Years later T. L. Peacock recalled this review as a ‘malignant’ example of ‘odium theologicum’, exhibiting all the venomous animosity of religious dispute.22 The same might be said more emphatically of an article in The Investigator for 1822, which serves as both an obituary notice of Shelley and a repudiation ‘with unmingled horror and disgust’ of Queen Mab as ‘nine cantos of blasphemy and impiety, such as we never thought that any one, on the outside of Bedlam, could have uttered’, before going on to imagine the spirit of the drowned atheist trembling before the throne of God, to be judged for infidelity, seduction and incest.23 As against the paternalistic severity of the Tory Quarterly Review, administering necessary chastisement to one of its own class who has gone astray, while allowing that he just might still be redeemed, and the evangelical and moralistic Investigator’s unmingled revulsion, may be set the liberal Leigh Hunt’s sustained defence of his friend Shelley in a series of reviews and articles in The Examiner, as a benevolent reformer, tolerant, philanthropic and, although a philosophical non-believer, a truer Christian, because more charitable, than his self-righteous detractors. Hunt’s admiration found an unexpected echo when, in 1821, relatively cheap pirated editions of Queen Mab began to appear. Ironically, the poem that Shelley originally imagined as influencing aristocratic youth circulated widely right through the nineteenth century among the labouring classes, in particular Chartists, socialists and freethinkers – acquiring the popular epithet of ‘the Chartists’ Bible’.24

Opinions considered subversive of the established order and a supposedly licentious biography were not the focus of all contemporary reviews, however; a not inconsiderable number avoid any comment on the political stance and moral character of the man to deliver what can be nuanced and subtly appreciative responses to the poetry. To be sure, there are reservations. The representation of incestuous rape and parricide in The Cenci provokes shock and revulsion, for example, and the peculiarly concentrated imagery of Prometheus Unbound is condemned by several critics as muddled and incomprehensible – ‘absolutely and intrinsically unintelligible’ and displaying a ‘total want of meaning’, according to the Quarterly Review.25 Such judgements notwithstanding, there is a large consensus that Shelley possesses poetic and dramatic powers that are considerable, even exceptional, and that they promise well for future development. Shelley himself insisted in A Defence of Poetry on the distinction between the imperfections of the poet as a man and the poet ‘inasmuch as he is a poet’ and as such ‘the happiest, the best, the wisest and the most illustrious of men’ (here). In fact this idea of the poet as a divided being, though in another key, was a leading theme of criticism of Shelley in his lifetime and continued in various forms through the nineteenth century and beyond as an opposition between the reprehensible opinions and behaviour of the man and his exceptional gifts and accomplishments as an author. A conspicuous example appears in the May 1820 issue of the London Magazine, then under the editorship of the liberal John Scott, which delivers a long and scathing verdict on Shelley as one of those modern writers who, out of self-absorbed vanity, claim as morally liberating what is in fact indecent, weak and corrupted. In particular, the plot, characters and tendency of The Cenci are judged to fail utterly of their declared object of ‘teaching the human heart … the knowledge of itself’ (see Preface: here). For all that, the reviewer considers that the tragedy, together with his other works, amply demonstrates that Shelley the poet displays ‘real power of intellect, great vivacity of fancy, and a quick, deep, serious feeling, responding readily and harmoniously, to every call made on the sensibility by the imagery and incidents of this variegated world’.26

The majority of contemporary reviews were based on Shelley’s long poems, the vehicles of his most contentious views. It was not until the appearance in 1824 of Mary Shelley’s edition of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley that a substantial quantity of his medium-length and shorter verse, including a large number of personal lyrics, became available. This landmark volume, containing eighty-three completed poems, fragments and verse translations, most of them not previously published, aimed to win the readers that Shelley’s poetry had failed to find while he was alive. In addition, Mary’s brief Preface represented her first efforts to counter her late husband’s reputation as depraved and profligate, instead recalling him as a wise, brave and gentle companion and friend, selflessly devoted to ‘the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind’.27 Within two months Posthumous Poems had been withdrawn from sale, following the intervention of the poet’s father, after little more than 300 of the 500 copies that were printed had been sold. Sir Timothy Shelley did not wish the works of his late scandalous son to be given an afterlife during his own lifetime, and made the suppression of the Posthumous Poems and the destruction of all remaining copies a condition of maintaining the allowance he provided to Mary and her son Percy.28 But an interest in Shelley’s poetry had been stimulated, and a number of unauthorized editions appeared before Mary published the enlarged Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in four volumes in 1839. Later that year she reissued the Poetical Works as a single volume with additions. Together these supplemented Posthumous Poems with more than forty further titles. The publication of Shelley’s Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) completed Mary’s editorial labours, which brought before the public almost all his verse and an important selection of his prose, including A Defence of Poetry.

Mary Shelley’s editions were remarkable achievements in the recovery of Shelley’s texts, especially those that she derived from his often untidy and tangled manuscripts. But they were neither complete nor completely accurate. As the considerable mass of the surviving manuscripts gradually became available for examination in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of individual publications and editions were able to supplement and correct the foundations she had laid down in 1824 and 1839–40. They also provided more ample information on Shelley’s life and the circumstances in which his texts were published, as did the substantial scholarly biography by the Victorian academic Edward Dowden.29 The critical editions of the complete poetry by W. M. Rossetti (1870, 1878) and (especially) by Harry Buxton Forman (1876–7) confirmed Shelley’s position as one of the major poets of the nineteenth century, and the inclusion of his poetry in the Oxford Standard Authors series (1904) might be said to have sealed his canonical status. For bibliographical details of on-going twentieth-century editions of the complete poetry and prose, see Abbreviations and Further Reading.

As the nature and extent of Shelley’s poetry became more widely known, it gradually secured its place in the mainstream of English literary tradition, though still regularly provoking controversy. Some important waymarks along this route to acceptance were the advocacy for Shelley of the Cambridge Apostles, a group of undergraduates which included Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam and which bore the cost of a facsimile of the first edition of Adonais in 1829. The most widely read and influential Victorian anthology of verse, Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), included twenty-two titles by Shelley, the third largest number after William Wordsworth (forty-one) and Shakespeare (thirty-two). Palgrave’s selection of Shelley’s verse consisted exclusively of lyrics, largely of those first published by Mary in Posthumous Poems, half of these on the subject of love – thus setting the terms of popular appreciation of the poet through to the end of the century and into the twentieth. But as Shelley’s reputation as a lyricist of intimate feeling grew, the radical poet continued to live a parallel existence, though in a different social sphere. Queen Mab enjoyed phenomenal circulation in cheap pirated texts following the unauthorized editions of 1821, for one of which the nominal printer and publisher was prosecuted and imprisoned on an action brought by the Society for the Suppression of Vice.30 The formation of the Shelley Society in 1885 by the scholar, Christian socialist and advocate for workers’ education F.