ABSTRACT
Jane Williams possessed an attractive singing voice and was an accomplished musician, proficient on the harp, guitar, and piano (for detailed discussion of S.’s relationship with Jane Williams, including the appeal for him of her musical talent, see To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), ‘General Headnote to S.’s Poems to Jane Williams’). In Pisa, however, she had the use only of ‘a very bad piano’ (Mary L i 221). On Friday 25 January 1822 S. wrote to Horace Smith, then staying at Versailles, asking him to purchase a harp:
Will you not think my exactions upon your kindness interminable if I ask you to execute another commission for me? It is to buy a good pedal harp without great ornament or any appendage that should unnecessarily increase the expense, but good; nor should I object to it being second hand if that were equally compatible with it’s being dispatched immediately. Together with the Harp I should wish for 5 or 6 napoleons’ worth of harp music, at your discretion. I do not know the price of harps at Paris, but I suppose that from 70 to 80 guineas would cover it; and I trust to your accustomed kindness, as I want it for a present, to make the most immediate advance, as if I were to delay, the grace of my compliment would be lost. — Do not take much trouble about it, but simply take what you find if you [half a line cancelled] are so exceedingly kind as to oblige me —
(L ii 378) The ‘present’ was evidently intended for Jane Williams, who had celebrated her 24th birthday on the preceding Monday, 21 January (S.’s letter to Smith was written on the same day, 25 January, that he probably wrote the first of his poems to Jane, To —— (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’); (see headnote). Smith received S.’s letter on 7 February (in L ii 379 Jones records it as endorsed ‘Reced 7 July’ but this is obviously an error), and he replied on 19th, declining to carry out the commission, as is clear from S.’s letter to Claire Clairmont of 24 March in which he explains that he has no money with which to assist Claire in her wild scheme to kidnap her daughter Allegra from the convent where Byron had sent her: ‘So far from being ready to lend me 3 or 400 pounds, Horace Smith has lately declined to advance 6 or 7 napoleons for a musical instrument which I wished to buy for Jane at Paris’ (L ii 400). Smith’s letter to S. of 19th February is lost, but it would have arrived with S. at Pisa by around 1 March (S.’s letter to Smith of 25 January took 13 days to arrive). When S. finally replied to this letter, on 11 April, he confirmed that the plan to purchase an instrument had been carried out: ‘I have contrived to get my musical coals at Newcastle itself’ (L ii 412). S.’s belated birthday present to Jane was not a harp, but a guitar. The instrument was ‘a local guitar, nearly new, in a coffin-like box’ (Shelley’s Guitar 176). The Pisan guitar, with pine sounding-board, was preserved (apparently unplayed after S.’s death) by Jane Williams and passed on her death to Mrs Prudentia Lonsdale, her daughter by Thomas Jefferson Hogg. After she died, it was purchased by her grandson W. Williams, who subsequently sold it to Edward Silsbee on condition that it remain in Britain. Silsbee presented the guitar to the Bodleian Library in 1898 (Shelley Relics 1; see Shelley’s Guitar ix-x and 176). There are photographs of the guitar in Joan Rees’ Shelley’s Jane Williams (1985) facing p. 162, and on the front and back covers and frontispiece of Shelley’s Guitar.