“Not with the Completeness We Could Have Wished”: George Henry Lewes’s Annotated Copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edited by Mrs Shelley (1841)

Abstract George Henry Lewes’s annotated copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley provides fascinating insights about the writer’s perceptions of Shelley’s life and poetry. Annotated after Lewes’s aborted attempt to write a biography of Shelley, the book likely served as a de facto rough draft for Lewes’s essays on Shelley in the Penny Cyclopaedia and the Westminster Review. Lewes’s marginal comments reflect—sometimes verbatim—his published thoughts on Shelley, and he focuses on the same works and with the same emphasis. Just as he does in his essays, Lewes focuses less on textual explication in his annotations than he does examining Shelley’s general character as a man and ideology. This suggests that Lewes was still focused on Shelley’s biography and that his annotations reflect not the first blush of discovery but rather a validation of his initial encounters with Shelley—and, perhaps, a justification of the strong affinity he felt for a writer whom he numbered among England’s greatest. Through an examination of the annotations, the authors help establish Lewes’s composition process in the Penny Cyclopaedia and the Westminster Review.