[In the following review of Adventures of a Younger Son, Jacobus emphasizes the extent to which Trelawny believed in his own Romantic fantasies, particularly regarding his early adventures.]

“If we could only make Trelawny wash his hands and speak the truth we could make a gentleman of him.” Byron—by now cultivating a more sophisticated image—was understandably embarrassed when the personification of his own Corsair turned up at Pisa. It was the Shelleys who fell for his piratical past and tall stories. Byron warned that they would mould him into a Frankenstein monster; and the monstrous side of Trelawny was certainly on view for Mary Shelley: “He tells strange stories of himself, horrific ones, so that they harrow one up.”

Trelawny is notorious for his account of Byron's corpse (“Both his feet were clubbed”) but even the accidents of his own birth become deformities in the telling: “I came into the world, branded and denounced as a vagrant … for I was a younger son.” Thus opens his fictionalized autobiography, Adventures of a Younger Son, edited for the first time from Trelawny's previously censored manuscript by William St Clair in the Oxford English Novel series. The five-year-old Trelawny repays this parental oversight by lynching his father's pet raven (“His look was now most terrifying: one eye was hanging out of his head, the blood coming from his mouth”). It is the first of many blood-lettings. Casual, vivid cruelty and brutal Regency humour come together in the chief comic character, a diabolical ship's surgeon whose hobby is vivisection.

But this romance has a thesis: the monster is humanized by benevolence. Brutalized, rejected, and oppressed, the young Trelawny comes to know friendship, love, and liberty under the tutelage of a politically motivated free-booter named De Ruyter. Until this point, Trelawny sticks to the outline of his early life: he really was a lout, sent to sea by a violent and avaricious father. But, with De Ruyter, fantasy takes over. Chasing pirates, flushing out slavers, slaughtering natives, and harassing the British fleet alternate with tiger-hunting, idyllic interludes, and marriage to an exquisite childbride, Zela. Crudely adolescent, confusedly on the side of freedom and truth against tyranny and treachery, Trelawny shapes an adventure-story rather than a Bildungsroman.

The most intriguing aspect of Trelawny's novel is not the much-researched ratio of fact to fiction, but the extent to which he imposed his fantasies on other people. “The Pirate” (as he was inevitably nicknamed) slept with The Corsair under his pillow, and De Ruyter is a Boy's Own version of Byron's hero—but the pose successfully coloured Mary Shelley's description of Trelawny himself. The American schooner commanded by the fictional Trelawny has its counterpart in the scale model actually used for designing Shelley's fatal boat. Trelawny's stage-management of Shelley's funeral rites parallels the funeral pyre built for Zela. Irked by Byron's preference for political strategy in Greece, Trelawny went off to a mountain cave with a Greek chief and married the chief's thirteen-year-old sister, by whom he had a daughter called Zella. Trelawny didn't just fictionalize his life: he lived his fictions.

“A strange yet wonderful being … destroyed by being nothing”: Mary Shelley's verdict offers a clue to Trelawny's compulsive romancing. It also suggests why Adventures of a Younger Son is less convincing as a work of imagination than his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Though he loads his novel with quotations from both poets, Trelawny never writes up to the Romantic images he invokes; he is better as the yarn-spinning ex-sailor later domesticated in Millais's North West Passage. But, confronted with the actuality of Shelley's vagueness and Byron's lameness, Trelawny had no need to make his own myths: these heroes were for real.