One Moment in the History of Reading: Midnight, 18 June 1816

Abstract

On Wednesday, 3 August 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, in the journal that he shared with his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a characteristically prescient and lucid precis of what we would now call reader-response theory: 'Mary read to me some passages from Ld Byron's poems. I was not before so clearly aware [of] how much of the colouring our own feelings throw upon the liveliest delineations of other minds. Our own perceptions are the world to us' (lMS, p. 9). Two years later, he gave a spectacular demonstration of how our minds can colour what we read (or hear read). The occasion was another reading aloud, an activity which, as Lucy Newlyn has shown, was important during the Romantic period, both for the consolidation of literary coteries (pp. 19-23) and for the promotion of literary works (pp. 61-66). On the evening of Tuesday, 18 June 1816, five English travellers were gathered in the Villa Diodati, a country house outside Geneva rented for the summer by George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron: Byron himself (or Albe, as his friends sometimes called him); John William Polidori, Byron's personal physician; Bysshe; Mary (by then already addressed as 'Mrs Shelley', although Harriet Shelley was still alive); and Mary's stepsister, and Albe's lover, Mary Jane Clairmont (who called herself Claire). 1 Albe recited part of Coleridge's 'Christabel', which he had recently persuaded his own publisher, John Murray, to publish. According to John William's diary: