Percy Shelley's Gothic Readings
While
yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
(49-52)
He was a lover of the wonderful and
wild in literature, but had not fostered these tastes at their genuine
sources--the romances and chivalry of the middle ages--but in the perusal of
such German works as were current in those days. Under the influence
of these he, at the age of fifteen, wrote two short prose romances of
slender merit. The sentiments and language were exaggerated, the composition
imitative and poor. Mary Shelley. note #9 to Queen Mab.
One important source of Shelleys' readings is the list kept by Mary Shelley in her
journals, 1814-1822. See "Shelleys' Reading
List," The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814-1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman
and Diana Scott (
Determining Shelley's
readings in the gothic is complicated by the generally held opinion that, of
all the major romantic poets, he was most avid reader of ghost stories and dark
romances as a child. Cameron's first chapter title, "The Votary of
Romance," represents a consensus among the early biographers (Hogg, Medwin, Peck) in stressing the impact of writers like Lewis
and Dacre on his early prose and poetry (which they
also tend to universally deplore). One strongly suspects that, in addition to
the fairly well-known titles listed below, there are others, shilling shockers
and blue books that are hard to determine, if not lost to posterity.
- Beckford, William. Vathek
(1787) 1815 J.
- Brown, Charles Brockden. Weiland
(1798), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly
(1799), Arthur Merwyn (1799). J.
"Brown's four novels, Schiller's Robbers, and Goethe's Faust
were, of all the works with which he was familiar, those which took the deepest
root in his mind, and had the strongest influence on his character . . . . He
devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a minor degree Southey . . .
but admiration is one thing and assimilation is another; and nothing so blended
itself with the structure of his interior mind as the creations of Brown."
Peacock, "Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley"
in Memoirs, Essays, and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (1970), 43.
- Burger, Gottfried August. "Lenore."
(1796).
"On Christmas Eve Shelley related the ghostly tale of Burger's ballad of Lenore,
a copy of which in Spencer's translation with Lady Diana Beaurcler's
designs, he possessed, working up the horror to such a height of fearful
interest that Polly 'quite expected to see Wilhelm walk into the drawing
room.'" Recounted by Dowden from a conversation with Shelley's childhood
friend Polly Rose in her old age; see Dowden's Life II. 123.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Christabel"
(Note: One can debate the inclusion of Coleridge on a gothic list--see Mudge's "'Excited by Trick:" Coleridge and the
Gothic Imagination."WC 22 (1992):
179-84--but how could one neglect Polidori's famous
rendering of Shelley's reaction to Byron's reading of the poem that 18th of
June, 1816?)
"Among
other particulars mentioned, was the outline of a ghost story by Lord Byron. It
appears that one evening Lord Byron, Mr. Percy Bysshe
Shelly [sic], two ladies and the gentleman before alluded to, after having
perused a German work, entitled Phantasmagoriana,
began relating ghost stories; when his lordship having recited the beginning of
"Christabel," then unpublished, the whole
took so strong hold of Mr. Shelly's mind, that he suddenly started up and ran
out of the room. The physician and Lord Byron followed, and discovered him
leaning against a mantle-piece, with cold drops of perspiration trickling down
his face. After having given him something to refresh him, upon enquiring into
the cause of his alarm, they found that his wild imagination having pictured to
him the bosom of one of the ladies with eyes. . . . [He] was obliged to leave
the room in order to destroy the impression."
from Polidori's preface to The Vampyre:
A Tale (1819) xiv-xv. Polidori
is not always the most reliable of witnesses, but see Byron's qualified
confirmation of the incident in his letter to
- Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya,
or, The Moor. A Romance of the Fifteenth Century
(1806).
Letter to Edward Graham 15 July 1811: "This [Cwm
Elan, Radnorshire,
"Anne
Radclyffe's [sic] works pleased him most,
particularly The Italian, but the Rosa-Matildan
school, especially a strange wild romance entitled Zofloya,
or The Moor, a Monk-Lewisy
production, where his Satanic majesty, as in Faust, plays the chief
part, enraptured him. The two novels he afterwards wrote, entitled Zastrozzi and [St. Irvyne,]
The Rosacrucian, were modelled
after this ghastly production, all of which I now remember, is, that the
principal character is an incarnation of the devil, but who, unlike The Monk
(then a prohibited book, but afterwards an especial favorite of Shelley)
instead of tempting a man and calling him into a likeness of himself, enters
into a woman called Olympia [Medwin misremembers the
name of the novel's heroine-villainess, Victoria de Lorendani],
who poisons her husband homeopathically, and ends by being carried off very
melodramatically in blue flames to the place of dolor." Medwin, Life (Revised Copy, 1913) 25.
- Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions de Spectres, Revenans, Fantomes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur
(Paris: Lenormant et Schoell,
1812). Rictor Norton from the walpole-onelist provides the following bibliographical
information:
"As
Mary Shelley made clear, the book read that fateful day at the Villa Diodati was a French translation of a German collection of
ghost stories (i.e. they did not read either an English
or a German book). The book they read was Fantasmagoriana,
ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions de Spectres, Revenans, Fantomes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur
(Paris: Lenormant et Schoell,
1812); the anonymous translator was in fact Jean Baptiste
Benoit Eyries (1767-1846).
The
German ghost stories originally appeared in the first two of the five- volume Gespensterbuch edited by Friedrich Schulze (though
he actually authored three of the stories) (under the pseudonym of Friedrich Laun) and Johann Apel (Leipzig:
G. J. Goeschen, 1811-1815). The English translation
appeared in 1812: Tales of the Dead (
The
details become complicated enough to delight any bibliographer, in so far as
three of the stories in the French edition do not appear in the German edition, and one story in the English edition does not
appear in the French edition. The most famous story of the collection,
"The Spectre-Barber," is by Musaeus. Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1816 related five ghost
stories to Percy Bysshe Shelley, one story that seems
to derive from the French edition, and one story that seems to derive from the
English edition, and three other stories are so far untraced.
The
1813 edition of this English translation was republished by The Gothic Society
(
All
of the German stories are based on German folktales which circulated for many
years prior to the German publication, so there could be a common ur-source for those in the first Gespensterbuch
(1811) and those in the various English chapbooks (1801 and 1802), but I
don't think any systematic links have been suggested." --Rictor Norton. Also see Fantasmagoriana (Tales of the Dead). Edited and introduced by A.J. Day. St. Ives: Fantasmagoriana Press, 2005 (this
edition includes new English translations of two tales in the French edition
not included in Utterson’s text).
- Godwin, William. Caleb Williams; (1794)
Letter to Elizabeth Hitchner 26 Nov. 1811: "Have
you read Godwin's 2 "St.
"The
Rosacrucian was suggested by St. Leon, which
Shelley wonderfully admired. He read it until he believed that there was truth
in Alchemy." Medwin, Life (Revised Copy,
1913) 49.
- Lamb, Lady Caroline. Glenarvon
(1816). 1816.J
- Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk (1796); The Bravo of
Letter to Peacock 20 April 1818: "I have taken the resolution to see what
kind of a tragedy a person without dramatic talent could write. It shall [have]
better morality than Fazio, & better poetry than Bertram, at
least."
- Peacock, Thomas Love. Nightmare Abbey
(1818). Letter to Peacock [?20-21] June 1819:
"I am delighted with Nightmare Abbey," even with the
satiric portrait of himself as Scythrop!
- Polidori, John. The Vampyre
(1819).
- Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian (1797) 1814 J. The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) 1815 J.
In addition to the Journalentires, see
the passage from Medwin (under Dacre), which suggests Shelley's early acquaintance
with Radcliffe's novels.
- Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. "Der
Ewige Jude." (1783). One source for
Shelley's "The Wandering Jew."
- Schiller, Johann Friedrich von. The Robbers,
trans. A. F. Tytler (1792): see Cameron, The
Golden Years (398) and Peacock note under Brown.
- Anonymous. Tales of Terror (1801) Peck records a delightful
detail from his inspection of this text in the Shelley estate, noting that
it "bears evidence of hard use; and is marked throughout by childish
characters, perhaps in the hand of Shelley" (I 30n). Tales
of Terror (1801) is also the source of Percy Shelley's plagiarized
"Saint Edmond's Eve" in the Victor and Cazire
volume. The publishing history of the Tales of Terror has
been complicated by its association with Lewis's
preexisiting Tales of Wonder, also from
1801 and printed and sold by the same publishers (Bulmer and Joseph
Bell). The former is a actually a clever parody of Lewis’s
volume, although some later editions continue to confuse the two,
especially Morley’s
terribly misleading edition in 1887 of Tales of Terror and Wonder,
which collapses the two very different texts into one volume and,
following earlier dubious attributions, ascribes authorship of both to
Lewis.