Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire
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''Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire'' was a poetry collection written by
Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley ( ; 4 August 17928 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achie ...
and his sister Elizabeth which was printed by Charles and William Phillips in Worthing and published by
John Joseph Stockdale John Joseph Stockdale (1770, 1776Stockdale (1990) ''p.''30 or 1777 – 16 February 1847) was an English publisher and editor with something of a reputation as a pornographer. He sought to blackmail a number of public figures over the ''memoirs ...
in September 1810. The work was Shelley's first published volume of poetry. Shelley wrote the poems in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth. The poems were written before Shelley entered the
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
. The volume consisted of sixteen poems and a fragment of a poem. Shelley wrote eleven of the poems while Elizabeth wrote five. Shelley contributed seven lyrical poems, four Gothic poems, and the political poem "The Irishman's Song". Elizabeth wrote three lyrical poems and two verse epistles. The collection included the early poems "Revenge", "Ghasta, Or, The Avenging Demon!!!", "Song: Sorrow", and "Song: Despair". The epigraph was from the "
Lay of the Last Minstrel ''The Lay of the Last Minstrel'' (1805) is a narrative poem in six cantos with copious antiquarian notes by Walter Scott. Set in the Scottish Borders in the mid-16th century, it is represented within the work as being sung by a minstrel late i ...
" by
Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy' ...
: "Call it not vain:— they do not err, Who say, that, when the poet dies, Mute Nature mourns her worshipper." Controversy surrounded the work, however, because one of the poems included, "Saint Edmond's Eve", originally appeared in the anonymously published ''Tales of Terror'' (1801), attributed to
Matthew Gregory Lewis Matthew Gregory Lewis (9 July 1775 – 14 or 16 May 1818) was an English novelist and dramatist, whose writings are often classified as "Gothic horror". He was frequently referred to as "Monk" Lewis, because of the success of his 1796 Gothic no ...
. Shelley told Stockdale that his sister Elizabeth had included the Lewis poem. Shelley apologised and informed Stockdale to suppress the volume. Fourteen hundred and eighty copies had been printed and one hundred copies had been circulated. Fearing a plagiarism lawsuit, Stockdale withdrew the work from publication. Copies of the work became extremely rare and it lapsed into obscurity. Four original copies are known to exist. In 1859, Richard Garnett was able to substantiate that the volume had been published but was unable to locate an extant copy. The collection was reprinted and revived in 1898 by John Lane in an edition edited by Richard Garnett after a copy of the volume had been found.


Contents

# Letter ("Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink") # Letter: To Miss—From Miss – # Song ("Cold, cold is the blast when December is howling") # Song ("Come ---! Sweet is the hour") # Song: Despair # Song: Sorrow # Song: Hope # Song: Translated From the Italian # Song: Translated From the German # The Irishman's Song # Song ("Fierce roars the midnight storm") # Song: To – ("Ah! sweet is the moonbeam that sleeps on yon fountain") # Song: To – ("Stern, stern is the voice of fate's fearful command") # Saint Edmond's Eve # Revenge # Ghasta Or, The Avenging Demon!!! # Fragment, Or The Triumph of Conscience


Critical reception

The volume was advertised in the ''Morning Chronicle'' of 18 September, the ''Morning Post'' of 19 September, and ''The Times'' of 12 October 1810. Reviews appeared in ''Literary Panorama'', ''The Anti-Jacobin Review'', ''
The British Critic The ''British Critic: A New Review'' was a quarterly publication, established in 1793 as a conservative and high-church review journal riding the tide of British reaction against the French Revolution. The headquarters was in London. The journ ...
'', and ''The Poetical Register''. The reviews, which primarily focused on Elizabeth's poems, were negative and highly critical. ''Literary Panorama'' dismissed the poems as examples of "nonsensical rhyme". ''The British Critic'' review described the volume as "filled up by songs of sentimental nonsense, and very absurd tales of horror." ''The Poetical Register'' called the poems "downright scribble" and a "waste of paper", dismissing "all this sort of trash". In 2015, David Duff wrote that ''Original Poetry'' represents "a vital stage in Shelley's literary development, reflecting a fascinating but under-explored phase in the broader culture of Romanticism." The influence and impact of the work endured: "But the literary experiments of 1810 --- an adventure in writing and book-making involving every kind of transgression, textual, political, and legal --- had a formative effect on his work, the traces of which he could never fully erase."


Influence

''Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire'' influenced ''
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus ''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific exp ...
'' (1818). In her biography of Mary Shelley, Anne Kostelanetz Mellor noted the influence of the work on the latter novel:
"As William Veeder has most recently reminded us, several dimensions of Victor Frankenstein are modelled directly on Percy Shelley. (6) Victor was Percy Shelley's pen-name for his first publication, ''Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire'' (1810). Victor Frankenstein's family resembles Percy Shelley's: in both, the father is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter; in both the oldest son has a favorite sister (adopted sister, or cousin, in Frankenstein's case) named Elizabeth. Frankenstein's education is based on Percy Shelley's: both were avid students of Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, Pliny, and Buffon; both were fascinated by alchemy and chemistry; both were excellent linguists, acquiring fluency in Latin, Greek, German, French, English, and Italian. (7)"
The theme of unremitting vengeance is also common to both works. "Revenge" and "Ghasta, Or, The Avenging Demon!!!" rely on the theme of revenge. The Being similarly seeks revenge against Victor Frankenstein. John V. Murphy noted in ''The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley's Works'' that the revenge motif was a major theme of Shelley's writings: "The idea of an avenging demon is central in Shelley's poetry and, in diverse form, will appear in almost all of the major works." Revenge is the major theme of ''
Zastrozzi ''Zastrozzi: A Romance'' is a Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1810 in London by George Wilkie and John Robinson anonymously, with only the initials of the author's name, as "by P.B.S.". The first of Shelley's two early Go ...
'' (1810), '' Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson'' (1810), and ''
The Cenci ''The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts'' (1819) is a verse drama in five acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Italian family, the House of Cenci (in particular, Beatrice Cenci, pronounced CHEN-chee). ...
'' (1819). The language of the two works is also similar. In the poem "Revenge", line 20, the narrator exclaims: "Alone will I glut its all conquering maw." In ''Frankenstein'', the Being expresses a similar sentiment: "I will glut the maw of death."


See also

* 1810 in poetry


Notes


References

* * *Dowden, Edward (1886). ''The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley''. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co. * * * * * * * *. Also see: ** . The text of this edition is that of the Centenary edition of Shelley's Poetical works, 1892, but differs from it by the omission of variant readings and emendations except in cases where the text is acknowledged to be corrupt or of doubtful authority. * * Stockdale, John Joseph. ''Stockdale's Budget'', 13 December 1826. * Veeder, William. "The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys." ''Critical Inquiry'', 12.2 (1986): 365–90. *


Further reading

* *Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. ''The Original Frankenstein''. Edited with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. NY: Random House Vintage Classics, 2008.


External links


Online edition.

Online versions of the 1810 and 1898 editions on Google Books.
{{Authority control 1810 poems Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley 1810 books Revenge Gothic fiction Romanticism British poetry collections