Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 is a travel narrative by the British Romantic author Mary Shelley. Issued in 1844, it is her last published work. Published in two volumes, the text describes two European trips that Mary Shelley took with her son, Percy Florence Shelley, and several of his university friends. Mary Shelley had lived in Italy with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, between 1818 and 1823. For her, Italy was associated with both joy and grief: she had written much while there but she had also lost her husband and two of her children. Thus, although she was anxious to return, the trip was tinged with sorrow. Shelley describes her journey as a pilgrimage, which will help cure her depression.
At the end of the second trip, Mary Shelley spent time in Paris and associated herself with the "Young Italy" movement, Italian exiles who were in favour of Italian independence and unification. One revolutionary in particular attracted her: Ferdinando Gatteschi. To assist him financially, Shelley decided to publish Rambles. However, Gatteschi became discontented with Shelley's assistance and tried to blackmail her. She was forced to obtain her personal letters from Gatteschi through the intervention of the French police.
Shelley differentiates her travel book from others by presenting her material from what she describes as "a political point of view". In so doing, she challenges the early nineteenth-century convention that it was improper for women to write about politics, following in the tradition of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lady Morgan. Shelley's aim was to arouse sympathy in England for Italian revolutionaries, such as Gatteschi. She rails against the imperial rule of Austria and France over Italy and criticises the domination of the Catholic Church. She describes the Italians as having an untapped potential for greatness and a desire for freedom.
Though Shelley herself thought the work "poor", it found favour with reviewers who praised its independence of thought, wit, and feeling. Shelley's political commentary on Italy was specifically singled out for praise, particularly since it was written by a woman. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shelley was usually known only as the author of Frankenstein and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Rambles was not reprinted until the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s provoked a wider interest in Shelley's entire corpus.
Background
Risorgimento
From the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was divided into many small duchies and city-states, some of which were autonomous and some of which were controlled by Austria, France, Spain, or the Papacy. These multifarious governments and the diversity of Italian dialects spoken on the peninsula caused residents to identify as "Romans" or "Venetians", for example, rather than as "Italians". When Napoleon conquered parts of Italy during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), he unified many of the smaller principalities; he centralised the governments and built roads and communication networks that helped to break down the barriers between and among Italians. Not all Italians welcomed French rule, however; Giuseppe Capobianco founded a secret society called the Carbonari to resist both French rule and the Roman Catholic Church. After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Congress of Vienna left much of northern Italy in the hands of the Austrians, the Carbonari continued their resistance. The Carbonari led revolts in Naples and Piedmont in 1820 and 1821 and in Bologna, the Papal States, Parma, and Modena in the 1830s. After the failure of these revolts, Giuseppe Mazzini, a Carbonaro who was exiled from Italy, founded the "Young Italy" group to work toward the unification of Italy, to establish a democratic republic, and to force non-Italian states to relinquish authority on the peninsula. By 1833, 60,000 people had joined the movement. These nationalist revolutionaries, with foreign support, attempted, but failed, to overthrow the Austrians in Genoa and Turin in 1833 and Calabria in 1844. Italian unification, or , was finally achieved in 1870 under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi.Moskal, "Travel writing", 248; Seymour, 487; Moskal, "Gender and nationalism", 191.
Travelling and writing
1840 Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley had lived in Italy from 1818 to 1822. Although Percy Shelley and two of their four children died there, Italy became for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise", as she put it.Quoted in Bennett, 115. The couple's Italian years were a time of intense intellectual and creative activity. Percy composed a series of major poems, and Mary wrote the autobiographical novel Matilda, the historical novel Valperga, and the plays Proserpine and Midas. Mary Shelley had always wanted to return to Italy and she excitedly planned her 1840 trip.Seymour, 476. The return was painful as she was constantly reminded of Percy Shelley.
In June 1840, Mary Shelley, Percy Florence (her one surviving child), and a few of his friends—George Defell, Julian Robinson, and Robert Leslie Ellis—began their European tour. They travelled to Paris and then to Metz. From there, they went down the Moselle by boat to Coblenz and then up the Rhine to Mainz, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Freiburg, Schaffhausen, Zurich, the Splügen, and Chiavenna.Bennett, 115–16. Feeling ill, Shelley rested at a spa in Baden-Baden; she had wracking pains in her head and "convulsive shudders", symptoms of the meningioma that would eventually kill her.Seymour, 476–77. This stop dismayed Percy Florence and his friends, as it provided no entertainment for them; moreover, since none of them spoke German, the group was forced to remain together. After crossing Switzerland by carriage and railway, the group spent two months at Lake Como, where Mary relaxed and reminisced about how she and Percy had almost rented a villa with Lord Byron at the lake one summer.Seymour, 477. The group then travelled on to Milan, and from there, Percy Florence and his friends soon left for Cambridge to take their university finals. Mary Shelley remained, waiting for funds to complete her journey. In September, she returned to England via Geneva and Paris. Upon her return, she became depressed and could not write: "[in Italy] I might live – as once I lived—hoping—loving—aspiring enjoying ... I am placid now, & the days go by – I am happy in Percy [Florence's] society & health – but no adjuncts ... gild the quiet hours & dulness [sic] creeps over my intellect".Quoted in Sunstein, 353. Despite this lethargy she managed to publish a second edition of Percy Shelley's prose and began working on another edition of his poetry.Sunstein, 353.
1842–1844 Sir Timothy Shelley gave his grandson Percy Florence an increase in his allowance for his twenty-first birthday, allowing Mary Shelley and Percy Florence to plan a second, longer trip to the Continent.Seymour, 480. In June 1842, Mary Shelley and her son left for a fourteen-month tour. They were accompanied by a few of his friends: Alexander Andrew Knox, a poet and classicist, whom Emily Sunstein, a biographer of Mary Shelley, describes as "reminiscent of [Percy] Shelley";Sunstein, 356. Henry Hugh Pearson, a musician who had written musical accompaniments for several of Percy Shelley's poems; and Robert Leslie Ellis. Mary Shelley hoped that the easy manners of the other young men would rub off on her awkward son, but instead they became petty and jealous of each other.Seymour, 482–484; Sunstein, 356. The group visited Liège, Cologne, Coblenz, Mainz, Frankfurt, Kissingen, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Salzburg, the Tyrol, Innsbruck, Riva, Verona, Venice, Florence, and Rome.Bennett, 116. In Rome, Mary Shelley toured museums with the French art critic Alex Rio; Percy Florence was unimpressed with the culture and refused to see the art, infuriating his mother, who spent an increasing amount of her time seeing the country with Knox instead.Seymour, 485; Sunstein, 359. She also paid numerous visits to Percy Bysshe Shelley's grave in Rome.Sunstein, 359. After two months in the Sorrento Peninsula, the group was short of money; Percy Florence and his friends returned home while Mary Shelley went on to Paris.Sunstein, 359; Seymour, 486.
In Paris, Mary Shelley associated with many of the Italian expatriates who were part of the "Young Italy" movement.Seymour, 487–88. Her recent travels had made her particularly sympathetic to their revolutionary message.Seymour, 488. One Italian patriot captivated her in particular: Ferdinando Gatteschi, a smart, handsome, would-be writer. He was young—not yet 30—and in exile, following his participation in a failed Carbonari rebellion against Austria in 1830–31.Sunstein, 360. Shelley was fascinated by Gatteschi; she described him as "a hero & an angel & martyr".Quoted in Moskal, "Travel writing", 247. Jeanne Moskal, the most recent editor of Rambles, argues that Mary Shelley was attracted to Gatteschi because he resembled Percy Shelley: he was an aristocratic writer who had been cast off by his parents for his liberalism. Moskal argues that "the strength of [Shelley's] devotion overturned her previous resolve not to publish again".Moskal, "Travel writing", 247.
At the end of September 1843, Mary Shelley proposed to her publisher, Edward Moxon, that she write a travel book based on her 1840 and 1842 Continental journeys. Interested in assisting Gatteschi, she wrote to Moxon that she was writing "for a purpose most urgent & desirable".Quoted in Seymour, 488. She described the work as "light", "personal", and "amusing".Quoted in Nitchie, 30. Moxon agreed to her proposal and advanced her £60, which she promised to return if fewer than 300 copies of the work were sold.Moskal, "Introductory note", 49. (She subsequently gave this same amount to Gatteschi.)Moskal, "Travel writing", 250. By the end of January 1844, Shelley had already completed most of the first volume. As Sunstein writes, "once started on Rambles, she worked fast and with pleasure, but her head and nerves were bad at times, and her eyes got so weak and inflamed that she wrote only until noon."Sunstein, 362. She left Paris at the end of January and returned to London, still infatuated with Gatteschi. The death of Sir Timothy Shelley, Percy Florence's grandfather, in April 1844, delayed the completion of the work. However, with material from Gatteschi on the Ancona uprising of 1831 and research help from German-speaking friends, Shelley finished.Sunstein, 362–63; Moskal, "Introductory note", 50. The text was largely drawn from correspondence written during her travels to her step-sister Claire Clairmont. Mary Shelley's last published work, which was dedicated to the travel writer and poet Samuel Rogers, came out on 1 August 1844.Nitchie, 29; Sunstein, 365.