ABSTRACT
William Jones’s edition of the letters provides enriching insights into Percy Bysshe Shelley’s life, especially his intellectual development, and establishes indispensable contexts for his frequent travels in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, in France and Switzerland and, from April 1818, in Italy. In the early letters, particularly, it allows to observe Shelley struggling to understand and articulate the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology and the challenging facts of English society and contemporary politics. Surviving correspondence is always subject to these and other distortions; yet, even with the proviso that the testimony of letters must always be approached with exceptional caution, Shelley’s extant correspondence is of great value. Shelley had been filling his notebook with sketches of sailing boats and translating Faust, and the recipient of this letter appropriately was John Gisborne, who had been his chief instructor in German.
