May: PBS meets Maria Gisborne and her family at Livorno.
June: Moves to Bagni di Lucca, where he translates Plato’s Symposium, writes ‘On Love’ and completes title-poem of Rosalind and Helen volume.
August: Accompanies CC to Venice; visits Byron to discuss Allegra’s future; stays in a villa (I Cappuccini), rented but not occupied by Byron, at Este, south-west of the city (until November).
September–October: Begins Prometheus Unbound and Julian and Maddalo.
24 September: One-year-old Clara Shelley dies in Venice.
October: PBS composes ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’.
November: The Shelley party visits Ferrara and Bologna en route for Rome, where PBS begins to write ‘The Coliseum’.
December: Settles at Naples (1 December–28 February): with MWS and CC makes excursion to ascend Vesuvius; visits Herculaneum, various volcanic landscapes, Pompei, and other sites of Classical interest. Composes ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection … near Naples’.
27 December: Elena Adelaide Shelley born; the birth will be registered on 27 February 1819 and the child declared his and MWS’s legitimate offspring – her true parentage an abiding enigma for biographers.
1819 5 March: Family arrives back in Rome.
April: Acts I–III of Prometheus Unbound completed.
Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems published (spring).
May: Begins to compose The Cenci.
7 June: Death of William Shelley, aged three and a half.
17 June: PBS relocates to Livorno.
August: Completes The Cenci and sends Julian and Maddalo to Leigh Hunt for anonymous publication (though it does not appear until 1824). Composes Act IV of Prometheus Unbound (August–December).
September: Writes The Mask of Anarchy in response to the ‘Peterloo Massacre’.
October: Moves to Florence (2 October). Composes ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Peter Bell the Third.
November–December: Drafts ‘On Life’ and begins A Philosophical View of Reform.
12 November: Son, Percy Florence, the Shelleys’ only child to reach adulthood, born.
December: In an attempt to control dissent, Parliament passes the ‘Six Acts’, curtailing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.
PBS sends ‘England in 1819’ to Leigh Hunt.
1820 January: Death of George III; Prince Regent becomes George IV.
26 January: The Shelley household moves to Pisa.
February: Cato Street conspiracy to assassinate the British prime minister and cabinet detected (leaders executed 1 May).
Spring: Constitutional monarchy re-established in Spain following rebellion of the armed forces (March).
PBS composes ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and ‘Ode to Liberty’.
Summer: The Shelleys occupy the Gisbornes’ house at Livorno, while they are in England (15 June–4 August), where PBS writes ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and ‘To a Sky-Lark’ (June–July).
July: Learns of the death (on 9 June) of Elena Adelaide Shelley. Constitutional revolution begins in Naples.
August: The Shelleys move to the spa Bagni di San Giuliano (Bagni di Pisa) (staying there until October). PBS writes The Witch of Atlas, ‘Ode to Naples’ and Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, a burlesque Greek tragedy (on the political crisis over the claims of Caroline of Brunswick, estranged wife of George IV, to be crowned queen), which is published anonymously in London in December and immediately suppressed.
Prometheus Unbound … with Other Poems published.
20 October: CC moves to Florence.
29 October: The Shelleys return to Pisa.
November: First meeting of PBS with Teresa Viviani, to whom Epipsychidion will be addressed.
December: First meeting with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, Greek patriot and future president of Greece.
1821 January–February: Introduced to Edward and Jane Williams, newly arrived in Pisa (13 January). Writes Epipsychidion.
February–March: Writes A Defence of Poetry (published 1840); second edition of The Cenci published in London (spring).
March: Neapolitan revolutionaries defeated by Austrian troops acting on behalf of the Holy Alliance.
April: PBS learns (from Mavrokordatos) that an armed revolt has begun in Greece against Ottoman rule, and of the death in Rome (on 23 February) of John Keats.
April–June: PBS composes Adonais (printed at Pisa in July).
May: Death of Napoleon (5 May; PBS probably receives the news in July).
The Shelleys return to Bagni di San Giuliano (8 May). Epipsychidion published anonymously in London.
July: Drafts ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’ (published with Hellas in 1822).
August: Visits Byron at Ravenna.
Late September–November: Composes Hellas.
25 October: Returns from Bagni di San Giuliano to Pisa.
1 November: Byron moves to Pisa.
1822 January: PBS writes scenes for drama Charles the First, which is left unfinished.
14 January: Meets Edward Trelawny, who joins the Byron–Shelley circle in Pisa. Increasing attachment to Jane Williams, to whom he addresses a number of poems (January–July).
February–April: Translates passages from Goethe and Calderón, and works on ‘Unfinished Drama’.
20 April: Death of Allegra.
30 April: The Shelleys and the Williamses move to San Terenzo, on the Bay of Spezia near Lerici.
May–June: PBS drafts the unfinished The Triumph of Life.
12 May: His sailing boat, the Don Juan, is delivered.
16 June: MWS miscarries dangerously, crediting her recovery to PBS’s prompt attention.
1 July: Accompanied by Edward Williams, PBS sails to Livorno to meet Leigh Hunt and his family, who have come to Italy.
8 July: Drowns during a squall on the return voyage, along with Williams and the young seaman Charles Vivian.
Mid July: Bodies of PBS and Williams recovered.
15–16 August: Bodies cremated on the beach near Viareggio, with Hunt, Byron, Trelawny and others in attendance; ashes interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, in 1823.
1823 July: MWS returns to England.
1824 June: MWS publishes Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley; edition suppressed at the insistence of Sir Timothy Shelley.
1839 MWS publishes The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in four volumes, and late in the year a revised Poetical Works in one volume dated 1840.
1840 MWS publishes Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments in two volumes.
Further Reading
Collected and Selected Editions of the Poems
Two editions of Shelley’s complete poetry are in progress. The Poems of Shelley – published by Longman (vol. 1), Pearson Education (vols 2–3) and Routledge (vol. 4) in the series Longman Annotated English Poets – presents poems and verse fragments in chronological order by date of composition. Four volumes of a projected five have so far been published: Volume One: 1804–1817, edited by Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (1989); Volume Two: 1817–1819, edited by Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews with contributions by Jack Donovan, Ralph Pite and Michael Rossington (2000); Volume Three: 1819–1820, edited by Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington (2011); Volume Four: 1820–1821, edited by Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Kelvin Everest (2013). The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which will run to eight volumes when complete, maintains the original order of those poems that appeared in early published volumes, presenting other poems according to the dates at which they were printed or privately circulated and treating incomplete or rejected drafts separately. Three volumes have so far appeared, covering the years 1809 to 1818: Volume One (2000) and Volume Two (2004), edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat; Volume Three (2012), edited by Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook with contr
ibutions by Stuart Curran, Michael J. Neth and Michael O’Neill. Earlier editions still worth consulting include: The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, edited by C. D. Locock (London: Methuen, 1911); Shelley: Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), corrected by G. M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); see also under ‘Collected Works and Editions of the Prose’ below. Notable selections of Shelley’s poems and prose include: Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose, edited by G. M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); The Esdaile Notebook, edited by Kenneth Neill Cameron (London: Faber and Faber, 1964) – a collection of Shelley’s early poems, most of them published for the first time; Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, edited by Timothy Webb (London: J. M. Dent, 1995); Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, second edition edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002); and Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Collected Works and Editions of the Prose
The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose, edited by Harry Buxton Forman, 8 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880) – the first four volumes, containing the verse, were published in 1876–7; The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Ernest Benn, 1926–30); Shelley’s Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, corrected edition edited by David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988); The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by E. B. Murray, vol. 1 (1811–18) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) – a second volume is in preparation.
Manuscript Sources
Two series of facsimiles under the general editorship of Donald H. Reiman include almost all the surviving manuscripts of Shelley’s verse and prose – personal letters apart – with annotation and commentary: The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 23 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1986–2002), presents facsimiles of manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley, 9 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1985–96), presents facsimiles of Shelley’s manuscripts in libraries other than the Bodleian. Most volumes in each series include transcriptions. Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822, 10 vols to date, edited (successively) by Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fisher (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002), is a continuing edition of the manuscripts of Shelley, Byron, Mary Shelley, Peacock, Leigh Hunt and others in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, the New York Public Library, with extensive commentaries and related essays.
Letters and Journals
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88); The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; single-volume edition: Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Biographies
Modern full-length critical biographies include Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940); Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, 2 vols (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2004, 2005). There are good brief accounts of Shelley’s life in the generously illustrated Shelley and His World by Claire Tomalin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980; revised Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992) and in Michael O’Neill, Shelley: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), which stresses its subject’s development as an author. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Humbert Wolfe, 2 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), gathers important accounts of Shelley by three of his friends: Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858); Thomas Love Peacock’s Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858–62); and Edward John Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). Lives of the Great Romantics: Volume 1: Shelley, edited by John Mullan (London: William Pickering, 1996), includes excerpts from the three biographical works just mentioned as well as collecting several other nineteenth-century portraits and reminiscences of the poet.
Critical Sources
Early reviews are collected in The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers 1793–1830, Part C: Shelley, Keats, and London Radical Writers, edited by Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1972). Important reviews and selections from others published in Shelley’s lifetime are given with commentary in Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938; reprinted New York: Octagon Books, 1966). Karsten Klejs Engelberg considers further nineteenth-century estimates in The Making of the Shelley Myth: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1822–1860 (London: Mansell Publishing, 1988). For later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critical opinion, see James E. Barcus (ed.), Shelley: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1975), and Clement Dunbar, A Bibliography of Shelley Studies, 1823–1950 (New York: Garland, 1976). Jerrold E. Hogle’s chapter on Shelley in Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, edited by Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), gives a brief overview of Shelley scholarship and criticism from the second half of the twentieth century. The annual bibliography in the Keats-Shelley Journal from 1952 lists scholarly and critical work on Shelley, Mary Shelley and their circle as well as on other Romantic-period authors and topics.
The following is a selection of important book-length critical appraisals post-1950. Shorter studies of relevance to particular works are referenced in the notes to individual poems.
Behrendt, Stephen C., Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
Bennett, Betty T., and Stuart Curran (eds), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
Blank, G. Kim, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988)
Bloom, Harold, Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959)
Brown, Nathaniel, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
Cameron, Kenneth Neill, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London, Macmillan, 1950)
——, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974)
Chernaik, Judith, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland, Ohio, and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972)
Clark, Timothy, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
Colbert, Benjamin, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005)
Cronin, Richard, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1981)
Crook, Nora, and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Curran, Stuart, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975)
Dawson, P. M. S., The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)
Duff, David, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Duffy, Cian, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Everest, Kelvin (ed.), Shelley Revalued (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983)
Foot, Paul, Red Shelley (London: Bookmarks, 1984)
Garrett, Martin, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Shelley (London: Palgrave, 2013)
Gelpi, Barbara, Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Goslee, Nancy, Shelley’s Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Hebron, Stephen, and Elizabeth
C. Denlinger, Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010), and at shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Hoagwood, Terence Allan, Skepticism & Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998)
Jones, Steven E., Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994)
Keach, William, Shelley’s Style (New York and London: Methuen, 1984)
King-Hele, Desmond, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1971)
Matthews, Geoffrey, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH 24 (1957), pp. 191–228.
Morton, Timothy, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
——, The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Mulhallen, Jacqueline, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010)
O’Brien, Paul, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland (London: Redwords, 2002)
O’Neill, Michael, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
—— and Antony Howe (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Pulos, C. E., The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Skepticism (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1962)
Reiman, Donald, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study (Champaign, Ill.: Illinois University Press, 1965)
Roberts, Hugh, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997)
Robinson, Charles E., Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)
Ruston, Sharon, Shelley and Vitality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
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