1829: The Turning Point for Shelley’s Reputation

Abstract

The article argues for 1829 as the year in which Percy Bysshe Shelley’s reputation as a great and enduring poet is secured and for the importance of Europe and America in effecting this. This process interweaves and is concurrent with the better-documented efforts of Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and the British radical underground press. Key texts here are Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), Hazlitt’s anthology, Select British Poets (1824, suppressed for copyright reasons but resold in America and plundered and diffused by French anthologists), and, crucially, Galignani’s pirated Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829). During this period Shelley becomes best known in France, Italy, and Germany as the associate of Byron and as the author of The Cenci. His increasing visibility comes to a head in 1829, when the discovery of an unpublished Shelley poem prompts the enthusiastic claim on his behalf that “with the single exception of Lord Byron, no poet of our day has evinced a more strikingly powerful and original genius”.