However defective, the Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ were greatly beneficial to the reputation of the poet, whose writings had found few readers outside the literary coteries during his life, whose name was still associated in the minds of the majority of educated Englishmen with atheism, conjugal faithlessness, and dangerous politics, rather than with the highest poetry. Written lightly and circulated widely, the sketches, dealing only with the Oxonian Shelley, created an impression that the undergraduate had been treated harshly by the authorities of his college, and left readers in a mood to discover that he had been too severely punished for the indiscretions of later stages of his career. Henceforth, instead of being confined to the coteries, the desire for larger knowledge of the poet's personal story found a voice in general society.
It was felt that the Papers should be followed up and superseded by a complete biography. By turns, and repeatedly, several of the persons, who had known him most intimately, were urged to produce a worthy record of so remarkable a poet. Mrs. Shelley, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, and Hogg, were all entreated to write the sufficient memoir. William Godwin's daughter would have written the poet's _Life_ had not old Sir Timothy Shelley informed her that, if she ventured to publish anything in the way of biography about his family, she must go her way without the income he provided for her own and her child's maintenance. Peacock declined to write the _Life_ because he had a strong opinion that it would be impossible to tell the story honestly, without setting forth matters that, for the poet's sake, had better be unrecorded. Leigh Hunt (eventually the author of a flimsy and unsatisfactory memoir of the poet whose pocket had yielded him so many guineas) was silent from the fear of provoking dangerous resentments.
'The book,' he remarked, in reference to Middleton's _Shelley and his Writings_, in a letter dated to Edmund Ollier, 2nd February, 1858, 'is a proof of what I have always said when applied to to write the _Life_ myself, viz., that it would be impossible to give a complete account of Shelley and his connexions till the latter were all dead and gone; even if it was possible then for any person to be so thoroughly well informed or impartial as to do it, because facts would have to be so coloured as to misrepresent both living and dead, some one way and some another; or the living would be forced either to enter into the most unseemly and worse than useless wars with one another, or to maintain silences the most difficult and distressing to keep out of delicacy, and the most self-condemning in appearance with some, and in reality with others.'