Though W. M. Rossetti, R. Garnett,
Mac-Carthy, and Dowden had earlier made copies and published
excerpts from Shelley's letters to Elizabeth
Hitchener, that correspondence, including his letter of ?16
January 1812 containing the early draft ofThe Devil's
Walk, was first published in full by T. J. Wise in 1890
(see De Ricci 105, 112). Thus the public's first knowledge of
The Devil's Walk came when Rossetti, alerted by
someone at the Public Record Office to the
Shelley materials there, published the text of the
1812 broadsheet and its accompanying letters in
Fortnightly Review for January 1871 (n.s., IX [XV of
full sequence], no. xlix, 67-85). H. B. Forman, after checking
the text at the Public Record Office, included The
Devil's Walk in his edition of 1876-77 (IV,
371-77). Though Rossetti accepted several of Forman's
corrections in 1878 (III, 371-76), he retained much of
his own revised punctuation and orthography, rather than
returning to that of 1812. Rossetti's most important
innovation was the addition of quotation marks around lines
45-79, which embody his insight that these seditious lines
were meant to be Satan's own words, thereby allowing
Shelley to evade prosecution by claiming that the
attacks on the Regent are presented as being from the lips of
the Father of Lies.