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 1820s. He was present at Shelley's cremation in Italy in 1822 and attended to Byron's body in Greece in 1824, but more than thirty years elapsed before Trelawny composed his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). In the interval the poets and their deaths had been magnified by the vivid imagination of a man whose hopes of immortality rested on their reputations. Trelawny is now seen more as an image maker than a biographer and his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron as a creative rather than scholarly memorial. Harold Nicolson refers to Trelawny as "a liar and a cad" in his...