‘I sent, before I had the pleasure of knowing you, the MS. of a poem to Messieurs Ballantyne and Co., Edinburgh; they have declined publishing it, with the inclosed letter. I now offer it to you, and depend upon your honour as a gentleman for a fair price for the copyright. It will be sent to you from Edinburgh. The subject is The Wandering Jew. As to its containing Atheistical principles, I assure you, I was wholly unaware of the fact hinted at. Your good sense will point out to you the impossibility of inculcating pernicious doctrines in a poem, which as you will see is so totally abstract from any circumstances which occur under the possible view of mankind.’
The words, which the present writer has caused to be printed in italics, should hold the reader’s attention for a moment. Whilst the desire for money, indicated by the earlier set of words, is noteworthy, the second set of words should be examined as an example of the Oxonian’s epistolary style at a time when some of his adulators have declared him capable of writing vigorous prose.
Not quite seven weeks after the date of these significant sets of words, Shelley (now an Oxonian ‘in residence’) is writing on 14th November, 1810, to the Pall Mall publisher: ‘I am surprised that you have not received The Wandering Jew, and in consequence write to Mr. Ballantyne to mention it; you will doubtlessly, therefore, receive it soon.’ Five days later (19th November, 1810), writing again to his publisher from University College, the youthful literary aspirant says, ‘If you have not yet got The Wandering Jew from Mr. B., I will send you a MS. copy which I possess.’ Nearly a fortnight later (2nd December, 1810), he writes from his college to the same correspondent: ‘Will you, if you have got two copies of The Wandering Jew send one of them to me, as I have thought of some corrections which I wish to make,—your opinion on it will likewise much oblige me:’—words showing that Shelley had sent his ‘reserved copy’ of the poem to Pall Mall, that he assumed it was in Mr. Stockdale’s hands, and that he thought it possible Mr. Stockdale was also in possession of the transcript which should have been sent to him from Edinburgh by the Ballantynes. The words also show that the young author was in some excitement about the fate of his poem, and eager to hear whether the publisher would produce the metrical romance, and, ‘as a gentleman’ pay him ‘a fair price for the copyright.’
Unless Stockdale’s memory failed him on the matter in 1827, neither of these copies came to his hands.—‘It is singular,’ he says in his scandalous Budget (1827), ‘that, after all, the poem of The Wandering Jew never reached my hands, nor have I either seen or heard of it from that time.’ From this not altogether reliable statement it seems that there was a miscarriage of the second and ‘reserved’ transcript of the poem, sent by Shelley himself from Field Place to Pall Mall. For the removal of a scarcely noteworthy misapprehension, it may be observed there was no similar miscarriage of the other copy; the evidence being abundant that the MS., sent by Shelley from Field Place to Edinburgh, was not lost through miscarriage on its way from Edinburgh to Pall Mall. This MS. cannot have miscarried for the simple reason, that it was never despatched by the Ballantynes to Mr. Stockdale’s place of business. Instead of being sent to London, in accordance with the suggestion made by the Ballantynes themselves, and in accordance with the instructions sent to them by Shelley, mainly in consequence of their suggestion, the MS. rested at Edinburgh till 1831, when, some nine years after the poet’s death, it came to light;—a discovery that was speedily followed by a publication of some portions of the metrical folly (Medwin says ‘four of the cantos’) in Fraser’s Magazine.
After throwing off The Wandering Jew, which even Mr. Buxton Forman, with all his reverence for every scrap of paper blotted by the poet, has excluded (with the exception of a few verses) from his authorized edition of the poet’s writings, Shelley, with the assistance of a friend, produced in the spring or summer of 1810, the volume of poetry entitled Original Poetry, by Victor and Cazire,—the edition of miserable rhymes, noticed in the British Critic of 1811 (vide Professor Dowden’s very noteworthy article in The Contemporary Review of September, 1884, on ‘Some Early Writings of Shelley’), that was suppressed soon after its untimely birth, because at least one of the poems was discovered to be scandalously wanting in originality; to be, in fact, a gross and disgraceful plagiarism of one of Monk Lewis’s pieces of sensational verse.
Ignorant of the name of Shelley’s coadjutor in this discreditable business, Mr. Garnett is at much pains to show, who could not have been the coadjutor, who may not be supposed to have been the coadjutor, and who might have been the coadjutor. Hogg could not have been the coadjutor, because he had not yet made the poet’s acquaintance. Tom Medwin was not the coadjutor. But Mr. Garnett is of opinion that Miss Harriett Grove may have been the coadjutor. ‘A more likely coadjutor,’ he says, ‘would be Harriet Grove, Shelley’s cousin, and the object of his first attachment, who is said to have aided him in the composition of his first romance, Zastrozzi.’ It is strange that so exemplary a Shelleyan expert as Mr. Garnett dealt thus respectfully with what Shelley told Medwin, or Medwin imagined himself to have been told by Shelley, about Harriett Grove’s part in the composition of Zastrozzi. There is no more truth in the fable that Harriett Grove wrote some of the chapters of Zastrozzi, than there is in the fable that she was the Harriett of the Dedicatory Prelude to Queen Mab. Possibly Shelley saw his pretty cousin in her Wiltshire home, when he went from Brentford to Fern for the Easter holidays, in the company of her Harrovian brothers. Probably the cousins saw one another on other occasions, when they were small children; but when they met at Field Place in the summer of 1810, they came together as new acquaintances. There is decent, though not conclusive, evidence that they had never looked on each other before that summer. It is certain that their brief intimacy, attended with innocent flirtation and cousinly correspondence, was an affair of the later six months of 1810:—that Zastrozzi had been written to the last line, sent to Messrs. Longman and Co., declined by those publishers, sent to Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson, printed by them, and almost, if not actually published, before the dawn of that brief intimacy. So much for what has been written about Harriett Grove’s participation in the authorship of the earlier of Shelley’s inexpressibly ludicrous novels.
The poet’s coadjutor in the unfortunate business of the Original Poetry was his sister Elizabeth, and it is easy to see how Shelley manufactured the fanciful name ‘Cazire’ out of so dissimilar a name as Elizabeth. He may be presumed to have made it out of the letters of his sister’s name and a single epithet of affection, on principles familiar to students who are versed in the romantic curiosities and fanciful contrivances of eighteenth-century English literature. Isabel and Elizabeth are the same name with differences of garniture. In each case Iza is the veritable name. To call a woman Izabel, or Izabella, is to call her ‘the beautiful Iza.’ To call her Elizabeth (El Iza beata) is to style her ‘the blessed Iza.’ In being christened Elizabeth, the eldest of Shelley’s sisters was named Iza. The letters out of which Shelley made the fancy-name ‘Cazire,’ were the letters of Cara Iza == dear Iza. Of course he used no letter twice. Rule of art forbade him to use the same letter twice. First he took the letters of the name, and by reversing their order made them spell ‘azi.’ By prefixing to ‘azi’ the ‘C’ of Cara, and putting the ‘r’ of the same epithet after the ‘i’ of ‘Cazi,’ he made the name ‘Cazir,’—a name to which he gave a more feminine appearance by adding to it the initial letter of his sister’s familiar name, Elizabeth. Hence ‘Cazire.’
Even as the Byron of Southwell Green employed Ridge, the Newark bookseller, to print and publish his three first volumes of verse, the Shelley of Field Place appointed a Horsham printer to make a printed book of the Original Poetry, which he and his sister had put together. The edition, thus printed at Horsham in the late summer or early autumn of 1810, though it can scarcely be said to have been published there, seems to have been an edition of fifteen hundred copies. If the youthful authors looked for a brisk sale in Sussex, that would enable them to pay their printer as soon as he should ask for his money, they were disappointed. If the Horsham printer worked off the edition, under the notion that he would have no difficulty in getting payment of his little bill from the young gentleman of Field Place, or from the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, or from old Sir Bysshe Shelley, he, too, was disappointed. For in the autumn (towards the end of August or on one of the earliest days of September), 1810, the Oxford undergraduate entered for the first time the place of business of Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, and with a countenance eloquent of anxiety besought the publisher to satisfy the demand of the importunate Horsham printer, and taking over the stock of printed copies to offer them for sale in his usual way of business. Had he been a youth of no social quality, instead of being the eldest son of a well-known Member of Parliament, who was reputed to be the heir of the wealthiest commoner of Sussex, the petitioner for relief from an embarrassing position would probably have been bowed out of the publisher’s office with more promptitude than courtesy. But the heir-apparent of the heir-apparent of the inordinately rich Sir Bysshe Shelley, Baronet, was no person for Mr. John Joseph Stockdale to repel. In a few years the beardless undergraduate might himself be one of the richest of England’s dignified commoners.
An arrangement was made between the man of business and the youth of quality; and on 17th September, 1810, the Pall-Mall publisher received from the Horsham printer fourteen hundred and eighty copies of the Original Poetry: By Victor and Cazire, a work forthwith announced in the principal London papers as on sale ‘by Stockdale, Jun., 41, Pall-Mall,’ at the price of 4s. per copy, in ‘boards.’ The book’s career, under these circumstances, was brief. It had not been re-published many days, at the longest not more than two or three weeks, and the copies sold or put into circulation cannot, at the boldest computation, have exceeded a hundred, when, on examining the book closely (examining it, probably, in consequence of something he had heard to the volume’s discredit) the publisher came to the conclusion that the work must be withdrawn and suppressed. A fraud on the public, an infringement of at least one author’s copyright, a thing published with a deceptive title-page, the Original Poetry was found to contain poetry by Monk Lewis. It may be conceived how surprised Shelley was to find he had induced a London publisher to accept for the original poetry of himself and his friend, poetry that, instead of being what he declared it to be, was stolen poetry. No fine words, no specious phrases, can put out of sight the fact that this business was an ugly business. Shelley was not a child when he thus put wares under a false name on a London tradesman. He had entered his nineteenth year when he did this distinctly discreditable thing.
To separate Shelley as far as possible from what he necessarily regards as an awkward and humiliating affair, Mr. Garnett has recourse to a representation which, instead of according with the probabilities of the case, is discountenanced by several facts. ‘It was but too clear,’ says the author of Shelley in Pall Mall, ‘that Shelley’s colleague, doubtless under the compulsion of the poet’s impetuous solicitations for more verses, had appropriated whatever came first to hand, with slight respect for pedantic considerations of meum and tuum.’ What evidence could Mr. Garnett produce that the pilfered matter was put into the book, not by Shelley but by his coadjutor? that the poet had pressed his coadjutor impetuously for more verses? that, in consequence of his impetuous solicitations for more verses, Shelley’s coadjutor took verses out of a printed book, and palmed them off on him as verses of her own composition? What evidence could Mr. Garnett produce that Shelley was unaware that the volume of so-styled original verse contained poetry which had been ‘appropriated ... with slight respect for pedantic considerations of meum and tuum?’ No evidence of any kind, over and beyond these words by the mendacious and rascally Stockdale:—