ABSTRACT
On February 22nd, 1825, Mary Shelley wrote to Trelawny describing a letter that she had recently received from Medwin. It was ‘principally taken up with excuses for having (against my earnest desire) published a very blundering & disagreable memoir of our Shelley in his Conversations’ (Bennett, Letters, I, p. 469). For all his excuses and apologies, the truth seems to have been that Medwin could hardly write without returning to the influence of his friendship with Shelley. Even his own literary efforts expressed this. His long Orientalist poem – or ‘Dramatic Legend’, as it called itself – Abasuerus, the Wanderer (1823) was presented as having originated in joint compositions undertaken with Shelley in adolescence, and contained, Medwin told Byron, ‘In one of the characters under the name of Julian… a sketch of our poor friend Shelley’ (cited in Lovell, Captain Medwin, p. 140). His translations of Aeschylus avowedly followed in the wake of Shelley’s own. His collection of tales and fictionalised reminiscences, The Angler in Wales (1834), exploited his connections with Shelley wherever it could (it used, for instance, Shelley’s previously unpublished translation from Dante’s Purgatorio). There were sound financial reasons for those who had known Byron to publish their supposed recollections, but memories of Shelley were not particularly bankable. Medwin seems to have been driven to publish them by a need for vicarious literary fame.
