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  • Fourteen New Letters by Mary Shelley1
  • Nora Crook

The late Betty T. Bennett, introducing the third volume of her edition of Mary Shelley’s letters, took heart from the fact that, although much had been destroyed, new unpublished items kept unexpectedly surfacing. “And perhaps” she concluded, “there are bundles … tucked away in someone’s attic, neatly ribboned and awaiting their time.”2 Bennett herself was to publish two supplements of unexpected finds in K-SJ between 1997 and 2001.3 Others have been located by Nicholas A. Joukovsky4 and by Grant Scott.5 Two other new uncollected items have come on the market in the last decade: an important letter to Thomas Medwin of May 10, 1823,6 and a note to Mary Sabilla Novello of autumn-winter 1849–50. An internet search for the author Mary Crumpe led me unexpectedly to the on-line catalogue of the Essex Record Office, Chelmsford (ERO), and to a cache of eight previously unknown, unberibboned letters that Mary Shelley wrote to Horace (Horatio) Smith (1779–1849) and five she wrote to his daughter Eliza Smith in the archive “Records of J. Horace Round.” This archive also contains some of Smith’s literary MSS. and correspondence with writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lady Morgan, and Leigh Hunt.

Horace Smith is perhaps best known for Shelley’s tribute in “Letter to Maria Gisborne” (composed 1820): “Wit and sense, / Virtue and [End Page 37] human knowledge, all that might / Make this dull world a business of delight, / Are all combined in Horace Smith” (lines 247–50). He met Shelley in late 1816 through Leigh Hunt.7 Smith was at that time a widower with two children by a marriage (1810): Eliza (“Tizey”) and Horatio Shakespeare (who was to die young). He was well-known as the co-author of Rejected Addresses (1812), one of the wittiest of all collections of parodies. He was also a successful stockbroker, hence Shelley’s astonishment that a stockbroker should be “the only truly generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with.”8 In 1817 he visited the Shelleys at Marlow, cemented the friendship, and, with Shelley, wrote sonnets on Ozymandias. On March 17, 1818, just after the Shelleys moved to Italy, Smith clandestinely married Sophia Ford, by whom he was to have two other daughters, Rosalind (b. 1821), named for Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen (1819), and Laura (b. 1827/28).9

The loyal and practical Smith remitted Shelley’s quarterly allowance to Italy, obtained books for him, and advanced him money.10 The Smiths set out for Italy in 1821, invited by the Shelleys, but got no further than Versailles, where in 1823 they were kind to Mary Shelley, “flying in her despair” from Italy back to England after Shelley’s death, “with her pale face and in her travelling dress.”11 In 1826, they settled in the fashionable seaside resort of Brighton, where Smith devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, hospitality, and literary pursuits. It has long been known that Mary Shelley was one of his correspondents, but so far only one fragment of her side of the exchange [End Page 38] has been found, and a brief 1850 note to Eliza.12 As Smith allegedly had a “curious weakness for destroying all letters, however important,”13 the preservation of these eight suggests that he kept them as records of some of his most memorable literary transactions. For Shelleyans they fill out some gaps and unsettle a few received ideas.

The eight letters to Smith cover the years 1831–39. Letters 1 and 2, of 1831, concern Mary Shelley’s involving Smith in making cuts to Trelawny’s manuscript of Adventures of a Younger Son. By collating letters from the published correspondence of Mary Shelley and of Trelawny, we can partly reconstruct the relevant negotiations. Trelawny, then living in Florence, had asked her to show the MS to John Murray and Henry Colburn, “or any other publisher” and to arrange publication. Certain passages, she warned him, would make it “interdicted” to women, but Trelawny insisted that he was writing for sailors, men of the world. He instructed her to...

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