ABSTRACT
In 1878, when Trelawny was eighty-six, three years before his death, he was persuaded by William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and enthusiastic Shelleyan, to issue an expanded version of his 1858 Recollections as Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. The inclusion of ‘the Author’ in the title conceded what had always been the case: Trelawny’s memoirs were unashamedly stories of himself as well as of his famous friends (Shelley and Byron were both dead well before the reader got to the end of the Recollections). His records are subjective in ways that have led later literary historians to ignore them. For there is little evidence that the aged Trelawny returned to any documentary sources, let alone found new ones. Instead he seems to have turned to his own memories and to senses of allegiance that had altered since his memoir of the 1850s.
