https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8231-0413
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The article contains a transcription of a new letter recently acquired by Keats-Shelley House, Rome. The letter, written partly by Mary Shelley and partly by her son, Percy Florence, is dated 11 February 1843 from Florence and addressed to Julian Robinson, Percy’s Cambridge friend. The Shelleys spent the winter of 1842–3 in Florence in the course of their second continental tour, recounted in Parts II and III of Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844). The letter complements the travelogue by offering a glimpse of their daily life abroad as members of the local foreign community. We thus learn of Percy’s regular but unenthusiastic attendance at the carnival balls and his lack of interest in female society, to his mother’s chagrin. Her portion of the letter further reveals her financial difficulties and strained relationship with Laura Galloni d’Istria, Mrs Mason’s daughter, with whom Mary Shelley had been reunited after twenty years. Both mother and son also comment on the much-opposed marriage to Henry Hunt of the daughter of Jane Hogg (formerly Jane Williams), Dina.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Deputy Curator, Luca Caddia, for inviting me to examine the Abinger papers at Keats-Shelley House and to the Curator, Ella Kilgallon, for granting me permission to publish Mary Shelley’s letter. Thanks also to Nora Crook, Elizabeth Denlinger, Francesco Rognoni, and Michael Rossington for assistance of various kinds.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nora Crook, ‘Fourteen New Letters by Mary Shelley,’ Keats-Shelley Journal 62 (2013): 37–61. Earlier finds are listed in the article.
2 Crook, ‘Fourteen New Letters by Mary Shelley,’ 49n. Nora Crook has confirmed that the handwriting in the letter matches this description (private email communication, 6 January 2023).
3 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–8), I, 540n; III, 36, 41; II, 7-8n, 10–12. Hereafter MWSL. On Mary Diana Dods and her queer relationship with Isabel Robinson see Betty T. Bennett, Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
4 MWSL, II, 321; III, 4n.
5 MWSL, III, 81. Information on Julian Robinson is derived from Joseph McAleer’s recent biography of his son, Escape Artist: The Nine Lives of Harry Perry Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–8, which provides previously unavailable details on Julian, his family, and his friendship with Percy Florence Shelley.
6 I have located only two other letters by Percy Florence Shelley from the periods he spent abroad with his mother, both in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library.
7 Mary Shelley, ‘Rambles in Germany and Italy,’ in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook, 8 vols, (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), VIII, 229. Hereafter MWSN.
8 MWSL, III, 32, 44, 49, 47.
9 MWSL, II, 209.
10 MWSL, III, 53.
11 McAleer, Escape Artist, 2.
12 The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 vols, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), II, 348. Hereafter CC.
13 CC, II, 365, 367n.
14 CC, II, 370, 442; MWSL, III, 36–7.
15 MWSL, III, 32, 33n, 47, 49.
16 Claire Tomalin, introduction to Mary Shelley, Maurice, or the Fisher’s Cot (London: Viking, 1998), 43–8.
17 MWSL, III, 30; Pamela Clemit, ‘A Holograph Letter to Mary Shelley,’ Keats-Shelley Journal 62 (2013): 27–31 (29–30).
18 MWSL, III, 55, 44, 45.
19 MWSL, III, 56; Tomalin, introduction to Maurice, 49–50.
20 Pamela Clemit, ‘“A Society of Their Own”: Four Letters from Laura Tighe Galloni d’Istria to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,’ La questione Romantica, new ser., 1, no. 1 (2009): 95–109. Part of the translation, on which Mary Shelley worked in the penultimate year of her life, is preserved in the Abinger Papers Collection at the Bodleian Libraries. It has been edited by A. A. Markley in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, gen. ed. Nora Crook, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), IV, 309–29.
21 A possible reference to the title of Charles Dibdin’s song, ‘Let Us All Be Unhappy Together’ (1791), repeatedly quoted by the character of Mr Glowry in Chapter XI of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818). I owe the identification of this allusion to Nora Crook.
22 Possibly Percy’s grandfather, Sir Timothy Shelley; according to Mary Shelley, only Percy’s aunt Hellen had written to him since he had gone abroad (MWSL, III, 40, 50).
23 The spelling ‘Dinah’ is an indication of the name’s pronunciation (CC, I, 168n).
24 Der Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber. Mary Shelley had seen it ‘two or three times’ in London in 1824 and again in Dresden in August 1842, presumably accompanied by Percy (MWSL, I, 450; MWSN, VIII, 208). Gemma di Vergy (1834) by Gaetano Donizetti.
25 The news appeared in Galignani’s Messenger of 26 January 1843, but Percy misremembered some details. The French Captain, who acted on behalf of another, was Charles François Lavaud (1798–1878), Commissaire du Roi for the French settlement in New Zealand (Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, s.v. ‘LAVAUD, Charles Francois,’ (by Bernard John Foster), https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/lavaud-charles-francois (accessed January 20, 2023)). Charles Robinson was incorrectly identified as the English Consul in the article.
26 Italian for ‘mother’.
27 This word, which is squeezed at the end of a line, is actually spelt ‘charmg’ with an ‘i’ dot above it.
28 Mary Fawkener (1788–1860), wife of Horatio Walpole, third earl of Orford.
29 Constantine Henry Phipps, first marquess of Normanby (1797–1863), Whig politician, diplomatist, and writer (ODNB). Mary Shelley had reviewed his collection of stories The English in Italy (1825).
30 Not identified.
31 Emanuele Fenzi (1784–1875) had founded his bank, which was soon well established in Italy and Europe, in 1821. A shrewd entrepreneur, in 1838 he financed the construction of the Leopolda railway line connecting Florence with Leghorn. He then had a steam locomotive added to his family’s coat of arms, which is still visible above the entrance of Palazzo Fenzi in via San Gallo, Florence (Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, s.v. ‘FENZI, Emanuele’ (by Luigi Fallani and Lucia Milana), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/emanuele-fenzi_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ (accessed January 20, 2023)).
32 The Reverend John Sanford, his wife Elizabeth Georgiana, neé Morgan, and their daughter Anna Horatia Caroline, who had been a pupil of Claire Clairmont’s (CC, II, 349, 350n).
33 ‘Foolish, silly’ (OED 1).
34 Field Place was Sir Timothy Shelley’s home in Warnham, Sussex. A common acquaintance had told Mary Shelley that his wife and daughters were jealous of the fancy he seemed to have taken to Percy and consequently tried to keep the latter away (MWSL, III, 22; cf. also ibid., 41).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Valentina Varinelli
Valentina Varinelli completed her AHRC-funded PhD in English literature at Newcastle University, UK, and currently holds a post-doctoral position at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Brescia, Italy. She is the assistant editor of the Mondadori Meridiani editions of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry and prose (2018) and the author of a monograph, Italian Impromptus: A Study of P.B. Shelley’s Writings in Italian with an Annotated Edition (LED, 2022). She has published articles and essays on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and their circle and is now co-editing Shelley’s Complete Verse Translations for Longman.