Over at About Last Night, OGIC responds to our Twain post from earlier this week. I present her comments in full as it’s like having a wonderfully lucid stunt double in one’s employ, somersaulting across the blog and filling in the blanks:

Ms. Tingle Alley unearths Mark Twain’s incensed reaction to a Victorian biography of Percy Shelley, Edward Dowden’s 1886 Life of Shelley. Dowden was much in Shelley’s thrall and seems to have raised more eyebrows than just Twain’s in brazenly defending the poet’s monstrous behavior toward his first wife Harriet, who ended a suicide. Interestingly, Matthew Arnold registered the same objection to Dowden’s exculpatory treatment of Shelley, though not nearly so acidly or entertainingly as Twain:

On the 9th of November 1816 Harriet Shelley left the house in Brompton where she was living, and did not return. On the 10th of December her body was found in the Serpentine; she had drowned herself. In one respect Professor Dowden resembles Providence: his ways are inscrutable. His comment on Harriet’s death is: “There is no doubt, she wandered from the ways of upright living.” But, he adds: “That no act of Shelley’s during the two years which immediately preceded her death, tended to cause the rash act which brought her life to its close, seems certain.” Shelley had been living with Mary [Wollstonecraft Shelley] all the time; only that!

I can’t go into detail about it just now, but I have a pet theory that the narrator of Henry James’s 1888 novella The Aspern Papers was partly modeled on Dowden. I’m hoping Carrie’s find may give me more ammo. Whether it does or no, it’s still Twain, and fine reading.