ABSTRACT
Date. Mary's date is ‘Leghorn, July 1, 1820’ in 1824 but ‘Leghorn—June 1820’ beneath her transcription of the poem now in the Huntington Library (HM 12338, referred to here as MT). N. I. White, ‘Probable dates of composition of Shelley's “Letter to Maria Gisborne” and “Ode to a Skylark”‘, Studies in Philology xxxvi (1939) 524–8 suggests LMG was written on the evening of 15 June when S., Mary and Claire occupied Casa Ricci, the residence in Livorno vacated by the Gisbornes on their departure for London on 2 May (Mary Jnl i 316n.1). In support, he cites from S.’s letter to the Gisbornes of 30 June–2 July 1820: ‘I write from Henry's study, and I send you some verses I wrote the first day I came, which will show you that I struggle with despondency’ (L ii 207). Assuming LMG to be ‘the verses’ referred to here, even S.’s rapid rate of composition would preclude a single evening's exertion, given its length. Furthermore, the original not being extant, the most authoritative available text of S.’s letter, John Gisborne's nbk transcription in Bod. [Abinger] Dep. d. 475 ff 45v–48r, probably made in 1831 (see Shelley's Guitar 131), gives ‘verses I spawned’ (47r) instead of ‘verses I wrote’, indicating LMG was begun, or perhaps even just meditated, on 15 June. Whether LMG was finished by 1 or 7 July is a source of scholarly disagreement. B. C. Barker-Benfield (Shelley's Guitar 137) follows Betty Bennett (Mary L i 152n.) and Donald Reiman (MYRS iii 95) in inferring from a note by Gisborne (‘The letter in verse which precedes—’), keyed to the words ‘some verses’ in the passage cited above, that it was enclosed in the 30 June–2 July letter, thus corroborating the precision of date in 1824. However, White, in the above article, suggests that, while ready for fair copying by 30 June, it was in fact enclosed in Mary's letter to Maria Gisborne of 7 July 1820 where it is referred to thus: ‘I send you a letter from Shelley which as it is not addressed to any of the trinity in particular he as a courteous knight begs you as the lady fair to accept laying it humbly before the happy footstool which receives the envied weight of your most ladylike foot hoping that from thence not by its own worth but by your most gracious favour it may rise to your hands & thence be distilled into the precious fishponds of Heshbon namely your mild, bright eyes.’ (Mary L i 153) Jones (L ii 210 n. 1), Bennett (Mary L i 154 n. 1) and Barker-Benfield (.BSMxxiii 117) argue that S.’s undated and unsigned letter (L ii 210–12 [No. 575]), which Jones conjectures was also written on 7 July, is the ‘letter from Shelley’ referred to here. This hypothesis goes unchallenged by Gisborne's misdating of ‘No. 575’ in his transcription of it in Bod. [Abinger] Dep. d. 475 f 39r (‘Florence beg. of June or end of May 1820’): its content means it must have been written after the letter of 30 June–2 July. A solution to the puzzle may well be that LMG and ‘No. 575’ were both enclosed in Mary's 7 July letter. The folds visible in the leaf on which the 7 July letter is written, and the postal charge of five shillings and sixpence it records, are commensurate with an enclosure more sizable than ‘No. 575’ alone. Moreover the layout of the transcription of LMG by John Gisborne, discussed below, may replicate its source, which would no doubt have taken the customary form of a compact, neat copy written into a home-made booklet made up of several leaves of thin paper. That LMG is what Mary refers to in her 7 July letter seems almost certain given her apparent allusion to the poem's vocabulary (‘ladylike’ in the excerpt cited above echoes line 304) and her postscript, with its injunction that ‘The enclosed must on no account be published’ (Mary L i 153), as well as her reference to a theme of LMG, the ‘fierce battle … between bella Italia & smoky London’. Maria Gisborne refers to LMG as ‘the delightful and laughable and exquisite description in verse of our house and Henry's work-room’ in her letter to Mary of 23 August 1820 (Gisborne Jnl 66). As Mary's 426injunction to Maria Gisborne makes plain, S. did not intend LMG to be published, at least not immediately. But it does seem to have been S.’s intention that the poem circulate in MS form amongst his London circle. Maria Gisborne evidently assumed so since she mentions, in the 23 August letter referred to above, that ‘[w]e have not been able to show the Hunts the … description in verse … we took it on purpose one evening to read it to them, but, unluckily, Mr. Hunt was out’. Its inclusion in 1824 was presumably because Mary judged it, correctly, to be a hitherto unpublished poem of the kind that could win S. a wider audience.
