James Cummins Bookseller

London: Edward Moxon, Basil Montagu Pickering, 1858,1878.

Price: $850.00

About the item

First edition of the Recollections, first edition thus of the Records ("with additions" CBEL). 2 plates: nature view, portrait of the author, 304 pp.; frontispiece portrait of Shelley and 2 plates, 214 pp.; frontispiece portrait of Byron and 1 plates, 245pp. 3 vols. 8vo. Their Famous Friend's Recollections, in the first and second collections. Bound in modern burgundy cloth with gold printed spine titles, fine. CBEL III, 681.

Item #353862

Trelawney was Shelley's closest friend in the poet's final year (it was Trelawney who snatched Shelley's heart out of the flames on the shore of Viareggio); and he was closely associated with Byron in the latter's final three years
Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author is actually the revised and expanded version of Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. In the later edition, at the age of 86, still hale and hearty Trelawney writes in his Preface: "No two men [Shelley and Byron] could be more dissimilar in all ways, yet I have seldom known two men more unhappy."
Trelawney himself died three years later, having arranged for his ashes to be transported to the English Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where they were buried in a plot next to Shelley's grave.