Editor
P.B. Shelley failed to achieve widespread recognition for his work during his lifetime and, upon his death, Mary set about editing it for publication. Some of his work soon appeared alongside her own in The Liberal. When she published P.B. Shelley's Posthumous Poems in 1824, Sir Timothy Shelley (her father-in-law) withdrew the allowance which he paid towards the upkeep of his grandson, demanded that the volume of poems be withdrawn, and prohibited Mary from further publication of his son's work.44
Mary Shelley nevertheless remained determined to publish P.B. Shelley's work and can be credited with having positioned him as a significant writer of the Romantic Period and praised for the usefulness of her annotations. Thanks to John Gregson (the Shelley family's new solicitor) Mary Shelley and publisher Edward Moxon issued four volumes of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839), two volumes of Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839), and a single volume of Shelley's poetical works (1840).45
By Mary's own account, editing P.B. Shelley's work was no easy task:
“I feel sure among other things that the copy right of the Posthumous Poems must be entirely mine. The M.S. from which it was printed consisted of fragments of paper which in the hands of an indifferent person would never have been deciphered - the labour of putting it together was immense - and the papers were in my possession & in no other person's (for the most part) the volume might be all my writing (except that I could not write it) …”
Shelley, M. Letter to Edward Moxon, 7th December 1838.
Quoted in Bennett, Selected Letters, p.275.
