In February 1822 the writer and adventurer Edward John Trelawny
arrived in Pisa to make the acquaintance of his heroes Shelley and
Byron, leaving a broken marriage and an exotic seafaring career
behind him. He became a close companion to them and their circle,
and this collection of his reminiscences is one of the most fresh
and intriguing documents of the Romantic age. It records his
initial meeting with a cynical and flippant Byron, his impressions
of a youthful, otherworldly Shelley and, most memorably, the poet's
death at sea and the subsequent burning of his body on the sand.
Trelawny's Records combine vigorous prose, vivid description and
mythmaking to create one of the most memorable portraits of an age.
Rosemary Ashton's new introduction explores the mysterious life and
quixotic character of Trelawny, and this edition includes all the
author's later revisions. Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881) was one
of the most curious figures of the English Romantic Movement, and
spent his long life travelling extensively as a naval officer,
biographer and adventurer. After a brief education, Trelawny was
assigned as a volunteer in the Royal Navy by the age of thirteen,
and led an unaccomplished naval career until his resignation at
nineteen. He met Shelley and Byron in Italy in 1822, where he
became fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the two poets. His Records
of Shelley, Byron and the Author, written after both their deaths,
is the end-product of this strange obsession. An incorrigible
romancer, Trelawny had three marriages - the second of which was to
Tersitza, sister of the Greek warlord Odysseus Androutsos, whose
cause he had joined and whose mountain fortress he looked after
when Odysseus was arrested. He died after a fall at the age of
eighty-eight, in England, and his ashes were buried in Rome in a
plot adjacent to Shelley's grave. Rosemary Ashton was educated at
the universities of Aberdeen, Heidelberg and Cambridge. She taught
English literature at University College London from 1974 to 2012,
and is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature
and an Honorary Fellow of UCL. She has published critical
biographies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas and Jane Carlyle,
George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes, two books on Anglo-German
literary and cultural relations in the nineteenth century, The
German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German
Thought 1800-1860 (1980) and Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in
Victorian England (1986), and two books about Victorian radicalism,
142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006) and
Victorian Bloomsbury (2012).
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!