ABSTRACT
The Dedication of Hogg’s biography of Shelley proclaims not only the work’s aims, but also the identity of its sponsor. It is dedicated to Lady Jane Shelley, the wife of Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son. It was she, writes Hogg, ‘at whose request the delicate and difficult task was undertaken of giving a full and authentic account of a life innocent and imaginative’ – the life of ‘the divine poet’. Lady Shelley had married Sir Percy in 1848, and had committed herself to preserving and celebrating Shelley’s memory (see the headnote in this volume to her Shelley Memorials). In 1855 she summoned Hogg to the family home that her husband had bought after their marriage, Boscombe Manor, near Bournemouth. Hogg was to be given access to the Shelley manuscripts, especially letters, in their possession in order that he produce a proper biography of the poet. This would be an authoritative rebuttal of Medwin’s Life, but was also made necessary by the many forgeries of Shelley’s (and Byron’s) correspondence that appeared in the 1850s (some of which Sir Percy and Lady Shelley themselves purchased: see Norman, pp. 191–2). When Tennyson’s friend Francis Palgrave recognized one of Shelley’s supposed letters to Godwin, published in a volume with an introduction by Browning, as having been copied from an article about Florentine art written by his father in 1840, speculation about Shelley’s correspondence became public (Norman, p. 190). This meant that Shelley’s private life was again under scrutiny. Hogg, the former radical who was now not only a respectable lawyer but also an Anglican and a Tory, was judged to be the right person to produce the authorized, incontestable account of Shelley’s life and relationships.
