ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1829, Mary Shelley received a most unusual request. Cyrus Redding (1785–1850) asked if she had a portrait available from which an engraving could be made for the edition of P. B. Shelley’s works that he was preparing as part of the pirated series of works published by A. and W. Galignani in Paris. 21 Although Mary Shelley knew of Redding, it appears that until that point they had not met. From 1815 to 1818, Redding had edited Galignani’s Messenger, an English periodical published in Paris and read by English travellers on the Continent, including the Shelleys and Byron. From 1821 to 1830, he was the editor of the New Monthly Magazine, nominally edited by Thomas Campbell, and published by Henry Colburn, who would publish Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man and co-publish with Richard Bentley her 1830 novel The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck. On 13 January 1824, Godwin sent Colburn an article by Mary Shelley ‘intended for the next number’ (MS, Victoria and Albert Museum). It has been conjectured that her contribution may have been ‘Rome in the First and Nineteenth Centuries’, published in the March 1824 issue. And sometime in late 1826, Mary Shelley submitted her playful essay on ‘Roger Dodsworth’ to the New Monthly, but it was not printed until Redding included it in his 1863 book, Yesterday and To-day (Robinson, p. 377).
