ABSTRACT
As a literary historian Cameron is a credit to his profession, though his methods frequently uncover him as an enemy in the camp. His intention is to organize and to reinterpret the traditional material on Shelley, from his birth in 1792 to 1813—after "Queen Mab" and "A Refutation of Deism", but before the later period of the great lyrical and philosophical poetry. Cameron telescopes much of the background materials in Newman Ivy White's Shelley without distorting the essential perspective. Cameron's real contribution is to construct Shelley's intellectual background with insight and thoroughness. He interprets Shelley as an essentially stable human being whose actions proceeded from rational decisions. Cameron's only failure, and it is a serious failure, is as a psychologist. Surely none but the professional analyst should attempt to interpret the dubious evidence unearthed from a subject's literary remains, and even then one has serious reservations about the validity of the results.
