1816–1818: ‘Truth’s Deathless Voice’

Abstract

The year 1816 was a difficult but significant one in Shelley’s literary career. It ended traumatically with the suicides of Fanny Godwin and Harriet Shelley. It got under way with bad health, to which would be added disappointment at the reception of Alastor and disillusion with Godwin, intellectual guide turned importunate sponger. The combination of these difficulties must have made leaving England for Switzerland in May, with Mary and Claire Clairmont, a welcome change. Abroad, Shelley’s luck altered; he met and began a close if strained friendship with Byron. The encounter was crucial for both poets. Byron was the most celebrated author of his day; Shelley virtually unknown — a fact which goes some way towards explaining Shelley’s intermittent sense of creative inferiority to Byron. But both poets already knew something of one another’s work: ‘Shelley’s admiration for Byron’s poetry (according to Claire, he was “Byron-mad” in 1815) was to some extent reciprocated by Byron when he read Queen Mab in 1813 and Alastor in early 1816.’¹ The same critic describes well the difference between the political vision of the two poets before their meeting, a difference which was to grow more complex after they had met.