ABSTRACT
There is a telling entry in the Index of Newman Ivey White’s Shelley (1940), the single most important and influential twentieth-century biography of the poet. Under the heading for Thomas Medwin’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley it simply says ‘citations too numerous to specify’ (II, lxi). White’s expression of his debt to Medwin is all the more significant as he is using H. Buxton Forman’s 1913 edition of Medwin’s text, which provides a detailed commentary on Medwin’s almost innumerable errors and confusions. White, the most dedicated and scholarly of researchers, announces his reliance on the most careless of biographers – a writer mocked for his inaccuracies from the first appearance of his Conversations of Lord Byron in 1824. This paradox is characteristic of Medwin’s role as a memoirist of Shelley: though constantly wrong on matters of detail, he has often been felt to be fundamentally truthful, his very mistakes a sign of his lack of guile. ‘Muddled and confused’ is White’s (in context) rather kind judgement on Medwin, whose ‘general good faith’ he still trusts (I, 437). It is a kindness that is particularly striking when we consider that Medwin’s first memoir of Shelley, given below, appears as a lengthy footnote to a passage of the Conversations that tells a peculiarly audacious lie.
