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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Though scholars have long been familiar with Peacock's interesting statement concerning the strong influence exerted upon Shelley by certain novels of Charles Brockden Brown, no one has undertaken to define precisely the extent of Shelley's debt to the American novelist. Professor M. T. Solve in a recent article has ably analyzed the intellectual and spiritual kinship of the two men, and pointed out the general direction of the presumptive influence, but he notes no specific indebtedness beyond the borrowing of some details of gothic phraseology and the name Constantia. It is my present purpose to examine relevant passages from the works of Shelley in the light of Peacock's statement, with a view to more precise definition.
1 Fred Newton Scott Anniversary Papers, University of Chicago Press 1929.
2 Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Works, London 1875, III, 409–10.
3 See A. M. D. Hughes: “Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyn,” Mod. Lang. Rev. VII (1912); and W. E. Peck: “Shelley, Mary Shelley and Rinaldo Rinaldini,” PMLA, XL, 165ff; and Shelley: Bis Life and Work, 1927, especially the Appendix Vol II, p. 311 ff.
4 The page references to Defoe in what follows are to Works Vol. IX, Oxford, 1840; those to Wilson to The City of the Plague and Other Poems Edinburgh 1816; and those to Brown to the edition of his novels, Philadelphia 1887.
5 Cf. her book-list quoted by Dowden in his Life of Shelley, II, 184–5.
6 Canto XII, stanza 25.
7 VI, 48.
8 X, 22.
9 P. 156, p. 181.
10 VI, 51–2.
11 Act III, Sc. 4, p. 153.
12 X, 14.
13 X, 16.
14 Arthur Mervyn Vol. I Ch. XIV,
15 X. 22.
16 Ormond, p. 56.
17 X, 23.
18 Vol. I, p. 141.
19 X, 44.
20 X, 47.
21 XI, 12.
22 Act II, Sc. 1, p. 123.
23 It may be interesting to note that Mary Shelley gives to Adrian (i.e. to Shelley) in The Last Man exactly the sort of rôle in plague-stricken London that Brown's Arthur Mervyn plans for himself before he falls a victim to the pestilence in Philadelphia.
24 Shelley seems to have been fond of this name. He used it again for the charming if slightly sketched heroine of the Coliseum fragment.
25 Wieland, An American Tale, 3 vols. London 1822, p. 21–2, p. 37. Italics mine.
26 Italics mine.
27 Ormond, p. 75.