Old Cherished Memories or New Commercial Products?: Mary Shelleys Retrospective Writings

Abstract

This essay attempts to read Mary Shelleys retrospective writings (specifically, The Last Man, Preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Preface to The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley) from the perspective that these writings include significant elements that highlight how the Hunt circles public ideals were received in the Victorian period. When Shelley wrote retrospectively about her husband, the ideal publicity that the Hunt circle attempted to embody in the context of post-Napoleonic politics and culture became not so much a feasible principle for realizing the public good as a past intellectual experiment about which only a critical assessment could be made from a later perspective. The disintegration of the Hunt circle caused by the deaths of the three key members (i.e., John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Byron), indeed, entailed the demise of all the practical public implications that the Hunt circles activities bore for contemporaries. Although Shelley was a consistent witness to all the public and private activities of the Hunt circle, her ambivalent position toward the Hunt circle made her vacillate between an insider and an outsider; therefore, while continuing to revive the Hunt circles achievements for the Victorian public, Shelley ceaselessly revealed a critical attitude toward the Hunt circles public practices at the same time. Given this unique position that Shelley assumed in relation to the Hunt circle, this essay explores how her retrospective writings on the Hunt circle reconstruct (or deconstruct) its members political, cultural practices and how this re/deconstruction inflects the Hunt circles notion of ideal publicity.