Mary Shelley’s travel writing-desk, or ‘slope’

This travel writing-desk, or ‘slope’, to use its correct technical name, once belonged to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. This might be the desk that the Shelleys’ friend Sophia Stacey observed as belonging to the writer when she saw them in Florence in 1819. Certainly it remained in Mary Shelley’s possession until her death in 1851, at which point it was passed on to the care of the writer’s son, Percy Florence, and his wife, Jane, who had become very close to her mother in law and particularly so in the later years of her life. A symbol of their relationship remains attached to the slope in the form of a pink ribbon and wax seal which belonged to Lady Shelley. The desk has remained with the family to this day and has recently been given as a long-term loan to the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association by its owner, the present-day Lord Abinger, who is the closest living descendant of P. B. Shelley. Here at the Keats-Shelley House it has been publicly displayed for the first time. Lord Abinger recalls that ‘My father used to tell the children that we should not open the box, as it contained Shelley's heart! A macabre rumour and completely unfounded of course, but it kept our prying hands away from it until we were old enough to appreciate the desk. Had we known there were secret compartments in those days, I am sure they would have been investigated!’ There are indeed hidden compartments in the slope, and its underside still bears some damage from when it was forcibly entered to access a hidden drawer, a move encouraged by leading Mary Shelley scholar Betty Bennett, who believed that a missing Mary Shelley journal was enclosed within. The drawer was later found to be empty. 

no date

1 desk

wood and felt

writing desks

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851

KSH

REL-012