Following the death of the
nonagenarian Samuel Rogers in 1855 Edward John Trelawny went on to become the chief
living chronicler of romantic poets. While Rogers spent most of his long life
engaged with politicians and men of letters, Trelawny, save for the few months
spent in the Pisan circle in Italy, mixed little with the world, wrote little, and
was largely forgotten when his memoirs appeared three years after Rogers’
death. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858) was
afterwards revised and expanded as Records of Byron, Shelley, and the Author
(1878).
These memoirs, especially the
latter, published after the deaths of nearly all who had known Byron and Shelley,
brought renewed attention to the Trelawny whose personal eccentricities, quite as
much as his writings, seemed to bring the earlier era back to vivid life. Following
his death in 1881, however, Trelawny became the object of less flattering attention
when the details of his account of the death of Shelley began to be challenged,
culminating in the unflattering biographies by William St. Clair (1977) and David
Crane (1999) which present not just Trelawny’s writings but his life as a
tissue of fraud and deception.
Trelawny was an odd man who
reveled in his oddities. Having served in the Pacific as a midshipman, he was given
to spinning yarns about himself that involved a fictional pirate and violent
encounters with wild beasts and savage tribesmen. These tales passed for truth, or
at least partial truth, among the Byron-Shelley circle, and when Trelawny later
collected and embroidered them as Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), he
insisted that “all was true,” which it certainly was not. Yet it is not
so obvious that Trelawny was a pathological liar. What he recorded about Byron and
Shelley was, if not the whole unvarnished truth, truth after the fashion of
nineteenth-century memoirs—or rather, after the manner of nineteenth-century
anecdotes: Trelawny’s, like Rogers’, acquired form and refinement
through oral recitation and variation
Alienated from his wealthy family,
the memoirist had been living as a sportsman in Switzerland when he and Edward
Elleker Williams were invited by Thomas Medwin to visit Shelley in Pisa, where in
January 1822 Shelley introduced Trelawny to Byron. Shelley’s passion for
boating was communicated to the others, and Trelawny, Williams, and their friend
Daniel Roberts were soon involved in a boat-building project. Trelawny became the
skipper of the Bolivar, built for Byron, and Williams of the Don Juan, built for
Shelley. After Shelley and Williams were drowned in July 1822 Trelawny arranged the
famous cremation of the bodies and lent financial assistance to Mary Shelley.
In the summer of 1823 Byron again
enlisted Trelawny’s services in traveling to Greece, and having spent time
with Byron in Cephalonia Trelawny proceeded to the mainland with James Hamilton
Browne to assess the political state of affairs. Trelawny was arranging a
conference when he learned of Byron’s death; he hastened to Missolonghi where
he looked after Byron’s remains as he had earlier for Shelley’s.
Trelawny then enlisted with the rebellious Greek chieftain Odysseas Androutsos,
marrying his sister and supervising affairs in his stronghold on Mount Parnassus.
Having narrowly survived an assassination attempt he was evacuated to the Islands
on a British ship.
Such is the sequence of events,
though the memoir itself is less a continuous narrative than a series of anecdotes
and descriptive vignettes arranged into a character study of the two poets. Leigh
Hunt is thrown into the background, the rival biographer Thomas Medwin disappears,
Claire Clairmont and Teresa Guiccioli are all but invisible, and Trelawny is
uncharacteristically reticent about his actions in the Greek Revolution. The
Recollections is narrowly focused on his personal interactions with
Shelley and Byron.
Shelley is represented as the beau
ideal of a poet: intellectual, otherworldly, kind—in contrast to Byron, who
is depicted as shallow, cynical, and miserly. If the substance of the two portraits
recalls Hunt’s Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828),
Trelawny displays none of Leigh Hunt’s spleen and adds much circumstantial
detail. He imparts a sense of sublimity to his scenes that neither Hunt nor Medwin
nor the other memoirists seem capable of. The Recollections is memorably
gothic, not only in its voyeuristic descriptions of mangled bodies, but in its
alternation of idyllic and horrific scenes and its guilt-ridden, obsessive
references to water and boats that keep the climactic events always in mind if not
always in view.
The emotional power of the
Recollections derives from this obsessiveness. While the memoirist knew
Shelley for only six months, the encounter was obviously a life-changing
experience. Trelawny, who afterwards became a vegetarian and political radical,
seems to have emulated Shelley for much of his later life. His extravagant acts in
arranging for Shelley’s cremation and burial, his difficult relationships
with Shelley’s family, and his distribution of relics indicate the depth of
his feelings for the dead poet with whom he arranged to have himself buried.
If Trelawny’s encounter with
Byron was not so life-changing, it too seems to have been obsessive. The Trelawny
Byron knew was a sportsman and not a writer and Byron responded to him as such: if
he had “conversations” with Medwin, interactions with Trelawny took the
form of riding, shooting, swimming, and boating. Trelawny boasts of his athletic
triumphs over Byron in ways that suggest that the spirit of emulation remained
strong decades for afterwards. Byron, who saw through Trelawny’s humbug, is
himself presented as a poser. Trelawny betrays no empathy for the racking cares
that afflicted Byron’s latter days and represents the poet (in contrast to
himself) as a decayed and diffident dandy.
No doubt the same heated
imagination at work in Adventures of a Younger Son was responsible for the
success of the Recollections, but this need not imply that the latter is a
parallel case. There are no fictive pirates or tiger-hunts; while Trelawny is
selective in what he remembers or chooses to tell, there is no indication that he
invents things out of whole cloth. Claire Clairmont and Jane Williams were both
alive in 1858 and might have taken him to task if he had. As William St. Clair has
shown, Trelawny did alter the letters he prints within the dubious norms acceptable
at the time. The positiveness with which Trelawny makes assertions of fact and
opinion does not carry conviction—especially given discrepancies between the
two versions of his narrative—but neither does it imply mendacity. He was who
he was; his memoir, like Leigh Hunt’s, is surely the better for bearing the
stamp of its author’s difficult character.
David Hill Radcliffe
