History of A Six Weeks' Tour - Composition and Publication

Composition and Publication

In the summer of 1817, Mary Shelley started to assemble the couple’s joint diary from their 1814 journey into a travel book. At what point she decided to include the letters from the 1816 Geneva trip and Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc" is unclear, but by 28 September the journal and the letters were a single text. By the middle of October she was making fair copies for the press and correcting and transcribing Frankenstein for publication while Percy was working on The Revolt of Islam. Percy probably corrected and copyedited the journal section while Mary did the same for his letters. Advertisements for the work appeared on 30 October in the Morning Chronicle and on 1 November in The Times, promising a 6 November release. However, the work was not actually published until 12 and 13 November. It was Mary Shelley’s first published work. (Frankenstein was not published until January 1818.)

History of a Six Weeks' Tour begins with a "Preface", written by Percy Shelley, followed by the journal section. The journal consists of edited entries from the joint diary that Percy and Mary Shelley kept during their 1814 trip to the Continent, specifically those from 28 July to 13 September 1814. Of the 8,500 words in the journal section, 1,150 are from Percy’s entries and either copied verbatim or only slightly paraphrased. Almost all of the passages describing the sublime are in Percy’s words—passages describing God in nature, experiences of terror and awe, the transportation of the soul, and particularly the feeling of being overwhelmed by the majesty of nature, are Percy's. When Mary turned to her own entries, however, she significantly revised them; according to Jeanne Moskal, the editor of the recent definitive edition of the Tour, "almost nothing of her original phrasing remains". She even included sections of Claire Clairmont’s journal.

The second section of the text consists of four "Letters written during a Residence of Three Months in the Environs of Geneva, in the Summer of the Year 1816". The first two letters are signed "M" and the second two "S". The first two are attributed to Mary Shelley, but their origin is obscure. As Moskal writes, "the obvious inference is that they are literary versions of lost private epistles to Fanny Godwin", Mary Shelley's stepsister who remained in England and with whom she corresponded during the journey. However, Moskal also notes that there is a missing Mary Shelley notebook from precisely this time, from which the material in these letters could have come: "It is extremely likely that this notebook contained the same kind of mix of entries made by both Shelleys that the surviving first (July 1814—May 1815) and second (July 1816—June 1819) journal notebooks exhibit....Furthermore, Letter I contains four short passages found almost verbatim in P. B. Shelley’s letter of 15 May to T. L. Peacock." The third and fourth letters are composites of Mary’s journal entry for 21 July and one of Percy's letters to Peacock.

The third section of the text consists only of Percy’s poem "Mont Blanc. Lines written in the vale of Chamouni"; it was the first and only publication of the poem in his lifetime. It has been argued by leading Percy Shelley scholar Donald Reiman that the History of a Six Weeks' Tour is arranged so as to lead up to "Mont Blanc". However, those who see the work as primarily a picturesque travel narrative argue that the descriptions of Alpine scenes would have been familiar to early nineteenth-century audiences and they would not have expected a poetic climax.

In 1839, History of a Six Weeks' Tour was revised and republished as "Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour" and "Letters from Geneva" in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edited by Mrs. Shelley (1840). Although these works were not by her husband, she decided to include them because they were "part of his life", as she explained to her friend Leigh Hunt. She appended her initials to the works to indicate her authorship. As Moskal explains, "the unity of the 1817 volume as a volume was dissolved" to make way for a biography of Percy Shelley. After Percy Shelley drowned in 1822, his father forbade Mary Shelley from writing a memoir or biography of the poet. She therefore added significant biographical notices to the edited collections of his works. The 1840 version of History of a Six Weeks' Tour has four major types of changes according to Moskal: "(i) modernization and correction of spelling, punctuation and French (ii) self-distancing from the familial relationship with Claire Clairmont (iii) a heightened sensitivity to national identity (iv) presentation of the travelers as a writing, as well as reading, circle". As a result of these changes, more of Percy Shelley’s writing was included in the 1840 version than in the 1817 version. In 1845, Mary Shelley published a one-volume edition with additional minor changes, based on the 1840 version.