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“The Shelley Legend”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Late in 1945 appeared a book entitled The Shelley Legend. It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, and was written by Professor Robert M. Smith of Lehigh University in collaboration with Mr. Theodore G. Ehrsam, Miss Martha M. Schlegel, and Mr. Louis A. Waters. These authors began their labors in 1943 with apparently no previous experience in Shelley research and in less than two years claim to have discovered not only the real Shelley but also the fact that the patient biographical and critical labors of a long line of predecessors are in the main wrong. They even “venture the opinion that at least fifty per cent of the present attitude toward Shelley still stems from this cult [Lady Shelley's] of worshippers.” (p. 305) Their predecessors include Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Thomas Medwin, T. J. Hogg, T. L. Peacock, E. J. Trelawny, Lady Jane Shelley, Richard Garnett, D. F. MacCarthy, W. M Rossetti, H. Buxton Forman, J. Cordy Jeaffreson, Edward Dowden, Mrs. Julian Marshall, J. A. Symonds, William Sharpe, A. J. Koszul, Mrs. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Walter Peck, André Maurois, Newman I. White, and a host of lesser contributors, many of whom are of the highest intellectual and scholarly attainments. It is claimed that these intelligent people, who have accumulated, tested, and published the greatest quantity of materials on any modern writer, have lacked discernment sufficient to free themselves from a false interpretation of Shelley presented to the world by Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley and have been unable to base their conclusions on the facts in hand. This claim is made in spite of the fact, evident from the book itself, that no authors in question except Richard Garnett, Dowden, and Mrs. Marshall can in any way be shown as coming within the sphere of Lady Shelley's influence, and in spite of the fact that some were positive rebels against any possible influence of Lady Shelley; namely, Peacock, Trelawny, W. M. Rossetti, and J. Cordy Jeaffreson.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946
References
1 The Shelley Legend, by Robert M. Smith in collaboration with Martha M. Schlegel, Theodore G. Ehrsam, and Louis A. Waters (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945). vii + 343 pp. Permission to quote from The Shelley Legend has been granted by the Publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons.
2 The Complete Works of P. B. Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. 10 vols. Published for the Julian Editions (London and New York, 1926-29), x, 298.—All references to Shelley's letters are to the Julian Edition. References to Mary's letters are to The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, collected and edited by Frederick L. Jones. 2 vols. (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1944).
3 From this point on I shall, for the sake of convenience, refer only to Professor Smith as the author of The Shelley Legend. Though at least half the book was not originally written by Professor Smith, he directed the whole project and obviously edited and approved all materials printed.
4 Letters of Mary W. Shelley, i, 317.
5 Ibid., i, 339-340.
6 R. Glynn Grylls, Mary Shelley (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 217.
6a Ibid., p. 218 and note 2 of p. 217.
7 Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ii, 24.
8 Ibid., i, 308; see also a similar statement on i, 315, and J. C. Hobhouse's letter of November 12, 1824, to Mary (Shelley and Mary, iv, 1188-89).
8a The few differences between the 1817 and 1840 editions are recorded by Ingpen in the Julian Edition, vi, 356-358.
9 Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ii, 141.
9a H. B. Forman collated the texts by Hunt and Mary and recorded the variants. See the footnotes to his Prose Works of Shelley (1880), i, 128, 150-151, etc.
10 I pass over an irrelevant Professor Smith's account of Lady Shelley's Shelley shrines, her employment and subsequent dismissal of Hogg as the official biographer, her Shelley Memorials (1859), her conflict with Peacock and with Trelawny, and her numerous other activities. These have no bearing whatsoever on the charge that she actually established a Shelley legend. It is admitted that she had no influence whatever on Hogg, who had, according to his own published statement, not only access to all the original MSS belonging to Lady Shelley but actual possession of them (“every scrap,” he says). That Lady Shelley should dismiss him as a biographer and should repossess the MSS upon the discovery that he had altered and falsified documents was entirely proper, and is in itself proof that she was concerned about the truth. Hogg had done much more even than Lady Shelley knew, for not until recently has it been known fully how radically he changed letters in his own possession and never seen by Lady Shelley. Her opposition to Peacock's story that Shelley was content with Harriet until he met Mary was also in the main right. Peacock's error on this point has been established by overwhelming proof. It must have been Lady Shelley's strong conviction of Peacock's better knowledge of the real truth that led her to espouse the baseless theory that Peacock was himself the guilty man, that on the October 1813 trip to Edinburgh with Shelley and Harriet he had made successful advances to Harriet It is a fable that Peacock is one of the most reliable witnesses on Shelley biography. He stands convicted of having committed a number of very serious blunders. For example, his contention that Shelley protested word by word the changes required by Ollier in Laon and Cythna is absolutely false and has led to a misrepresentation of Shelley's attitude towards that work and the public almost to this day. (See Marcel Kessel, Times Literary Supplement, Sept., 1933, p. 592, and F. L. Jones, “The Revision of Laon and Cythna,” JEGP, xxxii (July 1933), 366-372.) As for Lady Shelley's Shelley Memorials (1859), though a valuable book when published, it has been known by every intelligent scholar as a family portrait of Shelley and has been used by them only as a source book for materials not available elsewhere.
There is no need to notice Kegan Paul's life of William Godwin or Mrs. Julian Marshall's Life and Letters of Mary Shelley. They are useful books even to this day, not for their opinions, but for the documents of which they mainly consist.
11 Letters About Shelley, p. 118.
12 Professor Smith's perversion of the truth is further illustrated by this statement on p. 116: “We can now see clearly why Dowden kept bitterly complaining to Garnett about his having to use abstracts of abstracts' rather than the originals, few of which apparently Lady Shelley ever allowed him to examine.” On December 6, 1883, Dowden wrote to Garnett: “It has grieved me to hear that Lady Shelley has not been well. Her last letter (sending your ‘abstracts of abstracts’ of Miss Clairmont's and Mrs. Godwin's letters with comments on them— spoke with warm gratitude of what you had done for Shelley's sake and for theirs” (Letters About Shelley, p. 85). Claire had made abstracts of Mrs. Godwin's letters; Garnett had made abstracts of Claire's abstracts; hence the “abstracts of abstracts.” Dowden not only saw Claire's original abstracts later, but he printed them in Appendix B of his Life (ii, 541-551).
13 Letters About Shelley, p. 145.
14 Fragments From Old Letters, E. D. to E.D.W., p. 179. Professor Smith prints only the last sentence!
15 Ibid., p. 181.
16 Ibid., p. 182.
17 Letters of Edward Dowden and His Correspondents, p. 221.
17a Dowden's Life gives frequent evidence of his use of Lady Shelley's original MSS. Specific uses of the MS Journal are to be found on i, 457, 480, 505. Other examples are at i, 493, where Dowden prints a letter from the MS and restores omissions in the Shelley and Mary text; and at ii, 21, 46, 47, 67-68, 325, where Dowden prints (from Lady Shelley's papers) letters and a MS which are not in Shelley and Mary.
18 Letters About Shelley, pp. 113-114.
19 Ibid., p. 115.
20 Ibid., p. 115.
21 Note the perversion of Professor Smith's account at this point. “When,” he writes, “Dowden was called to Boscombe, therefore, he encountered a barrage from Lady Shelley against Harriet. Lady Shelley, he wrote Garnett, had ‘filled up all the gaps … ‘” Dowden was not colled; nor was he at any time a man whom the Shelleys could call. He himself thought of going to London to see the Shelleys, but, as we have seen, he did not go. He therefore did not encounter a “barrage from Lady Shelley.” His quotations of Lady Shelley's speeches about Harriet refer to his first visit to Boscombe in July 1883, and these, as he says, led him “from the first” to anticipate difficulty on this part of Shelley's life.
22 Letters About Shelley, pp. 116, 118.
23 Ibid., p. 119.
24 Lady Shelley, though yielding to Dowden and Garnett, did not change her mind about Peacock being responsible for the separation and about Harriet's infidelity before the separation. In all the copies of Shelley and Mary still in her possession she wrote out her reasons for holding such an opinion. The signed entry is dated December 21, 1885, and is printed in Grylls, Mary Shelley (1938), pp. 269-271.
25 Letters About Shelley, p. 124.
26 Letters of Edward Dowden and His Correspondents, p. 221.
27 Leiters of Mary W. Shelley, i, xxv.
28 Miss Grylls labels the whole extract from the Journal as an “Unpublished entry,” as she always does for anything printed only in Shelley and Mary. Only the sentence quoted is not in Shelley and Mary. The extract is dated Dec. 31, 1819.
29 Shelley and Mary, iii, 595.—Though T. J. Hogg's description of the Journal (Preface to his Life of Shelley) is not strictly accurate, it confirms what I have said about it: “… from the 28th of July, 1814, until a few days before his death, Shelley [and Mary] kept regularly a journal of his daily life, recording, day by day, all [certainly not all] that he did, read, and wrote; mentioning the letters received and sent by himself, the places which he visited, and the persons whom he saw… . Many pages are little more than dates, lists of books, and names of places and persons, but much curious matter is interspersed.”
29a It may be worth recording that H. B. Forman also collated some of the original MSS while they were in Lady Shelley's possession. See his Prose Works of Shelley (1880), iv, 343, note 1.
30 Seymour De Ricci, A Bibliography of Shelley's Letters, Privately Printed, 1927, pp. 293-295 and at various places throughout the book. Samuel C. Chew, Byron in England, London, 1924, pp. 187-190. The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ii, 263-270, 294-296.—It is true that the author convicts me of having made some errors in printing the correspondence of Mary Shelley which relates to Major Byron:—the erroneous combination of the parts of three letters, the incorrect dating of some undated letters, and in consequence the duration of Mary's dealings with the forger and the extent of her purchases from him. But he has in no way changed the validity of my conclusions that Major Byron unquestionably had a considerable quantity of genuine Shelley letters, that he would not have dared try to sell forgeries to Mary, who, better than any handwriting expert in the world, could have detected forgeries of Shelley's or her own letters. He might have offered to sell “copies,” but Mary was obviously not interested in these. My errors, due mainly to the use of microfilms, are in themselves a good example of the danger of working with reproductions of MSS instead of with the originals.
31 Lady Shelley wrote, “Twice have forgeries of these very letters been brought to us and twice we have bought them.” Quoted on p. 92 of The Shelley Legend.
32 This is but one more of numerous details which prove that Dowden did see the original MSS.
33 For instance, that after Mary's death Lady Shelley found the Hodges forgery in a packet of letters marked “Shelley letters.” (p. 120)
34 Verse and Prose from the MSS. of P. B. Shelley, ed. Shelley-Rolls and Ingpen, p. 134.
35 One entry for four days. Claire's baby, Allegra, was born on January 12. Shelley and Mary, i, 178.
36 Julian Edition, ix, 216.
37 Letters of Mary W. Shelley, i, 17-18.
38 On Friday, September 19, 1817, Mary wrote in her Journal: “Letter from Albe [i.e., Byron]” (Shelley and Mary, i, 217). The entry obviously covers the period September 2-19; on September 2 Mary's baby Clara was born.
39 These letters to Byron are in the Julian Edition, ix, 218-220, 226-227, 232-233, 245-247.
40 Dowden, Life of Shelley, i, 503-504.
41 Professor Smith has 1879, in a faulty quotation (p. 291) from H. B. Forman's Introduction to the Facsimile Reprint of the MS for the Shelley Society, 1887, p. 9.
42 Shdley and Mary, iii, 884.
43 The Works of T. L. Peacock (Halliford Edition), ed. by H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (1934), viii, 232-234.
43a Ibid., p. 233.
43b Ibid., p. 227.
43c Professor Smith fails to explain why Lady Shelley, if she were eager to establish charges against Harriet, omitted from her Shelley and Mary text of the January 11, 1817 letter the entire passage containing those charges.
44 Though the impressionistic purpose of the first paragraph (pp. 1-2) may be some excuse for the following statements, they are inappropriate in a book which supposedly is based on research and which announces important discoveries. The members of the old Pisa circle did not, of course, disperse themselves for any of the reasons assigned: “Trelawny … sailed away with Byron to assuage his own grief at the loss of the man he adored. The Countess Guiccioli after Byron's departure went away to her own consolations, for [because] she had never liked Mary or Claire Clairmont. Claire … drew away to Vienna to find a retreat for her sorrows.”