Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 in the light of Samuel Rogers’s Italy, A Poem, and previous women’s travelogues

Abstract

Mary Shelley’s last work is a travelogue about her return to Italy with her son and the latter’s Cambridge friends, seventeen years after P.B. Shelley’s death. This thesis aims to investigate part of Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 in comparison with the illustrated Italy, A Poem by Samuel Rogers, to whom Mary Shelley’s travelogue is dedicated, and previous female travel accounts, especially those by Lady Morgan, and Frances Trollope. First, British travel writing is introduced, with a focus on the nineteenth century. Then, the recounting of Mary Shelley’s route from the Alps to Milan in 1840, and her stay in Venice in 1843, is associated with Italy, J.M.W. Turner’s vignettes of the places featuring in the poem, and the aforementioned women’s travel accounts. Finally, Shelley’s, Rogers’s, and Trollope’s possible ‘gendered’ view of Italians and Italian women is examined. What emerges is an attempt to shed further light on the pictorial quality of Rambles in Germany and Italy, and its unexplored links with Mary Shelley’s predecessors in travel writing.