ABSTRACT
When Sir Percy Florence Shelley and Jane, Lady Shelley asked Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) to write an authoritative biography of P. B. Shelley in 1855, using family papers supplied by them, they believed they had turned to one of the Shelleys’ oldest and most reliable friends. Although Hogg was by profession an attorney, he had written several books, including Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff translated from the original Latin MS. under the immediate inspection of the prince by John Brown, Esq., published anonymously in 1813, and reviewed anonymously by P B. Shelley in the Critical Review of 1814, and, more to the point, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley at Oxford’, a series of articles published in the New Monthly Magazine (January, February, April, July, October, and December 1832 and May 1833). Mary Shelley herself thought Hogg was the right person to write a memoir of P. B. Shelley, on the evidence of the New Monthly series (Bennett, MWSL, vol. 3, p. 17). In her 1839 Note to Queen Mab, she referred to these articles as ‘written by a man of great talent, a fellow collegian and warm friend of Shelley: they describe admirably the state of his mind during his collegiate life’ (P B. Shelley, Poetical Works, vol. 1, p. 97).
