Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s Audiences

Abstract In assembling her husband’s works—Posthumous Poems in 1824, and in 1839 two editions of Poetical Works and one of essays and letterss—Mary Shelley conceived of two classes of readers. The first, as she names it in the Preface of 1839, was “the world” to whom she would give “the productions of a sublime genius … with all the correctness possible.”1 With this “perfect edition”s—the “first stone of a monument due to Shelley’s genius, his sufferings, and his virtues” (xvi)s—she hoped to diminish the aura of his unintelligibility, quell the controversies over his conduct and political opinions, and solicit the favor of “any one newly introduced” (viii). In this editorial capacity, she acts as mediator, of fering herself as a model of perfect sympathy for and understanding of the poet. Yet simultaneously and more subtly, she was representing herself as the synecdoche of another kind of audience and with a somewhat contradictory agenda. Motivated by the charges—self-generated as well as held by some of their friendss—of her having failed the poet spiritually and emotionally in his last years, the editor, in view of “the public” whom she purports to serve, displays herself in a position of unique, and at times hermetic, readerly privilege: a singular Shelleyan audience, the intimate who is the poet’s ideal, best reader. This gesture of discriminating two audiences-popular and elite-is not particular to Mary Shelley’s volumes, of course; its double view reflects conflicting Romantic attitudes about the social role and potency of poetry: To whom does a poet speak? How is he heard?