Shelley's Ghost

Between 1834 and 1838 Mary Shelley negotiated with the publisher Edward Moxon over the complete edition of Shelley’s works she had first envisaged in the months after his death. In December 1838 she agreed to sell the copyright of Shelley’s writings to Moxon for £500, and to edit the poems. Old Sir Timothy Shelley, now approaching ninety, finally agreed to lift his ban on the poetry. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley was published in four volumes in 1839. A one-volume edition was published later that year along with Mary’s edition, in two volumes, of Shelley’s prose, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (with an 1840 title page). 

To the displeasure of several of the poet’s friends Mary felt bound to work within the prejudices of the time. From her edition of the poetry she omitted the anti-religious later cantos of Shelley’s early poem Queen Mab, and two of his most overtly radical poems, Swellfoot the Tyrant and Peter Bell the Third. The edition of the prose was also censured, and she interleaved this, her own copy, with blank leaves on which she wrote parts of the original text. In the pages shown here she restores passages and wording from Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium which are concerned with homosexual love.

Mary Shelley; (bequest, 1851) Sir Percy and Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1889) Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1899) John C.E. Shelley (later Sir John Shelley-Rolls); (bequest, 1961) Bodleian.