ABSTRACT
This ‘Personal Notice’ of Shelley appears to be an unusual mixture of the factual and the fictional: factual, in that it is likely that it is based on a real incident; fictional, in that its author is unlikely to have witnessed what he here describes. Indeed, at least one contemporary reviewer noticed that this story of Shelley’s angry attempts to get help and shelter for a sick young woman whom he had found on Hampstead Heath was similar to a recollection already published by Leigh Hunt. This reviewer, writing in The Atheneum of 5 September 1846, pointed out remarkable similarities between the two accounts of ‘Shelley’s Hampstead Adventure’, and preferred the earlier version. This had appeared in The Literary Examiner on 23 August 1823, under the heading ‘On the Suburbs of Genoa and the Country about London’. It was anonymous, but was written by Leigh Hunt, and was to be included, practically verbatim, in his Autobiography, published in 1850 (see the headnote to extracts from this work in this volume). So, although Dix’s memoir has a ring of truth, it is probably a truth that he purloined.
