“He was moreover a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part. Shelley's lyrics were mere sparks in this comet's trail.
From the age of nineteen, Shelley passed through a series of personal crises, dictated partly by chance but increasingly by choice, which had the cumulative effect of forcing him further and further away from the family, class and cultural background into which he had been born. By the time his life was cut short, one month before his thirtieth birthday, he was a complete exile, both geographically and spiritually. The encroaching condition of exile plays a highly significant part in his story.
At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally unspeakable in England, an object to be torn apart between the conservative and radical reviews, but not on the whole to be mentioned in polite London society. In this he was quite unlike his aristocratic friend and rival Lord Byron who, though similarly exiled, always had a tremendous popular following in England, and who by sailing to Greece instantly canonized himself on the altars of English liberalism.
Moreover, while Byron had achieved perhaps the greatest international readership of the age, Shelley had achieved almost none. Thus while exile had brought Byron fame and the kind of notoriety that is quickly transmuted into fashionable glamour, it brought to Shelley both literary obscurity and personal disrepute. A few days after Shelley's death, Byron wrote to Tom Moore in London, 'there is thus another man gone about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken' - but it was a mistake which his Lordship himself had frequently helped to compound.
Shelley's exile, his defection from his class and the disreputability of his beliefs and behaviour, had a tremendous effect on the carefully partisan handling of his biography by the survivors of his own circle and generation, and even more so by that of his son's. In the first, the generation of his family and friends, fear of the moral and social stigma attached to many incidents in Shelley's career prevented the publication or even the writing of biographical material until those who were in possession of it, like Hogg, Peacock and Trelawny, were respectable Victorians in their sixties, who were fully prepared to forget, to smudge and to conceal. With one exception, almost no significant biographical material appeared until more than thirty years after his death.
Shelley's second wife, Mary, was the key to his biography both in her own experiences and in her access to papers. Yet Mary Shelley was actually prevented from writing anything fuller than the brief introduction to Galignani's edition of the Posthumous Poems in 1824, and the editorial 'Notes' to the first Complete Works of 1839-40.
She was prevented partly by the same considerations of propriety as Shelley's friends, but even more by the fact that Shelley's father, Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, specifically forbade any such publications until after his own death, on pain of the removal of the annuity, Mary's only regular source of income, with which she was just able to support herself and her son - Sir Timothy's grandson and heir - Percy Florence Shelley.
Sir Timothy did not hesitate to remind Mary of this interdiction through his solicitor Whittan, and made the ban singularly effective by outliving his detested son by twenty-two years, and dying at the age of go in 1844.
Mary, who had contented herself with enshrining the remembered image of her husband in a series of noble and emasculated figures in her fiction, especially The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835), died without further revelations only seven years later in 1851.
In the second generation, control of the Shelley papers passed to Boscombe Manor and Sir Percy Florence's wife, Lady Jane Shelley, who made it 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 Collection in 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 Chartism.
In a field across which immense troops of scholars are now constantly being deployed, one hesitates to claim originality. The reader who asks what is literally 'new' partly misunderstands the nature of this kind of biographical research. It is more the case that perspectives change, 'old' facts and events and documents take on new significance and relations, while fresh local research puts events and experiences in a new setting, drawing in elements that before had not been given proper consideration. What is constantly new is not the past itself, but the way we look back on it. My book will be found to be different from previous biographies in several ways, apart from the original local research upon which it is based. I have used both Mary's and Claire's Journals more fully than previous writers, and for the first time I think Claire is given her full and proper place in Shelley's life. I have offered fully documented reinterpretations of the two great biographical mysteries in Shelley's carcer - the 'assassination' attempt in Wales in 1813, and the problematical 'Neapolitan child born in the winter of 1818. I have made constant reference to Shelley's manuscript working notebooks in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in an attempt to show more clearly how Shelley's great postic themes were gradually conceived and progressively executed.
Finally, I have redrawn the critical estimate of both Shelley's major poetry and his prose, and attempted to set it as vividly as possible in its immediate physical setting, and against the disturbed and excited political period which brought it into being, and which flashes up through the years towards our own.
This last is a comparison that I have never presumed to mention, since that has not been my task. But it stands there for anyone who has eyes to see, ears to hear, or heart to feel, sometimes so close that Shelley's life seems more a haunting than a history.
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