The Draper’s Assistant and Mary Shelley’s Lost Journal

Among the Abinger Papers in the Bodleian Library is a document, MS. Abinger c. 73, fols. 99–104, the testimony of one William Tyler, a draper’s assistant from Marlow, Buckinghamshire who wrote poems and saw the Shelleys plain. Jane, Lady Shelley (the wife of the Shelleys’ only surviving son, Sir Percy Florence) gathered as many reminiscences of her father-in-law as she could. Tyler’s is by far the longest. (Appended to this essay is a transcription of his testimony reproduced in full for the first time). Tyler has been virtually erased from the literary and biographical records of the Shelleys, save for one footnote. Edward Dowden made use of his testimony for The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886), but whilst some of Tyler’s words are artfully deployed to bolster the memories of another, others are cut from the record altogether. This essay tells the remarkable story of Tyler, a man unknown to fame, who deserves to be remembered. For one, he provides the only surviving verbatim record of the contents of a journal kept by Mary Shelley which covered the events of May 1815 to June 1816. Who was William Tyler and how did he come to turn those lost pages?