SHELLEY AT OXFORD
Shelley at Oxford
BY
THOMAS JEFFERSON HOGG
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
R. A. STREATFEILD
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1904
INTRODUCTION
Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s account of Shelley’s career at Oxford first appeared in the form of a series of articles contributed to the New Monthly Magazine in 1832 and 1833. It was afterwards incorporated into his Life of Shelley, which was published in 1858. It is by common consent the most life-like portrait of the poet left by any of his contemporaries. “Hogg,” said Trelawny, “has painted Shelley exactly as I knew him,” and Mary Shelley, referring to Hogg’s articles in her edition of Shelley’s poems, bore witness to the fidelity with which her husband’s character had been delineated. In later times everyone who has written about Shelley has drawn upon Hogg more or less freely, for he is practically the only authority upon Shelley’s six months at Oxford. Yet, save in the extracts that appear in various biographies of the poet, this remarkable work is little known. Hogg’s fragmentary Life of Shelley was discredited by the plainly-expressed disapproval of the Shelley family and has never been reprinted. But the inaccuracies, to call them by no harsher term, that disfigure Hogg’s later production do not affect the value of his earlier narrative, the substantial truth of which has never been impugned.