History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

Her first book
co-authored with Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft) History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through A Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland: with letters descriptive of a sail round the lake of Geneva, and of the glaciers of Chamouni. London: Published by T. Hookham, Jun. and C. and J. Ollier, 1817.

12mo.; yellow endpapers; top edge darkened; edges foxed; dark green cloth; spine stamped in gilt; corners bumped. In a specially made cloth slipcase.

First edition, of Shelley’s first book, co-authored with her new husband during their elopement in 1814. CBEL III, 416; Lowndes p. 2374; Sunstein p. 412; Buxton Forman, 47. In three sections: the first section, a travelogue, is by Shelley; the second section, “Letters,” was written by Shelley and her husband to friends and family at home; and the third section, a poem titled, “Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” is Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley explains in her Preface, “Nothing can be more unpresuming than this little volume. It contains the account of some desultory visits by a party of young people to scenes which are now so familiar to our countrymen” (iii). She goes on to say the volume was cobbled together with “the few materials which an imperfect journal, and two or three letters to their friends in England afforded” (iii-iv), and adds that one might “find some entertainment in following the author, with her husband and her sister, on foot, through part of France and Switzerland, and in sailing with her down the castled Rhine” (iv-v).

Though the scenes depicted might be familiar to readers, the situation that brought the Shelley’s to the continent is the stuff of romance novels. At dawn on the morning of July 28, 1814, Shelley and her sister Claire Clairmont, were fetched at their home by Percy Bysshe Shelley and whisked to the Continent, where Mary and Percy eloped. They remained in Europe together for six weeks, recording their joint impressions in a journal, though it was kept mostly by Mary. After six weeks, when the couple ran out of money, they returned to England; Shelley was already pregnant with their first child. They were not married in a church until December 30, 1816.

Shelley once described her elopement as “acting a novel, being an incarnate romance;” indeed, it appears that History of a Six Weeks’ Tour sprung from a literary and romantic tradition that might not be obvious to a casual reader. They read aloud to each other while sitting on a hilltop at twilight or boating down the Rhine, and at Calais they stayed in the famous Dessein hotel, which is where Laurence Stern began writing his book, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. In fact, they stayed in the same room as Stern did, and the first entries of their journal were written there.

The first portion describes the travelers’ journey, which began at the end of July, 1814, and includes Shelley’s opinions on what she saw. A large part of the narrative is in recounting the sweltering heat, like in this passage about Paris.

The heat of the weather was excessive, so that we were unable to walk except in the afternoon. On the first evening we walked to the gardens of the Thuilleries; they are formal, in the French fashion, the trees cut into shapes, and without grass. I think the Boulevards infinitely more pleasant. This street nearly surrounds Paris, and is eight miles in extant; it is very wide, and planted on either side with trees. (10)

She also is adept at describing less than ideal traveling conditions and people she encountered during the trip, as revealed in this passage about a village in Provence:

As we prepared our dinner in a place, so filthy that the sight of it alone was sufficient to destroy our appetite, the people of the village collected around us, squalid with dirt, their countenances expressing every thing that is disgusting and brutal. They seemed indeed entirely detached from the rest of the world, and ignorant of all that was passing in it. There is much less communication between the various towns in France than in England. (23-24)

Shelley preferred Switzerland to France. “On passing the France barrier, a surprising difference may be observed between the opposite nations that inhabit either side. The Swiss cottages are much cleaner and neater, and the inhabitants exhibit the same contrast” (40).

The letters, too, reveal the same disgust toward the French. The writer of the first letter, dated May 17, 1816, explains: “The manners of the French are interesting, although less attractive, at least to Englishmen, than before the last invasion of the Allies: the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself” (86). The Swiss fare little better; in a letter from July 24, 1816, the sender, “S” explains, “In the evening I went with Ducrée, my guide, the only tolerable person I have seen in this country, to visit the glacier of Boisson” (157). However, in the poem, “Mont Blanc,” is full of praise of the beauty of the scene: “Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange” (177).

Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of the authors William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; Wollstonecraft died eleven days after she was born. Wollstonecraft’s first daughter, Fanny, was illegitimate, and Godwin raised Mary and Fanny until he remarried Mary Jane Clairmont, who had two illegitimate children of her own; Godwin and his new wife soon had a son together William Jr. Shelley was raised in this unconventional family arrangement. Shelley attended two girls’ schools, one of which was Miss Caroline Petman’s school for the daughters and dissenters at Ramsgate. The most enduring part of her education came from her father, who taught her history, mythology, literature and the Bible, and encouraged her to use her imagination. She also received private lessons in art, French and Latin.

Shelley met Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was fifteen years old, when she was in London receiving treatment for an infected arm. As their interest in each other grew, they arranged rendez-vous at Mary Wollstonecraft’s gravesite in St. Pancras. Though the whole Godwin family admired Percy – who was five years older than Shelley and a published poet – William Godwin urged the couple to give up the idea of marriage and to break off their relationship. Instead, they eloped.

During the summer of 1816, the Shelley’s traveled to Geneva, where they spent time with Lord Byron and his circle (who was having an affair with Claire Clairmont). This is where the fabled ghost story contest took place resulting in Shelley’s conception of Frankenstein (1818), her first novel. This book was an instant popular success and is now considered to be the best-known fiction of the Romantic era, and includes a range of contemporary concerns: social politics, science, industry, and the economy. When it was first published, critics were convinced the author was a man, and when they found out Shelley was a woman, they ceased to address the political implications in the novel, because these were “male topics.”

During this time, the Shelley’s collaborated on another book; Mary made a copy of a holograph transcription of Relazaione della morte della famiglia Cenci seguita in Roma il di II Maggio 1599, Percy used Mary’s copy to write The Cenci, which Mary then translated into English. A play that the couple planned to write about the same story was never realized. Their plans for further collaborations were thwarted with Percy’s premature death, in 1822, when he was drowned off the coast of Italy.

After her husband’s death, Shelley was determined to persevere; her literary output was extraordinary. She published novels, short stories, and essays, including Valperga, or, The Life and Death of Castruccio Castracani (1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Ladore (1835), Falkner (1837), several essays in Reverend Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet of Biography: lives of the most eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835-7) and Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838-9), the two-volume Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844). In addition to her own work, she continued to support her husband’s work, seeing many of his writings to publication and furthering his reputation; many of these were published in The Liberal. She also arranged for the publication of a volume of Shelley’s poems, Posthumous Poems (1824), and later brought out her edited collections, the four volume Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the two volume Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley (both 1839).

In spite of Shelley’s own literary output, many of her accomplishments are shadowed by Percy’s legacy. Even when it was asserted that she was the author of Frankenstein, she was often known as a writer of romance stories. One biographer explains: “Critics continued to ignore Mary Shelley’s vision, which depicted the limitations of conventional values through her metaphoric use of public and domestic abuse of power,” which is, ironically, exactly what happened to her reputation. “Her own family abetted the depoliticization and domestication of Mary Shelley’s works, which was not an unusual development within the context of Victorian conventional presumptions of women’s ambitions, intellect, and concerns” (Betty T. Bennett, ‘Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb/view/article/25311]).

Shelley died of a brain tumor.

(#10899)

Item ID#: 10899

Print   Inquire

Copyright © 2024 Dobkin Feminism