Rediscovered Shelley and Keats Manuscripts in Kraków

I. Introduction

The treatment of Shelley’s and Keats’s holographs as relics was an important part of the poets’ canonization in the nineteenth century. Relatives and friends distributed autographs as gifts, tokens of gratitude, or mementos of their own proximity to the writers, while collectors eagerly gathered them up. If this admiration of the two poets helped preserve a large number of literary manuscripts and letters, it also contributed to their dispersal, frustrating the work of modern editors. Any relocated manuscripts are therefore significant not only because they were unknown to previous scholars, but because they may reveal further details of the poets’ reception. The present case is particularly noteworthy, for the autograph collector, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858), was not British but German, involved with the Continental literary scene, and the dedicatee of the first German translation of Shelley in 1830.² Moreover, few manuscripts can claim a more complex history than the items in the Varnhagen von Ense Autograph Collection, initially held in Berlin as part of the larger “Varnhagen Collection.” The autographs escaped destruction during the Second World War, but their preservation was not publicly revealed for over thirty years owing to Cold-War politics. The nature and history of the collection, further detailed below, may explain why it has remained largely unknown to scholars of British Romantic literature, even after it became accessible in the library of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Thus, a manuscript fragment of Shelley’s intermediate fair copy of Laon and Cythna, Canto I, and Keats’s draft of stanza 4 of “To Fanny” in the Varnhagen Autograph Collection have not previously been published. Fortunately, I rediscovered the former just in time for it to be noted by Michael J. Neth in Volume iii of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.³ Another Shelley item in the collection, an autograph letter to his publisher Charles Ollier, dated August 16, 1818,⁴ was transcribed twice before the Second World War, but with inaccuracies that make a new transcription necessary. The text is noteworthy, for Shelley not only gives his own, partly ironic opinion of Rosalind and Helen, anticipating its unpopularity with “that pig the public,” and laments that The Revolt of Islam “acquires little attention,” but also candidly voices his judgment of Keats as poet. Moreover, since this letter carried Shelley’s “conclusion” of Rosalind and Helen, hitherto unrecorded details such as the postal fee may provide scholars with new evidence to reconsider current assumptions about the final stage of the poem’s composition. After a short introduction outlining the history of the Varnhagen Collection, this essay will offer full transcriptions and collations of the poetic texts and of the Shelley letter, with descriptions of physical characteristics and the provenance of the manuscripts as well as short commentaries.

II. The Varnhagen von Ense Autograph Collection

Moving in the highest intellectual and literary circles in Berlin, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense—diplomat, author, biographer, literary critic, political commentator, and husband of the famous salonnière Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833)—assembled an important collection of autographs, letters, notebooks, memoirs, and unpublished literary works. When he died in 1858, Varnhagen’s literary estate went to his niece Ludmilla Assing, and at her death in 1880, to the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin (Royal Library in Berlin) on the condition that, under the name of “Varnhagen von Ense’sche Sammlung,” it would be housed as an independently administered literary estate, separate from the library’s “Autographa” Collection.⁵ Upon the abolition of the monarchy in 1918, the library was renamed Preußische Staatsbibliothek (Prussian State Library), so that the manuscripts in question bear stamps with the words “Preußische | Staatsbibliothek | Berlin” in red ink or “STAATS- | BIBLIOTHEK | · BERLIN” in brownish ink.

After the Staatsbibliothek had been damaged in aerial bombing raids of Berlin in April 1941, the authorities decided to evacuate the valuable holdings to safer repositories in rural areas. Together with large portions of the general “Autographa” Collection, the Varnhagen Autograph Collection was deposited at Schloss F...