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MARY SHELLEY
LETTERS FOUND
Researching Family Connections Can Lead to Historic Discoveries
In January of 2014 a loose collection of 13 letters written by Mary
Shelley the author of Frankenstein were discovered by an English
college professor
in Chelmsford, Essex while researching a 19th Century author called
Mrs. Crumpe. The personal letters were written to
Horace Smith and also addressed to his daughter, Eliza. Nora Crook,
who is the Emerita Professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin
University reported that the letters dated from 1831 to 1849 and
had been given over to the Essex Public Record office by a daughter
of Mr. Smith at some later time. The Smiths had become friends with
Mrs.
Shelley some while after the tragic drowning of her poet husband Percy
Shelley in Italy in 1822. Horace Smith was a stockboker by trade, but
part time poet and novelist, and achieved some notoriety in a sonnet
writing competition
with
Shelley,
where
the romantic
icon said of him: "Is it not odd that the only truly generous
person I ever knew who had money enough to be generous with, should be
a stockbroker? He writes poetry and pastoral dramas and yet knows how
to make money, and does make it, and is still generous."
Neither Mary Shelley nor the London born Horace Smith had any direct connection to Essex, but Smith’s youngest daughter married into a family named Round, from Birch near Colchester, was the mother of a renowned Victorian historian, J. Horace Round, who had translated part of the Doomsday Book relating to Essex and as an expert on the English peerage had seved as consultant to the crown. The subject of a number of the letters relate to literary censorship, an issue which the Frankenstein author had a great deal of experience. This is related in the book about Mary Shelley Frankenstein Diaries - Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley at Amazon, audio book coming soon. See Mary Shelley Memoirs Audibook Trailer.
Professor Crook was researching an anonymous book review of a work by a Miss Crumpe, which she thought might have been penned by Mary Shelley. She had found a published quote from Mary Shelley that her father might be “half in love” with Miss Crumpe, but in the end could not find any evidence that Mrs. Shelley had written the review that had begun her search.
According to a spokesman for the university, a number of Mary Shelley letters have been found over the past 25 years. In 2005 a collection of letters written by Percy Bysshe Shelley found in a trunk in a house in south-west London. The letters were written to Ralph Wedgewood, a member of the family of pottery manufacturers while Shelley was at Oxford, dating from December 1810 to February 1811. They were found along with four letters written by Shelley’s college friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and revealed thoughts on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s views on atheism which got his expelled from Oxford and put him at odds with his father. The letters were kept, not for the information they held of the poet, but because of the connection to the Wedgewood Family and were in the possession of man believed to be a descendent Josiah Wedgewood. The Percy Shelley letters were sold at auction for £45,600 by Christie’s auction house.
To follow further historic connections the Wedgewoods are related
to the Darwins. Josiah Wedgewood, who founded the Wedgewood
Ceramic Company in Stoke-on-Trent was the famed naturalist Charles
Darwin's grandfather through his daughter
Susannah Wedgewood and Charles' paternal grandfather was the poet Erasmus
Darwin, was connected to the story of the Shelleys as a friend of Mary's
father William Godwin. There's a train named for Wedgewood at the Churnet
Valley Railway near the Staffordshire factory.
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