ABSTRACT
The exact composition-sequence is complex and perhaps undeterminable. Mary S. stated that ‘Rosalind and Helen was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside – till I found it; and, at my request, it was completed … Rosalind and Helen was finished during the summer of 1818, while we were at the Baths of Lucca’ (1839 iii 159-60). Not all of this statement is correct. The only known MS, a first draft of lines 40-349 with some omissions and additions, is in Nbk 1, which also contains jnl entries for S.’s tour of Lac Léman with Byron in June 1816, so Mary S. must have ‘found’ these lines when she began compiling 1817 at Marlow on 9 August 1817 (Mary Jnl i 178). On 26 September she lamented to S., who was in bad health and had just been forbidden by his doctor Sir William Lawrence to write poetry, that ‘It is well that your poem [L&C] was finished before this edict was issued against the imagination but my pretty eclogue will suffer from it’ (Mary L i 43), so composition of R&H was about to be resumed, or had just been resumed, after the completion of L&C at the end of September. Lines 894-901 of R&H are an acknowledged quotation of The billows on the beach’ (no. 139), so those lines cannot be earlier than July-August 1817. The last week of September, moreover, was that in which William Baxter, Isabella Booth’s father, told Mary S. on his second visit to Albion House ‘that Mr Booth is illtempered and jealous towards Isabell – & Mr B[axter] thinks that she half repents her marriage – so she is to [be] another victim of that ceremony’(Mary L i 41), a situation greatly developed in lines 219-535. For 18-25 February 1818 Mary S. noted: ‘copy Shelley’s Eclogue’ (Mary Jnl i 194), and some at least of the poem went to Oilier for printing before the departure to Italy. The Shelleys were at Bagni di Lucca (15 miles N. of Lucca) from 11 June to 17 August 1818, but for most of this time S. found himself ‘totally incapable of original composition’. On 16 August, however, he told Peacock: ‘I have finished, by taking advantage of a few days of inspiration … the little poem I began sending to the press in London. Oilier will send you the proofs. Its structure is slight and aery; its subject ideal [i.e. imaginary]. The metre corresponds with the spirit of the poem, and varies with the flow of the feeling’ (L ii 29). Two days later he wrote to Oilier: ‘Void the conclusion of my little poem, which I took advantage of ten days of dubious inspiration to finish – the terror of your reproaches & the printer’s wonder operated as Muse on the occasion. You will observe that the fabric of the composition is light & unstudied, & that if it have little merit it has as much as it aspires to. – I cannot expect that that pig the public will trust itself to desert its cherished mud, & drink a cup of dew so evanescent’ (text by Walter Fischer, Eng. Studien li (1918) 389). R&H was therefore completed about 4-14 August 1818, and the final additions must have been fairly substantial to have taken ten days in writing and three days in transcription (Mary Jnl i 223).
