After Percy Shelley died, Mary Shelley was keen to disseminate his works and bring him the recognition that he didn’t receive in his lifetime. Percy Shelley’s father Sir Timothy Shelley objected to his son’s works being published and prohibited Mary Shelley from doing so by threatening to withdraw the financial support he was providing for his grandson (her and Percy Shelley’s son), Percy Florence Shelley.
However, in the summer of 1838 Edward Moxon “offered her £500 to edit a four-volume set of Shelly’s collected works. He also wanted her to provide biographical material for those readers who had already encountered Shelley’s poems and were eager to know more about him.” (Gordon). Fortunately for Mary Shelley, Sir Thomas Shelley’s legal representation had changed and his new lawyer was more sympathetic to Mary Shelley. He persuaded her father-in-law to allow Mary Shelley “to publish Shelley’s work by telling him he should be proud of is son’s poetry and reminding him that the Shelley name no longer spelled scandal.” (Gordon). He would not, however, allow her to publish a biography, and so she wrote extensive notes on each poem, putting them into context as editor, rather than biographer.
She did censor the work somewhat, to make it more palatable to the conservative readers, so that “New readers, unaware of Shelley’s radical ideas and the scandals attached to his name, bowed to Shelley’s genius and ushered him into the halls of the great English poets.” (Gordon). She “presented Queen Mab in this volume with so many excisions as to make it both harmless and meaningless […] later in the year a one-volume edition of the poems appeared in which Queen Mab was printed entire, with Shelley’s notes. It was for publishing this volume that Edward Moxon was tried on June 23, 1841, for blasphemous libel”, the last case of its kind in England (White).
A very good set, joints, and corners rubbed. Two bookplates to front pastedowns.
Newman I. White, “Literature and the Law of Libel: Shelley and the Radicals of 1840-1842“, in Studies in Philology.
