ABSTRACT
Polidori’s diary might appear anomalous alongside the other texts included in this anthology, all of which carefully shape their recollections of Shelley for public consumption. Yet the diary is not quite what it seems. When John Polidori, at the age of only twenty, became travelling physician to Lord Byron in the Spring of 1816, John Murray, Byron’s publisher, offered him £500 for an account of the tour of Europe on which he was about to embark with his employer. An intimate account of the lordly poet would be a highly saleable commodity. Polidori therefore began to keep a journal – a text designed from the first as the basis of a future publication. Just as Medwin sought conversations with Byron in order to obtain material for a book, so Polidori, in his unsystematic way, scribbled a record of his time in Switzerland with Byron and his friends in order to make an account that could be published. As it was, Byron and Polidori parted company sooner than Murray can have expected: the ‘diary’ was begun on April 24th, 1816, when they left London on the first leg of their journey, and recorded September 16th, less than four months later, as the date of their separation. ‘L[ord] B[yron] determined upon our parting, – not upon any quarrel, but on account of our not suiting’ (The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, ed. Rossetti, p. 152).
