Posthumous Poems (London, 1824, edited by Mrs. Shelley) contain better readings at certain points than that volume, readings which do not appear in an authorized text until Mrs. Shelley published The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1839 (London, four vols.). Robert Browning noticed this in a letter addressed to H. Buxton Forman, dated 2 July 1877, in which he says of the fifth line of “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples,” omitted in the body of the text of 1824, “The line was first restored in a strange edition of Shelley published by Benbow in 1826; and Leigh Hunt, in 1828, quotes the poem without it, remarking on its loss: and it was myself who told him of its existence, to his surprise and pleasure.” Frederick A. Pottle, who quotes from Browning's letter in his Shelley and Browning (Chicago, 1923, p. 14), wonders how it was that Benbow obtained the missing line (p. 83). My investigation of this problem, instigated by Pottle, has led to two surprising discoveries: first, that all the modern editors of Shelley's text have failed to notice an errata leaf to Posthumous Poems which is present in some copies still extant, and, secondly, that there are important relationships between certain of the unauthorized editions which followed Posthumous Poems and Mrs. Shelley's text of 1839. These relationships, in fact, call into question the textual value of a large number of readings hitherto believed to be original to the first edition of 1839.
1 The reading “lightenings,” which the meter requires, occurs in none of the early editions, authorized or pirated.
2 The last word of this line, picked up from the line omitted in the uncorrected text of 1824, is not printed correctly as “might” (Boscombe MS.) until 1847 in a footnote to Thomas Med win's Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
3 Unfortunately this poem is not printed in Verse and Prose from the Manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Sir John C. E. Shelley-Rolls and Roger Ingpen (London, 1934).
4 In general, the collation by the Julian editors leaves much to be desired; they omit, for example, any notice of the numerous variants in the autograph version of “Lift not the painted veil” which immediately follows the “Stanzas” in the Morgan MS.
5 Presumably Cyrus Redding. Cf. letter No. 323 and the note in Vol. ii of The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1944).
6 In the case of the Adonais, it can be seen by collation of the Pisa edition of 1821 with Galignani, Ascham, and the first edition of 1839 that Ascham most probably derived his text from Galignani, and Mrs. Shelley in turn used Ascham. It seems clear that the major alteration in the ninth line of stanza viii as it appears in 1829 is one of the “changes Mr. Shelley wished made in the Adonais” to which Mrs. Shelley refers in the letter cited above. To what extent the other small variants introduced by the Galignanis depend upon Mrs.
7 There is no question of the proper date of the 1834 edition and hence of its priority. Ascham's edition is listed on p. 172 of a volume of The London Catalogue of Books (1814–34) published in 1835.
8 In an article which has come to my attention since I wrote the above, Neville Rogers arrives at the same conclusion on other evidence. Although believing that Dec. 1817 is the only date Mrs. Shelley gives for the poem, he argues convincingly that the poem “seems more likely to belong to the autumn of 1819 or later” (“Four Missing Pages from the Shelley Notebook in the Harvard College Library,” Keats-Shelley Journal, m [Winter 1954], 53).
9 The bibliographical status of the leaf was discussed, just one year before the Julian edition began to be published, by Percy L. Babington in “The Errata Leaf in Shelley's Posthumous Poems” Library, 4th Ser., v, iv (March 1925), 365.