Percy B Shelley

Letters from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener - Volume 1 is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1890. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

This two-volume set presents and contextualizes major manuscripts in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, now at the New York Public Library. These volumes of Shelley and His Circle include a retrospective centered on the young Shelley, featuring unpublished letters from 1809–1810, a memorandum book he kept at Eton, his libelous verse-letter about his parents, and other manuscripts predating his Italian exile. This backward glance also includes the only known exchange between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, Godwin’s first letter to Malthus, and a partial draft of Mary Shelley’s Proserpine, emended by her husband. The chronology of the Italian period begins in July 1820 with the press copy of Byron’s verse drama Marino Faliero and continues through December, a period of political ferment when the letters of Leigh Hunt, the Shelleys, Byron, and Countess Teresa Guiccoli reflect preoccupation with Queen Caroline’s “trial” for adultery in Britain and brewing revolutions in Italy. Other highlights are two important eyewitness accounts: a young British officer’s reminiscences of Shelley in 1814 and Henry Reveley’s testimony about the Shelley Circle. Four substantial essays along with detailed commentaries provide context for the 100 manuscripts.

Volumes VII and VIII not only carry the chronological catalogue of relevant manuscripts into July 1820, but they also contain an important retrospective of recently acquired Shelley and Byron letters and literary manuscripts from their summer together in Switzerland in 1816 through the end of 1819. (Some eighty-five percent of the manuscripts appearing in these volumes were not known to exist when Volumes V–VI of Shelley and His Circle went to press.) Among these are Shelley’s long letter to Peacock describing his first acquaintance with Byron and their trip together around Lake Geneva (hitherto published as two separate letters); the press-copy manuscripts of Byron’s Beppo and Shelley’s “Athanase: A Fragment”; letters of Henry Brougham and Madame de Stael that comment on Byron in Switzerland; numerous letters by Byron’s Venetian mistresses; and letters charting the growth of Byron’s attachment to Teresa Guiccioli. In volume VIII, the materials of 1820 include E. J. Trelawny’s account and commonplace book of 1820–1822; letters by Keats and others mentioning him; hitherto established letters from Peacock and others relevant to Shelley’s debt to a Bath upholstery firm; Shelley’s annotations in copies of Godwin’s Political Justice and Spinoza’s Traclatus Theologico-Politicus; three newly discovered letters of Shelley to his Florentine banker, as well as other important letters by Shelley, Godwin, and Leigh Hunt; and a web of correspondence between Teresa Guiccioli and Byron while they carried on their affair from different apartments in the Palazzo Guiccioli. These primary materials, all meticulously transcribed (those in Italian and Latin also accompanied by full translations) are complemented by detailed commentaries on events, people, ideas, and problems reused by the manuscripts, as well as by the following major essays: “Shelley as Athanase” by Donald H. Reiman; “Countesses and Cobblers’ Wives: Byron’s Venetian Mistresses” by Doucet Devin Fischer; “Mixed Company: Byron’s Beppo and the Italian Medley” by Jerome J. McGann; “Countess Guiccioli’s Byron” by Doucet Devin Fischer; “Trelawny’s Lost Years” by William St. Clair; and “Shelley and the Upholsterers of Bath” by Donald H. Reiman.

Volumes V and VI of Shelley and His Circle, edited by Donald H. Reiman, make available a further portion of the Shelley manuscript materials in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library. These two volumes continue in the format and style of the preceding ones. They progress chronologically from late 1816 through 1819, tracing the growth of the poet’s friendship with Leigh Hunt and his circle (including John Keats) and the blossoming of Shelley’s poetic maturity. These volumes record the writing of The Revolt of Islam, Shelley’s epic on the lessons of the French Revolution; the poet’s journey to Italy; the deaths of his and Mary’s two children; and his literary annus mirabilis in 1819. During this year he wrote Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and A Philosophical View of Reform, which is here presented in a corrected text. The sequence closes in late December 1819 with a series of letters that signal the beginning of Shelley’s sense of isolation from his English friends and publisher. Among the 175 manuscripts presented in full diplomatic transcription are 82 by Shelley and numerous others by Godwin, Hunt, and Byron, as well as important hitherto unpublished early letters by Edward John Trelawny, and letters and journals of Keats, Peacock, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and Edward E. Williams. An Appendix of eleven early letters and poems by Byron completes this set. Altogether, Shelley and His Circle will encompass a half-century of interconnected biographies and will capture the literary and intellectual tenor of the Romantic era.

The publication of Volumes III and IV of Shelley and His Circle under the editorial auspices of Kenneth Neill Cameron makes available a further portion of the Shelley manuscript materials in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library. These two volumes continue in the format and style of Volumes I and II, which received the critical acclaim of, among others, John Ciardi, who lauded Cameron and his contributing editors for rescuing “the material from felonious footnotery primarily by enclosing it in a continuous narrative that contains detailed introductions to each of the characters of the circle, and a general background of their relationships and of the times.” Volumes III and IV progress chronologically through Shelley’s life, beginning with the early years of Shelley’s marriage to Harriet Westbrook, where Volume II ended, and concluding with her suicide. Among the manuscripts are twelve letters and literary pieces by Byron including the first of his “separation” poem “Fare Thee Well,” the expanded 1814 journal of Claire Clairmont, the curious triangular correspondence of Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley’s annotated copy of Queen Mab, and the suicide letter Harriet Shelley wrote a few hours before she drowned in the Serpentine. A number of maps especially prepared for this edition and other supplementary illustrations enhance the impeccable scholarship of these volumes which, with the projected publication of the remaining materials, will present a half century of interconnected biographies and will suggest the literary and intellectual tenor of the Romantic era. The Pforzheimer collection, exceeded only by that at the Bodleian in the number of Shelley and Shelleyana manuscripts, reflects the personal interests of Carl H. Pforzheimer, who put together one of the notable private libraries of modern times. Before his death in 1957, he planned the form of publication for his collection, designing it not only for the academic use of scholars but also as a stimulating and readable set for the enthusiastic layman.

The magnificent collection of “Shelley and His Circle” manuscripts in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library is one of our finest sources for the English Romantic movement. This edition presents the more than 450 manuscripts from 1772 to 1822, over half of them by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Volumes I and II include a first accurate printing of Shelley’s letters to Thomas Hogg during a crucial period of his life; another series of letters records a struggle between Forman and Silsbee for acquisition of Shelley’s papers that was the background for Henry James’s Aspern Papers; Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others are represented by materials (most of them previously unpublished) that throw much new light on their lives and times. The Peacock and part of the Wollstonecraft manuscripts were edited by Eleanor L. Nicholes, and The Diary of Harriet Grove (Shelley’s boyhood sweetheart) by Frederick L. Jones. New and effective editorial, bibliographical and typographical methods were devised to deal with special problems.