ABSTRACT
These five stanzas were first published in The Athenaeum for 2 December 1832 (724) under the title Lines Written during the Castlereagh Administration. They are there attributed to ‘The Late Percy Bysshe Shelley’ and preceded by a brief notice: ‘There is something fearful in the solemn grandeur of these lines. They may, however, be now published without the chance of exciting either personal or party feeling.’ In the course of 1832 The Athenaeum had published several pieces of verse and prose by S. in a continuing series, ‘The Shelley Papers’, of which the present poem is an instalment. The following year Thomas Medwin included it in Medwin (1833) in a text identical to the one printed in The Athenaeum; this and the title of his volume give grounds for concluding that it was he who supplied the poem to the magazine. Several sections of his ‘Memoir of Shelley’ had also appeared in The Athenaeum during 1832, some containing previously unpublished verse. But Medwin's role in The Athenaeum publication has been contested. In The Browning Box or The Life and Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes as reflected in letters by his friends and admirers (1935), H. W. Donner, the editor of the volume, printed a letter (18–19) of 3 July 1824 from Mary to Thomas Forbes Kelsall, a young lawyer and friend of Beddoes, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for S.’s poetry, and who was also one of the financial guarantors of 1824. An untitled transcription of To —— (Corpses are cold in the tomb) is appended to the letter, without introduction or comment, by Mary. Both letter and transcription are included in the version printed in The Browning Box in Mary L 281i 432–33, which accepts them as genuine. The transcription of the poem agrees in all essentials with Mary's untitled transcript in Mary Copybk 1, from which the text of 1839 was derived, apart from the variants recorded in the notes to ll. 16, 22 and 25 below. Donner also prints an extract from a letter of 22 October 1832 from C. W. Dilke, the editor of The Athenaeum, expressing his willingness to publish an unnamed Shelley poem that Kelsall had sent him, evidently this one, as well as to pay ‘any reasonable price’ for the MS (21). From this evidence Donner infers that it was Kelsall and not Medwin who supplied Corpses are cold to Dilke, explaining the variants in ll. 16 and 22 of the Athenaeum text as arising from Kelsall's difficult handwriting (144).
