William Michael Rossetti and the Organization of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Later Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Rossetti was a self-proclaimed interventionist who saw it as his “clear duty and prerogative to set absolutely wrong grammar … rhyming and … metre right.” In the matter of conjectural emendation, he noted that Swinburne and Harry Buxton Forman thought he had gone too far, his brother and William Bell Scott not far enough. By modern standards, Rossetti appears gauche in comparison with such contemporary editors as Forman, Dowden, and Woodberry. Yet in her review of his 1870 edition, Mathilde Blind recognized his extraordinary flair: “if in many instances his scruples are needless, there are many others where they have been called forth by a real corruption, which he has instinctively felt.” To Rossetti's delight, several of his conjectural emendations to the text of Prometheus Unbound proved correct on C. D. Locock's inspection of the manuscripts donated to the Bodleian in 1893. With regard to the organization of Rossetti's editions of Shelley, this essay addresses his “innovation” on “Mrs. Shelley's distribution of the poems” whereby the number identified as “Fragments” was significantly increased. Overall, it argues for a need to respect Rossetti's principled resistance to individuals and institutions (Lady Shelley, the Shelley Society) who sought to organize Shelley in questionable ways for posterity.