New Perspectives on Byron and Godwin: The View from the Archives

ABSTRACT

A manuscript copy in Charles Clairmont’s hand of an unpublished letter of Byron to Catherine, Lady Mackintosh dated 17 May 1814 has recently been uncovered at Keats-Shelley House, Rome. The letter is part of an exchange that also involved William Godwin, for whom Byron expresses his esteem, and it provides evidence of a hitherto unrecorded attempt of the latter to ease Godwin’s financial situation by interceding with John Murray on his behalf, nearly two years before he resolved to cede part of the copyrights of The Siege of Corinth and Parisina to the philosopher. The new episode is reconstructed in the article, which includes a transcription of the copy of Byron’s letter and all extant related correspondence held at Keats-Shelley House and the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland.

KEYWORDS:

• Lord Byron
• William Godwin
• John Murray
• Catherine, Lady Mackintosh
• Sir James Mackintosh
• The Adventures of Caleb Williams
• Abinger papers

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ella Kilgallon and Luca Caddia for inviting me to examine the Abinger donation at Keats-Shelley House and granting me permission to publish Lady Mackintosh’s letter to Godwin and Charles Clairmont’s copy of Byron’s letter. Thanks also to Kirsty McHugh, Curator of the John Murray Archive and Publishers’ Collections at the National Library of Scotland, for her assistance and permission to quote from Lady Mackintosh’s letter to Byron and Godwin’s letters to Murray. Above all, I am indebted to Pamela Clemit and Michael Rossington for their comments and advice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ On Mary Shelley’s creation of the archive and its subsequent management and bequeathing by her daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, see Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010) and Michael Rossington, ‘Commemorating the Relic: The Beginnings of the Bodleian Shelley Collections,’ The Bodleian Library Record 18, no. 3 (2004): 264–75. More specifically on the Abinger Papers Collection see Pamela Clemit, ‘William Godwin’s Papers in the Abinger Deposit: An Unmapped Country,’ The Bodleian Library Record 18, no. 3 (2004): 253–63.

² Valentina Varinelli, ‘An Unpublished Mary Shelley Letter,’ The Keats-Shelley Review 37, no. 1 (2023): 4–11.

³ Mary Shelley’s fragmentary draft has been edited by Pamela Clemit in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, gen. ed. Nora Crook, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), IV, 3–113.

⁴ Mary Shelley’s original enquiries with Henry Crabb Robinson and Josiah Wedgwood II can be read in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88), II, 271–2, 275–6. Hereafter MWSL.

⁵ MWSL, II, 275.

⁶ Several letters to and from Godwin at the Bodleian have been similarly numbered and annotated by Mary Shelley. See Pamela Clemit, Introduction to ‘Life of William Godwin’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, xxi-xxii.

⁷ The Letters of William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols in progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-), II, xxx-xxxi, 67–72.

⁸ The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (accessed 14 April 2024).

⁹ NLS MS. 43523, fols 50–1. The letter is edited according to the principles outlined below.

¹⁰ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: Murray, 1973–94), III, 80, 226. Hereafter BLJ.

¹¹ BLJ, V, 16. According to Godwin’s diary, the meeting took place when he called on John Murray on 4 August 1813.

¹² I have identified the hand by checking it against Charles Clairmont’s letter to his sister Claire of 13, [17], 20 September 1815, Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 69, fols 7–10. In this letter he affirmed: ‘I love Lord Byron and Coleridge & Wordsworth, and Werter & S^t. Leon, and the Wrongs of Woman’.

¹³ Byron had moved into his bachelor apartment in the Albany, Piccadilly, at the end of March 1814 (BLJ, IV, 87).

¹⁴ NLS MS. 40455, fols 10^r, 12^r.

¹⁵ The Diary of William Godwin, http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (accessed 14 April 2024); NLS MS. 40455, fol. 14^r. All three letters quoted above will appear in volume 3 of The Letters of William Godwin.

¹⁶ The Diary of William Godwin, http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (accessed 14 April 2024). On Godwin’s extensive archival research for this book see Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron and others, 12 vols in progress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961-), III, 149–50.

¹⁷ The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 351–2, 372. Foscolo outlined the defects of the novel, including the characters’ anachronistic manner of thinking and speaking, in his letter to Murray of 11 August 1822, Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario, ed. Plinio Carli and others, 10 vols in progress (Florence: Le Monnier, 1949-), IX, 81–3.

¹⁸ Letter to Mary Shelley, 15 April 1830, Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 48, fol. 68^r; MWSL, II, 110; The Diary of William Godwin, http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (accessed 14 April 2024).

¹⁹ Copy of a letter to John Murray, 10 March 1832, Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 20, fol. 54^r; copy of a letter to Walter Scott, 17 February 1831, Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 20, fol. 40^r-v; MWSL, II, 160.

²⁰ The Edinburgh Review 25, no. 50 (October 1815), 486. Mackintosh’s second review appeared in The Monthly Review 78 (December 1815), 414–24.

²¹ William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (New York: Norton, 1989), 392.

²² The anecdote is recounted in William Maginn, ‘Gallery of Literary Characters. No. liii. William Godwin, Esq.’, Fraser’s Magazine 10, no. 58 (October 1834), 463.

²³ Byron also knew Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), from which he quoted the phrase ‘Opinion an omnipotence’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, 833 (Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), II, 333).

²⁴ Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 39. The quotation is from Maria Gisborne’s journal entry dated 9 July 1820.

²⁵ Bodleian MS. Abinger c. 14, fol. 58^r. The beginning of the letter is missing, but William St Clair tentatively assigned it to late 1816 (St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 548). Pamela Clemit has kindly informed me that it has been dated ‘[?16 August 1816-?16 December 1817]’ in the forthcoming volume 4 of The Letters of William Godwin (private email communication, 11 July 2023).

²⁶ St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 339. On Falkland as a prototypal Byronic hero see also Donald Roemer,

‘The Achievement of Godwin’s “Caleb Williams”: The Proto-Byronic Squire Falkland’, Criticism 18, no. 1 (1976), 43–56.

²⁷ On ‘Godwin’s Mandeville’, in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume I, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 177. Shelley’s assessment seems to be echoed in Godwin’s retrospective account of the composition of the novel in the Preface to the 1832 edition of Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling (1805): ‘It was necessary to make [Falkland], so to speak, the tenant of an atmosphere of romance, so that every reader should feel prompted almost to worship him for his high qualities’ (Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering, 1992), V, 9).

²⁸ The Scots Magazine 2 (January 1818), 60; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2, no. 9 (December 1817), 270.

²⁹ Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (London: Macdonald, 1962), 258, 340.

³⁰ Sir James Mackintosh to Samuel Rogers, 19 January 1816, quoted in The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 156. Hereafter LJM.

³¹ BLJ, V, 16.

³² LJM, 155–6.

³³ BLJ, V, 18.

³⁴ LJM, 449–50; BLJ, X, 18.

³⁵ The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, II, 224–9, 428–9. On Godwin’s claim to Shelley’s financial support and his landlord’s lawsuit see St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 447–69.

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Notes on contributors

Valentina Varinelli

Valentina Varinelli completed her AHRC-funded PhD in English literature at Newcastle University, UK, and currently holds a post-doctoral position at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Brescia, Italy. She is the assistant editor of the Mondadori Meridiani editions of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry and prose (2018) and the author of a monograph, Italian Impromptus: A Study of P.B. Shelley’s Writings in Italian with an Annotated Edition (LED, 2022). She has published articles and essays on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, and their circle and is now co-editing Shelley’s Complete Verse Translations and Milton’s Complete Shorter Poems, both for the Longman Annotated English Poets series.