Volume 47, Number 7 · April 27, 2000
The Truth as Masquerade
By Anne Barton
In the autumn of 1821, Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881) left Geneva for Italy, where in the following January he briefly became part of the little circle of English expatriates at Pisa: Lord Byron, Shelley and his wife, Mary, Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin, Edward Williams (who, like Medwin, had been a British army officer in India), and Williams's partner, Jane. Trelawny himself was thirty, the same age as Shelley, but four years younger than Byron. He later claimed that it had been his discovery of Shelley's poetry, quite as much as a desire to meet Byron, that induced him to act on the Williamses' suggestion that he join them in Pisa. Like a good deal else in Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878), this was almost certainly not true.[*] Byron, rather than the comparatively obscure Shelley, was the real magnet. Trelawny was attracted to him, moreover, for reasons more complicated and personal than simply the great international celebrity at this time of the self-exiled author of Childe Harold, Don Juan, and the various Eastern tales.
Feature, 1588 words
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