UPDATE: Hotel Register in Which Shelley Declared Himself to be an Atheist: FOUND

In the category of "hiding in plain sight," I can now offer a higher resolution copy of the Hotel de Villes de Londres' register.

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This has been available since 22 July on the Trinity College Library site (the "Trinity Library blog"). My original searches did not unearth this and I was forced to rely on the much poorer quality image that appeared here (the "Trinity College blog")  I have my friend Stathis Potamitis to thank for this discovery.  He is obviously more thorough than I am!! Therefore I offer my apologies to all of my readers.

The Trinity Library blog also fills in many of the gaps that were left out of the Trinity College blog. The page came to the Trinity College Library as part of a bequest by the granddaughter of Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes was a poet in his own right but is more widely known as a patron of writers.  Here is a portion of the Britannica entry:

"He published the pioneering Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), secured a pension for Tennyson, made the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson known in England, and was an early champion of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. He also formed a large library of erotic books that included the first serious collection of the works of the Marquis de Sade."

Several very rare Shelley editions were included in the bequest, and the page from the register was discovered pasted inside the front cover of Milnes' copy of Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam.

The higher resolution image now puts us in the position of advancing some more refined conclusions.  Here is the relevant portion of the page:

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Here is what Trinity Library blog suggests:

"Underneath Shelley’s name is written ‘Mad. M. W. G.’ – Madame Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future Mary Shelley – and a further name, now crossed out, was Claire Clairmont. It was very likely to have been Byron who underlined Shelley’s name along with ‘the fool’ in the Greek text, in order to vent his frustration at Shelley’s outrage, and who crossed out Claire Clairmont’s name. A later visitor cut this page out of the visitors’ book..."

Professor Wilson in the Trinity College blog adds:

“Lord Byron, no stranger to scandal, claimed to have struck out one of Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds to think that this is Byronic hyperbole and that it was Byron who in fact underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s name in the hotel register”.

This thesis originally appealed to me.  I liked the idea of Byron telling people that he had crossed out Shelley's name when in fact he had underlined it.  There is a deliciously Byronic aspect to this bit of chicanery.   But the more I think about this, the more I think it is inconsistent with his character.  I am therefore not sure how we arrive at the conclusion that Byron had anything to do with the underlining of Shelley's or crossing out of Claire's names - but more on this later.  There may, however, be details that have yet to be released by Trinity Library. 

With respect to the Greek portion of the entry, I turned to my old friend Stathis, a respected lawyer based in Athens.  Now, there are two distinct Greek entries.  The first is the famous and well known declaration by Shelley that he was an atheist.  We know know exactly what he wrote and in what order.  Says Stathis: "It is clear that what Shelley wrote is: “I am a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist.”

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Now, it has also been suggested that Shelley's Greek is less than perfect.  Yet Stathis notes only that there is one spelling mistake (Shelley writes δημωκρατικός, with an ‘ω’ as opposed to the correct ‘o’) and that the Greek is missing its accents.

For Shelley scholarship the more interesting aspect of the register is the Greek quote that appears immediately beneath Shelley's entry.  In my last post, I proposed that the handwriting in each case appeared to be the same; allowing for the speculation that Shelley may have engaged in one of his classic ironic inversions.  But the higher resolution image from the Trinity Library post tells a different story.  Here is Stathis:

"...the Greek seems to be by two different hands – for example the α is different in the two parts, the quote has all the accents unlike the first one where only άθεος is accented, the θ is also different as is the final ς.  Shelley’s Greek includes a spelling mistake (δημωκρατικός, with an ‘ω’ as opposed to the correct ‘o’).  By contrast the Greek of the quote is perfect.  Interestingly, the word order is different from the original [Psalm 14.1]: “ο άφρων είπεν εν τη καρδία αυτού, ουκ έστιν θεός" as opposed to "Είπεν άφρων εν τη καρδία αυτού, ουκ έστι Θεός".  This would suggest someone who is familiar with both Greek and the Psalms (or possibly only the particular one) and is able to reproduce from memory, however with a slight change in the word order that still works well in Greek."

It is worth looking back to my previous post to remind ourselves what Psalm 14 is about.  There I wrote:

The opening words of Psalm 14:1 have for centuries been used by Christians to assail atheists; the “fool” of the line is assumed to be the atheist.  However, this is a mistake. The second half of the first verse goes on to say, “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Again, the assumption is often made that “they” refers to the atheist.  But Psalm 14 2-3 goes on to make it clear that god looks down on all people as corrupt:

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The Hebrew word translated in the King James version as "fool" is nâbâl.  But this is an adjective that means "stupid and wicked". It comes from the root verb nâbêl, which means "to be foolish or morally wicked". Thus, I believe the connotation intended is less that the individual is a mere fool, and more that he has a defective moral character which is the result of his belief that god will not notice his bad behavior. The Psalm’s introductory note comments that ‘David describeth the corruption of a natural man. He convinceth the wicked by the light of their conscience. He glorieth in the salvation of God.”  The implication, then, is that all people are morally wicked and can only raise themselves up with the help of god. In a nutshell: “you are an idiot if you think you can do this by yourself.”

Based on the assumption that the handwriting was the same, I offered an interpretation:

Shelley was an astute reader of scripture. He has also become justly famous for his ironic inversions in which he seizes on old myths and employs them to obtain a radically different moral result. Here I could easily see Shelley using this quotation to accuse his enemies of moral perfidy. In effect saying, “You think you are better than me, but you are all, according to your own god, morally wicked.”

But it would seem that I am quite wrong.  Stathis also points us to the famous scholasticist, St Alselm:

"I noted before that the particular quote was used by Saint Anselm in his Proslogion as part of his famous ontological proof of the existence of God.  Anslem attempts a reduction ad absurdum of the denial of the existence of God.  His argument is that since God is a being of which something greater cannot be conceived, that means that it must not lack in any attribute that would make it less than perfect.  “Existence” is in Anselm’s view such an attribute, indeed a non-existent God would be less perfect than an existent God, therefore God must necessarily exist.  This “a priori” proof of the existence of God was criticized by many philosophers, including Hume and other empiricists, and that discussion must have been familiar to William Godwin and perhaps, through him, to Mary Shelley.  However, the Proslogion was written in Latin – it is not clear to me that quoting the Psalms in Greek should be seen as a reference to Saint Anselm’s argument (it would have been a clearer reference had the quote been in Anselm’s Latin)."

Shelley himself was intimately familiar with philosophical works of David Hume (though perhaps the interest indeed derived from Godwin), so I am not sure we need to assume it came to Shelley through Mary.  In any event, based on Stathis' analysis, it is clear I am wrong that Shelley made this entry and I think we must conclude that it was made by someone else. But who? As I noted previously, it is tempting to think it might have been Byron.  But the Greek is perfect and Byron's Greek was anything but perfect. It seems most likely then that someone familiar with the Psalms and St Anselm inserted the remark - someone offended by Shelley's assertion of atheism; but this hardly narrows it down as literally every educated English traveler of the day would have been familiar with both.

Which brings us to the question of the underlining. Stathis offers this thought:

"The underlining of Shelley’s name seems to be repeated by the same hand under the words ‘ο άφρων’, “the fool”.  To me this suggests that whoever quoted from the Psalms wanted to make sure that people understood that “the fool” was Shelley."

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I find this a very attractive idea.  Now it also takes us back to Byron.  Byron himself asserted that he had tampered with at least one register.  And it is important to remember, as Shelley's biographer Bieri points out, that Shelley made a similar entry in possibly as many as four registers. This means that we may not be looking at the register in which Byron crossed out Shelley's name - perhaps he crossed it out somewhere else; perhaps for the first time in history we should give Byron the benefit of the doubt!  The Hotel de Villes de Londres was, however, the place to stay in Chamonix; if Byron was going to see one of Shelley's entries, it is most likely that he saw it there.  So let's allow ourselves some guesswork.

Byron and his friends arrive at the Hotel.  He looks for and finds Shelley's entry. It would be entirely within his character to play the devil and critique Shelley by underlining the word "the Fool" and then Shelley's name. But why would he cross out Claire's name? He had been made aware at that point that Claire carried his child.  Shelley has literally forced him to admit paternity and accept responsibility. But his admission was grudging and he made it clear from the very start that he would have nothing more to do with Claire. So why would he cross her name out? What possible motive would he have to protect her? The answer is unclear to me. But I welcome the speculation of others. And if Claire's name was not crossed out by Byron, by whom.....and when? Did Claire do it herself?

Postscript

My thanks to Stathis Potamitis for his careful and thoughtful assistance.  Stathis and I have known one another for decades. One of the hallmarks of our friendship is our spirited and perpetual dialogue about our favourite poets, his (Byron) and mine (Shelley).  Indeed I can thank him for rekindling my interest in Shelley which had lain dormant for many years.  It happened in a succession of debates at seaside tavernas in the Peloponese in the winter of 2013. You can find out more about Stathis here.

Hotel Register in Which Shelley Declared Himself to be an Atheist: FOUND

There is a supplementary post here. It contains additional information and a high resolution copy of the register.  The articles should be read together.

On 19 July 2016, the University of Cambridge made a startling and almost completely unheralded announcement.  They were in possession of a page from the register of a hotel in Chamonix: not just any page and not just any hotel. The hotel was the Hotel de Villes de Londres and the page in question was the one upon which Percy Bysshe Shelley had inscribed his famous declaration that he was an atheist, a lover of humanity and a democrat. Not a copy of it….THE page. No reproduction or copy of this page has ever, to my knowledge been made available to the public.  Evidence for what Shelley wrote was based almost exclusively on either eye witnesses, such as Southey and Byron, or mere hearsay.

I make the point in my article "Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?" that Shelley’s declaration is exceedingly important to our understanding of his entire literary output. There I wrote,

“I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.” 

Thus the discovery of this page is a rather momentous occasion; rather like finding a hitherto unknown, handwritten copy of the Gettysburgh Address.

My sources for this discovery are two-fold: an article in Cambridge News, dated 19 July 2016, and an undated blog post on the University of Cambridge website. Unfortunately, neither included a high resolution copy of the register.

But based on these sources here is what we know.  Cambridge News, quoting noted Shelley scholar, Professor Ross Wilson reports, “No-one knows by whom or why, but the leaf had been removed from the visitors' book by late summer 1825, three years after Shelley had drowned in the Bay of Spezia.” Cambridge News goes on to inform us that the page was "found pasted into Shelley's copy of his poem, “The Revolt of Islam”, which addresses revolutionary politics and the long history of the nineteenth century through an elaborate mythological narrative.”

There are obvious questions.  Who removed the page? When? How do we know it had disappeared in late summer of 1825? How did it find its way into Shelley’s own copy of the Revolt of Islam? Who had this copy? Where has it been and why is it only now this important artifact is noticed.  Has it be suppressed? overlooked? ignored? Tantalizing speculations are available to us.  Clearly the page which the University of Cambridge is in possession of has a provenance which requires a more fulsome exploration. It is to be found no where on line as of today. The most important question of all is this, until now has any scholar ever seen a copy of the register, or have they all been relying on hearsay? I believe we have to assume it is the latter case and that for the first time we are seeing the real thing. This will require everyone who has ever written anything about this incident to revise their opinions.

As I said, both sources included a low resolution image of the page which is difficult to read. I have reproduced it below. However, what we can see is fascinating.

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A low resolution copy of the page taken from the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres in Chamonix.

On the left hand side of the page we see Shelley’s familiar signature – I don’t know why, but I felt quite emotional seeing this. Below it are the initials of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin: “MWG”.  Beside their names we have their country and city of origin: London, England.

Interestingly, Shelley’s signature has been underlined twice – but by whom? Well, our biographies do tell us something about this.  For generations, biographers, relying on a claim made by Byron, have believed that Byron, upon encountering Shelley's entry some weeks later, scribbled out Shelley’s name. He claims to have done this to protect his friend’s reputation (Ellis, 115; and Bieri 342-343). Biographers have universally taken Byron at his word, one remarking that, “he [Byron] must have felt that Shelley was too young to understand fully what a red rag to a bull of English public opinion the word “atheist” would be, and how quickly news of its offensive presence would be spread…” (Ellis, 115). Personally I find that assertion ridiculous.  For his part, Holmes concludes, "Byron...immediately felt obliged to cross it out as indelibly as possible for Shelley's own protection." (Holmes, 342-3) Again, ridiculous. The Byron I know was hardly solicitous of the reputations of others and relished controversy. Well, we now have evidence that Byron’s story may well have been false.

What we see when we look at the register is that quite apart from scribbling Shelley’s name out, someone (and who else but Byron) underlined it not once but twice.  Professor Wilson would seems to agree:

“Lord Byron, no stranger to scandal, claimed to have struck out one of Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds to think that this is Byronic hyperbole and that it was Byron who in fact underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s name in the hotel register”.

Now many motives may be ascribed to this if we are to assume that the underlining is Byron’s.  One could conclude, charitably, that Byron delighted in his friend’s provocational action and sought to draw attention to it. On the other hand it could have been a crude attempt to compound what he might have viewed as Shelley’s indiscretion.  We can’t forget that for all of his bluster, Byron was anything but an atheist or even deist.  Given that fact that he appears to have lied about his action, the latter conclusion seems the more likely. There is something of an irony bound up in this. If in fact Byron did this to attract unwelcome attention to Shelley’s provocative statements, he actually would have played right into Shelley’s hand – for Shelley would have most likely thanked Byron for helping to draw attention to his declaration.

Under the column heading, “destination”, Shelley writes “L’Enfer”; both for himself and for Mary. We might find this amusing – but it was anything but in those days. For more on this see my article Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?. 

We then come to the heart of the matter, his famous declaration of atheism. Until I looked at the register, I, like everyone else, assumed that the only words he wrote were the Greek words for “atheist”, “democrat’ and “lover of humanity”.  The ordering of these words is different in almost every version.  Holmes for example use this formulation: "Democrat, Philanthropist, Atheist" (Holmes, 342); PMS Dawson uses this one: "I am a philanthropist, utter democrat, and an atheist." (Dawson, 54).  Until we can see a better copy of the Cambridge document, it is difficult to tell who is right. And I think it actually matters.

Bieri notes that Shelley’s entry occasioned caustic rejoinders from fellow travelers, including one who wrote in Greek that Shelley was a “fool”. I doubt Bieri ever saw the original register – based on what we have just learned from Cambridge; if he did, he does not say so. And his footnotes for this assertion point us to articles by Gavin de Beer (1958) and Timothy Webb (1984); neither of whom saw the original register either – everyone relying on contemporary third party reports – in law we call this “hearsay” evidence. Both of these article are unavailable online.

Not knowing Greek, I forwarded the Cambridge document to my friend Stathis Potamitis, a distinguished lawyer in Athens. Stathis reported:

“There is a passage in quotation marks which is a line from a Psalm (14:1) “o άφρων είπεν εν τη καρδία αυτού ουκ έστιν θεός”. This I recognized because it was used by St. Anselm in his ontological proof of the existence of God.  It means ‘the fool said in his heart there is no god’. There are three words (the third one is very long and may be more than one that are linked) that precede the quotation, but I can only make out one of them: “φιλάνθρωπος», which literally means he who loves humans, but is usually translated as charitable.” 

It is the quotation that interests me.  Bieri, relying on de Beer and Webb, jumped to the conclusion that these words were added by someone else and were an attack on Shelley.  No one that I am aware of has ever ascribed these words to Shelley himself. However, while I am not handwriting expert, my untutored eye tells me that whoever wrote the first three words included the quotation. I would welcome the thoughts of scholars who have spent more time with Shelley’s handwriting than I have. If this is true it adds an exciting dimension to this incident.

I can understand why people would jump to the conclusion that these were not Shelley’s words.  The opening lines of Psalm 14:1 have for centuries been used by Christians to assail atheists; the “fool” of the line is assumed to be the atheist.  However, this is a mistake. The second half of the first verse goes on to say, “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Again, the assumption is often made that “they” refers to the atheist.  But Palm 14 2-3 goes on to make it clear that god looks down on all people as corrupt:

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The Hebrew word translated in the King James version as "fool" is nâbâl.  But this is an adjective that means "stupid and wicked". It comes from the root verb nâbêl, which means "to be foolish or morally wicked". Thus, I believe the connotation intended is less that the individual is a mere fool, and more that he has a defective moral character which is the result of his belief that god will not notice his bad behavior. The Psalm’s introductory note comments that ‘David describeth the corruption of a natural man. He convinceth the wicked by the light of their conscience. He glorieth in the salvation of God.”  The implication, then, is that all people are morally wicked and can only raise themselves up with the help of god. In a nutshell: “you are an idiot if you think you can do this by yourself.”

Shelley was an astute reader of scripture. He has also become justly famous for his ironic inversions in which he seizes on old myths and employs them to obtain a radically different moral result. Here I could easily see Shelley using this quotation to accuse his enemies of moral perfidy. In effect saying, “You think you are better than me, but you are all, according to your own god, morally wicked.”

Much of what I have written is, of course speculation. But my desire is to get the discussion started and focused on earthing the facts. When the University of Cambridge makes a better copy available and when they tell us more of the provenance of the page, we will be much further down the road.  Look for updates here.

One last note.  while Shelley's name is not crossed out, someone's is.  If you look below Shelley's name and Mary's initials, you will see that a name has been heavily over-scored.  Could this be Claire? If so, who crossed her name out, and why?

References

Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (2008). Print. 

Dawson, P.M.S.  The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.

Ellis, David. Byron in Geneva, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,( 2011) Print

Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit Weidenfield. London: and Nicolson, 1974). Print.

Shelleyana!! My Father's Shelley, Part Two

"Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, "Remain thou, thou art so beautiful'."

Letter to John Gisborne, 18 June 1822. The Letters of Shelley, II 435-6

We all know what happened 16 days later; the past, the present and the future were indeed obliterated.

It is the anniversary of Shelley's death today [this article was written on July 8th 2017], and I thought the best way to observe this sad occasion was to turn again to the enormous impact Shelley on me and my dad's life - though we had radically different ideas about exactly who Shelley was. The "different" Shelleys were the subject of my essay, My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys." I want to further explore this theme by digging into a photographic album I discovered among my father's effects after he died. It is a slim volume entitled "Shelleyana". I think we will find much to reflect upon, and Shelley may perhaps seem less remote and more immediate.

My father's interest in Shelley must have started very early for reasons that will emerge quickly.  And that fact that it did so inevitably leads my to conclude that his mother, Edith Wills, must have had something to do with it.  She had an absolutely incalculable effect on his life.  One of the reasons I know this is that shortly before his death I came into possession of hundreds of letters that he had written to her.  She appears to have kept almost all of them. There is a generous sprinkling of those she wrote to him, but he does not appear to have been as concerned for posterity as she was.

My father was born in 1916 in Montreal, Canada. Very early in life he exhibited an aptitude for, and an interest in, the arts.  This came from his mother, and not his father.  He assiduously studied music and was good enough that he was in a position at one point to chose a career as a professional pianist.  But he abandoned this for the stage. In his late teens he was active in the Montreal theatrical community.  Then he did something truly extraordinary. In 1936, at age 18 he boarded a ocean liner and sailed for England to pursue an acting career.

While he did not appear to have set the acting word on fire, he did seem to progress his career until the Second World War ruined his dreams as it did those of almost everyone else on the planet.

The cover of my father's Shelley "scrap book".

While in England he also took the time to pursue a passion of his: Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know this because I have an unusual little scrap book which I found on his shelf with the rest of his Shelley materials. It is a bit shabby now, but he appears to have spent considerable effort to put it together - beginning in 1937.

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"Shelleyana"

Now the term "Shelleyana" is an interesting term in and of itself, and I have been unable to find any "official" definition for it.  It is used to refer to collections of materials that pertain to Shelley and his circle. It is clearly a coined term and I can think of no other example of it. There is an affectionate overtone; it strikes one as diminutive. It is even a little cloying.  All of which is entirely in keeping with the manner in which Shelley was viewed by a large segment of the literate intelligentsia in the 19th century. I wrote about this in my article, "Shelley in the 21st Century."

Many people who held Shelley in high esteem had collections of "Shelleyana".  These might be relics, or they might be first editions, or they might be rare or unusual books about him or those he was close to. For example, here is an article from the New York Times in 1922 extolling a particular collection of Shelleyana which was available to the public on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death.

My father always referred to his collection of books on Shelley as his "Shelleyana".  And as suits the reverential, almost hagiographic overtone, which the term connotes, his scrap book begins with not one, but THREE portraits of the poet - each accorded its own page.

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Amelia Curran's 1819 portrait of Shelley which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery

This is the most famous, even iconic, of the portraits.  Shelley sat for Curran in Rome on May 7 and 8 in 1819. Curran was known to Shelley and Mary and they had last encountered her in Godwin's home in 1818.  Crucially, this painting was NOT finished in his life time, and must be considered to be an extremely unreliable likeness.  Shelley's biographer, James Bieri notes, "It has become the misleading image by which so many have misperceived Shelley." We know that neither Mary nor Shelley liked it - nor did his friends.  The history of this painting and its effect on the way in which Shelley came to be regarded can not be underestimated, but this is not the time and place for such a discussion. Suffice to say that it played directly into the hands of those Victorians who preferred to imagine Shelley as a child-like, almost androgynous being - this is the "castrated" Shelley (in Engles' famous phrase). The man in this painting is NOT my Shelley - but it was most decidedly my father's Shelley.

Here is the second:

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A crayon portrait based on the painting by George Clint

Well, what can you say?  Here Shelley has lost almost all of his masculine characteristics and the ethereal being the Victorians (and my father) so came to adore is born. We are getting very close Mathew Arnold's vision of Shelley as "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain".  Clint's portrait was painted in 1829 years after his death, and is known to be a composite of Curran's painting and a sketch by Shelley's friend, Edward Williams.

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Sketch by Edward Ellerker Williams, Pisa, 27 November 1821

Curran's painting was repainted several times and each time, Shelley become less recognizable, more child-like, more androgynous, more ethereal. I believe these images of Shelley played a central role in the re-invention and distortion of his reputation.  For example, here is Francis Thompson (one of his Victorian idolators) writing in 1889:

“Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind; bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time.” - Francis Thompson, "Shelley", 1889

The story of the incalculable damage that these stylized images wrought, divorced as they were from reality, has yet to be properly told. But I think it is fair to say that had no portraits of Shelley ever existed, we might see him in a very different light today.  I think that portraits like these fed a particular vision of Shelley that my father fed off.  Looking into the eyes of these three Shelleys, it is difficult to see the revolutionary, the philosophical anarchist, the atheist that he was.

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Postcard purchased at the Bodleian by my father, July 1937

On the next page we find, not unsurprisingly, a postcard my dad purchased in July, 1937 in Oxford at the Bodleian. It displays certain Shelley "relics".  These are: (1) the copy of Sophocles allegedly taken from Shelley's hand after his body washed ashore; (2) locks of Shelley's and Mary's hair; (3) a portrait of him as a boy; (4) his baby's rattle; and (5) his pocket watch and seals.

The idea that Shelley was found with that book in his hand is a story we owe to one of the most notorious liars in history, Edward Trelawny who for his entire life trafficked in stories derived from his association with Shelley and Byron - two men, both dead, who could not contradict his lies. There are certain element of his biography of Shelley which we can take at face value, but they are few and far between.  But stories like that, when the become "relics" and part of "Shelleyana" feed myths. My dad was always fond of Trelawny - and Trelawny did my father the ultimate disfavour of serving up a vision of Shelley that was almost completely divorced from reality.

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Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial, University College, Oxford. Commissioned in 1891.

Next up, entirely predictably, is one of the great abominations in the canon of Shelleyana - the famous (or infamous) Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. The history of this hardly bears repeating. It was so routinely disfigured and disrespected by young Oxford students that today it is actually encased in a cage. It was Shelley's daughter-in-law who perpetrated this imaginative, shambolic disaster.  Paul Foot absolutely shreds this statue in his speech, "The Revolutionary Shelley"

Not content with this, she went further and commissioned Henry Weeks to reinvent Shelley as Christ and Mary as, well, another Mary. The resulting statute was, according to my father, refused by Westminister on the grounds of his atheism - if this anecdote is in any way true, I rather doubt his atheism had anything to do with it; more likely it was the monstrously poor taste in which the statue was executed. You be the judge:

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Henry Weeks, Shelley Memorial, Christchurch Priory, Bournemouth, England

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Shelley's birthplace, "Field Place", Horsham, Sussex.

It is now that the scrapbook becomes more interesting, for it becomes clear that my 19 year old father was engaged on a sort of pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of Shelley. The preceding pages feature postcards clearly acquired on a visit to Oxford in July of 1937; a visit clearly focused almost exclusively on Shelley.  However, the previous year, and almost immediately upon his arrival in England, he traveled to Shelley's birthplace where he took a sequence of poorly composed but magical photographs:

There are thousands of beautiful pictures of Field Place; these are awful. But that is not the point. These photographs have a haunting, poignant, other-worldly quality. They were taken by an 18 year old boy who was enthralled by his hero, Shelley. And they take us back in time almost a century.  He kept a very detailed diary of those years, and his thoughts and reflections in this pilgrimage are memorable and touching.

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The graves of Mary, Mary Wollestonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Florence Shelley and the latter's wife, Jane Shelley

Dad also visited the graves of Mary, Mary Wollestonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Florence Shelley and the latter's wife, Jane Shelley.  As he notes, "They are all in one plot of ground (barely sufficient for five people to die down)....One stone does for all." Interestingly, Mary had refused Trelawny's offer of the plot he had reserved for himself beside Shelley's grave in Rome. I have always found that curious, though none of Shelley's biographers offer any thoughts on this.  Had she not refused, it would have been she and not Trelawny who is buried beside Shelley.  This is, I think, a great loss; for more than one reason.

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The home in Marlow in 1937

Prior to visiting Oxford in July of 1937, my father also dropped by Marlow to visit Shelley's home in that location. The pictures are somewhat clearer and he records the inscription above the dwelling which includes the line "...and was here visited by Lord Byron."

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Lechlade, Gloucestershire, 1936

One of my father's favourite poems by Shelley was "Lechlade:A Summer-Evening Churchyard" so, of course he went there in 1936.  In a chemist shop owned by a man named Davis, he was informed that according to local legend, Shelley had strolled through a particular path in the town composing the poem. The top photograph shows this path, the bottom, the neighbouring cathedral. 

We now come to one of the more significant fabrications of literary history. The cremation of Shelley. Here is the painting by Louis Edward Fournier;

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Louis Edward Fournier, "The Burning of Shelley", 1889.

It is not for me to debunk the many myths created by one of history's great liars, Edward John Trelawny (Bieri does an excellent job in his biography of Shelley). Shelley was indeed cremated by the bay of Lerici.  The body had washed ashore after 10 days rotting in the ocean.  It was thrown into a shallow grave and covered with lime.  It was only over a month later that permission was finally received to exhume the body and cremate it - and what they found was horrific - the body was "badly mutilated, decomposed and destroyed." Mary was NOT at the burning and Byron refused to witness it himself. This painting, like so many of the other signal components of the Shelley myth, was hagiographic in tone and divorced from reality. But to an impressionable 19 year old Canadian on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Shelley, it was as good as gold.

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Upper right, Keats' tomb. Lower left, Trelawny, lower right, Shelley, Photographs 1950

The Second World War then stole almost 10 years from my father's life, as it did for so many millions more.  He was lucky to be demobilized quickly and lucky again to find employment quickly. He became a journalist and rose very quickly to become the most famous Canadian broadcaster of his era. I will tell THIS story elsewhere. In 1950 he secured an extraordinary assignment.  Tour the world and send stories back to Canadians eager to learn about strange an exotic locales.  One of the places he went was Rome and it will surprise no one reading this that he made a beeline to the Protestant Cemetery and Shelley's grave.

The photographs are poorly composed and either under or over exposed.  But again, they have an intensity, a nostalgia and a haunting quality which are undeniable. So many things strike me.  why did my father have his picture taken at Keats' grave and not Shelley's? He had very little time for Keats. Why only a picture of the tombstone itself? I have been in the Cemetery. It is an extraordinary lace and it must have been even more extraordinary in 1950 when the world was literally bereft of tourists.  The photograph of Shelley's grave, in many formats, graced our home through out my life.  My father curiously never had it properly framed or preserved - and the negatives are long lost.  But I treasure these images, the more so for their faded character, there soiled nature and their shop-worn corners.

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Larry Henderson at Casa Magni, Lerici, Italy, September 1986

My father was a thorough man, and in 1986, as a vigorous 70 year old he made his way to the Bay of Lerici to visit the site of Shelley's death and his last domicile, the Casa Magni. Anna Mercer has made her own pilgrimage to Lerici, and her wonderful story, "In the Footsteps of the Shelleys" can be found here.   He can be seen here, in one of his very typical poses, in front of Shelley's last home.

From his first pilgrimage in 1936, to his last 50 years later in 1986, my father was devoted to the man and the poet he perceived Shelley to be.  While we could never find any common ground in our mutual appreciations for Shelley, which I wrote about in "My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys", I have come to realize that in his passion for Shelley, I am my father's son (and perhaps my grandmother's grandson!). I do not know if my father's and grandmother's love for this man will descend to another generation of Hendersons, but if it does not and if it ends here, it has be a truly memorable run. And were Shelley alive to have witnessed all this, as a man who believed that the world could indeed be changed one person at a time, I am hope he would be well and truly satisfied.

THE WIND has swept from the wide atmosphere
  Each vapor that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
  In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day.
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,        
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
 
They breathe their spells toward the departing day,
  Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
  Responding to the charm with its own mystery.        
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
 
Thou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles
  Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,        
  Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
Around whose lessening and invisible height
Gather among the stars the clouds of night.
 
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres;
  And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,        
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
  Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around;
And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
 
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild        
  And terrorless as this serenest night;
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
  Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at sea, 8 July 1822.

"Death is mild and terrrorless as this serenest night."