page_title: Edward Ellerker Williams
section_title: Friendship with Medwin and Trelawny
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Ellerker Williams / Friendship with Medwin and Trelawny
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Medwin
context_page_description: Edward Ellerker Williams was a retired army officer who became a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the final months of his life and died with him.
context_section_description: In 1819 Thomas Medwin (left) returned to London and persuaded the Williamses to travel with him to Geneva, where they lived until September 1820. In February Jane and Edward's first child, Edward Medwin Williams (d.1897), was born. Williams also wrote an article on big game hunting for a Swiss encyclopaedia, Bibliotèque universelle des sciences, belles-lettres, et des arts.
  Medwin left, and the Williamses moved first to Chalon and then to Italy, where they met with Medwin again in January 1821 in Pisa. Medwin introduced them to Shelley's circle, and Williams became a close companion of Shelley, writing a play under his tutelage, The Promise, or a Year, a Month and a Day, which he sent to Covent Garden, although it was rejected. The Williamses' second child, Jane Rosalind (d.1880), was born on 16 March.
  Williams met Lord Byron in November 1821 and Edward John Trelawny in January 1822. Whilst Mary Shelley was struggling to overcome the effects of another miscarriage, Shelley developed what one biographer has termed an "escapist crush" on Jane Williams, addressing many of his poems to her.
caption: Thomas Medwin c. 1850
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