ABSTRACT
Having been drawn unwillingly into his first (1858) article on Shelley in Fraser’s Magazine, Peacock found himself further provoked the next year by Lady Shelley’s Shelley Memorials and drawn to defend Harriet Shelley in accents of frosty anger. ‘Some of Shelley’s friends have spoken and written of Harriet as if to vindicate him it were necessary to disparage her’, he wrote (see the first of the passages below). Medwin and Hogg had both been guilty of this, but perhaps only ignorantly. (Hogg had indeed spoken up for Harriet, if condescendingly.) Lady Shelley, however, had been more thoughtfully dishonest, and Part II of Peacock’s ‘Memoirs’, the article that he had projected as a review of the completion of Hogg’s biography, became a nettled reply to the Shelley family’s official version of events. Above all, it was written, as Peacock says in the opening of the 1860 article, ‘under the necessity of dissenting from Lady Shelley respecting the facts of the separation of Shelley and Harriet’ (see below).
