Between 1835 and 1839 Mary Shelley produced the three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal and the two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia. Mary Shelley is the only woman among the thirty-eight acknowledged contributors to the 133-volume work, which appeared between 1829 and 1846. An 1832 advertisement for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia lists the names of Scott, Southey, Moore, James Mackintosh, James Montgomery, and Cunningham, promising that only the best authorities will be producing volumes. Lardner did not set out to include her in this group, though he did have hopes novelist Maria Edgeworth would join his list of authors. Shelley was engaged in 1833, and she attended social gatherings at Lardner’s house while she worked on the Lives. Her involvement was likely suggested by her father William Godwin, who speculated privately in letters to Mary Shelley how he might turn the vogue for popularising knowledge to his own political and philosophical ends. While his own attempts to be published by Lardner met with a polite refusal (the volume was eventually published as the Thoughts on Man in 1831), Mary Shelley found herself writing for Lardner in circumstances different than those envisioned by Godwin. Her subject was assigned and it is clear that she took up volumes begun by others: in the Italian Lives James Montgomery wrote the biographies of Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso and Sir David Brewster is acknowledge as the author of the life Galileo; she did not write the life of the Spanish writer Ercilla, and in the French Lives she added her biographies to the lives of Rabelais and La Fontaine.
The Lives have not received much critical attention, but they reveal some significant aspects about Mary Shelley’s skills as a writer and her success as a woman of letters (see Smith). Working for Lardner was necessary even if it was not always easy, as Shelley confided in a letter to the poet and critic Leigh Hunt: “I am now writing French Lives. The Spanish ones interested me — these do not so much – yet, it is pleasant writing enough – sparing one imagination yet occupying one & supplying in some small degree the needful which is so very needful” (MWS Letters 2.293). Yet Shelley clearly saw the project as more than a source of income, and they are not simply hack work. If the research and writing were sometimes exhausting, she found satisfaction in their composition and suggested in a letter she preferred writing them to composing romances (MWS Letters 3.93). The amount of expertise the Lives required serves as a testament to Shelley’s erudition and work ethic. Writing the lives demanded knowledge of history and literature and a reading knowledge of a number of languages for reading sources, undertaking research, and offering translations. She was certainly assisted by her reading knowledge of French, Latin, German, Spanish, and Italian. She often had to rely on friends lending books; when she was writing the Spanish and Portuguese Lives she complained to writer and editor John Bowring, “The difficulty seems to be that from slight biographical notices one can yet the book will be more of literature than lives--& I know not how Lardner will like that. The best is that the very things which occasions the difficulty makes it interesting—namely—the treading in unknown paths and dragging out unknown things—I wish I could go to Spain” (MWS Letters 2.255).
More importantly the Lives were undertaken by Shelley with a clear sense of the value of biography in furthering political justice. While Greg Kucich has looked at the Lives in terms of a feminist reengendering of history, I believe that Shelley is working out a form of citizenry that advocates subjects thinking for themselves. Biography and history provide a means to educate people to become thinking persons. In the life of Metastasio Shelley suggests that her model for biography is a well-known eighteenth-century intellectual venture: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1777). As Jean de Palacio points out (508), Mary Shelley adopts a Johnsonian model for her project. She begins entries with information about the life and character of the writer, gives examples from their work both in their original language and in translation (sometimes by Mary Shelley herself, but more usually from noted translators of the day), and concludes each entry with a summary of the beauties and defects of the writer. Her judgments are a mixture of personal convictions and a distillation of received contemporary critical opinion. But even more than drawing upon Johnson, Mary Shelley’s conception of biography has close links with the writings of her parents, including her father William Godwin’s life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria note that like Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets Godwin favours “‘individual history,’ or biography, which contributes to progress of mind by providing scope for the study of the intricacies of mental life.” Clemit and Luria summarize, “For Godwin, the reformist potential of biography lies in its ability to depict the individual in a social context, and the best subjects for biography are historical individuals who contributed to moral and social improvement in their own time. By demonstrating how social forces act on such individuals, and how they, in turn, had an impact on society, Godwin argues, biography has the power to inspire the reader with an analogous spirit of reform” (13).
The Lives also offer Shelley the opportunity to insert her own opinions and experiences. The Italian Lives draw upon her years of residence in Italy and her sympathy for Italian republican causes. Her lives of Mme. Roland and Germaine de Staël offer meditation on women’s role in society (Morrison). Jeanne Moskal has demonstrated how in the Cervantes biography Mary Shelley is giving ‘literary form to some feelings raised by the unfinished memoir’ of Godwin in writing the life in a manner which echoes the adversities of her father’s own life (22). Something similar might be said of the life of Calderón de la Barca, who was admired by Percy and whom Mary Shelley calls ‘one of the master geniuses of the world’ (3.287). In this life Mary Shelley undertakes some further thought about the nature of literary biography, working from the received assumption that little is known of Calderón because of the prosperity of his life. She challenges this view with the thought that a condition of life is that it is filled with event:
Sismondi says, that his life is sprinkled with few events. How do we know this? Throughout these campaigns, during these years of youthful ardour and enterprise, how much may have occurred, what dangers he may have run—what generosity, what valour he may have displayed—how warmly he may have loved, how deeply have suffered! As a poet and master of the passions he must have felt them all. But a blank meets us when we seek to know more of these things. A poet’s life is ever a romance. That Calderon’s was such we cannot doubt; but that we must find its traces in the loves, the woes, the courage, and the joys of his dramatic personages: he infused the soul into these; what the events might be that called forth his own personal interest and sympathy we are totally ignorant’ (3.280).
In emphasizing the importance of the personal, the life becomes relevant to all readers. At the same time in the life of Calderón she is writing a parallel life of Percy Shelley (Jean de Palacio 519). In arguing for the value of Calderón’s style, her belief in the significance of Percy Shelley’s own beautiful idealisms seems to resonate as she implies a connection between her Spanish subject and an English one: ‘The Germans subtilise, mystify, and cloud the real and distinct: they dissolved flesh and blood into a dream. Calderon, on the contrary, turns a dream into flesh and blood: he gives a pulse to a skeleton; he breathes passion from the lips of ghosts and spectres. Which is the greater power, others must decide. The influence of Calderon is greatest to us; he is master of a spell to which our souls own obedience’ (3.285). The only explicit mention of Percy occurs when Mary Shelley discusses the difficulty of translation of writing and she suggests only a poet could translate Calderón, and mentions the scenes from the ‘Magico Prodigioso’ by Shelley (Lives 3.285; the translation appeared in her edition of Percy’s Posthumous Poems [1824]). If Percy Shelley suggests, ‘Didactic poetry is my abhorrence’ (Preface to Prometheus Unbound PW 207), Mary Shelley characteristically evades an overly didactic type of writing in her efforts to encourage her readers to think for themselves. And in so doing she presents a version of the subject in the 1830s that preserves continuity with the writings of her parents and with Percy Shelley while remaining true to her own convictions and concerns.
Finally, for more information on the composition of the Lives and for annotation of her sources readers should consult:
Works Cited
Bennett, Betty T. ed. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Volume 2. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.
Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker. Peterborough: Broadview P, 2001.
Kucich, Greg. "Biographer". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
---. “Mary Shelley’s Lives and the Reengendering of History.” Mary Shelley in Her Times. Ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 198-213.
Moskal, Jeanne. “’To speak in Sanchean phrase’: Cervantes and the Politics of MaryShelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour.” Mary Shelley in Her Times. Ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 18-37.
Morrison, Lucy. "Writing the Self in Others' Lives: Mary Shelley's Biographies of Madame Roland and Madame de Staël". Keats-Shelley Journal 53 (2004): 127–51.
Palacio, Jean de. Mary Shelley dans son Oeuvre. Paris: Klincksieck, 1969.
Peckham, Morse. “Dr. Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. 45(1951): 37-58.
Shelley, Mary. Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France. 2 vols. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1838–39.
---. Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. 3 vols. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1837.
Smith, Johanna M. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne, 1996.
- General Introduction
- Dr. Lardner
- Mary Shelley and the Lives
- Provenance of the University of Saskatchewan Collection