Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” as Workshop Poetry

ABSTRACT

Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet’s invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne’s son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time (with Shelley’s financial and intellectual backing). In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer’s workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet’s tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets’ and scientists’ workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley’s celebrated “Letter.”

KEYWORDS:

• garret
• invention
• poetry
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• steamboat
• verse epistle
• workshop

Notes

1. The poem was drafted by Shelley and transcribed by Mary Shelley in two notebooks, one now in the Bodleian Library (the draft) and one in the Huntington Library (the transcript). The copy actually sent to the Gisbornes in London may not survive. Both title and date (1 July 1820) were provided by Mary Shelley, who first published it in Posthumous Poems (1824). See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Fraistat and Reiman, 328–37, which provides the text of the poem I use. Hereafter line references are cited parenthetically in the text.

2. See for example John Ashbery, “This Room,” in Notes from the Air, which briefly lists mundane objects, including a portrait of a dog and “macaroni for lunch,” then ends: “Why do I tell you these things? / You are not even here,” 249 (lines 8–9).

3. Percy Shelley to John and Maria Gisborne, 26 May 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 201–3.

4. Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 18 June 1820, Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol. 1, 146–48 (146, 149).

5. Maria Gisborne to Mary Shelley, 23 August 1820, Maria Gisborne and Edward Williams, 66.

6. Webb, “Scratching at the Door,” 130, 132.

7. Percy Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 21 September 1819, Letters, vol. 2, 119–20.

8. Percy Shelley to Henry Reveley, 28 October 1819, Letters, vol. 2, 131–33 (132).

9. Percy Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 26 May 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 201–3.

10. See for example Percy Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 12 July 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 212–14 (213).

11. Percy Shelley to John and Maria Gisborne, ?7 July 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 210–12 (211).

12. Shelley was always boating, and he took a hands-on approach to the design of boats he commissioned. He had Henry oversee the purchase of a small flat-bottom boat for traveling between Pisa and Livorno, but a sketch for proposed alterations of the small craft stands at the head of a letter to Henry, 19 April 1821, Letters, vol. 2, 286. In another of his notebooks used around this time, now Huntington MS 2177, he sketched a paddlewheel steamboat, complete with a “funnel” (smokestack), cabin, mast, and paddlewheels. See The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, vol. 4, 78.

13. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 14, 108–9.

14. From the transcription, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 14, 109.

15. Hogg, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, 7.

16. Vertesi notes in “Light and Enlightenment”: “in their attempt to redefine chemistry as divergent from alchemy, eighteenth-century chemists made what they considered special distinctions between alchemical practice and that of the new chemical science, concerning not only what kind of discipline chemistry was as currently practised, but also what kind of discipline it would and should become” (n.p.).

17. Hogg, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, 65, 69–71.

18. As noted by Vertesi in “Light and Enlightenment,” who sees the chemistry apparatus as “surprising in its anachronism” (6), and suggests that we see in the image “the ghost of alchemical inquiry in modern chemistry” (26).

19. In The Lunar Men Uglow sees in the painting a reminder that “[t]here was still something magical about such [chemical] science” (157).

20. Holmes, Age of Wonder, 285.

21. Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge,” 774, 778.

22. Rankine, Introductory Lecture, 22. The citation of Lauder is noted by Miller, who suggests Rankine may have seen the painting exhibited in 1855 (Miller, James Watt, Chemist, 72).

23. Percy Shelley to John and Maria Gisborne, 19 March 1819, Letters, vol. 2, 178–79 (179).

24. Percy Shelley to Claire Clairmont, 29 April 1821, Letters, vol. 2, 287–89.

25. Percy Shelley to Claire Clairmont, 8 June 1821, Letters, vol. 2, 296–97. John Gisborne had earlier proposed using the steamboat’s engine for a new iron-casting enterprise, which Shelley said was “a mere scheme to defraud us,” and which greatly increased the acrimony between the families. Percy Shelley to Claire Clairmont, 29 October 1820, Letters, vol. 2, 241–44 (243). In the same letter, Shelley refers to the Gisbornes as “filthy and odious animals” (243).

26. Webb, “Scratching at the Door,” 124–26.

27. Rogers, Grub Street, 219, 166.

28. Robinson, Selected Poems, 354.

29. Radcliffe, headnote to Mary Robinson, “The Poet’s Garret.” http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=38648.

30. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 14, 104–5.

31. Allen, “Poetry and Machinery,” 56.

32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 350.

33. Ibid.

34. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 528.

35. Ibid., 530–31.

36. Wordsworth, “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways,” in Poetical Works, vol. 4, 47.

37. Percy Shelley to John Gisborne, 10 April 1822, Letters, vol. 2, 406–10 (408).

38. Baillie, “Address to a Steam-Vessel,” in Feldman, British Women Poets, 39–43 (39).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven E. Jones

Steven E. Jones is DeBartolo Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the University of South Florida, USA. He’s the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America in 2013, editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal, 1993–2004, and author of numerous essays and books on romantic literature and digital humanities, including The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2014), and Roberto Busa, S.J. and the Emergence of Humanities Computing (Routledge, 2016).