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and market systems and by institutions of reading. Arnold is both
fascinated and troubled by his inability to shake the sense of an
intimate connection to Shelley s alternately seductive and madden-
ing personality, a personality that makes strong emotional claims on
the responsive reader. That Shelley s verse seems to render his feel-
ings almost obtrusively palpable to the responsive reader contributes
to Shelley s Victorian prestige as well as to the discomfort of later
modernist and New Critical readers.14 Yet if Arnold finds it difficult
to separate Shelley s poetry from his personality, he consistently
links such personality effects to the impersonality of the literary and
market systems in which poetic subjectivity finally seems to inhere.
What feels initially like access to an essential interiority turns into
the paradox of an intimate connection with a radically public sub-
jectivity, a subjectivity fully proper to no individual.
When the University of Dublin professor and Shelley votary
Edward Dowden s Life of Shelley appeared in 1886, it came at the crest
of a wave of publication about Shelley s life spanning three decades.
In the late 1850s, Shelley s friends Peacock, Trelawny and Thomas
Jefferson Hogg had all published memoirs of the poet, following
Shelley s Glamour 95
earlier ventures in anecdotal biography by Hogg (in the New Monthly
Magazine in 1832 3) and Medwin (in the Athenaeum in 1832 3, and
in his Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1847), and Mary Shelley s own
very influential biographical notes to her 1839 edition of her hus-
band s poetry. Moxon, the publisher of Hogg s memoir, added Lady
Shelley s Shelley Memorials and Richard Garnett s Relics of Shelley to
his growing list of Shelleyana in 1859 and 1862, respectively. The
1870s alone saw W.M. Rossetti s memoir of Shelley attached to his
edition of Shelley s Poetical Works (1870), D.F. MacCarthy s Shelley s
Early Life, from original sources, with curious incidents, letters and writings
(1872), the Symonds biography quoted above (1878), R.H. Stoddard s
Anecdote Biography of Shelley in the Sans Souci series (1877), George
Barnett Smith s critical biography (1877), and Trelawny s expanded
Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (1878), not to mention a slew
of reminiscences by nearly everyone who had encountered Shelley
and, it seems, nearly everyone who had encountered someone
who had encountered Shelley, many of these in the perennially
popular conversations with genre. As this flood of biographical
writing attests, Shelley was a figure whose reputation was steadily
growing but also undecided. Since evaluation of his poetry was so
dependent on opinion of his character, these biographers sought
especially to intervene in disputes over the more troubling passages
in the poet s life, especially the tragic denouement of his marriage
to Harriet Westbrook. Though the materials for writing Shelley s life
were almost overwhelmingly copious and strangely discordant,
Symonds comments, Shelley s character remained difficult to fix:
Those who ought to meet in love over his grave, have spent their
time quarrelling over him, and baffling the most eager seeker for the
truth. Through the turbid atmosphere of their recriminations it is
impossible to discern the whole personality of the man. 15
The distinction of Dowden s work was that he had been granted
unfettered access to the vast trove of Shelley documents that Lady
Shelley had literally enshrined at Boscombe, along with other relics
of the poet. Promising a more complete, more truthful picture of
Shelley than had yet emerged, Dowden s two volumes trained new
light on the more scandalous and provocative episodes in Shelley s
life, including the marriage with Harriet, the elopement with Mary,
the relations with Claire Clairmont, Emilia Viviani, and others,
though Dowden offers sentimentalizing defenses of the poet at each
96 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
turn. To exasperated readers like Arnold, the effect of these revela-
tions was to produce an unfamiliar and unwelcome view of a Shelley
of unchecked passions and dangerous seductiveness. I have read
those volumes with the deepest interest, says Arnold in his response
to Dowden s work,
but I regret their publication, and am surprised, I confess, that
Shelley s family should have desired or assisted it. For my own part,
at any rate, I would gladly have been left with the impression, the
ineffaceable impression, made upon me by Mrs. Shelley s first edi-
tion of her husband s collected poems. The charm of the poems
flowed in upon us from that, and the charm of the character.
(XI, 305 6)16
It is the split personality of the poet of personality that troubles
Arnold here, prompting a searching discussion of Shelley s psychol-
ogy and of the limits of public curiosity, of Arnold s own mixed feel-
ings of love and distrust for the poet, and of the difficulty of locating
a real Shelley among all the representations of the poet in circula-
tion. But the riddle that Shelley s life poses only further increases the
fascination with his figure, since Arnold s disgust at the biography s
revelations is evidently matched by his desire to puzzle out the inco-
herence. Shelley s life, that is, becomes more obviously textualized.
Nowadays all things appear in print sooner or later, Arnold
acknowledges with some resignation at the start of the review, signal-
ing that the essay s topic is not just the character of the poet but the
character of that print culture in which Shelley s character is con-
structed and circulated. Paradoxically, though, the more that appears
in print, the more elusive the truth of Shelley appears. Wading
through Dowden s Life, Arnold complains,
one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations;
God forbid that I should go into the scandals about Shelley s
Neapolitan charge, about Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about
Shelley and Miss Clairmont, and the rest of it! I will only say that
it is visible enough that when the passion of love was aroused in
Shelley (and it was aroused easily) one could not be sure of him,
his friends could not trust him.
(XI, 308 9)
Shelley s Glamour 97
Arnold s sickened feeling registers the queasiness of an emotional
overload so much loss, so much sadness in the Shelley circle but
also a narrative surfeit: there is just too much Shelley to take in.
When Arnold comments on Shelley s self-isolating unreliability, the
concern is epistemological as well as ethical: one could not be sure
of him. The vagueness of the pronoun one allows Arnold to place
himself and his reader in the position of Shelley s friends, loving,
frustrated, unable to trust.
Arnold s concern here is overdetermined. On one level, he is react-
ing as a reader and as a public figure himself to the distressing inva-
siveness of celebrity culture: the way in which matters that should
remain private inevitably become part of an endless series of scan-
dals drawn before the public with mortifying repetition. Implicit in
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