Shelley's Ghost

Laon and Cythna is a poem of epic length and ambition, and occupied Shelley for some six months. Much of the poem was written outdoors, often while Shelley floated in his boat on the Thames. He described the poem as ‘an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live.’ The events of Laon and Cythna are clearly derived from the French Revolution, and the relationship of the central figures, Laon and Cythna, offers a hope for the future.

Laon and Cythna was published at the end of 1817 but quickly withdrawn. A new version, The Revolt of Islam, appeared early the following year with a number of revisions; most significantly, the incestuous relationship between Laon and Cythna was removed, and the anti-religious sentiments of the poem were softened.

This manuscript fragment of Laon and Cythna was recently discovered in a folder of autographs in the Harcourt family. It is an early draft of Canto III, stanzas 6 and 7, and appears to have been torn from a notebook, although no other leaves from this notebook have yet been identified and no other drafts of this particular Canto are known to have survived.

The leaf may originally have been given away by Mary Shelley to an autograph collector, as she and Hunt both did with other pages of Laon and Cythna, or it may have been among the papers the Shelleys left at Marlow in 1818.  It is not yet clear how the fragment came to be in the Harcourt family's hands. It has been preserved in a small collection of  autograph letters which appears to have been originally compiled by Rev. William Venables Vernon Harcourt (1789-1871). The collection reflects his interest in Science, and includes letters from Faraday, Wollaston and Davy.

The autograph collection appears to have been subsequently added to by his son Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt (1827-1904) and grandson Lewis Vernon Harcourt (1863-1922). Some of the letters are addressed to Frederick John Robinson, first Viscount Goderich and first earl of Ripon, or his son, George Frederick Samuel Robinson, first marquess of Ripon, and date from the 1850s-70s. Sir William Harcourt corresponded with George Robinson, Lord Ripon, with whom he had a shared interest in Liberal politics. Sir William was a Cambridge Apostle and may also have had an interest in collecting material with a Cambridge connection.