Shelley's Ghost

Captain Edward Augustus Silsbee of Salem, Massachusetts, was a retired merchant seaman and a Shelley devotee. ‘I have been heaping up notes about [Shelley] for 40 years’, he wrote to the American scholar George Edward Woodberry, ‘never have I been shaken in my feeling toward him & I may say, his mission. His mind seems to me rarer, more graceful, subtler & intellectual than Wordsworth’s’. He purchased the guitar Shelley gave to Jane Williams from Jane’s grandson John Wheeler Williams, on the understanding that it would go to a public institution. The guitar was presented to the Bodleian Library ceremoniously on 21 June 1898. The following year he gave to the Library this superb portrait of himself in old age by John Singer Sargent. ‘Shelley has been my life to me’, he wrote to Bodley’s Librarian.

In the 1870s Silsbee discovered that Claire Clairmont was still alive and living in Florence. Over seven years he made regular visits to Claire and her niece Pauline, recording their long conversations about Shelley and eventually coming away with a precious Shelley notebook, but not the letters he knew her to have. Henry James, then living in Florence, heard about Silsbee and wrote in his journal:

the picture of the two faded, queer, poor and discredited old English women – living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town – with these illustrious letters their most precious possession. Then the plot of the Shelley fanatic – his watchings and waitings – the way he couvers the treasure.

The picture provided the inspiration for James’s story The Aspern Papers, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in March-May 1888.