ABSTRACT
Edward Williams (1793–1822), the son of a Bengal Army officer, was a schoolboy at Eton 1805–1807, overlapping with S.’s own time there (where they seem not to have met). Williams left Eton to join the Royal Navy as a Midshipman, but following his father’s death at sea in 1809 he gave up the Navy and purchased a commission in the 8th Dragoon Guards. While serving in India he met Thomas Medwin, S.’s cousin and schoolboy companion, who was a lieutenant in the 24th Light Dragoons. Little is known of Williams’s life in India, but by 1817 he had left his regiment and returned to England. He appears in the Army List for 1820 as having been a half-pay lieutenant in the 21st Foot since May 1818 (see Edmund Blunden, K-SMB iv (1952) 49–51 for details of Williams’s bafflingly complicated family background). It is not known where or when Williams met his common-law wife Jane (1798–1884). She was born Jane Cleveland and as a girl probably spent time in India before returning to England where in 1814 at the age of 16, she married John Edward Johnson of the East India Company. It is possible that Edward and Jane first encountered each other through Anglo-Indian connections in London. Jane’s marriage to Johnson was unhappy and, following what she described as ‘irreparable injuries’ suffered at the hand of her husband, Jane eloped with Williams some time in 1817 (see Joan Rees, Shelley’s Jane Williams (1985) 40). When Medwin returned from India to London in early 1819, the friendship with Edward Williams was resumed. Medwin says he came upon a copy of RofI in Bombay (Medwin (1913) 230) and shared with Williams his newly-rekindled enthusiasm for S.’s poetry. Once Medwin had determined upon leaving England for a cheaper lifestyle on the Continent, and with the intention of renewing his friendship with S., Edward and Jane decided to join him there. They were in hopes of a meeting with S., and also needed to escape gossip about their situation and possible aggression from Jane’s legal husband (whose subsequent history was to confirm him as a criminally reckless and even dangerous character; see Ernest J. Lovell, Captain Medwin (1963) 136–7). Medwin and the Williamses were settled in Geneva by September 1819, and while there came in contact with Edward Trelawny, himself a new convert to S.’s poetry and delighted to meet by chance a relative and friend of S. (on Trelawny’s early enthusiasm for S. and the circumstances of his first acquaintance with Medwin and the Williamses, see William St Clair’s discussion of Trelawny’s notebook for 1820–1823, SC 656, SC viii 611–703). This group, Edward and Jane, Medwin and Trelawny, all agreed in wishing to travel to Pisa to encounter the brilliant young poet of Medwin’s accounts for themselves. Medwin, having written to S. and received an encouraging reply with an invitation to visit him in Italy (L ii 169) had by October 1820 joined the Shelleys in Pisa (Mary Jnl i 337). Medwin later claimed that ‘It was under the idea that their enlightened society and sympathy would tend to chase Shelley’s melancholy, that I allured [the Williamses] to Pisa from Chalons’ (Medwin (1913) 267). Edward and Jane sailed from Marseille to Leghorn, arriving on 13 January; they joined Medwin in Pisa on the 15th or 16th, and were introduced by him to S. and Mary on 16 January 1821 (Gisborne Jnl 103, Mary Jnl i 349). Trelawny was not to join the ‘Pisan Circle’ until January 1822 (Mary Jnl i 389).
