To Edward Fergus Graham, April 1st, 1810

     To Edward Fergus Graham (London)                                                                                                  

                                                                                                             Eton, 

                                                                                                                April 1, 1810

My Dear Graham 

    I will see you at Easter - next Friday I shall be in London, but for a very short time - unable to call on you till Passion week - Robinson will take no trouble about the reviewers, let everything proper be done about the venal villains and I will settle with you when we meet at Easter. - We will all go in a posse to the bookseller's in Mr. Grove's barouche and four - She them that we are no Grub Street garretteers  - but why Harriet more than anyone else - a faint essay I see in return for my enquiry for Caroline - 

    We will not be cheated again - let us come over Jock, for if he will not give me a devil of a price for my Poem and at least £60 for my new Romance in three volumes the dog shall not have them. 

    Pouch the reviewer - £10 will be sufficient I should suppose, and that I can with the greatest ease repay when we meet at Passion week. Send the reviews in which "Zastrozzi" is mentioned to Field Place, the British Review is the hardest, let that be pouched well. - My note of hand if for any large sum is quite at your service, as it is of consequence in fiction to establish your name as high as you can in the literary lists. 

                                                                                                            Adieu, 

                                                                                                                    Yours most devotedly

                                                                                                                            Percy Bysshe Shelley 

[Post scrip] Let me hear how you proceed in the business of reviewing. 

                                                                                                P.B.S.

- The Grove's were Shelley's cousins. Jock, spoken of in the letter is Robinson, the publisher of Shelley's novel Zastrozzi. The "Romance" spoken of in paragraph 2 is believed, by Ingpen, to be either "St. Irvyne or The Rosicrucian." Shelley wrote these two romance works, both short relative to the three volume romance novels that were so popular in lending libraries at the time, while he was still at Eton. These gothic romances have been largely ignored as mere juvenilia by most Shelley scholars and were largely unattainable until recent reprints by Broadview Press. One of the most admired Shelley scholars, Kenneth Neill Cameron, wrote that we "heave a sigh of relief that he [Shelley] finally (via Godwin or any one else) found that he had social duties to preform" instead of continue to write romances.  

(Letters taken from the 1909 Edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Roger Ingpen, published by Sir Isaac Pitman and Son , London)