Edward John Trelawny is remembered today as the "friend" of Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron. His work as a biographer consists of personal memories of and anecdotes about the two poets, with whom he was connected briefly in the...

George Gordon, Lord Byron, is reputed to have said of his friend Edward John Trelawny that "Trelawny would be a good fellow if he could spell and speak the truth." As Byron explained to his mistress Teresa Guiccioli, "since [Trelawny's] adolescence he...

Despite little formal education, Edward John Trelawny was a riveting storyteller with a prodigious imagination who managed to insinuate himself into the lives of some of the most important literary figures of nineteenth-century Britain. He was the...

Biography always strikes me as a grinding job: devoting yourself to the detail of someone else's life, offering their jottings and indiscretions a significance you would never dare give to your own. Surely, by the time they're done, biographers must start to despise their...

David Crane. Four Walls Eight Windows, $30 (400p) ISBN 1-56858-143-2 Dismissed by a contemporary as "Lord Byron's jackal," Trelawny (1792-1881), the 19th-century adventurer and companion of the English Romantics, traded on his celebrity as a survivor all his life. He had burned...

Ward's essay, published just after Trelawny's death, reflects the general nineteenth-century acceptance of Trelawny's version of his own life and celebrates him as one of the last of the truly adventurous spirits.

In the following excerpt, Reiman contrasts two biographies of Trelawny and concludes that his work should neither be accepted as factual nor dismissed due to its interweaving of fantasy and reality, but rather read for its literary merits as “autobiographical fiction.”

In the following excerpt, Massingham characterizes Trelawny's letters as deeply inscribed by his short friendship with Shelley, although most of the letters date from the sixty-year period of Trelawny's life after Shelley's death in 1822.