Thomas Medwin’s 1847 Life
of Shelley was the first full-length biography to appear. The poet was
Medwin’s younger first cousin; they were neighbors and schoolmates who
remained close until Medwin, having damaged his professional prospects, enlisted in
1813. He spent five years as an officer in India before rejoining Shelley as part
of the circle of English writers at Pisa in October of 1820. His biography is thus
an important source of information about Shelley’s earliest and latest years;
for the intervening period Medwin relies on the previously-published memoirs of
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Thomas De Quincey, the prefaces and notes to Shelley’s
works by Mary Shelley, and Thomas Moore’s life of Byron. The second of
Medwin’s two volumes is given entirely to Shelley’s last months.
The textual history of the Life
of Shelley is complex. Medwin had few personal letters to work with, having
lost some and lent others to Edward John Trelawny. In addition to his journals he
reworked material from his earlier publications, the Conversations of Lord
Byron (1824), his review of Moore’s Byron published in the
Literary Gazette (1831), and the articles published in the
Athenaeum (1832-33) reissued as the Shelley Papers (1833). While
there was no second edition, Medwin revised the Life at least twice and one
of the later versions was edited and published by H. B. Forman in 1913. That
edition contains new material but also (though Forman fails to specify them)
excisions from the 1847 publication, including a long section concerned with Byron.
The Life of Shelley is in fact an olio of matter composed at different
periods for various purposes with copious filler added; like his book,
Medwin’s life had, by 1847, become an affair of rags and patches. His
Conversations had been savaged by Hobhouse and other associates of
Byron; since its publication Medwin had married a Swedish countess in 1824 and then
abandoned her and his children after losing much of her fortune speculating in the
art market. He had been unexpectedly disinherited by his wealthy father in 1829 and
forced to earn his living by literature, never an easy thing for an impoverished
gentleman to manage. Medwin spent most of his life living as a voluntary exile on
the Continent, returning occasionally to England to cultivate his literary
projects.
He was living under distressed
circumstances when his biographical books and articles appeared. There is no doubt
they were written with a lofty intention, and the case of Shelley anyway, to
vindicate the poet’s much-abused character. But there is also no question
that Medwin was converting his former friendships into ready money. We may be
grateful that he did so, but it is understandable that other members of the
Byron-Shelley circle took a dim view of his motives. Mary Shelley regarded
Medwin’s request for money in exchange for complying with her request that he
suppress his biography as an attempt at blackmail. Fanny Brawne, who Medwin knew in
Heidelberg, may have been less than fully forthcoming in what she revealed about
John Keats. Medwin was in bad odor with respectable people as the result of the
attacks on his character by Hobhouse and others.
He was thus in a position to write
feelingly when recounting the social ostracism suffered by Byron and Shelley. His
own difficulties as a writer stem less from the fact that he was “less than a
gentleman” than from the fact that he was too much of one: he was an amateur
poet, an amateur painter, an amateur sportsman, an amateur art-collector, an
amateur critic, an amateur classicist—one might add, an amateur biographer.
One can deplore his lack of genius and occasional lack of accuracy (he relies too
much on his memory) but one can generally rely on his honesty. It was that, after
all, which threatened those who attempted to dismiss him as a liar, a ruffian or an
adventurer.
But Mary Shelley, Claire
Clairmont, and Jane Williams had little to fear from a biographer who is nothing if
not circumspect about women’s reputations. One might attribute Medwin’s
reticence to a desire to depict Shelley as “eternal child” or to
lessons learned from the response to his Conversations of Byron. More likely
it simply reflects what Medwin had always claimed: the gossip and loose talk in the
Conversations were indeed Byron’s utterances and not his own;
writing as himself Medwin was not inclined to mock others’ frailties. The
exceptions to this are his personal attacks on Moore and Hobhouse, yet even there
he attempts to attack his assailants using Byron’s words rather than his own.
The Life of Shelley is a woefully-printed book. Medwin was careless about
names, dates, and quotations to begin with, and the text abounds with garbled
words, unclosed quotation marks, and odd paragraphing. There is no index, no
running heads, no chapter divisions, no table of contents. While Medwin took some
care over his first volume, the second is so digressive and badly stitched together
that the sequence of events becomes difficult to follow.
The Life appeared to mixed
reviews. By 1847 Shelley was hardly a pariah (though Medwin writes as though he
were) and several journals seized the occasion to write favorably of him.
Medwin’s book was puffed by the magazines in which he published. The stinging
remarks in the Westminster Review, however, are not entirely unfair:
Two curious rambling volumes, in which all that is really new and worth telling
about Shelley relates principally to his early life, and bears about the same
proportion to the irrelevant twaddle that the oft-quoted grain of wheat does
to the bushel of chaff. Quotations from the clever paper entitled ‘Shelley at
Oxford,’ scraps of poetry with opinions thereon, and vituperations of Byron,
Moore, Hobhouse, Southey, and others, make up the bulk of the book. We certainly
looked for something much more to the purpose from the pen of one who claims to be
the sole possessor of “data absolutely requisite for tracing Shelley’s
genius from its first germs up to its maturity, and forming an impartial judgment
of his character.” 48 (January 1848): 568
While The Life of Shelley
is an execrable example of nineteenth-century “book-making,” it
does contain the “data” Medwin claimed. It is also an
invaluable source for Medwin’s own life which, despite the efforts of Ernest
J. Lovell in Captain Medwin (1962) remains something of a puzzle itself.
David Hill Radcliffe
