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 intimate friend, confidant, and correspondent of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Claire Clairmont (the subject of Henry James's short story "The Aspern Papers," 1888), William Michael Rossetti, Prince Aléxandros Mavrokordátos (hero of the Greek war of independence), and Fanny Kemble (British Shakespearean actress and author), among others.

It was his good fortune to live long enough to regale the Victorians with firsthand accounts of long-dead Romantic writers. Robert Browning marveled, "Ah did you once see Shelley plain / And did he stop and speak to you." In later life Trelawny became known as "the friend of Byron and Shelley," though, in truth, he had known Shelley...