ABSTRACT
Published in April 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first book of verse to appear since the removal to Italy a year earlier, Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems was preceded by an ‘Advertisement’ which makes a decidedly inauspicious prelude to the Italian phase of his career. Shelley’s display of authorial candour as to the poem’s status, aims, value and prospects reaches only so far; he maintains a conspicuous silence on the sources of both characters and story. A vivid and detailed account of the two gatherings is rendered in the letters of Shelley, David Booth and William Baxter. On the first evening Shelley read aloud the just-completed Preface to Laon and Cythna. The social benefits and disadvantages of matrimony were strenuously debated by Shelley and Booth; Shelley’s loss of the custody of his two children by Harriet because of his critical opinions on marriage as an institution was also aired.
