The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley : a critical biography 9781118533963, 1118533968, 9781118534045, 1118534042, 9781118534038

Table of contents :
Content: List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgements xiAbbreviations and Texts xiiiForeword xviiPart I Background, Foreground 1792-1811 11 A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 1792 -1810 32 'Bit' 1796 -1811 123 Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 1810 -1811 214 Printing Freaks 1810 -1811 325 The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 1811 43Part II Lover of Mankind, Democrat & Atheist 1811-1818 556 A Shelley Business! 1811 577 My New Sister 1811 -1813 678 Tan?yr?allt 1813 789 Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 1812 -1813 8310 A Rash & Heartless Union 1813 -1814 9611 Mary Godwin 1814 10312 This is a Vampire 1814 -1815 11313 Alastor 1815 -1816 12414 Geneva and Byron 1816 13515 A Series of Pain 1816 14916 Drowned, Frozen, Dead 1816 15817 Laon and Cythna: Writing against Death 1817 16718 My Country Dear to Me Forever 1817 -1818 180Part III Expatriation 1818-1821 19119 Italy: As Light in the Sun, Throned 1818 19320 Flowering Islands 1818 20721 A Birth in Naples 1818 -1819 22222 Exceeding Grief: The Cenci 1819 23023 Prometheus Unbound 1819 24024 Satiric Reality 1819 24825 Beam?Anatomising Prism 1819 -1820 25826 Harmonious Madness 1820 26827 Swellfoot the Tyrant 1820 28028 Epipsychidion v. Flesh & Blood 1820-1821 29129 Defending Poetry 1821 30230 This Latest of my Orphans 1821 313Part IV No Rest or Respite 1821-1822 32131 Ariel to Miranda 1821 -1822 32332 To the Villa Magni 1822 33533 'The Triumph of Life' 1822 34234 Enchanted Heart 1822 34935 Upon a Precipice 1822 36236 Going to Join Friend Plato 1822 37037 Beyond this Life 379Notes 393Bibliography 448Index 457

Citation preview

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley

BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES General Editor: Claude Rawson This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European, and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places. This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous pointmaking, but through the practical persuasion of volumes that offer intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context. Also in this series The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer Derek Pearsall

The Life of W. B.Yeats Terence Brown

The Life of Samuel Johnson Robert DeMaria Jr.

The Life of Henry Fielding Ronald Paulson

The Life of Robert Browning Clyde De L. Ryals

The Life of John Milton Barbara K. Lewalski

The Life of Joseph Conrad John Batchelor

The Life of George Eliot Nancy Henry

The Life of William Faulkner Richard Gray

The Life of William Shakespeare Lois Potter

The Life of Walter Scott John Sutherland

The Life of William Wordsworth John Worthen

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Rosemary Ashton

The Life of Daniel Defoe John Richetti

The Life of Evelyn Waugh Douglas Lane Patey

The Life of D. H. Lawrence Andrew Harrison

The Life of Thomas Hardy Paul Turner

The Life of Robert Frost Henry Hart

The Life of Goethe John R. Williams

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley John Worthen

The Life of Céline Nicholas Hewitt

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley A Critical Biography John Worthen

This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of John Worthen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation.You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Worthen, John, author. Title: The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley : a critical biography / John Worthen. Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Blackwell critical biographies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018038903 (print) | LCCN 2018038972 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118533963 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118534038 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118534045 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822. | Poets, English–19th century–Biography. Classification: LCC PR5431 (ebook) | LCC PR5431 .W67 2019 (print) | DDC 821/.7 [B] –dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038903 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © John Worthern Set in 10/12pt Bembo by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for David Ellis Sil. Is’t not so? Fal. ’Tis so. Sil. Is’t so? Why then say an old man can do somwhat.

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgementsxi Abbreviations and Texts xiii Forewordxvii

Part I  Background, Foreground 1792–1811 1 2 3 4 5

1

A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 1792 –18103 ‘Bit’ 1796 –181112 Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 1810 –181121 Printing Freaks 1810 –181132 The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 181143

Part II  Lover of Mankind, Democrat & Atheist 1811–1818

55

6 A Shelley Business! 181157 7 My New Sister 1811 –181367 8 Tan‐yr‐allt 181378 9 Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 1812 –181383 10 A Rash & Heartless Union 1813 –181496 11 Mary Godwin 1814103 12 This is a Vampire 1814 –1815113 13 Alastor 1815 –1816124 14 Geneva and Byron 1816135 15 A Series of Pain 1816149 16 Drowned, Frozen, Dead 1816158 17 Laon and Cythna: Writing against Death 1817167 18 My Country Dear to Me Forever 1817 –1818180

vii



  Contents 

Part III  Expatriation 1818–1821 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Italy: As Light in the Sun, Throned 1818193 Flowering Islands 1818207 A Birth in Naples 1818 –1819222 Exceeding Grief: The Cenci 1819230 Prometheus Unbound 1819240 Satiric Reality 1819248 Beam‐Anatomising Prism 1819 –1820258 Harmonious Madness 1820268 Swellfoot the Tyrant 1820280 Epipsychidion v. Flesh & Blood 1820–1821291 Defending Poetry 1821302 This Latest of my Orphans 1821313

Part IV  No Rest or Respite 1821–1822 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

191

321

Ariel to Miranda 1821 –1822323 To the Villa Magni 1822335 ‘The Triumph of Life’ 1822342 Enchanted Heart 1822349 Upon a Precipice 1822362 Going to Join Friend Plato 1822370 Beyond this Life 379

Notes393 Bibliography448 Index457

viii

List of Illustrations

  1 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (1793–1822) (Newman Ivey White, Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940, Volume II, facing page 524) xviii   2 Elizabeth Shelley [‘Mrs Shelley (So‐called)’] (1763–1846), graphite drawing with pen and brown ink (c.1795) by George Romney (1734–1802) (Yale Center for British Art,Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr and Mrs J. Richardson Dilworth, B.A. 1938) 13   3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, tinted drawing (?1802–1804) by Antoine‐Philippe, Duc de Montpensier (1775–1807) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelley Relics 7) 14   4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), detail of oil portrait (1839–1840) by Richard Rothwell (1800–1868) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 1235) 104   5 Clara Mary Jane (Claire) Clairmont (1798–1879), oil portrait (Rome 5–6 May 1819) by Amelia Curran (1775–1847), Newstead Abbey NA 271 (public domain) 139   6 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), oil portrait (1813) by Richard Westall (1765–1836) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 4243) 140   7 Lateen‐rigged sailing boat, photograph (Lake Geneva c. 1900) (in collection of John Worthen) 143   8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, oil portrait (c. 1829) by George Clint (1770–1854), after Amelia Curran (1819) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 1271) 232   9 Jane Williams Hogg (1798–1884), photograph (c. 1851) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, [Pr] Shelley adds. e. 8 facing page 1244) 305 ix



  List of Illustrations 

10 Edward Ellerker Williams (1793–1822), detail of pencil and crayon self‐portrait (1821–1822) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, [Pr] Shelley adds. e. 7 facing page 736) 11 Detail of page of ‘Coliseum’ manuscript (post 1818) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 201v) 12 ‘Casa Magni’, watercolour (1879) by Henry Roderick Newman (1833–1918), whereabouts unknown (copyright © City of London, Keats House, Hampstead) 13 Final page of manuscript of ‘Bright wanderer’ (1822) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Oxford, Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 36v) 14 Percy Bysshe Shelley, pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (Newman Ivey White. Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940,Volume II, facing page 524)

x

306 333 339 360 368

Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge a huge debt to the editors of The Poems of Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, and the Shelley volumes of The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics. I am also extremely fortunate in being able to draw on the work of previous Shelley biographers, in particular Newman Ivey White, Richard Holmes and James Bieri. I am grateful to the Bodleian Library for its assistance in my researches, and for granting me permission to use a number of illustrations drawn from its collection. Bruce Barker‐Benfield was wonderfully kind in helping me with his extraordinary knowledge of Shelley and the Shelley archive. Nicolas Bell opened up the riches of the Trinity College Cambridge library holdings for me, and I wish to thank him for that; Linda Bree read the submitted draft of the book and made a large number of very helpful comments, for which I am profoundly grateful. Mario and Julia Broglia explained the explanations of those selling cheese and oil in Naples; Nora Crook was marvellously patient, set me right on many occasions, and employed the huge range of her competence in Shelley matters on my behalf, so that I am more thankful than I can say. Michael Erkelenz, with utter generosity, gave me a copy of his own BSM volume; Steele Haughton was very informative about Shelley’s trees; Caroline Murray allowed me to tap into her knowledge of (almost) everything, and specifically kept my Greek straight. Michael Rossington was wonderfully helpful in leading one ignorant of Shelley scholarship through the minefield of ‘The Triumph of Life’, after I had more than once tripped over explosive material; my publisher’s Readers also helped enormously with various scholarly matters, including the text of ‘Bright wanderer’. Katherine Carr, my copy‐editor, did her very best for the book; remaining peculiarities in my texts and readings are due entirely to my own pig‐headedness. Cornelia Rumpf‐Worthen read the final drafts and made more helpful suggestions (an ambiguity she would have queried) than even she can have realised. Anne Serafin read a good deal of an early draft with care and loving attention; Danaya C. Wright helped me understand Chancery proceedings.

xi



  Acknowledgements 

Throughout, Claude Rawson patiently listened to insights spoken in enthusiasm, and supported me as a General Editor should. Simon Collins and Thomas Nowack produced fine photographic images for me from difficult originals; I am indebted to them. I also wish to thank Benjamin Colbert, Keith Crook, Kelvin Everest, Lesley Haughton, Paul Hamilton, Michael O’Neill, Angela and Paul Poplawski, Alyson Price (of the British Institute in Florence), John and Moyra Tourlamain, and Sue Wilson for various kinds of assistance.

xii

Abbreviations and Texts

Shelley’s Work 1824 1839 i.−iv. 1840

Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1824) The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 Vols. (London, 1839) The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs Shelley, 1 Vol. (London, 1839, distributed 1840) 2016 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London, 2016) BSM i.−xxiii The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al, 23 Vols. (New York, 1986–2002) Cenci The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts (London, 1821) CPPBS i. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley,Volume One, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London, 2003) CPPBS ii. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley,Volume Two, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London, 2004) CPPBS iii. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley,Volume Three, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, with Nora Crook (Baltimore and London, 2012) MYRS i.−viii. The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics [Percy Bysshe Shelley], ed. Donald H. Reiman et al., 8 Vols. (New York, 1985–1997) PE Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (London, 1811) PS i. The Poems of Shelley,Vol. 1 (1804–1817), ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London, 1989) PS ii. The Poems of Shelley,Vol. 2 (1817–1819), ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, with Jack Donovan, Ralph Pite and Michael Rossington (London, 2000) PS iii. The Poems of Shelley,Vol. 3 (1819–1820), ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington, with Laura Barlow (London, 2011) xiii



  Abbreviations and Texts 

PS iv.

The Poems of Shelley,Vol. 4 (1820–1821), ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Kelvin Everest, with Andrew Lacey and Laura Barlow (London, 2014) PWS i. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1811–1817, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford, 1993) SL i.−ii. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1964) SMW Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 2003) SPP Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn. (New York, 2002) St.I St. Irvyne [see Zastrozzi] Zastrozzi Zastrozzi, A Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Ontario, 2002)

Biographical and Scholarly Material James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Biography (Baltimore, 2008) Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 Vols. (London, 1973–1994) CC i.–ii. The Clairmont Correspondence, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 Vols. (Baltimore and London, 1995) CCJ The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge MA, 1968) Dowden i.−ii. Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1886) Elopement H. B. Forman, The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin (Privately Printed, 1911) Enquiry William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793], ed. Mark Philp (London, 2013) Fraser’s lvii. Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Part I, Fraser’s Magazine, lvii (June 1858), 643–659 Fraser’s lxi. Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Part II, Fraser’s Magazine, lxi (January 1860), 92–109 Gisborne Maria Gisborne & Edward E.Williams, Shelley’s Friends:Their Journals and Letters, ed. F. L. Jones (Norman OK, 1951) Guitar Shelley’s Guitar: A Bicentenary exhibition of manuscripts, first editions and relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, catalogue by B. C. Barker‐ Benfield (Oxford, 1992) Bieri BLJ i.−xiii

xiv



  Abbreviations and Texts 

Hearth

Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth (Durham, NC, 1938) Holmes Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 1974) Hogg i.−ii. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1858) Ingpen Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England: New Facts and Letters (London, 1917) K‐SJ Keats‐Shelley Journal K‐SMB Keats‐Shelley Memorial Bulletin LB William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797– 1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992) Med.33 Thomas Medwin, The Shelley Papers: Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1833) Med.47 i.−ii. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1847) MSJ i.−ii. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott‐Kilvert, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1987) MSL i.−iii. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 Vols. (Baltimore & London, 1980–1988) OED Oxford English Dictionary OHPBS The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford, 2013) Oxford Robert Montgomery, Oxford: A Poem, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1835) Peck i.−ii. Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 Vols. (Boston, 1927) Robinson i.−iii. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 Vols. (London, 1938) Rogers Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1967) SC i.−x. Shelley and his Circle, ed. Kenneth Cameron et al., 10 Vols. (Cambridge MA and London, 1961–2002) Seymour Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London, 2000) TLS Times Literary Supplement Trel.58 Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London, 1858) Trel.78 Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author [1878], ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, 1973) Trel.Letters Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford, 1910) White i.−ii. Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 Vols. (New York, 1940)

xv



  Abbreviations and Texts 

Names CC LB LH MWG MWS PBS

Claire Clairmont [originally Mary Jane Clairmont, also Clare and Clara: Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont on her tomb] Lord Byron Leigh Hunt Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin [until 30 xii 1816] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [from 30 xii 1816] Percy Bysshe Shelley

Texts There is (2019) still no authoritative complete edition of Shelley’s poetry, nor a complete edition of his prose. PS, with conventionalised punctuation, has published four volumes out of five; CPPBS, with three volumes published of eight planned, is more authoritative but less complete. Of the three easily available scholarly selections (SPP, SMW and 2016) the last is textually the most comprehensive and reliable, and contains a good selection of Shelley’s prose. In‐text references here are therefore to 2016, giving page numbers and, following a colon, line numbers and where appropriate section and Act numbers. e.g. (90), (591:57–58), (272:IV.570–578). Other references – to Shelley’s letters, to poetry only appearing in CPPBS and PS (with preference given to CPPBS), to manuscript readings, editorial emendations and all other material  –  appear in endnotes. Oddities in original spelling (e.g. ‘Appenines’, ‘embarassed’) and non‐standard grammar (e.g. ‘not one of whose opinions coincide with mine’) have been marked [sic] only when confusion seems likely (e.g. ‘sive’ for ‘sieve’).

xvi

Foreword

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you? And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems, and new!’1 Robert Browning (1812–1889) Seeing Shelley ‘plain’, as Browning put it in 1851, is harder than one might imagine. The best‐known portrait of him, painted in 1819 by Amelia Curran, was – the artist herself admitted – ‘so ill done’ that she nearly destroyed it (it was never finished).2 There exist, however, life‐drawings by Shelley’s friend Edward Williams, including a profile confirming just how ‘boyish looking’ he appeared, together with a ghostly back view (see Figure 1). His brown hair was always wild, his face freckled when he caught the sun; he grew tall but, as the pictures suggest, remained slight, with something of a stoop: small head, narrow shoulders, long legs.3 Readers of this book will find a concentration upon the actual: pistols fired in enclosed spaces, books printed in signatures, pieces of paper tightly folded. Shelley has so often been seen as an evanescent, barely human soul  –  his wife Mary remarked after his death that ‘I do not in any degree believe that his being was regulated by the same laws that govern the existence of us common mortals’ – that we need to ground our understanding of him in what he called ‘the difficult and unbending realities of actual life’.4

This is a biography shorter than most of its predecessors:5 the man who writes (poetry, letters, pamphlets, discursive prose) is the central subject. Not because the works are autobiographical, but because they focus the most intense concerns of

xvii



  Foreword 

Figure 1  Percy Bysshe Shelley, pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (Newman Ivey White, Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940,Volume II, facing page 524)

the life: and because they are what makes Shelley extraordinary. He wrote so much that being comprehensive is, however, not an option. It is tempting to assume that he must always have known where he was going as a writer, but he took a long time to locate the styles and the approaches that suited him. As Julian Barnes has remarked, an artist’s career is ‘likely to be a matter of obsessional overlap, of ferrying back and forth, of process rather than result, journey rather than arrival’.6 Shelley came to the end of his journey so very suddenly, at the age of 29, that it seems entirely natural for him not to have known exactly where he was arriving: if, indeed, he was going to be a poet at all. He had started to write very early: in his penultimate year as a schoolboy at Eton, 1808–1809, when he was only 16, he began a highly coloured gothic novel, Zastrozzi. He had explained to a potential publisher in May 1809 that he expected no money for it (music to a publisher’s ears): ‘I am independent, being the heir of a gentleman of large fortune.’ The book came out in March 1810, when he was still at school. It got into print because he could afford to have it printed: he could even lay out £10 to bribe potential reviewers.7 And what followed was not just a stream but a flood of writing. His second book, Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, written with his sister Elizabeth (1794–1831), was printed at his own expense, though he xviii



  Foreword 

failed to settle the printer’s bill (a massive £75) for some while. His third book, the novel St. Irvyne: or The Rosicrucian: A Romance, would be printed in December 1810, again at his own expense, and appeared in 1811, when Shelley was 18.8 But having his work printed and published privately became necessary, as he grew more critical of government, monarchy and Christianity, and as his reputation grew worse. Three pieces of political (in fact treasonable) writing had to be printed anonymously in 1812; copies identified as Shelley’s were nevertheless passed to the Home Office. In 1813, he realised that his poem Queen Mab could not be published as it stood, while the Notes he was planning would make it doubly impossible. Paying the real printer himself, he added his own name as printer, at his father‐in‐ law’s address (the law demanded that a printer be named), but even then the book was only distributed to friends, often with name and address removed. In 1816, Shelley had his poem Alastor printed at his own expense, as he did his poem The Revolt of Islam in 1818 (which must have cost him near to £1309). He sent printed copies of his play The Cenci to London from Italy in 1819; Adonais, too, was printed in Italy and the copies sent to London for publication. On the other hand, two of his greatest poems, written in 1819, The Mask of Anarchy and his sonnet ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King’, would only be published in the 1830s, years after his death, and long after the time when they made political sense. Such publishing – or failure to publish – was not conducive to Shelley’s making money. In one way, that was not a problem. As a gentleman possessed of a private income – in practice, an allowance awarded by his father Timothy Shelley (1753– 1844) – and with a future which looked financially assured, he made a point of not writing for money. For much of his life the idea was repellent to him. In February 1821, he would actually insist on not being paid for an essay which, he declared, he had ‘determined to write’ before learning of its potential publisher’s ‘liberal arrangements’10 for payment. On 25 January 1822, nearly 12 years after his first book had been published, he would tell his friend, the London critic and editor Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), that he had no idea how well his books sold: ‘I have never until now thought it worth while to inquire.’ Back in 1811, he had instructed the bookseller responsible for his second gothic novel: ‘Will you have the goodness to inform me of the number of copies which you have sold of “St. Irvyne”.’11 But by 1822, Shelley knew how pointless it would be to enquire how a book of his was selling – because so few sold. It seems likely that he never in fact earned a penny from any of his books.12 What makes this more startling is the fact that, by April 1822, he was in debt for over £20 000: in modern terms, over £1 million, as for rough equivalence 1800– 1822, sums can be multiplied by 50.13 He coupled his remark in 1822 about book sales with a question about his newest work, a play. A fortnight earlier he had given his usual publisher, Charles Ollier (1788–1859), an opportunity to buy it: now he asked whether Hunt might be able to find a publisher who would take it for £150 xix



  Foreword 

or £200. His questions to Ollier and Hunt seem to have been the first occasions in his life when Shelley had actually put a price on a piece of his writing. For, despite his constant, at times awful, local difficulties, he knew that he would – one day – be rich. But because he lived his entire life in the style appropriate to the eldest son of a gentleman, his income from his father never proved adequate. His unpaid bills dictated where he could live; eventually his debts were crucially important in his decision to leave England, in 1818, and to settle in a country (Italy) where his income would go further and his old liabilities could not be pursued. His doctor’s warnings had also directed him to a warmer climate. Another necessary biographical topic – an often under‐rated problem – is that, from his early twenties until almost the end of his life, Shelley was beset by illness; in January 1821 he called himself a ‘feeble mass of diseases & infirmities’ dragged through the world by a ‘vapid & weary spirit’.14 He was frequently in severe pain: perhaps kidney stones, quite likely kidney damage and recurring infection. He was believed tubercular by an English doctor who examined him in 1817, though his life in Italy brought him a period of remission which lasted until his death. His astonishing achievements as a writer, along with ‘his habits of temperance and exercise’, confirm his ‘remarkable degree of strength’. But because he was slightly built it is, rather bizarrely, possible to compile seven accounts of his being knocked or thrown to the ground, as an adult.15

There is another reason why this book is shorter than many Shelley biographies. Myths about Shelley are still being created and distributed. The idea that, at Tan‐­yr‐allt in North Wales in 1813, Shelley ‘claimed’ to have ‘twice fought off an intruder … perhaps a devil’, which he never at any stage claimed to have done, was repeated authoritatively in 2013.16 Because it remains problematic, and is likely to remain so, the Tan‐yr‐allt episode has become an opportunity for biographers to locate in it the Shelley they want: a man who narrowly escaped being murdered by a political opponent, a man who saw the devil, a man with acute psychological problems, a man not entirely sane, a man subject to what Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) would influentially call ‘semi‐delusion’. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2013, after stating that Shelley exchanged pistol shots with an intruder, came down firmly on both sides of the fence by adding: ‘This may have been another delusional episode.’17 Shelley biography needs to prioritize contemporary and documentary testimony. This will not always produce what is reliable, but some kinds of evidence are better than others and they should be identified. This book will, for example, depend as little as possible on the recollection of conversations or remarks written xx



  Foreword 

down many years after the events they describe, even by close friends or relations. What we now know of the waywardness of autobiographical memory, and the extent to which all memories are reconstructed memories, should stop us hoping for any accuracy in such accounts. They reveal the teller and his or her changing relationship with Shelley: they are hardly ever reliable. George Eliot was aware of this as early as 1870: ‘The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.’18 It would be as well, too, not to be distracted by the siren calls of psychological analysis which proved so tempting to those writing in the second half of the twentieth century. Shelley himself beautifully described how reflections in the waters of a canal manage to ‘surpass & misrepresent truth’.19 They may reflect the actual, but they embellish it into the alluring.

xxi

Part I

Background, Foreground 1792 –1811

1 A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 1792 –1810

Shelley was born on 4 August 1792, just three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution. It was a well‐timed arrival. Although born in the eighteenth century, he grew up taking it for granted that the world would never be the same again; and when, at the age of 24, he visited Versailles and Fontainebleau, he thought the latter ‘the scene of some of the most interesting events of what may be called the master theme of the epoch in which we live’. From the age of 19 he had known how important it was that people should be active in opposing ‘religious, political, and domestic oppression’:1 in 1819, at the age of 27, he summed up his developed political philosophy: That the majority [of the] people of England are destitute and miserable, ill‐clothed, ill‐fed, ill‐educated. That they know this, and that they are impatient to procure a reform of the cause of their abject and wretched state. That a cause of this peculiar misery is the unequal distribution which, under the form of the national debt, has been surreptitiously made of the products of their labour and the products of the labour of their ancestors; for all property is the produce of labour. That the cause of that cause is a defect in the government. (644)

He feared in 1811 that England itself might be ‘willfully rushing to a Revolution’, but continued to believe in progress, writing in 1817 how ‘There is a reflux in the

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

3



  A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 

tide of human things which bears the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven, after the storms are past. Methinks, those who now live have survived an age of despair.’2 Nevertheless, in spite of such radicalism, ‘He never could have been taken for anything but a true thoroughbred English gentleman.’3 He was not an aristocrat like his friend Lord Byron, but the eldest son of a Sussex landowning family (his father was Whig MP for Horsham, later a baronet: but that is not aristocracy). Shelley grew up with a knowledge of hare‐hunting and fox‐hunting along with a love of pistol‐shooting, riding, sailing and billiards. His carelessness (or worse) in paying shopkeepers and tradespeople – including printers and publishers – remained all his life an indication of his class, however egalitarian he became (Byron described being slow to pay a debt as treating someone ‘like a tradesman’). People with the status of Shelley and Byron were, though, also very likely to be cheated by those they employed; tradespeople could never be certain when  –  or even if – they would be paid. On Lake Geneva in 1816, the man who hired out boats asked Shelley ‘as a favour’ not to tell Byron that he was paying ‘double’ for the boat he had hired.4 Shelley’s everyday behaviour was very different from what was expected by people unprepared for his extraordinary courtesy. His politeness and amiability were not only those of a sweet disposition but of his upbringing: a friend insisted that Shelley was almost the only example I have yet found, that was never wanting even in the most minute particular of the infinite & various observances of pure, entire, & perfect gentility.5

Such gentility, nonetheless, did not preclude the ferocious resolve which Shelley could also demonstrate; he regularly repeated lines from the third Canto of Childe Harold, ‘But there are wanderers o’er Eternity, / Whose bark drives on and on’ and sometime between 1821 and 1822 noted down ‘Ever press onward onward’. Such quotations may add credence to the otherwise problematic recollections of Edward Trelawny (1792–1881): Shelley saying ‘I always go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped’, for example, another version being ‘with exquisite gentleness of manner he would always do, and do on the instant, what he resolved on’.6 Driving on and on, never being stopped, demonstrated the kind of determination which could easily strike others as class‐based arrogance, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his ‘exquisite gentleness of manner’. Although always insisting on his absolute difference from his father, he remained throughout his life, in attitude and outlook, one of the gentry (‘People of gentle birth and breeding; the class…immediately below the nobility’). It would be hard to find a friend of Shelley’s who did not observe this, many of them with just a little sharpness: people with his kind of background were not usually the friends of 4



  1792 –1810 

r­ adicals. Leigh Hunt and Shelley’s acerbic acquaintance Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781–1851) both found Shelley ‘very gentlemanly’,7 but it is easy to see how ­limiting a compliment that might be. John Joseph Stockdale (?1777–1847), who met him in the autumn of 1810 and published his second gothic novel, St Irvyne, ­encountered a ‘somewhat natural haughtiness of disposition’, while his friend the writer and lawyer Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) thought him ‘in the main, eminently patrician’. Hunt took it on himself to rescue Shelley from that charge, but had himself called Shelley ‘patrician‐looking’; and in 1820 we find the Hunts and others laughing together ‘at S’s little occasional aristocratical sallies’.8 Exactly the opposite reaction came from the editor and writer J. G. Lockhart (1794–1854) of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in his insistence that ‘Mr. Shelly, whatever his errors may have been, is a scholar, a gentleman, and a poet’: that was a way of ­distinguishing him from the radical Hunt and from Hunt’s reformist Sunday paper The Examiner, with its ‘sonnets from Johnny Keats’. Less qualified recognition came (as might be expected) from Byron, always on the lookout for the behaviour of ‘a Gemman’,9 recalling his association with Hunt over the latter’s paper The Liberal, and thinking Alas! poor Shelley!—how he would have laughed—had he lived, and how we used to laugh now & then—at various things—which are grave in the Suburbs.

That is, of importance to suburban people like the Hunts. But, for Byron, Shelley was very different, being as he was as perfect a Gentleman as ever crossed a drawing room;—when he liked—& where he liked.—10

Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli (1800–1873), an aristocrat herself, who knew Shelley in Italy 1821–1822, in old age also recalled his ‘refinement’ and remarked that ‘he would always have seemed the most perfect of gentlemen, one in a ­thousand’. Although declaring himself in 1811 ‘no aristocrat, or any crat at all’ – he believed ‘the canker of aristocracy’11 endemic – Shelley was upper‐class through and through.

In Britain’s past it had often been the landowning gentry who had felt the responsibility (which went with wealth) not only of assisting the poor but of m ­ aintaining the stability and promoting a conservative development of society. It was not an accident that, the eldest son of only recently entrenched gentry, Shelley grew up determined to help the world ‘step by step’ on its way into change. In 1819 he 5



  A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 

declared it his ‘hereditary duty’ to prompt ‘the welfare of the great circle of mankind’,12 it being incumbent upon people like him to change the world; they had been brought up to inherit power. He told Leigh Hunt in 1816 that ‘I am undecived in the belief that I have powers deeply to interest, or substantially to improve, mankind.’13 This can be seen in his response when he found, ill in the snow on the night of 19 December 1816, a woman who ‘The doctor said…would inevitably have ­perished, had she lain there only a short time longer.’ He helped the woman’s son get her to the nearest friendly house, the Hunts’ in Hampstead’s Vale of Health. But  Shelley not only played the good Samaritan. He also confronted  –  and denounced  –  a house‐owner who refused to take the woman in. Here, Hunt’s account must depend on memory, but Shelley said something like: ‘It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable) recollect what I tell you;—you will have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head.’ ‘God bless me, sir! Dear me, sir!’ exclaimed the frightened wretch, and fluttered into his mansion.14

Shelley had confronted the 50‐year‐old Thomas Sheppard (1766–1858), owner of Upper Bowling Green House, at the top of Heath Street, Hampstead, who eventually became MP for Frome. From the age of 19, Shelley’s poetry and prose writing had constantly stressed egalitarian change and the needs of the poor: he told a correspondent in July 1811 that the noble has to[o] much therefore he is wretched & wicked, the peasant has too ­little  –  Are not then the consequences the same from causes which nothing but equality can annihilate.

And yet, although ‘Equality is natural’, the real problem was how far such change was possible. Shelley did not, after all, insist on ‘the doctrine of the natural equality of man’: he believed that ‘The question is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicability: so far as it is practicable, it is desirable’.15 And it was only to some degree practicable. What was indisputable was the duty of charity: the upper‐class man should be ‘the friend of the unfriended poor’,16 the one to whose door the needy would come. Shelley’s active ‘noble generosity’17 went far further than the ‘certain generosity in trifles’ which a man like Coleridge thought the ‘most commonly received attribute’18 of the gentleman. Shelley’s life was filled with examples of his support for the needy, especially when he was settled in places which he had come to regard as his community, as in Tremadog and Marlow (see Chapters 7 and 17). Timothy 6



  1792 –1810 

Shelley on his estate in Sussex 20 years earlier had helped relieve suffering, distributing in 1795 ‘during the late inclement weather…forty stones of good beef, and a large quantity of pease soup; he also contributed liberally for the purchase of flour for the use of the poor’. And, every Christmas, he ‘used to give about 6lbs. beef and a plum pudding to about sixty or seventy families’. But his son also extended to others the responsible generosity of the good, farming landowner which for some years he expected to become (he declared himself neither ‘gentleman’ nor ‘poet’ but ‘farmer’ on his marriage certificate in 1811 and was negotiating to buy a farm in June 1814). He demonstrated the responsibility which Jane Austen identified as that of assuring ‘the poor of the best attention and relief ’.19 Shelley saw no contradiction in his own position as an upper‐class eldest son of gentry, declaring in 1817, in his ‘Proposal for Putting Reform to theVote throughout the Kingdom’, that I have an income of a thousand a year on which I support my wife and children in decent comfort and from which I satisfy certain large claims of general justice.20

That expenditure to meet the ‘large claims of general justice’ was incumbent on him. His financial aid for the philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836) would be an example: assistance not driven by his relationship with Godwin’s daughter Mary, but starting long before he met her.21 Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) had helped educate Shelley into the nature of the society in which he was growing up: ‘general justice’ meant that Godwin deserved support. Equally deserving was Thomas Love Peacock (whom Shelley got to know in 1813), with his ‘great learning, considerable taste’ and ‘understanding very quick and bright’  –  and almost no income: Peacock was impoverished gentry.22 For years, too, he had been attempting to survive as a poet, as well as to support his widowed mother, and in 1815 would start to write satirical, intellectual prose fictions. Shelley was prepared to award him ‘above £100 a year’, until Peacock got a job in 1819. At the start of December 1816, too, Shelley sent money – probably £50 – to Leigh Hunt and followed that up at the end of January 1818 with the magnificent sum of  £1,400; and in 1819 he started to subsidise the engineer Henry Reveley (1788–1875) in his project for a steamboat to ply along the Ligurian coast.23 It is not surprising to find a deep belief in responsibility in such a radical as Shelley; at times he could evince, as strongly as any old‐fashioned landowner might have done, a nostalgic regret for ‘the old aristocracy’, ‘men of pride and honour, sans peur et sans tache’ with ‘their dignity & chivalric disdain of shame or danger’, compared with the current upper and ruling classes, among whom he would have classed his father and Thomas Sheppard, and whom he judged ‘petty piddling slaves’.24 7



  A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 

From almost the start of his writing career, ‘slave’, that ‘favourite word’, had become significant in his vocabulary (it appears – as ‘slavery’ – in the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, his first major poem). It has been pointed out how ‘the real slaves of the early nineteenth century are almost never his concern’.25 The slavery which concerns and fascinates Shelley is not just humiliated submission to a superior or to historical oppression but the acceptance (in The Mask of Anarchy) that one is ‘a slave in soul’ (362:184). And that applies, too, to the slavery of belief: ‘kings, and priests, and slaves’ (430:128) are brought together in his ‘Ode to Liberty’, while ‘The priest, the slave, and the liberticide’ are side by side in Adonais (494:32). The slave and the tyrant (another favourite word, again starting in the Poetical Essay) may in theory be ‘foes’ but Shelley also knows them symbiotically dependent, ‘twin‐born’.26 One of his poems provoked by Ireland in 1812,‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’, produced ‘the tyrant, the coward, the slave’ (14:5) and, after first seeing Venice in 1818, Shelley commented: ‘But Venice which was once a tyrant, is now the next worse thing, a slave.’ Over and over his poetry points out ‘the slave and the tyrant’, ‘tyrants and slaves’, ‘Tyrant and slave’, ‘slave and tyrant’, ‘tyrant’s slave’:27 the ‘monarch‐slave’ of Queen Mab (79:IX.94) in 1813 is ‘the slave of slaves’ in ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’ (156:123) in 1818. Yet the vocabulary of tyrant and slave shows us, too, how insistent Shelley was on the struggle for freedom, and how both words displayed his conscious superiority over those whom he judged complicit in tyranny. For Shelley, the ‘slave’ was one who accepted the role, and such acceptance was only natural to an inferior: ‘to be a slave in soul’ meant holding ‘no strong control / Over your own wills’ but to be ‘All that others make of ye’ (362:184–187). ‘Slave’ is thus a word of the deepest pessimism: for how can slaves ever see their real situation, how can they escape the tyranny under which they live and upon which they depend? Can  poetry or essays or pamphlets, however stirring or violent, do anything to assist such people not be slaves, under a tyranny? The answer, for the young Shelley, was a resounding ‘yes’, even though he would condemn such optimism as ‘unreflecting enthusiasm’ just a few years later. But before he was 18 he had escaped what he saw as the tyranny of Christianity; during his 19th year he was rebelling against what he saw as his own father’s tyranny; by the time he was 19 he was promoting the destruction of the tyranny of monarchy.28 The rebellion against his father was the most predictable of all the young Shelley’s rebellions against tyranny, but also perhaps the most serious: more serious than either he or his father at first realised. Within six months it had led not just to Shelley’s loss of his home and his beloved family, but to a determination on the part of both men to continue actively to resist the tyranny of the other’s demands (Shelley’s, to conform to his father’s demands that he abandon his beliefs and ignore the demands of his conscience: Timothy Shelley’s, to resist and where possible to inhibit the godless, irresponsible and unprincipled behaviour of his son and heir). 8



  1792 –1810 

The effect on Shelley was to isolate him; it seems likely that, without this quarrel, he would never have embarked on his first marriage.

Even though deeply in sympathy with ordinary people, Shelley could never help revealing his habit of observation de haut en bas. In 1811, he remarked ‘I know I am superior to the mob of mankind’; in 1812, he described the poor of Dublin as ‘one mass of animated filth!’; in 1817, he referred in passing to ‘the herd of mankind’, in 1822 to the ‘apes of humanity’.29 It would be impossible to imagine Hunt, or John Keats (1795–1821), or even the young Wordsworth (1770–1850) ever using such phrases. In 1818 he would denounce ‘that pig the public’ and ‘its cherished mud’; in 1819 he wrote about ‘those herds whom tyranny makes tame’; in 1821 he wrote of his poem Epipsychidion that ‘it would give me no pleasure that the vulgar should read it’; and in his 1821 poem Adonais he dismisses with what has been termed ‘aristocratic hauteur’ the ‘trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given’.30 Shelley’s unthinking superiority would have been brought forcibly home to him in July 1811 when, living with cousins at Cwm Elan near Rhayader in mid‐Wales, he overheard an old beggar at the door asking for food ‘for Charitys dear sake’. Shelley ran downstairs ‘and gave him something’, but – when the man left – Shelley went after him and attempted to engage him in conversation: I followed him a mile asking a thousand questions; at length I quitted him finding by this remarkable observation that perseverance was useless. ‘I see by your dress that you are a rich man − they have injured me & mine a million times.You appear to be well intentioned but I have no security of it while you live in such a house as that, or wear such clothes as those. It wd. be charity to quit me.’31

For once, someone resisted Shelley’s attempts to discuss with them why they were as they were, and pointed out that – gentleman as he was − he was irreversibly different, and therefore not to be trusted. Keats had exactly the same reaction. He ‘did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him’, being prone ‘to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy’.32 Shelley, even Hunt agreed, possessed ‘some of the ordinary pretensions to rank himself ’, his conversation (the lawyer and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson thought in 1817) being ‘arrogant and intolerant’; he was characterised at all times by what Hogg called ‘conspicuously…gentlemanlike dispositions’, the word ‘­ conspicuously’ suggesting why middle‐ and lower‐middle‐class acquaintances reacted against him as they did.33 His gentlemanliness had, too, consequences other than politeness, responsibility and wilfulness. His first negotiations with publishers in 1809, when he was only 16, 9



  A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 

demonstrated his instinctive response to trade: his letters’ valedictions (e.g. ‘your obedient / Hmle Sert’) evinced a traditional, perfectly styled formality, but when he offered to ‘defray the needless expence I might have put you to’ − ‘in case I have troubled you in vain’34 − it was not because he sympathised with them or their financial problems. It was because gentlemen do not allow themselves to be indebted to tradespeople. One of his very last letters to a publisher demonstrates a devastating, perfectly controlled contempt: Should you pay the same attention to my present letter as its late predecessors have received from you, you will scarcely think it extraordinary that this should be the last time I intend to trouble you. Dear Sir, I have the honour to be,Your obedient humble srt., Percy B. Shelley.35

It is impossible to imagine any of his literary contemporaries – with the exception of Byron – writing in just that way. The way that he went on printing books at his own expense and advertising them himself demonstrates the same attitude. He allowed publishers to publish him; he was not beholden to them. Byron  –  a real aristocrat  –  had for years actually refused to accept money for his work, writing as he said ‘from the fullness of my mind – and the love of fame’, and explaining his desire for fame as ‘not as an end but as a means to obtain that influence over men’s minds  –  which is power in itself ’.36 (That was exactly the power which Shelley hoped for but never achieved in his lifetime.) It was only when, at the age of 28, Byron was assured that his publisher was making a very great deal of money out of him that he agreed to accept payment  –  and that only after Shelley, together with Byron’s banker Douglas Kinnaird (1788–1830), had taken the third Canto of Childe Harold to its publisher, John Murray (1778–1843), in September 1816. It seems, in fact, possible that it was Shelley who persuaded Byron to allow himself to be paid for his writing, although for both of them a publisher remained someone to whom they gave the opportunity to publish their work, not a person with whom they bargained. This can be seen in the beautifully ironical tone Shelley employed to Byron in describing Murray’s behaviour at the September 1816 meeting: You have heard from Kinnaird the arrangement which has been made about Childe Harold.You are to receive 2000 g[uinea]s. There was no objection made on Murrays, tho, there was a trifling mistake arising from his believing that he could get it for 1200 which was no sooner made than obviated.37

Murray was given no chance to object or bargain: his forlorn attempt to get the poem cheap ‘no sooner made’ than countermanded.

10



  1792 –1810 

Shelley – not only when young – behaved, too, with the kinds of carelessness which upper‐class life permitted. Even the open‐necked shirt he habitually wore, which both Curran and Williams included in their portraits – men customarily wore some form of cravat or neck‐cloth – was an example of the eccentric casual freedom of the upper‐class man who needs show off no credentials besides good manners (‘Italians used to stare but not say anything’). Claire Clairmont refused to be fetched by him at night from her lodgings in Pisa because Shelley ‘looks so singular in the streets’, in ‘a long grey coat a sort of dressing gown coming down to his heels’.38 Restriction, like slavish compulsion or convention, was something he refused to tolerate: and the same applied to the restrictions necessitated by a lack of money. When he wanted to do something, he did it, no matter how imprudent it might have been financially. In late March 1813 he was in an exceptionally distressed state (all his bills of exchange were being returned ‘protested’): ‘I know not what to do.’39 But from mid‐May to mid‐July 1813, he and his first wife (and her sister) were living in superior lodgings in London, and Shelley commissioned the building of a carriage. Again, in January 1822, in spite of being extraordinarily hard‐up, he had a boat specially built. In the words of his 1816 solicitors, he was certain that one day all would be paid for  –  ‘as soon as Mr. Shelley…gets into Cash’.40

11

2 ‘Bit’ 1796 –1811

For an intimate account of Shelley’s young life, it is tempting to do what Hogg did in 1858 and print verbatim the letters which Shelley’s younger sister Hellen (1799–1885) started to write late in 1856, recounting what she could recall of her brother. They provide only a few details of him when he was really small, but Hellen must have got these from their mother Elizabeth (1763–1846): ‘As a child, I have heard that his skin was like snow, and bright ringlets covered his head. He was, I have heard, a beautiful boy.’ His eldest sister – also Elizabeth – was born in 1794, and his third sister Margaret in 1801 (two other sisters died when young); his brother John was born in 1806.1 A letter from Shelley’s mother survives which describes how her ‘dear little’ boy (known as ‘Happy P’, aged around four), observing a bulge in a newly arrived visitor’s pocket, attempted to pull out the contents before recollecting himself and shaking the visitor’s hand; for this he was rewarded by the visitor taking out ‘his fine toothpick case and watch to please him’. He also demonstrated his manners in politely asking after his ‘Aunt Woodward’ (the recipient of his mother’s letter). For a four‐year‐old, he sounds irresistible, and his mother ­happily passes on another doting anecdote: Bysshe eats a partridge every other day, you never saw a fellow enjoy anything more than he does boiled partridge and bread sauce.2

When George Romney went to paint her in 1795, he produced a tiny preliminary sketch beautifully suggesting her energy and style (see Figure 2). A portrait of

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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  1796 –1811 

Figure  2  Elizabeth Shelley [‘Mrs Shelley (So‐called)’], graphite drawing with pen and brown ink (c.1795) by George Romney (Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr and Mrs J. Richardson Dilworth, B.A. 1938)

Shelley as a 10‐ or 12‐year‐old helps suggest how he turned into an adult ­(arching eye‐brows, a straight nose, a rosebud upper lip, a rounded chin; see Figure 3). The nature of his attachment to his mother is one of the areas of his life we cannot illuminate. Almost nothing survives. We can gain an idea of how close he was to her when, at the age of 10 or 11, he wrote to her about a boy at school for whom ‘I first experienced the sacred sentiment of friendship’, and whom he kissed every night before going to bed: I remember in my simplicity writing to my mother a long account of his admirable qualities & my own devoted attachment. I suppose she thought me out of my wits, for she returned no answer to my letter.3

It is equally likely that she did not know what to say, wishing neither to warn him against such feelings nor to encourage them. When he published his poems 13



  ‘Bit’  

Figure 3  Percy Bysshe Shelley, tinted drawing (?1802–1804) by Antoine‐Philippe, Duc de Montpensier (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelley Relics 7)

Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson in Oxford, at the age of 18, he wished to ensure that the copy sent to her lacked anything explicitly sexual.4 He was tutored at home up to the age of 10, though we can exempt his tutor the Rev. Evan Edwards5 from any responsibility for his later intellectual directions; he was then educated at Syon House Academy, Brentford  –  a boarding school where ‘The lady of the house…was, or was said to be, connected with the Duke of Argyle.’6 There were between 50 and 60 pupils; the school was run by a more than respectable family (Dr Greenlaw, his wife and his sister‐in‐law).We know very little that is reliable about Shelley’s time there; practically our only source is his second cousin Thomas Medwin (1788–1869), who was four years older than Shelley, only briefly at the school at the same time, and whose memoirs are mostly designed to show, nevertheless, how very well he knew Shelley.There may, all the same, be some truth in Medwin’s recollection of the scientist (as we would now call him) Alexander 14



  1796 –1811 

Walker coming to the school, lecturing on Astronomy and demonstrating his solar microscope. Shelley himself acquired just such a microscope,7 and his passion for astronomy and chemistry – for understanding the Earth’s place in the universe, and investigating the real nature of substance – probably started at Syon House. As a child with a ‘singularly retentive’ memory, too, he could recite ‘Gray’s lines on the Cat and the Gold Fish…word for word, after once reading’,8 and such a power of recollection also quickly became linked with an appetite for words, a joy in employing them, and a power over them. He had written poetry from boyhood, too, and before he reached the age of 18 had completed not only numerous lyrics but a poem more than 450 lines long. Why did he write? ‘Poetry was the rage of the day, and I racked my imagination to be a poet’9 was what, late in his long life, Trelawny recalled Shelley saying in 1822: he had probably said something like that.

At the age of 12, in 1804, he was sent to Eton – according to Medwin, again, ‘the most aristocratic’10 of the English public schools − and remained there until he was 18. It was another world after Syon House: there were more than 500 pupils. Again, most of the anecdotal testimony of Shelley’s time there is likely to be unreliable, being assembled in the 1860s and 1870s and in some cases recalled to prove how ‘mad Shelley’ ‘went wrong’.11 But Mary Shelley remembered in 1823 how ‘our Shelley’ would ‘relate the story of stabbing an Upper Boy with a fork…He always described it in my hearing as being an almost involuntary act, done on the spur of anguish, and that he made the stab as the boy was going out of the room.’12 Mary Shelley’s accounts, including reminiscences of Shelley’s time at Eton, are now perhaps the nearest we can get to an overview from Shelley himself. His ‘anguish’ before the stabbing may well have been connected with his refusal to fag13 for the boy to whom he had been assigned. Mary Shelley recalled what Shelley had told her: On being placed at Eton S–– had to undergo aggravated miseries from his systematic & determined resistance to that law of a public school denominated fagging. It…is detrimental to the disposition both of the elder & the younger boys: the one that they should capriciously command; the other that they should slavishly & fearfully obey. S.  would never obey  –  and this incapacity of his part was the cause of whatever ­persecutions might attend him both at school & in his future life.14

He did not refuse to fag because of his social status: many boys at the school would have been more aristocratic than he. It was his own untouchable freedom which he was determined to protect. He must have had a very rough time, especially during his first two years at the school, when he would have been exposed to those 15



  ‘Bit’  

who had him as a fag as well as to other older boys; he wrote, later, ‘I feared not those who ruled, nor did I hate / Mine equals, but was lone, untameable / Like some wild beast that cannot find a its mate.’15 An account originating with Mary relates to his school career a few years later, when he was doing very little work: ‘At the very time that he neglected the rules of school attendance he translated half of Plinys natural history into English.’16 He confirmed how, at Eton, he ‘pored over the reveries of Albertus Magnus, & Paracelsus, the former of which I read in Latin & probably gained more knowledge of that language from that source, than from all the discipline of Eton’; ‘The knowledge which I have…has been acquired by my unassisted efforts’,17 he told Godwin in 1812. Mary most usefully supplied, too, an account of Shelley’s gratitude to Dr James Lind, physician to Eton College, of whom he declared: ‘I owe that man far – oh! far more than I owe my father – he loved me & I shall never forget our long talks where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance & the purest wisdom.’18 Shelley’s creation in Laon and Cythna of an old man dedicated to healing the physically and mentally tormented may be traceable back to Dr Lind. At least later on in his school career, Shelley acquired a sympathetic circle of friends: something confirmed by the number of books presented to him by other boys, which ‘attested that Shelley had been popular among his schoolfellows’ and was by no means simply the ‘mad Shelley’ whom others later enjoyed characterising, though he was certainly called that.19 There is also evidence of how happily he could be part of a group of other boys. He wrote in 1821 how, at a time fairly late in his school career, out ‘in summer after six’, he and his ­companions would take with them ‘bottles of cold tea’ crammed ‘in great coat pockets’, having too Hard eggs & radishes and rolls,—at Eton; And couched on stolen hay, in those green harbours Farmers called gaps, and schoolboys [called] arbours Would feast till eight, and with that sweeten One light [restraint] which is not an oppression But just enough to savour the transgression.—20 Eton had a roll‐call at 7.00 p.m.; transgressors, out until 8 or later, accepted the ‘light’ punishment they inevitably came in for. The recollection was, for once, directly autobiographical: he was sharing experiences with his friend Edward Williams, his contemporary at Eton. In a letter to Godwin in 1812, Shelley wrote that he had twice been expelled from school, but that he had been ‘recalled by the interference of my Father’: by 1812 he would have preferred the distinction of having been expelled. His account has been disbelieved,21 but Eton might well have expelled him for stabbing his 16



  1796 –1811 

enemy with the fork, relatively early on in his time there (with Timothy Shelley as concerned not to have his son expelled from Eton as he was, later, not to have him expelled from Oxford). It seems possible that Shelley was responsible for setting an old tree on fire while experimenting with a burning glass, at Eton;22 what would have been taken rather more seriously was the fact that, as Shelley pointed out in 1812, ‘No sooner had I formed the principles which I now profess, than I was ­anxious to disseminate their benefits. This was done without the slightest caution.’ Having become ‘an enthusiastic Deist’,23 his attempts to convince other Etonians that Christ was not God might well have led to a threat of expulsion, to which Timothy Shelley apparently responded with an attempt to ‘withdraw me from College’ on the pretext that Shelley was suffering from ‘a fever’ which had attacked his brain. But Shelley resisted (‘I would not consent to it’) and Dr Lind apparently came to the rescue, as a medical doctor could, so that Shelley was neither expelled nor withdrawn.24 There is naturally a problem with accepting poetry (drafted, crossed‐out and  finally published in 1817) as factually true about Shelley’s time at Eton. In  an  account of a school experience, the poem’s narrator manages to remain ‘undefiled / By awe or by submission’:25 being impressed by bullies being as bad as accepting what they are doing. But his reaction keeps him solitary:‘I feared or hated none. but wept to find / That none did love me…/ Mine equals shunned a boy so sad & wild.’ Such isolation, notwithstanding, leads the narrator to a discovery that stays with him all his life: I remember well the day & hour One amongst many of lone wanderings When Truth first came upon me26 He dates it to ‘a fresh May‐dawn’ when  –  outdoors  –  he hears ‘From the near school‐room, voices, that, alas! / Were but one echo from a world of woes— / The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes’ (meaning masters and pupils). And thus – in this founding myth of what makes the narrator himself – comes the dedicatory moment, when he says to himself ‘I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannise Without reproach or check.’ (148–149:22,25–27,31–35) These experiences have been accepted as Shelley’s own ‘recollections of his adverse experiences as a schoolboy’.27 17



  ‘Bit’  

And yet he offered them as the reason why the narrator of his poem Laon and Cythna should have written an exemplary account of tyrants; and Shelley wrote more than one account of his dedication to the powers who, in the words of his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘wouldst free / This world from its dark slavery’ (138–139:69–70). He identified not only a May‐morning moment at school but Godwin and his Political Justice as the experience which dedicated him to political struggle. Another version, from 1812, simply identified ‘early life’ as the time, probably between late 1809 and the autumn of 1810, when he was 17 or 18, and Godwin’s book was undoubtedly an influence; it would have helped him think unacceptable things28 and would have supported his wide‐ranging attack on the Christian religion. But the moment of his dedication is unknowable, in spite of the poetry.

In the late 1850s, his sister Hellen provided first‐hand testimonies of ‘Bit’ (one of his siblings’ attempts to say ‘Bysshe’) at home from Eton in the holidays. She insisted more than once that she barely saw her brother after he went to Oxford at the age of 18, and she refused to give any account of his later life because she knew it only ‘as I have been told it’.29 Her letters on the other hand stress how, as a teenager at home in the family mansion Field Place, Shelley had been full of imaginative (including scientific) ideas: he had, for instance, the idea of acquiring a child to educate, to try an alternative education to the one to which he had himself been obliged to follow. He ‘often talked seriously of purchasing a little girl for that purpose’.30 It was characteristic of his social position that he imagined it within his power to do such a thing.What stopped him was the practical consideration that he could not pay for her board and lodging. He was, according to Hellen, also fascinated by telling stories which both scared and amused his siblings: The tales, to which we have sat and listened, evening after evening, seated on his knee, when we came to the dining‐room for dessert, were anticipated with that pleasing dread, which so excites the minds of children, and fastens so strongly and indelibly on the memory. There was a spacious garret under the roof of Field Place, and a room, which had been closed for years, excepting an entrance made by the removal of a board in the garret‐floor. This unknown land was made the fancied habitation of an Alchemist, old and grey, with a long beard. Books and a lamp, with all the attributes of a picturesque fancy, were poured into our listening ears.We were to go and see him “some day;” but we were content to wait, and a cave was to be dug in the orchard for the better accommodation of this Cornelius Agrippa.31

Shelley entranced his siblings with such fantasies; he also placed them hand‐in‐ hand round the nursery table to be electrified (Hellen hated this) by one of his 18

  1796 –1811 



devices.32 He was the most exciting, charming, though  –  at times  –  scary elder brother, and Hellen and her sisters adored him: ‘He was full of cheerful fun, and had all the comic vein so agreeable in a household.’That was not something they would often have experienced with their father. But Shelley’s ‘good temper was a pleasant memory always, and I do not recollect an instance of the reverse towards any of us’.33 Hellen’s younger sister Margaret, too, never forgot her loving elder brother: in her late fifties she remembered an occasion around 1806, when Shelley was 14 and at Eton, when he ‘came home in the midst of the half‐year to be nursed’: and when he was allowed to leave the house, he came to the dining‐room window, and kissed her through the pane of glass. She remembers his face there, with nose and lips pressed against the window, and at that time she must have been about five years old.34

He played with all of them: My younger brother, John, was a child in petticoats [around 1808, when John was two and Shelley was sixteen], when I remember Bysshe playing with him under the fir‐trees on the lawn, pushing him gently down to let him rise and beg for a succession of such falls, rolling with laughing glee on the grass…35

Given how profoundly scholarly and intellectual he was, it is striking how ­playful Shelley remained, all his life. Paper boats were a speciality: Medwin describes him sailing them on the Serpentine river in London when he was 19, delighted with floating down the wind, paper boats, in the constructing of which, habit had given him a wonderful skill…when one escaped the dangers of the winds and waves, and reached in safety the opposite shore, he would run round to hail the safe termination of its voyage.36

Shelley himself recalled another occasion of play from the same period: The wind is high & I have been With little Jack upon the green A dear delightful red faced brute, And setting up a parachute…37 The fact that the parachute needed ‘setting up’ suggests something more sophisticated than a handkerchief (with a suspended weight) being thrown as high as ­possible. Shelley also encouraged his young brother John to talk: ‘His great delight was to teach his infant brother schoolboy words, and his first attempt at his knowledge of the devil, was an innocent ‘Debbee!”38 19



  ‘Bit’  

Hellen recalled her elder brother as he had looked in 1811, following the great row with his father following his exclusion from Oxford, ‘when he came by stealth to Field Place’: ‘His forehead was white, the eyes deep blue’ (later, he was said to look ‘stag‐eyed – as indicating the fixed, full, unblinking gaze which characterized him’). She also recalled that he ‘had an eccentric quantity of hair, in those days… and [his sister] Elizabeth, on one occasion, made him sit down to have it cut, and be made to look like a Christian.’ By early 1811, his mother believed her son not just ‘in the High Road to Pandemonium’ but dangerous because ‘she fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters’; his father had forbidden him the house because Shelley had questioned the existence of Christ and the younger ­children might have been endangered.39 But at least he could be made to look like a Christian.

20

3 Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 1810 –1811

Shelley’s first poetry can probably be dated to when he was about 14, but very little of what he wrote as a boy survives; a poem with ‘February 28th 1806’ in its title may have been drafted then.1 But from his teens, writing fascinated him. By the age of 17, when he was still at Eton, he was a prolific writer: by the time he went up to Oxford in October 1810, when he was 18, he was in many ways an accomplished writer too. Hellen recalled how, at some point, he sent verses to his eldest sisters at school, illustrating something unfavourable to a French teacher, who was accused of being fond of those pupils, who could supply her with fruit and cakes. I believe it was clever, for the sisters were proud enough of it to be imprudent, and by some means it became known to Madame, and I can just remember the commotion it made and the ‘very bold boy our broder must be.’2

His novel Zastrozzi had been published while he was still at Eton and in ­celebration  –  according to one who was there  –  he ‘gave the most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends’.3 Between the winter of 1809–1810 and April 1810, too, he produced the first draft of a long, rhyming poem, ‘The Wandering Jew’: four cantos and 1456 lines survive from the final draft of 1811, complete with epigraphs from Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Macbeth and Aeschylus in Greek: Leigh Hunt, encountering Shelley in May 1811, found him ‘quoting the Greek dramatists’.4 He also insisted that his sisters should write. He gave Hellen subjects for short poems: she recalled how ‘one line about “an old woman in her bony gown,” The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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(even the rhyme to which line I forget), elicited the praise for which I wrote’. She came up with the couplet ‘There was an old woman, as I have heard say, / Who worked metamorphoses every day’, and still remembered it in her sixties because her brother had ‘expressed so much astonishment at my knowledge of the word metamorphoses’5 (he would have been delighted to find her so fascinated by ­language). And  –  this was where his money allowed him to do exactly what he wanted – he actually got a collection of her poems into print when she cannot have been more than 10 years old.When, however, ‘I saw my name in the title‐page “H―ll―n Sh―ll―y,” I felt much more frightened than pleased’, and as soon as the little book was discovered (by her governess or her mother), ‘it was bought up and destroyed’.6 It was Shelley’s first piece of banned entrepreneurship. Shelley was still closer to his sister Elizabeth, less than two years younger than him: someone seeing them together in 1814 thought their resemblance ‘as striking as if they had been twins’. With Elizabeth, Shelley ‘wrote a play secretly’, probably in the school holidays, and sent it to the well‐known actor Charles Mathews (1776–1835); but Mathews ‘after a time, returned it, with the opinion, that it would not do for acting’.7 Shelley was undeterred; we find him in the autumn of 1810 asking for help in getting ‘a tragedy’ into the hands of the right people at the Lyceum and Covent Garden theatres, and of wanting to follow it with a ‘farce which my friend is composing’, the friend being Elizabeth. With his usual combination of energy and optimism, Shelley also wrote to a composer asking him about writing ‘an overture for a farce’.8 He could not find anyone to take on ‘The Wandering Jew’; not put off, he again disguised Elizabeth as ‘my friend’ and, in the summer of 1810, they compiled a book of poems, eleven by Shelley and five by Elizabeth, plus one other. Shelley was the more competent (and ambitious) poet, and his sister’s lines record his reaction to her writing: ‘a jeering look, taunt, or an O fie! tush!’9 But Shelley arranged for a local printer to print 1500 copies of the book – a hugely ambitious print‐run. The bill submitted by the printer  –  the Phillips family of Horsham and Worthing – came to £75, because the print‐run had been so large, though there may also have been an adjustment for an upper‐class customer. It was probably the size of the bill (in September the Phillips family were staved off with a promissory note dated 15 December 1810) which caused Shelley to try and have the book sold in London; at the start of September he persuaded the London bookseller Joseph Stockdale to accept the printed sheets, under the title Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire.10 It was a notably cheeky title, as the 17th (and by far the longest) poem in the collection had been taken from another book, an anonymous 1801 publication, Tales of Terror. The poem was by a famous exponent of the gothic, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis (1775–1818); according to Hellen, for Shelley even ‘at an early age’, ‘Monk Lewis’s Poems had a great attraction.’11 And he and his sister had taken some pains 22



  1810 –1811 

to improve what they had stolen: an artless line in the original, ‘His body it shook with fear’, became ‘And his frame was convulsed with fear’, while a notably ­awkward line  –  ‘The Black Canon her blood relentless spilt’ − was modified to ‘Her blood by the ruthless black Canon was spilt.’12 The Phillipses did not notice the plagiarism, and nor did Stockdale until copies of the slim book were being sold (he was charging 4 s. a copy, in boards). When Stockdale noticed, or was told, he withdrew the book – and only four copies today survive. Why had Shelley and his sister included Lewis’s poem? One answer would be ‘to bulk out the collection to a reasonable length’. But Shelley’s facility, even at such an early age, meant that he could certainly have produced more material if he had wanted to; he also had items like his ‘February 28th 1806’ poem to hand, as well as ‘The Wandering Jew’ (then in the hands of the Scottish publisher Ballantyne), and quite possibly versions of the poems he would publish in November 1810. Observing that the 1801 Tales of Terror collection had been anonymous, he and Elizabeth might well have concluded that the poem was fair game; while Shelley may also have been demonstrating that his gothic style was so accomplished (he was, after all, ‘Victor’ on the title‐page) that no‐one would imagine that one of the poems was by Lewis. But after his initial success in getting the book accepted, he found himself faced with both an unpayable printer’s bill and a disgruntled ­publisher. Who eventually paid the printer, we do not know, but the publisher Stockdale – attempting doubtless to make up for his loss on Original Poetry – took on Shelley’s novel St. Irvyne.

Why was Shelley writing gothic novels and poetry? They were the rage of the age: as a teenager he was ‘haunted with a passion for the wildest and most extravagant romances’, and he had soaked himself in those published by William Lane in his Minerva Press series of blue‐bound volumes. Shelley was also reportedly ‘­enraptured’ by Charlotte Dacre’s three‐volume romance gothic novel Zofloya: Or, The Moor,13 and we know from Hellen Shelley that, even ‘at an early age’, her brother had enjoyed ‘any tale of spirits, fiends, &c’.: she and her sisters ‘dressed ourselves in strange costumes to personate spirits, or fiends’14 when playing with him, while he added fire and flames to the sport. While at Eton, following a formula he had read up in a book, he had attempted to raise a ghost one night. Carrying a skull, and ignoring a weird rustling in the long grass as he went along, he had made his way to a small stream, ‘stood with one foot on either side of it, and repeated an incantation and drank thrice from the skull, but no ghost appeared’.15 He blamed the wording of the incantation. His almost overpowering fascination with the occult, combined with a characteristic determination to sort things out for himself, are especially striking. 23



  Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 

The gothic offered him an opportunity, as a teenager, to write with linguistic extravagance, just as the girls’ costumes encouraged wildness and his own exploits at night had taken him as far as he could manage into horrors. But another advantage of the gothic genre, for a young man deeply suspicious of orthodox religion, was that it allowed him to describe wicked ecclesiastics, as well as spirits and supernatural events, without ever needing to set such things in a Christian context – except, perhaps, right at the end of the narrative, when his characters could summarily be dispatched to hell or heaven. Most of the time, the world of the gothic was one of exciting wickedness, misused power and authority, and extravagant sexual desires, where neither the restraints nor the conventions of religion operated.The imagination is encouraged to run wild in an essentially amoral world. With the kind of facility that characterised almost all his work, not just when he was young, Shelley produced his own two novels. For those not especially passionate about late eighteenth‐century manifestations of the gothic, the main interest today of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, as it is of Shelley’s gothic poetry (the title ‘Ghasta: Or, the Avenging Demon!!!’ shows what is to be expected), is for the way they reveal how much Shelley had read when young, and how fascinated he was by exotic transgression: it was not an accident that Claire Clairmont would later christen him ‘the Exotic’ – an appellation he seems to have accepted.16 It has been suggested that the two (shortish) novels are parodies of the gothic, and at times that  may be true; but Shelley does not care if he is parodying or ironising or ­participating. What comes over is his relish in the language, the subjects and the plot devices.17 The same is true of ‘Ghasta’ and ‘The Wandering Jew.’ There is an element of showing off in Shelley’s constant demonstration of how well he knows the form in which he is writing. He is positioning himself as an already accomplished writer, utterly conversant with his predecessors, when he starts ‘Ghasta’ with ‘Hark! the owlet flaps her wing, / In the pathless dell beneath’ (Thomas Chatterton having already written ‘Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge, / In the briered delle belowe’). St. Irvyne, too, offers ‘Hark! what shriek broke upon the enthusiastic silence of twilight?…‘Tis fled, but not for ever’ while Lewis’s The Monk reads ‘Hark! ’twas the shriek of your better angel: he flies, and leaves you for ever!’18 Shelley is indifferent as to whether he is quoting, remembering, surrendering to his sources’ influence, adapting, stealing or parodying. It is simply tremendous fun; but to be fun it needs to be taken seriously. The same was true of the ‘wild energy’ with which Mary Shelley remembered him, only a few years later, reciting both Coleridge’s ‘Ancyent Marinere’ and Robert Southey’s gothic ballad ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’,19 with its cast of terrified priests and choristers, and the final manifestation of the devil himself. Shelley’s gothic vocabulary is filled with coinages, near‐coinages and startling usages. The writer John Taaffe (?1787–1862), who met him late in 1820, never 24



  1810 –1811 

forgot how Shelley ‘knew English better than any person I ever met’; he had begun to develop his huge vocabulary when young, his memory being ‘so tenacious that he never forgot a word once turned up in his dictionary’.20 And vocabulary is, like everything else, on display in his novels: a characteristic sentence from Zastrozzi runs ‘A frigorific torpidity of despair chilled every sense.’ Although it has been suggested that Shelley was employing a seventeenth‐century archaism, ‘frigorific’ was in regular use in the eighteenth century, both in scientific contexts such as an 1800 Catalogue of Chemical Apparatus by R. and G. Knight – the kind of publication with which Shelley might well have been familiar – and in romance fiction: ‘a frigorifick torpor encroaches upon my veins’, for example, or ‘that frigorific head of casuistry’.21 Although the word was not rare, it certainly drew attention to itself and (in  Shelley’s case) to its author’s liking for it: the November 1810 reviewer of Zastrozzi for The Critical Review and Annals of Literature seized on the word as ‘­nonsensical and stupid jargon’. Shelley nevertheless included it yet again in the ‘Errata’ to his Poetical Essay to replace ‘frightful’, which his printers had apparently substituted.22 The reviewer of Zastrozzi also picked up on the word ‘scintillating’ – common enough today but used for the first time only in 1775 – as ‘a favorite word with the author’: ‘A scintillating flame darted from the cieling to the floor’, ‘Her eyes scintillated.’ It also gets into ‘The Wandering Jew’: ‘from which bright scintillations flew’.23 It may be evidence that Shelley had read Erasmus Darwin’s Botanical Garden, with its couplet ‘Cold from each point cerulean lustres gleam, / Or shoot in air the s­cintillating stream.’ The word had, all the same, regularly been used in romance: ‘the scintillating stars no longer glittered in the azure vault of heaven’.24 In his novel St. Irvyne Shelley became the first person ever to use the word ‘inerasible’ in print – ‘That cannot be erased, expunged, or effaced’ – and his reviewer in The British Critic lambasted it as one ‘which no dictionary explains’. It was a coinage of which Shelley appears to have been proud: he not only used it as an adverb in St. Irvyne (‘What man of honour needs a moment’s rumination to discover what nature has so inerasibly implanted in his bosom’) but as an adjective to his friend Hogg in 1811: ‘Nor do I think her Xtianity of the most inerasible nature.’25 And, coming up against the word ‘suscitated’ in the typically extravagant sentence ‘Wildered by the suscitated energies of his soul almost to madness’, at the end of St. Irvyne, most readers will hope that it relates to ‘resuscitated’ (it does) and pass on. How did Shelley know the word? The last person previously to use it had apparently been Sir Thomas Browne in 1646: ‘the Sunne…onely suscitates those formes, whose determinations are seminall’.26 Shelley had read Browne and might have noted it, but he was certainly capable of inventing a cod scientific word himself.

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  Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 

Hogg would complain about the ‘Fine flowery language’ of Shelley’s early writing and Shelley himself, considering the ‘faults of youthful composition’ a few years later, would have been the first to agree about his need to avoid ‘diffuseness, a profusion of inapplicable imagery, vagueness, generality, & as Hamlet says words – words’.27 There are, for sure, a lot of words in his early poetry. Overwriting shows itself in packed confusions like ‘early I had learned to scorn / The chains of clay that bound a soul / Panting to seize the wings of morn’ (20:71–73) in his poem ‘The Retrospect.’ Seizing wings is never to be recommended and ‘chains of clay’ are sadly ambiguous, though (later in his writing career) Shelley could show exactly what control he exerted over the outrageous, tongue‐twistingly pleasurable in a poem fragment starting ‘Sucking hydras hashed in sulphur’, or when he set down the word ‘hyperequatorial’ (449:42) at the start of ‘The Witch of Atlas.’ The early poetry exhibits perhaps less verbal invention than the prose (although there are words like ‘enscrolled’ in ‘Henry and Louisa’ and ‘basiliskine’28 in ‘The Wandering Jew’), but its descriptions can be just as violent and peculiar. When we hear of the Wandering Jew that ‘His burning fillet blazed with blood’, ‘fillet’ seems an archaism for head‐ band (later in the poem ‘a fillet grey’ is used to hide the ‘burning cross’ on his ­forehead). But ‘the fillet of his brow / Fierce as a fiery furnace glow’ turns out to be a real gouge; the brow actually filleted.29 The violence is even more extravagant in a poem Shelley wrote between 1811 and 1813, ‘Zeinab and Kathema.’ Kathema (transported from Kashmir to England, and horrified by ‘England’s varied woe’ and ‘the flood of crime that round his steps did flow’) realises, from the ‘deathy smell’ around him, that the woman he loves, Zeinab, has been gibbeted: ‘her shapeless visage shone / In the unsteady light, half‐ mouldered thro’ the bone.’30 Mad with loss, he scales the gibbet, observing her eye‐sockets filled with ‘full‐fed worms’ and her neck ‘changed by putrefaction’s blight’. He wraps the hanging chains around his own neck and leaps from the ­gibbet, to become its second victim. The poem has been developing an attack on a supposedly Christian land wracked by ‘Famine, disease and crime’, in which Zeinab has been driven to ‘prostitution, crime and woe’, to be executed for rebelling against ‘A universe of horror and decay, / Gibbets, disease, and wars and hearts as hard as they’: things sanctioned by ‘God, unjust and pityless.’ But the gothic excesses are even more striking than the attack on religion. In the words of St. Irvyne, Shelley is concerned with ‘The wild retrospection of ideal horror.’31 Horror is ‘ideal’: it is a literary resource.

Excess in Shelley’s early poetry goes together with technical experiment. His  command of poetic forms would eventually provoke praise even from Wordsworth (opposed to almost everything which Shelley valued, especially in the 26



  1810 –1811 

conventionality of his later life): Wordsworth’s nephew Christopher recalled him saying that ‘Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.’32 For example: Shelley’s third planned collection of poems, 51 in number and contained in what is now known as the ‘Esdaile Notebook’, put together in 1813 when he was 20, exhibits an astonishing range of (and skill with) metrical forms. There are sonnets, poems in blank verse, unrhymed or irregularly rhymed poems, and poems in rhymed quatrains; Shelley is also experimenting with Spenserian stanzas and producing poems (it has been calculated) ‘in no less than sixteen other rhymed stanzaic patterns of from six to twelve lines’. His experimentation with poetic forms continued for the rest of his life; he became a master of blank verse, of rhyming couplets, whether anacreontics (seven‐syllable lines) or quatrains, octosyllabics, couplets of seven and eight syllables or iambic pentameters.33 He also went on employing every variety of stanza form: his late poem ‘To Jane’, for example, employs stanzas of twelve lines in patterns of two, six, nine and twelve syllables, while he also mastered the especially difficult form of terza rima, as in the not‐quite‐ completed ‘A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune’, his famous ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘The Triumph of Life’. And then – having employed an Ode form essentially unequal and non‐symmetrical in his ‘Ode to Liberty’, he turned the Pindaric Ode on its head in his ‘Ode to Naples’. He made himself the kind of poet W. H. Auden praised for knowing ‘exactly what can be got out of a metre or stanza form’, the poet whose ‘first gift’ is ‘verse technique’. Even T. S. Eliot – who hated Shelley and his poetry – had to admit his ‘gift or facility for versification’.34 The almost endless revisions recorded in Shelley’s notebooks are a clue to the work involved in acquiring and developing such skills. His technique would allow him, later on, to throw off the kind of album verse which would do his critical reputation no good at all. But he ended up able to write skilfully in almost any metrical form, about almost anything. He could write salon poetry (and did); he could do plaintive lyrics; he could produce gothic poetry; he could be impressive and direct; he could be satirical…and every time with a pitch‐perfect control of rhythm and form, even if the genres in which he started writing were often second‐hand and the poetry frequently (and at times violently) overwritten. His capacity for rhyme was also, throughout his career, exceptional. He used it in his long poems, often with careful differentiations: in Prometheus Unbound, the Moon and the Earth in Act IV speak in rhyme but the human characters’ lines are unrhymed. A good many eye‐rhymes suggest how he expected his poems to be read, and there may be traces of either a Sussex accent or (more likely) an upper‐ class drawl in his six‐times‐used rhyme ‘ruin’ and ‘pursuing’.35 At times his undoubted skill leaves us certain that he is employing contemporary pronunciation: he twice rhymes ‘gondola’ and ‘way’ (165:62–63, 167:139–140), confirming that the early‐nineteenth century English in Italy were still pronouncing a word spelled ‘gonedelay’ by Spenser, while the rhyme of ‘Euganean’ and ‘paean’ tells us how 27



  Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 

Shelley, at least, pronounced the name of the North Italian hills (155:70–71). There survives, too, some evidence of how he worked out verse. On one occasion he scribbled down Ham, Humb um haumb haum, aum um umb36 as the hummed‐aloud rhythm of a projected lyric (perhaps ‘Thy beauty hangs around thee’, higher up the same page); and when working on ideas which culminated in his poem ‘O World o Life o Time’, at a very early stage he scribbled down how he was starting to hear it: Ah , oh night, oh day Ni nah Ni na, na ni Ni na ni na, ni na Oh life o death, o time37 In Italy in 1822 a friend heard Shelley,‘when he was alone or supposed himself so… recite poems then in course of composition, so as to try on his own ear the effect of the metre and diction’:38 that is what the notebook records, though it took many more drafts before he got the poem where he wanted it. Another notebook reveals a keenly anagrammatic mind attempting, around the years 1820–1821, to make as many possible words out of ‘starches’ (‘charts’, ‘acts’ etc.), employing the usual trick of rearranging the original word to make it release even more possibilities (‘starch’ / ‘stahrc’ / ‘stacrh’): he manages nearly 50.39 Above all, Shelley’s almost continuous writing answered a need in him. The fourth Act of Prometheus Unbound in 1819 got as close as anything to articulating this: Language is a perpetual Orphic song Ruling with dædal harmony, a throng Of thoughts & forms, which else senseless & shapeless were.40 For the man amazed if overwhelmed by the throng of his own thoughts, l­anguage was the key: harmonising, creating sense: a necessary, perpetual undersong to thinking and conceiving.

Another kind of interest, besides that of plagiarism, had been raised by Original Poetry. Two of the poems, probably by Elizabeth, were verse epistles to her friend 28



  1810 –1811 

and cousin Harriet Grove (1791–1867), and the latter – ‘how fresh and pretty she was!’41 thought Hellen – had for several years been a very significant person for Shelley. He had met her in the Easter holidays of 1804 and by February 1806, when he was 13, had started to write letters and poems to her; he was attracted to her, and she to him. An account of a family visit to Hellen’s school a couple of years later suggests how animated, not to say how much of a show‐off, the presence of Harriet Grove made him: he was full of pranks, and upset the port wine on the tray cloth, for our schoolmistress was hospitable, and had offered refreshments; then we all walked in the garden, and there was much ado to calm the spirits of the wild boy.42

His wildness could take many forms. It could lead to ‘pranks’: it might lead to the expression of inexpressible opinions. But it could also be the driving force behind love or rage, the latter if he found someone behaving unjustly. As his attention to the lives of his sisters at school in Clapham shows, even as a teenager he was ­passionately concerned with injustice. Hellen recalled: his ire was greatly excited at a black mark hung round one of our throats, as a penalty for some small misdemeanour. He expressed great disapprobation, more of the system than that one of his sisters should be so punished. Another time he found me, I think, in an iron collar, which certainly was a dreadful instrument of torture in my opinion. It was not worn as a punishment, but because I poked; but Bysshe declared it would make me grow crooked, and ought to be discontinued immediately.

And Hellen ‘was released forthwith’.43 It was even more the ‘system’ against which he was protesting than the individual injustice: he took it for granted that the principle of justice had to be fought for. But Hellen put it beautifully when  –  unlike Shelley’s Eton friend Walter S. Halliday, who was simply impressed by his ‘moral courage’  –  she described her brother as being, in his teens, one who suffered from ‘a too great moral courage’.44 He was in awe of no‐one and nothing: he spoke out not just about the faults and failures of ‘the system’ but also about his own lack of belief in the Christian God. And his outspokenness did him damage. We know this because of what happened to him and Harriet Grove. By January 1809, Harriet was making entries in her diary about hearing from ‘my dear Bysshe’,45 and there was an extensive correspondence between them: something which at that period would have led people to assume they were engaged. In February 1809 Harriet noted that they would be meeting in London and ‘I am so glad of it’; Shelley sent her some more of his poems in October, which she thought ‘very good’, while in March 1810 she referred to someone  –  almost certainly 29



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Shelley – as ‘my Greatest Friend’. He had apparently parcelled up for her his newest production, ‘The Wandering Jew’, on 1 March 1810, but – fortunately – she does not seem to have read many of those bangingly anti‐religious verses; they were out of the house within five days of the parcel’s arrival and her family luckily declared them ‘nonsense’46 rather than wickedness. In April 1810 she visited Field Place, but things puzzled her there and she left a worrying gap in her diary: ‘I can not tell what to make of it very strange.’ And the next day  –  having walked with Shelley and having had ‘a long conversation’ − she felt ‘more perplexed than ever’, though the following month she was still going on walks ‘with dear Bysshe’, one of them by moonlight. At some point, she also gave him a lock of her hair, which he kept in his diary; he certainly believed them pledged, betrothed. Harriet’s younger brother Charles Grove (1794–1878), 47 years later, recalled that ‘Bysshe was full of life and spirits, and very well pleased with his successful devotion to my sister.’47 He had sent her a copy of Zastrozzi in March 1810 and at the start of September would send her a copy of Original Poetry: he also arranged for her to be sent a copy of Locke’s Essay Concerning the Human Understanding,48 to give her a desirable intellectual direction. But although she was very fond of him, at some point during the second half of 1810 she withdrew from him because his opinions about the Christian religion distressed her; and she let her parents know the kinds of thing he had been saying. The relationship between the two of them was finally put an end to by Harriet’s father, sometime between the summer and the late autumn. Hellen Shelley understood that both parties were very young, and her father did not think the marriage would be for his daughter’s happiness. He, however, with truly honourable feeling, would not have persisted in his objection, if his daughter had considered herself bound by a promise to my brother, but this was not the case…49

That is, in spite of the letters, and the coil of hair she had given him, Harriet insisted that they were not betrothed. She had, too, by the end of 1810 met the man she would marry late in 1811. Shelley thought differently. His sister Elizabeth knew him to have been deeply affected; a later remark gives a probable indication of his feelings, when Hogg tells the story of Shelley and Godwin being questioned about love, with Shelley answering: ‘My opinion of love is, that it acts upon the human heart precisely as a nutmeg‐grater acts upon a nutmeg.’ Hogg dismissed this as a ‘pleasantry’ but it ­vividly suggests what Shelley had experienced. He later recalled suffering from what he called a ‘state of intellectual sickliness and lethargy’50 in 1810, before going up to Oxford: that may have been a consequence of Harriet Grove’s decision against him. Early in January 1811 he was contemplating suicide (‘Is suicide wrong? I slept 30



  1810 –1811 

with a loaded pistol & some poison last night but did not die’). Hellen remembered how Elizabeth ‘frequently told me how narrowly she used to watch him and accompany him in his walks with his dog and gun’ (since he had been a boy, Shelley had been out shooting at ‘wild Ducks & Geese in our River & Lake’51 ).Those worrying walks must have occurred in December–January of 1810–1811, the only time when Shelley was back at Field Place from Oxford and blaming his loss of Harriet Grove on the Christianity which, he was sure, ‘has injured me’: ‘I swear on the altar  of perjured love to revenge myself on the hated cause of the effect.’ ‘Perjured’ – ‘­deliberately false to an oath, vow, promise, etc.’ – reveals Shelley’s belief that Harriet had promised to marry him. And, having turned against him because of his lack of belief, by January 1811 she had (Shelley believed) married someone else, though that turned out not to be true. But, as he put it three months later, ‘she does not any longer permit an Atheist to correspond with her. She talks of her Duty to her Father.’52 Having lost her, and in such a way, Shelley now vehemently declared: ‘I think it is to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which can annihilate the dearest of its ties.’ It cannot have been an accident that it was during January 1811 that Shelley and Hogg put together their pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which set out to undermine Christianity by arguing that it was impossible to prove the existence of God. It was Shelley’s first printed attack upon ‘the system’ in general, on ‘things as they are’, ‘The Existing State of Things’:53 but it was also a counterblast to Harriet Grove and her father.

31

4 Printing Freaks 1810 –1811

When Shelley went up to University College Oxford in October 1810, some time between the 10th and the 30th (undergraduates only had to be in residence for six weeks in the Michaelmas and Hilary terms1) his father went with him. As an undergraduate in Oxford, at the same College (and with the same Leicester Exhibition putting £20 a year into his pocket), Timothy Shelley had lodged with the Slatter family and in 1810 Henry Slatter (?1790–1865) was just starting work in the Booksellers, Stationers and Printing Office of Joseph Munday (?1773–1844) and R. Slatter in the High, up the road from the entrance to University College. Shelley and his father visited the bookshop, where – Henry Slatter recalled 20 years later – Timothy imposed upon his son ‘a particular injunction to buy whatever he required in books and stationery of the aforesaid parties’. But Slatter also recalled the proprietors being told: ‘My son here, has a literary turn; he is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.’2 The words cannot be accurate 20 years later, but the tone of ironical pride sounds right. Timothy Shelley would have wanted to be ironical. His son, he probably knew, had been running up bills for getting poetry into print, and had also been reading ferociously for years while forgetting nothing of the dangerous books he had encountered; on the other hand, he was obviously extremely clever and talented. What Shelley had however learned from arguing with his father – and from resisting the Groves, and from refusing the demands made on him to fag at Eton – was an absolute determination that would not permit contradiction. Such determination, even at this early age, was (in the words of Prometheus Unbound) ‘Neither to

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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  1810 –1811 

change, nor falter, nor repent’ (272:IV. 575), although of course he sometimes did, and hated himself for it. From his teens he had been trying out ideas that his father found disgraceful: they had almost led to his being removed from Eton. In theory he was aware of what was expected of him at Oxford, as he explained to Leigh Hunt: ‘On account of the responsibility to which my residence at this university subjects me, I of course dare not publickly avow all that I think.’3 In practice, he seems just to have gone ahead. During the autumn of 1810, Shelley would continue to negotiate with Joseph Stockdale about the publication of St. Irvyne. Still chronically hard‐up (and unable to settle his debt with Phillips: something with which Timothy Shelley would have wanted nothing to do), Shelley optimistically recommended his new novel as ‘a thing which mechanically sells to circulating libraries, &c’. It would appear late in 1810, its title‐page declaring it written by ‘A GENTLEMAN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD’. Shelley hoped that Munday & Slatter would stock and sell it and they probably did; Shelley was a frequent visitor to the shop and ‘entered freely into conversation’ with its proprietors.4 Feeling, perhaps, that his novel‐writing career was now behind him, almost immediately he offered them a slim volume of six poems, his Posthumous Fragments. It was irresistible that, just up the road from the College, he should have had a printer and bookseller with whom complex negotiations would not be necessary.

We know almost nothing about the academic work Shelley may have done – or most likely did not do – at Oxford; he probably paid even less attention to such things than he had at Eton. He simply read and read: and while reading and thinking he wrote and wrote, intolerant of the opinions of others and always trying to change them to his own. He was ferociously intelligent and brilliant and radical, as well as being on fire with words and ideas. What is more, because he had grown up knowing how these things are done, with money with which to do them, and with a father who possessed a bit of (ironical) pride in him, he could just hand over a manuscript to Joseph Munday and have it published. Munday & Slatter published poetry occasionally (Walter Savage Landor’s Gebirus in 1803, for example); Shelley must have offered them his own poems within a month of arriving in Oxford, as the book would be published on 17 November 1810 in an edition of 250 copies.5 Joseph Munday may have felt obliged by Timothy Shelley to take on the publication, though Shelley himself would sensibly do his best to ensure that his father did not see it; the conservative print‐run demonstrates that Munday expected to sell rather few. The book  –  another subversive, spoof publication  –  claimed that its contents were by the (now deceased) Margaret Nicholson, who in 1786 had attacked 33



  Printing Freaks 

George III with an old, sharpened but round‐ended dessert knife. She was, in fact, still alive in the asylum (Bethlem, at Moorfields) to which she had been confined after the assault; Shelley’s claim of her authorship was a ruse for the expression of anti‐monarchical views, while the ‘editor’ of the poems remained disguised (he appeared on the title‐page as John Fitzvictor, supposedly Margaret Nicholson’s nephew,6 actually ‘son of Victor’ – the co‐author of Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire). The little collection was still heavily influenced by the gothic mode which had dominated Shelley’s writing style for years; only one poem (the last) being untouched by sensationalism. What was new, all the same, was the overt attack on monarchy the poems contained. One of the people who saw the book at Oxford cheerfully regarded it as ‘stuffed with treason’, with its author facing the possibility of being ‘hanged’ – probably for lines such as ‘Monarchs of earth! thine is the baleful deed, / Thine are the crimes for which thy subjects bleed’, and descriptions of a king who, ‘in cold ambition’s dreams, / Plans for the field of death his plodding schemes.’7 The next poem purported to be an ‘Epithalamium’ in which the assassin of the French King Henry IV, François Ravaillac, and the assassin of Jean‐Paul Marat, Charlotte Corday – both sent to heaven with ‘songs of triumph’ carolled by the ‘bright forms that swept the azure sky’  –  are brought together in marriage as a reward. Their sexual encounter is (for the period) graphically described: Shelley conceded its ‘indelicacy’, but it was not too explicit for Munday’s printers. As Shelley put it, ‘Mr. Munday’s principles are not very severe, − he is more a votary to Mammon than God.’8 If that was really the case, Mammon must have been disappointed. Shelley did his best to talk up sales of Posthumous Fragments by claiming, shortly after publication, that ‘Nothing is talked of at Oxford but Peg Nicholson, I have only printed 250 copies & expect a second edition soon’; ten days later he was still predicting that it would ‘sell like wildfire’. But Henry Slatter remembered the book as being ‘almost still‐born’,9 which sounds more likely: there was no second edition. Yet the book reminds us of how much of Shelley’s life, when he was still less than 20 years old, was not only concerned with attacking social hierarchy and formal religion but with poetry. Scraps of evidence show him discussing poetry with Oxford friends who may well have had no interest in radical ideas. We find him asking a friend − James Roe, the son of a gentleman farmer in Pembrokeshire − to return ‘the poetical scrap I left with you’ and also inviting him to ‘wine & Poetry in my room’, probably in November 1810; and Timothy Shelley himself encouraged his son to go in for the Newdigate poetry prize. Shelley was at work on his poem during his second term, telling his father on 17 February that ‘I have not yet finished “Parthenon.” [the set subject for 1811] I hope I shall make it a Poem, such as you would advise me to subject to Mr. Dallaway’s criticism’: a reference to the Rev. James Dallaway (1763–1834), an authority on architecture who in 1811 was 34



  1810 –1811 

working in Sussex as an antiquary for the Duke of Norfolk; Timothy Shelley had obviously recommended him. But Shelley never seems to have finished his poem.10 Shelley was also ‘on friendly but not intimate terms’ with Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868), whom he had probably known at Eton and who would win the Newdigate in 1812. Shelley gave Milman (who eventually became Dean of St.  Paul’s) a copy of Posthumous Fragments inscribed ‘with the Editor’s best Comp[liments]’, thus keeping up the joke.11

Much of our knowledge of Shelley in Oxford comes from the writing Hogg produced in 1832 and 1833, which in 1858 he imported into his biography. But Hogg was more interested in telling good stories about his friend, and in reporting what he himself had been responsible for, than in recalling actual events. He even describes an argument with Shelley which ended with the latter declaring ‘Your mind is not fitted for the reception of truth!’ on which Hogg unashamedly comments ‘and perhaps it is not’.12 But although all serious biographers have understood this, they have not felt able to question the general trustworthiness of Hogg about Shelley’s time in Oxford. It is to Hogg – there is a fine contrast between the grossly corpulent13 Hogg and the tall, lean Shelley – that we owe an account of the utter chaos of Shelley’s rooms in University College and of Shelley’s fascination with chemical apparatus, with great marks on his carpet being caused by spilled acid. But Hogg places his account at the very start of his acquaintance with Shelley, and it is unlikely that so much disorder could have developed so soon after Shelley’s arrival. And then there is his account of Shelley, on Magdalen Bridge, questioning a woman with a baby about her child’s recollection of its prenatal experience, and insisting that the baby could ‘speak if he will, for he is only a few weeks old. He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but…he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time.’14 It is an anecdote which Hogg offers as an example of Shelley’s absurd earnestness. In fact it shows Shelley, knowing both his Plato and his Wordsworth and the latter’s version of prenatal existence in his Immortality Ode, having fun with the woman – and with Hogg – and with the baby – but as commentators constantly repeat the proposition that Shelley had no sense of humour,15 such a solution never occurs to them. Hogg’s unreliability is sadly ubiquitous. He gives, at great length, details of the writing and printing of the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, describing how – after the proofs of the book had arrived in Shelley’s rooms – he made various objections to ‘errors and defects’, and how Shelley (of course) accepted his advice. According to Hogg, they then both spent several days making the poems ‘more and more ridiculous’ on the proofs, to an extent that they became a joint work: Hogg referred to ‘our burlesque’ and claimed to have been himself responsible for the 35



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‘ludicrous’ title (although the poems had been put together with such an ‘author’ in mind), so that it has even been assumed that the Nicholson poems were indeed the product of joint authorship. Hogg declared, too, that he knew that the first poem  –  the one attacking the monarchy most directly − had ‘been confided to Shelley by some rhymester of the day’.16 Hogg, however, also insisted that all this fun of compiling a ludicrous book went on ‘without any notion of publication’17 (completely untrue: they were correcting proofs), and that it was only when Joseph Munday in person arrived in Shelley’s rooms (an unlikely event, indeed) and eagerly seized on the book that publication went ahead. Hogg described Munday as being ‘so much pleased with the whimsical conceit that he asked to be able to publish the book on his own account’; but the firm had accepted the book long before Hogg took his chance of awarding himself an important place in the narrative. At least, in this case, some other evidence than Hogg’s is available.The poems are not ‘the concentrated essence of nonsense!’18 which Hogg calls them but typical of Shelley’s serious writing at this period. They are ridiculous only to a man who hated poetry but enjoyed making a good story out of something which had happened 20 years before. Hogg’s narrative of the episode of The Necessity of Atheism – Shelley’s next piece designed for publication – is so shot through with invention as to be even less reliable (and these episodes occur in what should have been the most trustworthy part of Hogg’s narrative). His rewriting of parts of Shelley’s letters, too, to deflect attention from his own vagaries, reveals how completely prepared he was to tamper with evidence. Hogg was not a man whose memory was faulty; he skewed the record to suit his purposes. His accounts of Shelley’s behaviour should in general be disregarded; it would be unwise, for example, to believe a word of his account of their very first conversation.19

More interesting is why Shelley should have taken up with Hogg at all (they remained friends – with periods of angry repudiation – until Shelley’s death). Hogg was, apparently, rather disliked at University College because of his uninhibited contempt for others. He must have seen Shelley as someone of social standing roughly equivalent to his own, but from a family richer and more influential, and with an ability to get books published – as well as someone who was a constant source of fascination and amusement. But what really mattered was his intellectual admiration: Shelley, he is said to have remarked, ‘had the most acute intellect of any man I ever knew’. He would write the following November how he and Shelley were of the same age the same disposition the same pursuits the same sentiments the same principles we have read the same books we have had similar educations we have lived

36



  1810 –1811  in the strictest intimacy for some time we have been similarly unfortunate we are brothers in every respect except in the least important point being born of the same parents we are in short in every thing precisely similar excepting only that Shelley is much wiser and much better than myself…20

He and Shelley also shared the same sense of humour; between December 1810 and January 1811 they engaged in the production of fake letters to well‐known people, sent out under pseudonyms. It may have flattered Hogg that a man with so many different talents was prepared to be his friend. Hogg, essentially ‘cynical in his habits’  –  some years later Crabb Robinson found him ‘most offensive’21 – was probably the first person whom Shelley had ever met not to be shocked at his opinions about Christianity and the monarchy. Hogg would have listened and sometimes agreed. He was prepared to listen to his friend’s invectives against inequality and injustice: not because he shared Shelley’s radicalism, but because he preferred not to believe in anything. He had no desire to change the world; he was not driven by a belief in truth and justice. Disdain for the follies of others was his default position: he confessed in 1823 how ‘I was always fond of reading Comedies, for wch our S. used to say, I ought to be killed.’ He was, as Crabb Robinson suggested, ‘very wide in his contempt of men’ and his writing provides a constant display of clever, sardonic irony: ‘I suppose he did not choose to blot the fine hot‐pressed paper of his mind with superfluous knowledge’, Hogg remarks of a ‘fine, full‐grown, full‐fed English parson’ he has met in a church in Bruges, who cannot understand religious images.22 Hogg was therefore happy to concur with Shelley’s (and to demonstrate his own) contempt for authority, while his lawyer’s mind assisted him in impossible demands for logic and clarity from others. He had grown up in a repressive family and had been ‘made worse than he would have been by the severity with which his juvenile excesses were visited’; his family had attempted to make him conform to conventional Christianity: Shelley’s father would attempt something similar. A letter Shelley wrote to Hogg in December 1810 would end with ‘the Voltairian flourish’ of ‘Ecrasez l’infame ecrasez l’impie in which endeavour your most sincere friend will join his every power, his every feeble resource.’23

Shelley, free of the kinds of control which his father and his schooling had attempted to enforce, was pursuing his own ambitions, scientific, political and literary; it was during the autumn of 1810 that he obtained his own copy of Godwin’s Political Justice. But he also developed early in his Oxford career a reputation for oddity: one commentator (who knew about the Posthumous Fragments) reported him, in March 1811, as 37



  Printing Freaks  a Mr Shelley, of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aquafortis, half‐an‐hour’s sleep in the night, and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson… Shelley’s style is much like that of Moore burlesqued; for Frank is a very foul‐mouthed fellow, and Charlotte, one of the most impudent brides that I ever met with in a book.24

The arsenic and aquafortis suggest that Shelley was habitually ravaged by venereal disease (as anyone as louche as the poetry suggests would, of course, have to be). Other commentators, too, tend to be very wide of the mark. Although Hogg enjoyed reporting that Shelley ‘was utterly indifferent to dress’, we know from a tailor’s bill of December 1810–March 1811 that at times he dressed extremely ­fashionably (velvet collar on his ‘Superfine Blue coat’, silk pantaloons and so on). Even Hogg has to admit that Shelley ‘through some unaccountable caprice’ had ‘conceived a fondness’ for his blue coat. A later note described him as ‘a strange tatterdemalion looking figure, dressed like a scarecrow’.25 He hardly ever dressed conventionally and he let his wild mop of hair grow even wilder, but the ‘scarecrow’ memory would only be true if he had been observed following one of his sessions of chemical experiment: it is a local manifestation of the old figure ‘mad Shelley’. But even Shelley’s chemical or electrical experiments might be seen as a tribute to his radical thinking about the modern world. As Joseph Priestley had put it, 36 years earlier, ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air‐pump, or an electrical machine.’26 Shelley was convinced that there was unsoundness in the hierarchy he knew from the inside; he knew it would change, he wanted to assist the change. What, seems most to have interested Shelley, after his Posthumous Fragments, was developing a case against Christianity which – being Shelley – he imagined from the start would be a public campaign. His role was to lead and initiate change: that was his social and personal future as he understood it – he would tell Godwin in 1812 that, by birth, he had been placed ‘in a situation capable hereafter of considerably influencing the actions of others’.27 Between 1808 and 1810, his last two years at Eton, he had turned against Christianity, and in September 1810, Stockdale had complained that Shelley’s poem ‘The Wandering Jew’ was unprintable because of ‘its containing Atheistical principles’, a charge which Shelley (an author wanting his poem published) implausibly denied: ‘I was wholly unaware of the fact hinted at.’ It was to Stockdale, nevertheless, that Shelley wrote in November 1810, asking the publisher if he could help locate a book Shelley had heard of ‘demonstrating that the Christian religion is false’: Shelley believed that the book in question contained ‘an unanswerable, yet sophistical argument’.28 Sometime in the winter of 1810–1811, Shelley gave up Deism because it meant believing in a creating and all‐powerful God. But it was against his Deism – and his usual desire to bring others to share his beliefs − that (probably) Harriet Grove and (certainly) his mother had protested; people would have used the term ‘Deism’ 38



  1810 –1811 

because they had no other for what he professed. He in turn was happy to be suspected of Deism, providing that he could still argue with those with whom he wanted to argue. But Deism was not a position to which he had retreated. By his time in Oxford it was simply a convenient stalking horse, as in his letter to his father of 6 February 1811. He was engaging in guerrilla warfare against religious belief, including ‘the scriptures’, while also attacking the ‘impudent & inconsistent falsehoods of priestcraft’. It was, too, in a very different manner from Hogg that Shelley finally broke with Christianity. It was a serious matter to him; a couple of years later he told Southey that – following a recommendation from a D.D. who was one of his correspondents – he had tried prayer for two months before giving it up, having followed ‘the prescription as regularly as if it had been to take three table spoonfuls of julip’.29 That would have been characteristic of him.

He and Hogg started their campaign in December with the inventor Ralph Wedgwood (1766–1837) – cousin of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood – who received some thoroughly sceptical letters about language and Christianity, at least four from a correspondent whose name he noted down as the ‘Revd Percy B. Shelly’, as well as three letters (including 12 folios of theological argument) from Hogg. One letter from Shelley described Christ as ‘a mass of electrified clay possessing the power to confine, fetter & deteriorate the omnipresent intelligence of the universe’30 – thus violently disparaging the concept of the Trinity as well as the divinity of Christ. He and Hogg then spent the Christmas vacation trying out arguments on each other. By 3 January 1811 Shelley was again discussing the ‘Soul of the Universe’; by the 7th Hogg had replied with an ‘argument against the non‐ existence of a deity’. In a letter to Hogg of the 12th, Shelley wrote how ‘I…wish, ardently wish to be convinced of the existence of a God’ and went on hoping that his ‘Soul of the Universe’ was indeed ‘a First Cause, a God’. In June 1811 he would agree that ‘To a belief in Deity I have no objection on the score of feeling, I would as gladly perhaps with greater pleasure admit than doubt his existence.’ He would maintain the ‘hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe’ in a Note to Queen Mab the following year, but still denied ‘the existence of a creative God’ (94, 96). He had a picture of Christ on his wall in June 1811,31 so as perhaps to focus on the ‘wonderful man’ (613) who was not God. Back in January, Hogg was meanwhile playing devil’s advocate, arguing for ‘the necessity of Xtianity’  –  in this context an extremely suggestive phrase: Shelley knew that Hogg’s arguments on behalf of Christianity were, in reality, ‘intended to  prove its inutility’. Shelley then received an ‘excellent’ letter from Hogg on 14 January containing material that ‘will fully (in his own mind) convince Mr. W.’ 39



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(that is, Ralph Wedgwood). Three days later, Shelley referred to this material as ‘Your systematic cudgel for Xtianity’, again calling it ‘excellent’.32 Shelley seems to have been conducting his arguments in a spirit of enquiry, while Hogg wanted to destroy the concepts of both God and Christianity, and was trying out the arguments which other people might deploy, to see how far he could, in turn, subvert them. By the 14th, Shelley had sat up ‘all night’ writing five pages to be sent to Wedgwood ‘which attack Xtianity’s very basis’ although his argument still depended on ‘the existence of God’.33 At some point during January 1811, the 15–year‐old Felicia Browne, author of the volume called Poems published in 1808 and later becoming Mrs Hemans (1793–1835), became the target of a letter from ‘Philippe Sidney’ (an interesting variant of ‘P. S.’), the letter declaring that ‘thro’ deficiency of proof I became an Atheist’. Shelley’s sister Hellen remembered hearing that ‘he received an answer, but it was to an effect which gave no encouragement to farther correspondence’.34 That cannot have been surprising. Shelley and Hogg were not only playing mischievous intellectual games. Hogg’s letter containing his ‘systematic cudgel for Xtianity’ arrived at Field Place on 14 January, and by the 22nd Shelley was on his way to London, perhaps having delivered the text of an anti‐Christian pamphlet to a printer, but most likely having the copy still with him. Hogg was engaged in a walking tour between the 15th and the 20th, and it is unlikely that he sent any more arguments while on his journey. Whatever Hogg had sent by the 14th must have been especially significant, as we know that on that date Shelley had still been arguing ‘from the existence of God’. And although ‘cudgel’ sounds a rather crude means of attacking something, ‘systematic’ is exactly right for the dry series of arguments which was the form the pamphlet took. It also seems possible that Hogg (as rumour at the time had it) was responsible for the Advertisement in The Necessity of Atheism (signed ‘AN ATHEIST’); he would remind Shelley just 11 years later of how ‘when we were at Oxford…we used to write ourselves into scrapes together’.35 But it was almost certainly Shelley who decided that the arguments should be published; he always believed in getting arguments out to people. Surprise has been expressed that the pamphlet did not offer any more sophisticated arguments than those offered by Locke and Hume. We know that Shelley and Hogg were capable of deploying such things, as in their letters to Wedgwood, but Shelley may have decided that a dryly reasoned pamphlet simply showing that the existence of God could not be proved would be the best way forward: ‘deficiency of proof’ was the crucial thing. Anyway, if the pamphlet only used arguments already published by Locke and Hume, how could those arguments now be dangerous? The Necessity pamphlet concludes ‘Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.’ Hogg – following Spinoza’s use of the demonstrative term in his Ethics – may have suggested the ‘Q.E.D.’, conscious that Spinoza used it, in his proof for Proposition XXX, to confirm that the human mind 40



  1810 –1811 

has ‘necessarily a knowledge of God’. The title The Necessity of Atheism was designed to increase the pamphlet’s aggravating challenge; itself a tribute to Godwin and his ‘doctrine of necessity’,36 it is thoroughly confrontational, courting shock and anger. The pamphlet itself has a tone which is sweetly reasonable, in keeping with the fake quotation from Bacon (in Latin) on its title‐page, invented by Hogg or Shelley: ‘The human mind can by no means accept as true what lacks clear and manifest demonstration.’ The pamphlet’s text, with its Advertisement studiously requesting responses to its arguments, blithely ignores the ways in which 99% of its readers would have reacted to it. It assiduously works through Hume’s and Locke’s arguments; nothing is said about the Christian Church, or clergy; it simply finds Christian belief incapable of reaching the standards required for the rational mind to accept it. The pamphlet’s conclusion  –  like the Advertisement’s final flourish, ‘Thro’ deficiency of proof. AN ATHEIST’37 − is what from 1869 would be called ‘Agnostic’ rather than ‘Atheist’, but ‘Atheist’ was a larger and looser term in the early nineteenth century than it is today. Shelley was opposed to Christianity, its ‘moral obligations’ and its creating God: he was not opposed to religious belief. But as he noted in June 1811, to argue as an atheist ‘I conceive…to be the most summary way of eradicating Christianity.’ He would, later, be physically assaulted in Italy by a man calling him a ‘damned atheist’ or something similar38 − and he was not sorry to maintain such a reputation in his confrontations with Christianity, even though his actual beliefs (as shown by his writing about religion) were a good deal subtler.

Getting a pamphlet with the Necessity title printed – let alone published − would have been a problem, one probably greater than Shelley and Hogg had reckoned. Anti‐Christian publications fell under the law concerning blasphemous libel, making printers and booksellers immediately liable to prosecution; in March 1812, the bookseller Daniel Isaac Eaton would be prosecuted for selling the third and last part of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, which supported Deism (and thus explicitly attacked Christianity). At Eaton’s trial, according to the journalist and social reformer William Cobbett (1763–1835), The Attorney General declared the work to contain doctrines of the most pernicious tendency; and that ‘their consequences, if they TOOK ROOT, in the minds of those by whom they were perused, would be DREADFUL IN THE EXTREME!’ The Judge (Lord Ellenborough) who tried the information, was of the same opinion.39

The cheaper the publication, the more people who might read it: Paine’s was a 95‐page book, The Necessity a 16‐page pamphlet. Eaton had been sentenced to 41



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eighteen months in jail, and to stand in the pillory. What would have happened to the printer, bookseller and author of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism? Approaching Munday (who had already refused to handle Hogg’s novel Leonora because of the ‘free notions’ ‘interwoven…throughout the work’40), or indeed any recognised London or provincial printer or publisher, would have been pointless; and as Shelley still owed C. & W. Phillips 75 pounds for printing Original Poetry, and showed no sign of being able to pay, it seems unlikely that they would now have taken on such an especially dangerous job. Shelley almost certainly took his own advice, given to Hogg about Leonora on 20 December, ‘I would recommend you to print it yourself.’ Members of the Phillips family much later recalled how, either in the summer or the winter of 1810, Shelley had taken a ‘great interest in the art of printing, and would often come in and spend hours in the printing office learning to set up the types’.41 As, however, he left Sussex for London on 22 January 1811, and the idea for the publication only seems to have come up after 17 January (nothing in Shelley’s letters up to that point suggested it and no printed copy can be identified as existing before 9 February), it seems much more likely that, either while in London 23–24 January, or somewhere near Oxford after he had returned, Shelley employed a jobbing printer in what was ‘in Printing Dialect’ called a ‘Hole’, ‘a place where privat Printing is used, viz. the Printing of unlicensed Books’. The surviving copies of The Necessity strongly ­suggest the work of such a printer, done carelessly (type from the wrong font appears at one point) and fast (two of the five surviving copies are smudged because the sheets were folded too quickly after printing).42 Shelley still hoped that it could be ‘SOLD IN LONDON AND OXFORD’, as its title page proclaims, and it therefore needed a printer’s name on it. A jobbing printer would not have confessed to it: the names of C. & W. Phillips and their workplace, Worthing, appear on the title‐page and in the colophon.43 The worst inking and impression in the entire pamphlet, though, shows itself in those title‐ page details, and C. & W. Phillips would never have issued a pamphlet with their own particulars so badly recorded (the title‐page of Original Poetry, which they did produce, is beautifully printed). Shelley would have been confident that − if there had been problems − the Phillips firm would have been able to show that it had not done the work. The Posthumous Fragments had had a print‐run of 250, The Necessity of Atheism perhaps the same; the copies would have been sent to Shelley at University College, so that he could supervise their distribution. The confrontation to which they led would be the turning point of his early life.

42

5 The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 1811

The events surrounding Shelley’s dismissal from University College, in the spring of 1811, are revealing not only about his attitudes to authority, but also about his financial dealings. Looking hard at the latter is not an attempt to prove Shelley’s bad behaviour. After such a time, and not possessed of all the evidence, we can never be quite certain who might have been guilty and who may have been innocent. What matters is understanding where Shelley’s priorities lay.

Timothy Shelley had up to now been kept ignorant of the writing of the pamphlet but early in February 1811 was induced to send his son an argument for orthodox Christianity to which Shelley replied at length on the 6th. Timothy Shelley stated his entire conviction of the truth of orthodoxy, the Christian church and the Bible. Shelley must have been amused that he had drawn such a predictable reply, which would have confirmed him both in his antagonism to his father, and in his own attacks on Christianity; his reply was a practice run for the letters he would shortly be writing on behalf of his pamphlet. All that, in return, Shelley was prepared to offer were arguments for Deism, knowing that they would (anyway) irritate his father beyond bearing. Shelley preferred to torment Timothy Shelley by being entirely reasonable: he offered the examples of Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Franklin,‘all of whom were Deists’1 but also perfectly moral men. He did not once use the term ‘Atheism’ or ‘Atheist.’

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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A day or so later, Shelley placed an advertisement in the newspaper which the firm of Munday & Slatter produced, the Oxford University and City Herald, announcing the forthcoming sale of his pamphlet (Joseph Munday cannot have seen the Necessity itself); the advert appeared on 9 February. Printed copies ­probably arrived in Oxford around that date; Shelley sent one to London on 14 February, to his father’s protégé the musician Edward Fergus Graham (1785–1852), with the request that the title‐page be advertised in eight London newspapers, and that the pamphlet’s ‘Advertisement’ be printed in another, four‐page newspaper, The Globe. He and Hogg also adopted the method they had tried out on Ralph Wedgwood, and started sending out The Necessity of Atheism either anonymously or under assumed names to ‘men of thought and learning’.2 They ensured that ‘all the Bishops’ got copies, as did the masters and fellows of various Oxford Colleges, and other celebrated people, including William Godwin.3 A copy went to one of Hogg’s particular enemies, the Rev. George S. Faber, Rector of Redmarshall,Vicar of Stockton‐upon‐Tees, the man used by Hogg’s family to try and keep him on the straight and narrow; another copy went to Shelley’s uncle Robert Parker (1754–1837). The latter would spend a lot of time arguing with it, Shelley having doubtless invited him to do so, just as he had invited his uncle’s ‘critical opinion’ of St. Irvyne when sending him a copy in December.4 Sometimes letters accompanied the pamphlet purporting to come from those whose faith had been shaken: Graham’s Vine Street address became a return address for an elderly clergyman, ‘the Revd. Charles Peyton’ (‘Meyton’ was another of Shelley’s noms de guerre5). The pamphlet having been distributed, Shelley and Hogg must have settled down to await developments: ideally, letters sent to ‘Charles Meyton’ or ‘Charles Peyton’. We do not know how many answers they received but they probably managed to engage in correspondence with some recipients. This  –  like their exchange of letters with Wedgwood – would have pleased them very much. At some point, around Friday 15 February, Shelley also attempted direct action. He went into Munday & Slatter’s shop when the partners were away and ‘strewed the shop windows and counters’ with copies of The Necessity, telling the shopman ‘to sell them as fast as he could and at a charge of sixpence each’.The pamphlet was apparently available for some 20 minutes before the Rev. John Walker, a fellow of New College, saw when passing the shop’s bow‐window what was on sale, and went in to complain. The firm realised what had happened, and burned the ­pamphlets in ‘a back kitchen’. They then apparently confronted Shelley with a city councillor, who attempted by entreaties ‘and next by threats, to dissuade him from the errors of his ways’.6 They also wrote to the Phillipses in Sussex with what Henry Slatter much later recalled as a friendly hint…warning them of the dangerous tendency of disseminating such vile principles, and the liability they ran of a prosecution by the Attorney General, at the

44



  1811  same time advising the destruction of every remaining copy, together with the MS. copy, types, &c.7

The firm seems nevertheless to have accepted Shelley’s behaviour, in trying to sell the pamphlet in their bookshop, as natural undergraduate high‐spiritedness. Henry Slatter later depicted himself walking up the High with Shelley, two young men together deep in conversation about why the latter should have persisted ‘in such strange and absurd notions’8 as filled his pamphlet. Joseph Munday would, as a practical expert in the law of blasphemous libel as it was currently used, all the same have spelled out to Shelley the dangers of marketing such a work. No bookseller would stock it and – if put on sale or even publicly distributed – it would have led to the arrest of the printer and author (in September 1813 a contributor to Cobbett’s Political Register would ask why the printer of the Necessity had not been obliged to disclose the name of its author9). And Shelley at this point resolved on caution. In spite of his spirited attempt in the shop and the announcement ‘SOLD IN LONDON AND OXFORD’, the pamphlet never went on sale, and on 17 February he wrote to Graham countermanding his request for advertisements to be placed in the London papers. By 17 February, though, Shelley believed that the Bishops − ‘How I pity them, how I despise, hate them’ − would have had their copies,10 but he was also now taking p­ recautions about being identified. He had postponed a trip to London the day before, ‘afraid that if I left Oxford so abruptly I shd. be suspected as Author of the tract’. A few days later, Godwin was sent his copy, accompanied by a new kind of letter, from ‘Jennyngs Stukeley’, with the return address of ‘Mr Mundays, Printer / High Street / Oxford.’11 ‘Stukeley’ stated that he was himself the author of the p­ amphlet and that he wanted Godwin’s opinion: a postscript added, mournfully: ‘The book is not, & I fear cannot be sold.’

Despite this new carefulness, a month later the Necessity got Shelley and Hogg expelled from Oxford. Many rumours grew up as to what happened; what follows prioritises Shelley’s own accounts.12 One of those who had been sent (or acquired) the pamphlet – the Rev. Edward Copleston, a fellow of Oriel College  –  ‘shewed it to the master and fellows of University College’; he must have known that the College was its source. At least one person resident in Oxford, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, had named Shelley as its author in a letter of 15 March,13 while of course Joseph Munday & Henry Slatter also knew the name. Just when Hogg and Shelley may have been thinking themselves safe, University College – more than five weeks after the pamphlet had first been distributed, but perhaps only 10 days or so after its senior members had been alerted − decided to act. 45



  The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 

By 9 March Hogg and Shelley had both fulfilled their residence requirements for the Hilary term and might have chosen to leave Oxford at any time; but ­unfortunately they stayed on until, one ‘fine spring morning’, Lady Day, Monday 25  March 1811, Shelley was suddenly sent for. He was faced in the common‐ room14 by the Master, Dr James Griffith (1761–1821), and two or three of the ­fellows. He was informed ‘that in case I denied the publication no more would be said’, but he was expelled when he refused (as he put it) ‘to disavow the publication’ (the entry in the College Books records ‘disavow a publication’, demonstrating how accurate Shelley’s own account was, at least in some details).15 He was told that he must leave by the following day. Shelley raced back to tell Hogg what had happened, and Hogg loyally insisted on being allowed to attend too; he, in turn, ‘contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to him’,16 refused to disavow the publication and was expelled. Although Shelley had been equally involved in the arguments that had originally led to the pamphlet, and though he had got it printed and shared in its distribution, Hogg’s similar refusal to ‘disavow’ demonstrates that he felt at least partly responsible for it: ‘I was as much the author as the person accused’, he told his father that same day.This makes his ‘systematic cudgel for Christianity’ even more likely to have been its basis. It has been argued that ‘his decision to share Shelley’s expulsion was partly a matter of loyalty and partly of pride – he could not allow his friend to accept full credit (or blame)’;17 but although believing their expulsion ‘tyrannical’,18 Shelley seems to have accepted that Hogg should share his fate. Being expelled by University College would have been a triumph for Hogg’s self‐esteem; it perfectly demonstrated the folly of authority in the face of his intelligence. The two friends spent some time that day visiting various Oxford acquaintances (an anecdote survives of Shelley visiting his ex‐Eton schoolmate Halliday and confiding ‘I am come to say good‐bye to you, if you are not afraid to be seen with me!’19) At 8.00 a.m. the following morning, Tuesday 26th, Shelley and Hogg boarded a coach to London and moved into lodgings in Poland Street. Shelley arranged for his possessions to be sent to London after him in his trunks; he returned to Oxford only in 1815, as a tourist guide for friends.

Staffed largely by ordained ministers and offering their fellows access to comfortable church livings, Oxford and Cambridge Colleges at that date were still in most respects religious institutions. Attendance at chapel was compulsory, and a degree would, for a great number of undergraduates, have led to a career in the church.The pamphlet had thus been a particularly offensive thing to have distributed, and expulsion was the only way in which the College could respond 46



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(­ r ustication  –  not being allowed to attend the University for a period of time – would not have been considered severe enough). It would, however, depend on the kind of person you (and your relations) were whether expulsion would be seen as a disaster or not. Unless you were ­destined for a career in the church, a failure to obtain a qualification from the education which was offered, which at that date most people agreed was second‐ rate, would not have been judged very bad. In the previous decades Coleridge and Southey had both left without degrees, as had Edward Gibbon; Wordsworth (having done very little work) acquired only a pass degree, and Byron (having done even less) no degree at all. And none of them showed any anxiety. Some famous contemporaries were also expelled (Landor and  –  later in the century − Swinburne) while Shelley’s own cousin Thomas Medwin, though matriculating at Oxford’s University College in 1805, had not studied for a degree. It would have been the social and religious aspects of the expulsion from Oxford which would have mattered to Hogg’s relations; and Timothy Shelley, too, was extremely angry. For him, Eton and Oxford were where you made the friendships and social contacts which served for the rest of your life. Not just to lose that chance, but to be expelled in ignominy, and to bring your family name into disrepute, would – assuming that you wished to be the kind of person that Timothy Shelley was – be a disaster. He wanted Shelley to apologize in person to the Master of University College; some years later, he would recall ‘the agonizing feelings which poor Bysshe’s departure from Oxford had caused him. These had…entirely and exclusively seized upon his mind, & oppressed his spirit.’20 It was the shameful social and personal folly which mattered to Timothy Shelley, who warned his son that – if he did not write to the College ‘and declare his return to Christianity’ – he would be abandoned to ‘the punishment and misery that belongs to the wicked pursuit of an opinion so diabolical and wicked as that which you have dared to declare’. Timothy Shelley refused to listen to any terms of compromise; at some point he apparently remarked that he had rather Shelley ‘had been killed in Spain’21 – as a soldier – than have been so shamefully expelled. Shelley got to hear of this and resented it very much.

There were, though, at least two reasons why Shelley would not have been unhappy about having to return to London (he had wanted to go back in mid‐ February). By January he had placed his ‘Satirical Poem on L’infame’ in Munday’s hands: this was his Poetical Essay, some 172 lines long. And he had a London publisher for it: B. Crosby and Co., of Stationers’ Court, London.22 But by the start of February there were things he wanted to add to it; and when it was printed as a 20‐page pamphlet, after his return to Oxford, it included on its title‐page the note 47



  The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 

that it was being published to assist the maintenance of Mr. Peter Finnerty ‘Imprisoned for a Libel’ (Finnerty’s name being printed a great deal larger and bolder than the poem’s title). On 7 February, Finnerty had been sentenced to 18 months in Lincoln prison for libelling Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary; Shelley had taken up his case. Shelley was aware of how dangerous the poem was: in January, before going back to Oxford, he had asked Hogg to ensure that ‘if Lundi has any idea (when he speaks to you[)] of publishing it with my name will you tell him to leave it alone till I come)’.The fact that lines towards the end came close to a direct attack on the British monarchy  –  ‘Man must assert his native rights, must say / We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway’23 – would have made a bookseller anxious. On the other hand, Munday was responsible for printing the poem, and his printers did not think it unacceptable.An advertisement for it (minus its author’s name) appeared on 9 March in their publication the Oxford University and City Herald. There are signs, though, in the solitary surviving printed copy, of haste in its composition. The obsolete word ‘meed’, meaning a reward for achievement, is not only used in the poem, but used on four occasions – the oddest with reference to Benjamin Franklin, something of a hero for Shelley: too famous for further admiration to be needed from anyone, No herald blazon to the world thy fame, Nor scrolls essay an endless meed to give;24 Readers are likely to be baffled until they realise that ‘essay’ is a verb meaning ‘try’ and ‘scrolls’ a poetic noun for writing (ironic, given that Franklin was a printer). And there is ‘meed’ yet again. Such lines could easily have been the source of Henry Slatter’s recollection of how Shelley, ‘on being informed that the men [printers] were waiting for more copy…would sit down and write off a few stanzas, and send them to the press, without even revising or reading them,―this I have myself ­witnessed’.25 Shelley’s exotic overwriting in the poem was mocked in the single notice it ever got, in the Eclectic Review in August, which quoted parts of its ‘­rhapsody’ on the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844): Thou taintless emanation from the sky! Thou purest spark of fires that never die!… No sculptured marble shall be raised to thee, The hearts of England will thy memoirs be!26 The writer suggested that, if the author had ‘not yet taken his degrees, we think he stands a fair chance of being “plucked”’; that is, being prevented from taking a degree at all, because of his support for Burdett and because of his awful poetry. 48



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The  writing is at other times extremely colloquial. Is virtue dead, its ‘fair form’ bowing to oppression? ‘Yes! it’s torn away—the crimes appear…’ Quite how it gets ‘torn away’ – and what exactly is torn – is not obvious.The most impressive writing comes in the attacks on the king’s ministers  –  ‘Ye cold advisers of yet colder kings, /…Who coolly sharpen misery’s sharpest fang, / Yourselves secure’ – and on royalty itself: ‘Kings are but men, if thirst of meanest sway / Has not that title even snatched away.’27 The Poetical Essay would be published – at least in theory − in March, with its author unnamed but again described as ‘A GENTLEMAN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD’; advertisements for it appeared in the Morning Chronicle of 15 and 21 March and in The Times on 10 and 11 April. In line with what we know he did later, Shelley must have organised – and paid for – this advertising campaign himself. Although it has been suggested that perhaps ‘250 copies’ of the poem were printed, the fact that only a single copy survives (and that one given to Shelley’s second cousin Pinfold Medwin) leaves a suspicion that it too may in fact have sold very few copies; it seems possible that just a few were distributed among friends and relations.28 The fact that it was listed in a contemporary note in the Bodleian Library, along with St. Irvyne, Posthumous Fragments and The Necessity, but not Zastrozzi, shows that, although anonymous, it was known about in Oxford. By August, its price had apparently been reduced from two shillings to one shilling and sixpence, reducing still further the chances of its raising much money for Finnerty.29 The poem was dedicated ‘TO HARRIET W—B—K’, marking another significant moment. By the start of January 1811, Shelley had heard from his sister Mary about her intimacy with a 15‐year‐old school‐friend, Harriett Westbrook (1796–1816); Shelley ensured that a copy of his newly published St. Irvyne was sent to her. By the end of January he had taken to London with him not just (in all likelihood) the text of The Necessity but – along with a present from Mary – a letter of introduction to Harriett (the double ‘t’ spelling, as insisted on by Shelley,30 distinguishing her from Harriet Grove). He met Harriett for the first time at the house of her father, John Westbrook, the extremely prosperous retired manager of a tavern in London (one which called itself a coffee house). Peacock gave an account of her in 1813: She had a good figure, light, active, and graceful. Her features were regular and well proportioned. Her hair was light brown, and dressed with taste and simplicity. In her dress she was truly simplex munditiis [‘elegance in simplicity’]. Her complexion was beautifully transparent; the tint of the blush rose shining through the lily.

Shelley’s sister Hellen thought that Harriett had a ‘similar complexion’31 to Harriet Grove. The dedication (presumably printed in February) was a most 49



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f­lattering compliment, and seeing Harriett again in March must have seemed most ­desirable to Shelley.

But he had done something else important on his last day in Oxford. He would have known that – moving to London, and certainly about to face a row with his father – he was likely to be in financial difficulties. He was already short of money: on 12 March, he had borrowed £10 cash from John Slatter, who ran his plumbing and glazing business from the Slatters’ old family house; on the 23rd, Shelley had borrowed a further £10 from him.32 But on 25 March, following his expulsion, he found the time not only to go around his friends in Oxford saying goodbye (incidentally collecting a pair of pantaloons which had been mended), but also to conclude a remarkable deal with the firm of Munday & Slatter. This was for the printing and publishing of a ‘large historical and political work relative to Sweden’ written by ‘a literary character of the name of Browne, or perhaps better known in Oxford by that of Bird’.33 This was undoubtedly a forerunner of the work ­published in two volumes seven years later by John Brown (of Great Yarmouth) as The Northern Courts; containing Original Memoirs of the Sovereigns of Sweden and Denmark, since 1766, etc. Why was it so important to arrange this, on a day when Shelley must have been busy with so many other things? Munday & Slatter were informed, perhaps earlier but possibly only on the 25th, that he wanted to raise the sum of £600 to pay Brown for the copyright of the book, and that he had applied to the well‐known London firm of Howard and Gibbs (‘annuity and money agent’) in an attempt to obtain the money;34 but even he had been shocked at their exorbitant terms. Munday & Slatter, according to Henry Slatter (keen in later years to present the firm in the most favourable light), ‘felt a most anxious solicitude’ for Shelley’s welfare and (Slatter claimed) were anxious to rescue him from money lenders who had a fearsome reputation.35 Munday & Slatter agreed to organize the finding of the £600 – on condition that they took on the book’s publication, to recover their money. Accordingly, because they trusted Shelley, on 25 March they advanced 200 l. in notes of hand, and next became security with him for the remaining 400 l. to a person of the name of [John] Hedges, who advanced the money…36

This was the deal which Shelley managed to conclude on 25 March.We cannot tell whether Joseph Munday knew that he had just been expelled from University College and would be leaving Oxford forthwith. Munday must have brought in John Hedges  –  most likely a business contact  –  because the firm did not have such a quantity of cash to hand. Hedges was prepared to charge Shelley only a very 50



  1811 

reasonable interest rate of 5% p.a. for the £400, for a maximum period of 20 years, with the firm of Munday & Slatter standing security for the loan. Shelley was apparently able to hand over at least some of Brown’s manuscript: the firm thus leaving itself reliant upon Shelley’s promise of sending the remainder [of the manuscript], and of rendering justice to them by taking on himself all the responsibility for the money raised on his account, for the purchase of the work, and also the risk in printing and publishing, the moment he had it in his power…

Although Shelley’s original intention may have been to raise money for Brown, he would have realised that it would also be wise to obtain all the money he could (the money, he probably told himself, could always go to Brown later). It would have been sensible to arrange such a matter before it became widely known that he had been expelled. Anyone who knew the Shelley family would have predicted a row between father and son, following the expulsion, and the firm’s normal reliance upon a father to ensure that a son’s bills were paid would not have felt quite so assured. The following morning, Shelley left Oxford; and Joseph Munday went ahead, apparently buying paper and laying in new type. But in the event the firm only ever acquired ‘a part of the MS’. According to Brown, when his book was published in 1818, ‘Eleven or twelve sheets’37 of an early version had once been printed; he almost certainly meant those produced by Munday & Slatter from Shelley’s ­provision of copy in the spring of 1811. Three weeks after getting to London, Shelley would write to tell John Slatter that he would soon be returning the £20 he had so recently borrowed, but that he had not yet heard from Munday (about the publishing agreement). He explained that ‘Directly the trunks come I will send Mr. B’s writings’:38 that is, what he had of Brown’s manuscript, packed up along with everything else from his rooms when he had left in such haste on 26 March. The firm had, after all, spent a lot of money on acquiring the book. They never, at all events, obtained any more of Brown’s book than the material which gave rise to the ‘eleven or twelve sheets’ they printed; and they never got their money back either. In the short term they were left out of pocket to the extent of £200, while also remaining responsible for the security of the £400 Shelley had borrowed. Twenty years later (in March 1831) the sum of £400 was demanded of them by  Hedges; three months later, in June 1831, they were technically ‘arrested for the  amount at the suit of Hedges’ by an Abingdon solicitor. They were being asked to pay ‘upwards of £1300’, to cover the sum for which they had originally stood security (£400), the interest on it (£405), and the legal expenses involved in 51



  The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 

pursuing the debt (reckoned at £500). Henry Slatter, now in charge, did what any other Oxford tradesman would have done, owed money by an ex‐undergraduate: since Shelley’s signature was on the bond, he went to the parent for redress, approaching Timothy Shelley for the repayment of the bond and interest, £805; the extortionate legal fees were probably being negotiated with the solicitor. Probably to his surprise, Slatter did not get the money from Timothy Shelley. He had to pay Hedges, ‘almost to the entire ruin at that time of the printers and their families!’ As he ruefully commented, this loss to the firm ‘of more than 1200 l.’ had been caused ‘by the introduction of a son by his father!’39 He tried one last time to recover his money, on the death of Timothy Shelley in 1844; this time he demanded the whole amount (the original loan of £200, the borrowed £400, and interest for the thirty‐three and a third years since, a sum of £1605). But he didn’t get that either. Nor did John Slatter get his £20 back. In January 1823, having heard of Shelley’s death, he too had approached Timothy Shelley, but was told that his loan of money to Shelley had been nothing but ‘officious interference’, leading Shelley ‘into expenses’. If Slatter were out of pocket, it was his own fault.Timothy Shelley noted on Slatter’s letter ‘Tolerably impudent.’40 Was Shelley deceiving Munday & Slatter? What happened to the money? There seem to be two possibilities. The first is that Shelley – and through him Munday & Slatter  –  were victims of a confidence trick. Brown had apparently convinced Shelley that he desperately needed the money, and that he had available the valuable manuscript of an unpublished book which he knew would sell. He had been dismissed from the Royal Navy in 1806 or 1807 in peculiar circumstances: he had insulted a ‘port‐admiral’, Sir George Montagu, who had prosecuted him for libel. Brown had presented himself as a victim of injustice: Shelley had listened to him, and believed him. Some time before the spring of 1811, Brown had acquired £150 from Shelley. Now, shrewdly, Brown was trying to raise an extra £450 and fed Shelley those ‘Eleven or twelve sheets’ of manuscript to prove that the book existed. His contribution (as ‘Mr. Bird’) of a guinea to the subscription for Finnerty (details were printed in the Oxford City and University Herald for 23 February and 2 March: Shelley also contributed a guinea) would have been a demonstration that he remained supportive of Shelley. It is therefore possible that, on his last day in Oxford, with some of Brown’s manuscript in his possession but by no means all, Shelley − still believing in Brown, and now under pressure of time − attempted to resolve the situation by getting Munday & Slatter to stump up the whole sum Brown demanded. Shelley may then have passed on the money to Brown, with Brown promising to hand over to him (or to Munday & Slatter) the rest of the manuscript. But apparently Brown never sent it, Munday & Slatter never acquired a publishable book, Brown (or Bird) vanished and Brown must have been paid all over again by his new publisher when his book was published in Edinburgh and London in 1818. 52



  1811 

That is all plausible. But it is more likely still that Shelley was not simply the unwitting victim of a confidence trick, but was as usual doing his best to help someone needy, at the cost of getting himself – and eventually others − into a considerable jam. What Shelley managed on 25 March seems to have been a last‐ minute scheme to raise money from the only people he knew in Oxford who were likely to hand it over; perhaps in an attempt to recoup what he had already given Brown, perhaps to help Brown, perhaps because of his own debts elsewhere, perhaps because he knew he would urgently need cash: most likely for all four reasons. The fact that Shelley had recently twice borrowed money from John Slatter shows that his financial situation in March 1811 was precarious; on the 25th he concluded a last minute attempt to raise all the money he could. It is possible that he did not himself benefit much (or only to the extent of £150) from the £600 now acquired from the booksellers and the money‐lender, but he may have acquired and (at least for the moment) kept all the money.The fact he would tell Hogg at the end of April that he wanted to ‘settle pecuniary matters. I am quite well off in that now’41 shows that he had some access to funds which he had not had in mid‐March; and that kind of money would not have come from Timothy Shelley, who had immediately stopped his allowance. On the other hand, in July he told Graham ‘I am now as poor as a rat’; he was obliged to go and stay for a month in the large house of his cousin Thomas Grove at Cwm Elan in Radnorshire. It is unlikely that he had spent the whole £600; some money must have gone to Brown. Munday & Slatter thought they knew Shelley and his family well enough to be able to trust them, first in lending the money and then in recovering it. What is, however, clear is how easily, after he had got to London with at least some of the Slatter money in his pocket, Shelley was able to put behind him his indebtedness to the Slatters: not just the £20 debt to John Slatter but also the other much larger debt. It is possible that he gave a thought to his responsibilities to the firm in mid‐ May 1811, when he developed a scheme to get a deserving book − poems by Janetta Phillips − into print, and offered ‘to print the Mss. at my own expence, as it would make even some balances with my printer’.42 In fact Janetta Phillips’s poems went to Samuel Collingwood & Co. of Oxford. But there is no trace of any consciousness of obligation in Shelley after that, even when Joseph Munday ‘happened to call’ on him early in 1818. Henry Slatter would ironically comment in 1835 that, after Shelley had left for London, ‘almost the recollection, apparently, of his having been at Oxford, faded also from his memory’.43 In the spring of 1811, anyway, all that Shelley owed the Slatter family was £20 and £200, the latter sum repaying him what he had already invested in Brown (with £50 useful pocket‐money extra). He could tell himself that Munday & Slatter would eventually get back all that they had paid out; while the £400 borrowed from Hedges was, after all, not due back for another 20 years, and was Brown’s responsibility, not his; it could certainly be ignored. The claim for its repayment 53



  The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 

(plus interest) would indeed not be submitted until long after Shelley was dead; and it is significant that – when it was − Slatter would recall approaching the Shelley family, and not Brown or his descendants, who must have profited from the 1818 publication. Something similar happened to the £150 bill for the printing of St. Irvyne. In August 1811 Shelley wrote to Stockdale apologising for still not having paid it: ‘I am sorry to say in answer to your requisition that the state of my finances render immediate payment perfectly impossible.’ He expressed surprise that there were apparently ‘no expectations on the profits’ of his book’s sale, but declared his determination ‘at the earliest period of my power…to discharge your account’. Nevertheless he appears never to have paid Stockdale; the latter declared in 1827 that ‘I have never ever received, directly nor indirectly, one farthing of my just claim, which, principal and interest together, cannot be less than £300.’44 Financial dealings must have occupied Shelley on 25 March 1811 just as much – or probably rather more – than coping with the other consequences of expulsion from Oxford. He had always been extremely generous to the causes which came to his attention; in 1811 alone, Peter Finnerty, John Brown and Janetta Phillips (he bought six copies of her Poems and was responsible for the sale of another nine, as well as ensuring that the names of his sisters  –  and of Harriett Westbrook – appeared on the list of subscribers45). Later on there would be William Madocks and William Godwin. He had always had money and – even when he was hard up − he knew that he would go on having it: he was heir to a massive estate. To Shelley, however, money, goods or services acquired from tradespeople involved rather little obligation for repayment if he were in financial difficulties, although he knew that, as he confirmed in 1820, people ‘must ultimately have the money’.A bill of £25/10/0 from his Oxford tailor (covering the period November 1810 to March 1811) pursued him until January 1814: payment of an 1817 bill for printing the History of a six weeks’ tour was repeatedly postponed, with Shelley asking the printer in August 1820 ‘to be so good as to wait until Deceb’; an 1816 bill for printing Alastor (still unpaid in 1820) would be forwarded to the book’s publisher.46 If Shelley had had the money, he would have paid; but he didn’t, and he felt under no especial pressure to recompense tradespeople until funds were available (as, one day, they would be). It is striking how much his father’s son he remained.

54

Part II

Lover of Mankind, Democrat & Atheist 1811 –1818

6 A Shelley Business! 1811

When he and Hogg got to London, Shelley wrote to his father about their ­expulsion, optimistically hoping ‘that your feeling mind will sympathise too deeply in my misfortunes’. He also sent him a copy of the Atheism pamphlet; it survives with Timothy Shelley’s annotation on its title‐page: ‘Impious.’1 Timothy Shelley came to London and met his son and Hogg on Sunday 7 April. Two days later he sent Shelley a letter declaring that ‘The Disgrace which hangs over you is most Serious’ and threatening to cut off his allowance if he did not return to Field Place and ‘abstain from all communication with Mr Hogg for some considerable time’. He had decided that Hogg was Shelley’s ‘original corruptor’;2 he even offered to send his son on a trip to the Greek Islands, to get him away and to ‘dispel the gloomy ideas which he has too long fix’d on objects, tending to produce Temporary Insanity’ (Timothy Shelley’s only explanation for his son’s behaviour). Travel, he told his London solicitor William Whitton (1763–1832), would have rais’d his depress’d spirits to a proper height of vivacity, and by placing him constantly in the presence of real dignity, bring him naturally to reflect on his own. Such a scheme I am confident would effect what no abstract reasoning can produce, dissipate all despairing doubts, tranquilize his perturb’d imagination…

It is striking how ‘gloomy’, ‘depress’d’ and ‘despairing’ Timothy Shelley had decided his son was, to hold ‘such abominable opinions’ as were revealed in the pamphlet: he wanted him returned to ‘vivacity’. But Shelley refused to leave Hogg.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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  A Shelley Business! 

Consequently, his father demanded, he must place himself ‘under the Care of, & Society [of] such Gentleman or Clergyman as I shall appoint & attend to his Instructions & directions’.3 Shelley wrote back refusing but instead listing his own terms, which were calculated to irritate his father beyond bearing. The primary way that Timothy Shelley could now affect Shelley was via his allowance. His impending poverty made Shelley first write to Stockdale asking if there was any money owed him from St. Irvyne (there wasn’t) and then put off repaying John Slatter his £20. But his major proposal, as eldest son and heir, to his father’s lawyer Whitton in mid‐April, was that he might be awarded an allowance of £100 a year (later enlarged to £200), with the remainder of the money and estates entailed on him as eldest son divided between his sisters. As such, it was a plan to see the family fortune, currently in the hands of his grandfather, divided up between its female members. Not surprisingly, Timothy Shelley and Whitton were horrified. As a minor, Shelley could, anyway, initiate no such thing. But for Timothy Shelley this was a second blow even more shocking than the Oxford expulsion: ‘I never felt such a shock in my Life, infinitely more than when I heard of his expulsion, for I could not then have thought it of so hidious a cast.’4 His eldest son caring nothing for family, status or inheritance! The family fortunes and estates simply thrown away! But along with trying to make financial arrangements with his father (at the start of May 1811 he would still optimistically be suggesting that ‘50£ per an. wd. be quite enough’), Shelley was also starting to be concerned about the situation of Harriett Westbrook: ‘a most amiable girl’, he wrote on 24 April. He referred to her as ‘My little friend Harriet W’, and was anxious about her return to school (a ‘prison house’ in Clapham). Harriett herself had recoiled in horror when – probably a few weeks earlier, following the debacle at Oxford − she had heard ‘that Percy was an Atheist; at least so it was given out at Clapham’. They started to correspond, with her ‘sure he was in the wrong & that myself was right’: at first she feared she would see the devil if she attended to Shelley’s arguments.5 By the end of April he had stopped being frightening to her, but she in turn was being persecuted by her fellow pupils for being friends with so wicked a man (she must have boasted about her acquaintance with him): ‘they will not speak to her, her school fellows will not even reply to her questions, she is called an abandoned wretch, & universally hated which she remunerates with the calmest contempt’. Shelley’s initial reaction was to save her; in that aim he was helped by Harriett’s elder sister Eliza (1782–1854),6 who could get Harriett out of school to go for walks, when Shelley could join them. At this stage, if anything, he found Eliza (aged  29) more interesting than Harriett (aged 15). But seeing Harriett in her London school, along with his sister Mary, where he could oversee their

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  1811 

‘­improvement’7 (in part, their progress towards a rejection of Christianity) would also have been an attractive prospect.

In the middle of May, Shelley and his father were temporarily on terms which allowed Shelley to visit Field Place and his family; he thought it a good opportunity for ‘making up’, even though his father seemed ‘as inveterate as ever’. At least his allowance of £200 a year was being renewed, on condition of his following ‘some Professional line’8 – that is, going into the army or navy, or qualifying himself as a doctor or lawyer or other skilled professional; Timothy Shelley may have been looking forward to a time when Shelley would be earning his own living, and when the Shelley family fortune might somehow be saved from him. On 14 May, Shelley passed on to Graham the news about his renewed allowance, but he also reported the extraordinary fact that they had, that morning, not only received a letter accusing Shelley’s father and mother ‘of [ge]tting drunk, & the latter of being more intimate with you [Graham] than with my father himself ’ but that ‘We all laughed heartily.’9 It is impossible to believe that Timothy Shelley could have found such a letter a laughing matter; Shelley’s account of the letter seems to be a joke appropriate to the poem which he was enclosing with the news. This poem – the first of two which Shelley sent to Graham – has been subjected to a series of misinterpretations almost unparalleled in Shelley biography. It has been seen as evidence that Mrs Elizabeth Shelley was having ‘an adulterous relationship with a music‐master’; it has been assumed to mean ‘that Graham either has, in fact, cuckolded Timothy Shelley, or ought to do so at the first opportunity’.10 Such conclusions depend upon simple misreadings of the first poem Shelley sent, which certainly very much enjoys the idea of Timothy Shelley’s jealousy − ‘His brows so dark his ears so blue!’ – and gleefully approaches the unforgiveable idea that ‘old Killjoy’ deserves cuckolding, and that Graham could be the cuckolder − but then denies that Graham could ever have ‘let one wild wish glow/Of cornuting old Killjoys brow.’11 Graham could not for a moment have considered it; the misreadings depend on ignoring the whole ludicrous machinery Shelley has erected, of joking letter and joking poem. The second poem dwells on the fact that if Timothy Shelley had a daughter and wife (which of course he did) ‘I’ll engage he’ll torment ’em just out of their life’, while Timothy Shelley would dearly like to get rid of a wife who is so often amused at him (‘His wife who so merrily laughs at each odd whim’). But (dammit) he cannot use the reason that she has cuckolded him. No‐one has ever done that − the cuckold’s horn doesn’t dare ‘to adorn/A brow which no daring horn yet has attempted.’12

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  A Shelley Business! 

The poems do not even start to suggest that Graham has had, or has ever c­ ontemplated, an affair with Mrs Elizabeth Shelley, a woman 22 years older than himself. The only person even to be considering the idea is Shelley himself, and he writes poems (and reports the letter) which although they play with the idea, deny that it has or – indeed – ever could happen.13 The poems are certainly in ­thoroughly bad taste by modern standards, but extremely revealing about how upper‐class males and their friends of the period were prepared to joke and jest.

But the largest question remained: what was Shelley to do with his gifts and talents? He had already shown his ambitions and his ability and he was happy to see what had happened between March and April as a step forward; he wrote in May:‘Behold me then enthusiastic quixotic, resolved, convinced that things shall be as I order it, that all my plans shall succeed…’ But what were his plans? Would he be a writer? While at Oxford he had considered taking up his father’s seat in Parliament when he was 21 (doubtless imagining he could be a radical member like Sir Francis Burdett). Free of Oxford and its obligations, he did indeed intend to devote himself to work; he did not see why earning one’s living should be ‘incompatible with the height of intellectual refinement’. In May 1811, he would tell Graham: ‘I still remain firm in my resolve to study surgery−−− You will see that I shall’, and he would repeat his determination in August.14 He had a strong and active conscience; and his scientific interests, as well as his experience with Dr Lind, would have directed him towards medicine. But he had also demonstrated a determination not just to help individuals (as a surgeon might) but to address himself more generally to the ills of society, and by 1811 he was sure that this was what poetry should do: ‘all poetical beauty ought to be subordinated to the inculcated moral’.15 This was still another way in which he differed from Hogg. Even his gothic writing had, at one level, demonstrated the misuses of power, although such a tendency had been heavily disguised by the gothic clichés with which he had enjoyed playing. But what kind of a writer would he be, now that he was to some extent past the fascinations of the gothic? In what genres would he write, with the goals that he had? Those were questions which, arguably, he never managed to solve. But, for the moment, such questions seem to have been put on hold. We know of nothing that he wrote between March and December 1811 besides letters and the two farcical poems sent in letters: no other poetry, no pamphlets. There was at least one excellent reason for this.

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  1811 

Shelley’s letters to Harriett Westbrook in 1811 do not survive, and we have little idea of what happened in their relationship between the middle of May and the second week of July 1811. On 9 May he mentioned her (along with her sister Eliza) to Hogg, saying that ‘I have arranged a correspondence with them, when I will impart more of the character of the eldest’ – so Eliza seemed equally significant. Three days later, he considered Harriett: there is something in her more noble, yet not so cultivated as the elder  –  a larger ­diamond, yet not so highly polished. Her indifference to, her contempt of surrounding prejudice, are certainly fine. But perhaps the other wants opportunity…

Still six of one and half a dozen of the other; Eliza interests him as much as Harriett. At some point Shelley appears to have suggested to the Westbrooks a way of saving Harriett from the effects of the Clapham school, and by 11 June her father had decided to remove her.16 We have an account by Shelley of his correspondence with Harriett and the process of their coming together during July and early August.The only problem is that it was written some months later, as a defence of why he had married her (and with considerable regret that he had done so) and reflects his considered later opinion. Strapped for cash (he had had to use the first quarterly tranche of the £200 from his father, which had arrived on 1 June, to pay long‐standing bills), he had gone to his cousin Thomas Grove around 9 July 1811, and although within a day declaring ‘this place a very great bore’, stayed there until August. He found the house and its occupants ‘very dull stale flat & unprofitable’, although the scenery of the Elan valley and of the mountains around it were ‘most divine’ (‘rocks, cataracts, woods & Groves’). But it was cheap: and he could wait there for the Westbrooks (father and sisters) to travel to Aberystwyth, where he hoped to meet them. During the wait, Harriett kept writing him letters: I answered them; they became interesting.They contained complaints of the irrational conduct of her relations, and the misery of living where she could love no one.17

But the Westbrooks did not come to Wales, and Shelley was left to enjoy Cwm Elan all by himself. ‘This valley is covered with trees, so are partly the mountains that surround it. Rocks piled upon each oth[er t]o an immense height, & clouds ­intersecting them, in other places waterfalls midst the umbrage of a thousand shadowy trees…’18

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  A Shelley Business! 

It is worth following in all possible detail the events of the next few weeks, which made such a difference to Shelley’s whole life; biographical summaries describing ‘his efforts to unite with Harriet’, or his ‘struggle to capture Harriet’, or his attempts to persuade her ‘to elope with him’,19 all ignore the way in which his ‘efforts’ appear to have been, at first, directed to not uniting or capturing or eloping. Complaints like those of Harriett about her father affected Shelley exactly as did the misfortunes of others with whom he was involved. But a letter of around 27 July to Hogg (who had been joking that his friend was in love with Harriett, just as he was himself with Shelley’s sister Elizabeth – whom he had never seen) reveals that Shelley was, at that point, not in love with Harriett. Shelley told Hogg that ‘Yr. jokes on H. Westbrook amuse me’, and went on: it is a common error for people to fancy others’ in their situation but if I know anything about Love I am not in love.. I have heard from the Westbrooks both of whom I highly esteem.

He also remarked that ‘to contend against impossibilities’ (having no money made it impossible for him to travel) ‘may do for a lover but will not for a mortal’,20 thus defining himself as a mortal, not as a lover. He could hardly have been plainer: he loved neither Harriett nor her sister Eliza: he only esteemed them (and esteemed them both). A day later, on 28 July, he still had no intention of going to London: he remained without money. But Harriett’s situation he took very seriously; and a few days later, when her father, according to her, ‘persecuted her in a most horrible way’, her letters started to worry him: Suicide was with her a favourite them[e and] her total uselessness was urged in its defence. I [then] admitted, supposing she could prove her inutili[ty that she] was ­powerless − her letters became more & more g[loomy]…21

Whether her father had really ‘persecuted’ her remains open to question: Harriett may have overdramatized what she suffered, as any teenager would be likely to do. Shelley would recall in October how, back in the summer − although he had continued to correspond with her − it had been ‘with ideas the remotest to those which have led to this conclusion of our intimacy’22 (i.e. their marriage). That, in retrospect at least, was what he believed, and it corresponds with the few facts we have. Around 2–3 August, still at Cwm Elan, Shelley developed a plan. He would go to York ‘as Mr Peyton’ to stay with Hogg, and Harriett could get away from her father (which at this stage was all Shelley was expecting) by travelling up too,

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presumably with Eliza, for propriety’s sake. He still had no thought of going to London. And such a trip to York was, anyway, something that Harriett herself thought might be carried out either ‘now or in 3 weeks’. Clearly neither of them felt any particular urgency. At York he was aware that he would hear Hogg’s ‘arguments for matrimonialism by which I am now almost convinced’.23 He obviously enjoyed inventing the word ‘matrimonialism’, thus undercutting his conviction: this was not the start of a marriage.

Shelley had again written to John Westbrook in an endeavour to persuade him to behave better to Harriett: in vain. He then advised Harriett to stand up against her father (‘I advised her to resist’). This gave Harriett her chance: she felt that Shelley was not only trying to save her from her father, but that he could save her, and indeed ought to do so: she wrote to say that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, & threw herself upon my protection.24

This was a remarkable development. On 3 August, Shelley repeated her remark to Hogg, still sounding astonished and not at all pleased: ‘she has thrown herself upon my protection!’ And he informed Hogg: ‘What have I said I declare quite ludicrous.’ He had obviously said something – and wrote ironically about his prospects with Harriett: ‘We shall have 200 £ a year, when we find it run short we must live I suppose upon love’, while Harriett’s ‘Gratitude & admiration all demand that I should love her forever.’25 The idea of becoming her husband was still something to make jokes about, though by no means so light‐heartedly as before. But then he got a letter from Harriett which changed everything. As he put it in October, her letter assumed a tone of such despair, as induced me to quit Wales precipitately. – I arrived in London, I was shocked at the alteration of her looks, little did I divine it’s cause; she had become violently attached to me, and feared that I should not return her attachment…26

This must have been around 5–6 August, and she was right to fear that he did not ‘return her attachment’. The phrase about the alteration of her looks − ‘little did I divine it’s cause’ – shows that Shelley came to believe that he had been deceived by what was perhaps a combination of sleeplessness, not eating, and make‐up: she had been putting on her distress, perhaps literally, to make him rescue her.

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  A Shelley Business! 

But it is clear that, by 6–7 August 1811, Shelley was – for some reason – feeling obliged to marry her, in spite of having been opposed to the idea as late as 5 August: he was about to take what he later agreed was a ‘hasty decision’ in promising ‘to unite my fate with her’s’.27 Claire Clairmont’s brother Charles (1795–1850) believed that Shelley married Harriett ‘under circumstances so very peculiar as could never have happened to any but one of so very strange a turn of mind [as] himself ’: it sounds to have been a madly principled decision. Byron would later call Shelley ‘a man who has made more sacrifices of his fortunes and feelings for others than any I ever heard of ’; he may well have included Shelley’s marriage to Harriett among those sacrifices. It seems probable that (in the words of an 1828 account by someone who had talked to Shelley) ‘an intimacy took place, &…He thought the only reparation he could make her, tho’ much beneath him, was marriage.’28 As a gentleman would – even if the ‘intimacy’ had been no more than having said ‘yes’ to her ­desperate pleas to him to marry her. The idea of such a reparation is supported by a letter which Shelley sent to Charles Grove about what he termed ‘his summons to link his fate with another’. Charles recalled Shelley’s feelings about learning his ‘fate’ being phrased in the language of Macbeth preparing to kill Duncan: ‘Hear it not, Percy, for it is a knell, which summons thee to heaven or to hell!’29 That was marriage to Harriett: a wonderful heaven, an appalling hell: and he did not want to attend to the summons. But he also apparently now believed that he was committed if she chose to ­summon him. After a couple of days Harriett ‘recovered her spirits’, to his relief, and around 8–9 August he would refer to his own state as one of ‘exerted action’ rather than of ‘inspired passion’ – he had been working hard to cheer her up and was not behaving as a lover. But probably in an attempt to convince his friend (and himself) that other things were more important than Harriett Westbrook, he also told Hogg that only his friendship could ‘engross my impassioned interest’:30 a way of saying that Harriett did not induce passion. On 11 August he at last went down to Field Place, having promised to return if Harriett demanded his return. She wrote to him two days later and he came back. The days between 5 and 11 August were probably the time about which he complained at the start of October: in one short week how changed were all my prospects – how are we the slaves of ­circumstances; how bitterly I curse their bondage.Yet this was unavoidable.

That was the week when he ‘proposed marriage…and she complied’, although by October he reckoned it had been a ‘bondage’ into which he had been misled and which he now cursed. His proposal to Harriett, he told Hogg, had 64



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made him feel ‘embarassed & melancholy’: 31 it was not at all what he had come to London for. In October he would refer, very coolly, to ‘the circumstances which caused my marriage’, 32 as if he had been confronted by a situation he could not resist. But it had not only been the ‘perplexing occurrence’ of having offered to marry Harriett which brought him back to London on 14 August. He was now concerned about his sister Elizabeth’s potential marriage to another of the Grove family, their son John (b. 1785), and may not even have seen Harriett.To make the situation even more awkward, having 10 days earlier demanded that Shelley come to her rescue, ‘My unfortunate friend Harriett is yet undecided –. not with respect to me but herself.’33 So ‘unfortunate’ Harriett still does not know if she wants him: and Shelley chooses to call her ‘friend’, nothing more loving. Hogg, meanwhile, with what looks like malice towards a man who had always been the enemy of matrimony, had been arguing powerfully for it, to an extent that Shelley declared that he was ‘a perfect convert’.34 After a very brief visit to London, Shelley went back again to Field Place. He did not wish to spend time with Harriett while she hummed and ha’d, and now he remained at Field Place for six or seven days. He must have corresponded with her, but the pause certainly does not show Shelley burning to carry her off, or Harriett burning to be carried off, in what has almost always been described as an elopement or – in an attempt to get round the problem of the facts − ‘an arranged elopement’:35 which is (of course) not an elopement. Finally Harriett – not Shelley – took a decision: he clearly felt obliged to agree with what she decided. Sometime around Friday 23 August 1811, Shelley left Field Place, met Harriett in London, and spent the rest of the day with her and Charles Grove. They then separated again before meeting the following day, the 25th, and taking a coach for York.The time spent with Harriett and Grove, and the overnight wait, were again not what might be thought the normal accompaniments of an elopement. Her family appears to have had no interest in preventing her from ­leaving: the fact that Shelley had been represented to her father as the heir to a considerable fortune must have played its part. When Harriett and Shelley returned to London, it would be to Harriett’s parental home that Shelley’s letters would be sent for forwarding. What made things still odder was that it was with the advice of Harriett’s sister Eliza ‘and with her active concurrence, and it may be said by her management’ that the couple set off. Waiting for Harriett on the morning of the day they left, Shelley and Grove breakfasted on oysters – and Grove recalled Shelley skimming the empty shells across the street, calling out ‘Grove, this is a Shelley business!’ Typical of the Shelleys (the family crest bearing three whelk shells)? Something hollow and empty? Just a silly pun? It sounds joyless enough, as might be expected of a ‘­bondage’ to which he felt obliged to submit and which within two months he 65



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cursed ‘bitterly’.36 It was almost certainly his own experience which led to his ­comments in Queen Mab: Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear ­otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their ­disappointment…(91)

But Shelley never engaged in any such avowal. No gentleman would.

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Shelley behaved entirely correctly to Harriett. He not only lived up to his original offer to marry her but – after not in the end stopping in York to see Hogg – they went directly to Edinburgh, where they got married the day they arrived, 28 August (a Scottish marriage being essential following the English 1753 Marriage Act, which required parental consent for a marriage in England involving those under 21). Shelley may also have informed Harriett that their marriage would only last until one of them wished it to end: he still thought marriage ‘an evil, an evil of immense and extensive magnitude…monopolizing, exclusively jealous’. He was being a good Godwinian: back in 1793, Godwin had called marriage ‘a system of fraud’ and ‘the worst of all laws’, and had remarked that ‘It is absurd to expect that the inclinations and wishes of two human beings should coincide, through any long period of time.’1 By 1798  –  having been married, and widowed  –  Godwin had grown certain that individuals should abandon relationships when they chose, with the proviso that ‘This, like every other affair in which two persons are concerned, must be regulated in each successive instance by the unforced consent of either party’ (Shelley would echo him in 1814 when writing how ‘these ties, these benefits are of equal obligation to either sex’). Shelley remained sure that ‘no ties ought to be imposed upon either party, preventing them from quitting the attachment, whenever their judgement directs them to quit it’.2 It seems probable that Shelley never did fall in love with Harriett, although he certainly found her physically desirable. He always tended at first to find women extremely compelling, but could also write very objectively about what he saw in them: in 1813 he was able to express in his Notes to Queen Mab, with real sadness, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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how − compared with other sorts of relationship – the ‘fetters of love’ are ‘heavier and more unendurable’, because ‘love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object’ (90). There speaks the unloving man, annoyed that he had been confined and reduced to the enjoyment of Harriett’s ‘ostensible merits’. When, however, Timothy Shelley heard that Shelley had married without parental consent, and after consulting with Whitton and John Westbrook, he decided to stop his son’s allowance forthwith, to ban him from Field Place, to cease writing to him and to refuse to receive letters from him. All communication would, in future, be via Whitton; Timothy Shelley did this, he explained, ‘to guard my Honor & Character in case of any prosecutions in the courts’. He probably meant prosecution of Shelley for the ‘Criminal opinions’3 in the Atheism pamphlet, although such action must now have seemed unlikely: but he wanted a reason for cutting himself so completely off from his son.

From June 1811 – at the time when his friendship with Hogg was frequently on hold and his letters to Harriett would not have been about matters intellectual – Shelley had been corresponding with another woman: the 29‐year‐old Sussex schoolteacher Elizabeth Hitchener, of ‘humble origins’ (her father kept a pub). He had met her at the house of his mother’s brother Captain John Pilfold in Sussex and, over the next 12 months, would write rhetorical and hyperbolic letters to her on at least 46 occasions (she seems to have kept everything he sent, along with 11 of her own draft replies). We can judge his developing friendship by the way he ­modulated from ‘Dear Madam’ in June 1811 to ‘My dearest friend’ in December.4 And that was how she stayed except for extravagant outbreaks of other kinds of address: ‘my friend, my dearest friend, the partner of my thoughts’ in January 1812, ‘my beloved friend’ in May. By then he was describing her letters as ‘like angels sent from heaven…they point out the path which it is Paradise to tread’: letters were ‘indissoluble bonds that bind our friendship’. He also told her ‘I esteem revere & love every part of your character’: ‘wherever I am, I am with you in spirit & in truth’.5 Many of the most extravagant remarks to Elizabeth Hitchener are to be found as the letters start or sign off. Shelley constructs florid, elegant, intensely old‐­ fashioned compliments in which he cannot have believed: they would have made him smile. In November 1811, for example: My dear friend believe that thou art the cheering beam which gilds this wintry day of life, perhaps ere long to be the exhaustless sun which shall gild my millenniums of immortality.6

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Does he really think that she would preserve the memory of his greatness? The  worn‐out metaphorical extravagance really conveys nothing at all; he is ­experimenting with the languages of compliment, just as he had experimented with the language of the gothic. And in many of his letters to Elizabeth Hitchener he experiments further, with – for example – fine writing, or histrionic appeal. The second thing the letters show is Shelley’s developing ability to deal with the kind of knotty arguments in which he was interested: about God, about reason, about the soul, about morality. But the third thing they reveal is his need of understanding. His correspondence with Hogg had changed in quality since their furious intellectual discussions of December 1810 and January 1811; his letters in the spring, summer and autumn of 1811 are mostly about Hogg’s feelings for Shelley’s sister Elizabeth, samples of Shelley’s poetry, invitations to stay and promises of visits. His letters to Elizabeth Hitchener show how badly he needed someone to whom he could pour out his thinking and who encouraged him, even if her replies (to judge by their draft survivals) were lacking in intellectual engagement. During the autumn of 1811, too, after his father had stopped financing him and he was left in desperate uncertainty, she offered moral support and reassuring belief in him. But Shelley’s behaviour to her also displays his awareness that – with his loss of his old home – he existed in a peculiar void socially.That is one reason why the idea of Elizabeth Hitchener coming to share life with Harriett and him, as he regularly pressed her to do, was so attractive. He was not imagining what it would be like to have her in the room with her own ideas, convictions and an unceasing flow of  words (her rambling draft letters, largely lacking full‐stops, give an idea of how she probably talked). For Shelley the idea of friendship in the social world he now inhabited, and (in particular) of belief in him, was what now mattered: he desperately wanted more than Harriett’s company. During the marital drama of August 1811, Shelley’s correspondence with almost everyone lapsed. But by September he was again in full flow; though just in case Miss Hitchener misunderstood declarations such as ‘I love you more than any relation I posses’, or when he signed off ‘With I hope eternal love your/Percy Shelley’, he insisted that he was not addressing ‘the lump of organized matter which enshrines thy soul’ but her soul itself. Not many women – not many men − would care to be called lumps of organized matter, but it was a way of reminding her that he viewed her scientifically and was not attracted to her (he had met her only twice). But, in compensation, he also attempted, as his ‘duty’, to pass on to her half his inheritance.7 What would Harriett have thought about that? Luckily the moment when it might have become a reality was some way off. On the one hand, Shelley was behaving like his father and his grandfather – and many other members of his social class – not only in being attracted to women but feeling a natural superiority to them: not falling in love with them but treating them as potential mistresses, Elizabeth Hitchener being a kind of intellectual 69



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mistress, to be used as wanted. On the other hand, he also wanted to behave as an ideal being, turning the women he met into ideal companions. And so Elizabeth Hitchener was transformed, in his letters, from the rather gauche, disappointed, intellectually stumbling woman she seems to have been, into a considerable intellectual who would not only unceasingly learn from him but teach him, too, while always being there for him. He was behaving towards her as he would have done towards that little girl he had once thought of purchasing:8 educating, encouraging, praising, setting little tasks for her but also showing her the way forward, in spite of being in thrall to his idealisation of her. The role of teacher was almost essential to Shelley in his early relationships with women. In the end, such relationships fall to pieces because human beings live complex lives in which idealisation plays only one role, and in which other human needs and appetites assert themselves.

Joking that Timothy Shelley should be scared of Graham, as he had in his ribald poems in May, was one thing but for Shelley to find his mother conniving at a marriage between Graham and her daughter Elizabeth (Shelley’s favourite sister) was far more serious. That was what Shelley believed to be happening in October 1811, by which time – because of Shelley’s marriage to Harriett – Timothy Shelley had denied him access to Field Place. This had cut him off from his mother and sisters except by letter (and letters were intercepted by the servants, as he discovered); he had come briefly to stay with his uncle John Pilfold, just 10 miles distant. His father, hearing of this, sent a brief note to Pilfold, warning him of Shelley’s ‘irrational notions, and the absence of all sentiment of Duty and affection, and the unusual spirit of Resistance to any control’ – all of which had ‘determined Mr. S not to admit him’. Shelley’s response when he heard about this was violent and immediate. He fired off three letters to Field Place, bundled together. The shortest was to his father, with the snarling comment ‘very much obliged for this morn’s intimation to my uncle’, asking him to ‘deliver the enclosed to my Mother’. The letter to her accused her of ‘violently’ and ‘persecutingly’9 attempting to unite Graham and Elizabeth in order ‘to shield yourself from that suspicion which at length has fallen on you’. The third item was to his sister Elizabeth ‘on the subject of Graham’s projected union with you’, advising her to ‘speak truth’ – presumably about what she felt. Quite what would have happened if Timothy Shelley had opened this explosive little packet of letters is hard to say: further accusations bandied back and forth, distress all round. But Timothy Shelley, in accordance with his refusal to deal with his son directly, sent the packet off unopened to Whitton, who presumably read the letters and must have decided to preserve them, but to do nothing more. 70



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The affair shows Shelley violently attempting to put an end to his mother’s pushing Elizabeth into marriage. But to use such material as a proof that ‘in the years between 1811 and 1815’ Shelley behaved ‘with an irresponsibility and a carelessness of other people’s feelings that came close to madness’, or that ‘he was nearer to the edge of insanity than he had ever been before in his volatile career’, is absurd. Elizabeth Shelley’s manipulative attitude to her daughter might well be termed ‘depravity’ (Shelley’s accusation to Elizabeth Hitchener) or ‘baseness’, as he called it in October 1811 to Charles Grove, when he also noted that ‘I knew her intentions & counteract[ed the]m’ – not knowing that his letter had never reached her.10 Back in May – a long time before Elizabeth had successfully resisted her mother’s planning – he had admired the way his mother (‘mild and tolerant’ as she was) had responded to the idea that he himself was an atheist: My Mother is quite rational.. she says, ‘I think prayer & thanksgiving is of no use. If a man is a good man, atheist or Xtian he will do very well in whatever future state awaits us.’ This I call liberality.11

In November 1812 he would address her as ‘My dear Mother’, and send ‘my love to yourself & my sisters’, while still hoping that his ‘estrangement from my family’ (because of the attitude of Timothy Shelley) would only be ‘temporary’. As late as September 1813 there is evidence of one of his sisters writing to him, as well as of his mother being as helpful as she could be, in telling him ‘everything she hears’ about his father.12 This simply goes to prove that his rage with his mother in October 1811 was only brief: but it is a sign of what could be his ferocious temper. Following his marriage, anyway, he had somehow to cope with his father’s decision to cut him off from his family: financial disaster was impending. It looks as if he received no allowance at all between April and the middle of June 1811 – when he got £50 – and then got nothing again in September, by which time his father (knowing of his son’s marriage to a tavern‐keeper’s daughter) felt he had grounds to be even less forgiving, and stopped his allowance completely. Shelley, in turn, grew angrier and angrier with his father, writing to him in mid‐October:‘you have deprived me of the means of subsistence (which means recollect you unequivocally promised)’.13 But nothing could have better pleased Timothy Shelley, who wrote grimly how his son ‘for the first time…is placed in a situation that he must be humbl’d, for I never before oppos’d or closely pursued him’.14 Shelley would insist in his ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ how ‘unlike’ (445:300) his father he was, though it would be hard to say whether Shelley father or son were in fact the more obstinate.Timothy Shelley nonetheless underestimated the extent to which his son would resist: measures designed to ensure that Shelley would conform only made him more resistant.

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And what was his relationship with Harriett now that they were married? We know about it only from fragments of information. At the end of October 1811 he asked Elizabeth Hitchener to ‘Help me mould a really noble soul into all that can make it[s] nobleness useful and lovely.’ Harriett herself was aware that ‘My knowledge has been very confined’ and that she had been the victim of ‘a bad education’;15 to start with, at least, Shelley committed himself with ‘entire devotion’ to dealing with the problem. By the end of 1812 he was teaching her Latin: ‘I do not teach her ­grammatically, but by the less laborious method of teaching her the English of Latin words, intending afterwards to give her a general idea of grammar.’ As a result she was ‘attacking Latin with considerable resolution, & can already read many Odes in Horace’. In January 1813 he was planning Virgil for her, aided by a translation, ‘when she has mastered Horace’, and Hogg heard in February not only that she wanted ‘Ovids Metamorphoses’ but that she ‘has a bold scheme of writing you a latin letter’.16 By October 1814 he had come to believe that he had, in fact, ‘resigned all prospects of utility or happiness to the single purpose of cultivating Harriet’ (even if he also came to believe that such ‘devotion’ had been ‘a gross & ­despicable superstition’). She was intelligent but unchangeably non‐intellectual. In December 1811 he reiterated what he believed was his responsibility for her, though it did make for a rather remorseless list: ‘I am Harriet’s. I am devoted to her happiness, this is entrusted to me, nor will I resign it.’ Two months earlier, he had described her as ‘my new sister’17 rather than as ‘my new wife’, thus describing the kind of relationship he would in retrospect probably have preferred to have had with her. With her, however, Shelley had wished to construct a family to replace the one he had lost, one incorporating her as ‘my new sister’. What would change everything was his discovery at the start of November 1811 that Hogg had attempted to seduce her. For himself, Shelley would not – on principle – have objected to Hogg making love to Harriett; he had left her ‘under the protection’ of his friend at York, while he had been down at the Pilfolds. Elizabeth Hitchener heard, almost as soon as he got back, that she was now Shelley’s ‘almost only friend’,18 and that Harriett had been badly upset. And because Harriett hated even the thought of Hogg, Shelley objected too, in the strongest possible terms (he did not see Hogg for over a year). It was a bold step to take, for Hogg had been subsidising him; Hogg had in fact been almost his only source of money since August. But leave they would, for Harriett’s sake. By 4 November he, Harriett and her sister Eliza – who had joined them, and would now stay with them − had left York and by the 6th were in Keswick (both Harriett and Eliza knew that part of the country).

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Almost three months of residence at Keswick followed; Shelley got to know Southey, though he saw neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth, whom he had hoped to meet. He missed Coleridge by a week at the start of February, but it is more mysterious why he failed to see Wordsworth, who had planned to be in Keswick for three days during December, staying first with Southey and then with his neighbour William Calvert (1771–1829), both of whom Shelley had come to know. It may be that Southey deliberately kept them apart, knowing that Shelley’s radical opinions would thoroughly have annoyed the newly conventional Wordsworth. But it was probably Southey who told Shelley that William Godwin was still alive, and Shelley at once began a correspondence with Godwin which continued for 10 months before the men finally met, on 4 October 1812. By mid‐January 1812, Southey was insisting that Shelley was ‘the very ghost of what I was at his age, — poet, philosopher, & jacobin, & moralist & enthusiast’: Southey also believed that his advice on how to leave youthful follies behind would do Shelley ‘more good…than the whole Bench of Bishops could have done him’.19 Not surprisingly, Shelley grew irritated: the fact that in January he was knocked to the ground by robbers (see Chapter 8) can only have assisted his desire to leave Keswick. Like many radicals, he was concerned with the emancipation of Irish Catholics (Catholic Members of Parliament were still not allowed) and the repeal of the Act of Union of 1800. In the middle of 1811 he had wondered about visiting Ireland, and as recently as December had come up with an actual plan to do so. He now advanced the idea of disseminating liberal and non‐Christian views there, particularly addressed to ‘poor Irish Catholics’ oppressed by the Protestant minority; he devoted himself to writing most of an Address, to the Irish People to sell as a pamphlet. He also thought of producing a volume of poems (he was less likely to find his own work suppressed in Ireland) while daily life should also be cheaper. The family of three, as they now were, set off again on 3 February 1812 and by the 12th were in Dublin, where – after some revisions – the Address went to the printers.

It offered to solve the problems of a country which Shelley had never previously visited, and about which he knew very little. Although he has been hailed as a ‘serious reformer and revolutionary’20 in Ireland, he seems to have been engaged in an impossible enterprise. One sign is the note on the title‐page of the Address explaining that ‘The lowest possible price is set on this publication, because it is the intention of the Author to awaken in the minds of the Irish poor, a knowledge of their real state.’ But it still cost 5d – a sum far beyond the reach of the poor for whom, in theory, it was written. Shelley was buoyed up by belief in the role he could play in changing the direction of a country with pamphlets and public speeches: by the 24th he had 73



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another pamphlet ‘in the press’, his Proposals for an Association of those Philanthropists, which attempted to suggest a practical method of implementing the changes ­outlined in the Address, and a Declaration of Rights too, a single broadsheet, with 31 numbered clauses and a brief conclusion (Paine had reprinted the 18 clauses of the French Revolution’s Declaration of Rights in The Rights of Man in 1791: Shelley was going not one but 13 better). On 27 February 1812, when he had been in Ireland for just a fortnight, he claimed that his Address pamphlets ‘have excited a sensation of wonder in Dublin…I could not expect more rapid success.’ He spoke the following day at a meeting of the General Committee of the Catholics of Ireland and received cheers (on his call for a repeal of the Act of Union) and some hissing from the audience when people realised that he was more interested in equal rights and toleration than in Catholicism – he realised that ‘more hate me as a freethinker, than love me as a votary of Freedom’.21 Copies of the Address were subsequently handed out to people in the street and in public‐houses, and some were also thrown from the balcony of the Shelleys’ lodgings to people below, but very few seem to have been sold. By mid‐March it was clear to Shelley that the pamphlet had failed to make any impression – in part because, like his speech, it had not held back from criticising Catholics (‘your religion has not been spotless, crimes in past ages have sullied it with a stain’22), while offering the vision of a reformed society which, tolerant of all religions, had no special place for Catholicism; but mostly because almost no‐one bought it or seemed interested in it. He ended up with 1100 superfluous copies. The Proposals were published on 2 March but by 18 March had been withdrawn. Radical people he had talked to in Ireland were of the opinion that ‘expediency’ was the only way forward and by the start of April he had grown noticeably disillusioned: ‘all thoughts of an Association are given up as impracticable’, Harriett explained, while noting how unaffected the poor people of Dublin had been by Shelley’s efforts.23 It was hardly surprising. The Declaration was at least a publication aimed at ordinary people, and not meant for sale, but it was even less likely to have been a success in Ireland. Its 26th clause ran Those who believe that Heaven is, what earth has been, a monopoly in the hands of a favored few, would do well to reconsider their opinion: if they find that it came from their priest or their grandmother, they could not do better than reject it.

That was hardly going to go down well in Catholic Ireland. Nor would the 24th clause: ‘A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.’The very first clause began ‘Government has no rights’; the 13th ran ‘A man has not only a right to express his thoughts, but it is his duty to do so’; the 19th stated that ‘Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform.’24 74



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The Declaration should take its place alongside The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley’s great 1819 poem; both exhibit his talent for the direct expression of radical ideas. But not in Ireland: and not in 1812. By the start of April the Irish enterprise was over: all he had been able to achieve was to put his volume of poems  –  those contained in the ‘Esdaile Notebook’ – into the hands of his Dublin printer and publisher John Stockdale. The undistributed pamphlets were boxed up and sent (along with a letter from Harriett) to Elizabeth Hitchener. The box was, however, opened at Holyhead by the Customs, samples of its contents seized and the Secretary of State informed. Shelley must by now have been a marked man; influential people had received The Necessity of Atheism, and these three new pamphlets were certainly actionable. It can only have been Shelley’s status as the son of an MP (a fact noted by Thomas Pelham, second Earl of Chichester, Postmaster General, one of those who saw the materials) which prevented a move against him. He was running very close to the wind. He, Harriett and Eliza got back from Ireland on 4 April 1812 and made their way through Wales hoping to find a house to rent. They ended up in Rhayader, where Shelley had been the previous summer. Here, in the next valley from Cwm Elan, in mid‐April they found Nantgwyllt House, ugly and inconvenient, but ‘a good one, what I mean by good is, that there is plenty of room for all of us’. And it was to this house, after many more invitations, that they finally lured Elizabeth Hitchener. Shelley had told her in February that ‘We will meet you in Wales, and never part again’,25 and he had insisted that Harriett, too, was making ‘urgent solicitations’ for her to join them. Eventually she gave up her teaching job and came, after her father had attempted to stop her on the grounds that she would certainly become Shelley’s mistress; by the end of July 1812 she had joined the family. It was, as might have been predicted, a disaster. Harriett was quietly ironical about her from the start, writing to her friend Catherine Nugent at the start of August: ‘Our friend, Miss Hitchener, is come to us. She is very busy writing for the good of mankind…She talks a great deal. If you like great talkers she will suit you.’ Harriett clearly could not resist being amused by their guest, ‘so low spirited’ after reading a book (Pieces of Irish History) which Shelley had obtained: ‘I am in great hopes she will get the better of low spirits’.26 Shelley politely offered ideas for the book’s republication, though nothing came of them. But both Shelleys were ‘not long in finding out our great disappointment’ in Elizabeth Hitchener, who also (Harriett discovered) insisted that Shelley was really in love with her, and that it was only the fact that he was married ‘that could keep her within bounds now’.27 It was an impossible situation: to the Shelleys, dark‐skinned Miss Hitchener became the ‘Brown Demon.’ And money was the only solution. It was, Harriett explained in November 1812, ‘a long time ere we could possibly get her away, till at last Percy said he would give her £100 a year’:28 half his income. By the time they could get her to leave, the household had moved on to the Tan‐yr‐allt house 75



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in North Wales. It was of course true that she had given up her teaching post for Shelley, and that her association with him would have been the last thing to recommend her for another position. But the whole episode had been embarrassing, ­difficult (and eventually expensive) in exactly the way that Shelley’s undiminished capacity for believing that he was able to change people, and change the world, could be. He was still only 20.

The Shelley household had been moving from place to place since April, when they had left Dublin, as Harriett noted sadly in October 1812: ‘I know not how it is that whenever we fix upon any particular place of residence something comes to take us to another.’29 And the Nantgwyllt house turned out to be no more lucky for a long stay. After just seven weeks, having hoped to purchase it, Shelley found himself obliged to give it up; his attempts to get himself accepted as purchaser proved, not surprisingly, unconvincing to the man who owned it. At the start of June they had to leave and  –  after a fortnight at Cwm Elan with the Grove family – went down to Chepstow to view a house which they had heard would suit them. They found it ‘not half built’ and at the end of June went on to Devonshire, to Lynmouth, again hoping to settle for a while and attracted by the cheapness of accommodation and the beauty of the place. They spent nine weeks and three days there,30 but were obliged to leave because they feared arrest; their Irish servant Daniel Healey had, as instructed, been pinning up copies of the Declaration of Rights on trees, only to be arrested and imprisoned (Shelley contributed 15 shillings a week for his upkeep in prison). Shelley, Harriett, Eliza and Elizabeth Hitchener (still hanging on to them) left very quickly, borrowing money from their landlady as they did, but repaying her immediately, and then spent another month on the road in Wales, looking for a house first in the Vale of Llangollen and then at the new town of Tremadog. Their constant travelling and searching was in fact rather astonishing. It was by no means a cheap way to live, but it seems to have been important to Shelley, who – since being expelled from his family home in 1811 – had been looking for the right place to live, in the right kind of social context, with the right people (a kind of family) around him, and the right role to pursue. He believed he could afford to keep looking: so he did. At Tremadog, at last, they seemed to have struck lucky. The man who had built the town, William Madocks – according to Harriett in October 1812, a man who aroused ‘our warmest admiration and esteem’ because he ‘always stands up for the interests and welfare of the poor’31 − had for 12 years been building a dam across the estuary to reclaim land from the sea and to enable vehicles to cross. Shelley was impressed by the man and by the enterprise, and put  himself down to pay £100 (which he did not currently have) towards it. 76



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Madocks was very happy to gain the support of the son of a rich man, and to rent him one of the houses he had built in the area, Tan‐yr‐allt: Shelley was equally happy to take it, especially as he would not have to start paying rent until his 21st birthday, in August 1813. But he also needed to go to London (again in search of financial security). Having spent October and half November 1812 in London, and also having finally got rid of Elizabeth Hitchener (Shelley ended up owing her money, naturally, while she threatened legal action32), Shelley, Harriett and Eliza were back in Tan‐yr‐allt by mid‐November. Allowing Hogg to enter the circle had been a failure, as had been the addition of Elizabeth Hitchener, but including Eliza had clearly been Harriett’s wish. Shelley ordered books in large numbers, and showed every sign of making Tan‐yr‐allt the centre for what back in May and June he had called his ‘little circle’, ‘our society’, for which his wealth on attaining his majority would be ‘by right, natural right, the property of all members’.33 He hoped that Tremadog would at last be the proper place to live: he would be the man of means doing his best to care for his community, both the smaller one indoors and the larger one around them. ‘I have a patient or two for you in this neighbourhood’ he told a Caernarfon doctor in December, for example, offering to put the doctor up whilst he attended local patients too poor to pay for themselves.34 Shelley and Harriett had settled into a relationship in which the affection remained mostly on her side: he had remarked in May that ‘She is warmer & more affectionate than my heart, which in its time has had so much rubbing that it ought to be hard by this time.’ In August, too, he would write how, although ‘married a year to a woman younger than myself ’, ‘Love seems inclined to stay in the prison.’ All he really enjoyed was her artlessness; in December 1812, he would spell out what ‘ever formed in my eyes her greatest charms’: The ease & simplicity of her habits, the unassuming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connection of her thought & speech…35

By then there were, too, ominous signs of Shelley’s enthusiasm for Madocks’s project having cooled since his initial encounter with it. Madocks was actually in considerable financial difficulties and was spending most of his time in London dealing with his creditors. Just as they congratulated themselves on finding the right place, the Shelleys must also have wondered how long they were going to stay there, with barely a soul they knew for hundreds of miles.

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8 Tan‐yr‐allt 1813

About 11.00 p.m. on Friday 26 February 1813, after everyone had gone to bed at Tan‐yr‐allt, Harriett and Shelley heard noises suggesting a break‐in. Shelley went downstairs in his nightgown, carrying two loaded pistols. He always travelled with pistols ‘for defense’ but had also been ‘expecting to have occasion for them’; people worried about intruders would keep weapons to hand. Shelley was ‘fearless’ and had handled firearms since he was a boy.1 A pistol was fired, which woke the household, and Shelley ended up wrestling with a retreating man on the grass outside. Peacock knew that though Shelley appeared ‘Delicate and fragile…he had great muscular strength’; the son of a friend recalled Shelley blaming his later agonising side pains (almost certainly kidney trouble) on ‘the pressure of the assassin’s knee upon him in the struggle’.2 The household – including Harriett, five months pregnant, and Eliza – ­assembled downstairs. After Shelley decided to sit up the rest of the night with his newly returned servant Daniel Healey, in case of another intrusion, everyone else went back to bed – only to be disturbed at 4 a.m. by another shot. Downstairs, Shelley gave an account of a man at the window and a shot being fired which had just missed him. Harriett believed that Shelley’s nightgown had been shot through: a curtain was waving in the wind from a broken window. (It seems most likely that Shelley had in fact fallen asleep, had dreamed of another intruder, and had fired at – and broken – the window.) Shelley’s own belief, written down in haste the following day while suffering from ‘watching fatigue & alarm’, was that he had escaped ‘an atrocious assassination’.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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  1813 

That ‘nervous and unsettled’ first reaction would soon be modified by the admission that the night’s events were ‘mysterious’. No‐one in the locality was suspected of having broken in: ‘I am surprised that the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of.—Surely the Inquieries have not been sufficiently ­general or particular?’3 Harriett and Eliza were nevertheless convinced that they should leave, and the whole Shelley family decamped, going to stay with the nearest ­gentleman in the area whom they trusted, David Ellis Nanney (1759–1819), seven miles away; Nanney was squire of Gwynfryn and attorney‐general for North Wales.

Madocks wrote a reply to a letter from his local agent John Williams sometime that spring or summer, after the Shelleys had left the district: How could Shelly mind such a contemptible trick as had been played off on him to get him out of the Country on account of his liberal principles. Whoever the hoxters are, it is a transportable Offence, if discovered. I will write fully in a day or two after Monday, when the Committee of Creditors meet again.4

‘Hoxters’ are ‘hucksters’, people offering their services for gain. As Madocks had been in London throughout, everything he says was probably drawn from what Williams had passed on to him; he had concluded that more than one ‘hoxter’ had been paid, and that Shelley had been the victim of a ‘contemptible trick’, ‘played off on him’. The fact that Madocks also believed that a ‘transportable Offence’ had occurred is significant: it shows that the house had indeed been broken into during the hours of darkness.5 That seems as certain as anything can be. When Peacock was in North Wales later in 1813, he talked to ‘Persons who had examined the premises on the following morning.’ They told him that the grass outside the house had been much trampled on and that the only visible footsteps on the wet ground led to the window. Peacock was also told that a pistol ball had been found inside one of the rooms, fired into the wainscot beneath a window, and Richard Holmes demonstrated how someone outside the building could have fired a shot that ended up in the wainscot under the window of one of the inside rooms.6 But if the intruder’s main intention had been to frighten the house’s inhabitants, then a pistol ball might easily have ended up lodged low down indoors. Peacock, however, decided that – because Shelley must have fired the shot – therefore the affair must have been his ‘semi‐delusion’:7 an entirely illogical conclusion which proved astonishingly influential on subsequent commentators.

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  Tan‐yr‐allt 

For Tan‐yr‐allt, we need to hold on to the few threads of information which seem more certain than the others: a break‐in at night, a pistol fired, a fight on the grass outside, a subsequent pistol shot.The whole affair had likely been a trick played by people paid to take it on, which the Shelleys took seriously. Who might have been interested in tricking them into believing that they were under threat? According to the postscript note written by Harriett the next day to their London bookseller friend Thomas Hookham (?1786–1867), the threat came from ‘a person who is actuated by revenge & who threatens my life & my Sisters as well’; writing again a fortnight later, she recounted how the intruder had sworn ‘By God I will be revenged! I will murder your wife. I will ravish your sister. By God. I will be revenged.’ A local housebreaker was unlikely either to have been so precisely acquainted with the persons of the house (‘sister’ with its common meaning of ‘sister‐in‐law’) or to have spoken English. Either Shelley was inventing such threats or the intruder was indeed ‘seeking to arouse terror’.8 A strong candidate for the person who sent in a man or two to cause a disturbance would be the Hon. Robert Leeson,9 the Irish owner of a local stone quarry which was providing materials for the embankment and whose dislike of Shelley was, in 1813, well known. Leeson lived in another of Madocks’s houses, Morfa Lodge (today Gelli Faia) in Porthmadog. He and Shelley were ‘the only two members of the upper classes residing in that isolated little community of peasants, labourers and small shopkeepers’, and Leeson had offered to call − or had called − on them. The Shelleys, though, had decided not to see him: they had ‘heard his character’. Such a refusal was socially unforgivable, and Leeson was, not surprisingly, ‘for ever saying something against us’. He would have regarded Shelley as a traitor to his social class, would have been irritated by his attack on absentee Irish landlords (he was one himself ), and may well have been anxious about Shelley’s attitudes to workers’ rights – the ‘liberal principles’ Madocks described – influencing his own work force. A letter of April 1812 reveals Leeson’s attitude to his workers: he thought it ‘madness to feed so many mouths’, because ‘most of the men eat more than their work is worth’.10 Harriett insisted that Leeson had been saying ‘that he was determined to drive us out of the country’ while Shelley believed that Leeson had been spreading stories about his inability to pay his bills: if he failed in his attempts to raise money, he reckoned that the reason would be ‘Leeson’s lies.’11 Shelley had been encouraged to stay at Tremadog because he was the obviously energetic son of a rich man with access (or so it had been thought in September 1812) to people possessed of considerable sums of money. Getting him out of Tan‐yr‐ allt in February 1813 while Madocks was away in London might well have seemed desirable. According to Harriett, Leeson told the local shopkeepers, the morning after the intrusion, ‘that it was a tale of Mr. Shelley’s to impose upon them, that he might leave the country without paying his bills. This they believed, and none of them 80



  1813 

attempted to do anything towards his discovery.’12 It is certainly odd that no surviving local newspaper paid any attention to the episode, in spite of the fact that ‘Feloniously Breaking and Entering any Dwelling House, in the night time’ had been a topic in the press, and in Tremadog the previous year there had been a serious  –  and reported – break‐in. There must have been some kind of collusion for silence about a break‐in at Tan‐yr‐allt to have been maintained. Shelley himself continued to be surprised that ‘the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of ’,13 but neither Leeson nor Williams would have been the least interested in pursuing inquiries. If Williams, when he wrote to Madocks, had known what had really happened, he could easily – and even truthfully – have portrayed the event as an insignificant ‘trick’. Madocks, anyway, was by the spring of 1813 far too busy defending himself against his creditors to be more than sad that he had lost Shelley as a backer.

It is worth setting the Tan‐yr‐allt episode beside an event which had taken place just 13 months earlier in Keswick, in the Lake District. An account had appeared in the Cumberland Pacquet of 28 January 1812: Several attempts at robbery have been made within the last fortnight, at Keswick, and in its neighborhood; but, fortunately, without effect. One of the most remarkable was about seven o’clock, on the night of Sunday the 19th inst. at Chestnut Hill, near Keswick, the seat of GIDEON DARE, Esq. − A part of the house, it seems, is occupied by Mr. SHELLEY and his family. − Mr. Shelley, being alarmed by an unusual noise, (but not knowing, or suspecting, the cause) went to the door; was knocked down by some ruffians, and had remained senseless for a time, when Mr. DARE, hearing the disturbance, rushed out of the house. The villains, no doubt perceiving that he was armed, fled immediately. It could not be ascertained how many the gang consisted of; but the attack was of a very formidable nature, and must stimulate the magistrates and inhabitants of the vicinity to make the most speedy exertions, and adopt the most effectual measures for the security of the town and neighborhood.14

Robert Southey (a long‐term resident) had been worried about ‘ruffians’ in Keswick: he had seen ‘Ugly fellows…who frightend the whole town men women & children’, and had twice mentioned them in his correspondence. The Shelleys’ landlord, Gideon Dare, was ‘armed’ when he came out of his house, too, while Southey was himself so alarmed by what he had seen and heard that he intended to acquire pistols in case his own house were attacked. He wrote to a close friend describing what had happened: Pistols I must have, – they allow of two shots, & they are more easily put out of the way by day, & in the way by night. The evening I wrote to you [19 January] Shelley was

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  Tan‐yr‐allt  knocked down at his own door.  –  so close to it as to fall back senseless into the passage, & thus escape robbery. So that you see there is some cause for the alarm, & that it may not be amiss to carry arms at night for some time to come.15

Anyone hearing – from Shelley, Harriett or Eliza − about the Keswick attack would have reckoned that staging a similar assault at Tan‐yr‐allt would have been an excellent way of convincing Shelley that he was the target of a series of attacks (he knew that he had been the subject of government investigations).

And the plan worked: the Shelleys left and found themselves on the road again. They went back to Ireland in March 1813, just for a month, probably so that Shelley could attempt to recover the manuscript poems he had left with John Stockdale, who had been holding them to ransom because of Shelley’s failure to pay for the printing of his pamphlets; by the start of April the Shelleys were back in London again, with the poems. It must have been in their lodgings there that Shelley was able to do the final work he wanted on his long poem Queen Mab which – amazingly – he had been able to keep writing since the spring of 1812, in the numerous places in which he, Harriett and Eliza had lived. It would bring together all the major concerns of his life; it would constitute a considered act of rebellion against constraint.

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9 Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 1812 –1813

Queen Mab, a nine‐canto poem written between April 1812 and mid‐February 1813, and dedicated ‘TO HARRIET *****’, was the culmination of Shelley’s early career as a writer: his longest work since ‘The Wandering Jew.’ He may have finished it at Tan‐yr‐allt in February 1813 but continued with the Notes during April and May in London, where it would have been easier to consult the authors he needed. Although its title suggests poesy and fairies, his subtitle was the serious ‘A Philosophical Poem/With Notes’, with other resonances altogether; there is an echo of Erasmus Darwin’s 1789 poem The Loves of the Plants, A Poem. With Philosophical Notes. But Shelley’s whole poem is bejewelled with quotation and reference to other writers: it provides a kind of reading‐list for radical thinkers.The epigraphs on the title‐page as finally selected (his first plan had included a quotation from Shakespeare) offer Voltaire’s famous rallying cry against authority ‘ECRASEZ L’INFAME!’, which Shelley had used to Hogg back in December 1810,1 a quotation from Lucretius demonstrating a determination ‘to free men’s minds from the crippling bonds of superstition’, and the famous statement by Archimedes ‘Give me a place to stand upon, and I will move the earth’, which had (in English) been the first sentence of Paine’s ‘Introduction’ to his Age of Reason Part the Second (1792).Voltaire in French, Lucretius in Latin and Archimedes/Paine in Greek not only positioned the poem directly in the context of contemporary radical thought but revealed the kind of audience at which Shelley was aiming. The poem itself positively bubbles with other writing. In one 13‐line passage (60:VI.108–120), quotations and near‐quotations from Paul‐Henri Thiry, Baron

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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d’Holbach (1723–1789), Milton, James Thomson, Henry V, Southey and Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) all come to the surface.2 Shelley was also happy to quote from himself, especially in the Notes he added: not just portions of The Necessity of Atheism in Note 13, but extracts from his unpublishable 1812 pamphlet A Letter to Lord Ellenborough in Note 15 (he had attacked the jail term handed out to Eaton for publishing Paine’s Rights of Man), and in Note 17 his own Vindication of Natural Diet. He had done the same in the poetry. ‘To Liberty’ anticipates the start of Canto IX of Queen Mab and one phrase (‘pyramids shall fall’) is re‐used; an anecdote about Christ in ‘The Wandering Jew’ appears again in Queen Mab; four lines in Queen Mab come from a footnote to the poem ‘A Dialogue —1809’.3 ‘Whose is the love that gleaming thro the world’ becomes the dedication to Queen Mab (23–24), while ‘It is not blasphemy to hope that Heaven’ contributes 12 lines to Note 16.4 The poem at moments also repeats itself; the lines ‘to me is given/The wonders of the human world to keep’ appear twice (65:VII.60–61, 72:VIII.48–49), while the line ‘Symphonious with the planetary spheres’ becomes ‘Symphonious to the planetary spheres’ (58:VI.41,71:VIII.18). And the poem is full of echoes and half‐ echoes of itself: ‘reins of light’ remind us of the ‘lines of rainbow light’ eight lines earlier (25:I.62,54).

The poem couples its earnest attack upon religion and contemporary politics with poetry drawing upon all Shelley’s resources of erudition, imagination and evocation: he had told Hookham at the very start of writing that he intended it to encompass ‘The Past, the Present, & the Future’ as its ‘grand & comprehensive topics’.5 It remains adjective‐laden in his customary youthful way (‘purpureal’, ‘sempiternal’, ‘beamy’6 were all frequent words in poetry which he knew), but it is also permeated by the language and findings of science, as in ‘circumambient’ (32:II.37), ‘viewless beings’ (creatures only visible under a microscope) (37:II.231), ‘meteor‐happiness’7 (meaning happiness short‐lived and transient) and ‘mediative’, at that date most commonly used scientifically (57:V.232). The poetry is at times also touched by his old gothic language. The spirit of the central figure, named Ianthe (for Shelley, a figure for the next generation: the daughter he would call Ianthe would be born in June 1813), is taken by the Fairy Queen, Queen Mab, to observe the Earth from a position far above it. What she sees of the universe involves no reference to God or to creation, only to the processes of an entirely impersonal – and ‘eternal’ − ‘Spirit of Nature’; the universe, with its ‘circling systems’, obeys ‘Eternal nature’s law’ and ‘Nature’s unchanging harmony.’8 It is not subjected to divine direction: the ‘reality of Heaven’ is the ‘happy Earth’ itself (77:IX.1).

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Such a perspective on the Earth, too, is able to demonstrate not only the hatefulness of religion but the folly and thoughtlessness of conventional power. It is Mab’s problem ‘How soonest to accomplish the great end’ (29:I.183) of making Ianthe aware of how her own Earth is run. One way is to insist that the misery of human life is not ‘unconnected’,‘Nor stands uncaused, and irretrievable’ (46:IV.74–75). Mab starts to show Ianthe the details of the Earth which she has left behind, and they look at the ruined palaces of Palmyra and the heaped stones of the pyramids (35:II.134– 148); the power which constructed such places is denounced as ‘a desolating pestilence’ (42:III.176). Attacks are mounted on ‘the fool/Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave/Even to the basest appetites’ (39:III.31–33), on the corruption of the ‘gilded flies’ (41:III.107) who are his courtiers (and who live off the toil of the working classes): on the absurdity of religion, Solomon’s temple being mocked and religious believers being ‘the credulous vulgar’ (37:II.249): and on the ‘brief and frail authority’ of Judges ‘clothed in venal power’ (42–43:III.156,220). And – to counterpoise one of Shelley’s enduring themes – ‘freedom’ haunts the poem as it does the ‘colonnades’ of Greece and Rome, ‘Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks’ (35:II.168–169). ‘Once peace and freedom blest/The cultivated plain’ (36:II.202– 203), while ‘Power’ is the ‘Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth’ (42:III.176,178). Mab (like Milton’s Satan) prefers ‘Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven’ (68:VII.195); we also hear of ‘freedom’s young arm’ (70:VII.244), of ‘Love, freedom, health’ (71:VIII.15), of ‘that sweet bondage which is freedom’s self ’ (79:IX.178) and of ‘freedom’s fadeless laurels’ (81:IX.178). A God ‘Of nature and benevolence’ does not exist: God is seen to give ‘A special sanction to the trade of blood’ (35:II.156–157) in the countless religious wars fought in his name. Such a view of Earth and its societies is also brought into particular focus by Shelley’s use of Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791) by Constantin François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820), translated both in 1792 and 1802. Although Shelley nowhere directly refers to it, he knew it extremely well.9 Just as Mab points to ‘Palmyra’s ruined palaces!’ (34:II.110) as her first instance of grandiose human folly, so Volney’s examples at the opening of the first chapter of his book are the ‘celebrated ruins’ of Palmyra. His narrator, too, has been taken on an aerial survey of the Earth; and each of Volney’s narrative chapters comes with extensive notes. The development of Volney’s thought in Part I of his book is from ruins to the weakness of power, to the lack of anything like a God’s purpose or influence on men’s deployment of power (as demonstrated by the variety of utterly different religions), to the fact that religious belief must be a matter of conjecture, to the observation that ‘the only means of establishing harmony is to return to nature’.10 That, though, does not mean what we might expect. The second part of Volney’s book demonstrates his new understanding of nature, ‘the constant and

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regular order of events, by which God governs the universe’: God remains ‘the power that animates, that moves’.Volney’s book has been claimed as one of the genuinely radical documents produced in the early years of the French Revolution, a work that severely critiques all the reigning ideologies of the world— whether political or theological—and proposes their abolition.11

But Volney’s work remains underpinned by the ‘theological’. The first English translation of Les Ruines, published as The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires in 1792, had been done by Godwin’s close friend James Marshall. Volney himself thought the translation too tame and in 1802 oversaw a new English version published in Paris, which was reprinted frequently and became the standard conduit for his ideas in the English‐speaking world. In it, God is described as ‘the soul of the universe’, something followed directly by Shelley − the ‘Spirit of Nature’ is ‘Soul of the Universe!’12 Shelley, however, usually uses the word ‘God’ in the context of his savage attacks on the Christian religion (and always does so in his Notes); only on one occasion does he discuss the ‘Spirit of Nature’ in the same terms as Volney: specifically not as ‘the God of human error’ (62:VI.199) but as ‘the God/Of nature’ (35:II.155–156). That tradition can be found everywhere in English (Edmund in King Lear had confessed ‘Thou Nature art my Goddesse’) but Shelley’s radical contemporaries would have thought of Paine’s question and answer in his Age of Reason of 1794: But some perhaps will say, Are we to have no word of God—no revelation? I answer yes. There is a word of God; there is a revelation. THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD13

Queen Mab, as well as being indebted to others, also asserts its independence by offering various sorts of polemic against established writers; the very first line of the poem, while adopting the form of Southey’s epic Arabian poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), turns Southey’s ‘How beautiful is night!’ into ‘How wonderful is Death’ (24:I.1). Shelley also takes on, in verse, Edward Young’s ‘aggressive theism’ in The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts (collected edition 1750). In his poem’s Ninth Night, Young had rhetorically questioned why the Earth and the planets move as they do, and had found that ‘Much Design/Is seen in all their Motions’: Who, Motion, foreign to the smallest Grain, Shot thro’ vast Masses of enormous Weight?… Has Matter innate Motion? Then each Atom, 86



  1812 –1813  Asserting its indisputable Right To dance, would form an Universe of Dust…14

And that, to Young, is fortunately not the case. He happily concludes that motion and intelligence ‘Resides not in each block; – a GODHEAD reigns.−’ Shelley deals with Young’s argument by adopting its language but making it say the opposite.Young’s ‘block’, ‘That for uncounted ages has remained/The moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight’, is in fact … active, living spirit. Every grain Is sentient both in unity and part, And the minutest atom comprehends A world of loves and hatreds…(47–48:IV.139–146) Young believes that every atom in the universe is controlled by God; Shelley believes every atom to be remarkably like himself, in fact: independent, active and alive, going its own way unaffected by the supernatural. The main direction of Queen Mab, and its encouragement of like‐minded readers, can, at all events, be ascertained from Canto IX: thy will Is destined an eternal war to wage With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot The germs of misery from the human heart. (81–82:IX.189–192) This is the kind of polemic which renders the poem endlessly optimistic about the future. Canto III had culminated in a vision of the ‘age of endless peace…And the unbounded frame, which thou pervadest, /Will be without a flaw/Marring its perfect symmetry’ (44:III.235–240). The savagery of some of the descriptions of power and blood is modified by Mab’s reassurances that life will change: in Canto IV, ‘A garden shall arise, in loveliness/Surpassing fabled Eden’ (46:IV.88–89). Canto V is certain that ‘A brighter morn awaits the human day’ (57:V.251); Canto VI that truthful men ‘Shall bind the scorpion falshood with a wreath/Of ever‐living flame,/Until the monster sting itself to death’ (58:VI.36–38); while Canto VIII insists on how ‘Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear:/Earth was no longer hell’ (71:VIII.13–14). The poetry in such passages can be as vapid as the thought; how can a wreath of flame be used to bind something? Why should hope be aroused just because Mab (like the poet) says it is? How will ‘germs of misery’ be uprooted ‘from the human heart’? (82:IX.191–192) Assertion is what this poetry mostly depends upon, and – at times – assertion gives way to a kind of schematic writing which is even less convincing, as at the end of Canto VIII when ‘the omnipotence of mind’ 87



  Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 

(Shelley had written in 1811 how ‘my golden age is when the present potence [of mind] will become omnipotence’) ‘from its dark mine drags the gem of truth/To decorate its paradise of peace.’15 Truth as decorative jewellery for a peaceful paradise is positively suburban. Canto IX, too, is for the most part a hymn to the new world which the Earth might be: a world in which ‘care and sorrow, impotence and crime,/Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come’ (77:IX.9–10). Palaces, cathedrals and prisons are in ruins, and – with a nod to The Tempest – These ruins soon left not a wreck behind… Thus human things were perfected, and earth, Even as a child beneath its mother’s love, Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew Fairer and nobler with each passing year. (80:IX.130,134–137) What the poem is after is nothing less than the remaking of the human race as individuals who – in the ideal future – will mock ‘The unprevailing hoariness of age.’ For man will grow immortal: … man, once fleeting o’er the transient scene Swift as an unremembered vision, stands Immortal upon earth… But it will also be a world in which ‘man has lost/His terrible prerogative, and stands/An equal amidst equals’ (76:VIII.208–211,225–227).

Shelley is writing poetry of exactly the kind which in 1819, with the benefit of hindsight, he would condemn; he would denounce writers who dedicated their ‘poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform’ (187) and would characterise his own early work as ‘dreams of what ought to be, or may be’ (273). For modern readers there are nevertheless passages of insight and beautiful coherence, as in the lines ‘of resolute mind,/Free from heart‐withering custom’s cold control’ (82:200–201), though even there the adjectives are rather hard at work. There are moments with the startling quality of scientific vision, as when (in the slightly revised second version of 1815), The Daemon and the Spirit Approached the overhanging battlement.

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  1812 –1813  Below lay stretched the boundless universe! There, far as the remotest line That limits swift imagination’s flight, Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion Immutably fulfilling Eternal Nature’s law. Above, below, around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony; Each with undeviating aim In eloquent silence through the depths of space Pursued its wondrous way.—16

Others beside Shelley had been thinking along such lines for a long time; Paine, in The Age of Reason, had written how ‘the infinity of space is filled with worlds’ and how ‘all the component parts of the immense machine of the universe have influence upon each other, and act in motional unison together’. But Shelley shapes the scientific ideas into provocative poetry: ‘circling systems’ form ‘A wilderness of harmony.’ It seems likely that Southey had recited Coleridge’s unpublished ‘Kubla Khan’ to him, for him to have remembered ‘mazy motion’.17 And there is also child‐like precision, as when Ianthe – leaving her place above the universe − observes the planets growing smaller and the stars becoming ‘Such tiny twinklers’ (82:IX.223). The actuality and particularity of some of the writing is also notable in a poem so often running to abstractions. The horses of Mab’s chariot, when they first descend, ‘paw the unyielding air’ (25:I.60). Previous poets (Lawes and Smart, as well as translators of Homer and Ovid) had used ‘yielding air’, but Shelley understands how the animals need to paw something: at the end of the poem, too, after coming back to Earth, they are seen to have ‘pawed the ungenial soil’ and ‘Snuffed the gross air’ (82:IX.229–230).

Shelley also knew that, as part of his old ‘passion for reforming the world’,18 he not only wanted (as he would put it in 1819) to offer his readers ‘beautiful idealisms of moral excellence’ (187) but to fill them with a powerful sense of horror. Supporters of the monarchy rampage as ‘tameless tygers hungering for blood’, intent on getting their victims sent to hell and thus to ‘Eternal misery’ (49:IV.213,216). Such writing was so offensive that the passage would be cited in evidence against Shelley in 1817, during Chancery proceedings attempting to prove his unsuitability for acquiring custody of his own children.

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  Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 

Still worse was the fact that, after Queen Mab had been ‘finished & transcribed’, and the poem itself printed, Shelley added what he called ‘long philosophical, & Anti Christian’ Notes,19 as factual, forceful and provocative as he could make them, drawing on a very wide range of sources, and at times reproducing them at length. They bring together many of the texts and ideas which had compelled him over the previous four or five years. He also added much entirely of his own, his second Note for example savagely attacking ‘the falsehoods of religious systems’ in the light of the magnificence of the universe: It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine, begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonime of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcileable with the knowledge of the stars. (83–84)

It would have been the fear of a charge of blasphemous libel which would lead to that passage being omitted from the 1821 pirated edition (which did not, however, prevent the imprisonment for four months of its publisher, William Clark).20 Long before the Notes were completed, Shelley told his prospective publisher, his friend Hookham, in March 1813, I expect no success.  –  Let only 250 Copies be printed. A small neat Quarto, on fine  paper & so as to catch the aristocrats: They will not read it, but their sons & daughters may.21

It is a revealing instruction. The planned physical appearance of the book, the limited number of copies planned and the use of ‘fine paper’, would (both to author and prospective publisher) have significantly reduced the chances of its being prosecuted: works of pamphlet length and of cheap appearance were in greater danger. Shelley was also writing for the tiny section of the public capable of reading French, Latin and Greek: the audience to whom he had addressed his Original Poetry, his Posthumous Fragments and his Necessity. For the moment he had abandoned writing and publication such as had been executed for the Address, the Proposals and the Declaration. Even though he had added items to Queen Mab like Note 7, where aristocrats are excoriated ‘for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society’,22 he would have hoped for sales in those areas of the book market (considerably larger than one hundredth) frequented by aristocrats. And he sent a copy to Byron, presumably to capture the interest of one of the leading poets of his generation; the seventh edition of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold had come out in February 1814, newly dedicated to ‘Ianthe’ – the name from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which Shelley had used 90



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in 1813 for the central character of Queen Mab and for his own daughter – and that may have been his provocation.23

When Hookham saw the complete text he prudently opted not to take it, while its excellent printer also refused to allow his name to appear (‘it is too much against every existing establishment’ noted Harriett in May 1813:24 in fact it offered itself as a target for immediate prosecution). So long as he hoped for the publication of his poem, Shelley was obliged to supply the name of a printer and the place of printing: he constructed a title‐page and colophon in which he gave his own name as printer and added the address of Harriett’s father. His Letter to Lord Ellenborough, the Address, to the Irish People, the Proposals for an Association of those Philanthropists and A Declaration of Rights had all (illegally) omitted details of their printers,25 while the name on The Necessity had been incorrect; but none had been in the conventional sense published. But it had become clear to him – perhaps as he added the Notes − that such an enterprise might be as dangerous as The Necessity of Atheism; and according to someone who talked to him about it, because he could find ‘no bookseller in London who would publish it, the copies of the book were given away privately’. Apparently ‘some copies’ were ‘sent over to America’. In many cases, in the copies given away, he removed the title‐page (with his name as printer and John Westbrook’s address),26 thus often removing the dedication to Harriett too; with a knife he often sliced off the colophon from the last page (again removing the name and address). Most of his private distribution seems to have taken place in the second half of 1813; he gave the artist John Linnell (1792–1882) a copy ‘at Binfield Berks’. This would have been while the Shelleys were living at High Elms House at Bracknell, just a couple of miles from the house of friends in Binfield, sometime between late July and September 1813. Shelley was still distributing the poem as late as 1817 (again in the ‘mutilated’ state)27 but because 180 copies of the 1813 edition were still in existence in 1822, it is clear how very few copies of ‘so dangerous a gift’, as Harriett put it, had got into the hands of readers between 1813 and 1817: the maximum possible number being something under 70, probably fewer.28 Although we know of a copy ending up in the hands of Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818) − the Westbrooks’ counsel at the 1817 Chancery hearing − to whom Shelley had certainly not given it, the fact that the book was written by one of the upper classes, was not available to the public, and could only have been appreciated by an audience which Shelley himself characterised as ‘the more select classes of poetical readers’ (187), probably led the authorities not to bother about it, even after the 1817 legal hearing.29

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  Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 

The presence of Notes for the poem draws attention to one of Shelley’s problems as a writer at the start of his career. He believed that he could write poetry which imaginatively conveyed his own beliefs and desires for change to his readers, but in spite of this, he would remark in January 1813, when thinking of Queen Mab, that ‘A poem very didactic is I think very stupid.’30 The Notes for Queen Mab were there precisely in an attempt to keep the poem itself free of didacticism. The fact that, in 1813, he had had Queen Mab and its Notes printed, also demonstrates how much at that date he wanted his instructive words to be read. If he had to, he would write and publish only for a small group of friends, many of whom would have agreed with him from the start, and would himself continue to bear all the expense of printing – something that by 1813 he could ill afford to do. But it was part and parcel of his attitude towards social and legal norms that he should continue to demonstrate the same attitude towards the worlds of commercial publishing, legality and conventional authority he had always shown. He felt entirely superior to them, as to much else in his society; but although he never seems to have been frightened of anything, he saw no point in committing himself (or a conniving bookseller) to a hefty prison sentence, to which publishing either The Necessity of Atheism or Queen Mab would have led. Ironically, for Shelley, it would probably be his Notes (all the foreign language ones translated) rather than his poem which led to the continuation of interest in Queen Mab in the 1820s and subsequently. The bulk of his poetry remained little known but Queen Mab was pirated ‘at least fourteen times…between 1821 and 1840’:31 an 1832 copy sold for as little as 3d. It was also the first of his poems to be published in North America, in 1821. It became a kind of Bible for the proponents of radical reform and from the 1830s for early socialists.Taking his cue from Godwin, whose essay ‘Of Avarice and Profusion’ (1797) had stated: ‘There is no wealth in the world except this, the labour of man’, Shelley had memorably developed the idea: There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold and the vallies of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race. In consequence of our consideration for the precious metals, one man is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expence of the necessaries of his neighbour; a system admirably fitted to produce all the varieties of disease and crime, which never fail to characterise the two extremes of opulence and penury.32

What follows in Godwin is rather different from what Shelley develops. But such writing situates Queen Mab in the pattern of Enlightenment as defined with relation to this period by Jonathan Israel: Enlightenment being best characterized as the quest for human amelioration…driven principally by ‘philosophy’, that is, what we would term philosophy, science, and political and Social

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  1812 –1813  science…leading to revolutions in ideas and attitudes first, and actual practical revolutions second…both sets of revolutions seeking universal recipes for all mankind and, ultimately, in its radical manifestation, laying the foundation for modern basic human rights and freedoms and representative democracy.33

Shelley’s ‘quest for human amelioration’ is of the kind that the French Revolution had made possible.The massive social and political changes to which the Revolution had led had naturally been coupled with the ideas of change in religion and social order which had been fermenting, especially in America and France, for the previous half century. Unlike writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had had to come to terms with the results of the Revolution in their maturity, for Shelley it had been a fact of life from the outset, and remained something very actual: the British war with France could be seen as a response to the Revolution, with yet another consequence being the increased attempt by the British state from the middle 1790s onwards to control what might be published. And against that, a writer had to work and speak in whatever way might be found: the peculiar printing but non‐publication of Queen Mab in 1813 being just such a way. The fact that, in 1815, Shelley spent some time marking up two different copies of Queen Mab with extensive changes, one to be called ‘The Queen of the Universe’ and the other ‘The Dæmon of the World’34 (publishing part of the latter in his 1816 volume Alastor) demonstrates how quickly he had become impatient with the poem in its first form, and how ready he also was to dispense with its Notes (in 1821 he would describe a pirated Queen Mab edition as ‘better fitted to injure than to serve the cause of freedom’). To get part at least of the poem published in 1816, he was prepared to make it less offensive to public and official opinion. In ‘The Queen of the Universe’, for example, ‘the proud God of Evil’ was changed to ‘the proud Power of Evil’, while two of the most offensive lines in Queen Mab were simply cut, one describing ‘reason’ being seared ‘with the brand of God’ and the other how ‘One curse alone was spared – the name of God.’ The poetry was also improved: the ‘omnipotence of truth’ passage, with its decorative ‘gem of truth’, was removed.35

The finishing of Queen Mab had coincided with another financial crisis for Shelley. Since January 1812, he had told Elizabeth Hitchener, ‘my father has allowed me 200£ per an. attended with the Compliment that he did it to prevent my cheating strangers!’36 The money would certainly not have covered his expenses but was at least predictable; and at some point Harriett’s father, too, gave her money. This may have been why he and Harriett (and of course Eliza) could afford to live in Cooke’s hotel – a large town residence, rented and run by Mr Cooke in Albemarle Street, 93



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offering lodgings to people of superior class – between April and July 1813 in preparation for the birth of Harriett’s first child, but also in anticipation of a major change for the better approaching.When Shelley came of age on 4 August 1813, he hoped for a huge increase in his income (at one point he had imagined £6000 a year). One consequence of looking forward in such a way was that, in mid‐May, he started negotiations for having a carriage built; on 14 May he gave the carriage builder Thomas Charters (‘one of the best makers in Bond Street’) the names of two friends as references: in law, he was still a minor.37 The carriage was ready in the middle of July and was probably first used to carry him and Harriett to Bracknell, 30 from London, towards the end of the month. One reason for a carriage – and for their superior lodgings in the summer of 1813 – had been because Harriett was pregnant and should not be subjected to more awkward means of transport, in the constant moving‐about which remained the pattern of her life with Shelley. But the symbolic significance of having their own carriage would have been lost neither on Shelley nor on Harriett: ‘keeping a carriage’ could be used as a convenient short form for ‘being a gentleman’.38 A carriage was a proof of status and income: it would assist one in commanding loans and credit. Shelley, though, had to put off paying Thomas Charters. Not only did he not get the hoped‐for increase of income on 4 August, he got nothing at all. His grandfather turned out to have decided that the Shelley estate should do nothing to support its profligate and dangerous heir; everything was legally on hold. Shelley’s only advantage was that, now he was 21, he could legally borrow money, and by now he certainly needed to (there were the expenses of Cooke’s hotel, and the carriage, but also other unpaid bills going back for months: he was in danger of being arrested for debt39). All he could now do was launch himself into obtaining the kind of ruinous post‐obit loans that had been almost impossible before he came of age. By October he had managed to borrow £500 but by November 1813 still more money was needed, and another loan was being worked on (in the interim he had had to borrow money from friends and acquaintances). And many bills still went unpaid. John Williams of Tremadog was owed £100 (he eventually acquired a post‐ obit bond from Shelley), the doctor William Roberts of Caernarfon was still owed £30, and Charters had not been paid.40 Shelley’s carriage would in fact prove a problem over the next few years, right down until 1818 when he went abroad never to return (he kept the carriage until late in 1819). By then  –  with interest and costs accruing  –  he owed Charters £532/11/6. Charters was still attempting to recover his money in 1844; he had joined the list of tradespeople whose financial situation was, to Shelley, a matter of secondary importance.41 Shelley seems to have survived his debts at the cost of (only) considerable difficulty. Between August 1813 and June 1815, he was in constant financial trouble: but 94



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reading the poetry he wrote, we would never have guessed it. When and how – or even if – he managed to pay the printer of Queen Mab in the spring of 1813 is unknown. By the time it was printed and in his hands, and he was realising how impossibly difficult publication would be, his finances were in disarray: but he did not seriously try to publish any other writing at this stage of his career. He was emphatically not a commercial writer; he remained – as he had been since 1810 – an independent gentleman who wrote. His poetic ‘visions’ (273), as he later called them, perfectly demonstrate the attitude of the upper‐class man accustomed to imposing his own views upon others; he was continuing to write what he thought would change the world, however wild, offensive, outrageous, illegal – and unpublishable – it might be.

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10 A Rash & Heartless Union 1813 –1814

Although Harriett always claimed that Shelley’s decision to leave her was totally unexpected, among commentators Peacock stands almost alone in insisting that ‘There was no estrangement, no shadow of a thought of separation’ between Harriett and Shelley before the summer of 1814, when Shelley encountered Mary Godwin. It has become a Shelley myth that the parting happened after Shelley’s marriage to Harriett had been in trouble for ages: ‘growing estrangement from Harriet’1 is a typical entry in an authoritative chronology of his life. What Shelley had been writing about Harriett does not substantiate the idea of estrangement, but it does make clear the terms on which their relationship had come to rest. A poem where we can perhaps detect something of what he felt is a long, unrhymed piece from 1812,‘It is not blasphemy to hope that Heaven’,2 in which the narrator tells himself that Harriett (‘oh thou most dear’) is the ‘Warm, tranquil, spirit healing’ person he really needs: ‘the sense of love/The thirst for action, & the impassioned thought’ will indeed ‘Prolong my being’ (although these capacities are, significantly, his, not hers). But he thinks of this gentle, warm relationship as potentially ‘holy friendship (for what other name/May love like ours assume?)’ That was marriage to Harriett. Another 1812 poem, ‘The Retrospect’, concentrates on the ‘mild’, the ‘gentle’ characteristics of the (unnamed) person finally addressed: ‘Thou fair in form and pure in mind’ sounds exactly like Shelley’s version of Harriett, ‘pure’ being all he thought he could decently say about her mind. Of poems composed or probably composed in 1813, the sonnet ‘O thou bright Sun! beneath the dark blue line’ spends eight lines comparing the sun which

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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i­lluminates the Earth to ‘the vision of a beauteous dream’ and then gives two lines to a person like the poet who, ‘with astronomic eye’, ignores the illuminated world but instead simply counts the sun’s spots. The poem’s four‐line moral compares such a person to ‘thy lover, Harriet’ if he ignores her sun‐like ‘warm caress’ and their own ‘close woven happiness’ by turning away from his own ‘passion dear’.3 It is a poem which reads like an apology by a man who has been doing exactly that, and it is given a very precise date: ‘July 31st 1813.’ That would have been just five weeks after the birth of their daughter Eliza Ianthe on 23 June; and the reason why an apology may have been necessary is that − according to Peacock − Shelley very much disliked the wet‐nurse employed to feed the baby, as well as the fact that his sister‐in‐law Eliza took on so much childcare. Peacock ended up believing that ‘if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if this sister had not lived with them, the link of their married love would not have been so readily broken’.4 ‘To Harriet’ (‘Thy look of love’) may be another nagging poem, written in May 1813. But ‘Whose is the love that gleaming thro the world’ certainly does not nag. It links Shelley’s writing with Harriett – but via her love for him, and his gratitude: ‘thou wert my purer soul/Thou wert the inspiration to my song.’5 Written as a dedication poem for the ‘Esdaile Notebook’, it is a poem also linked with Queen Mab (revised, it had appeared as a dedication there).

Shelley was thus insisting to himself that marriage as friendship was what he really wanted (it being what he had). More significant was the fantasy, in which he indulged in May 1814, of finding a woman who really suited him – a woman who would (in his words) be ‘destined to be mine’ and who would respond to his ‘exulting recognition’. He even dreamed up the letter which he would then send Harriett, ‘on the subject of my passion for another’ – if, that is, he ever found one. He had developed the fantasy in the course of a day‐long hike from Bracknell to Sussex: ‘Thus was my walk beguiled.’6 So Shelley was, in imagination, ready for a woman who would be his intellectual and passionate companion. Peacock tells the story of his insisting that she would be ‘one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither.’7 Though the general import of the remark is probably true, the exact words cannot be: they are Peacock’s report (written down 45 years after the event) of what Shelley had said to a friend who had, in turn, passed it on to Peacock. Charles Clairmont was much more cutting in 1815 when describing Harriett as ‘a pretty trifling girl, of the most slender capacity’, her only interests being ‘balls & theatres & such frivolous amusements’.8 But Peacock had spent time with Harriett and Eliza  –  and Shelley  –  first in Edinburgh and then in London, Keswick and Bracknell. His tribute to Harriett is 97



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acute in emphasising how good she had been in adapting herself to being Shelley’s wife. Within a week of travelling across England in December 1811, staying in wretched inns and having almost no money, and ending up in a place where they knew no‐one, she had found herself suddenly having to appear as a guest of the Duke of Norfolk (a family contact, currently in residence near Penrith). But, Peacock went on, She was fond of her husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed the change of scene.

For the whole time that he had known Harriett, Shelley had been the one who had decided what they must do, where they should go, even what they believed in. Having ‘a heart devoted to him’,9 Harriett had always fallen in with what he wished. By the spring of 1814, there is no evidence of estrangement, only of the careful management of distance to which Harriett was by now accustomed: living often without him, but with her sister Eliza and daughter Ianthe. Shelley knew it had been a ‘rash & heartless union’,10 for which he blamed himself: but that was how it was. Whatever feelings Shelley had (or may have had) about ending the marriage, he was just as intent on not responding to them. By leaving Harriett and Eliza to spend more and more of their time together with Ianthe, in lodgings in London, and later in Bracknell with the family of Harriet de Boinville (?1780–1827),11 whose friend they had become in the summer of 1813, and later still in lodgings in Bath, he spent longer and longer periods away: the constant financial dealings in which he was engaged, in London, both to raise money for himself and (from 1813) for Godwin, must have offered excellent cover for his preference for not living with the family. After Harriett’s death, he would use the word ‘libidinous’ about Eliza, which can only mean that, at some point, he believed she had made advances to him. By March 1814 he felt ‘unbounded abhorrence’ for her: ‘I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul.’12 That would have been a yet stronger reason for his keeping his distance from the household (he would not have wanted to tell Harriett). In turn, his absences brought Harriett to rely on Eliza still more, something which Shelley found exasperating, especially when he started to think that Eliza was alienating him from Ianthe. But when he was away, we know he wrote regular letters to Harriett: another part of his ‘duty’. One other piece of evidence confirms the extent to which Peacock was right. In May and June 1814, Shelley was negotiating for a place to live, deep in the country, where Harriett, Eliza and Ianthe could be based and where, doubtless, he planned to leave them all when he was away in London. In the summer of 1811 he had fallen in love with the country in which Cwm Elan and Nantgwyllt were set; 98



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Harriett had loved it too, in 1812, when they had tried to rent the house there. They had enquired about the farm, buying ‘the lease stock &c’13. But in 1812, as a minor without capital (the sum of £1000 had been discussed), Shelley had had no chance. Now he tried again and – by 12 June 1814 − he had reached the point of being able to acquire what Harriett had called ‘our favourite Nantgwyllt’; he was of age, and able to raise the money he needed. In fact he had been engaged since February in an effort to raise something like £3000 from a post‐obit of £8000, even though the bond as auctioned realised only £2593 10s: a horrible loss.14 The sum had originally been destined for Godwin, but by June it was obvious that – when he got it − Shelley would keep half for himself: and that would have been just the right sum (with a little in hand) to solve the problem of the missing capital for Nantgwyllt. A letter to his solicitor of 12 June 1814 shows how close to completion the ­negotiations for Nantgwyllt were; Godwin recalled in August how, during the last 10 days of June, Shelley had been every day impatient to be spared to go into Wales, to secure a retreat he had fixed on, where he might reside with his wife and child, shut out from the rest of the world.15

Nantgwyllt was both a financial investment and a serious plan: Shelley, late in June 1814, was planning a future in which he remained married to Harriett and would become the ‘farmer’ he had declared himself to be.

To compare that reading of the facts with the way in which Shelley’s life during these months has usually been seen, with his ‘growing estrangement from Harriet’, we need to return to the autumn of 1813. As so often for Shelley in these years, financial problems had not only intervened but had become intolerable. Early in October 1813, on the run from his creditors, he had escaped north in the unpaid‐ for coach with Harriett, Eliza and Peacock, ending up in Edinburgh (‘Do not tell anyone where we are’, wrote Harriett16). In November 1813 Shelley arranged to return to London, to negotiate if possible a financial settlement of some sort with his father, while hiding from his creditors, and he had at first planned to leave Harriett behind with the baby and with Eliza. But in the event they all came south with him – Eliza probably going to her father’s in London, Harriett and the baby to stay in Bracknell with the de Boinvilles − while Shelley was based in London for his negotiations. His first plan – to leave his family in Edinburgh, which would have been cheaper and simpler − has, all the same, been taken to indicate ‘obvious marital problems’: ‘There must…have been dissension in Edinburgh.’17 Biography is setting the scene 99



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for what is widely supposed to have happened next: Shelley’s attraction to another woman. Material was printed in 1886 which biographers since that date have taken with immense seriousness. But the problem is that this material, consisting of copies of letters, with some additions, made by Claire Clairmont probably in the 1850s or 1860s, is thoroughly unreliable. Dowden, in 1886, declared it unusable, while the most recent expert on the subject warned against ‘using anything from these copies not independently verifiable’.18 There are just two items supposedly showing Shelley’s attraction to Cornelia Turner, Harriet de Boinville’s married daughter (1795–1874): Dowden’s copy of part of a letter (itself copied by Claire) from her mother Mary Jane Godwin, written either in August or September 1814 (Claire’s dates varied on her copies); and, secondly, the comments on the letter made by Claire when she was copying it, transcribed by Dowden. The letter states that – after Shelley and Mary Godwin had fallen in love in July 1814  –  Harriett Shelley had come to the Godwins and had told them that ‘last November’ – 1813, therefore – Shelley had fallen in love with Mrs. Turner, Madame de Boinville’s daughter, and paid her such marked attentions Mr. Turner, the husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire.19

That is the only piece of evidence with any real claim on our attention: everything else is Claire’s alone, and she was writing when her savage anger with Shelley could vitally obscure her recollections (her own accounts contain numerous errors20). Although she had at times a startlingly good memory, she was not a reliable witness to the events of half a century before. There are things obviously wrong with the letter’s account of Shelley’s feelings for Cornelia Turner. By the spring of 1814 Shelley was not spending his time in London but was also in Bracknell (exactly as Harriett Shelley herself was) while Cornelia Turner was also in residence in Bracknell. And her husband Thomas Turner (b. 1790) actually became a friend of the Shelleys, without a sign of those feelings which are supposed to have made him remove his wife to Devonshire. It is extremely likely that Harriett had resented the ‘attentions’ she had seen Shelley paying Cornelia: they had read Italian together (Shelley was learning the language) – not an activity in which Harriett had participated. In despair at Shelley’s later attraction to Mary, she may well have cast Cornelia in the role of another alluring woman. But that is not evidence of Shelley’s love for Cornelia; and to establish a theory of Shelley’s ‘infatuation’ with Cornelia Turner upon such a basis is wrong. The evidence is simply not there. For the only other evidence consists of three poems by Shelley, in each case ‘read’ in accordance with the belief that Shelley was infatuated with Cornelia Turner. The first (‘Thy dewy looks sink in my breast’) he sent in a letter to Hogg 100



  1813 –1814 

on 16 March 1814; although almost certainly addressed to Harriett Shelley, it has been declared to be ‘addressed to Cornelia Boinville Turner’.21 Harriett and Shelley conceived a child (Charles Bysshe) towards the end of March 1814, and the poem’s description of urgent sexual attraction goes together precisely with the evidence of the pregnancy. It is true that by mid‐July 1814 – after Mary Godwin had told him of her love for him  –  Shelley would attempt to convince himself, Harriett and (most importantly of all) Mary that his relationship with Harriett had never been ‘one of passion & impulse’.22 But in March he had been – even if only briefly – ­passionately and impulsively attracted. ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’ is the second poem; description and annotation in a scholarly edition of 1989 is almost exclusively biographical, and Shelley scholars have declared themselves certain that it was to Cornelia Turner that Shelley addressed the poem.23 If it has any biographical reference, it could just as easily have been written about Harriett, and have addressed Shelley’s horror at making love to her in March. The third poem, ‘Thy look of love has power to calm’, has been judged as Shelley’s attempt to get Harriett’s forgiveness for ‘his recent infatuation with Cornelia Turner’, but the poem had been written by 1811.24 In the 1930s and 1940s, drawing upon the Mary Jane Godwin material and these poems, Shelley biographers nevertheless made up their minds about Shelley’s ‘infatuation’ with Cornelia Turner; the scholarly annotators of the 1980s and 1990s followed suit. But there is no evidence that Shelley had any significant relationship with Cornelia Turner.When he first met her he thought her ‘cold and reserved’ but by March 1814 he believed her ‘the reverse of this, as she is the reverse of e­ verything bad. She inherits all the divinity of her mother.’25 Being the reverse of everything bad is certainly a compliment, though an oddly slanted one. In 1819, in a letter finely discriminating about someone whose company he had once enjoyed, Shelley wrote: ‘Cornelia, though so young when I saw her, gave indications of her mother’s excellencies; and, certainly less fascinating, is, I doubt not, equally amiable and more sincere.’ Her mother Harriet de Boinville, still only in her middle ’thirties but white‐haired, he had found deeply impressive, being conscious of ‘the extreme subtlety and delicacy of Mrs. B.’s understanding and affections’.26 An unbiased reading of his references to the de Boinvilles would have to conclude that the mother was more interesting and possibly more attractive to him than the daughter, although he came to feel that she was not entirely trustworthy. Harriet de Boinville appeared entirely ‘oblivious’ to any feelings Shelley might have had for her daughter, to the surprise of one modern scholar confident that, by March 1814, ‘Shelley’s feelings for Cornelia must have begun to develop.’ Peacock also knew the de Boinville family, and had ‘very agreeable reminiscences of Mrs. B. and her daughter Cornelia’, but never hinted at any attraction between Shelley and Cornelia. For this he would be ticked off (‘his account requires correction’) by an Edwardian editor convinced that ‘the attractions of Mrs. de Boinville’s daughter 101



  A Rash & Heartless Union 

Cornelia’ had ‘seriously engaged’ Shelley’s ‘highly susceptible heart’.27 A still more recent biographer declares that Shelley ‘certainly appears’ to have had a sexual relationship with Cornelia, without offering any evidence beyond Hogg’s remark that Shelley was ‘in very close alliance’ with his friends at Bracknell.28

Biographical interpretations of the poems do the opposite of what has been hoped for, with regard to Cornelia Turner.They suggest that Shelley’s unhappiness with his marriage was combined with continued attraction to, and feelings of responsibility for Harriett and Ianthe, even if dreams of leaving would have been stimulated by his enjoyment of a household like the de Boinvilles, intellectually rewarding and interested in literature. But up until the last few days of June 1814 Shelley would plan to rent the Nantgwyllt house in Wales for Harriett and family – and himself on occasion. He had no intention of abandoning Harriett. It was Mary Godwin, and no‐one else, who made such a massive difference to all their lives.

102

11 Mary Godwin 1814

In June 1814, Mary Godwin was nearly 17, ‘Very, very fair’, her hair ‘light brown, of a sunny and burnished brightness…so fine the slightest wind or motion tangled it into a golden network’, with ‘a certain close compressed and decisive expression while she listened’1 (see Figure 4). That was noted down 10 years later – just when Mary herself was attempting to recreate her own first sight of Shelley in 1814. She recalled him as a tall, slim, fair boy, with a physiognomy expressive of the excess of sensibility and refinement…the morning sunbeams tinged with gold his silken hair, and spread light and glory over his beaming countenance.

In June 1814 this vision of golden refinement was sleeping in an inn in Fleet Street and having to keep out of the way of bailiffs working for his creditors: Godwin recalled how ‘He was under apprehension of arrests; and from this consideration I invited him to make my house his principal home.’2 Shelley ended up spending almost every day in Skinner Street, and dining with the Godwins; he and Godwin doubtless trying to work out, among other things, the best way of preventing the post‐obit money being swallowed up by the first of Godwin’s creditors to get wind of it. For the Nash brothers of Cornhill had bought the crucial, £8000 post‐obit bond at auction. They were in no hurry to pay up, for all that, and lawyers’ costs had started to eat into the sum of money (just under £2600) which the auction had raised.3

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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  Mary Godwin 

Figure  4  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, detail of oil portrait (1839–1840) by Richard Rothwell (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 1235)

Shelley may first have seen Mary in November 1812; we do not know when he first encountered her in 1814, but it had probably been during the first two weeks of May, after she had come back from Scotland. He does not seem to have visited the Godwins again between 23 May and 2 June, and afterwards only on 7 and 8 June, before starting on the 19th to be a regular visitor to the household, at Godwin’s invitation. He would then have seen Mary constantly. And by then she was in love with him. His attraction to her came more slowly: Godwin seems right in his belief that nothing happened before late in June. But she declared her passion for him, probably on 27 June 1814, after Shelley had gone with her to old St. Pancras’s churchyard; accompanying them was the 16‐year‐old whom Mary had acquired as a ‘sister’ by Godwin’s remarriage, Claire Clairmont, as dark‐haired as Mary was fair, with dark eyes which a visitor in Claire’s late seventies found ‘still expressive’.4 This visit to Mary’s mother’s grave was at least the occasion which her father identified as when ‘the impious idea first occurred to him of seducing her, playing the traitor to me and deserting his wife’. Harriett was also informed that the Wollstonecraft grave was the place where Mary ‘told him she was dying of love for him’.5 It was not the anniversary of the birth or death of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759– 1797); Shelley was being shown the grave of an almost mythical figure (whom ­neither 104



  1814 

of the girls had ever seen) who had given her life for Mary: someone whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman had, even before Shelley met her family, influenced formulations such as ‘Even love is sold’ (55:V.189) in Queen Mab. The fact that her daughter Mary was now in love with him must have seemed to Shelley in June 1814 (especially in his more rational moments) perfectly amazing. But at the time not only was he exhilarated, but also horribly guilty because of the way in which he found himself responding to her: ‘I loathed the very light of day, & looked upon my own being with deep & unutterable abhorrence.’6 That, at least, was what he told Harriett – but only after she had (he believed) accepted that he now loved Mary.

Before the start of July, Harriett knew nothing about what was starting to happen. But she wrote to Thomas Hookham from Bath around Wednesday 6 July, expressing her anxiety at not having heard from her husband for four days. This tells us, firstly, that throughout the spring and summer, when Shelley had been in London or Bracknell, and Harriett in Bracknell or London or Bath, he had regularly written to her; and, secondly, that he had continued to do so right up to the end of June. For Harriett to be anxious on 6 July about a four‐day gap, and allowing for weekend delays, she had probably last heard from Shelley no later than Thursday 30 June – meaning that he must have written to her around the 28th or 29th, a day or so after Mary’s declaration of love. Compelled as ever by ‘duty’, he had initially gone on behaving as always, and Harriett had got her letter. But then – no more. And Harriett was worried. It is impossible that Godwin would have invited to dinner a married man whom he knew was in love with his daughter (dinner giving the guest another chance of being in her company), and Shelley dined with the Godwins on both Monday 4th and Wednesday 6th July, the latter probably to celebrate the actual ‘transaction of the loan’ (that is, the payment by its purchasers of what had been raised). It was after dinner on the 6th that (according to Godwin later) Shelley ‘had the madness to disclose his plans to me, and to ask my consent’.7 It seems rather doubtful whether Shelley had ‘plans’ quite so early, but asking Godwin for his consent in loving Mary sounds very like Shelley; he would have felt morally obliged to disclose his feelings, and he had probably waited for the day when Godwin would have been feeling happiest. Godwin was instantly furious and said so, but he also arranged to meet Shelley the following day and go for a walk. He was hoping to talk Shelley out of his feelings for Mary and at first believed he had succeeded: ‘I expostulated with him with all the energy of which I was master, and with so much effect that for the moment he promised to give up his licentious love and return to virtue.’8 In spite of the fact 105



  Mary Godwin 

that he was dependent upon Shelley for the massive sum of money (something over £1100) which the latter had arranged for him, Godwin raged at him and demanded promises. Rational man as he was, he was undeterred by gratitude; he also never considered not taking the money. The fact that he used the word ‘licentious’ and later referred to ‘the fair and spotless fame of my young child’, ‘seduced’ by Shelley’s ‘fierce impulse of passion’ shows that he knew it to be a sexual passion. Godwin’s diary recorded (on Friday 8th) ‘Talk with Mary’, an unabbreviated entry, of the kind reserved in his diary for special events. In August he wrote in a letter how, during July,‘I applied all my diligence to waken up a sense of honour and natural affection in the mind of Mary, and I seemed to have succeeded.’9 On both the 8th and the 9th Godwin noted in his diary ‘Write to Shelley’, perhaps to inform him that Mary had changed her mind, and to insist that he must now abandon ‘his licentious love’. If Shelley hesitated, then it was probably not for more than 72 hours: he felt driven by what he would in 1818 call ‘an imperious necessity only to be satisfied by the complete or partial actual or supposed, fulfilment of its’ claims’.10 It was a case he would then define as the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating the deductions of our own, an imagination which should enter into & seize upon the subtle & delicate peculiarities, which we have delighted to cherish & unfold in secret…

An impossible and very wordy dream of course, Shelley himself immediately describing this as ‘the invisible & unattainable point to which Love tends’, knowing as he did that only the ‘faintest shadow’ of such an ideal could ever come his way. But without at least the hope of such a shadow, ‘there is no rest or respite to the heart over which it rules’.11 All his life he had been dedicating himself to the ideal. Despite Godwin’s refusal to allow them to meet, he and Mary managed to see each other throughout the month; Claire helped by going for walks with Mary and then making herself scarce when they met Shelley. It has been accepted that, because Mary would not make up her mind, ‘Shelley attempted suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum’, with ‘the effects of the poison’ being ‘worked off by walking him about for some hours’ – and that this ‘overcame Mary’s resolution’ – but those accounts (derived from Claire in old age) are not reliable. It does not look as if Mary ever did more than waver, following her initial declaration of love, and that out of concern for her father; Shelley would tell Hogg how ‘Godwin’s distress induced us to prolong the period of our departure.’12 But Godwin’s cross‐questioning and Mary’s wavering would explain why it took some days before Shelley wrote to Harriett in Bath asking her to come up to London; he did not want to leave London but he also believed in telling Harriett 106



  1814 

in person, not by letter. He wrote to her probably on Sunday 10th or early on 11 July; Harriett would have got his letter around Tuesday 12th and have travelled to London the next day, arriving on the 14th. Shelley told her everything as soon as he saw her, and so attempted to bring their marriage to an end.

The news came as an overwhelming shock to Harriett: she had had no idea of what had been happening. In October 1814 she would recall, to a friend, ‘You may suppose how I felt at the disclosure. I was laid up for a fortnight.’ It was, Shelley knew very well, a terrible thing to have done to Harriett; she had been implicitly and innocently trusting of his love, and had always gone along with what he wanted. As she would put it two years later: ‘I never could refuse you.’13 Presumably, in the middle of everything else, Shelley also cancelled his plans for the house at Nantgwyllt and the purchase of the farm equipment: more legal business to transact. Godwin remained horrified and outraged: he never minced his words, and must have said horribly unpleasant things to Shelley. The two men met on seven further occasions in July; some of the meetings, inevitably, because Godwin could not avoid the final arrangements for the money he would be getting. Interestingly, Shelley and Harriett together tried to see him on Friday 15th, but he was either out or (more likely) refused to see them when they called. He would not at that stage have known whether Harriett was aware of what had been going on. He did, however, call on Harriett himself, that same afternoon, and then went to see both the Shelleys the following day, to confirm that their marriage remained uninterrupted; while Harriett too now did her best (with Godwin’s encouragement and assistance) to prevent her husband from meeting Mary. She also wrote to Mary asking her to write to Shelley to help him get over his love.14 In spite of being ‘striktly watched’, Shelley all the same managed to see Mary frequently; it may perhaps have been true that ‘the porter of the shop in Skinner Street was bribed by Shelley, and conveyed letters between them’.15 With Mary torn between passion for Shelley and pity for her father, Shelley finally received a massive, 10‐page letter from Godwin which was  –  to judge by what survives of it – more denunciatory than persuasive. Finished on Monday 25 July, its surviving part runs: You entered my home on June 19th.You dined with me and my family every day in the following that was a week of virtue…I trusted to your principles. I could not entertain the idea of suspecting a man of so much virtue, honor, generosity, and philosophy, nor did I fear more for the principles of my child. If you had been a young man unentered in the engagement of a previous marriage, I should have reflected severely and strictly on the subject. But I could not fear that the existence of your wife

107



  Mary Godwin  and child could be overlooked by either of you. I would not have believed that you would set up caprice and a momentary impulse over every impulse that is dear to the honest heart – I could not believe that you wd. sacrifice your own character and usefulness, the happiness of an innocent and meritorious wife, and the fair and spotless fame of my young child to fierce impulse of passion – I could not believe that you wd. enter my house under the name of benefactor, to leave behind an endless poison to corrode my soul. I would as soon have credited that the stars would fall from Heav’n for my destruction…

It may well have been this letter which decided Shelley to leave, taking Mary with him. Such ‘injustice’, as Shelley called it, was neither an inducement to stay nor to minister to Godwin’s wounded feelings.16

At five a.m. on the morning of 28 July – his usual getting‐up time – Godwin found a note from Mary on his dressing‐table, explaining that she and Claire had gone away with Shelley. Shelley had stayed up and ‘watched until the lightning & the stars became pale’; he had ordered a chaise for four o’clock and after some delay (he recalled ‘How dreadful did this time appear’) they escaped, changing to a coach and four horses at Dartford ‘that we might outstrip pursuit’.17 Shelley was convinced that they would be followed by one or both parents of two underage girls, as indeed they were: the Godwins questioned the men working at the nearby livery‐stables and discovered that the young people ‘had set off post for Dover’. ‘MJ for Dover’ Godwin noted in his diary; Mary Jane Godwin took the next mail coach in pursuit of their daughters (only one of them of course her own child), with Godwin insisting that she should not speak to Shelley, ‘who…might be capable of any act of desperation’.18 He was clearly impressed by – and worried by – Shelley’s capacity for violent reaction. Did he know about Shelley’s brace of pistols? Why was Claire with them? Envy of the adventurousness of her sister and admiration verging on love for Shelley: although she explained, when challenged whether she too was running away ‘for the sake of Love’, ‘Oh! dear No – I came to speak French’19 (neither Mary nor Shelley could). But she must also have been asking, how could they think of leaving her alone in Skinner Street with two now doubly impossible adults, their sister Fanny Goodwin happening at the time to be in Wales? Things had been bad enough while Mary was there: what would they be like after she had left? Claire had probably demanded to be included in the elopement. There seems, too, to have been an instinct in Shelley that he was not cut out for solitary partnership of any kind: and perhaps especially not with Mary. It can hardly have been an accident that this elopement with Mary turned out to be, in its own 108



  1814 

way, as peculiar as his previous one; not just an elopement with a sister tagging along, but one subscribing to his belief that his partners were also members of a family including sisters. He would write in 1819 how I never was attached to that great sect Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion—though it is the code Of modern morals…20 ‘Modern morals’ were never his concern. But Claire was also musical, and Shelley could never resist those who could sing and play (Claire could do both). The three fugitives got to Dover in mid‐afternoon; Shelley negotiated with the customs house officers about their luggage and also with men owning boats, hoping as he did that they could sail that evening (the packet boat would leave early the following morning and would probably be used by anyone pursuing them). The Shelley party was promised a crossing time of just ‘a couple of hours’, unrealistic in any weather, but their small boat turned out to be an awful way to cross the Channel.They ran into storms and got blown off track, they were sick (Mary worst of all), and the crossing took nearly 12 hours; the boat did not make landfall in Calais until sunrise. But once they had landed, Shelley, confident that they could afford to wait before travelling on – they were now beyond the reach of British law − took lodgings. Mary, in particular, was worn out after such a day and night, although she never forgot the date of 28 July as when ‘S. & I were united.’ It would have been the first time they had shared a bed; it may also have been when she became pregnant.21 But the intrepid Mary Jane Godwin − having come across in the packet boat − was not just relying upon the law. Shelley recalled how In the evening Captain Davison came & told us that a fat lady had arrived, who said th[at] I had run away with her daughter. It wa[s] Mrs Godwin. Jane [i.e. Claire] spent the night w[ith] her mother.

And Claire (according to Godwin) ‘promised to return with her to England the next morning’. But in the morning ‘she said she must see the fugitives for a few minutes, & in that interview all her resolutions were subverted’. Shelley noted how ‘Mrs G. departed without answering a word’,22 probably in a fury, but also because Godwin had insisted that she not speak to Shelley.

109



  Mary Godwin 

Why did Shelley believe that Mary ought to be his partner? She was not only the most attractive, the most intelligent, and the best‐read young woman he had ever met, she exhibited what Shelley found even more exciting than beauty, intelligence or learning: ‘irresi[s]tible wildness’ (including the wildness of sexual desire) and ‘originality’ he named those qualities23  –  just the things which Harriett Westbrook had never demonstrated. Superbly educated (Godwin had done a lot of the teaching himself) and stimulated by her mother’s heroic independence, she was too (to Shelley’s great pleasure) ‘not incapable of ardent indignation & hatred’ and yet she was also ‘gentle…& tender’: ‘Her smile, how persuasive it was & how pathetic!’ Godwin himself, three years earlier, had described her as ‘singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.’24 If ‘somewhat’ imperious in 1811, by 1814 she was brilliantly so, and not just ‘almost’ invincible. She had hated living with Mary Jane Godwin and did not much care for her stepsisters: and here was this heaven‐sent opportunity of a young man who seemed as marvellous to her as she did to him, married to someone utterly unsuitable: he could carry her off, she could be carried off. She may only ever have seen Harriett once, at dinner on 11 November 1812.25 That would have helped Mary walk into Shelley’s marriage and destroy it. But in July 1814, above all Mary and Claire – utterly different as they were – both wanted the excitement of escaping life with their parents and step‐parents: and going abroad was a perfect way of showing how committed they were to radical change. Napoleon having gone into exile in mid‐April, France − inaccessible since early in 1803 − was hugely tempting for many people…while France was also the route to Switzerland, with its histories of insurrection and popular struggles for liberty. Before leaving, Shelley arranged with the solicitor Gabriel Tahourdin to work out a financial settlement for Harriett and to draw up a couple of deeds so that she would be provided for. As he had managed to acquire something like £1200 in July (his half of the massive post‐obit sum: the other half had gone to the angry Godwin), and he had next to no money remaining in September (while remaining encumbered by all his old debts), it seems extremely likely that between £750 and £1000 had gone straight into some kind of bank deposit for Harriett, to be accessed via one of those deeds, leaving Shelley with very little. But they were all so young: Shelley, not quite 22, was still five years older than either of the others. And he had an almost miraculous ability to lay his hands on sums of money when necessary. They would survive. Thus began what must have been one of the happiest, most romantic, cheerful and catastrophic elopements of all time: dogged from the start by the fact that, while trying to save money, they found it running through their fingers. Having Claire with them was of course the first extravagance, the cost of travel and overnight lodgings instantly increasing. The four horses at Dartford were something else 110



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which at the time seemed necessary. And then, in Dover, for extra money, they had hired that small boat to take them across the Channel, confident that it would be faster. It was not – and as a result of taking it they were so exhausted that they had to wait 24 hours and pay for lodgings in Calais. They were making a symbolic journey. They were going to Switzerland; they would have known all about the recent history of the cantons from (of all places) Godwin’s 1805 novel Fleetwood. They also intended to do the greater part of their journey on foot, arriving – like Casimir Fleetwood – on Lake Lucerne, to start a new life in the land of freedom. But their plan was first to get to Paris; for this they travelled in an expensive three‐horse cabriolet. Having hoped to spend just a night or two there before leaving again, Shelley discovered that the lodgings which he wanted could only be rented for a week. So they stayed a week, again more expensively than they had planned. They could not go on until they raised some money: they were stuck. But Shelley was resourceful, even abroad and without a good command of the language. He had to sell his watch and chain to keep them going (that would have brought in 45 or 50 francs) before he could manage what he was really after – the sum of £60, enough to allow them to continue. But they seem to have been utterly untroubled, as appeared in Mary’s remarks in 1826 about how every inconvenience was hailed as a new chapter in the romance of our travels…we saw with extasy the strange costume of the French women, read with delight our own descriptions in the passport, looked with curiosity on every plat, fancying that the fried‐leaves of artichokes were frogs; we saw shepherds in opera‐hats, and post‐boys in jack‐boots; and (pour comble de merveille) heard little boys and girls talk French: it was acting a novel, being an incarnate romance…26

Things which went wrong became sources of infinite amusement. For example, they decided to buy an ass to carry their luggage and sometimes one of them, so that they could pursue the rest of their journey cheaply on foot. That would be romance, and at last save some money. Shelley and Claire went to the ‘ass merchant’ on their last morning in Paris and (innocent of asses) bought one; that evening they attempted to set out but ‘like the Miller & his son’ in Aesop’s fable, who have to carry their ass, they found theirs utterly ‘weak & unfit for labour’. The next day, in Shelley’s sadly ironic note, ‘We sell our ass & purchase a mule in which we much resemble him who never made a bargain but always lost half.’27 It cost them but made them laugh and laugh. And then, having got to Troyes, Shelley hurt his foot, and they had to sell the mule and saddle and, instead, hire a mule, driver and trap to proceed further towards their goal (they lost ‘more than 15 napoleons’ – something like £3/10 − over these transactions). At a pause in Neuchâtel, Shelley went to the Bank and returned, to the delight of Mary and Claire, ‘staggering under the weight 111



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of a large canvass bag full of silver’. He remained apprehensive, nonetheless: money ‘is gone before one can say Jack Robinson’. But on to Brunnen, ‘where the fundamental league between their respective cantons was concluded’.28 Here a dilemma. Brunnen turned out not to be the paradise they had expected; in fact, it was rather suburban, not to say overcrowded. And they had very little money left. Sit tight and hope to raise some more – or go home again? After spending three weeks doing little else than travel uncomfortably across Europe, it was utterly natural that they should have decided to stay. They rented a house for six months and moved in. But it was equally natural that – the following day – they should after all have decided to leave: and on Saturday 27 August they were off. By being astute about rivers going down stream, this time they got all the way to Bonn, in Germany, remarkably quickly and comparatively cheaply,29 and then went overland to Rotterdam, where they ended up on 8 September with no money at all.They had to persuade the captain of a cross‐channel boat (which took them to Gravesend) to trust them to repay, a boatman from Gravesend likewise, and then a coach driver also to trust them – so that they ended up on 13 September going round their entire London circle looking for cash to pay back these people while the coach driver waited (Mary and Claire staying in the coach as hostages). In the end, only one person could come up with the money: of all people, poor Harriett (the final bad joke of the journey). She provided £20. The whole trip had probably cost them  –  that is, cost Shelley  –  something around £70: a third of his current yearly income. They planned to get a book out of it (both Mary and Claire had kept journals) and  –  in 1817  –  they did. But although the elopement should have managed to establish a decisive break for Mary and Shelley with the past, the Godwins turned out to be another family which, like  his own, Shelley had apparently left behind but from which he could not free himself.

112

12 This is a Vampire 1814 –1815

After leaving Harriett in mid‐July 1814, Shelley found himself explaining his ­abandonment to her over and over again: texts of 10 letters he wrote to her survive. On the one hand they demonstrate the stages of his detachment from her as no other materials could, but they also present the break‐up as he chose to see it, and Harriett as he wanted to see her. In the first letter, of 14 July 1814, the actual day when he had told her about his passion for Mary, he writes that he has ‘dreaded lest the shock might inflict on you some incurable unhappiness’ and thanks her from his ‘inmost Soul’ for taking the news as she has. He had hoped for ‘consolation & happiness’ from her (thus positioning himself as the one who needed ‘consolation’) and she has given it to him. That might well have been news to her, but she was probably still in shock: she certainly soon became angry, by late August thinking of him as ‘vicious and depraved’.1 But in his letter of 14 July he also promises her, in the most optimistic and unreal way, that, in fact, nothing is going to change in their relationship – ‘my attachment to you is unimpaired’ − because he has, after all, never felt passionately for her: ‘Our connection was not one of passion & impulse. Friendship was its basis.’2 She was three‐and‐a‐half months pregnant at the time…but Shelley backed this up with support from Harriet de Boinville, who had also observed ‘that friendship & not passion was the bond of our attachment’. So their friendship can of course – indeed, it must – continue: he is her ‘friend, the brother of your heart’. But then, in words

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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he hopes will be reassuring and helpful, but which she must have found wounding beyond belief, he justifies himself for leaving her: It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all‐sufficing ­passion―perhaps, you are even yourself a stranger to these impulses, which one day may be awakened by some nobler & worthier than me, and may you find a lover as passionate and faithful, as I shall ever be a friend affectionate & sincere!3

The fact that she was still – and probably had been from the start – in love with him, experiencing the ‘passion’ which he here suggests may well be alien to her, is something he chooses to discount because he is not – and says he never has been − in love with her. His own passion for her was never ‘all‐sufficing’, and that was her fault; she never filled his heart with passion. From very early on in his marriage to Harriett he had indeed insisted that the marriage would end when either of them wanted it to.4 But Godwin’s 1793 guidance had also done its best to ignore feelings altogether, especially the feelings of the abandoned party in the event of a marriage breaking down, in ways that in 1814 Godwin would certainly have disowned (would in fact have disowned from the time of his own relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, starting in 1796). Shelley, however, was now seizing upon a justification for never having bothered about Harriett’s feelings, and for being certain of what he could do – and in fact, should do – in order to end things. Robert Southey would recall, eight years later, how While you were at Keswick [six months after the marriage] you told your bride that you regarded marriage as a mere ceremony, and would live with her no longer than you liked her.5

Southey was certain that Harriett had not ‘considered this as the condition upon which she was married’ and that Shelley had himself not ‘looked forward to a breach of the connexion’ when he had married her. But in the summer of 1814 Shelley retrospectively justified his whole course of behaviour towards Harriett. He  would suggest to her sometime in July (according to an angry letter which Harriett wrote in November) that they might ‘all live together…I as his sister, she as his wife’, Harriett thus becoming Shelley’s ‘sister’ once again, he (as he insisted) ‘far more Brother’.6 The letters to Harriett chart his progress in the late summer and autumn of 1814 from his original offer of unimpaired friendship (though he does admit that – just for the moment  –  Harriett might perhaps feel ‘incapable of compassion & love’ for Mary), via an invitation to her on 13 August to come to Switzerland to live near Mary, Claire and himself in ‘some sweet retreat I will procure for you among 114



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the mountains’,7 down to another wretched appeal to her for money in October. It was just as well that Harriett did not take him up on his invitation to Switzerland: by the time it arrived, Shelley, Mary and Claire were on their way back to England, nearly penniless. His first letters to Harriett after their separation are written with the slightly desperate belief in people’s ability to behave well, and to see the very best in each other, which is so interesting in Shelley, a man who had a lot of experience of his father (and grandfather) behaving badly. The letters show him being the utterly kind, gentle, generous, protective person he could be and now above all knew he ought to be. If Harriett had announced that she was indeed on her way to Switzerland (and had they all still been there), Shelley would certainly have done his very best to take care of her; if she had said that she would be happy to live with Mary and him, she as his friend and Mary as his wife, he in turn would have done his best to make the situation work – although Mary would doubtless have screamed and screamed. For Mary, having Claire as a constant companion was bad enough: she would admit in 1836 that ‘years ago my idea of an agreable world Heaven was a world without a Claire’.8 As the weeks passed, nevertheless – there is a gap of a month between Shelley’s first surviving letter to Harriett and his second, and another month between the second and third − Harriett was clearly no longer writing sweetly and reasonably, if indeed she ever had done, but with thoroughly understandable ‘reproach and blame’. She was calling his letters ‘cold and unfeeling’; she told him that he had injured her. Shelley grew correspondingly tetchy. He could not behave well if she would not do so. In September he demanded ‘confidence and truth’ from her – that is, confidence in him unaltered from the old days, and acceptance of him as the one with the ‘superintending mind’.9 He insisted on being the partner who understood her ‘real interests’, but his insistence was peculiarly self‐righteous: You think that I have injured you. Since I first beheld you almost, my chief study has been to overwhelm you with benefits. Even now when a violent and lasting passion for another leads me to prefer her society to yours, I am perpetually employed in devising how I can be permanently & truly useful to you, in what manner my time and my fortune may be most securely expended for your real interests. –

Did he really think so constantly of how he might assist Harriett – not just of how glad he was to be with Mary? His protests ring very hollow: In return for this it is not well that I should be wounded with reproach & blame. − so unexampled & singular an attachment demands a return far different. And it would be generous, nay even just to consider with kindness that woman whom my judgement and my heart have selected as the noblest and the most excellent of human beings.10

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It is a crazy ideal of good behaviour which makes him try to impose on Harriett the obligation to view Mary ‘with kindness’ and to see her as noble and excellent, as well as to accept that he had been right to take her as his partner: ‘My attachment to Mary neither could nor ought to have been overcome.’11 These September letters bring out the best and the worst in Shelley − his intense belief in goodness and in love, combined with a self‐regarding superiority, a confidence that he is behaving as well as is humanly possible, combined with a ruthless insistence that a lesser being (like Harriett) must accept that he knows best. His letters often read like exercises in calculated provocation. His warnings that his offer of lasting friendship depended entirely upon Harriett’s good behaviour reach a climax on 26 September, with a series of angry outbursts following his discovery that she has taken a lawyer to fight him, and has been ­making his address available to his creditors: ‘I was an idiot to expect greatness or generosity from you…You are plainly lost to me for ever. I foresee no probability of change—.’12 She seems to have alluded to the fact that he had ‘conferred pecuniary benefits’ on her, and that he also had a duty to settle property on her, and he dislikes that intensely: it is ‘mean & common’.Telling words, from him: she is showing her origins, something he underlines by pointing out that while he originally assisted her ‘in cultivating an elevated philosophy’, that is something to which, ‘without the interest I have taken in your improvement, it is probable that you would never have aspired’. He is prepared to allow, in a gentler mood at the start of October, that ‘Perhaps I have done you injury’ but continues to insist that his going away with Mary ‘was not to be avoided’. A less aggressive tone in his postscript, however, gives him a chance to try and get some of his possessions back: ‘I am in want of stockings, hanks & Mrs W’s posthumous works.’13 Mary Wollstonecraft’s works (edited by Godwin – and taken to Switzerland by Mary and Shelley back in July) would hardly have been the most tactful thing to ask for, and he withdraws his request in his next letter. But as late as October, Harriett is in turn still capable of loving concern for him, asking about his cough, recommending that he refrain from washing his hair and that he should start wearing flannel. But it takes very little to upset this temporary truce, for him to insist that his ‘cold or distanced feelings’ towards her are her fault, for him to repeat his feelings of superiority in the criticism that she is not awarding him ‘the justice which is due to me’.14 The sequence of surviving letters ends on 23 October with his 10th and last letter, a piece of emotional blackmail in the form of a begging‐letter, as he ­confronts arrest for debt if he cannot ‘quiet Chartres’: unless you can effect something I must go to Prison…I have not a friend in the world who can assist me. My endeavors have been in vain. If once in prison, confined in a damp cell, without a sixpence, without a friend…I must inevitably be starved to death.

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He begs her to send a porter with her answer. Back in September she had managed to come up with £20 to pay for his return from his elopement with Mary and Claire,15 but she may have been able to draw on the money he had settled on her. In October, at any rate, he must have felt that it was worth reapplying to her: he makes the application a test of whether she still believes in him. And she still does. Claire delivers his letter on Sunday 23rd and notes in her journal, later the same day, ‘Harriet promises to raise money for Chartres.’16

Things were at their worst for Shelley, financially, at the end of October and the start of November 1814. Not only did he not dare go to the lodgings he was in theory sharing with Mary and Claire, for fear of being arrested, but at the end of October he pawned, among other things, his beloved solar microscope, simply to raise cash so that they could eat. When he and Mary moved into an inn at Salt Hill for two days, to be with one another (and for Mary to get away from Claire), as well as to remove themselves from the orbits of the creditors and bailiffs – hardly a way of saving, but Shelley always behaved as one who inevitably would have money – as early as the second day they were in trouble for not paying their bills: ‘people want their money – wont send up dinner & we are all very hungry’. But, suspecting that Harriett had been inventing a ‘Plan of ruining Papa’ (as Claire put it) by interfering with the chronically insolvent Godwin’s hopes of getting a loan, which seems rather unlikely, Mary turned on her:‘she is a detestable woman’. And when Harriett, on 2 January 1815, knowing herself abandoned and thinking that Mary and Shelley owed her something at least, maliciously told the Shelleys’ creditors their secret address (the creditors turned up the following day), Mary responded simply: ‘nasty woman – now we must change our lodgeings’.17

In November 1814, just a month before she gave birth to his second child − and less than a month after Shelley’s last letter to her, with its successful appeal for money − Harriett summed up what she thought of him: No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire. His character is blasted for ever. Nothing can save him now.18

She meant ‘vampire’ in its original sense of the reanimated corpse reputed to kill people by sucking their blood (thus both dead and deadly dangerous), not simply one who preys upon others;19 his recent appeals for money may well have seemed 117



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blood‐sucking. Her word ‘blasted’ suggests both cursed and blighted, exactly as Harriett herself felt (‘Oh no, with all the affections warm, a heart devoted to him, and then to be so cruelly blighted’). Yet Shelley had continued to protest that, throughout their parting, he had acted in a sincere, ‘elevated’ and principled way, as he left Harriett for ‘the noblest…of human beings’, while Harriett had been guilty  of showing her origins in ‘most unworthy & contemptible proceedings’, foolishly making a ‘mean & common’ mistake, using ‘mean’ language in her ‘unworthy b­ ickerings’, and demonstrating a ‘mean & despicable selfishness’.20 It is, all in all, a ghastly series of episodes, and Shelley comes out of them very badly.

Against such things it would be nice to rejoice in the love poetry which Shelley completed under the influence of Mary Godwin, and to enjoy the way in which he  could now settle down to a new relationship. In fact neither celebration is possible. In the first place, although Harriett had been commemorated in a number of poems, although his admiration for Claire Clairmont would find its way into poetry, although his interest in Teresa Viviani (1801–1836) in 1820–1821 would be celebrated in verse, although his feelings for Jane Williams (1798–1884) in 1822 would be most important for his writing, and although even Harriet Grove can be seen in the few poems surviving from the time of Shelley’s love for her, nothing exists for the young Mary Godwin before 1818. Only one poem of that kind has ever been offered, and that simply because, after Shelley’s death, Mary herself teased out, from one of his notebooks,21 the words of some untitled poetry (starting ‘Mine eyes were dim’) which she cannot have seen before, and (in her fair copy) awarded the piece the title ‘To MWG’ and the date ‘June. 1814’, thus commemorating his love for her. She wanted a poem. She was, though, having second thoughts as early as her 1824 edition of Shelley’s poetry, when she removed the ‘MWG’, changed the title to ‘To ――’, and removed the date; in 1839 she would put it among the ‘Poems written in 1821’. The influential 1904 edition by Thomas Hutchinson of Shelley’s poems, however, chose the title ‘To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’ and reinstated ‘June, 1814’. And as such it has continued to play a role in biography; so that although Shelley left it unfinished (not to say entirely unreadable), it has even been described as having been ‘clandestinely slipped across the book counter’ of Godwin’s shop for Mary, in the summer of 1814.22 There is further discussion of it later (see Chapter 20); for a poem involving Mary – albeit in the oddest way – we have to wait for Alastor, early in 1816.

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All through the autumn of 1814 and its problems with debt and bailiffs, Shelley had been aware that, above all, he needed to establish some new relationship with his father; it was absurd that the Shelley family should be so well off, and he the heir to a fortune, while he was dragging himself (and now Mary and Claire too) from one financial crisis to the next. It was, nonetheless, not possible for him to change his way of life so that he could live within his income, especially as now he had to support two establishments, Harriett’s with two children (Charles Bysshe would be born on 30 November) and his own with Claire and Mary (Mary had had to accept that Claire – still only 16 years old – having abandoned the Godwin household, necessarily remained part of her own). The first major change came in January 1815, with the death of Shelley’s grandfather at the age of 84. It looks as if it had been the utter opposition of Sir Bysshe to his grandson which had assisted Timothy Shelley’s obstinate anger with Shelley in 1811. With the grandfather’s death came the problem of an extra inheritance of £18 000 descending from Sir Bysshe’s brother John which Sir Timothy Shelley (as he had now become) – and his lawyer – wished to retain. Over the next four months a deal was worked out. Shelley would not benefit from the John Shelley inheritance; instead he would acquire an income of £1000 a year, with the promise of having his existing debts (to the sum of £7400) paid off as well.The deal must have seemed reasonable, even though the amount available to him was immediately reduced by Harriett being awarded £200 a year out of the £1000 and Shelley giving Peacock an annuity of £100: he also decided that he was now in a financial state which would allow him to give the sum of £1000 to Godwin. He remained, in legal terms, ‘the tenant in tail expectant’:23 he would inherit the family estates from his father. As usual, his income would be paid four times a year, meaning that he would get nothing more until June 1815. And the money set aside for repaying his debts, unsurprisingly, turned out to be inadequate.The Nash brothers, owners of the most recent post‐obit bond, refused to accept Sir Timothy’s offer of £4500 for it but demanded the whole £8000 (and as a result had to wait until 1844 to get paid), while Sir Timothy never learned about some of his son’s other debts (the debt to Charters which grew to over £500, for example, and the debts in Wales). But, for the first time since they had come together in July 1814, Shelley and Mary could feel reasonably secure financially. They could at last afford to live where they chose, and Shelley could once again settle to writing; he had been reduced almost entirely to letter‐writing and financial negotiation during the previous 12 months.

Shelley’s new relationship with Mary was, all the same, not quite such a straightforward and loving partnership as might have been expected. The evidence is obscure 119



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and obscured, but an unbiased reading comes up with the probability that, during the winter of 1814–1815, Shelley had encouraged his old friend Hogg to start some kind of relationship with Mary. He had told Hogg, in November 1811, that ‘Jealousy has no place in my bosom, I am indeed at times very much inclined to think that the Godwinian plan is best.’ He meant that he favoured Godwin’s suggestion in Political Justice that, in an ideal state of society, no man would object to another man being sexually attracted to his partner. For if another man were to be attracted, ‘This will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall all be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.’24 Godwin had been writing speculatively in the last book of Political Justice, but Shelley was intrigued at the idea of taking him seriously and, indeed, of achieving something which Godwin had thought of as only a future possibility. In November 1811 Shelley had, though, been faced with precisely the ‘difficulty’ which Godwin’s book had ruled out. While he had been away in London, Hogg had told Harriett how attracted he was to her; and – when Shelley found out − he had insisted that Hogg’s ‘possession of Harriet’s person, or the attainment of her love’ presented him with no difficulties. It was only a problem for Harriett. ‘She is prejudiced’, Shelley noted:25 but she did not want Hogg. And Shelley – again on principle – had stood up for her, and had refused to see Hogg for a year. There had been nothing wrong in Hogg’s wanting Harriett, but there was in his making her miserable with attentions she did not want. Now, in the winter of 1814–1815, the situation repeated itself, but this time with Mary Godwin. Shelley had constantly been away in the autumn, on the run from creditors and trying to patch together some financial security, but had started seeing Hogg again late in October or early in November; and from November (when Mary met him for the first time), Hogg was a regular visitor to their London lodgings. And it looks as if, on 1 January 1815, Hogg declared his love for Mary (using one of the three pet names Shelley had adopted for her, ‘Maie’). By 4 January, Mary could, in turn, tell Hogg ‘that I love you more & more −− ’ and was begging him to ‘come and console a solitary lady’; three days later, she sent him ‘what you asked for’: three ringlets of her golden‐brown hair. What added to the complexity of the situation was that Mary was six months pregnant and refraining from sexual intercourse. But she also offered this as an advantage: ‘this dear Hogg will give time for that love to spring up which you deserve and will one day have’.26 It is important to stress that, throughout, Shelley knew what was going on, and approved of it, though we might wonder with what kind of self‐admiration. Mary’s baby was born on 22 February, ‘not quite 7 months’, Shelley noted: it was ‘not expected to live’.27 It was not named or christened, and died on 6 March; Mary begged Hogg to come and see her. We know very little about the following six weeks or so, but a common post‐partum abstention from sexual activity would have 120



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ended around 10 April, when Shelley started sleeping with Mary again: she conceived before the end of the month. Towards the end of April, too, Mary and Shelley went away for that couple of days at the inn at Salt Hill, where Mary showed some irritation that Hogg had shown no sign of following her. She wrote to him on 26 April: I shall expect you tonight and if you do not come I am off – not for London I promise you −−…do not you think that you ought to come to Salt Hill incontinently – Remember I shall believe that your love is all a farce if you do not…Yours – as we shall see when we know how you behave…you have not chosen to write to me very well I know by this what you are good for.28

There is of course a great deal of playfulness mixed up with the threats (‘­incontinently’ – with its underlining – is a real erotic provocation). Shelley himself went on showing Hogg what he believed their immediate future held: tucked in with Mary’s letter was his of the same day. I shall be very happy to see you again, & to give you your share of our common treasure of which you have been cheated for several days. The Maie knows how highly you prize this exquisite possession, & takes occasion to quiz you in saying that it is necessary for me to absent from London, from your sensibility to its value. Do not fear. A few months We will not again be deprived of this participated pleasure.−−−

It seems likely that (Mary now a ‘common treasure’) had for about a fortnight been a shared ‘exquisite possession’29 so that – when she left – Hogg could justly feel unjustly deprived. On the other hand, neither Shelley nor Mary ever seemed in any doubt that the child she conceived towards the end of April was Shelley’s; if her relationship with Hogg had indeed been sexual, it had not involved unprotected intercourse. We know nothing more. A number of pages from Mary’s journal have been torn out, which may well be significant, but no further letters survive. Hogg accompanied Mary to Covent Garden on 6 May, when she and Shelley were back in London; she recorded ‘talk with Jefferson’ on 8 May, and – that evening – there was an interesting note: very tired – go to bed early – Jefferson − scolds30

If the word order is to be trusted, Hogg came after she had gone to bed, but at that point – in bed or out of it – either he or she got angry. On the 10th she went to the British Museum with Shelley and Hogg; on the 11th she visited ‘Exeter 121



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Change’ to see the animals with Hogg (these were things usually done with visitors unused to London). On the 12th, Shelley went out with Claire and Mary read some of her translation of Ovid to Hogg; on the 13th, ‘Jefferson does not come until 5.’31 And then no more. It seems likely that Hogg returned to Yorkshire. The next time he comes into view is almost two years later, by which time Mary has very little time for him (she complains about his ‘ill humour and noise’ and declares ‘I do not like him and I think he is more disagreeable than ever’32). It seems likely that, in mid‐April 1815, they had attempted Shelley’s expectation of treasured and common relationship; but that – by the time of the days at Salt Hill – Mary was starting to have doubts about it, and would therefore take her chance of being offended by Hogg’s failure to come when she called…such things being a way of ensuring that, before very long, the relationship could be brought to an end if she wished. And indeed it was, never to be re‐established. Later contacts with Hogg led to her settled judgement against him. It has been claimed that the spring 1815 episode with Hogg shows that Shelley ‘viewed the whole situation with great satisfaction’.33 But we do not know how he viewed it. He probably believed that, as a good Godwinian, he ought to undergo it. It never seems to have occurred again. Mary appears to have taken it in her stride, perhaps as a rite de passage with Shelley; if he insisted, she would go along with it, and then leave it behind, believing that Shelley could (no, must) subsequently accept her as entirely his own. It is right, nonetheless, to ask about Shelley’s relationship with Claire: did he make advances to Claire, as Hogg did to Mary? What evidence there is strongly suggests not. Mary might be engaging in dalliance with Hogg, but would not have stood for any kind of sexual relationship between Shelley and Claire. Claire was certainly in love with Shelley (in April 1816 she would describe him as ‘the man whom I have loved & for whom I have suffered much’) but we should not forget a ‘discovery’ Shelley had communicated to Mary’s diary in October 1814 about ‘Janes insensibility & incapacity for the slightest degree of friendship’, even though he recognised ‘Her mind unsettled. her character unformed’.34 What is striking is that – as soon as Shelley could afford it – Claire found herself in May 1815 banished to a cottage in Lynmouth, on the north Devon coast (Shelley paying the rent); an exile which, later in life, she came immensely to resent.35 She appears to have been there from mid‐May until August, and possibly longer; she visited Ireland with her brother Charles in October – enjoying financial support from Shelley  –  and was in London early the following year, before provoking Shelley and Mary into making their trip to Geneva. Byron was, however, confident that ‘during the time of our acquaintance’ in the spring of 1816 Claire ‘had not lived with S.’ (a common period phrase: we would say ‘had not slept with’); and in Claire’s report of Shelley’s ‘exact words’ when addressing her, he started ‘My sweet

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Child’, which certainly does not suggest a passionate relationship. From 1816 until 1818, anyway, Claire’s relationship with Byron, and Mary’s active jealousy (she being ‘jealous in the ordinary sense, and also as regards the influence of other women over his mind’), would probably have been sufficient to keep Shelley and Claire apart.36

123

13 Alastor 1815 –1816

Shelley’s poem Alastor probably came into existence early in the autumn of 1815, after he and Mary had finally settled on their own into a rented house in Bishopsgate Heath, on the edge of Windsor Great Park, some 20 miles west of London (they called it a ‘cottage’, but it was nevertheless a small house). Mary was pregnant; she would give birth to their son William as a full‐term baby in January 1816. So long as the weather allowed it, Shelley went out into the woods to write; probably, like the Poet in his poem, feeding the birds and squirrels with ‘bloodless food’ (116:101) which in Shelley’s case would have been bread‐crumbs and raisins. Alastor is at times quite brilliant, and beautifully written. In a mountainous landscape, At midnight The moon arose: and lo! the etherial cliffs Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone Among the stars like sunlight, and around Whose cavern’d base the whirlpools and the waves Bursting and eddying irresistibly Rage and resound forever.– (122:351–357) Those summits shining ‘Among the stars like sunlight’ are magical, and ‘bursting’ (not just breaking) waves catch both ear and eye; over and over in this poem Shelley comes up with such metaphors. He had, after all, seen the Alps since he had last

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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written poetry, but that was probably less important than the way that, in the writing of Queen Mab, he had developed his skills at blank verse. In Alastor he imagines not just European but tropical forest, where the woven leaves Make net‐work of the dark blue light of day, And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful. (124:445–451) He extends finely spun paradoxes about the light filtering through such a canopy, but finally focuses on grass visibly ‘eyed’ with tiny flowers: ‘day’s eyes’ (daisies), ‘Minute yet beautiful.’ The poem describes the journey of a Poet, framed and commented on by a narrator who stands outside of the action. But this arrangement also demonstrates a tendency Shelley very rarely attempted to overcome (he probably never saw it as something he needed to overcome).What is lacking, from the start, is any reason for our interest in the narrator and in the protagonist. They are never dramatized: they are never constructed so as to involve us in any way – they have, indeed, almost no human interest. We never even know whether Alastor is the name of one of them. As it turns out, it is not: but there is nothing within the poem to explain that, or even to start to explain the title (which Peacock, who was there when it was being written, thought meant ‘evil genius’,1 though the poem’s subtitle – ‘The Spirit of Solitude’ − may be another kind of translation). It has been argued that Shelley’s decision not to give the central figure of the Poet ‘a name or nationality’ serves to emphasize ‘the representativeness of his protagonist’: another authority states that the character’s namelessness is ‘a mark of his failure as a poet’.2 But the oddities of strange title and missing name are also natural to Shelley: he is not only not concerned with making life easy for his readers, for the most part he is not thinking of readers. In his prose Preface to Alastor, Shelley says that the Poet is a person marked by ‘self‐centred seclusion’ (112), but few readers would have reached such an understanding from the poem itself (it has even been argued that the Preface and the poem are in that way deliberately contradictory3). It does, all the same, make sense. The Poet journeys the world and meets a number of people (mostly those who take care of him), but not only does he keep ‘aloof from sympathies with their kind’ (113), he shows no interest in the world or in its people (or in his carers). He is the only person who interests him: all he carries onward from his experiences is the hope of another meeting with the woman whom he once saw, as in a vision, 125



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embraced in that vision, and then lost: he is driven on purely ‘By the bright shadow of that lovely dream’ (119:233). It is even unclear whether the journey which the Poet undertakes in the main action of the poem is in person, or via books, or purely in the imagination, where all kinds of contradiction and unreality might be incorporated. The fact that ‘an Arab maiden brought his food,/…from her father’s tent’ (117:129–130) suggests that his journey is indeed being made in person – unless, again, the Arab maiden is also a vision: for how otherwise could she and her father visit all those ruins with the Poet, in lands where the antelope roams, and later in ‘Cashmire’? (116–117:103,145) The same with the ‘cottagers’ (120:254) who take on the job of caring for the Poet.We are, throughout, not in a geographical location but in that standby of poets in the later eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, the eastern tale; Southey’s Thalaba is never far away, as when a ‘red volcano’ and ‘bitumen lakes’ put in an appearance (115:83–85). But Shelley’s poem is supremely uninterested in how and why the protagonist is real or unreal, or whether he is looked after or not. It is not concerned with literal meanings or with the practical details of life or travel, any more than it is with character or characterisation or with what Mary would later rather disparagingly call ‘narrative’4 (meaning story‐telling). Instead, Shelley creates visions appropriate to and explorations of what he happily calls the ‘deep mind’ (121:298), so that it barely matters whether we believe that anyone ever goes anywhere, or any landscape exists beyond what is observed by the deep mind’s eye. All that matters is that the experience should be richly symbolic. The protagonist at one point finds a totally unseaworthy boat (‘its sides/Gaped wide with many a rift’) and reckons that it offers him an appropriate way to ‘meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste’ (121:301–302,305). It certainly sounds likely to do so. He stretches out his cloak on the mast to improvise a sail, and shoots off ‘Like a torn cloud before the hurricane’ (121:315) (nothing explains why – without ropes or hands holding it the whole time − the cloak does not go flying off by itself, or along with the Poet holding it). But the boat runs before the storm and never sinks: never shows any sign of sinking. ‘Along the dark and ruffled waters fled/The straining boat’ (121:319–320) while the Poet somehow also manages to sit firmly, ‘Holding the steady helm’ (122:333): perfectly strange for a man whose ‘listless hand’, shortly before, had ‘Hung like dead bone within its withered skin’ (119:250–251). And the boat, driven on by ‘the boiling torrent…beyond all human speed’ (122:358,361), at one point manages to climb upwards, driven on by a spiral of water, before finally passing through a cavern and slowing down. As a result it does not vanish into ‘the abyss’ (123:395) of a waterfall, whose ‘enormous volume fell/ Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound/That shook the everlasting rocks’ (123:376–378); boat and Poet finally sail through a wild landscape of woods and valleys, still lured by ‘Two starry eyes’ (125:490) which we certainly associate with his original encounter with (or vision of) the woman, before he finally disembarks 126



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and walks onward under the trees, beside the stream.The river journey of a protagonist is something recurrent in Shelley’s poetry, and Shelley certainly knew his trees: his notebooks are constantly decorated with little sketches of foliage but in particular with leaning, branching tree forms recalling the coppiced trees he would have seen on the estate at Field Place. In 1832, Hunt recalled Shelley’s habit of drawing trees, in the intervals of thinking, whenever he had pen or pencil in hand. He would indulge in it while waiting for you at an inn, or in a door‐way, scratching his elms and oak‐ trees on the walls. He did them very spiritedly, and with what the painters call a gusto, particularly in point of grace. If he had room, he would add a cottage, and a piece of water, with a sailing boat mooring among the trees. This was his beau ideal of a life…5

The little sketches in his notebooks often appear to have been made with a pen just dipped in ink but with a word or line of poetry not quite ready for inscription: the doodle thus playing a role in the pause before composition. There are, too, occasionally more elaborate drawings of trees in his notebooks over which he must have lingered as he lingered over his writing in Alastor. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching, frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang Tremulous and pale. (124:431–437) The Poet grows visibly older on his journey, eventually finds a ‘green recess’ (129:625), rests there, grows older still, and dies. Such a summary, however, comes nowhere near the actuality of the poem, which is full of descriptions of the changing light, of the rocks and landscapes, and of the passage of the boat along sea, river and stream. Many of these are haunting and wonderful. But by the same token, the boat journey up the Thames which Shelley, Mary, Peacock and Claire’s brother Charles took in August 1815, which has often been declared one of the poem’s starting points, really seems to have very little to do with Alastor. Lechlade and the water meadows near Oxford never evoke the exotic landscapes of the poem, and the very practical problems of the 1815 boat trip (they had to turn back because the river, in summer, had grown too shallow) have nothing to do with the torrents of water sluicing their way through Alastor. The poem is full of imagination, but it is not imagination of experiences that occur either to boats or to bodies. 127



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Other parallels, mostly literary, are more to the point. Wordsworth’s poem ‘Lines left upon a seat in a yew‐tree’, first published in 1798 and included in his 1815 Poems, is sharply critical of ‘The man, whose eye/Is ever on himself ’,6 thus perfectly foreshadowing the way the central character of Shelley’s poem focuses upon himself. But for most readers the Poet’s death will have very little to do with ‘self‐­ centred seclusion’ except that it does indeed take place in seclusion (and there are, anyway, very few people with whom the Poet might have made contact along the way: none at all towards the end, when he walks beside the stream and finds his ‘green recess’). The descriptions of the landscapes, though, suggest a consciousness only rarely aware of the significance of what lies outside itself. What matters is that we follow a progress which is spiritual, symbolic and – Mary saw this – oddly ‘didactic’,7 in spite of Shelley’s fixed opinion that he did not want to write didactic poetry. He was committed to change, and to furthering change through his work: he could not help at times being a didactic writer. And the Poet of Alastor is the wrong sort of poet: he is not interested in the society in which he lives, he neither assists the human race in any way nor is devoted to its betterment, he is not engaged in any pursuit from which he might learn anything of the nature of the world or of its place either in the universe or in human consciousness. Ianthe in Queen Mab is constantly and strongly encouraged to learn things for the future betterment of others. All that drives the Poet of Alastor forward is his vision of the lost woman. It is always the progress itself, and its surroundings, which we are encouraged to follow; and this is yet another thing which serves to make the protagonist less definite, less of an individual. We can admire the details and stages of a richly described symbolic journey, but still remain untouched by the fate of the figure suffering the terrible things happening to him. Alastor is, nevertheless, remarkable for the concentration of its drive to the ending; the voyage feels like a birth story in reverse. It may be a nightmare progress to death, but it reads like a marvellous journey to final rest and peace, eventually rich and lush and consoling. And it is as a result a most undepressing poem, with its constant adjectival blossoming: eyes which are ‘irradiate dewy’ (127:535), leaves ‘whose decay,/Red, yellow, or etherially pale,/Rivals the pride of summer’ (128:584–586). Shelley’s mind – in 1819 he would describe the mind as ‘a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the ­universe’8 – is full to bursting point with excited descriptions, comparisons and ­qualifications, and he wants all of them – and all their accompanying adjectives – in his work, as in this passage shortly after the Poet loses his visionary woman. The cold white light of morning, the blue moon Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods, Spread round him where he stood. (118:193–196) 128



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The poetry’s facility carries us forward but the movement will inevitably be interrupted at some point by the reader’s questioning mind: how might a non‐­proverbial moon be blue? And how are hills garish? They might be brightly lit,9 but how could bright light come from a cold white light and a blue moon? But the Poet is directly back from a visionary encounter: the world he is experiencing is not the normal world. We are taken within his consciousness; it is not that the poetry is unreal but that the Poet himself now inhabits a world peculiarly lit and coloured with that sickly blue moon.

One reason why Shelley was perhaps prepared to leave the poem in this state is its very particular private significance for him: something forming an insubstantial fabric of meaning which biography can help realise. Although Shelley’s attachment to Mary Godwin in 1814 appears not to have resulted in any poetry,10 Alastor is, oddly, a poem which Mary would certainly have read as for her: it is a poem creating the narrative of how simple it is for a Poet to fail, while implicitly celebrating how her own, very different poet has succeeded. The poem’s Preface had described the fate of a young Poet of ‘adventurous genius’ (112) who, after ‘early youth had passed’, had left ‘His cold fireside and alienated home’ (115:75–76). Both phrases are resonant for Shelley, the cold fireside taking us back to the ‘sad and silent home’, with its ‘desolated hearth’, of his 1814 poem ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’,11 the alienated home analogous to Field Place. The Poet in Alastor has, like Shelley, drunk deep of ‘the fountains of knowledge’ but realises that love for knowledge (in which Shelley was steeped) and knowledge of the external world are not enough; his ‘mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself ’ (112). This undoubtedly offered Shelley a way of thinking about himself and his past history. With a mind freshly awoken, he had (he may now have reckoned) fallen in love with Harriet Grove as his ideal intimate friend and intellectual companion: but that hope for a relationship had failed. And then he had looked to intellectual and moral companionship from Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Elizabeth Hitchener, from the late spring of 1811, had been yet another person with whom Shelley had hoped to develop an intellectual companionship. And then  –  when marriage to Harriett Westbrook had become inevitable – he had hoped to find in her, too, a potential companion for life, who would respond to his eager fostering of her intelligence. But Harriett could not be the proper intelligence, the needed companion, for all his educative attempts. In Shelley’s new myth of his life, if he had stayed with her then his fate would have been that of the Poet in Alastor, who spends his life considering intercourse with ‘an intelligence similar to itself ’, but who only has a recollected vision to pursue, so that the poem ends with his withering and death. 129



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There, but for his own sudden perception of Mary as the ‘intelligence’ he really needed, might Shelley himself have gone. When the Poet in Alastor encounters his ‘vision on his sleep’, it suggests just a little of what those heady days at the Godwin household in June and July 1814 must have been like, as the Poet recreates a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought…(117:150–154) Mary was unlikely to have been veiled, but dinner at the Godwins in late June 1814 must have seemed very like that to Shelley, as he listened to Godwin’s daughter sounding just like the father whose writing of the 1790s had brought him to the house in the first place: Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy…(117:158–160) Alastor, in this way of thinking, ends up recounting the stages of the life which Shelley felt he would have led without Mary. It implicitly celebrates her as the being (intellectual and physical) who has saved him from the fate of the Poet. The poem sets out and recounts an alternative life history for Shelley: a history, thank goodness, of which he has not been the victim.

It would have been natural for Shelley to have associated such a life history with those set out in the various autobiographical poems of Wordsworth, in particular with that in ‘Tintern Abbey’, another poem which attempts to see what had been missing from or had gone wrong in the earlier life of the poet (and, therefore, with his earlier poetry). Shelley could not have read the 1805 ‘Prelude’, though it is conceivable that Southey – who had read it − had told him about it during their intimacy in Keswick early in 1812, or had even quoted extracts to him. But it seems very likely that Shelley had at least read one of the sections of the poem which had appeared in Coleridge’s periodical The Friend on 26 October 1809; and we know that he read another extract from the poem in the issue of 25 January 1810, because he quoted from it in his Preface to Alastor.12 That was by no means the only Wordsworthian reference in Alastor. At the end of March 1815,Wordsworth had published the two volumes of his collected poetry 130



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which  –  omitting The Excursion and of course The Prelude, not published until 1850 – brought together all his great poetry. It was a sign of Shelley’s continuing loyalty that he and Mary should have acquired those two volumes within three weeks of their becoming available. And Alastor is intimately Wordsworthian. Line 3 cites the words ‘natural piety’ which, in the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, had acquired a new position as the third line of the epigraph for the great Immortality Ode, while line 26 quotes ‘obstinate questionings’, also from the Ode.The final lines of Alastor, celebrating ‘the web of human things…that are not as they were’, suggest ‘It is not now as it has been of yore’, also from the Ode, just as line 713, almost at the end of Alastor, puts another quotation from the Ode in quotation marks: ‘too “deep for tears”’.13 The start of line 666 – ‘No sense, no motion’ – will remind Wordsworth’s readers of ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’ (‘No motion has she now, no sense’), while the conclusion of Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ – ‘Farewell, farewell the Heart that lives alone,/Hous’d in a dream, at distance from the Kind’14 – matches the implicit moral of Alastor spelled out in the Preface, with its warning against those kept ‘aloof from sympathies with their kind’ (113).The steady development of one of the climactic moments in ‘Tintern Abbey’, too, is exactly paralleled in Alastor. Wordsworth writes of … the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.15 Shelley’s verse also uses a repeated ‘and’ and a final line of monosyllables to create something which could not have come into existence without Wordsworth: with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. (114:46–49) At such times, the reader may again feel oddly at home in a poem whose narrator is filled with recollections of poetry, and who asserts his kinship with the fellowship of poets and poetry. One of the reasons for writing his own poem with such reference to Wordsworth was that Shelley was signalling that his poem was concerned with a poet’s development from a man in one kind of relationship with the world to one in another kind, exactly as ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Resolution and Independence’ and ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ had been. But the problem is that the looked‐for development 131



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does not happen to the Poet in Shelley’s poem; his Poet sinks deeper into his private world (a world of adjectives, verbs and visions rather than of encounters) until finally he expires in it. This way of reading also suggests how Shelley may have understood the one significant experience the Poet undergoes before taking his journey towards ultimate loneliness and death: his fantasy encounter with ‘the veiled maid’ whose voice is ‘like the voice of his own soul’. As the encounter develops, it becomes increasingly unclear to the Poet (and indeed to us) whether it is with the fantastic or with the real, although at moments its status as ‘vision’ (118:189) is reinforced. Eventually the Poet falls in love with his vision, to find her (it?) finally responding to him: … yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes…(118:185–187) He falls asleep in orgasmic mid‐vision – and wakes with a shock to find his dream woman gone. But it is as if this young Poet does not wish – is indeed unable – to distinguish between fantasy and reality. All that the doomed Poet of Alastor has left, after the main part of his journey is over, is his consciousness of a pair of eyes, ‘Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought’ (125:490). Just before his death he can still make out how ‘two lessening points of light alone/Gleamed through the darkness’ (130:654–655). If only they could have been the eyes of a real woman! But this Poet arrives at no such fulfilment, and by the end might not even know the difference.

None of Shelley’s other poems included in the Alastor volume offers such insights. ‘Stanzas. − April, 1814’ appears, with its allusion to the ‘desolated hearth’,16 as does the uncontroversial text constructed out of Cantos I–II and VIII–IX of Queen Mab for publication as ‘The Dæmon of the World.’ Given the references to Wordsworth’s poems in Alastor, and Shelley’s use of Wordsworth as an exemplary moral explorer, the sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’ might have been expected to lavish praise upon the older poet: Byron recalled how in Geneva, a year later, Shelley would ‘dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’.17 But  –  like Byron  –  Shelley had been appalled by Wordsworth’s lurch to the politically reactionary, confirmed by his publication in 1814 of The Excursion. Wordsworth was now working with – or, in his case, for – the government: Mary’s reaction was to call him ‘a slave’, that very Shelleyan term for someone who is complicit in a tyranny.18 Yet the sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’ primarily mourns the loss of 132



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the Wordsworth who had once been such an inspiration; it does not attack him for what he now is, although it can only celebrate him for what he once was: Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar… In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,— Shelley is one of these left grieving that – having once been like that – Wordsworth ‘shouldst cease to be’ (110: 7–8,11–12,14). In the autumn of 1819 Shelley would reveal how ready he was to satirise Wordsworth but in the Alastor poems Wordsworth remained an exemplary memory.

The book which contains Alastor as its major poem bears the odd distinction of being what Shelley called ‘his first poetical production’.19 He was leaving out of his calculations Original Poetry, the Posthumous Fragments and the Poetical Essay: none of those books had named him as its author. His career as a writer (if we can even call it that) between 1810 and 1813 had produced works in prose and verse which had reached almost no‐one outside a small circle; Queen Mab had never even been published. All this, of course, defines the writing career of a man who had – in fact – never had one. He had not only not been trying to live by his writing, but − by producing unpublishable work – he had been ensuring that he could not do so. In the case of a poem like Queen Mab, a substantial work costing a good deal to produce, all he was prepared to earn from it was praise from his friends and bafflement (or notoriety) from anyone else who happened to encounter it. His work up to Alastor had been read by only a few (and written for even fewer), and had done nothing − could not have done anything – did not mean to do anything – to make his name. As late as 1826, a publisher would remark that ‘his elegant productions have been kept in comparative obscurity’.20 In this respect, the Alastor volume was different. It was published in the normal way (in February 1816), it had Shelley’s name on its title‐page, and it contained nothing that might make it subject to the threat of legal action. Shelley had, as usual, found his printer21 for himself (and, as usual, failed to settle his bill: the printer did not get paid until 1 July 1820). But once again Shelley only had 250 copies printed – no more than the print‐run for Posthumous Fragments back in 1810. And Alastor sold very slowly, as might have been expected of a rather short book (101 pages long but beautifully printed in fairly large type on fairly small sheets), priced at 5 shillings, by an author entirely unknown outside an exclusive circle. Its reviews 133



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in 1816 all declared it incomprehensible, with its first reviewer (in April 1816) pointedly wondering about Shelley’s readers, ‘if he has any’. But that was something Shelley himself was well aware of. He commented in August 1817 that ‘the sale I believe was scarcely any thing’ and that his publisher ‘had no interest in the work nor do I know any one else had’. Even the limited print‐run of Alastor was not exhausted until 1820.22 At this point in his life, Shelley remained untroubled, even amused at such a failure. The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846), however, who knew both Shelley and Byron, complained that − unlike Keats, who was ‘conscious of a high calling’ as a poet – ‘Byron and Shelley were always sophisticating about their verses: Keats sophisticated about nothing.’23 Haydon means that Shelley and Byron wrote artificially, did not deal with the genuine, and spent their time playing with trifles. They had no ‘high calling’ to be poets. But both Shelley and Byron were gentlemen, and Shelley – for all his chronic shortage of money – had never developed any plan to be a professional writer. He continued, at times, to pay to get his work printed and sent to London, the publisher‐bookseller being in that case simply his servant, charged with getting the printed sheets sewn and distributed. For Shelley, that remained an ideal relationship between himself, his poem and his publisher.

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14 Geneva and Byron 1816

When we consider what Shelley was going through during the late summer, autumn and early winter of 1815, it seems miraculous that he should have been able to dedicate himself to such poetry. Having struggled in 1814 to escape being arrested for debt, a year later he was most unhappily involved in the financial affairs of a person far less capable than himself of coping with debt and its consequences. In spite of refusing even to meet Shelley, let alone admit him to his house in Skinner Street, Godwin was now attempting to get large sums of money from him: money he believed was owed to Shelley following the death of Sir Bysshe Shelley, or could at least by raised by Shelley if he would only be energetic enough. It took Shelley months of trying to find out whether, according to the complex terms of his grandfather’s will, he was indeed owed anything more by the Shelley estate, while all the time being blamed by Godwin for not trying harder, before finally, in February 1816, becoming sure ‘that until my father’s death I shall receive no portion of the estate’. We might have expected that to have ended Godwin’s attempts to raise money through him. On the contrary; while making no attempt to prevent others from using words like ‘seducers and prostitutes’ about Shelley and Mary,1 and continuing to believe Shelley guilty of the most disgraceful behaviour, Godwin went on developing plans to raise money on ‘the estimated value of your father’s life’ – and would complain bitterly when he found that one of his own complex schemes was likely to come to grief because Shelley had been away: ‘This is the first fruits of your unfortunate absence.’ Shelley showed extraordinary forbearance in dealing with Godwin’s demands, as well as with the storm of letters which Godwin’s

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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schemes (and legal misunderstandings) generated. At the very last minute before leaving England at the start of May 1816 Shelley most imprudently told him that he would be able to give him £300 when negotiations with Sir Timothy were finally concluded.2 The naming of a sum was disastrous: for Godwin it constituted a promise which at this stage Shelley could not be absolutely sure of keeping. Why, nevertheless, was Shelley still so caring of Godwin when it became clear (as it quickly did) that Godwin had no respect for him, and simply wanted money? It has been suggested that Shelley was ‘driven by a need to prove himself in Godwin’s eyes’, that he desired to ‘buy his father‐in‐law’s approbation at almost any price’, that he saw Godwin as ‘his own father by adoption’ and feared a ‘second withdrawal of love’.3 The twentieth and twenty‐first centuries have very often tried to find psychological answers to problems, but such suggestions come up against the ­worrying fact that Shelley also wrote some extremely direct letters to Godwin, describing his ‘perpetual experience of neglect or enmity from almost every one but those who are supported by my resources’.4 Chief among those demonstrating neglect and enmity, despite his efforts to ensure that they were indeed ‘supported by my resources’, would have been the Godwins. And yet Shelley went on trying to raise money for Godwin throughout the period 1814–1816. Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), had famously commented in 1752, in a letter to his son: Remember, there are but two procédés in the world for a gentleman and man of parts: either extreme politeness, or knocking down. If a man notoriously and designedly insults and affronts you, knock him down; but if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him in your outward behaviour…

That was exactly how Shelley behaved: for the most part with extreme politeness, though Mary recalled how the rudeness of some fellow‐travellers in Switzerland, in August 1814, had ‘provoked S*** to knock one of the foremost down’.5 We should also never forget the way that Shelley’s upbringing had positioned him as one whose social role included support for the deserving. The moment he discovered Godwin to be alive in 1812, and had realised how fragile the other man’s financial existence was (the moment perhaps arriving when Godwin complained on 4 March 1812 of having to pay over the odds for the postage of a letter with enclosures from Shelley6) he had become one of the people for whom Shelley – recalling his original admiration for Godwin’s writing − felt responsible. Within a month of his first letter to Godwin, he had declared his hopes, when he came of age, ‘of being enabled to offer you a house of my own. Philanthropy is confined to no spot.’ It was, naturally, Shelley’s financial potential (not his intellectual potential) which informed Godwin’s early interest in him as ‘the eldest son of a gentleman of Sussex, with an ample fortune’ and Fanny Godwin’s idea of Harriett as ‘a fine lady’.7 136



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Shelley had then, against the odds, for all his own financial difficulties throughout the period, managed to raise for Godwin the magnificent sum of £1296‐15‐0 (realised in July 1814 from the post‐obit sale) and then a further sum of £1000 in May 1815; there were other sums too (in 1820 Shelley reckoned that altogether he had given Godwin between £4000 and £5000). He was not being driven by weakness, nor by any sense of obligation to a man he thought he had wronged. He didn’t believe he had wronged him. He was simply sticking by his original philanthropic promise to assist; and from July 1814, he saw Godwin as Mary’s father – so Godwin was family, however badly he behaved. For Shelley, as for all gentlemen, his word once given, to one of his own family, was his bond. Godwin might be rude and unjust – but ‘if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him’. And Shelley remained civil (he and Mary had, for example, named their son William). But he never grew close to Godwin. Godwin was on the receiving end of extremely conventional politeness: But I have been too indignant, I have been unjust to you.–forgive me.–burn those letters which contain the records of my violence, & believe that, however, what you erroneously call fame & honour separate us, I shall always feel towards you as the most affectionate of friends.–8

Such sentiments are not to be taken seriously any more than are Shelley’s extravagant professions of admiration and affection to Elizabeth Hitchener: and there is plain speaking (‘what you erroneously call fame & honour’) mixed with the ­politeness. We should never expect Shelley’s letters to be simple expressions of feeling, although there is a lot of feeling in them.

The months May–September 1816, when the Shelleys met Byron, have been celebrated as one of the creative high points of the romantic period: two poets and a novelist meeting and provoking each other to write, with numerous poems and one of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century resulting. How inevitable it now seems: how unplanned and in many ways accidental it was, as can be judged if we simply ask why Shelley was on the continent. In 1816 there was a sense for many people of an opportunity for continental travel which had been rudely interrupted by Napoleon’s resurgence in the spring and summer of 1815 (the ideal time of year for the start of the journey). But Shelley’s motives were different. As early as February 1816, he had developed a considerable desire to get away from England, as a way of ‘hiding myself and Mary from that contempt which we so unjustly endure’.9 Among those showing their contempt was Shelley’s own family. He had had a horrible and humiliating experience in January 1815 when he had gone to Field Place to hear the reading of Sir Bysshe’s 137



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will, upon which his entire financial future would depend, only to find himself excluded from the house. He was obliged to sit on the doorstep until someone came out – eventually an uncle did – to tell him what the will said. All he could do was sit and ostentatiously read the copy of Queen Mab which he had presented to Mary, to demonstrate himself in several ways unrepentant. But by February 1816, it was Godwin’s ‘systematic injustice’, his ‘contempt’ and ‘neglect’ which most troubled Shelley;10 and he developed a plan for Mary and baby William to reside abroad, while he returned to sign a planned post‐obit and to receive the money from it, before rejoining his family, and then probably p­ roceeding with them to Italy. Going abroad, now that the long continental war was over, would be a way of coping until Sir Timothy Shelley died; it would mean shedding the burden of debt which oppressed Shelley. And money went further in Italy. The reception of Alastor would have done nothing to raise his spirits. At the start of March 1816 he had even sent a copy to Southey, referring to it as ‘the product of a few serene hours of the last beautiful autumn’,11 doubtless also aware that – from his position of influence  –  Southey might be able to do something to help an almost unknown author. But Southey did not reply, or acknowledge the book, or (so far as we know) do anything to speed it on its way. But there was, too, a new reason for travelling. Claire had been determined to make a claim on a figure whom she knew would very much interest Shelley: Lord Byron. Her attempts to attract him can be seen as a way of making Shelley jealous, for having chosen Mary and not her: as a way of making both Fanny and Mary envious: as a proof of how marvellous she herself really was: as a way of getting Mary and Shelley to accept her back into their joint life. All are possible scenarios for Claire and all may be true. She was brown‐haired and dark‐eyed (see Figure 5), and had managed, by careful planning and sheer audacity, on 20 April 1816 to seduce Byron into sleeping with her while he was in London, following the break‐ down of his own marriage and before he set off for Geneva. It was, therefore, to Geneva that she urged Shelley and Mary to go, to strike up an acquaintance with Byron (see Figure 6), she acting as go‐between: she could help Mary with childcare along the way. If she had not managed to sleep with Byron; if Shelley had at some point felt mollified by his treatment in England (by a good review, by an offer of warm friendship, by some alleviation of his debts); if he had postponed his idea of going abroad; if Byron had had further problems with the ending of his marriage, so that he had decided either to stay in England for longer, or to go straight to Italy to meet his friend John Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869) – then no meeting of hearts, minds or creative capacities would have taken place. But into this wet, wet continental summer both parties went,12 with the routes of their very different carriages coinciding just outside Geneva. The Shelley party, plus small child, stayed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre at Sécheron, waiting for the Byron entourage to arrive (and spending too much money while doing so: but on clearer 138



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Figure 5  Clara Mary Jane (Claire) Clairmont, oil portrait (Rome 5–6 May 1819) by Amelia Curran, Newstead Abbey NA 271 (public domain)

days they could see Mont Blanc magnificently in the distance). Byron finally turned up on 25 May; within a week, the Shelley party had crossed to the other shore and had found a house to rent, the Villa Chapuis, at Montalègre, just above the lake. Byron had also taken a house, much grander, ten minutes up the steep hill behind the Villa Chapuis; he named his new place the Villa Diodati.

A pattern of living quickly emerged. Byron would appear at the Chapuis early in the afternoon, having spent the night writing and the morning asleep, and they might, if it were fine, go out on the lake in the boat which he and Shelley had hired together, one of the lake’s typical two‐masted small sailing craft13 with a couple of crew to sail it; or they would stay in and talk. Byron would often return to the Diodati to dine; they might go on the lake again, but more often the Shelley party would make their way up the vineyard slope to the Diodati, to spend the evening there, crowded before a blazing wood fire,‘little blue‐eyed boy’14 William remaining back at home with a nursemaid: at some point they hired a 21‐year‐old Genevan, Louise Duvillard (known as Elise). If it rained at night they might stay at Byron’s: Claire certainly did, night after night. 139



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Figure 6  George Gordon, Lord Byron, oil portrait (1813) by Richard Westall (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 4243)

What writing actually resulted from their acquaintance? The most famous product of the summer was the first version of Mary’s Frankenstein novel, initially drafted as her contribution to a group of horror stories written probably in the third week of June when they were all kept indoors by the rain, and Byron challenged them to write stories to make the flesh creep. Mary apparently started with a version of what eventually became chapter VII of her book: It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed, with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony I collected instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being in to the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning, the rain pattered dismally against the window panes, & my candle was nearly burnt out, when by the glimmer of the half extinguished light I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.15

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For his part, Byron recited Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (Shelley was overcome by it and rushed from the room: he had had a vision of a woman with eyes where her nipples should be) and also produced (on 17 June) an incomplete story which was probably going to involve a vampire, while Byron’s travelling doctor John Polidori (1795–1821)  –  ‘a very extravagant silly gentleman’16 he increasingly seemed to Byron – went on to produce his own vampire tale, a version of which was published in 1819 as The Vampyre. Shelley appears to have told tales impromptu (Claire screamed and responded) but also invented at least one Christabel‐like stanza of his own, which he wrote into his notebook early in July: A shovel of his ashes took From the hearths obscurest nook With a body bowed & bent And tottering forth to the paved courtyard She followed Muttering mysteries as she went.— Helen & Henry knew that granny Was as much afraid of ghosts as any And so they followed hard — But Helen clung to her brothers arm And her own shadow made her shake Henry17 There was other writing too. Various diaries: Polidori kept one, of which fragments remain; Mary kept one, of which also only fragments survive (some of the entries by Shelley). If Claire kept a diary, it no longer exists. Shelley, though, kept a diary during his tour with Byron, using a notebook bought in England for drawing as well as writing; it contains fragments of journal along with sketches and numerous drafts of poetry (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Verses written on receiving a Celandine’, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Otho’, and the first extended sketch for Rosalind and Helen, then probably called ‘Isabel and Helen’). Yet another Shelley notebook, loaned to Byron’s gambler friend Scrope Berdmore Davies (1782–1852), contains early versions of two poems (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’) and two sonnets ‘Upon the wandering winds’ and ‘To Laughter’, all drafted in Switzerland. Shelley also wrote lengthy letters to Peacock about the trip: four still exist. Two sonnets by Byron also survive, as well as numerous small poems (including one about Prometheus), while the third Canto of Childe Harold, with its debt to Wordsworth, written before and during their time together, demonstrates Shelley’s insistence to Byron that Wordsworth was a great writer.18 Add Frankenstein and The Vampyre and it is a very considerable haul. 141



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It was assisted by the fact that Byron and Shelley had taken to each other at once, and that Byron had developed a great affection for Shelley. Shelley had always admired Byron’s writing, but Byron knew very little of Shelley’s: Shelley had sent him a copy of Queen Mab (Byron later ‘expressed warm admiration of the opening lines’, though he may not have read much more) and had dispatched another poem in June 1814.19 But Shelley’s intellectual acuity, the range of his reading, the quickness and breadth of his understanding, would have impressed Byron, who was in an intensely gloomy state after the ending of his marriage (his heart feeling ‘as if an elephant had trodden on it’20). The Shelley party (even demanding Claire) must have been a welcome distraction. Within a month, the two men had embarked together on a trip by boat around Lake Geneva, largely in pursuit of the characters and scenes in Rousseau’s novel Julie: ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, in which Shelley once more soaked himself as they travelled. They went along the south shore via Evian and Meillerie (staying at the Curonne) and returned along the north, stopping at Ouchy and visiting Lausanne. The boat they were in (see Figure 7) was small enough to suffer a sudden danger of shipwreck after setting out from Meillerie, where a hurricane of wind blew up so that, close to the shore, the waves were ‘at least 15 feet high’. Because of the wind they had only had one sail hoisted, but one of the sailors had its rigging rope (or sheet) torn from his hands by a sudden tremendous gust, and without a sail to control it the boat refused to answer to the helm: the fact that their rudder oar was damaged suggests desperate attempts to steer but contact with the rocks. At once, water began to break over the bows, one huge wave after another, and ‘We all prepared for a swamp.’21 Shelley observed how ‘My companion [Byron], an excellent swimmer, took off his coat, I did the same, and we sat with our arms crossed, every instant expecting to be swamped.’ Byron was confident of saving himself, ‘being so near the rocks, and a good swimmer’,22 but Shelley, with his usual remarkable politeness, and hugely to Byron’s admiration, remarked ‘with the greatest coolness – “that he had no notion of being saved – & that I would have enough to do to save myself, and begged not to trouble me”’. The sailors, in spite of the water flooding in, still managed to regain control of the boat and, with frantic bailing, got round the headland at Saint‐Gingolph and into the shelter of its small harbour, to find confirmation on land of the violence of the storm by observing ‘an immense chesnut tree which had been overthrown just before’.23 No more sailing that day; Shelley and Byron went off by coach while the rudder oar was repaired.

The event was all the same responsible for an extremely significant piece of writing. That night, in their Saint‐Gingolph inn, Shelley drafted the first will he ever seems 142



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Figure 7  Lateen‐rigged sailing boat, photograph (Lake Geneva c. 1900) (in collection of John Worthen)

to have written. To Mary he left the bulk of the Shelley estate he expected to inherit (otherwise, unmarried, she would have got nothing), but he also left sums of £6000 to Harriett (plus £10 000 to the children Ianthe and Charles Bysshe), and £6000 to Claire,24 along with an additional £6000: a demonstration not only of the way in which Shelley felt responsible for her, but an indication that she was either already pregnant with Byron’s child or was likely to be so shortly (Byron would later boast of having had ‘a good deal’25 of sex with her during the summer, but Shelley was the one concerned for her future). 143



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The date of 23 June 1816 which later got attached to the poem ‘Mont Blanc’ is in fact far more likely to have belonged to Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, another product of the little tour: a rich and complex poem of huge idealism, fed by Shelley’s understanding of Rousseau. It insists on the superiority of the idea of beauty to actual, observed – and transitory – beauty, but does so through recollection and sharp observation and not just from generalities. Shelley, in a letter written on the journey, noted how his contemplation of Rousseau’s ‘imperishable creations’ had ‘left no vacancy in my heart for mortal things’.26 That was always something which fascinated him: he could be so passionately impressed by the idea of something that its physical reality appeared of only secondary interest. Intellectual beauty is, indeed, beauty not seen but apprehended and maintained in the mind, and the poem is concerned precisely with human attempts, often via religion or superstition, to apprehend something by its very nature intangible (the poem cites Shelley’s ghost‐hunting as a boy – he had also attempted to raise the devil – as an example of a frustrated but entirely natural impulse). Our apprehension of intellectual beauty, however, is what saves us from falling into the abyss of materialism (in which death would be no better than life). It makes life, nourishes, makes worthwhile. The poem ends with the confident assertion that The day becomes more solemn & serene When noon is past – there is a harmony In autum & a lustre in its sky Which thro the summer is not heard or seen As if it cd not be – as if it had not been.27 That is how, unexpectedly, apprehension of unseen beauty can steal upon us, though a word like ‘lustre’ also plunges us straight back into the world of sensation. A few months later, Shelley would write part of an essay ‘On Christianity’ which would attempt to explain what Christ meant when he said that the ‘pure in heart…shall see God’. Shelley took his chance, in fact, to attempt an explanation of the nature of God. There is a power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords, at will. Our most imperial and stupendous qualities, those on which the majesty and the power of humanity is erected are, relatively to the inferiour portion of its mechanism indeed active and imperial; but they are the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipresent Power.This power is God. And those who have seen God, have, in the periods of their purer and more perfect nature, been harmonized by their own will, to so exquisite a consentaneity of powers, as to give forth divinest melody when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame.28

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The essay’s ‘power by which we are surrounded’ feels very like the ‘lovely shadow of some awful Power’ which haunts the poem; both are not only manifestations of the transcendental which Shelley thought an inevitable part of experience, but rework the idea of responsible power which meant so much to him. He did not believe in the Christian God, but such writing reminds us how insufficient the title ‘atheist’ is for him, although he used it to provoke his contemporaries.

From the north shore during their tour, he and Byron would have caught further glimpses of Mont Blanc; but to see it properly they would have to get a great deal closer. Shelley, Mary and Claire went down to Chamonix on 21 July, leaving William with Elise in the Villa Chapuis – Byron also remaining behind, probably to demonstrate that, although he slept with her, he was not to be reckoned Claire’s partner. Shelley found his first experience of Chamonix overwhelming: ‘I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before.’29 The fact that Mont Blanc itself was so often wrapped in cloud made it, if anything, more dramatic: avalanches could be heard (and sometimes seen) on its slopes, and on their first day Shelley was especially impressed by what he could see of a glacier descending like a great irregular river from the clouds above. He wrote about it to Peacock: Its surface is irregularly broken into a thousand unaccountable figures. Conical & pyramidal crystallizations more than 50 feet in height rise from its surface, & precipices of ice of a dazzling splendour overhang the woods & meadows of the vale. This glacier winds from the valley until it joins the masses of frost from which it was ­produced above, winding thro its own ravine like a bright belt flung over the black regions of pines.There is more in all these scenes than mere magnitude of proportions – there is a majesty of outline, there is an awful grace in the very colours which invest these wonderful shapes – a charm which is peculiar to them, quite distinct even from the reality of their unutterable greatness.30

And this was some days before they journeyed up to Montanvert to see the amazing Mer de Glace (‘a scene in truth of dizzying wonder’31) from still further up the slopes. Phrases like ‘a bright belt flung over the black region of pines’ remind us what a writer Shelley was, but it was also natural in him to ask what, exactly, was so impressive about what he is seeing. It was not just size, ‘magnitude of proportions’. He uses words like ‘majesty’, ‘grace’ and ‘charm’: he finds himself attempting, once again, to locate something ‘distinct even from the reality of their unutterable greatness’, something beyond their undeniable ‘reality’. His chance came in the poem which  –  as its original title ‘At Pont Pellisier’ shows  –  he may well have started outdoors (his first draft is in pencil). Finally 145



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p­ ublished in 1817 as ‘Mont Blanc/Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’, the poem thus acknowledges its reference to Coleridge’s 1802 poem ‘Hymn Before Sun‐Rise. In the Vale of Chamouny’, written (though Shelley probably did not know) without its author having left England.32 But Coleridge’s poem is always focused on God; God is beyond man, the mountain is a constant sign of Him; and the poem ends with the assertion that the earth itself praises God. On this very trip, in the Hôtel de Londres at Chamonix, Shelley had inscribed himself ‘a lover of mankind, democrat, and atheist’ in the hotel’s livre de police, albeit in Greek.33 But he was making a point. Thomas Gray had written in 1775, about the Alps, ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument’, and an entry made in the livre de police two days before the Shelleys arrived had declared how ‘Such scenes as these, then, inspire most forcibly. the love of God.’34 Shelley insisted not only that he was not inspired but – in the column for ‘Destination’ – he added ‘L’Enfer’ [hell], as did Claire for Mary’s stated ‘Destination’. His poem (despite scholarly attempts to show it coming down on one side or other of a particular philosophical debate) is remarkable in describing the processes of thought and realisation, and in thus showing how philosophical debate about the sources of experience comes into being. On the one hand there is a constant surging of experience into the mind, including the astounding experience of Mont Blanc.And compared with the raging torrents of sensation created by the mountain above and by the river Arve below (the Arve was in flood while the Shelleys were there, because of the summer’s rain), human thought feels both puny and dependent; is indeed only a stream in comparison, having ‘a sound but half its own’.35 And yet we are also conscious of the ‘vast river’ of experience which, like the Arve, ‘Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves’ (140:11); while the poem’s rhyme‐scheme (every end word rhyming with some other end word, somewhere nearby) carries in itself something of the tossing, disturbing – but always ongoing – presence of the river beneath everything. The poem offers, rather than philosophical conclusions, a series of responses to the sheer overpowering experience of the mountain and the Arve. One response, in Section IV of the poem, concentrates on the great glaciers that track their way down the slopes, tearing up trees, destroying any possibility of habitation.We prefer to think of ourselves as inhabitants of the ‘daedal earth’ (144:86), the earth perceived as Spenser saw it in The Faerie Queene: ‘Then doth the dædale earth throw forth to thee/Out of her fruitfull lap aboundant flowres’, spontaneously generating beauty and abundance.36 And the first part of Section IV of Shelley’s poem offers us a fantasy of the ‘hidden buds’, the enfolded leaves and flowers, in a ‘detested trance’ of dreamless winter sleep, dormant until they can ‘bound’ into wakefulness and life in spring (144:90‐1). But the poem also shows everything subject to life and death: the Earth essentially powerless over its own fate, however well it may create, support and generate (flowers, human beings, thoughts and reflections). For 146



  1816  Power dwells apart in its tranquillity Remote, serene, and inaccessible…(144:96–97)

And that is what Mont Blanc,‘the naked countenance of earth’, teaches ‘the adverting mind’ (144:98,100), the mind which applies its understanding of the world to itself. The glaciers, terrifying, scornful ‘of mortal power’ (144:103), overthrowing ‘The limits of the dead and living world,/Never to be reclaimed’ (146:113–114), simply are. Seeing them from a distance, we naturally try to make something comprehensible out of them: the icy walls they throw up suggest, for a moment, a city, albeit ‘a city of death’. But no, it is ‘not a city, but a flood of ruin’ (144:105,107), remorselessly advancing. And there is nothing to be done but get out of the way. The ‘tempest’s stream’ renders everything else non‐existent: ‘work and dwelling/Vanish, like smoke’ (146:118–119). Man’s habitation, overtaken by the glacier, will become like the rest of the glacier, a place of desolation; and Shelley saw enough of what he called ‘these deadly glaciers’ in his few days at Chamonix to be terribly impressed by their remorseless advance: ‘One would think that Mont Blanc was a living being & that the frozen blood forever circulated slowly thro’ his stony veins’.37 But the section ends with a third, contrasting experience; that of the caves, streams and rivers below, together ‘one majestic River’ which is ‘The breath and blood of distant lands.’The glacier which, up here, freezes, terrifies and negates, elsewhere becomes warm and fertilising. But not for us; its fertility is ‘for ocean waves’, for ‘the circling air’, the latter also suggesting the ‘circling systems’ of the universe described in ‘The Dæmon of the World’,38 the uncaring universe going its own way beyond and without us. The passage shows a pitch of clarity, ways of thinking aloud in images which – despite some passages remaining ‘disconcertingly abstract’ – Shelley had not previously demonstrated: it provides its reader with what an 1812 letter had cheerfully described as ‘as much explicitness as my nature is capable of ’.39 The poem as a whole also offers an excellent contrast with the descriptive letters Shelley was writing to Peacock and which eventually became part of the History of a six weeks’ tour which he and Mary put together; letters workmanlike, at times slightly conventional. It was his poetry which enabled Shelley, like Wordsworth, not simply to describe but to keep thinking aloud about how and what he saw, to convey how it touched him, and to carry his readers with him in thinking, too.

Back at Montalègre on 27 July 1816, Shelley received a quantity of mail from England, much of it distressing. In particular, his financial problems had caught up with him. His plans to raise money from a post‐obit had fallen through; Hookham had now written complaining of being owed money, and so had Mary’s doctor 147



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from Bishopsgate. Such people had to be paid. And there were still all the old debts, such as Charters’s carriage bill. Shelley’s lawyer P. W. Longdill40 had organised the sale of their possessions at Bishopsgate to try and pay off some debts, but much more was needed. And there were bills from tradespeople  –  £18 for coal, for example – which, as usual, Shelley put off (‘The coal man…may wait, but it would be as well to speak to him or write to him to assure him of payment’:41 that was how to keep one’s supplier while not paying). Above all was looming the problem of Godwin, who was not only expecting money but making it clear that he depended entirely upon it.Things were so bad that not just Shelley but the whole party – now including Elise, as William’s nurse – would have to go back. The Villa Chapuis was, though, theirs until the end of August (they must have rented it for three months), so they did not leave until then. Staying longer allowed them, too, to see more of Byron and of his friends Hobhouse, Scrope Davies, and Matthew Lewis (‘Monk’ Lewis himself), all of whom arrived towards the end of August. As Davies would also shortly be returning to England, Shelley may very well have loaned him the notebook with his four Swiss poems in it; a notebook lost for 150 years until its rediscovery in the opening of Davies’s trunk in Barclays Bank in London, in 1976.42

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After travelling back across France, visiting Versailles and Fontainebleau on the way, Shelley and Mary and Claire landed in Portsmouth on 8 September 1816. Mary and Claire went straight to Bath; they wanted to keep the Godwins ignorant of the fact that Claire – now giving her name as Mrs Clairmont – was visibly pregnant. Mary would certainly have preferred not to keep Claire with them, but Shelley felt responsible for her and would not hear of her being sent away. He went to London, probably on the 10th; he wanted a house where they could all stay, and he badly needed (at least for the moment) to quieten down the demands for payment for the carriage which Charters was making, as well as to put off other urgently pressing debts. He also had to hand over the manuscript of the third Canto of Byron’s Childe Harold to the publisher John Murray. The manuscript had had an ‘inglorious’ journey, Shelley told Byron: ‘He was taken for a smuggler, and turned over and over by a greasy Custom‐house officer, to see if lace, &c., were hidden within.’ But ‘He is now quite safe…’1 Godwin was a real worry. Back in May, in the belief that Sir Timothy would be advancing him money to cover his existing debts, Shelley had promised Godwin ‘£300 from this source’, and on the strength of that Godwin had (in his usual way) gone ahead and signed a promissory note for £300 in one of the tributaries of the great river of his debts − but Shelley did not yet know when Sir Timothy was going to hand over the money (perhaps £600) Shelley was expecting. And when he got to London, his lawyer Longdill turned out to be away, so he could not find out. Fanny Godwin, however, came to see him immediately he arrived, to tell him how

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Godwin’s new novel was getting on, and  –  as she seems to have made herself responsible for acquiring the money her father needed – she also wanted to be reassured that the money Shelley had promised would indeed be arriving soon. He did not tell her about his worries, but it was perhaps now that he gave her the little gold watch Mary had bought for her in Geneva on 10 August. At first he had gone into his old lodgings at 26 Marchmont Street but had found them ‘dreadfully vacant and lonely’,2 reminding us of the ‘sad and silent home’ and its ‘desolated hearth’ about which he had written in 1814. He soon went down to Marlow to stay with Peacock (he was there by the 14th) – and on the 19th Mary joined them there, leaving Elise and Claire in Bath looking after baby William, now almost eight months old, and Claire sending reports about his health (‘I just stooped down to ask “itty Babe” if I should send his love which he returned by putting his heel with great composure into my eye’3). But catastrophe was impending. Almost exactly a month later, on 9 October, Fanny Godwin committed suicide; while Harriett Shelley would be found drowned in the Serpentine river on 10 December. Shelley has been blamed for both deaths. As late as 1820, Godwin would state that Fanny – ‘in love with’ Shelley – had ‘put an end to her existence owing to the preference given to her younger sister’, and he has been supported by some modern commentators. And ever since 1816 Shelley has been blamed for Harriett’s death: she herself felt ‘so deceived, so cruelly treated, that I can never forget it’.4 Both cases are very troubling, but not for the reasons sometimes given. As often, a careful look at the chronology of events helps with some of the problems.

Back on 29 July 1816, Fanny had written a lengthy letter to Mary which hindsight allows us to see as extremely worrying. It describes ‘the dreadful state of mind I generally labour under & which I in vain endeavour to get rid of ’, it notes that ‘my mind always keeps my body in a fever’, and also reveals Fanny ‘harased by a variety [of ] trying circumstances’, including worries about Godwin’s finances; there is widespread political unrest, and the ‘melancholy season’ – the awful summer of 1816 – assists her to ‘write so dismally’, but also with an ominous self‐abnegation (‘but never mind me—’). Her parenting had been utterly problematic.5 She had barely known her father, who had never shown any interest in her; before she was three years old she had acquired a stepfather (Godwin) and then within six months a younger, half‐sister (Mary), whose birth had killed their mother. Before Fanny was seven she had had to accept a stepmother (Mary Jane Godwin) with whom she never got on, with whom she had also acquired a new sister and a new brother (Claire and Charles); and then another baby brother, to none of whom, again, was she in any way related. Mary and Claire also seemed – and had in 1814 and 1816 150



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proved themselves to be − cleverer, more attractive and more adventurous than she. She had grown up knowing Godwin’s preference for Mary; in 1812, he had told a friend that ‘My own daughter’ – Mary – was ‘considerably superior in capacity’, while Fanny was ‘somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault’. For Godwin, Fanny’s only advantage was being ‘peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory’. One thing she had, indeed, never been allowed to forget was that she was ‘a dependant being in every sense of the word but most particularly in money’: ‘you know I have not a sous [sic] of my own’,6 she told Mary. Mary Jane Godwin apparently reported in July 1815 that, when Fanny had returned to the house in July 1814 (she had been in Wales when Mary and Claire had gone away with Shelley), ‘her emotion was deep when she heard of the sad fate of the two girls; she cannot get over it’.7 The truth was probably that she was depressed at not having been thought young or pretty enough to be part of the escapade. Godwin had noted that whereas Mary was ‘I believe, very pretty’, Fanny was ‘by no means handsome’: Crabb Robinson recalled her as ‘a very plain girl’, as well as ‘odd in her manners and opinions’, while Harriett Shelley back in 1812 had also thought her ‘very plain, but very sensible’. She was apparently ‘pitted with small‐pox’, having caught the infection as a baby’; she may have used her ‘long brown hair’ to shield her face.8 Fanny, nevertheless, ‘fully approved of and vindicated her sister’s conduct in living with Shelley’,9 and had responded to Mary’s earnest request to come and visit her after she had lost her first child in March 1815; indeed Fanny came more than once. She had written to Mary and Shelley at the end of May 1816, too, insisting that ‘I love you for your selves alone’, but also mentioning a nasty piece of gossip from Mary Jane Godwin, who had apparently told Fanny that she was Mary’s ‘laughing stock – and the constant beacon of your riposte satire’.10 That was always Fanny’s worry: to be laughed at by those she had had to accept as her siblings. On Tuesday 24 September 1816, Shelley went up to London again to try to get his lawyer Longdill to agree about the exact sum of money owing to him; he also saw Fanny Godwin in Piccadilly and she passed on some further remarks from Mary Jane Godwin (complaining, for example, that she had had to pursue Mary and Shelley ‘like a hound after Foxes’ in July 1814). But Fanny also recalled that Shelley ‘chose not to be frank with me’ about the money he had promised Godwin. He got back to Marlow at 11 that night. The following day Mary and he travelled down to Bath, and the day after that, Thursday 26 September, Fanny wrote to Mary. She was intensely envious of what Shelley had been telling her about the ‘calm philosophical habits of life’11 which he, Mary and Claire enjoyed: their independence and peace of mind, following their exciting trip to the continent in the summer and their contact with the famous Lord Byron (writing to Byron the following Sunday, Shelley confirmed how ‘well and content’ he, Mary, Claire and little William were together). Fanny would have been horribly aware of the contrast with her own life as a 151



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dependent in Skinner Street: we should bear in mind Crabb Robinson’s acute observation that, when the Godwins were unhappy, they were ‘I fear, wretched beyond the ordinary proportion of wretchedness.’ Fanny’s letter showed that she would have liked to see Claire and Mary and Shelley, and baby William too: ‘this change of air does him infinite good no doubt’.12 Fanny also concerned herself with Shelley’s bad health and asked Mary to ‘Give my love to Shelley’: she felt genuinely affectionate to one who was saving her father from ruin, though she wanted him to write the moment he had news about the money he was going to hand over. Godwin was equally anxious about his writing and his debts, something which put the whole family (but Fanny in particular) on edge. She would admit the following week that ‘Mamma and I are not great friends’; they must have been quarrelling again. But she had, too, a new reason for depression: she now knew that her chance of getting away from Skinner Street into employment as a teacher in Ireland (suggested back in the summer by her aunt Everina Wollstonecraft) had not worked out. In August Fanny had told Mary how, when Everina passed through London, ‘my future fate will be decided. I shall then give you a full & clear account of what my unhappy life is to be spent in &c &c.’13 Everina had been in London on 24 September but – apparently in some financial difficulties herself − had not taken Fanny with her.That would have been deeply depressing for someone with Fanny’s ‘unhappy life’: her ‘sisters’ were gone but the door had closed, ending her own hope of escape. Mary sent Fanny a reply on Sunday 29th, complaining about what she understood Mary Jane Godwin had been saying about her and Shelley. Some such remarks had in fact originated not with Mary Jane Godwin but with Harriett, who by late September was telling people that Godwin had ‘sold’ Mary and Claire to Shelley in return for money14…but Mary Jane Godwin had certainly passed on the gossip. Shelley probably knew by now how little money he would be getting from his father: no money would be handed over until it had been employed to pay his debts, Sir Timothy being shocked at the level of his son’s liabilities. But Shelley still delayed telling Godwin about the impending disaster; he knew the probable effect of the news on Godwin’s ability to finish the novel on which he was currently working (something on which, as ever, Godwin believed his financial future depended). Shelley was also apparently checking whether the financial agent William Bryant might be able to assist. Finally, on Wednesday 2 October Shelley wrote to Godwin, who received the letter on the 3rd. The letter came, according to Fanny, ‘like a thunder‐clap’. Shelley explained that he could only pass on £200, as he had only received the sum of £248 from his father, but that he remained committed to Godwin’s ‘welfare’: ‘I am ready to co‐operate in whatever plan may be devised for your benefit.’15 (This promise he kept and, by the end of the year, Godwin was financially relatively safe again.) And Shelley ensured that a cheque was immediately made out to Godwin for £200 (with fearful consequences for his own finances, of course); this was in 152



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Godwin’s hands within a day or two – only for him testily to reject it: it had to be made out to one of his creditors, Joseph Hume. Fanny now demanded, in another, desperately angry letter written that same day, that it was up to Shelley to ‘tell papa exactly what you can & what you cannot do  –  for he does not seem to know what you mean in your letter’.16 Godwin cannot properly have read what Shelley had written: it was perfectly clear. But Fanny was also insistent that Shelley should at least have warned Godwin what might happen, instead of allowing him to believe that the money would come – and then suddenly disabusing him, just a fortnight before Godwin was due to repay his debt. Fanny’s letter, addressed to Mary, was very angry throughout: angry with Shelley but also with Mary’s letter of the 29th. She energetically defended Mary Jane Godwin, insisting that she had carefully explained to Shelley that the insulting comments had all originated with Harriett (Mary Jane Godwin had only passed them on). She did concede that ‘Mamma’ could be outspoken when ‘in a passion’ but – she loyally insisted − only ever when addressing herself to Fanny. But then she confessed that ‘Mamma’ would never be able to forgive Shelley for having carried off her daughter Claire. Fanny, however, insisted that Mary and little William were not now the target of Mary Jane Godwin’s anger; instead she accused Shelley of paying ‘little regard’ to what she had said to him and of his having told Mary stories ‘of his own imagination for your amusement’. Having only a week earlier been looking forward to being down in Bath and seeing Shelley, her sisters and William for herself, Fanny now accused Mary and Shelley of being ‘vulgar souls’ for their ‘talking and petty scandal’.17 Given that Fanny had been responsible for passing on the gossip, we might wonder who was now more responsible for ‘petty scandal’. Fanny agreed that she was writing ‘unkindly’ in her letter, but insisted that she simply wanted to be frank (meaning that she was anxious and miserable). Her hopefulness about both Mary and Shelley had been undermined, as had her hopes of a future; she had presumably been keeping up Godwin’s spirits with her confidence that Shelley would come up with the money, and now felt that in that way, too, she had failed. How Shelley felt about this letter we do not know, but Mary callously noted ‘stupid letter from F.’ And Mary’s journal suggests that it cannot have upset them too much; Shelley recorded some very playful banter on Sunday 6 October. And on 7 October Shelley wrote out a replacement £200 cheque for Godwin as the best he could do, despite knowing its consequences for himself. On 20 October he would be prevented from travelling by bailiffs or some other court officials, from 31  October he was technically in custody and being supervised, and from 16 November he was technically under arrest for debt.18 But Fanny, after her anger on Friday 3rd, seems to have sunk into a deeply depressive state. Now that Godwin was financially so desperate, she would have felt 153



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still worse about being a burden on his household, living as she was with two very difficult and not especially generous people, neither of whom was even a blood relation of hers, and with whom she was currently getting on very badly, so that Skinner Street felt less and less like a home. She felt alienated from Mary and Shelley because of what Mary Jane Godwin had said about them (that they made fun of her); she was still furious with Shelley for letting Godwin down. At eight in the evening on Monday 7 October, just four days after her angry letter, she left London by coach with what little money she had. She was wearing stays marked with the initials ‘M. W.’ (Mary Wollstonecraft had twice attempted to kill herself ), and was either carrying a bottle of laudanum or very soon purchased one. She was travelling not only towards Wollstonecraft relations in Wales, and towards Ireland, but towards Shelley and her sisters; the fact that she had set off in their direction and, right to the end, when she had almost no other possessions beyond the clothes she wore, her purse and a necklace, she still kept the little gold watch, strongly suggests her attachment to them. She would have arrived in Bath shortly before 10 in the morning on Tuesday 8th and dispatched them a note (it must have gone by hand) saying that she was in Bath, apparently telling them that she was on her way to see the Wollstonecraft relations, and probably asking to see them – why else would she have written?19 Mary does not, all the same, mention a meeting in her journal, which makes it unlikely that Fanny came to the house: a powerful reason not to invite her would have been Claire’s desire to conceal her pregnancy, still kept secret from the Godwins. But it seems probable that Shelley went to meet Fanny, and encountered her angry unhappiness with the way he had let Godwin down the previous week. This seems likelier than a refusal by all three of the Shelley household to see her. It would then have been later on the Tuesday that Fanny travelled on, again by coach, to Bristol, just 13 miles west of Bath. From here she again wrote letters: one to Mary and Shelley and the other to Godwin. Both letters  –  neither ­survives − arrived on Wednesday 9th. The one to Godwin included the sentence ‘I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to be removed.’ Claire was in the room when, that evening, Shelley opened Fanny’s letter, ‘crushed it into his pocket and rushed off, and would not let anyone see it’.20 It may have been Mary’s, Claire’s and Shelley’s response on the Tuesday morning which finally decided Fanny to do away with herself, but the fact that she also wrote to Godwin shows that she wanted Godwin and Mary Jane Godwin to know what she was doing, and to blame themselves as well. At some level Fanny still wanted to be loved, pitied and (perhaps) prevented, but she was doing her best to put herself beyond the reach of help. Her letter was so ‘very alarming’ that Shelley went straight to Bristol as soon as he got it, to find that, just as she had threatened, Fanny had left, leaving no clue as to where she had gone. After spending until midnight enquiring which coach she 154



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might have taken, Shelley got back to Bath and his waiting family at two in the morning on Thursday 10th with, agonizingly, ‘no particular news’.21 They were very short of cash, and Shelley needed to take some to continue the hunt for Fanny; before returning to Bristol later that same day, he wrote to his bankers in London asking for £30 ‘by return of Post’. This time in Bristol, on Thursday 10th, he found ‘more certain trace’:22 Fanny had gone by coach to Swansea.There was no coach he could now take until 6 a.m. on Friday: he returned to Bath with the news and the following morning, Friday 11th, undertook the 8–10 hour journey to Swansea on the light mail coach the Cambrian. Fanny had told a person on the Swansea coach on Wednesday 9th that she was ‘intending to go to Ireland’, but Ireland was no longer a possible destination for her (she only had 8s. 6d. in her purse). She went instead into the Mackworth Arms in Wynd Street, Swansea and probably that night (while Shelley was hunting for her through Bristol for the first time) she took an overdose of laudanum. After ‘Much agitation…in the house’,23 her room door was finally forced; she was found dead. Perhaps she had chosen Swansea in hopes that no‐one would follow her until too late; but she had left a suicide note, reported in the local newspaper: I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as*****24

It reads composedly; as if, indeed, it had been previously composed. The signature identifying her was reported as having been torn off, probably in an act of discretion or kindness from someone before the inquest, which took place on Friday 11th, probably at the Mackworth Arms itself. Her birth had been ‘unfortunate’ because she was illegitimate; the ‘persons who have hurt their health’ looking after her must have been the Godwins. She may well have been thinking of Mary and Shelley too when she wrote of causing people pain. On the other hand, although it has been stated that the note was ‘to Godwin himself ’, we cannot know to whom it was addressed: Godwin, Mary Jane Godwin, Mary, Claire, Shelley, all of them? The denigration of herself as ‘such a creature’, and her consignment of herself to the role of one who would blessedly be forgotten, are horrible. The inquest mercifully reached the verdict of ‘Found dead’, thus sparing Fanny and her family the special unpleasantness of a suicide’s interment; but, her name being unknown, she was buried in an unmarked grave.25 Shelley got to Swansea on the Friday, but only in the afternoon. He had no reason to assume that an inquest was being or had been held,26 but it would not have taken him long to find out what had happened: the Mackworth Arms, where the 155



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Cambrian coach stopped, would have told him everything about the ‘unhappy catastrophe’ described in the local paper. Shelley must have known immediately that the woman was Fanny, with the ‘small French gold watch’, the stays showing ‘M.W.’, and stockings marked ‘G.’ It is possible that he was assisted by old friends in Swansea, but he travelled back to Bath as soon as he could, arriving with what Mary called ‘the worst account’. She noted ‘a miserable day’: they bought mourning.27 On the same Thursday as Shelley had been searching a second time through Bristol for Fanny, Godwin had himself left London to try and find her. He had made enquiries in Bristol on Friday 11th, while Shelley was on his way to Swansea, but had found nothing and abandoned his search. Returning to Bath that same night, he had chosen not to call on the Shelley family; instead he wrote a letter. He was on principle refusing to see Shelley and Mary following their elopement, and was probably still angry for being let down financially. But above all he wanted to ensure that no‐one else knew what Fanny was doing: ‘What I have most of all in horror is the public papers’, he told them. He was back at home in London on the 12th, where he received a letter from Shelley telling him exactly what had happened. Godwin answered immediately: I did indeed expect it…avoid any thing that leads to publicity. Go not to Swansea. Disturb not the silent dead. Do nothing to destroy the obscurity she so much desired, that now rests upon the event. It was, as I said, her last wish.

While thanking Shelley for his ‘strong expressions of sympathy’, he also responded, typically: ‘I do not see however that that sympathy can be of any service to me.’ He was, instead, allowing friends and family – ‘during the first shock’ − to believe that Fanny had indeed gone to visit her aunts in Ireland, ‘a thing that had been in contemplation’. He was determined to keep secret what had happened, in particular from the servants: ‘We have so conducted ourselves that not one person in our house has the smallest apprehension of the truth.’ In December, Mary Jane Godwin would discuss Fanny with Crabb Robinson without disclosing that her stepdaughter was dead; Robinson would only learn the truth – from the writer Charles Lamb (1775–1834) – in February.28 Ten months later, Claire’s brother Charles still did not know about Fanny’s death.

Shelley at least was horribly affected by what had happened: Claire told Byron a fortnight later how ‘Poor Shelley’s health is broken up’.’29 A single page of writing survives with Shelley’s meditations upon Fanny, some probably inscribed soon after 12 October 1816 and some the following year (perhaps on the anniversary of her death). They seem to be autobiographical, and they were not shared with Mary, 156



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who only appears to have discovered the page after his death. They describe his guilt at not realising, either in September or in October, how depressed Fanny had been. A fragmentary, unfinished poem starts: Friend had I known thy secret grief Should we have parted wher Her voice did quiver as we parted – Yet knew I not the heart was broken From which it came – and I departed Heeding not the words then spoken –30 Was he referring to a brief meeting in Bath? Another line runs ‘Some secret griefs woes had been mine own’, suggesting that in some way he felt he participated in her unhappiness. One link between them would have been a fascination with suicide; but another would have been the loss of parents. At the age of 18 Shelley had in effect lost his mother, except by letter, and gained (in his father) an utterly unsympathetic parent whom he now never saw. The second half of Shelley’s poem relates directly to Mary Wollstonecraft, with quotations from her writing and reminiscences of Fanny’s childhood, which he linked to her death in the coastal town of Swansea: Thy little footsteps on the sands Of a remote and lonely shore – . . . These footsteps on the sands are fled, cold

Thine eyes are dark – thy hands are still, And she is dead – & thou art dead – And the31 Both Mary and Claire had taken their chance of escaping from the tragic Godwin household (‘she is dead – & thou art dead’): Fanny had not escaped until she made her final journey westwards towards Mary and Shelley, but also – she resolved − past them. On the back of the same page of fragments Shelley insisted ‘It is not my fault – [?An] is not to be attrubed to me –.’32 He had been the last person who might have saved her, but he did not feel responsible for what she had done. The autumn turned to winter with Claire depressed (Byron was totally ignoring her), Shelley depressed but reading hard (and reading Don Quixote aloud in the evenings), William growing, and Mary – as ever – determined and active, writing hard, reading, studying. But then came the other terrible event of 1816.

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16 Drowned, Frozen, Dead 1816

Harriett Shelley had, since Shelley had left her in 1814, been living at home with her parents and sister Eliza, but we know very little about her state of mind before a startling glimpse at the start of 1815, when we find her – not for the first time in her life − contemplating suicide. She wrote to a friend: ‘Is it wrong, do you think, to put an end to one’s sorrow?’ She may have attempted to end her sorrow in a different way, sometime in the spring or early summer of 1816, by taking an army officer as lover and becoming pregnant.1 We have just a scrap of evidence about Harriett’s state of mind in the summer of 1816; she wrote at the start of June to a friend: If there is any thing which I can do for you pray let me know to the unhappy there is nothing so delightful, as being of use to others.2

Thus classing herself as one of ‘the unhappy’. And then, on 9 September 1816, she left her father’s house in Chapel Street and moved into lodgings in Chelsea, over a mile away. That was the day after Shelley and Mary had landed and the day before Shelley got to London. It is normally assumed that she moved because she did not want her father or mother to know that she was pregnant – she would appear ‘in the family way’ to Jane Thomas, her new landlady at 7 Elizabeth Street − but the date strongly suggests that she did not want Shelley to know either.3 He was very likely to come to her, wanting to see his children: he had still not seen little Charles Bysshe. She made herself scarce: the children were apparently sent to the care of a retired clergyman and his wife in Warwick. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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After eight weeks and a few days in Elizabeth Street, for some reason Harriett moved again, on 9 November 1816; and this time the Westbrook family (with the exception of Eliza) had no idea where. She had in fact moved just a few streets away into lodgings run by a couple named Smith in a Mews ‘near Chapel Street’,4 perhaps Groom Place; Eliza, doing her best to help make Harriett untraceable, introduced her as a lady’s maid whose husband was abroad. The move was obviously very sudden; on 7 November she had paid another month’s rent for her Elizabeth Street lodgings. By now Harriett was in a ‘very low’ state; her army lover (abroad) had given up corresponding with her and she felt ‘lowered in the opinion of everyone’ as well as ‘Too wretched to exert myself.’5 John Westbrook was now trying to find her, to the extent of having ponds dragged, while Shelley was also endeavouring to locate where she – and his children – were. Shelley’s financial troubles meant that he was in some danger of arrest if he went to London himself, but he would also not have wanted to reveal to Mary how anxious he was about Harriett and the children; he asked his publisher friend Hookham if he could help shed any light on their whereabouts, and Hookham set out to track Harriett down. It was on a Saturday evening, probably late in November, that Harriett wrote a farewell letter to Eliza6 and then drowned herself in the freezing waters of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, only 10 minutes’ walk from her lodgings; her body surfaced and was found on 10 December. At the coroner’s inquest on 11 December, she was named Harriett Smith and declared ‘Found dead’; the verdict (as with Fanny Godwin) sparing her and her family the fate of suicides, who in this district of London were interred at the crossroads at the end of Grosvenor Place (a practice ending only in 1823).7 By chance, Shelley had been in Marlow and London from 5 December (he had been house‐hunting in Marlow). In London he had met his new friend Hunt, and had then – on the 14th – gone back to Bath, not having seen the newspaper reports on the 11th or 12th. Nor had he seen Thomas Hookham; but the latter,‘endeavouring to discover Mrs. Shelley’s address’,8 had instead discovered what had happened to her. So he had naturally written to Shelley in Bath, thinking him there. As a result, Shelley only discovered Harriett’s fate when he got back to Bath, probably very late on the 14th, and found Hookham’s letter. On the 15th he went for a walk with Mary (they probably discussed what should now happen to Shelley’s children Ianthe and Charles Bysshe); and then, after dinner, Shelley set off back to London, arriving early on the 16th. Here, someone – very likely Hookham − told him that Harriett had been ‘driven to distress, she lost her virtue & was kept & then on the Town’. Shelley himself passed this on to Mary as ‘driven from her father’s house, & descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith’9. The word ‘prostitution’ at that date could mean not only a woman selling herself but living with a man to whom she was not married; Shelley meant that 159



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Harriett had been supported by men of lower and lower class. But she had only left her parents’ house in September: Eliza was taking care of her: and a ‘valuable ring’10 had been found on her finger – none of which Shelley knew. Shelley at first assumed what Hookham also believed: that Harriett had left home because her family (including Eliza) had forced her out when they discovered her pregnancy: he was savage in his anger with ‘the dete{s}table Westbrooks’. He not only told this story to Mary but to Hunt either on 16 or 17 December (it would be repeated over the next few years11) but then he ceased doing so: someone who knew better may have informed him of Eliza’s and the Westbrooks’ actual roles in what had happened. He twice called at the Westbrooks’ house on 17 December to see Eliza, but she was not ‘at home’ (it seems likely that she had refused to see him). Even after finding out more about what had happened, he continued to insist that Eliza was responsible for Harriett’s death (‘not in law yet in fact’12) − for helping a vulnerable person like Harriett leave her father’s house, and then keeping her whereabouts secret while even her father hunted for her, at the same time ignoring any possibility that Harriett might do violence to ­herself. But taking on the responsibility for her sister was what Eliza had done in 1811, firstly when helping organize Harriett’s departure for Scotland with Shelley, later when going to stay with her in York and becoming a part of the new Shelley family. Shelley was for the moment passionately angry with Eliza, deciding that she had got Harriett out of the way ‘for the sake of her father’s money’13 (Mr Westbrook had been extremely ill at the time). But that was certainly wrong. Harriett remained very grateful to her sister, and mentioned Eliza’s help in her suicide note, a note that also asked Eliza to care for Ianthe and Shelley to take care of Charles Bysshe. She addressed Shelley directly: Do not refuse my last request – I never could refuse you & if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of.14

The Westbrooks would have kept this utterly secret; Shelley certainly never saw it. The Godwins, however, would at last have seen a way clear to Shelley’s ­marrying Mary, if he could be rendered sufficiently disgusted with Harriett – and they imagined that there was evidence that Harriett had abandoned him as a husband long before he left her. This, combined with the way he now believed Harriett had ‘descended the steps of prostitution’ in 1816, would mean that Shelley need feel no compunction about making Mary his wife at once. On 15 December 1816, Mary Jane Godwin would ask Crabb Robinson for a ‘tête‐à‐tête’ consultation about ‘the practicability of obtaining the divorce of Mr. Shelley from his wife’: Mary Jane Godwin told Robinson that Harriett ‘was guilty of adultery 160



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before Mr. Shelley ran off with Mr. Godwin’s daughter. In this case Shelley would certainly marry Mary Godwin.’15 It was three days since the report of the inquest in the Times of Harriett’s death. It cannot have been a coincidence that Mary Jane Godwin should have been asking about a divorce. But why do so when Harriett was dead? Mary Jane Godwin must have wanted to impress upon people, before knowledge of the suicide leaked out (as it would), that it was common knowledge that Harriett was guilty of adultery; so that her pregnancy in December 1816 could be viewed as simply another proof of her immorality. It was thus also important to stress that the child Harriett was carrying was not Shelley’s (and Robinson later noted that ‘Mrs Godwin has stated this to me as a fact’16). Shelley had that same day also found out what had happened. His own 16 December 1816 letter to Mary is strikingly self‐controlled. In a quite astonishing way, he never once names Harriett. Having described her as ‘this poor woman’ and ‘innocent’ and ‘this poor creature’, he refers to himself merely as ‘faint and agitated’,17 something designed to reassure Mary of how little he had been affected. The letter is written out of loyalty to Mary: she would badly have wanted Harriett out of his (and her) life. Although shocked at such a death ‘having fallen on a human being once so nearly connected with me’, as Shelley puts it − euphemistic in a very ­uncharacteristic way − he goes on to tell Mary that Harriett had descended into such a pitiable and degraded state that there really could be ‘little to regret’ even in ‘so hideous a catastrophe’. He writes as if his self‐congratulating response – ‘every one does me full justice’ – could bear testimony to what he calls ‘the up{rightness &} liberality of my conduct to her’.18 But only Mary heard this self‐congratulating tone: and such self‐justifications only succeed in emphasising what they deny. One of the few people Shelley knew in London was his very recent acquaintance, Leigh Hunt. Back in March 1811, Shelley had written to Hunt, but the fact that the two men had never met is an indication of how little contact Shelley had had with the London literary world, although he had always thought of Hunt as ‘a brave, a good, & an enlightened man’: Hunt had been fined and sent to prison for two years in 1813 for publishing an attack on the Prince Regent in his paper The Examiner.19 A piece about new poets in The Examiner on 1 December 1816 had mentioned Alastor and Shelley, with Hunt announcing that he would immediately ‘procure what he has published’:20 another indication of how little Shelley was known, or could be known, as Alastor was all he had published. But contact was established, with Shelley immediately assisting Hunt financially; and Hunt was crucially there for Shelley on his return to London in December 1816, when Hunt heard no note of self‐congratulation in reference to the suicide: ‘Nobody could lament it more bitterly than Mr. Shelley. For a time, it tore his being to pieces.’ Hookham, too, recalled how ‘Shelley felt this very severely to the last’21 while Shelley himself confessed to Byron in January 1817 that Harriett’s suicide ‘did… 161



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communicate a shock to me which I know not how I have survived’. But the last thing Shelley wanted was to reveal to Mary how agonised he was; and in this he succeeded. All she knew – or guessed – was that ‘such was his fear to wound the feelings of others, that he never expressed the anguish he felt’.22 In fact, to others he reacted very differently. He knew – as they still had de facto control over his children – that the Westbrooks had to be mollified; on the 18th, accordingly, he wrote to Eliza telling her that ‘I give no faith to any of the imputations generally cast on your conduct…towards the unhappy victim’ − thus implying that people had been assuming her culpability (exactly as he had himself done two days earlier). He was sure that Eliza ‘might have acted more judiciously’ (by not concealing Harriett for so long), ‘but I do not doubt that you intended well’. To Eliza he even allowed that his union with Mary ‘you may excusably regard’ as ‘the cause of your sisters ruin’: something he would never have admitted to Mary.23 Mary’s immediate reply to his letter of the 16th was also extraordinary. It was as if she and Shelley had made a pact never to refer to Harriett directly: while referring to and naming 11 other people, the letter fails to name Harriett once. Only in its postscript does it make even a passing reference to the very reason why Shelley was in London:‘Remember me, sweet in your sorrows as well as your pleasures they will I trust soften the one and heighten the other feeling.’ Otherwise the letter ignores Harriett, as does Mary’s journal after an initial ‘death of H. S.’ (her father would inscribe ‘H S dies’ in his own diary24). Mary’s letter to Shelley does, though, contain another weird sentence:‘Poor dear Fanny if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved for my house would then have been a proper assylum for her.’ Why could Mary not have made that offer earlier? It looks like a rather desperate attempt to divert Shelley into thinking about ‘Poor dear Fanny’, and the care they could have extended to her, rather than feeling guilty about (not poor, not dear) Harriett. And Mary’s letter concludes not with any reference to Harriett but with ‘I long to hear about Godwin.’25 The Godwins had continued to do their best to blacken Harriett’s character; they wanted Shelley to marry Mary. Godwin now informed Shelley that he had evidence that Harriett had been ‘unfaithful to me four months before I left England’.26 The date is probably significant. Shelley had left England with Mary on 28 July 1814: four months before would have been 28 March  –  exactly the time when Harriett was being made pregnant by Shelley himself. It seems rather likely that both Godwin and his wife had chosen to regard the birth of Harriett’s son Charles Bysshe at the end of November 1814 as evidence that she had been misbehaving four months before Shelley eloped with Mary. Shelley would have been in no hurry to correct such a mistake; he would not have wanted to explain to Godwin that he had slept with Harriett just when he had been doing his best to convince himself  –  and later the Godwins  –  that they were parting by mutual consent. The fact that Harriett was pregnant when she drowned herself in 1816 would have 162



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been taken by unsympathetic hearers like the Godwins as confirmation of her immoral behaviour two years earlier, and have been fed back to Shelley as proof of her continuing depravity. It was apparently only to please the Godwins – and to safeguard future communication with them – that, at the end of December, Mary and Shelley agreed to marry. Mary Jane Godwin had insisted that Godwin ‘was in a state of despair’: she melodramatically ‘conjured them to marry if they wished to prevent another suicide’.27 Having (on 27 December 1816) permitted a visit from Shelley, for the first time since 1814, Godwin made a diary entry of his daughter’s wedding on 30 December in the cursory note ‘Call on Mildred, w. PBS, MWG & MJ; they dine & sup.’ ‘Mildred’ was St Mildred’s Church, Bread Street, where Godwin and the couple, plus Mary Jane Godwin (‘MJ’) had paid their ‘call’; Godwin would not have rated a religious service any higher (though he did hereafter see Mary ‘as one of the daughters of prosperity, elevated in rank & fortune’). Mary’s own journal entry was, if anything, even more off‐hand than her father’s: ‘a marriage takes place on the 29th’.28 In the spring of 1817, Godwin would be very happy to find apparently still further evidence of Harriett’s misbehaviour: The late Mrs Shelley has turned out to have been a woman of great levity.29 I know, from unquestionable authority, wholly unconnected with Shelley, (though I cannot with propriety be quoted for this) that she had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation. Afterwards, she was guilty of repeated acts of levity, & had latterly lived in open connection with a colonel Maxwel.30

Godwin’s new ‘unquestionable authority’ was the book collector Thomas Hill (1760–1840), whom Godwin had met at an exhibition (probably the Royal Academy opening day) on 5 May.When Godwin (in some apprehension) passed on the news to Shelley, taking care not to name his source. Shelley ‘only said in a vague way, that it was “much exaggerated, & that farther explanation was for the present superfluous”’.31 To have been sure that ‘Hill’s story’ was exaggerated, Shelley must have believed that he already knew the truth. Anything he now heard was ‘superfluous’, and only made him feel worse about Harriett.

In 1820, Shelley would be confronted by Southey’s charge that he had wrecked the happiness ‘of those who were most nearly and dearly connected with you’ and had brought ‘immediate misery upon others, and guilt, which is all but irremediable, on yourself ’.32 Southey was certainly thinking of Harriett but at some point – with their incomparable talent for misunderstandings  –  the Godwins had come to 163



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believe that Claire’s child was Shelley’s, not Byron’s (Godwin would be disillusioned only in August 1820), Shelley thus standing accused of incest with Mary’s sister. Southey would have relished that; in 1820 he insisted that because Harriett had imbibed Shelley’s own teaching about sexual morality – ‘you debauched her mind’33 – Shelley could not accuse her of being immoral. Shelley’s response in 1820 was to insist to Southey that he had lived ‘a life otherwise not only spotless but spent in an impassioned pursuit of virtue’: … this you call guilt. I might answer you in another manner, but I take God to witness, if such a Being is now regarding both you and me…that you accuse me wrongfully. I am innocent of ill, either done or intended; the consequences you allude to flowed in no respect from me. If you were my friend, I could tell you a history that would make you open your eyes; but I shall certainly never make the public my familiar confidant.34

That ‘history’ would doubtless have consisted of an account of Eliza’s ‘libidinous’ behaviour and of Harriett’s ‘repeated acts of levity’ in 1814 and 1816 (such as he had been fed by the Godwins), none of which did he repeat to Southey, any more than he would to the Court of Chancery in 1817. Only Coleridge, in 1830, rejected Southey’s attack as being based on ‘reports essentially false’. But the charge that Shelley was a liar – and had cheated on Mary by fathering the child Harriett was carrying when she died – has been widely accepted.35 Mary and Byron were the only people whom Shelley attempted to convince that he did not feel guilty about Harriett. Even in his defence of himself to Southey he had to admit that it was only ‘otherwise’ – with the exception of his marriage to Harriett – that he had lived a spotless life.The key to all such wrangles is how we view Shelley: as primarily a liar and fantasiser, or as someone who generally told the truth, although, like most people, he was capable (as when being tactful to Mary about Harriett’s death) of downplaying the significance of things to someone he loved. Peacock, like Hunt and Hookham, believed that Shelley felt the pain of Harriett’s death more intensely ‘because for a long time he kept the feeling to himself ’. Early in 1817, after Shelley had fallen for once into ‘a gloomy reverie’ when they were walking together, and he had suggested trying to ‘deaden my feelings’ with alcohol (something very unusual for him indeed), Peacock recalled him admitting the following day: ‘I will tell you what I would not tell any one else. I was thinking of Harriet.’36 The person whom he would most have wanted not to tell was Mary: that was why he had to keep ‘the feeling to himself.’ Locating in his poetry the ‘deep agony of mind’ which Shelley felt about what he called ‘the terrible Catastrophe’ of Harriett’s death is more difficult, even though individual lines (such as his reference to ‘unforgiving memories’) may have been touched by it.37 Two poems probably written in 1817, ‘The cold earth slept below’ 164



  1816 

(headed ‘Nov. 5. 1815’) and ‘That time is dead forever child’ (headed ‘Nov. 5. 1817’), inscribed following each other in the same manuscript notebook, in the same script, bear dates close to the date (9 November) when Godwin and perhaps Shelley believed Harriett had drowned herself, although the 1817 date was also thought memorable as the date of the death of the King’s granddaughter Princess Charlotte (the date was included in some of the poems about her death38). Shelley seems to have been constructing – months later – a couple of poetic composites drawing on the weird coincidence that, just four days after getting back to London after Harriett’s death in the Serpentine, he should have been involved in the incident on Hampstead Heath described in Chapter 1, when he had found a woman dying in the snow and had helped to rescue her. The poem is a poem, with its references to ‘thy dear head’ and to ‘beloved’, neither of which would have applied to the Hampstead woman, and there is some entanglement in gothic cliché (there are ‘spectres wailing pale & wild’39); but the eyes gleaming in the snow, the wintry hedge and other details may well have been garnered in Hampstead. Shelley is not in the least concerned to describe an incident out of his own life (nothing in the dates remotely corresponds); he is using experiences to construct poetry, and they can come from anywhere, in order that the feeling of the frozen body can be made vivid. The ending runs: The air did shed On thy dear head Its frozen dew; and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will. The language, too, comes very close to that in a letter from Shelley to Mary written in late October 1814: ‘My mind without yours is dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down. It seems as if you alone could shield me fr impurity & vice.’40 The original title, heavily overwritten, had been ‘To Constantia’,41 suggesting a poem to that enigmatic personage, in part Claire but never completely: Constantia being Shelley’s cue in 1817 for poetry about extreme states, to which these two pieces certainly belong. The second poem, dated Nov. 5 1817, without a title, must again in some sense relate to Harriett (‘Drowned, frozen, dead’). But it is not about the dead person. It is about the onlookers who have managed to divert (that is, ‘beguile’) what had once been their hopes for the future. A poem which had started in hope ends with us simply watching the dark river roll: we stand ‘Like tombs’, commemorating what had once been, and the ‘child’ who is addressed needs to remember it too. Very often Shelley did not write poems on the crucial events of his life: and the  poems that reflect upon and use his own experiences are hardly ever 165



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s­traightforwardly autobiographical, in spite of 40 years and more of assumptions that they are.42 These heavily worked‐over poems of 1817 suggest a person wracked by thoughts of the past, as he himself tended to be (sometime probably in 1814, he had written:‘The thoughts of my past life/Rise like the ghosts of an unquiet dream/ Blackening the cheerful morn’43). Following the death of Harriett, too, Shelley had been left, perhaps for the first time in his life, unsure about whether he had really been gifted with a vocation to change people’s lives for the better. Had he really a ‘superintending mind’ when those close to him did such things? Elizabeth Hitchener had certainly not been made happier by her time with the Shelleys, but Shelley and Harriett had been confident that that was not their fault: she had been a dreadful person. But so far as Harriett herself was concerned, in the words of a later poet writing about his responsibility for a death, Shelley had mauled her ‘unobtrusive world/Unmendably’.44 All he could do was to keep going  –  and writing – while trying not to show what he felt about ‘that happiness which you have deprived me of ’, of which her suicide letter would have been the most terrible reminder, if ever he had been allowed to see it. The year 1817 would pass as one of the quietest and most reflective of Shelley’s life, the year he made himself the ‘Hermit of Marlow’, the year when he ‘felt the precariousness of my life’, and believed he could stand silent as a tomb to ‘mark the memory/Of hopes & fears.’ Claire would suggest 60 years later how, after Harriett’s suicide, Shelley ‘became much less confident in himself and not so wild as he had been before’. Standing silent did not, however, mean not being a poet. He was about to write the longest poem of his life: he had ‘resolved to leave some record of myself ’,45 not by writing autobiographically (for a person of his background and class, personal revelations would have been rather unlikely), but by once again working out what was most important for his society.

166

17 Laon and Cythna: Writing against Death 1817

In Switzerland during the summer of 1816, still thinking of the European tour he planned to make with Mary, Shelley had looked forward to 1817 as the start of a new life, when he would return to England and make ‘that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting place’ (it may have been Byron who had talked him out of living abroad). Even allowing for a touch or more of irony in such a remark, he seems to have settled on making what he determinedly called ‘a fixed, settled, eternal home’ with Mary, William and Elise. His purchase in Chamonix of ‘a large collection of the seeds of rare Alpine plants’, with which ‘to colonize’ his English garden,1 shows him imaginatively thinking ahead; Peacock’s neighbourhood of Marlow was near enough to London for both men to maintain their contacts there, but would allow Shelley to lose himself in the country (or in his Alpine garden) to write, when he wished to imagine himself away from eternal England. He had planned to buy a house in Marlow; to be exact, he wanted Peacock to find one and immediately to start buying it, in a purchase which Shelley planned as a post‐obit transaction. He was setting out to put behind him the years of his acceptance of Harriett as his partner, his Wanderjahre and the aftermath of his marriage. He was 24 years old and was settling down, with wife Mary and child William (now one year old), together with Claire and her child by Byron, who would be born on 13 January 1817 and acquire the ‘Venetian name’2 of Allegra. Shelley even had an idea of what he would be writing. After Queen Mab and Alastor he was turning to an old subject, the significance of the French Revolution

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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for those of his generation. In September 1816 he had referred to the Revolution as ‘a theme involving pictures of all that is best qualified to interest and instruct mankind’,3 and he still regarded such ‘instruction’ as his goal. By the turn of the year 1816–1817, having returned to England far sooner than planned, and having been made wretched by the deaths of Fanny and Harriett, Shelley felt by no means so sanguine about either his own happiness or his ‘excellent’ nation as the proper place to be. Nevertheless, living in Bath through the awfulness of the autumn of 1816 he had also been making choices about how to live; and because at the end of October he had been (technically) arrested for debt (his ability to move around was for the moment restricted) he started looking for a house with a long lease. His need for a house was immediately increased by his expectation of shortly acquiring custody of Ianthe and Charles Bysshe. In 1817 (he signed its lease on 14 February) he arranged to take Albion House in Marlow,4 a long, stucco and red‐brick house with eight windows in its frontage, in West Street; he and Mary contracted with the Bath furnishing firm of English, English and Becks, Shelley agreeing that up to £800 could be spent; the house was being ‘fitted and furnished’ for the long term. It had ‘2 large nurseries, each 30 feet by 20’ (Mary’s second child was on the way) as well as ‘5 best bedrooms’ and what Shelley liked to call the ‘library’, the largest room in the house at ‘36 feet by 18’5 (others would have made a ballroom of it). And it was only six or seven minutes’ walk from the Thames: Shelley could start boating again.

But by the time he and Mary moved in, at the end of March 1817, Shelley had suffered an exhausting series of defeats in his attempts to recover his children by Harriett. The Westbrooks, blaming him for her death, had by the end of December begun campaigning to make the children their own; the matter had been referred to the Lord Chancellor, John Scott (1751–1838), Lord Eldon, responsible for settling family affairs at the Court of Chancery. For Shelley, to start with, it must have seemed an open and shut case (in mid‐ December his lawyer had told him that – as soon as he married Mary – ‘all pretences to detain the children would cease’6). He was, after all, a father applying for the custody of his own children after the death of their mother; and, being now married to another woman, was confident of being able to offer the children marital security. He employed Longdill as his lawyer (he also retained the barrister Basil Montagu (1770–1851) as an advocate for the court proceedings) but by 8 January had discovered that the Westbrooks had already filed a declaration designed to damage him as far as they could. It stated that he was an avowed atheist and republican, and thus (as Shelley summed it up) ‘I ought not to have the children because I am an infidel.’The Westbrooks also stressed that Shelley had ‘deserted his said wife 168



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and unlawfully cohabited with the said Mary Godwin’.7 And they made numerous promises for the children’s future financial security. Shelley and his lawyers compiled an ‘Answer’, submitted on 18 January, in which Shelley insisted that he had only let Harriett have the children at her ‘urgent entreaty’, and that he had been deprived by the Westbrooks of all access to them since Harriett’s death.8 Shelley was scrupulous in his application: he never, for example, informed Montagu that, when she died, Harriett was pregnant by another man, and he also refused to declare ‘that he had changed his doctrines as to marriage’9 in spite of his lawyers strongly advising him to do so. But the Westbrooks used every weapon they could lay their hands on. At the hearing on 24 January 1817, Harriett’s own copy of Queen Mab would be produced and would become the source of Eldon’s conclusion that Shelley was not only an atheist but a fierce opponent of marriage. Extracts from the poem’s Notes would be read out in court, and assertions made about the way in which Shelley had lived in an adulterous relationship with Mary for two and a half years. The Westbrooks had also handed in as evidence Harriett’s copy of Shelley’s 1812 pamphlet A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, which attempted to defend a man convicted of blasphemous libel, thus conveniently proving both that Shelley took the side of blasphemous libellers and that he had in the past contradicted the decisions of the Lord Chief Justice. Montagu argued that Queen Mab had never been published and probably stressed – as Longdill had tried to do – that it was ‘boyish and silly’ as well as ‘unjustifiable’. But in vain. Although Eldon announced that a decision would only be made later (the date of 8 February was given), the hearing had gone badly for Shelley. On 11 February matters were again postponed; but on 27 March, exactly as feared, Eldon pronounced that Shelley’s beliefs and his behaviour had decided him against awarding custody of the children to their father: ‘There is nothing in evidence before me sufficient to authorize me in thinking that this gentleman has changed, before he arrived at the age of twenty‐five, the principles he avowed at nineteen.’ Eldon was unfortunately right. Wounded by the verdict that he was unfit to bring up children, Shelley saw no reason why as an atheist he should not now be subjected to a criminal prosecution for blasphemy, with ‘some such punishment as imprisonment and fine’ imposed upon him.10 That did not happen; but the only area where he was still able to exert any influence over the future of the children was in the long‐drawn‐out procedure of choosing their guardians.The Westbrooks’ first choice, and their second, were turned down, as was Shelley’s first choice (Longdill and his wife); Shelley’s final suggestion of Thomas and Caroline Hume, of Brent End Lodge, Hanwell, Oxfordshire – not people with whom he had any personal acquaintance – was accepted.11 But these decisions took months; by the time they took effect, Shelley was in Italy. He was never able to take up the court’s award to him of 12 visits a year to his children 169



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(visits paid in the presence of their guardians): he never saw Ianthe again and probably never saw Charles Bysshe at all.12 Ianthe would marry in 1837, would have two children, and would die in 1876 at the age of 63; Charles Bysshe (the Shelley heir, of course: eldest son of the eldest son) would die when he was only 11, in 1826.

By sheer chance, the night following the Lord Chancellor’s judgement was the first spent by Shelley and Mary in their new house in Marlow, finally ready for them, William with Elise, and Allegra with Claire: ready, too, for the children they had lost. But here Shelley could at last settle, as he had planned for so long; it was the first home of his own he had occupied since leaving Field Place for Oxford on 22 January 1811. And he could get to work on the poem he had been planning: despite the Lord Chancellor, the new poem’s Preface would claim that ‘mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change.’ He had always written so as (he hoped) to influence people, to disturb and upset them, to carry their thoughts in directions they had not expected, to ‘teach’ even ‘experienced’ people ‘with native skill/Strange truths and new.’13 An example had struck him during the weeks when he had been awaiting the Lord Chancellor’s decision. On 9 February, he had called with Hunt on the MP Henry Brougham (1778–1868), who  –  in the House of Commons two days ­earlier – had asked ‘how far the patronage of the crown, in and out of parliament, could be abridged’: Brougham had also called for a reduction of ‘useless splendour’ in the monarchy. That boded well. Brougham, though, was not in favour of Parliamentary reform: on 29 January he had referred in the Commons to ‘that glorious fabric of human wisdom, the British constitution’.14 And he was also against extending the suffrage (a subject on which the House of Commons was currently being bombarded, in petitions drawn up in various parts of the country complaining that nothing could be expected without it). Ten days after their talk with him, Shelley, Mary and Hunt were joined by the writer, merchant and insurance broker Horace Smith (1779–1849) and the critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830) in ‘a discussion until 3 in the morning…concerning monarchy & republicanism’.15 The immediate result was very practical: Shelley’s pamphlet A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote, composed between 10 and 21 February, which took the side of the moderates in demanding reform if there were a national vote in favour of it. It set out the way the national will could be determined, and demanded annual Parliaments if reform were agreed upon. The pamphlet, however, argued against universal suffrage on the grounds that it would ‘place power in the hands of men who have been rendered brutal and torpid and ferocious by ages of slavery’.16 Shelley was unquestionably egalitarian, but believed that to give a vote immediately to an angry populace, politically totally unsophisticated, would be unwise.17 170



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After an opening in which monarchy is characterised as the tyranny of the madhouse (‘a single person bullying and swindling a thousand of his comrades out of all they possessed in the world, and then trampling and spitting upon them’18), this 1817 publication is – compared with Shelley’s earlier ­pamphlets – both moderate and persuasive. The fact that 11 copies survive suggests that it may also have been more widely distributed than Shelley’s earlier pamphlets (he had suggested a print‐run of 500), but only Hunt’s Examiner took any real notice of it. It was up against politics of Brougham’s sort, which claimed that the demand for reform was in fact a call for violent revolution. That was exactly the line taken by  Southey in the Quarterly Review, in an essay listing three contemporary ­publications on the reform issue (one being Brougham’s and one being Shelley’s); Southey declared that ‘revolution’ was the ‘endemic moral malady of this distempered age’.19

Much of Shelley’s poetry, all his life, had been concerned with his anxiety and excitement about the present moment in history and politics; but up to 1817 he had continued to believe that although he could carry his enthusiasm over to people via the occasional pamphlet, he could do so even better through the kinds of epic romance (or eastern tale) with which others – for example, Southey – had been so successful. Hence Queen Mab, hence – from the spring to the autumn of 1817 – the lengthiest of these attempts, Laon and Cythna, in which a near‐eastern popular revolution is betrayed and crushed, and its leaders captured and executed, and who yet – in love with each other – survive strangely triumphant: his longest and today probably his least read work, in (as the title‐page announced) ‘THE STANZA OF SPENSER’, used by Wordsworth more than once and very recently by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Shelley composed the poem, as almost always, astonishingly quickly; the Hunt family stayed with the Shelleys during the summer, and Hunt (employing the title later substituted for Laon and Cythna) observed Shelley’s routine: He was up early; breakfasted sparingly; wrote this Revolt of Islam all the morning; went out in his boat or into the woods with some Greek author or the Bible in his hands; came home to a dinner of vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine)…wrote or studied again, or read to his wife and friends the whole evening; took a crust of bread or a glass of whey for his supper; and went early to bed. This is literally the whole of the life he led.20

It was in this way that, in around six months, Shelley managed to write over 5000 lines of the poem, with the usual huge numbers of cancellations and 171



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redraftings along the way. Mary recalled it as a time when he composed ‘in his boat, as it floated under the beech groves of Bisham’ (just up river from Marlow). He explained to Hogg at the start of July that ‘I am weak enough to employ myself in writing’,21 as if it were a bad habit from which he could not wean himself. The poem combines a full‐blooded account of a European city (the ‘Golden City’ of the poem’s subtitle) being overtaken by a revolution – this was Shelley’s long‐planned ‘French Revolution’ poem  –  with a didactic commentary on the nature of human society, complete with the inevitable cast of tyrants and slaves. But it is also a romance narrative, ‘replete with battles and adventures’:22 the man who initiates the revolutionary change falls in love with a young woman revolutionary, so that the poem’s political development is paralleled by their developing romance. In his original conception, which made Laon and Cythna brother and sister, Shelley felt hopeful that incest would be – as he explained in November 1819 – ‘like many other incorrect things a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or of hate.’23 It would give him an opportunity for a narrative of extraordinary passion, but the central figures would also retain the brother–sister relationship which so appealed to him. The poem – following a lengthy prose Preface explaining motives which are actually clear in what follows – starts with a 14‐stanza dedication to Mary celebrating ‘our tranquillity’: something still worth celebrating, in spite of court decisions and financial anxieties. It is a poem again rich in reference and allusion: Coleridge’s ‘The Ancyent Marinere’24 at one point, Byron’s Childe Harold at another: also Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer and The Curse of Kehama, Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene. But it also aims at being an epic narrative like those of Homer,Virgil and Lucan: like so much of Shelley’s writing, the poem situates itself in ‘a highly self‐conscious’ way not just in the English poetic tradition but in ‘the grand European tradition of heroic poetry’.25 It is, too, a poem dedicated to the presentation of tormented states of mind. Laon, when rescued by an old man from the cage in which he has been imprisoned by his enemies, and where he will surely die, is at the start of Canto Fourth taken by boat (probably: he believes it to be a boat journey) to a tower which at one time seems on the sea shore (if indeed the sea exists) and is later situated beside a lonely lake amid forests and mountains.26 The narrative is in the hands of the older, experienced Laon, here recounting what was done to him many years earlier, but it reproduces in a remarkable way the vagaries of mental instability, as if the consciousness of the suffering Laon were still in control of the narrative. The most difficult thing about the poem is the constantly unreal nature even of the fantasy it recounts. Laon recovers, is recognised, men swarm to him, all differences are laid aside, an army gathers and marches, feeds itself as it moves, a tyrant is overthrown, the city is freed. All in the twinkling not of an eye but of poetry which 172



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slides brilliantly over surfaces and annuls all differences and difficulties: the utterly dissimilar combatants Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall In a strange land, round one whom they might call Their friend, their chief, their father, for assay Of peril, which had saved them from the thrall Of death, now suffering. Thus the vast array Of those fraternal bands were reconciled that day.27 If only; the word ‘Thus’ doing its customary lazy work. The verse is, too often, of the kind W. B. Yeats lampooned in his description of Shelley’s poetry, where meaning ‘wanders hither and thither at the beckoning of fancy. It is now busy with a meteor and now with throbbing blood that is fire, and with a mist that is a swoon and a sleep that is life. It is bound together by the vaguest suggestion…’28 All true, sadly. There are, too, more signs than usual in Shelley of his work having been p­ roduced at pell‐mell speed: of stanzas having sequence and rhymes jammed together to get them finished, even if the sense is troubled. In Canto Fourth, ‘when one meets/ Another at the shrine, he inly weets, /Though he says nothing’, and un‐weeting readers will be baffled; and when heroine Cythna, in Canto Fifth, breaks into a ­passionate speech – With wild and thrilling pauses woven among, Which whoso heard, was mute, for it could teach To rapture like her own all listening hearts to reach.29 – the reader needs mentally to rearrange the last line as ‘All listening hearts to reach to rapture like her own’, while ignoring the oddity of ‘to reach to rapture’. And at the end, needing a rhyme with ‘abode’ for his gliding boat, Shelley allows himself ‘glode’ (Spenserian: though Leigh Hunt had used the word the previous year). There are beautiful felicities, like the first words of Canto Second: ‘The star‐light smile of children.’30 But the lists of nouns – One mind, the type of all, the moveless wave Whose calm reflects all moving things that are, Necessity, and love, and life, the grave, And sympathy, fountains of hope and fear; Justice, and truth, and time, and the world’s natural sphere31 173



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– demonstrate less the range of the poem’s concerns (or the contents of Cythna’s consciousness) than the packing out of verse at which Shelley is adept. There is an odd sense that the writer is not aware that such abstractions are demanding; for him they are a natural mode of expression, the ‘words thro’ which my spirit sought/To weave a bondage of such sympathy/As might create some response to the thought.’ The bondage is not only that of sympathy: it means being ruthlessly held down to the subject in hand by a poet who declares ‘I will arise and waken/The multitude.’32 A tactic typical of the poem is that, having decided that both Laon and Cythna will be burned at the stake, it gets around the problem of their failure and horrible death (as well as that of having the poem’s narrator die while narrating) by escaping into the undying consciousness of Laon, which survives to the poem’s end. Death at the stake happens in a painless instant: flames like a ‘blood‐red gleam/Burst upward, hurling fiercely from the ground/The globed smoke’ – then Laon is asking ‘And is this death?’ The pyre disappears, there is music (‘like the kiss of love’) and a sweetly dreaming, paradisal post‐death consciousness returns: he and Cythna are lying ‘on the waved and golden sand/Of a clear pool, upon a bank o’ertwined/ With strange and star‐bright flowers.’33 It is, in every sense, too easy: and ease is, too, all that the future apparently offers. The poem simply walks out of the corner into which it has painted itself. But though constructed as a work of the kind about which Shelley had fantasised in 1811, with things falling into place exactly as he has ordered them (‘all my plans shall succeed’), the exemplified reality the poem is designed to achieve is over and again turned unthinkingly into fantasy. Laon and his fellow citizens march on the Golden City ‘in joy – a nation/Made free by love’, the ‘many nations’ managing to decree ‘to hold a sacred Festival,/A rite to attest the equality of all/Who live.’ They are naïve, and the tyrant returns and scatters them. But according to Shelley such restorations of tyranny are only manifestations of its ‘temporary triumph’, ‘that secure earnest of its final and inevitale fall’.34

Shelley must have finished the poem just as Mary’s pregnancy came to a conclusion with the birth of their daughter Clara on 2 September 1817, but the period of composition had also almost exactly coincided with his suffering ‘a kind of relapse’ into the illness to which he came to refer as his ‘constitutional disease’.35 Any diagnosis of illness 200 years after the event is difficult, and Shelley was probably suffering from more than one thing, including anæmia (very hard to escape with a vegetarian diet such as his, at that date), but a great many of the serious symptoms about which we know  –  and the kinds of doctor whom he later

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c­ onsulted – suggest a chronic urinary condition, ‘consistent with kidney damage’. What was at times simply ‘that nasty side ach’ could become ‘so constant a pain… as to make my holding a pen whilst I wrote to you an almost intolerable exertion’; and it could result in spasms of violent pain which made him writhe on the ground, as the boy Thornton Hunt (1810–1873) saw. In October 1817 the pain was again so bad (it may well have been accompanied by a high temperature) as one day to prevent him from going out.36 The fact that his condition seems to have been markedly better in some places he lived, and distinctly worse in others, suggests that the quality and nature of the water which he habitually drank may have played some role. The coughs he also suffered in the summer and autumn of 1817 were, however, so bad, and his health in general so ‘miserable’, that he was led to believe that illness had opened up a second front in its attack on him: he told Byron in September that ‘some care will be required to prevent it speedily terminating in death’; but he also commented that Italy would be ‘a certain remedy for my disease’. This can only mean that he feared consumption, in 1797 named ‘the perpetual pestilence of our island’ by the physician and scientist Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808). By early October 1817 Shelley was certain that ‘We must go to Italy’, and added ‘on every ground’.37 What other grounds? One ground is revealed simply from the details of their household. A single page, in Mary’s hand, of accounts for the month of January 1818 demonstrates the family’s everyday needs.38 They had a new nurse Amelia (‘Milly’) Shields, for baby Clara; her wages were £1/12. Cook was paid £2, Harry (‘a man who did the work of gardener and man‐servant’) was also paid £2. Elise only got 18/‐, but she was probably treated as a member of the family (taking her meals with them) so that her wage was less. Claire was given £2/11/0 (though the money apparently went to the seamstress Mrs E. Harvey39), ‘William G.’  –  perhaps Godwin’s son, aged not quite 15 – got £1: probably a present.The household swallowed £23/4/0, £9/4/8 and £3/10/3. There was a ‘lunch etc at Wargrave’  –  a village a couple of miles upstream from Marlow – on which they spent 11/‐. A tea tray cost 6/‐. Altogether they got through £90/9/8 in the month. Although they would have spent more money on fuel than in summer, and they were including a payment to Peacock of £30, they were spending £900 to £1000 a year – and with £200 awarded to his children with Harriett, that was Shelley’s income of £800 overspent by hundreds. That explains why living as they did got them into debt so quickly. Nevertheless, on three occasions ‘Pensioners’ were given money (18/‐, 18/6, £1/1/10): nearly £3 in the month, so £30–£40 a year. ‘Pensioners’ were those in receipt of a pension, very often an army pension, who could not afford to live on it and became the responsibility of the Parish, which might well compel them to enter an institution such as the Work House or the Poor House. Support from a

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local upper‐class man like Shelley could save them from that: Hunt saw how, in Marlow, Shelley was a blessing to the poor. His charity though liberal was not weak. He inquired personally into the circumstances of the petitioners, visited the sick in their beds…and kept a regular list of industrious poor, whom he assisted with small sums to make up their accounts.

He also spent an extra £17 ‘to mitigate the sufferings’ of his ‘poor neighbours at Marlow’ in the winter of 1817–1818, organising the dispatch of sheets and blankets sent down from London in December 1817. Charles Ollier, too, who also visited him in Marlow, took away with him the belief he expressed in March 1822 that ‘The greater part’ of Shelley’s income ‘during his residence at Marlow was given to the needy in that wretched neighbourhood’.40 These payments were not simply charitable. Without having any tenants on his estate, Shelley was behaving as his father or any responsible landowner of the period would have done, and as he had started to do in Tremadog; these were the expected, responsible expenditures of money of someone in possession of a large house and garden in his community. Shelley was a social and political rebel, but he knew what was expected of him, and what he could do. It was his duty to help underpin his community at a time of crisis: the aftermath of the Napoleonic war had resulted in a huge unemployed population, while the dreadful harvest of 1816 and the fast‐ increasing prices of commodities were catastrophic alike for small farmers and for anyone living off the land or river. On one of his visits Hunt had noted ‘villagers… starving’, Mary forgot neither ‘the heart‐rending evils’ suffered by the local population nor the way that ‘Shelley afforded what alleviation he could’.41 He had found a social role and could fill it. He and Mary stayed longer in the Marlow house than in any other of the places where they ever lived, although even here they were in residence for less than 11 months. It is clear that, between May 1811 and April 1818, Shelley’s allowance always fell short – and at times far short – of what he wanted for the way of life he was attempting to follow. But he had always lived as someone of his background would have expected to live, taking lodgings in a ‘fashionable situation’ in London in the early summer of 1813 for example, while simultaneously keeping a room (or rooms) in Cooke’s hotel. And now life in Marlow had confirmed him as just such a concerned, upper‐class person: the only problem being that, as he discovered, he could not afford to live like that in England.The ‘ground’ of expenses and costs spoke overwhelmingly in favour of a move to Italy, of the kind that Byron had made; only there might Shelley be able to live on his income as the upper‐ class man his upbringing had prepared him to be and which he insisted on remaining. 176



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His financial ‘embarrassment’, as Peacock termed it, always extensive, was now massive and accumulating: he owed some £1500 (in modern terms, something like £75 000), and for weeks at a time during October had not even been able to return to Marlow for fear of being arrested. He knew how much cheaper Italy would be than England; Byron would tell his sister ‘You can have no idea of the saving and the extreme difference of expences for a family.’42 Mary agreed that they should go, though she also saw such a visit as an excellent opportunity to deliver little Allegra to Byron, who wanted custody – thus (Mary would have hoped) also freeing her from responsibility for Claire. Far from well, Shelley proved unable to go on with a poem he had tried to return to, Rosalind and Helen (now claimed by Mary as ‘my pretty eclogue’). As the winter progressed, he became still more certain that ‘This weather does me great mischief.’43 The Marlow house turned out to be cold and damp, and Shelley was convinced – and his doctors were happy to go along with the idea – that a better climate would help him and his ‘pulmonary symptoms’. For years he had looked like a man with a weak chest: Polidori  –  Byron’s doctor  –  had instantly classed him as ‘consumptive’ in Geneva in 1816, and Thornton Hunt recalled – from what he had seen of Shelley in 1817 – ‘the sense of weakness in the chest, which attacked him on any sudden effort’.44 It may not have been a coincidence that his son Charles Bysshe would die of consumption. In December 1817 Shelley would go so far as to inform Godwin that ‘the true nature’ of his own disease was ‘consumptive’, and by the end of the month he was amusedly characterising himself as ‘a secluded valetudinarian’.45 But consumption was also a convenient illness for someone increasingly determined to leave an England where he was ill all the time, where his children had been taken from him, where his father‐in‐law was an impossible financial burden, and where he could not live on his income. Even Godwin could hardly object to his son‐in‐law going abroad to save himself from dying: hence, perhaps, the stress on ‘consumption’ which Godwin in particular heard.46

In his Preface to Laon and Cythna, probably added in November 1817, Shelley had declared the poem, in Wordsworthian phrasing, ‘an experiment on the temper of the public mind’,47 but the first person to show the experiment in trouble was the poem’s printer, Buchanan McMillan ( f l. 1784–1834). He saw to it that a sentence in the Preface was altered in the press: Shelley had described the belief which some people ‘express in the cruelty and malevolence of God’, which McMillan changed to the belief people ‘entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his benevolence’: he kept Shelley’s autograph page, bearing his own correction and signature, ‘as a trophy’. ‘That McMillan is an obstinate old dog as troublesome as he 177



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is impudent’48 was Shelley’s comment. But McMillan thus refused to endanger either God or himself: prosecution of publisher and printer had, by the winter of 1817, become an increasingly common tactic against subversive publications. The trial for blasphemous libel of the writer, printer and bookseller William Hone (1780–1842) – who had been in prison since May – was set for 18 December; and Shelley’s poem could certainly be argued for (or against) as both seditious libel and blasphemous libel. But although Shelley himself would insist that the poem was ‘of a character so refined and so remote from the conceptions of the vulgar’49 that it would be read by almost no‐one except a coterie public, its publisher Ollier (who had only seen a brief sample before accepting it) responded to McMillan’s objections and his own fears first by completely withdrawing as publisher but then – following Shelley’s protests  –  agreeing to go ahead if the poem were made inoffensive. His main demand was that all references to God (or in one case to Christ) should be expunged. This was the main target of the revision of the poem accomplished at Marlow by what Peacock called a ‘literary committee’ inaugurated during the third week of December 1817. Peacock organised it, Ollier participated in it, and Shelley offered it the occasional correction. When for example they were dealing with the phrase ‘your dreadful God’, Peacock proposed ‘the Power ye fear’, but Shelley himself altered ‘fear’ to ‘dread’, ‘with two whippy d’s’: ‘God’ might have to go but ‘Power’ and ‘dread’ must not be denied.50 Of the 49 alterations made, 33 removed references to the Christian God, replacing them with ‘Heaven’ or ‘King’ or ‘gods’ or some other form (so that ‘and Christ’ became ‘Joshua’51). The poem’s presentation of the love between brother and sister was also problematic. Shelley had even drafted an extra paragraph for his Preface explaining why he had adopted an incestuous love affair for the couple; but although McMillan had not objected, the literary committee decided that that too had to go, for drawing attention to something illegal, immoral and unjustifiable. Eight small changes to the poem (‘sister’ altered to ‘lover’, and so on) were enough to take care of all allusions to incest. The poem could thus be republished fairly quickly, in January 1818, as The Revolt of Islam, although – as it turned out – hundreds of pages of the original printing eventually also got into the world, in later issues.52

Queen Mab had, in its own way, been a poem bringing its reader into an awareness of modern ways of thinking: it had been a poem to learn from (the Notes explicitly assisting that function). In a doubling‐back kind of way, too, Alastor had been a poem in which the central Poet figure teaches us the futility of the way of life to which he has committed himself: how it brings him to nothing. Both poems had claimed the attention of their readers to a developing understanding which was in 178



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some way almost inevitably didactic. ‘Obsessional overlap’ was Julian Barnes’s way of describing how writers proceed to their next work: the third major poem of Shelley’s mature writing career, Laon and Cythna, was easily the most ambitious and in theory the one with the most to teach, as Shelley did his best ‘to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life’. The poem has a palpable design on us from the start: it attempts to command our assent, to fill our minds ‘with unbounded & sustained enthusiasm’. It rallies us, provokes us, hectors us, finally carries us away from earth ‘full/Of love and wisdom’53 (or so it tells us) on one of those magical boat journeys in which Shelley specialised: the narrator’s boat finally reaching a point of perfect balance, ‘as one line suspended/Between two heavens’ on a ‘windless waveless lake’; it finds its appropriately Spenserian haven at ‘The Temple of the Spirit’54 in unsustained isolation from the human world. Shelley had been writing a great deal about illness (Laon spends years recuperating) just when he came to believe that he was himself suffering from an illness that could prove fatal, so that the poem seems to have had for him the feeling ‘as real, though not so prophetic, as the communications of a dying man’.55 It stands today as an example of how a highly intelligent man and great poet could nonetheless so directly aim, single‐handedly, to change his society (in the words of the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, to ‘free/This world from its dark slavery’ – 138:69–70) that he could leave behind an almost unreadable monument to his hopefulness. In spite of money which Shelley put forward for advertising it, the poem sold very badly when finally issued in January 1818; it earned him nothing, it did nothing for his reputation (among its reviews was one of the nastiest he ever received56), and it was not reprinted in his lifetime.

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18 My Country Dear to Me Forever 1817 –1818

A demonstration of the kind of polemical writer Shelley might have been, and still mostly preferred not to be, had come soon after he finished Laon and Cythna. On 7 November 1817, ‘three working men were hanged for treasonable utterances and actions which they had been entrapped into making and performing by a Government agent provocateur’1 (these were the men arrested following the so‐called ‘Pentrich Revolution’). On the previous day, the heiress to the British throne, Princess Charlotte, had died in childbirth; Shelley was not alone in noticing the coincidence (Hunt’s Examiner had drawn attention to it on 9 November) and he had discussed it with Hunt and Ollier. On Tuesday 11th the ‘Hermit of Marlow’ set to work on a prose pamphlet, An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte. Finishing 11 numbered sections the following day, he immediately sent them to Ollier for printing. What he produced was – despite his attempt to convince Ollier that ‘the subject tho treated boldly is treated delicately’  –  quite unpublishable, though it is probable that 20 copies or so were privately printed for friends and acquaintance.2 It could not be circulated more widely: once again, in a brilliant piece of polemic, Shelley had preferred to speak the unspeakable, as he stressed ‘the impotence of royalty’. Princess Charlotte ‘had accomplished nothing, and aspired to nothing, and could understand nothing’ of the social situation of those ‘over whom she was destined to rule’. His pamphlet  also spared its readers nothing in making them realise that the three men – the ‘Pentrich Martyrs’, as they came to be known – had not only been hung but beheaded: they had been found guilty of High Treason.3

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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But Shelley’s final stress was on the fact that it was their execution, not the death of the Princess, which should be mourned: for ‘man has murdered Liberty’. His final sentence was: Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen.4

For its combination of the ironical, the anti‐monarchical and the blasphemous, that takes some beating. Such things, however, also rendered unpublishable what Shelley had written. Significantly, he was using ‘Phantom’ to mean ‘Something having the form or appearance, but not the substance, of some other thing’: liberty would not appear, but its appearance was imaginable. The phrase would resonate.

As well as spending a great deal of time writing, Shelley had very much enjoyed the companionship which having a house in Marlow allowed. Visits from friends had occurred regularly; Hogg had come to stay, as had the Hunts.Walking and climbing in the woods had also became regular: two years later Shelley was still vividly remembering (and reminding Peacock) of ‘that cliff in Bisham wood which is overgrown with wood, & yet is stony & precipitous…where Hogg & I scrambled up & you – to my infinite discontent – would go home’. Habitués to the Shelleys’ home found themselves punningly named: Shelley became both ‘Glirastes’ and the hermit‐punning Conchoid,5 while Mary’s new‐born Clara would become the ‘Conchoidion or little hermitess’ and Hunt (of course) ‘La Caccia’ (‘The Hunt’). Another inhabitant became the ‘mysterious and terrible infernal deity’6 ‘Demogorgon’, a name full of resonance for readers of Shelley’s 1818–1819 poem Prometheus Unbound (Peacock would introduce him  –  as Dæmogorgon  –  into Canto VI of his poem Rhododaphne: Or, the Thessalian Spell, finished some time in 1817). It is hard to imagine anyone else for the role of Demogorgon than Mary-asauthor. And there was the occasional outsider in residence too, as when Peacock found at Marlow ‘a Mr Baxter from the Highlands’, ‘with whom I have taken some long walks’. William Baxter was father‐in‐law to Isabella Booth, Mary’s closest teenage friend. As it turned out, his visit gave rise to some correspondence brilliantly illuminating Shelley.

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It was T. S. Eliot who complained that Shelley’s letters were ‘Except for an occasional flash of shrewd sense…insufferably dull’;7 he regarded them as evidence of how poor a writer Shelley was.There had been numerous editions of Shelley’s letters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Eliot is most likely to have known the 1909 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Roger Ingpen. One reason for Eliot’s scorn would have been that the impression of uninhibited frankness which characterises, for example, so many of Byron’s letters – a product of the kind of people to whom he wrote and who kept them – is generally lacking in Shelley’s. But what Eliot took for pedantry, dullness and ‘fine writing’ would mature, in Shelley’s case, into the most disciplined and sensitive control of tone, as in his letters to William Baxter.The latter had been told by his son‐in‐law David Booth that Shelley was ‘An ignorant, silly, half‐witted enthusiast, with intellect scarcely sufficient to keep him out of a madhouse, and morals that fitted him only for a brothel’, but Baxter had very much enjoyed Shelley’s company. Booth was predictably outraged when he heard that his father‐in‐law had responded so positively, and discouraged him from replying to invitations to pay another visit.8 The invitations accordingly went unanswered. Shelley eventually sent Baxter a letter which is a masterpiece in its negotiation of difficult ground, asking what had happened to prevent him answering letters, and insisting that you will be always sure of a welcome, & plain dealing on my side.—But…I hate to have to find out from coldness & reserve, what can be told in two words. If you are tired of our society, say so. If we have offended you in any manner, or you have conceived an ill opinion of us, or any other person has exhibited our characters in a new light,—at least let us know this.9

What could be clearer? Baxter’s reply attempted to wriggle out of his dilemma by saying that he could not introduce his family into Shelley’s circle ‘as it could only tend to give them notions and habits of life wholly unsuited to my circumstances’; but he did mention Shelley’s ‘freedom of thought and action’ as inconsistent with the customs of European society.10 Shelley answered at once, asking exactly what these ‘free opinions’ were, and happily reminding Baxter of how well they had got on together, though also refusing to respond to the implicit attack: We had a good deal of discussion about all sorts of opinions, & I thought we agreed on all – except matters of taste – & I dont think any serious consequences ought to flow from a controversy whether Wordsworth or Campbell be the greater poet.Yet I would not be misapprehended. Though I have not a spark of pride or resentment in this matter, I disdain to say a word that should tend to persuade you to change your decision.11

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Shelley remains entirely amiable but ‘disdains’ to argue. And he knows that Baxter is fibbing about the problem of social standing. He turns to the subject of Booth, whom he rightly suspects is responsible for Baxter’s change. Mr Booths’ reasonings may be right; they may be sincere; he may be conscientiously impressed with views widely differing from mine. But, be frank with me, my dear Sir, is it not Mr Booth who has persuaded you to see things in this way since your last visit, when no such considerations as you alledge in your letter were present to your thoughts? The only motive that suggests this question is an unwillingness to submit to the having my intimacies made the sport of secret & unacknowledged manœvres.12

There is the flash of steel. Shelley will not have his emotional intimacies subjected to the wiles and opinions of a third party with whom he is not intimate. He never goes back on his original liking for Baxter, but he nevertheless knows that Baxter has not responded with proper straightforwardness – and tells him so. It is a finely handled, lean prose in which never for a moment does Shelley relax his grip on what annoys him; and he does it without (so to speak) once raising his voice. No‐ one would argue for Shelley’s surviving letters as masterpieces, but they are utterly characteristic of him. The matter came to an end with Baxter once again not replying but (of course) showing Shelley’s letter to David Booth, and Booth writing Shelley a most unpleasant, combative letter,13 to which Shelley disdained ‘to say a word’.

During the winter of 1817–1818, after the major task of Laon and Cythna, but before the planned journey to Italy (they had decided only to leave in the spring, to spare themselves from travelling in winter) Shelley composed a fair amount of prose; he wrote a review of Mary’s Frankenstein and another of Peacock’s Rhododaphne, as well as various polemical and argumentative pieces about society and religion. The most important thing he wrote was probably the result of rereading the ­historical work of the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, where he came across a reference to a colossal statue, ‘the greatest in all Egypt’, with its inscription: ‘“King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”’14 The fact that the Shelleys’ friend Horace Smith also produced an Ozymandias poem may well be evidence of something which was sometimes done in the Shelley circle: a friendly competition being staged, contenders agreeing to produce a poem on a set topic (in this case probably not within

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the 15 minutes specified for a competition involving Shelley, Keats and Hunt in January). This is the poem which Smith ­submitted to The Examiner at the end of January, three weeks after Shelley’s poem had been published there: In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows:— “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone, “The King of Kings; this mighty City shows “The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,— Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder,—and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.15 Smith decides to concentrate upon the mighty City of London past and future: the one long vanished, with just that incongruous leg remaining – the future London also ‘annihilated’ along with the rest of England and its accompanying history. It’s very beautifully done, only at a couple of points feeling awkward (the ‘wolf in chace’ – but a rhyme is needed – being apparently ‘held’ by London for a moment, until one realises what the sentence is doing; and the Hunter has to meet his fragment ‘thro’ the wilderness’). But it is a decent piece of writing: and if done within a set time, then all the cleverer. Shelley had probably known Diodorus for longer than Smith but that played little part in the very different choices he made. One of the first things he did was set down, complete, the only line in this first draft which survived into the final poem: it may have been the ‘given’ starting point for both him and Smith. ‘My name is Ozymandias – King of Kings.’ The draft then becomes a succession of false starts, crossings‐out and germinating ideas: My name is Ozymandias – King of Kings A pedestal in  In the A  There is A pedestal is There stands by Nile a lone single pedestal, On which, two trunkless legs are 184



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Near    crumbling stone the wreck of a colossal form    brown two trunkless legs of marble grey The wrecks of a colossal image stand Quiver thro sultry mist, th    beneath the sand Shine thro        the sultry mist Half sunk a shattered visage lies whom A shattered head half sunk whose gathered frown Beneath And  & wrinkled lips impatient of command Betray the sculp < > A    half sunk beneath Its shattered head is lying on the sands Whose gathered frown, & curved lips betray The And on the Betray some sculptors art, whos Is there no peace but in     where the dead who sleep Cannot we rest until our life is gone? Not16 It is characteristic of a Shelley work at this stage of its development: how on earth could such fragments become a poem? But he has, already, those ‘trunkless legs’,‘shattered visage’,‘pedestal’,‘wrinkled lip’, ‘command’ and ‘frown’.What made all the difference to the developing poem was the idea of choosing a story‐telling narrator who would, from the start, describe what is in front of him. Egypt is simply a ‘sandy Silence’ for Smith: Shelley has an actual desert, described by someone who has been there. That is going to be crucial at the end. I met a Traveller from an antique land. Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings. Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!”’ 185



  My Country Dear to Me Forever  No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.17

For a poem so simple, there is a deal of detail, especially for a poem by Shelley: far too much, in fact, for the visage of an Egyptian statue, which never expresses anything more than a faint smile. But Shelley is making his Ozymandias, not reproducing him: he wants an image of the actual; the writing is ‘compressed, pictorial and ironically suggestive’,18 and the confidence with which he uses the last three lines of his sonnet is especially striking. Just where Smith is most busily at work, trying to point his moral and tie things up, all in a very limited space, Shelley has given himself time to draw out and simplify his lines to realise the irony and emptiness he wants. Of his five last adjectives, only ‘Colossal’ says anything: the other four denote absence of one kind or another. And, as usual, not only is Shelley’s sonnet rhyme scheme entirely his own but the internal rhyming of ‘King’ and ‘No thing’ does a useful job: while he has the inspired idea of making Ozymandias not just gesture at his achievements (as in Smith’s ‘this mighty City’ and ‘The wonders of my hand’) but also to command ‘despair!’ – an excellent lead‐in for the desolation of the last three lines. Shelley is not just a more experienced writer but also capable of sudden, exact and memorable formulations (the ‘shattered visage’ from the very first draft, now the description ‘lone and level’) as well as the complex idea of a creating hand which ‘mocks’ the reality of what it reproduces while simultaneously being ‘fed’ by a heart which understands and feels (that clumsy prose paraphrase demonstrating how accomplished Shelley’s verse is).

When he and Mary at last left the Marlow house on 7 February 1818, planning to go abroad as soon as possible (they had sold all the furnishings acquired from English, English and Becks), Shelley knew he was starting to break almost all his ties with England: ties which, as recently as May 1816, he had been confident ‘can never be broken asunder’, England being ‘my country dear to me forever’.19 But there was nothing else he could do. What happened to the house contents is instructive. English, English and Becks had agreed to charge him £800 for furnishing and decorating, and had promised to tell him if the costs were going to exceed that sum by very much. For his part, Shelley had undertaken to pay half the amount within three years, and the rest upon the death of his father (then aged 74). To the firm it must have sounded a reasonable speculation. The final bill apparently came to £1192/1/10 but Shelley was not told about the massively increased costs until the debt fell due early in 1820. At that point, English, English and Becks requested the £400 they were owed and – on not being paid, and on learning that Shelley had 186



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gone abroad – threatened him with outlawry if he did not hand over £500. Shelley pointed out that a demand for £500 was in effect charging interest of 25% on the outstanding debt and – piqued – offered to pay them the £400 at 5% per year. Alternatively, he would write them a post‐obit for the whole sum immediately.20 Discovering that Sir Timothy Shelley was in Bath in the spring of 1820, Edmund English wrote him a letter declaring that the firm would accede to any terms ‘considered fair and equitable’ which Sir Timothy might like to propose. Unfortunately for him, Sir Timothy – while continuing implacably rude about his son – also knew all about ‘facing down mere tradesmen’. Sir T. Shelley has recd Mr English’s letter, and He must again beg leave to assure him, that He cannot in any way interfere in the unpleasant business he has communicated.21

As Shelley remained abroad, English, English and Becks could only settle for the post‐obit bond, although (as they had learned) Shelley had made money selling their furnishings. And Sir Timothy did not die until 1844. The firm had, however, gone bust in 1828; they must have done one such deal too many. Shelley had not set out to cheat English, English and Becks, but he was certainly not going to exert himself to ensure that they got paid; and when in 1820 it appeared to him that they were trying to cheat him, and then turned down what seemed to him a reasonable offer, he was happy to see that as their problem, not his. He had always spent what he regarded as necessary, not what he could afford: the way he had advertised Laon and Cythna in the London newspapers in the autumn of 1817, despite being deeply in debt, had shown how little he was concerned to save money. The only way he could survive was by borrowing from Horace Smith and still larger sums via post‐obits; he was trying to set one up in London in November 1816, and managed to raise £2000 in London at the end of January 1818, some of which went to Godwin (who was hugely ungrateful, as usual).22 There seems no doubt that Shelley would have preferred to pay off his debts. Writing about his creditors in 1820, he referred to ‘what is justly theirs’ and to the difficulty of withholding ‘their due from those to whom I am the only source of happiness & misery’. In the case of ‘a just debt’, he also believed himself ‘totally incapable of taking advantage of my residence abroad’. What he did, though, was borrow, postpone, pay in part, further postpone, postpone again; that was his attitude to Munday & Slatter, to Joseph Stockdale, to Thomas Charters, to the piano‐ maker Joseph Kirkman (who – for 75 guineas – had supplied the Marlow house with a ‘cabinet piano…as good as possible’) and to English, English and Becks.23 Those are the ones we know about: there may well have been others. He was in effect behaving exactly as his father did a few years later, when many of Shelley’s creditors tried to recover their money. Sir Timothy regarded such bills as the 187



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c­ reditors’ responsibility. Just before he left England in April 1818, Shelley would send his bankers, from Dover, a brief statement listing the bills they were to pay; it is worth reproducing. Gentlemen In my absence I wish no other bills to be honoured but the following Mr. Peacock — £30 — 15 days Mr. Godwin 150 — one month Mr. Ollier 30  — Do Mr. Madocks (for accounts at Marlow) 117 — Four Months. –– 327 Should any others be presented for payment, I request that payment be refused, as they depend upon conditional engagements with friends in England who ought to be prepared to meet them. Gentlemen, I have the honour to be Your most obed. Sert. Percy Bysshe Shelley24

Not honouring the bills of people ‘who ought to be prepared to meet them’ was, in fact, the only way he could deal with his creditors. Sensible people negotiated with him on that understanding. Peacock would go on helping him in practical ways and until 1819 would be paid for his services, and Shelley was in an unusual relationship with the man who saw to the publication of his books, in that he expected to have to pay him, and not to be paid. But Ollier supplied him with books he wanted, and placed the advertisements which Shelley wanted; he would be extremely useful when Shelley was abroad. The third person whose bills would have to be honoured was Godwin: but at least a limit had been set on how much he would get. The other person was Robert Madocks, agent for the Marlow house, where some bills (to local people) might still have to be settled, and who remained in possession of some boxes of books. By March 1820, however, Shelley was in debt to Madocks; he asked Peacock to ‘tell him that I shall take care to pay him with full interest on the first opportunity’. But all Madocks ever seems to have got was the promise; in February 1822 he was still refusing to hand over the boxes.25 Another inhabitant of Marlow, the child Polly Rose, was luckier.The Shelleys had, typically, taken her in ‘to educate her’, and she had played with William, Clara and Allegra: ‘A favourite game with Shelley was to put Polly on a table and tilt it up, letting the little girl slide its full length; or she and Miss Clairmont [Allegra] would sit together on the table, while Shelley ran it from one end of the room to the other.’ Thornton Hunt, too, remembered how enthusiastically Shelley talked and played ‘with the children of the house’, while 188



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‘On the day on which he left Marlow for ever, Shelley filled his favourite plate with raisins and almonds and gave it to Polly.’ She recalled him as ‘the most interesting figure I ever saw: his eyes like a deer’s, bright but rather wild; his white throat unfettered’; she kept the plate for almost half a century and never forgot.26 When – together with children and nursemaids – Shelley, Mary and Claire left for the continent on Thursday 13 March 1818, they would have been using (among other vehicles) the excellent carriage originally built for Shelley and Harriett by Thomas Charters in 1813. Shelley had had it serviced in London before they set off, but not by Charters: it had gone to Lukin, Allen & Beech of Chancery Lane (the work cost £32, which Shelley paid immediately). Thomas Charters never had been, and never would be, paid, but his carriage would once again help carry the Shelley party ‘several thousand miles in perfect security’, through France, Switzerland and Italy; they kept it down to the end of 1819. Other unpaid bills and unhappy  creditors were left behind  –  along with the greatest loss of all, ‘England, my country.’27

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Part III

Expatriation 1818–1821

19 Italy: As Light in the Sun, Throned 1818

When the Shelley party arrived in Calais on 12 March 1818, Mary realised that it was ‘for the third time’. She was thinking of their desperate chase across the Channel with Claire, pursued by Mary Jane Godwin, in July 1814, on their way to the Swiss paradise they hoped for; then of their expedition in May 1816, with Claire but also with baby William, to meet Byron and to explore Europe. Those first two explorations had both been prematurely abandoned. On this third occasion, they were heading further south than ever before, and once again hoped to meet Byron. But they were not this time journeying with the excitement of escape. They were leaving England for the sake of Shelley’s health, and to get away from the financial pressures incumbent on remaining; it was a journey into several species of exile, only one of them the ‘Paradise of exiles’ (165:57) about which Shelley would write. And as it turned out, of the eight of them (Shelley, Mary, Claire, William, Clara, Allegra, Milly Shields and Elise Duvillard), only Milly, Claire and Mary would ever see England again. In fact, things seem to have gone wrong from the start of this first year of the Shelleys’ time abroad. Although the places they were now able to visit constantly astonished and pleased them, event after event contributed to feelings of unhappiness and at times anger. At the border between France and Savoy, for example, Shelley’s precious trunk of books was confiscated for examination by the censor: all he could do was protest and hope it would soon be sent after them.They then spent four weeks in Milan, where Shelley read Dante in a solitary spot in the cathedral,

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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behind the high altar, ‘where the light of day is dim & yellow under the storied window’.1 Though he had known Dante for years, and had learned some Italian with Cornelia Boinville in 1814, he had previously read The Inferno in an edition with a facing‐page English blank‐verse translation by Henry Cary; but those copies were back in England. He intended, anyway, to read solely in Italian, and expose himself at length to terza rima. A real disappointment, however, was not meeting up with Byron. Shelley, before leaving England, had imagined seeing their old friend ‘in a few weeks’: Byron had written that he wanted his daughter Allegra, and renewed contact with him was one of the things Shelley had most looked forward to. But Byron would not come over from Venice. He refused to have anything to do with Claire: would not write to her, certainly would not see her, later declaring to his sister Augusta that ‘the consequence’ might have been ‘an addition to the family’.2 But that was just boasting. Finally, at the end of April, Claire (probably hoping to maintain good relations with him) agreed  –  against Shelley’s advice  –  to send Allegra (whom she regularly called ‘darling’ in her journal3) across to Byron, accompanied by the servant he had sent and by their own Elise, whom Allegra had known since birth. Shelley greeted Byron’s offer to take over the payment for Allegra’s upkeep over the past two years and more with one of those rejections of which he was a master: as steely a way of saying ‘no, damn you’ as it was perfectly turned. The expenses of which you speak have been in our family so extremely trifling, that I know not how to name any sum that will not leave me, what I cannot accept, a pecuniary profit. Perhaps you will be kind enough not to place me in so degrading a situation, as to estimate a matter of this kind.4

The expenses – clothes, doctor’s bills, and nursemaids – must in fact have been considerable, with the Shelleys badly off as usual. But being recompensed was far less important to him than ensuring that, as a gentleman, he was not patronised; taking money would have been as bad as totting up what had been spent. Shelley wanted Byron to hear that word ‘degrading’. Claire remained miserable about her loss of Allegra and Byron’s unfeeling attitude. It was partly for her sake that Shelley gave up his hope of settling on Lake Como in a lonely, grand, ruined palace to which he could have invited Byron – he told Peacock to imagine ‘how great is this loss’5 – for the sake of moving on to a city where they could develop some form of social life.They headed south, crossing the Apennines and provoking Shelley to his first poetry in Italy: ‘Listen listen Mary mine  —  / Tis the whisper of the Apennine —’ (which turned out not to be a whisper at all but a roar ‘like the sea on a northern shore’). But after that initial

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irony, the surviving poem fragment goes in a wholly new direction and catches the sheer terror of the ‘dim starlight’: The Apennine in the light of day Is A mighty mountain dim & gray, Which between the earth & sky doth lay But when night comes a chaos dread, In dim starlight there is spread And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm6 They stopped in Pisa but found it terribly upsetting (Mary could not bear the sight of the convicts who cleaned the streets, musical Claire was especially conscious of how ‘All the day long one hears the slow clanking of their chains’7).They continued to the important port of Livorno, ‘Leghorn’ as the English then called it: Godwin had given Mary a letter of introduction to John (d. 1836) and Maria Gisborne (1770–1836). Back in the 1790s, Godwin had been in love with Maria, when she had been Maria Reveley, and on the death of her husband in 1799 had proposed marriage to her. Maria had also been one of those who had ‘tenderly nursed’8 the infant Mary when her mother Mary Wollstonecraft had died. The Gisbornes were very friendly and helpful but Livorno (‘the Wapping of Italy’ it had been called) was not to the Shelleys’ taste and – learning that they would probably find Italian cities unbearably hot in summer – they went back inland to the small spa resort of Bagni di Lucca, a ‘region of chesnut groves, rushing streams, pure air, and rural silence’9 about 75 kilometres from Livorno. Bagni di Lucca was more like Switzerland than Italy; there were hot springs on the hillside, where the Shelleys lived in the Casa Bertini, with most of the town in the valley below; and here from mid‐June to mid‐August 1818, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the silence, Shelley found himself ‘totally incapable of original composition’. He also wrote to Peacock in the most melancholy way: I have seen nothing so beautiful as Virginia Water in its kind. And my thoughts for ever cling to Windsor Forest, and the copses of Marlow, like the clouds which hang upon the woods of the mountains, low trailing, and though they pass away, leave their best dew when they themselves have faded.

The dryness and heat of Italy – which he eventually came to enjoy, discovering himself ‘rather Salamandrine in constitution’10  –  was the antithesis of the misty beauty which characterised this vision of England: of what he had called, in 1816, thinking back to Sussex and childhood and an old feeling of belonging, ‘the rural lanes & fields which are ours so especially’. He deeply regretted leaving what was

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‘ours’ so far behind: it was where he felt he belonged, and two years later he would write agonisedly to Peacock: ‘O that I could return to England!…O that I could return to England!’ But, as Sir Timothy maliciously and happily noted, ‘It is not likely that he will soon visit England with so many unwelcome guests to ask how he does by a gentle tap’:11 the tap on the shoulder leading to arrest for debt.

With his book trunk finally recovered, Shelley turned to a new mode of writing: translation.This originally started ‘only as an exercise’, but quickly became a method ‘to give Mary some idea of the manners & feelings of the Athenians’.12 Two pieces of work resulted: a translation of Euripides’ satyr‐play The Cyclops, and a translation of one of the most important works by Plato, his Symposium dialogue. The latter, taking for granted men’s attraction to boys, had never been translated into English, and so remained unavailable to a reader like Mary. Shelley threw all his energies into translating it and Mary transcribed it (they may have been thinking of publication). Shelley’s manuscript has disappeared; the surviving text comes from a fair copy made by Mary – she made copies of nearly all his work for him – but unfortunately not from the copy she made in Bagni di Lucca.13 We cannot, therefore, be sure of the extent to which her text conforms to what Shelley wrote; the piece shows some careful negotiation of sex, love and homosexuality, and Shelley had almost certainly been more explicit.The sketch of an intended Preface,‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks’, shows him nevertheless rejecting the idea that Greek male lovers could have enjoyed ‘so detestable a violation’ as anal intercourse – something he never names in his text, but links with ‘pain and horror’ and calls ‘ridiculous and disgusting’.14 Instead he assumes that male Greek lovers engaged in sexual sublimation and non‐penetrative sex. Memories of Eton schooldays may well lie behind his revulsion. He translated the whole of the Symposium in 11 days, in one of those bursts of writing when he could accomplish almost anything. His work on Plato would provoke not just the ‘Discourse’ but – first of all – a short piece, ‘On Love’, which reads exactly like the fragment of a dialogue in which Shelley himself plays the role of Socrates, taking it upon himself to handle the question with which the piece opens: ‘What is Love?’ (618). But, unlike Socrates, he reaches no assured answer. On the one hand, he sees love as the attraction towards an ideal ‘of every thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving’, but he adds a footnote denying his own vaguenesses in a thoroughly Beckettian way: ‘These words inefficient & metaphorical—Most words so—No help—’ (618n). And, anyway, although when we love we may be attracted ‘towards all that we concieve or fear or hope beyond ourselves’, our attraction originates in the fact that we have recognised ‘the chasm of an insufficient void’ within ourselves. 196



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So if our impulses of love and sympathy are not met by human response, we will turn elsewhere:‘we love the flowers the grass & the waters & the sky’.We are remorselessly driven to try and make up for that ‘insufficient void’ within; but what inevitably we discover is that the ‘point to which Love tends’ is ‘invisible & unattainable’.15 That marks the difference between what Shelley had enjoyed in the world of the Symposium, and life as he experienced it; it is a grim enough conclusion for Shelley‐as‐Socrates to reach. It is notable as one of the first pieces of writing Shelley had yet produced not to be optimistic about love and relationship; the fact that most words are ‘no help’ was also distressing enough for a writer. The Cyclops translation (probably done in 1818, though possibly the following year) is very nearly complete – just a few gaps are left for filling in later – and is mostly accurate and impressively speakable. It steers a middle course between the hilarious barbarity of the original and the decidedly cleaned‐up version which Mary printed in 1824; but Shelley unhesitatingly translates lines which take him straight into the problems of the Symposium. Semichorus 2 sings cheerfully not only about those who drink but about those with whom they sleep: ‘Seek the joys that soothe to sleep / Having first embrased thy friend—’ (a male friend in the Greek: and Mary altered ‘joys’ to ‘vines’).16 Towards the end of the play, too, comes a comical scene in which the drunken Cyclops gets hold of his own drunken father Silenus (who has been pretending to be the lovely boy Ganymede), declaring ‘Somehow or other I take more delight / In boys than women’, with the chorus of satyrs gleefully insisting that Silenus is heading ‘Into the lap of luxury & delight.’17 The scene was unsqueamishly translated by Shelley but omitted by Mary in 1824. Why did Shelley create such a translation? In part, to make available and explicit what was unavailable in English at that date, and to give an intelligent reader without Greek, like Mary, access to it. But he was also fascinated by the Athenians, and his own later jeu d’esprit the burlesque Swellfoot the Tyrant (an Aristophanic modernising of Oedipus Tyrannus) shows just how much ‘wild energy’, as Mary called it, he was prepared to expend on the ribald.We might compare his grandfather Bysshe (aged 61) competing with his father Timothy (aged 39) as to who might first get a child into the world in 1792, Bysshe Shelley reckoning he had ‘Run Tim Damned hard Age Considered.’18

The only other writing which Shelley seems to have done in Bagni di Lucca was to return to a poem originally begun beside Lake Geneva in 1816 – at that stage a poem about two women, Isabel and Helen, and their experience of loss  –  with which he had been unable to do much more during 1817, and had left, apparently half‐printed, in the hands of Ollier. At least the abortive visit to Lake Como had 197



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offered him a new setting and he was able to add the attractions of ‘The liquid marble of the windless lake’, ‘the blue lake, beneath the leaves’, and a distinctively southern setting of cypresses which Cleave with their dark green cones the silent skies, And with their shadows the clear depths below…19 At some point, too, one of the central characters, ‘Isabel’, became ‘Rosalind’ and the poem Rosalind and Helen. The name (and difficult marriage) of Mary’s friend Isabella (‘Izy’) Booth may well originally have suggested both the character of Isabel and the idea of her violent husband. Shelley used facts and feelings drawn from real people (from himself and the women he knew, for example) quite freely: Booth came to hand as a starting point for Isabel’s husband, and Shelley could develop what he knew into the monstrous figure who is the husband in Rosalind and Helen.This does not mean that Shelley thought that Booth was like that. It means that Shelley was doing what writers do, in recreating the traits of someone, sometimes in a recognisable form, sometimes even with a recognisable name attached (or at any rate recognisably similar) to create a new figure – even if, today, with an enhanced understanding of what constitutes slander and might be libel, authors and their agents are usually more careful. But Shelley took and used what he wanted; he did not care, either about himself or about others. He would approve of Byron’s portraiture and caricature of individuals in Don Juan: ‘The personal ones…though I thought them wonderfully strong, I do not regret.’20 And his own version of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ would be a lovingly produced satirical gem. Those who wish writers to behave with greater sensitivity, and in general to be nicer and more responsible, had better look elsewhere. But Isabel/Rosalind has, anyway, a story to tell very different from Isabella Booth’s. The whole poem, in fact, consists of two stories, hers and Helen’s: each being a story of loss, as Rosalind loses first the man she loves and wants to marry (at the last minute he turns out to be her father’s illegitimate son and so her own half‐brother), and then – because of the grasping malevolence written into the will of the man she marries instead – she loses her children by him too. Helen simply loses the man (Lionel) whom she loves. One partner may be fragile but is violently cruel: the other is loving but sadly fragile. Shelley subtitled his poem ‘A Modern Eclogue’: he was probably thinking of Southey’s nine ‘English Eclogues’ of 1799 and their use of dialogue for ‘rehearsing some affecting domestic event’.There is indeed some dialogue, but the form is mostly lengthy speeches by individuals. Mary Shelley the previous year had referred to it as ‘my pretty Eclogue’,21 and probably liked it for its attention to Isabella Booth and for its stress on independent women; a part

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at least of Shelley’s own interest must have been in the way he could show a parent being robbed of her children through the intricacy and malevolence of the law, as he had himself been robbed. The poem has always found a particularly appreciative audience because of its attention to women’s experience, but Shelley himself was politely disparaging about it in the Introduction he wrote for it in December 1818, in which he showed himself almost comically averse to self‐congratulation: The story of ‘Rosalind and Helen’ is, undoubtedly, not an attempt in the highest style of poetry. It is in no degree calculated to excite profound meditation; and if, by interesting the affections and amusing the imagination, it awaken a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the reception of more important impressions, it will produce in the reader all that the writer experienced in the composition.22

The fact that the poem had taken him over two years to complete (at that point the longest any poem of his had taken to get written) contributes to the impression that he did not think that domesticity was a sufficient subject: ‘a mere extempore thing, and worth little, I believe’23 was his comment two years later still.The poem did not do enough; he still believed in writing poetry to change peoples’ lives, not to entertain or distract them. His phrase ‘a certain ideal melancholy’ is also revealing. ‘Ideal’ means not only something more powerful than the everyday but links with the concept of idealism (new in England in the 1770s), and with the verb idealise: both of which insist that experience consists not only in encountering the objectively real but in recognising how the mind’s creative ideas make the world we encounter. An ideal melancholy, therefore, would create the world in very gloomy colours indeed. But all he was prepared to say about Rosalind and Helen was that such ideal melancholy could help the mind entertain ‘more important impressions’, and we can only guess what such impressions might be: perhaps a determination to find the cause of the melancholy, and to reform the kind of society which led to it. The main interest of the volume containing the poem, which appeared in 1819, would have been the first book publication of ‘Ozymandias’ and the first publication in any form of the wonderful poem ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills.’

That poem grew out Shelley’s first visit to Venice. By August, Claire was desperate to see Allegra again: and two letters from Elise, in Venice, had suggested an opportunity. Elise and Allegra were not after all living with Byron but in the house of Byron’s friend the English consul, Richard Belgrave Hoppner, and his Swiss wife

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Marie Isabelle; the Hoppners had a five‐month old son, John Rizzo. Byron had tried having Allegra live in his own Palazzo but found her ‘healthy’ (meaning noisy) and ‘capricious’ (a couple of years later he declared her ‘quite above the control of the Servants’), though he also enjoyed abominating children: ‘I have always had the greatest respect for the character of Herod.’24 For her part, Elise was doubtless glad to be back in a Swiss‐run household with French as its first language. The whole Shelley family had, anyway, to leave Bagni di Lucca for Florence (their intended next residence) on 10 September; they wanted Byron to allow Allegra to join them there. Shelley may have felt he could be more persuasive in person – and wanted to see Byron anyway – so planned a short trip to Venice. And although Claire insisted on going with him, Byron would not be told that she was coming: that was decided. She promised to travel only as far as Padua. When they arrived in Padua, however, she could not resist accompanying Shelley on a luxurious and expensive gondola journey all the way down the river from Padua and across the lagoon to Venice.They travelled clandestinely in the boat – ‘the most beautiful & convenient boats in the world’, Shelley thought them, with couches, carpets, and windows which ‘have at will either Venetian glass…or Venetian blinds or blinds of black cloth to shut out the light’ – and there finally was Allegra, with Elise, at the Hoppners.25 Within a few months Shelley had produced a poem (‘Julian and Maddalo’) with a passage recalling the moment of his arrival: its first inscription ran: Dear was she as mine own, for I had nursed Her frail & feeble limbs when she had first come Into the world; and she seemed to know On second sight her ancient play fellow And we were rolling billiards‐ balls about And as they struck she laughd with sudden lively shout26 It was probably just that kind of ‘lively shout’ which had made Allegra such a nuisance to Byron, who slept in the mornings. Shelley left Claire with Allegra and the Hoppners, and went on to Byron, who was immensely pleased to see him; having first insisted on going for ‘a gallop of some miles’ along the Lido (‘the long sandy island which defends Venise from the Adriatic’) he then kept Shelley up most of the night talking. They had got on marvellously well as they ‘rode along the sands of the sea’: Our conversations consisted in histories of his [Byron’s] wounded feelings, & questions as to my affairs, & great professions of friendship & regard for me. He said that if he had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have moved Heaven & Earth to have prevented such a decision.27

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Byron would indeed have been a splendid ally. And the talk certainly helped Byron agree that, yes, Claire could have Allegra for a short period. But not all the way across Italy. He offered instead ‘a pretty Villa’ called ‘I Capuccini’, in Este, just 70 kilometres away from Venice, for a month. As he put it, the situation is very beautiful indeed, among the Euganean hills – & the house is very fair;  –  the Vines are luxuriant to a great degree  –  and all the fruits of the earth abundant…

Byron had leased the house (and the man in charge of it) from the Hoppners in the autumn of 1817 ‘as a place of Villeggiatura’ (i.e. for the holidays), but had not used it in 1818.28 He was prepared to let Claire have Allegra there; she would in effect be under his own roof. Byron was aware  –  Shelley had told him  –  that Claire had come ‘prancing the other day over the Appenines…which threw my Venetian loves (who are none of the quietest) into great combustion – and I was in a pucker till I got her to the Euganean hills’. He supposed that Mary, the children and Claire were in fact all waiting in Padua, and may well never have known how close to him Claire had actually got.29 Shelley had hidden from him the fact that he had been travelling alone with Claire, without Mary: Byron’s friends knew how careful one must be, not to give him an excuse for scandalous insinuation and gossip. But Claire having been given that chance of Allegra, and Shelley extremely happy at having re‐established such relations with Byron, as well as having acquired such a place rent‐free – and with the family having to leave Bagni di Lucca soon anyway – Shelley wrote to Mary: ‘Pray come instantly to Este’. He gave her details of the journey, what kinds of transport to use, and strongly advised getting their extremely capable new Italian servant Paolo Foggi, who seemed adept at everything (he had driven Shelley and Claire as far as Florence when they set out), to find the right places to stay overnight. The Gisbornes were to hand too (they had visited Mary ‘directly’30 Shelley had left for Venice) while Mary had her nurse, Milly, to help with the two children. Shelley meanwhile, along with Claire, Allegra and Elise, went across to Este, in the Euganean hills, to spend the last week of August.

The house at Este was divided from ‘the old Castle of all the Estes – or Guelphs’ by a deep ravine; when William, now two‐and‐a‐half, arrived, ‘His childish voice had with its loudest call, / The echoes waked of Este’s Castle wall.’31 They also looked out over ‘the wide flat plains of Lombardy, in which we see the sun & moon rise & set, & the evening star, & all the golden magnificence of autumnal clouds’. Bagni di 201



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Lucca had been contained by a ‘limited view of mountain, ravine, and chesnut wood’32 but the new place felt opened up to light and air. And Shelley instantly started to write there, in a summer‐house or ‘pavilion’ at the end of the garden; a vine‐trellised walk led to it from the house. His contact with Byron in Venice would eventually provoke him to two further poems, but what he started at Este was a play. In July 1817, in Marlow, Shelley had dictated aloud to Mary a prose translation of the first third of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Chained, and she had transcribed it;33 he had then gone on to read all the plays of Aeschylus. Mary, too, had loved the myth of Prometheus, the usurper and humanizer of the power of the Gods; her life‐imparting hero Victor Frankenstein had been awarded the soubriquet ‘The Modern Prometheus’ in the subtitle of Frankenstein. What is more, as their carriage had slowly ‘ascended Les Echelles’ in their crossing of the French Alps, back in March, Shelley had been profoundly impressed by the way ‘The rocks which cannot be less than 1000 feet in perpendicular height sometimes overhang the road on each side & almost shut out the sky.’ It brought him an insight – which he inscribed in Mary’s journal – into how The scene is like that described in the Prometheus of Aeschylus – Vast rifts & caverns in the granite precipices  –  wintry mountains with ice & snow above  –  the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns, & walls of topling rocks only to be scaled as he describes, by the winged chariot of the Ocean Nymphs.34

He had found a perfect setting – a stage setting, indeed – for a Prometheus play, in which the Nymphs of Oceanus would arrive in just such a chariot. In Milan in April, too, Shelley, Mary and Claire had seen ‘the most splendid spectacle’ in ballets staged by Viganò, which had given Shelley an idea of how dance might be used on stage: The manner in which language is translated into gesture, the complete & full effect of the whole as illustrating the history in question, the unaffected self possession of the actors, even to the children, made this choral drama more impressive than I should have conceived possible.35

And in April, though considering himself a person ‘without dramatic talent’, he had planned a tragedy about Tasso – and had later composed a scene for it.36 He now asked himself why he should not write his own ‘choral drama’ about Prometheus, rather than yet another narrative poem which no one wanted. Such a piece of work would, too, have been a relief after the experience of Laon and Cythna; and the idea of drama attracted him as it did Keats and would Byron. For a writer whose work

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seemed condemned to appeal only to a tiny audience of connoisseurs, the thought of a play must have been immediately attractive. Byron supplied the final provocation, having not only written a poem about Prometheus – ‘Titan! to whose immortal eyes’ – but having done so at the Villa Diodati in July 1816, when the Shelleys had been his neighbours. Back in London, too, Byron had been an active member of the management of Drury Lane theatre. Shelley would produce all six of his works in dramatic form over the next four years; it is only surprising, perhaps, that he had not embarked on one before. Aeschylus was also in Shelley’s book box, and the idea came to him of a three‐Act play reversing the tragedy of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Chained. His Prometheus Unbound would be exactly what Rosalind and Helen had not been: it would reveal not melancholy but agony and immense suffering giving way to understanding and change, though it would also, in the old way, show the downfall of a tyrant (Shelley’s Prometheus would not only escape from the rock to which Jupiter – the ultimate king, ruler and almighty God – has had him nailed, but Jupiter himself would be defeated). Aeschylus was supposed to have started on his own sequel to Prometheus Chained, but Shelley could not recall the details; he would only ask Peacock to tell him after he had finished his own Act I, as he did not want to be influenced (he ended up declaring Aeschylus’ plan to have ‘the Champion [Prometheus]’ and ‘the Oppressor [Jupiter]’ (184) of mankind reconciled at the end ‘feeble’). Shelley’s manuscript for the opening of the play was inscribed, slightly unusually for him, on loose sheets of paper numbered from 1 to 26, suggesting that he may have made a start on it before the arrival in Este of his own possessions. But the fact that he started it at all also suggests a certain pressure building up in him, confirmed by the speed with which he wrote. He started with a direct recollection of Les Echelles: ‘Scene Night — a Ravine of Icy Rocks.’37 The version published in 1820, however, hardly reads as a play; it removed most of the settings and stage directions Shelley had inscribed in his manuscripts, including those in the fair copy he made in the spring of 1819: directions which show that he was not only imagining how it would look, but how it might be staged. A Chorus of Furies appears in Act I, but all printed texts omit the stage directions Shelley originally gave: ‘Enter rushing by groups of horrible forms: they speak as they rush by pass in chorus.’ An individual who speaks is a Fury ‘rushing from the crowd’ while, immediately afterwards, ‘The Furies having mingled in a strange dance divide, & in the background is seen a plain covered with burning cities.’ Such a spectacle could perfectly well have been staged in the London – or Milan – theatre of that date.38 On the other hand, Shelley did not consistently inscribe such directions, and in Acts II–IV he wrote very few. He stopped thinking about the  play being staged; and it was understandable that whoever prepared the copy for the printer should have deleted the few surviving directions. As Shelley wrote it, the piece grew more like the poem into which it finally turned.39

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Aeschylus had begun with the mute Prometheus being hammered to the rock; when his Prometheus speaks, it is to call on the earth and the heavens to look at his suffering. Shelley’s Prometheus speaks the first words in the dark, addressing himself to his tormentor Jupiter: Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which Thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes…(188:I.1–4) He takes it for granted that he and Jupiter are equal and equivalent beings, watching over the universe: the words ‘But One’ are individual hammer blows of Miltonic insistence on the free self. Milton’s Satan and Samson are in fact never far away, as in Shelley’s inversion bringing ‘me’ to the forefront of a sentence a few lines later (‘eyeless in’ also instantly suggesting Samson, ‘Eyeless in Gaza’): Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate, Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn, O’er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. (188:I.9–11) When he answers Mercury’s tempting, loaded questions about abandoning his rebellion against Jupiter, Prometheus is again serene and determined: Pity the self‐despising slaves of Heaven, Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene As light in the sun, throned….(202:I.429–431) Again the majestic, Miltonic ‘me’, throned as inevitably as light in the sun. By 22 September, Shelley had covered 26 sheets of paper – meaning 500 or 600 lines of verse – and by 8 October he had drafted the play’s first Act (in its final form 833 lines long); he does not seem to have started Acts II or III for another month or so. He had no experience in writing drama, and – in contrast with Byron – no experience of the theatre; his only real area of knowledge was Greek classical drama, which in his time was never staged. Some of his plot devices seem to us today more akin to those in opera than drama: for instance, the business of the curse which Prometheus once pronounced against Jupiter and which he now wants to ‘recall’ (190:I.59) – a wonderful word for what is both to be remembered and withdrawn… except that Prometheus does not appear to have any recollection of the crucial words.‘What was that curse?’ he asks:‘for ye all heard me speak’ (190:I.74). A number of voices answer: four ‘Voices’ (from the Mountains, the Springs, the Air, the Whirlwinds), and then the ‘melancholy Voice’ (193:I.152) of the Earth herself. But, 204



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as mother Earth points out, no‐one dares repeat the curse Prometheus p­ ronounced, ‘lest Heaven’s fell King / Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain / More torturing than the one whereon I roll’ (193:I.140–42). What Prometheus said does not become clear until the Phantasm of the living Jupiter is brought up from the shadow‐world which parallels the real one, and Prometheus’ two companions, the Oceanids Ione and Panthea, set the scene: the Phantasm is ‘A shape, a throng of sounds’: ‘The Shape is awful like the sound’ (195:I.226,233). The curse turns out to be exactly what we might have expected Prometheus to have pronounced: I curse thee! let a sufferer’s curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse Till thine Infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony; And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. (197:I.286–291) Cursing Jupiter to suffer eternally clearly means participating in the mindset which makes Jupiter such a barbarous tyrant, and Prometheus now says: ‘It doth repent me…I wish no living thing to suffer pain’ (198:I.303,305). And yet to make a moral and improving hero out of a man nailed to a rock by a cruel tyrant is to make him a hero to an extraordinary degree; while to have him unable to ‘recall’ such an obvious thing as the curse is far too obviously a poetic device to get lots of interesting responses from the multiple voices and choruses brought on to the stage to say that, sadly, they cannot help. The rest of the Act contains far less dramatic action, apart from the threats and  dancing of the Furies. The Chorus proper  –  complete with Semichorus I and II – describe what they can see of the future, including ‘a youth / With patient looks nailed to a crucifix’ (208:I.584–585), while Prometheus describes his concern for human beings, including a slightly unlikely imagining of the French Revolution, when ‘The nations thronged around, and cried aloud, / As with one voice, “Truth, liberty, and love!”’ before ‘Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil’ (210:I.650– 651,654). But that is why Shelley has chosen Prometheus. In his version of the myth, Prometheus stands on the side of ‘Heaven‐oppressed mortality’ and sees himself as ‘The saviour and the strength of suffering man’ (211:I.674, 216:I.817). That constitutes one way in which Shelley differs from Byron’s conception of the Prometheus figure: Byron’s second verse starts Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; 205



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But Byron’s Prometheus is ‘baffled…from high’40 and can provide no more than an instructive lesson. Shelley’s Prometheus is not ‘kind’ but heroic: less the bringer of fire to the human race than their inspiration to rebel against tyranny. Getting an Act of the play finished was probably as much as Shelley managed during the late summer and early autumn of 1818: a memory of lost Como may even have swum up as he wrote how ‘the poet’ will watch from dawn to gloom The lake‐reflected sun illume The yellow bees i’ the ivy‐bloom (213:I.743–745) His time in Este was wonderfully productive, given how brief it was, and how interrupted it became. But any feeling of security and inspiration, in this most beautiful place, to which a renewed friendship with Byron might have contributed, was very quickly dispersed.

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The weather in northern Italy was still very hot and Shelley did not know that his 11‐month old daughter Clara – ‘little Ca’ they called her, to distinguish her from ‘little Ba’, Allegra – had been ill at Bagni di Lucca after he had left.1 After sending his urgent letter to Mary to pack up and come to Este, he remained oddly unsure whether it had really been a good idea to bring his family all the way across Italy: I have done for the best & my own beloved Mary you must soon come & scold me if I have done wrong & kiss me if I have done right – for I am sure I do not know which – & it is only the event that can shew.2

But Mary was having an awful time. Leaving around 29 August, and after an easy first leg to Florence with Clara, William, Milly and Paolo, she had first had to wait a day for a signature to her passport and had then had a very slow journey in the heat across to Padua between 1 and 5 September, with Clara developing what Mary  termed dysentery, and also teething: she must have cried and screamed. Shelley went up to Padua to meet them, in spite of suffering from food poisoning; it was 6 September before everyone finally got down to Este. For some days they hoped Clara would get better in the new, very lovely place they were happy to make their own – ‘We have domesticated ourselves unceremoniously here’, Shelley told Byron – but after keeping up their hopes for a few days (and after a week Mary thought Clara ‘now some what recovered’, although still

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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not well) they accepted that she was not improving. Shelley went back to Padua to arrange for a doctor and planned that Mary should leave Este ‘very early in the day, and avoid the heat, which might be bad for the babe, & take the time when she would at least sleep great part of the time’3 . So, leaving Allegra and William with Claire in Este, and unsatisfied with the diagnosis of the doctor in Padua – they were terribly conscious not only of Clara’s ‘increased weakness’ but now of ‘convulsive motions of the mouth and eyes’ – they went on as fast as possible, by coach and gondola, to see the doctor in Venice whom Byron had recommended, Francesco Aglietti (‘the best Physician not only in Venice but in Italy’).4 But this turned into another nightmare journey. At Fusina, the port for getting a gondola to Venice, convinced (as Mary knew) that ‘life and death hung upon our speedy arrival’, they were stopped from crossing the lagoon because they had no passports: but even the Austrian soldiers on duty ‘could not resist Shelley’s impetuosity at such a moment’.5 The passage across the lagoon, however, took another hour, and by the time they reached Venice, Clara was in a desperate state. Shelley raced away to fetch Dr Aglietti from his residence on the Grand Canal, but Aglietti was not at home; a second doctor told them there was no hope, and Clara died in Mary’s arms, ‘silently, without pain’, within an hour of their arrival. The Hoppners took pity on them and welcomed them in; they buried Clara in the Protestant cemetery on the Lido the following day, 25 September. Mary later wrote how ‘my sweet girl – whose face resembled His, / Slept on bleak Lido, near Venetian seas.’ All they could do was go wretchedly back to Este. For Shelley, gondolas (‘hung with black, & painted black’) were ever after unforgettable: ‘I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis.’6 It was Mary’s second loss of a baby and it has been confidently asserted that she found it impossible to forgive Shelley for ‘a death that was the result of his actions’. But there is no evidence that Mary felt any such thing, only guess‐work of the ‘Mary must have seen’ and ‘Mary could not rid herself of the thought’ kind.7 Clara’s death, nonetheless, marked the start of a very bad time for Mary. She may have blamed Shelley but is just as likely to have blamed herself (for agreeing to undertake such travels): she may have blamed Claire (for whose sake they had all gone to Este): she may have blamed the doctors they consulted. She and Shelley must also have seen Clara’s death as another in the series of catastrophes for their children. Henceforth, William – now coming up to his third birthday – would be an especially precious charge: they left Este (where there was no good doctor) and spent a fortnight in Venice in October so that a doctor – probably Aglietti – could take proper care of him. At least Mary had the opportunity to enjoy Venice a little, in the company of Marie Isabelle Hoppner and away from Claire; and Shelley could spend time with Byron.

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Something else probably made Shelley feel still worse about Clara’s death. The period between 17 August and 6 September 1818 is the one time when it looks as if he may not have maintained an elder‐brotherly relationship with Claire. She had been in love with him for years: it must have been about him that she wrote, in 1834, ‘I had once a friend whom I loved entirely and who certainly loved me much’.8 Their journey to Venice in 1818, and their days following in Este together, were the first time that they had been alone without Mary for any period since 1814. They had gone down to Venice in that luxurious, covered gondola, and Shelley had then accompanied Claire, Allegra and Elise to Este when it might have been natural for him to have gone back to help Mary with the journey, or at least to have waited in Padua for her arrival. There is also the oddity of Shelley writing to Mary on 24 August not knowing whether he had done wrong or not…but there is a solitary piece of surviving evidence which is not circumstantial: Shelley writing ‘forget me & revive not the other thing’ to Claire at the end of September 1818.9 Thin pickings as evidence of a relationship between lovers, certainly: and Claire went out of her way later in life to disguise her relationship with Shelley by destroying what she could; she did her best, for example, to obliterate the ‘forget me’ sentence, in another letter she scratched out Shelley’s word ‘dearest’, and in 1834 she castigated him: ‘immense were the lies he told of me’10 (presumably lies to Mary, about herself ). In August 1821, too, following assertions made by two blackmailing ex‐servants that Shelley and Claire had had a child together, Mary stated baldly: ‘I am perfectly convinced, in my own mind that Shelley never had an improper connexion with Claire.’That might be thought to settle the matter, except that – in that statement – Mary was doing her frantic best to reject extremely damaging charges, and there were times she could not have known about. She could certainly deny Southey’s scandalous assertion that, in 1816, Shelley and Byron had formed a ‘League of Incest’ with Claire and Mary, an assertion which Byron had been at pains to reject.11 But, in 1818, Elise – one of the blackmailers – had had the chance to observe Claire and Shelley at Este. Byron, too – because of what he heard and suspected – went on gossiping about Claire’s relationship with Shelley down to the spring of 1822. The fact that any evidence survives is itself remarkable, which is what makes the poem ‘Mine eyes were dim’ (described in Chapter 12) potentially so important: a poem which Mary eventually attributed to 1821 and to which she gave the title ‘To ――’. As it appeared in a notebook containing material about Teresa Viviani, she may have thought – indeed hoped – that it was a poem of that date. The narrator describes how he has for years disguised and hidden his feelings, and has remained ignorant of the way in which the eyes of another have ‘sought to shine / With soothing pity into mine’: he has felt condemned to ‘sit and curb the soul’s mute rage / Which preys upon itself alone’, his life ‘the cage / Of fettered grief, that dares not groan’ (106:5–6,7–8,9–10). Having spent ‘years thus’, he is 209



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finally ‘rewarded’: ‘As you, sweet love, requited me / When none were nigh’: ‘thy lips did meet / Mine tremblingly, thy dark eyes threw / Their soft persuasion on my brain’ (106:15–17,21–23). But, marvellous though the lovers’ time together has been, in the long run it solves nothing: the narrator has to confess that ‘We are not happy, sweet, our state / Is strange, and full of doubt and fear’ (106:25–26). And the poem ends: Gentle and good and mild thou art, Nor can I live if thou appear Aught but thyself – or turn thine heart Away from me or stoop to wear The mask of scorn – although it be To hide the love you feel for me. (107:31–36) So what would hurt him would be if she changed (or appeared to): or if she abandoned him: or if she seemed to scorn him (though he hopes that such scorn would be a mask disguising her real feelings). It is an unusual poem in Shelley’s output, in the way it concentrates on the minutiae of human relationships, agonised, loving and yet in no way conventional; the kind of poetry he would eventually write about Jane Williams.12 What perhaps changes everything is the fact that, late in life, Claire declared that ‘she was “sure” that the poem had been written to her and “not to Mary”’,13 though we can never rule out jealousy of Mary as the provocation for her certainty. But, if written between 1818 and 1821, the poem might have drawn upon elements of the relationship between Claire and Shelley since 1814, with years of mute loving on Claire’s side, and Shelley aware of it but ignoring it in his desire ‘not to groan’. On the other hand, it would have been characteristic of Shelley not to write autobiographically, but to use realistic, personal elements in a fictional context: D. W. Winnicott finely argued for the artist’s ‘urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found’. A poem, after all, is not and cannot be ­evidence that love between Claire and Shelley had indeed been ‘requited…When none were nigh’, on the way to Venice and thereafter at Este. But the poem is certainly suggestive of such a thing, down to details of Shelley subsequently being very clear to ‘my dearest Clare’ about how his love for her ‘has been & still must be a source of disquietude to me’.14 He knew very well her capacity for ‘contempt’ (Byron had called her ‘a little fiend’) but he also believed that there was a ‘good Clare’,‘gentle yet cheerful’ – the poem describes how ‘Gentle and good and mild thou art’ (107:31) – and he recalled ‘your sweet consolation, my own Clare’.15 He also insisted, in December 1821, ‘Do not think that my affection & anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you the less’. In old age, however, Claire’s contempt for Shelley’s ideas of ‘free love’ would bring her to describe him 210



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and Byron as ‘monsters of lying, meanness cruelty, and treachery’:16 it was as if the ‘mask of scorn’ (107:35) he had feared she might one day adopt had actually become her face. If Shelley and Claire had been lovers at Este, Shelley’s realisation that his daughter Clara had fallen ill at just the same time, and had gone on getting worse until she died, would have been dreadful. It was in his letter to Claire informing her of Clara’s death and burial that Shelley had actually written ‘forget me & revive not the other thing’, and had continued: ‘And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself. / Your affectionate friend, P. B. S.’17 It was as friends that he wanted their loving relationship to continue, but he enjoyed singling her out as special to him. In a letter of 29 October 1820, for example, he told her that as his previous letter had been ‘taxed with a postscript by Mary’, it had therefore ‘contained nothing that I wished it to contain’: Mary must not be allowed near his feelings for Claire.18 But the crucial phrases in the 1818 letter about forgetting him and not reviving ‘the other thing’ were crossed out by Claire when she later decided that Shelley had always behaved badly to her.

All three pieces of writing on which we know Shelley was currently engaged contemplate human misery in one form or another, but all three had been conceived before he knew how ill Clara was. For the moment, what mattered more was the near presence of Byron. Given the family’s tragedy, Byron had humanely refrained from enforcing his decision that Claire could only have Allegra for a month; she stayed in Este for a second month, and the Shelleys could go on using the house too. It may well have been Byron who provoked Shelley to embark on his Prometheus play in the first place; Shelley saw a great deal of him during October, and he became a central presence in both of Shelley’s next two pieces of writing, as well as a major influence upon Shelley himself: a fragment about Byron, starting ‘O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age / Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm’,19 may well date from October 1818. The second piece of writing Shelley started in Este was a poem without a forerunner in his already large output.The Shelleys’ journeys from Este by carriage and post‐chaise to and from Padua and Venice had, until late in October, always skirted the southern and eastern edges of the Euganean hills, but now, travelling on horseback back to Este, without Mary, en route to collect Allegra and return her to Byron as promised, Shelley crossed the centre of the hills, and (following Byron’s advice) broke his journey in Arquà Petrarca, the steep little hillside town where the fourteenth‐century poet Petrarch had lived in old age, and had died. Byron had already been there twice; he had written a commemorative poem in the visitors’ book, as poets were encouraged to do.20 Shelley did not write a poem in the book 211



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but used Arquà Petrarca as his starting point for ‘a day’s excursion’ among the hills, explaining, in the ‘Advertisement’ to the collection of poems including what he now wrote, that he had witnessed ‘the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn on the highest peak of those delightful mountains’. He could have seen the summit of Monte Venda from the hills above Arquà Petrarca, but where his day’s excursion went we can only guess.21 From his very first sight of them, the Euganean hills had brought him a metaphor which proved hugely useful. In Venice in August, he had seen how they ‘bear, / As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles, / The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—’ They gave rise to the pervasive reference to mariner, voyage and island in ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills, October 1818’, lines steeped in a kind of melancholy marking a new note in his poetry. Day and night, and night and day, Drifting on his dreary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel’s track; Whilst above the sunless sky, Big with clouds, hangs heavily, And behind the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, Riving sail, and cord, and plank, Till the ship has almost drank Death from the o’er‐brimming deep; And sinks down, down, like that sleep When the dreamer seems to be Weltering through eternity; All the mariner can see, in the gloom, is ‘the dim low line before / Of a dark and distant shore’, which Still recedes, as ever still Longing with divided will, But no power to seek or shun, He is ever drifted on O’er the unreposing wave To the haven of the grave. (153–154:5–26) For Shelley, a person who had believed himself always decisive, to find himself with ‘no power to seek or shun’, simply drifting onwards, would have been the worst of fates. Such a reaction has been ascribed to the way he saw life following the death 212



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of Clara. But we know very little about his state of mind, or how Mary (or Clara, or both) had affected it. Of his writing a new kind of poetry, though, about depression and depressed states, there is no doubt; and it is significant that he was not only not employing his old stand‐by of the glamorous, changed future society but should have been sending such disturbing tremors of unhappiness through several different ideas of the future. He was also probably making some kind of reference to Coleridge’s ancient mariner, with which we know he was extremely taken (Mary records three separate occasions between 1814 and 1821 when he recited it22): a reference which became undeniable in his wild and extraordinary ‘Vision of the Sea’, included in the Prometheus Unbound volume. The Euganean Hills poem ends by imagining  –  instead of a transformed society  –  a private retreat, out of the swell of the sea, on (naturally) one of the ‘islands’ of the hills: Where for me, and those I love, May a windless bower be built, Far from passion, pain, and guilt, In a dell ’mid lawny hills, Which the wild sea‐murmur fills, And soft sunshine, and the sound Of old forests echoing round, And the light and smell divine Of all flowers that breathe and shine…(162:343–351) So the mariner‐narrator and his loved‐ones will after all be able to live together passion‐free (pain and guilt being passion’s consequences), in windless, unchanging, flowery happiness. It sounds a little nightmarish (that is the other side of the content it evokes) but it was repeated by Shelley in August 1821 when – weary of bickering friends and literary gossip – he told Mary in a letter that My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you & our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, & shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world.23

But wouldn’t such a ‘healing paradise’ be vulnerable? Wouldn’t people envy it, force its gates open and invade it – and turn it into a hell populated by what upper‐class Shelley seems most in terror of, a ‘polluting multitude’ (162:355–356)? In his poem, no‐one need be afraid: for even if people invade, … their rage would be subdued By that clime divine and calm, 213



  Flowering Islands  And the winds whose wings rain balm On the uplifted soul, and leaves Under which the bright sea heaves…(162:357–361)

The place is so beautiful, so evocative, that all envy would be subdued; the island would survive, the sea would just heave beneath it. And because this earthly paradise is based upon ‘love which heals all strife’ (162:366) – as opposed to all the other kinds of love and passion, presumably, which in Shelley’s experience had only too often been the cause of strife – invaders would quickly be transformed into inhabitants: They, not it would change; and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again.24 Never before had Shelley so inimitably poised the simultaneous qualities of the marvellous and the unbelievable. It is a note he would sound again, in very similar words, at the end of ‘The Sensitive Plant’, when building up the idea that his own thoroughly horrible description of the destruction and loss of the most beautiful plants in the garden is not, in fact, the truth, but our perception only: as, with utter simplicity, he first wrote it out – That Garden & that Lady fair And all sweet shapes & odours there In truth have never past away The reason being ‘Tis we tis ours are changed not they’.25 In both poems, the idea, the expression are wonderful; but what is offered is perfect, painful fantasy. Painful, because perfect, because fantasy. Both poems demonstrate, in fact, a rather desperate kind of writing, and that is what gives them their peculiar force. Only the fantasy of ‘flowering islands’ (155:66) can start to obscure the misery which is the main note of the first 67 lines of ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’, and which (like the sea heaving beneath the leaves) runs underneath it throughout. The utter unlikeliness  –  though the utter desirability  –  of the transformation described at the end is overwhelming: of all likely outcomes, it is the least likely. It is no more possible than that the mariner will grow young again, in this ‘wide sea of Misery’, through which, ‘worn and wan’, he knows he must always ‘voyage on’. The poem is also savage about the state of Padua and Venice, both then under Austrian rule, with Venice being a place ‘where human forms…To the corpse of 214



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greatness cling’, Padua having had its reputation for learning ‘Trampled out by tyranny’ (157:146–148, 160:268): Shelley’s anger with the Austrians doubtless sharpened by his encounter at Fusina. But the poem’s strength is its recreation of a land‐ and sea‐scape which is also a place of grim suffering for those obliged, like the mariner, to travel on. He wrote it near in time to his poem ‘Stanzas written in Dejection  –  December 1818, near Naples’ and just six months before writing ‘Misery. – A Fragment’. The Euganean hills, like Venice, had turned out to have been only another stage on a series of journeys which – in spite of their glowing moments – had begun to feel perfectly miserable.

A sonnet, ‘Lift not the painted veil’, composed and revised between 1818 and 1820 offers a still sharper insight into Shelley’s new way of conceiving the world in poetry. Everyday reality is seen as unreal shapes painted on a veil which serves to ‘mimic all we would believe’. The individual who wants to see what is real, and to look behind the veil – as someone might who ‘sought, / For his lost heart was tender, things to love’ – could make us think of Byron in Venice, writing savage poetry which stripped the veil from the conventionally accepted, while pursuing woman after woman to love. But, in the poem, the central figure – despite his search – ‘found them not’ (182:3,7–9). Behind the painted veil are, in fact, ‘Fear / And Hope, twin destinies’, even if themselves merely shadows, hovering ‘o’er the chasm’ (182:4–5). It is a poem suggesting multiple unrealities, not just an appearance and a reality. The searching individual is himself no more than ‘a bright blot / Upon this gloomy scene’ (183:12–13). He may stand out from the crowd, for not accepting the prevailing fantasy about what is real, but he is also a ‘blot’ ­(originally a ‘blight’26): unloved, unlovable. Shelley may have been thinking of Byron, he may have been thinking of himself, but he was above all concerned to get his poem right: Through the unheeding many did he move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth…(183:11–13) Shelley might have paid himself the compliment of that last phrase, as a writer who ‘strove / For truth’, ‘and like the Preacher found it not’ (183:13–14): permanent outsider and traveller as he was. The two lines they replaced are equally disturbing: I should be happier had I never known This mournful man – he was himself alone27 215



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Being ‘himself alone’ had always been a Shelleyan goal: now it seemed to ­necessitate being ‘mournful’.

The sonnet is, in miniature, a reflection of the other great poem Shelley began in the autumn of 1818 and continued to write down to the spring of 1819. That first encounter with Byron, when they had ridden together ‘along the sands of the sea talking’, had not only brought Shelley his first view of the Euganean hills; his admiration of Byron was also a spur to the other major work he started at Este or Venice, ‘Julian and Maddalo, A Conversation.’ This was most certainly ‘an attempt in the highest style of poetry’.28 But its endeavour to ‘express the actual way in which people talk to each other’ has been taken as an invitation to view it as some kind of ‘confessional autobiography’, with Shelley as Julian and Byron as Count Maddalo, and with various additional insights into Shelley’s relationship with Mary offered along the way: it has been claimed that the poem reveals ‘a whole psychological process that Shelley struggles to realise’, while scholarly editions have paid great attention to biographical interpretations and comparisons.29 But although Shelley made life easy for Leigh Hunt by saying ‘two of the characters you will recognize’,30 the poem is more complicated than that. Rather than noting that Byron – like Maddalo – kept horses on the Lido, or that he and Shelley rode there on 24 August 1818, we could instead read the poem for its creation of a man who cannot believe in anything, as opposed to an individual who, despite his total lack of religion, ‘Argued against despondency’: ‘for ever still / Is it not wise to make the best of ill?’ (165:46–48) That doesn’t sound much like Shelley, who had just written a long poem arguing for the inevitability of despondency. And rather than asking whether the man in the Venetian madhouse (whom Julian and Maddalo go to visit) is more like Byron, or more like Shelley, we might instead read him as the poem’s creation of ‘a very cultivated and amiable person’ in his own right. The fictional Preface‐writer seems not to have read the poem very well, either, in saying that the figure he calls ‘the Maniac’ (we would today say ‘the Melancholiac’) ‘seems…to have been disappointed in love’ (164). Can there be any doubt of it? The  Preface‐writer also coyly confides that ‘Of the Maniac I can give no information’  –  and, if he cannot, who could? The Preface‐writer is as much a creature of fiction as Julian, Maddalo and the Maniac. We should also look hard at his description of the Maniac as someone mostly not ‘in his right senses’: what the Preface‐writer disparagingly calls the man’s ‘unconnected exclamations of his agony’ (164) are, we quickly find, the speeches of someone profoundly imagined. It is for them that the poem was written: it was built up around the idea of their inscription.31 216



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The passage at the start continues in description both of twilight’s encroachment, and of Julian’s increasing gloom as he confronts what Count Maddalo has suggested of ‘the darker side’ (165:49) which he takes: a bell tolling in its tower in the twilight is an image of the soul of man, sending out ‘Our thoughts and our desires’ (167:125) until, like night, death comes – and that is the end. The broad star Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill And the black bell became invisible And the red tower looked grey, and all between The churches ships & palaces were seen Huddled in gloom; into the purple sea The orange hues of Heaven sunk silently We hardly spoke – & soon the gondola Conveyed me to my lodgings on the way32 Julian rebels against Maddalo’s conclusion, and says that such a belief – in man as helpless and passive – would reconcile him to religion. But we must not conclude that the Count offers what Byron said, or that Julian counters as Shelley might have done. What matters is Maddalo’s particular kind of nihilism in the debate which Shelley is constructing around the issues that most fascinate him: and it is the nihilism, not Byron’s point of view, which is most brilliantly expressed here. All Julian can do, when faced by it, is to insist that people could change: ‘We might be otherwise—we might be all / We dream of happy, high, majestical’ (168:172–173). In this context, such hopefulness comes over as foolish and vague. It is what Shelley might once recognisably have written, as he knows: but it is something which he now knows better than to write. ‘Julian and Maddalo’ offers us the best example yet of a poem by Shelley which  –  although provoked by real events and real people  –  resists biographical reading. It may feel odd, in a literary biography, to find a declaration that an author’s writing does not give us clues as to what he was like, but that is very often the art of Shelley’s poetry. ‘Julian and Maddalo’ allows us to see the world through its author’s eyes – but that is a commonplace. Although it constantly draws on reality, it is not autobiographical: it does not show or describe what he was like. It is a ­wonderful fictional creation. So that, although at times critics, editors and commentators have taken for granted that the Maniac has been driven by his experiences ‘into a touching but wholly inarticulate intensity of despair’,33 when the man speaks, in the second half of the poem, he is at least as sane as Maddalo (whose name has not so often been used against him, though it easily might be) or Julian. He is not the least inarticulate and although on six occasions, yes, a line of dots breaks 217



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into his poetic utterance, on not a single occasion does the Maniac miss a rhyme or a beat.

It had, in fact, been from the start Shelley’s ambition to include in his poem a particular idea about suffering and expression – perhaps something Byron had said, certainly an idea which had been fascinating Shelley himself, perhaps both – which started to appear in the pages of the notebook he was using to draft his poem in the winter of 1818–1819. Detached from any immediate context, it first occurs as ‘And learn in suffering what they speak in song.’ Shelley was intrigued by the idea, but did not know how he might best use it. Thirty‐eight pages later in the notebook, the idea and wording reappear, perhaps with the hope that text would crystallize around it when the poem arrived there.34 This time it runs ‘For this is what to poets shall belong / They learn in suffering what they.’ Shelley knows how it ends: he doesn’t need to finish it. But it doesn’t fit, and is ignored. Two pages later, again: — and Maddalo Made one remark which I remember now – I said his passion gave him such language high Which As writers who transcribe called poetry. . Poets he said are men whose nurse is wrong They learn by suffering what they teach in song35 But in spite of the appearance of this full version, and the addition for the first time identifying ‘wrong’ as the nurturing provocation of expression, a kind of aide‐ mémoire for recalling the phrase returns, partly scrawled out, seven pages later: Maddalo, made one remark which What wonder minds are made sublime Their minds are made sublime & keen by wrong They learn thro Not content with that, on the facing page – once again in the middle of what was originally a blank space, and quite detached from other context – ‘For the wild language of his grief is high’ is followed by And I rem b Maddalo made .

r one remark . . he said suffering36

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Shelley is determined to get the idea into the poem; for the moment all he can do is experiment with where it might fit and how it might rhyme. For it is, in fact, the key to why the poem’s Maniac comes to speak so much: his speech is the consequence of his suffering, his love not just rejected but – at one point – made to feel a ‘loathed embrace’ by someone whose eyes (he now believes) once ‘lied love in my face’ (174:422–423).That person did not just transmit loathing and contempt but ‘sealedst them with many a bare broad word / And cearedst my memory o’er them’ (175:432–433). That is, sealed them as if under the ‘bare broad’ words of an official document, while simultaneously burning them into his memory: the poem later uses the phrase ‘closed and ceared’ (179:614) to suggest something not just sealed but cauterized. Shelley saved up much of his writing of the Maniac’s speeches to the very end of his period of composition; he started with passages of relative normality, but at the end of his period of writing was adding passages like this (the lines with ellipses sometimes being more conventionally punctuated by editors): ‘Thou wilt tell With the grimace of hate how horrible It was to meet my love when thine grew less; Thou wilt admire how I could e’er address Such features to love’s work…this taunt, tho’ true, (For indeed Nature nor in form nor hue Bestowed on me her choicest workmanship) Shall not be thy defence…for since thy lip Met mine first, years long past, since thine eye kindled With soft fire under mine, I have not dwindled Nor changed in mind or body, or in aught But as love changes what it loveth not After long years and many trials. (176:460–472) Does this reveal a ‘wholly inarticulate intensity of despair’? Not for a moment: it is a frightening insight into the way that a man, no longer loved, will find himself changed by not being loved. He does not dwindle or change of his own volition. But after long years, and many trials, he is changed: and he knows it. It is perhaps natural to assume that a writer who spends such care crafting speeches describing abandonment must at some point (and no time like the ­present) have felt abandoned. But Shelley was a poet, and his speciality was imagination: biography does not need to assume that everything written, every emotion depicted, was provoked by the events of the moment. Feelings of alienation from Mary, of the kind which biographers use to interpret ‘Julian and Maddalo’,37 have got little or

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nothing to do with the poem, or indeed with any of the poetry which Shelley was now writing with such successful intensity and ambition.

It is, however, true that Shelley (the least novelistic of his generation of poets) provides in ‘Julian and Maddalo’ speeches of beings who are otherwise largely uncharacterised, so that their speeches often come with little or no context. We have to concentrate especially hard on what they say, and how they say it: reading such verse is not always easy, and the Maniac says a great deal. When the next generation of poets (Tennyson in ‘Ulysses’, Browning in ‘My Last Duchess’, both in 1842) fully developed the idea of the dramatic poetic monologue, they had certainly learned from writing like Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’; but they had also started to characterise in ways that make it possible instantly to grasp the individual who is talking. The biographical application of context and person (Shelley and Byron and Mary) supplies modern commentary on ‘Julian and Maddalo’ with exactly what Shelley does not supply – ­reasons why X should speak as he does, reasons why Y might feel unhappy, reasons for the way Z appeared to his friends. But what matters about the Maniac is, indeed, how he speaks; as Shelley told Hunt, ‘Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor borrowed from objects alike remote or near, & casts over all the shadow of its own greatness— —’38 And the Maniac does not in those terms only express passion; at times his speech is also melodramatic. ‘quick and dark The grave is yawning…as its roof shall cover My limbs with dust and worms under and over So let oblivion hide this grief…the air Closes upon my accents, as despair Upon my heart – let death upon despair!’ After such rhetorical cliché, it is with some relief that we turn to Julian’s narrative, so much more poised and actual. The Maniac ceased, and overcome leant back awhile Then rising, with a melancholy smile Went to a sofa, and lay down, and slept A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept And muttered some familiar name, and we Wept without shame in his society. Julian, afterwards, judges the Maniac to be intensely moving; we read him as self‐ indulgent too. That ‘melancholy smile’ is a giveaway: the man is pleased with his 220



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dramatic eloquence. In the poem, too, Maddalo has – compared with both Julian and the Maniac – the better arguments and the better poetry.

We do not know when Shelley finished work on ‘Julian and Maddalo’, but he was in the middle of it during December 1818. He appears to have committed himself to travelling on (he never ‘drifted on’) during his first year in Italy; and, with the onset of winter, both he and Mary would have been determined to push further south  –  they had, after all, come to Italy in part for the climate. From Este on 5 November the party set off. They had Paolo Foggi to help, and at times to drive the carriage; they went via Rome (which they left after a few days of profound enthusiasm, promising themselves to return) and continued to Naples, their goal for the three winter months. Shelley arranged to arrive first, before the carriages (they were now three adults with three servants but only one child); he rented a house at 250 Riviera di Chiaia  –  one of ‘those parts of Naples usually frequented by Foreigners…in other situations, lodgings are much cheaper’39 – with a view out over the Royal Gardens towards the sea, and was joined by his family at 6.00 p.m. on 1 December. And here it was that he revised Act I of Prometheus Unbound and embarked on Act II, continued to develop ‘Julian and Maddalo’, and finished the ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills.’

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21 A Birth in Naples 1818 –1819

A baby girl, born in Naples, christened Elena Adelaide Shelley, dead at 17 months in June 1820, a bundle of illness in her short life, has been a biographical problem about which more has probably been written than about any other of the mysteries of Shelley’s life, involving as she does Shelley himself, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Byron, the Gisbornes, the Hoppners, Elise Duvillard and Paolo Foggi: and (according to some biographers1) an unknown, perhaps titled lady. It is a story of deceit, threats and – finally – blackmail. But if you sign your name to a declaration that a baby is your own, even if it is not, and even if your reasons are entirely generous and philanthropic, there will be a price to pay if blackmailers (or, worse still, biographers) get hold of the story. After 200 years, Shelley is still paying up. The Shelleys were in Naples from 1 December 1818 to 28 February 1819: a three‐month rent of lodgings for the winter in a potentially sunny spot, exactly as English doctors would have prescribed for a man suspected of consumption. Having settled in, the Shelleys started on the things which tourists did: on 5 December they went to Herculaneum and its museum, on the 8th they took a long boat trip to Baiae (returning by moonlight); they went to the opera on the 13th, and on the 16th Mary’s journal recorded a most exciting excursion: Go up Vesuvius and see the rivers of Lava gush from its sides – we are very much fatigued ‐ S. is very ill – return at 10 o’clock –2

For the first part of the way up, she and Shelley had been on mules, and Claire in a sedan chair carried by four men; but after pausing at the Hermitage, where it was The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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possible to stay and eat, they had to proceed on foot, with a guide, to experience what a contemporary visitor called ‘the fatigues, the dangers, and the instruction, which this terrible volcano offers’.3 Shelley was fascinated by the lava flow, especially as it grew dark: ‘The lava like the glacier creeps on perpetually with a crackling sound as of suppressed fire…We saw the masses of its dark exterior surface detach themselves as it moved & betray the depth of its liquid flame.’ But on their way down, Shelley was either affected by the inhalation of fumes or had a worse than usual kidney attack: ‘they conducted me I know not how to the hermitage in a state of intense bodily suffering’. Characteristic of him, though, was to imagine that ‘the worst effect’ of his collapse ‘was spoiling the pleasure of Mary & Claire’.4 It must have been a struggle to get him home. Fortunately he suffered no lasting ill effects. Two days later, on 18 December, Mary recorded ‘write out Shelley’s poem’, almost certainly his ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’; and on the 23rd they resumed their excursions by going to Pompeii (‘We are delighted with this antient city’) where they had a picnic under a temple portico, ‘& pulled out our oranges & figs & bread & apples’. Pompeii would, however, be imagined very differently in the experimental ‘Ode to Naples’ which Shelley wrote in August 1820, with its ‘deliberate  –  and characteristic  – flouting’ of the conventional form of a Pindaric Ode, and which, right at the start, recreated the looming presence of Vesuvius in Pompeii: always sensed – ‘felt, but heard not’ – ‘in the suspended blood’, a marvellously Wordsworthian amalgam.5 I stood within the City disinterred* And heard the autumnal leaves like light foot‐falls Of spirits passing through the streets, & heard The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls: The oracular thunder, penetrating, shook The listening soul in the suspended blood;— I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke, I felt, but heard not —6 Those dry leaves scattering like ancient foot‐falls, too, are haunting. The whole time in Naples, Shelley was troubled by side pain, and in the New Year of 1819 – under the care of the English doctor John Roskilly (1788/9–1864), who ‘promised great things’ – he started on a regime which included ‘mercury & Cheltenham salts’. But a caustic was also used to keep open ‘an issue in the hepatic region’ which had to stay suppurating, in theory purging the poison in the liver, the organ Roskilly had diagnosed as problematic. It was an unpleasant and potentially dangerous business which made Shelley ‘endure severe bodily pain, without any good results’ (apart perhaps from distracting him from his other pains).7 The weather 223



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was not good; he and Mary mostly rode out on horseback for exercise. They also read extensively, walked in the royal gardens, and visited the museum of Greek antiquities,‘the Studii’. But Mary’s journal is particularly brief in its entries for what they did, and 28 days out of 89 are missing. They also suffered some significant domestic upsets, none of them recounted in Mary’s journal: she only admitted to being ‘dreadfully teized’ – that is, irritated and annoyed  –  almost certainly because of Elise and Paolo. The two had met when Paolo had arrived in Este with Mary on 6 September 1818; they had ‘formed an attachment’ by the time of the November journey from Este to Rome, and on their arrival in Naples, Mary believed that ‘without marrying they had formed a connexion’ (meaning that they were sleeping together). When Elise fell ill, ‘we sent for a doctor who said there was danger of a miscarriage’.8 The Shelleys were already angry with Paolo: he had ‘made, I fancy, £100 – by us’: ‘lately he has cheated us through thick and thin’. That became their cue for action: by 22 January they had sacked him. But Elise insisted on marrying him, ‘very much against our advice’,9 so the Shelleys organised a civil ceremony at the end of January at the house of the British Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of Naples, Sir William à Court. But they thus lost not only Paolo but Elise, who had been with them since Geneva, nearly three years before. The newly partnered couple went on to Rome where Elise converted to Catholicism and they had their church wedding; and then they went to Florence. Mary seems to have had occasional letters from Elise, but may well not have answered them; a begging letter of 21 July 1821 contains a comment suggesting that Mary had written to her late in 1819 but not subsequently.

What Shelley had been newly writing in Naples – besides going on with projects already started – is unclear; Mary remembered how ‘he hid’ from her what he was writing, ‘from fear of wounding me’.10 The only poem we can be reasonably sure he started was ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection – December 1818, near Naples.’ The ‘near’ suggests one of their excursions; the narrator positions himself on the sea‐shore, where it is intensely beautiful: ‘The winds, the birds, the Ocean‐floods; / The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s’ (180:8–9).The narrator however complains that he lacks ‘any heart’ which might ‘share in my emotion’: his solitude is not just complete but exhausting, and he would really like to lie down ‘like a tired child / And weep away the life of care’ (180:30–31). Given the embarrassing dimensions of the cliché into which ‘like a tired child’ has turned, it is worth pointing out that no‐one before 1800 had used it. For Shelley and his first readers, it was not a cliché. A striking aspect of this poem is that Shelley chooses to end each octosyllabic stanza with an iambic hexameter line, often with an extra syllable, which has very 224



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much the effect of such lines in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, the most famous example there being ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more’: Shelley’s poem contains lines such as ‘How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion’ (180:18). He chooses the classic contemporary poem of insistence on not being depressed to assist him in writing about ‘habitual’11 dejection; he draws on Wordsworth in spite of his anger with the religious conformist and monarchist. But he also suggests (as the Immortality Ode does, and ‘Julian and Maddalo’ would do) that self‐pitying depression  –  what two years later, in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, he called ‘the dull vapours of the little world of self ’ (667) – is what is likely to linger, rather like the ‘joy in Memory’ (181:45) which the perfect Naples day leaves behind it. So what exactly is the narrator of ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’ complaining about? Alas, I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned; Nor fame, nor power nor love, nor leisure — Others I see whom these surround, Smiling they live and call life pleasure: To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. (180:19–27) This could perfectly well have been a poem written from the standpoint of the  poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), whose cell in Ferrara they had seen on 7 November, whose life Shelley had considered for a play, and about whom he had composed a scene and first‐person ‘Song.’12 Nevertheless, the subjects the narrator lists are peculiarly appropriate for Shelley’s own situation. We know, from his exchanges with Byron, that his failure to acquire any kind of fame as a poet was a source of anguish to him; there is evidence that his relationship with Mary was not  loving; and his health was in a terrible state, leading to the ‘irritability & ­depression’13 he described in April 1821. And the fact that in Naples he hid from Mary what he was writing would also suggest this poem: he would have shown her a poem about Tasso. Although the ‘cup’ he had been dealt certainly did not include ‘peace within’, ‘content’ or ‘calm’, it is also arguable that it had been his discontent which had been the making of him, driving him to question so much and to express his dissatisfaction with ‘the existing state of things’. But he was also most of the time powerless, which was not what he had expected. Interestingly, in the poem’s last stanza the narrator also declares ‘I am one / Whom men love not, and yet regret’ (181:41–42). 225



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If this is personal, then it was astute of Shelley to have reached such an insight into how he affected others; people did not easily get close to him, often felt very critical of him, and in some cases were driven into violent opposition by him: and yet regretted it (and him). We have only to think of men as different as Hogg, Byron, Peacock and Southey. Both Mary and Shelley found themselves lonely in Naples. Shelley told Peacock in mid‐December how ‘I have depression enough of spirits & not good health, though I believe the warm air of Naples does me good. We see absolutely no one here—.’ ‘We lived in utter solitude’, Mary confirmed, recalling too how much Shelley enjoyed company – in small doses – and did not like loneliness: ‘usually when alone he sheltered himself against memory and reflection, in a book’.14 She thus reminds us that her husband always had a good deal to reflect on from which he would have liked to escape; it would need a long list to cover the things which, at the age of 26, Shelley might have wished had turned out otherwise. But Mary later dismissed any grounds which Shelley might have had for melancholy at Naples beyond his ‘constitutional disease’: ‘it was difficult to imagine that any melancholy he showed was aught but the effect of the constant pain to which he was a martyr’. She was determined to ignore the poem’s line about not having found love; in 1839, indeed, she went out of her way to account for Shelley’s state of mind in Naples as ‘but too natural’: Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the  environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, and then he escaped to solitude, and…poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness.15

But it was a time of self‐questioning about his role as a poet, as well as about what in ‘Lift not the painted veil’ he had described as a ‘lost heart’ (lost in loving someone unresponsive). For the moment, anyway, he made no attempt to publish it. He may have thought it too personal, but he probably considered it, along with the batch of poems he sent to Ollier on 10 November 1820, for publication with ‘Julian and Maddalo’: the serious, ‘peculiar’ poems which he called ‘all my saddest verses raked up into one heap’, like grass or straw. But ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’ did not get into print.16

Come February 1819, the irritations and anger caused by Paolo’s behaviour ­apparently behind them, and summery days starting to make themselves felt, the 226



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Shelleys renewed their programme of visiting and excursions. But such normality makes the sudden christening and registration of Elena Adelaide Shelley at the end of the month all the odder. The child was not Mary’s.17 So who was she? A careful reading of what has already been discovered makes things a little clearer. There appear, in fact, to be two stories, not one. Best to start with the baby. Shelley registered her birth at seven in the evening on Saturday 27 February 1819: she had been baptised earlier that day at San Giuseppe in Riviera del Chiaia (very close to their Naples lodgings at no. 250), but her birth was recorded as having ­happened on 27 December. That itself is more than a little odd; babies at that date were usually baptised within a few days (even hours) of being born, not two months later. But since the registrar had to see the baby to register her, she probably looked a couple of months old, ‘not a newborn’.18 Furthermore, Shelley and Mary and their entire household were on the very point of leaving Naples for their return journey to Rome: they would get away at 2.00 p.m. the following day. It was a very odd time to register a birth, at the last minute; but – even more strangely – the Shelleys (both are named on the registration document, but only Shelley signed it) did not take this hastily baptised and registered baby with them. They left her in Naples, where she stayed until she died, 15 months later, at the address where she had probably lived most of her short life, Vico Canale 43, in an area of small streets to the north‐east of the residential and middle‐class area where the Shelleys had been living. One of the two men present at Shelley’s registration of the birth on 27 February had been a 57‐year‐old c­ heesemonger, Francesco Florimonte (the other witness had been a 23‐year‐old hairdresser); one of the two men who registered her death in 1820 was the 25‐year‐old Antonio Liguori, of no. 48 in Vico Canale; the other was Pasquale Fiorenzano, aged 22. Antonio Liguori was also a cheesemonger; it seems possible that he worked with (or for) Francesco Florimonte, the only man of the older generation in this group of witnesses, and that the child was brought up in the latter’s family.19 But how are we to understand a baby registered as their own by Shelley being left in Naples among all these small tradespeople who certainly spoke no English? Shelley would never have done such a thing (‘abandoning a child—& that my own’ he classed as one of the ‘unutterable crimes’); nor would Mary. Nor, it is worth remarking, as she has been named as a potential parent, would Claire.20 Not only was it extremely unlikely that any middle‐class or upper‐class English parent would have left a baby in such a situation, but all three principals in this case had previously shown themselves intensely attached to the welfare and proper upbringing of their children. Not one of them would have left a baby in such circumstances, even if they had intended recovering it later.21 Shelley must have been making a false ­registration, to help someone (and that someone cannot have been Elise, after the birth of Paolo’s baby: the dates don’t fit). 227



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In 1940, Newman Ivey White (who discovered the baptism and registration documents) offered what is still the most likely explanation: that the baby was an orphan or an abandoned child (more likely the latter) whom Shelley, to all intents and purposes, had adopted. Although Naples had a considerable problem with abandoned children, and the Foundling Hospital was not the most compassionate institution, there was in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at that date no legal mechanism by which an individual might adopt an abandoned child, any more than there was in England.22 But White did not pursue the logic of why Shelley might have done such a thing as – in effect – adopt Elena Adelaide. He assumed that it was an attempt to make up to Mary for the loss of their daughter Clara in September. That idea can be ruled out at once. No such gift of a child would have meant anything to Mary; and, anyway, the Shelleys celebrated the acquisition of this new child by promptly leaving her behind. What Shelley was doing may become clearer if we consider how ready he had shown himself to assist local communities with practical help (in Wales, for example, and in Marlow). Taking on the responsibility of an abandoned baby, having her ­baptised (as his own children had been, and essential in Catholic Naples), declaring her born exactly two months earlier (to give her a birthday, as well as to account for a baby bigger than a normal newborn), and then lodging her with appropriate foster parents, would have seemed to him no more than the proper thing to do if a member of the English community (say Dr Roskilly) had brought an abandoned child to his attention. It may even have been a last‐minute decision, as the timing of Saturday at seven in the evening suggests;23 the Shelleys had been away from Naples 23–25 February, visiting Paestum and Pompeii, and getting back only on the Thursday evening. If someone had brought up the matter of the child on the Friday, they could have had her baptised on the Saturday and registered that evening. There is some evidence of Shelley arranging to pay for childcare; almost exactly a year later, on 8 March 1820, he sent the Gisbornes an outside calculation of the expenses at Naples calculated in ducats – I think it is as well to put into the hands of Del Rosso or whoever engages to do the business 150 ducats.24

Federico del Rosso was a lawyer in Livorno; 150 ducats amounted to roughly £50. Having taken on responsibility for the child at the end of February 1819, Shelley never thereafter referred to her by name (as he would have referred to a child of his own) but simply called her ‘my Neapolitan’, ‘My poor Neapolitan’ and ‘My Neapolitan charge’:25 the word ‘charge’ having the force of ‘a responsibility or duty’, one he had chosen to take on. However depressing Naples had  been, and however wretched his health, he had at least helped rescue Elena Adelaide. 228



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Attempts have been made to show that Mary was very angry about the registration, but the only evidence is the phrase ‘a most tremendous fuss’ which she inscribed in her journal the following day, after they had driven away from Naples. We need to hang on to what the word ‘fuss’ (‘A low cant word’) meant at that date  –  ‘a needless or excessive display of concern about something’, as in the increasingly common phrase ‘a fuss about nothing’.26 How Mary positioned it in her entry also seems significant: Leave Naples at 2 o’clock  –  sleep at Capua  –  Vincenzo drives  –  a most tremendous fuss

She means a hugely unnecessary display of concern, apparently following their stay at Capua (5 kilometres north of Naples) on the Sunday night: something to do, perhaps, with their new servant Vincenzo. She does not seem to be recording the consequence of the registration of a baby 36 hours earlier. But it is best to leave the matter of the Neapolitan charge on hold, as the Shelleys themselves left the child behind when they set off; what may or may not have been the second stage of the affair of Elena Adelaide Shelley would only get under way 15 months later. In the meantime, Shelley simply coped with the responsibility of childcare with appropriate disbursements of money.

Heading back to Rome from Naples was an exciting prospect, and the capital city did not disappoint. The period between March and May 1819 was the best time that the Shelleys had yet had in Italy, and this in spite of the fact that Mary – at the start of a new pregnancy27 – got tired quickly. But they constantly visited the sights, Claire resumed music lessons, Mary took drawing lessons, and Shelley wrote concentratedly and successfully, inspired by ‘The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication’ (185). In  retrospect, such an idea of ‘new life’ in Italy would prove the most awful ­contrast with what actually happened. Shelley’s later recollection of Rome as ‘at once the Paradise, / The grave, the city, and the wilderness’ (505:433–434) better suggests what, within three months, they experienced.

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22 Exceeding Grief: The Cenci 1819

In a mood of exhilaration with the marvellous spring of April 1819, Shelley started yet another new kind of work: a stage play. Mary later explained that, for years, he had been insisting that he was not a writer who could cope with plot and narrative, and had encouraged her to take up the new project.1 While they had been with the Gisbornes in Livorno the previous summer, they had learned about the Cenci family of Rome in the late sixteenth century; the Gisbornes had an account in Italian which Mary had spent some time translating with Shelley. In Italy the story had been largely confined to manuscript versions because of its revelations about the Papacy, which (much to its own advantage) had for years accepted heavy fines from rich individuals facing judicial proceedings; one such had been Count Francesco Cenci, who had engaged in a career of violence, murder and rape until eventually he was murdered by his own daughter, Beatrice, after raping her. It was a story about a terrible misuse of power – paternal power, too. When he started work, indeed, Shelley was in some hurry to use the story, as he reckoned he could be first in the field with an intensely dramatic subject. From the start he intended to write a piece that could be a popular success, both as a book and on the stage. Having learned about the Cenci in 1818, it was natural that – in Rome – Shelley and Mary would hunt out relics of the Cenci family. They found an only partially modernised palace, ‘a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture’: Shelley reckoned he could use the setting in his play, being especially struck by an entrance through a gate ‘formed of immense stones…opening into gloomy subterranean chambers’ (278). He was also delighted to discover in the Palazzo Colonna what purported to The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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be a portrait of Beatrice Cenci by the Italian painter Guido Reni, which he wrote about with great feeling in the Preface to his play: Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world. (278)

What he had, in fact, discovered was a portrait ‘not by Guido Reni of a girl who is not Beatrice Cenci’, as it has been rather devastatingly described. But it was helpful: it seemed to Shelley the portrait of an actress in ‘her impersonation on the scene of the world’. Rome was proving an ‘inexhaustible mine of thought and feeling’.2

How much of the play he wrote in Rome we do not know. The family had originally planned to spend two months there and then go back to the Naples, ‘where it is almost decided that we should remain until the commencement of 1820’,3 the reason being that Mary was pregnant and wanted to be near the English doctor John Bell, who had planned to be in Naples. But this plan was changed more than once. First, because they were worried about fever (meaning malaria) coming to Rome as summer advanced, the Shelleys decided to leave for Naples as early as 7 May 1819. But then, as Shelley himself felt much better in Rome, and because they had met a very old acquaintance of Mary’s, Amelia Curran, who had offered to paint portraits of them all, they decided to stay another month; they took an apartment at the top of the Spanish steps, next to Amelia Curran’s house, where the air was supposed to be better. In the late 1820s, Amelia Curran’s unconvincing portrait of Shelley was copied for the Shelleys’ friend Jane Williams by George Clint, a professional portrait painter who had never seen Shelley, penny plain or twopence coloured, but who incorporated what Jane Williams told him. Although Clint produced what at least looked like a real person, whether we might recognise Shelley from it seems doubtful (his wife Mary reportedly said that it looked ‘more like any body in the world than Shelley’: see Figure 8); but the version of Amelia Curran’s portrait which Mary herself sketched in 1829 is equally unconvincing.4 And then they discovered that Dr Bell had changed his plans, and would be near Lucca during the autumn, so that became their goal.Towards the end of May, however, their son William (not quite three‐and‐a‐half  ) – soon after Amelia Curran had painted his portrait – fell ill.Their ‘Wilmouse’ (as Shelley described him in July) had been a boy ‘affectionate and sensible to an extraordinary degree, his spirits had a 231



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Figure 8  Percy Bysshe Shelley, oil portrait (c. 1829) by George Clint, after Amelia Curran (1819) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 1271)

very unusual vivacity – it was impossible to find a creature more gentle and intelligent’. Of all Shelley’s children, he was also the one most like Shelley: ‘the animation and deep blue colour of his eyes were the astonishment of everyone’.5 What now struck him down was almost certainly mosquito‐borne malaria; and despite all Dr Bell could do he grew worse and worse. On 5 June he appeared ‘in the convulsions of death’ but Bell saved him; on 7 June, at noon, he died, Shelley having stayed beside him for 60 hours. They buried him at once, in the old Protestant Cemetery, in utter desperation. On 29 June Mary told Marianne Hunt (1787–1857) that ‘I never know one moments ease from the wretchedness and despair that possesses me’: their mistake in not leaving Rome was only one self‐reproach which agonised her. They had departed from England just 15 months before, ‘comparatively prosperous and happy’, with three children, but they had given up Allegra and had now lost two ‘lovely children’ in less than a year, in both cases having to live through ‘their dying moments’. Mary was ‘broken hearted & miserable’: ‘Everything on earth has lost its interest to me.’Years later she would note in her diary that although, as time passed, ‘joy returned & life was dressed in other charms for me’, yet ‘never for a moment did I cease to wish to die’. Shelley felt very similar: ‘it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover any cheerfulness again — ’6 And they could not go back to England. 232



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All they wanted to do for the moment was to get away from Rome. One aim was Florence, but they wanted somewhere where there were sympathetic English people with whom they could be – and that meant the Gisbornes. They were in Livorno by 17 June, in the Aquila Nera hotel; by the 23rd they had found ‘a small house’, ‘Villetta Valsovano near Monte nero’, near enough to their friends for the Gisbornes’ dog Oscar to run across to greet them. But their house was also ‘in the midst of a podere [farm]; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows’.7 On the roof was a kind of glazed terrace, which Shelley made his own, away from the family – though the house would have felt eerily quiet without children in it, for the first time since 1816. Prometheus Unbound must have received some attention there, but it was in this heat and isolation that Shelley wrote the bulk of The Cenci. Mary remembered it as the first of his works which he showed her throughout the period of writing: he was doing his best to interest her and distract her, just as he was attempting to distract himself with composition. She must have been touched by his lines about the death of a ‘fair blue‐eyed child / Who was the loadstar of your life’, of whom Beatrice says: All see, since his most swift and piteous death, That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time, And all the things hoped for or done therein Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief. (341:V.ii.49‐50) But Shelley’s attempt at relieving Mary’s distress also felt hopeless: she had entered a long depressed period. He gave just a hint of what this meant to him in the fragments of a poem he scribbled down, probably in his little glazed study, sometime during August: My dearest M. wherefore hast thou gone And left me in this dreary place world alone Thy form is here indeed, a lovely But thou art fled, — gone down the dreary road Which leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abo[de] Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair If where For thine own sake I cannot follow the[e] Do thou return for mine —8 ‘For thine own sake’ means that he cannot afford to let himself go down that ‘dreary road’ into depression: for her sake he has to stay undepressed. But on the facing notebook page at some point he also scrawled the lines ‘What does thou here Spirit of fiery life / In this freezing bosom.’9 233



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They saw a good deal of the Gisbornes (this was the period when their ‘friendship ripened into intimacy, so that we were continually at each other’s houses and frequently all day long’). But Mary also believed that Shelley ‘has never recovered from his fatigue at Rome and continually frightens me by the approaches of a dysentery’; she was now doubly apprehensive about illness. Later in life she stressed how Shelley’s glazed‐in study helped him: ‘the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence’.10 In fact neither his health nor his spirits revived much, except in her determined recollection.

His choice of the Cenci – a ‘dismal eno[ugh]’11 subject – brought with it a great string of problems: in particular, getting it on to the stage. One good reason why the story had not been used before had been voiced by Sir Walter Scott, who ‘had found it too atrocious and too disgusting to be rendered available in the drawing room at the present day’. If the story were not possible for the drawing room, it sounded impossible for the strictly censored London theatre. Peacock could see that the play’s chances were minimal: he wrote to Shelley ‘saying that he don’t think my tragedy will do’, and adding ‘that he don’t much like it’. Maria Gisborne too  –  who heard the play being recited while it was being written  –  ‘did not approve of the subject, she said it was too atrocious for modern civilization’. All that Mary and Shelley could hope for was that a play written with such ‘great care’, and with its story so ‘polished’, would not ‘shock its audience’.12 They were wrong. Thomas Harris – the manager of London’s Covent Garden theatre – ‘pronounced the subject to be so objectionable, that he could not even submit the part to Miss O’Neil for perusal’: Shelley had had the Irish actress Eliza O’Neill (1791–1872), who had deeply impressed him in 1818, in mind for the role of Beatrice. And Harris would not have bothered sending it to John Larpent, the Examiner of plays for the Lord Chamberlain. He did not mince his words when turning it down: Shelley noted how ‘The very Theatre rejected it with expressions of the greatest insolence.’13 Peacock did his best to soften the insolence 40 years later, when he wrote that although Shelley’s play ‘could not be received’, yet all the same ‘great hopes of his success with a less repulsive subject’ were expressed. But that last phrase is telling enough. Shelley had assumed that Harris had guessed his identity as its author (the play had been submitted anonymously) but that is unlikely  –  and irrelevant. It was an impossible subject, and would remain so for another hundred years. The Cenci did not receive a public performance in London until 1922.14 Why could Shelley not see that such a subject was impossible? In the first place, he never accepted that something which he wanted was impossible: we might 234



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remember his 1811 comment to Hogg: ‘Behold me then enthusiastic quixotic, resolved, convinced that.. all my plans shall succeed.’15 He could be taken as arrogant; in some contexts he doubtless was arrogant; but people of his class and background expected to get their way. That tendency was in Shelley’s case coupled with a revolutionary zeal that, because things were desirable, then they ought to happen; the much‐hoped‐for could quickly become the morally imperative. He would not only not have been deterred by the subject of incestuous rape but would positively have welcomed it: it was a confirmation of the violent perversion present at the heart of established Christianity. It had always been his aim ‘to break through the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend’, and Count Cenci was ‘the embodiment of every form of authority that Shelley had ever opposed in his life and in his poetry’.16 An unfortunate consequence, however, was the fact that the abused heroine, Beatrice Cenci, even when she ‘enters staggering’ (303:III.i.) at the start of Act III, can never say what has happened, never accuse her father of rape, never say how it makes her feel, never (in fact) say anything about it. In Hamlet Ophelia goes mad following the murder of her father Polonius, but in her madness she can show how she feels about his death: ‘He is dead and gone, Lady, he is dead and gone’.17 Beatrice too has her period of madness but all she can do is relapse into uncharacteristic vagueness – ‘What name, what place, what memory shall be mine? / What retrospects, outliving even despair?’  –  and declare the matter ‘expressionless’ (305, 309:III.i.75–76,214). Only the pain of not expressing it can occasionally be made powerful, through simple monosyllables: ‘What it can be, or not, / Forbear to think. It is, and it has been; / Advise me how it shall not be again’ (307:III.i.145–147). For his part, Cenci needs to be enormously impressive (Shelley had Edmund Kean in mind for the part, even though he worked for the other London theatre, at Drury Lane), and certainly he has astonishing moments, as when – planning his rape of his daughter Beatrice and allowing that ‘’Tis an awful thing / To touch such mischief as I now conceive’ – he continues: So men sit shivering on the dewy bank, And try the chill stream with their feet; once in— How the delighted spirit pants for joy!18 He thus conveys the utter physical pleasure he anticipates, ‘once in’, while remaining sufficiently inexplicit. He has been considering the rape from the very start of the play: it is the only thing which really excites him. there remains a deed to act Whose horror might make sharp an appetite Duller than mine. (282:I.i.100–102) 235



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‘Sharp’ meaning not just ‘keen’ but ‘painful’ and ‘exciting’. Cenci is, nevertheless, not allowed much insight into himself, the only thing which would make his kind of violently sensual criminality very interesting. What is more, not only would any actor of Shelley’s time who took on Cenci probably have been booed off the stage as a monster – he says very little that is not monstrous – he comes across to us not as a sixteenth‐century count, but as a Shakespearean actor. Preparing to rape Beatrice, he pronounces O, thou most silent air, that shalt not hear What now I think! Thou, pavement, which I tread Towards her chamber,—let your echoes talk Of my imperious step, scorning surprise, But not of my intent!19 Compare Macbeth: ‘Thou sure and firm‐set Earth, / Hear not my steps, which they may walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my where‐about.’ And then, swearing ‘Come, darkness!’ (Lady Macbeth swears ‘Come thick Night’20), Cenci imagines himself walking ‘secure and unbeheld / Towards my purpose’: and Macbeth walks ‘With Tarquins ravishing sides, towards his design’21 – an audience’s recollection of Macbeth thus helping confirm Cenci’s intentions. The constant reference to Shakespeare is striking. Cenci is also King Lear cursing Goneril (Cenci: ‘Quick Nature! I adjure thee…/ That thou be fruitful’ — Lear: ‘Hear Nature, hear…/ Suspend thy purpose, if thou dids’t intend / To make this Creature fruitful’) and stirring himself to action (Cenci: ‘Her name shall be the terror of the earth’ — Lear: ‘they shall be / The terrors of the earth’22). And it is not only Cenci who is immersed in Shakespeare. Beatrice is an abused victim but she is also Lady Macbeth (Beatrice: ‘O, fear not / What may be done, but what is left undone’ — Lady Macbeth: ‘What is done / Cannot be undone’) as well as King Lear (Beatrice: ‘Let me not go mad!’ — Lear: ‘O let me not be mad’23). The Cenci’s reference to Shakespeare effectively turns it into a kind of raid not only on Shakespeare’s language but on his roles and situations – the loyal servants, the abandoned wife, the tormented daughter, the motiveless malignity of the central figure (a kind of Iago malignity; but Cenci is far more than malign, and not witty at all, in the way he savagely kills and injures). One result is that the characters often impress us as actors recollecting their words and enacting their roles. But that takes us to the heart of the matter. Shelley himself did not believe that his quotations and near‐quotations of Shakespeare constituted any kind of plagiarism: indeed, he went so far as to declare that a passage influenced by Calderón was ‘the only plagiarism which I have intentionally committed in the whole piece’ (277 n). He was offering his readers (or theatre‐ goers) language they knew, or almost knew, in which to experience villains and 236



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wickedness of a kind they did not know. He was, in fact, making the strange as familiar as he dared. He would write in his ‘Defence of Poetry’ how poetry ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’: ‘it strips the veil of familiarity from the world’ (659, 675). But in The Cenci he aimed at the opposite, in an attempt to make the strange and appalling in the Cenci story something with which we find ourselves, after all, familiar (the verbal parallels mostly taken from the most famous moments of Macbeth, King Lear and Richard III). He thought his play ‘At all events… matter‐of‐fact’;24 he would not have been alone in Europe in believing that Shakespeare’s work was part of the common heritage, and that he could freely draw on it to give his play that immediacy with its audience which he knew Shakespeare’s work enjoyed. The play loses some of its central dynamic when Cenci is killed; but Beatrice becomes fatally compromised by her entirely justifiable desire to stay alive, in spite of having plotted and organised her father’s murder. And the last Act takes us into territory not previously explored. Beatrice turns out to be prepared to lie to save herself, and becomes morally responsible for the death of Marzio, the man she employed to murder her father but whom (under questioning) she now denies ever having met. Having initially proclaimed her guilt, Marzio retracts his confession when confronted by Beatrice herself (moral pressure which, significantly, he ­compares to torture); subsequently he dies under further torture. Beatrice herself is not tortured, but her mother Lucretia and brother Giacomo are, and tell the truth about the family’s responsibility for Cenci’s death. As a result, much of the last Act is taken up by Beatrice’s morally dubious assertions of innocence, and accusations of weakness against those who have confessed under torture: she calls their confessions ‘What ’twas weak to do’ (350:V.iii.111). Of course, in one way she is innocent, utterly so, but not in the ways which for the sake of her defence she constantly asserts; and moral superiority, from one who has not been tortured, is very unpleasant. We are confronted by the fascinating self‐contradictions of a highly moral individual who knows she is right, who has been horribly wronged, and who is in a fatal trap. She is finally faced with a judge who extracts from her not a confession but a refusal to deny her own guilt: as a result, ‘She is convicted, but has not confessed’ (349:V.iii.90). Up to now she has been toweringly independent‐minded but when confronted with her conviction, rather unconvincingly breaks down into a version of Claudio’s speech when confronted by death in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, although in this case the borrowed robes do not fit especially well.25 But in The Cenci Shelley was attempting to write a piece which would at last be the success he had begun to crave. The closer he could manoeuvre his characters to Shakespearian ­language and context, the more successful he probably thought he would be. What is lacking is the religious context which makes Claudio so terrified. Shelley attempts in his Preface to say how it can be that ‘The most atrocious villain 237



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may be rigidly devout’, and he understands Catholic belief sufficiently to see it as decidedly ‘not a rule for moral conduct’, although ‘interwoven with the whole fabric of life’ (276). But even a character as Catholic as Beatrice appears unable to take Christianity quite seriously. She is most psychologically convincing when she is least Catholic, in a terrified imagination of a universe without God or Heaven, and the world correspondingly ‘void’: ‘The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!’ (352:V.iv.58–59). She is being brought into realms of imagination unparalleled even in Shakespeare. She is still terrified of her father. But, both because of what he did to her, and because of what she did to him, she calls him ‘The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!’ – and asks was he not alone omnipotent On Earth, and ever present? Even tho’ dead, Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, And work for me and mine still the same ruin, Scorn, pain, despair? (353:V.iv.62,28–72) But such a moment – in which she knows, in effect, that she has killed not just her father but God, only to remain permeated by him – is followed by a plunge back into Hamlet: ‘Who ever yet returned / To teach the laws of death’s untrodden realm?’26 Shelley showed very great skill in constructing a drama out of his materials: for a first play it is a most impressive piece of work. The ending is marvellously simple: Beatrice preparing herself and her mother to be taken out for execution: Here, Mother, tie My girdle for me, and bind up this hair In any simple knot; aye, that does well. And yours I see is coming down. How often Have we done this for one another! now We shall not do it any more. My Lord, We are quite ready. Well, ’tis very well.27 Yet throughout the period of composition, and afterwards, Shelley refused to accept the actual state of London theatre, as is revealed by his fantasy of the play being accepted:‘After it had been acted & successfully (could I hope such a thing) I would own it if I pleased, & use the celebrity it might acquire to my own ­purposes.’28 It would have required not only powerful advocates in London but a huge amount of rewriting to fit The Cenci for the censor; and he had no advocates, and would strongly have opposed rewriting. In May 1820 he did, however, display a nicely ironic humour about ­himself – and the problem of writing such a piece – when for Thomas Medwin he summed up 238



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the problem of The Cenci: ‘My chief endeavour was to produce a delineation of passio[ns] which I had never participated in, in chaste language, & according to the rules of enlightened art.—’ That, fortunately, he did not do – could indeed never have done. He hardly needed to add, with his usual modesty, ‘I dont think very much of it.’29 The disparity between the ‘chaste language’ required for publication and performance, and the actual, horrible violence of feeling and act takes us to the heart of the problem of The Cenci. It is yet another work by a great writer which falls frustratingly short of what it ought to have been, as its writer knew. But Shelley was not considering the context of stage performance in which – to succeed – his play needed to exist, and for which, with his Shakespearian parallels, he was in one way preparing it. He was not going to give up on his belief that corruption must be shown up for what it is, or on his old certainty that he had the power to say whatever he wanted, and that he would be listened to.

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23 Prometheus Unbound 1819

Sometime between their arrival in Naples in the winter of 1818, and the autumn of 1819, Shelley managed to compose the second and third Acts of Prometheus Unbound. It looks, in fact, as if he worked on them at the same time as he was starting The Cenci in Rome, though he certainly finished The Cenci  –  a play requiring plot development and all the apparatus of contemporary theatre – before Prometheus. But writing The Cenci may well have made him feel that he now understood the difference between the genres in which he was working. His new Prometheus writing made it a good deal less like a play than what he had written in Este, in the sense of its being stageable or using theatre resources, or in setting up the kinds of opposition upon which drama usually depends. Acts II and III of Prometheus Unbound rely less and less upon interchange between the characters, because Shelley is finding ways of addressing all kinds of subject – such as the nature and significance of love – not obviously within the scope of a Prometheus drama; and as a result the speeches often became extremely long: a 206 line monologue from the ‘Spirit of the Hour’ concludes Act III (252–254:III.iv.98–204). But so much else happens in the piece – now in effect a poem developed into an extraordinary account of human life, structured as a drama – that this is not a serious limitation. Shelley not only draws on the existing threads of legend and myth in the story but creates a poem concentrating on the nature of the world in  which man  –  Prometheus, soon to be unbound  –  will find himself: Shelley ­creates what, in a ‘Note on Shakespeare’, citing Sophocles, he would describe as ‘a ‘world within a world’.1 And as part of his new thinking comes another way in  which he departs massively from his sources, in order to introduce a way of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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removing the tyrant Jupiter. For this, he invents Demogorgon, a new and very significant character. Back in 1817, Peacock had added to his poem Rhododaphne a playful note about the figure, part of which runs: “The dreaded name of Dæmogorgon” is familiar to every reader, in Milton’s enumeration of the Powers of Chaos…He has been supposed to be a philosophical emblem of the principle of vegetable life.The silence of mythologists concerning him, can only be attributed to their veneration for his “dreaded name;” a proof of genuine piety which must be pleasing to our contemporary Pagans, for some such there are.2

Peacock’s note is, however, an excuse to refer to ‘our contemporary Pagans’, among whom he would have included the non‐Christian Shelleys: and he cheerfully throws in his own threepenny‐worth of myth in calling Demogorgon the ‘philosophical emblem of the principle of vegetable life’, entirely appropriate for his friends the vegetarian Shelley and the campaigning vegetarian John Frank Newton (1770–?1827), a visitor to Marlow while the Shelleys were there. Peacock probably did not know that Demogorgon had come into existence via a mistranslation: hence the modern quip ‘Demogorgon is a grammatical error, become god’.3 Boccaccio was responsible for equipping the entirely non‐existent figure with his nature and powers, that being the reason for the ‘silence of mythologists’: unless they invented, they could add nothing. Both Shelley and Peacock would also have known the name from Rowe’s notes on Lucan’s Pharsalia: … that God whom they call’d Demogorgon, who was the Father and Creator of all the other Gods: who, tho’ himself was bound in Chains in the lowest Hell, was yet so ­terrible to all the others, that they could not bear the very Mention of his Name…4

Shelley was fascinated by such possibilities; he wanted a figure to overpower Jupiter, and that figure should not be Prometheus, or the latter might seem as guilty of the lust for power and revenge as Jupiter himself has been. Demogorgon also had the advantage of apparently possessing a direct link with ‘Demos’, the people: to Shelley he is the volcanic, subterranean power which  –  if somehow roused to action – embodies the inevitable, subversive human reaction to tyranny, and is thus capable of removing tyrants.5 Accordingly, having prepared the way in Act II scenes ii. and iii., he opens scene iv. with Asia and Panthea descending to the Cave of Demogorgon and there observing a seated form. With only the slightest hint of Pyramus’ ‘I see a voyce’, Panthea starts off: ‘I see a mighty Darkness’ (229:II.iv.2) – for what she observes is, as in Milton,6 awesome enough to count as ‘darkness visible’. Demogorgon, ­appropriately for the oracle he is (his cave is ‘Like a volcano’s meteor‐breathing chasm, / Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up’ – 226:II.iii.3–4), asks for questions. 241



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‘Who made the living world?’ asks Asia. With tremendous force in a play so full of crafted sentences and lengthy speeches, a single word answer comes – ‘God’ (230:II. iv.9) – carcely amplified by Demogorgon’s subsequent answers to lengthy questions about who did what: ‘God: Almighty God’, ‘Merciful God’ (230:II.iv.11,18). Does Demogorgon mean the Christian God? It is left entirely unclear: the reader can fill in the version of God by which she or he is most impressed (in 1811, even atheist Shelley had been struck by the idea of ‘the All‐wise, the Omnipresent ­intelligence of the universe’7). Although generations of critics have greeted this encounter in Prometheus Unbound as an anti‐climax,8 what follows is perhaps the most impressive moment of drama in the work. To Asia’s impassioned and very real question (10 lines long) about evil – ‘who made terror, madness, crime, remorse’ and so on9 – Demogorgon’s reply is simple, baffling: ‘He reigns’ (230–231:II.iv.19‐28,28). To the plea ‘Utter his name’, the answer is again: ‘He reigns’, as it is to a desperate ‘who?’ ‘He reigns’ (231:II.iv.29–31). That is all there is to be said. Evil is a pervasive power, reigning: God is a pervasive power, reigning. The conclusion that they might be identical is never made explicit, but grows implicitly, reinforced when Asia despairingly asks ‘Whom called’st thou God?’ Demogorgon is suddenly helpful: ‘I spoke but as ye speak, / For Jove is the supreme of living things’ (233:II.iv.112–113). But the moment for change – for challenging the supreme power, at last named – is now: when Asia asks when it will come, Demogorgon simply, but again impressively, states ‘Behold!’ (234:II.iv.128). And Asia and Panthea depart with the Spirit of the Hour. Demogorgon, too, travels: at the start of Act III, he confronts Jupiter, who can only respond ‘Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak!’ (240:III.i.51) And Demogorgon gives another of his chilling single‐word answers before taking Jupiter away: Eternity. Demand no direr name. Descend, and follow me down the abyss. I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn’s child; Mightier than thee: and we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness. (241:III.i.52) Prometheus has always known that Jupiter’s nemesis would be his own child. And now this mysterious oracular god from the underworld, who is not only d­ arkness, power and eternity, a force outside all temporal concern, but also uncontroversially the people, takes Jupiter down to hell. Well, in theory. In fact Demogorgon returns in Act IV, which Shelley only finished in the winter of 1819. Prometheus is ritually unbound at the start of Act III and thereupon becomes something like a minor character in his own drama,

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­ utspoken in particular by the Spirit of the Hour.The latter’s monologue, however, o does a wonderful job of conjuring up the end of the old conception of man ruled by power and violence, in a vision of the new world of possibility: The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed:—but man: Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,—the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise:—but man: Passionless? no—yet free from guilt or pain…(254:III.iv.193–198) How this magnificent, miraculous change might take place is…unspoken; man cannot escape ‘chance and death and mutability’, but is nevertheless declared to be ‘ruling them like slaves’; and – again – pain and guilt as passion’s consequences are ruled out. Such things are simply ‘clogs’ which prevent him from outsoaring ‘The loftiest star of unascended Heaven, / Pinnacled dim in the intense inane’ (254:III.iv.203–204) (that is, the faintest yet just visible star high in the void). It was entirely typical of Shelley to have added an adjective like ‘intense’ to the word ‘inane’, which from the middle of the seventeenth century had been the scientific word for the void or vacuity in which the earth and the heavenly bodies float. It is in Acts III and IV of the drama that he unleashes his scientific understanding of the  functioning and history of the universe (with reference to phenomena such as  electricity and infra‐red radiation); here he expresses the very idea of vacuity pressing intensely upon the mind’s eyeball, as it searches out that dim star. And yet, as has been pointed out, ‘Imagining the earth and moon joyously and harmoniously aspin presents nothing like the difficulty involved in imagining a world of harmonious, just, and equable human beings.’10 It looks as if the Prometheus work – continued in Naples, in Rome and then in Livorno – lasted over the next eight months or so. Shelley had thought it ‘just finished’ on 6 April, but it took until the end of July 1819 before starting to be ‘ready’; and even then it needed till mid‐August to be ‘ready for the press’. And it still had to be transcribed (by Mary) before at last being sent to Peacock in September. By then, however – again unlike The Cenci – it was a work ‘I do not wish to be sent to Ollier for publication until I write to that effect’:11 and, anyway, the copy which Shelley wanted Ollier to have, sent via John Gisborne, came back to Livorno when Gisborne abandoned his journey to England.The first three Acts of Prometheus did not finally get dispatched to Ollier until mid‐December 1819. And by then Shelley was announcing that ‘There is another Act written to Prometheus’, as if it had come by itself.This writing may have started in the summer of 1819, but the first surviving reference was in the shape of ‘additions’ which Mary

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was hurriedly transcribing on 15 December, and which would be posted to England ‘in a few days’. Eight days later, the ‘additions’ had enlarged themselves into a fourth Act, along with ‘some lyrical insertions’. But it was pure luck that the poem had not been printed before the arrival in London of the extra Act: ‘a sort of hymn of rejoicing’ Mary called it.12 But not just rejoicing. Panthea develops the strangest, most fascinating, scientific version of global change and evolution for the poem: the earth had once had a population (‘mortal but not human’) which had ended up crushed under the wrecks of its own development: ‘prodigious shapes / Huddled in gray annihilation, split, / Jammed in the hard, black deep’ (264:IV.298,300–302) – fossils, as they had been termed since the start of the eighteenth century. And eventually the succeeding reptile population, itself multiplying ‘like summer worms / On an abandoned corpse’, had in turn been overwhelmed, either when the blue globe Wrapped deluge round it like a cloke, and they Yelled, gasped and were abolished or  –  in another version of violent species change caused by the proximity of a comet, of the kind that Pierre‐Simon Laplace had suggested13 – some God Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried ‘Be not!’—and like my words they were no more. (264:IV.313–318) But just as words vanish, so does certainty.At the end of the fourth Act, Demogorgon is suddenly there again among the characters; and once again the poetry Shelley awards him confirms him as the significant centre of the action. Each group of the universe’s inhabitants in turn – Earth, Moon, ‘Aetherial Dominations’, ‘Ye happy Dead’, ‘elemental Genii’, Spirits and Man – respond to Demogorgon’s acknowledgement of them: from the Moon ‘which gazest on the nightly Earth’ to Man himself, ‘A Traveller from the cradle to the grave / Through the dim night of this immortal day’ (272:IV.549–552). And then Demogorgon spells out the constant disasters to which life on earth remains subject, as even the Titan Prometheus had been subjected. Living beings have To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, & bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates 244



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It is Demogorgon who is singled out to enumerate not only the marvellous ­possibilities of life when freed from tyranny, but – like Prometheus at the start of Act I – to reiterate another of Milton’s Satanic injunctions: ‘Neither to change nor falter nor repent’.There is no life without awful ‘woes’ and ‘wrongs’; only when that has been asserted can Demogorgon address Prometheus directly: This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great & joyous, beautiful & free This is alone Life, Joy, Empire & Victory14 The triumphal adjectives and nouns of those last three lines rest upon the suffering, the struggle, the defiance and the wreck depicted in the previous five. What Act IV of Prometheus Unbound does is provide a kind of verbally dancing conclusion which goes in a different direction from Act III’s single‐minded assertiveness, now in the hope that ‘The past Hours’ really are over, gone ‘To the dark, to the past, to the dead’ (255–256:IV.31,39). Mankind’s new chance of freedom is a matter of not changing or faltering or repenting, in spite of everything: it is a conditional state of defiance, even if magnificent as voiced by Demogorgon.

At the end of August or start of September 1819, Shelley had made one of his rather rare summaries of his work as a poet; and it showed the extent to which he was conscious of what over the years he had been doing. He was constructing a dedication (to Hunt) of The Cenci: Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience…(273)

He knew remarkably well the defects ‘incidental’15 to youth which had, up till then, invaded his poetry, rendering it visionary. But he now explained to Hunt that, in The Cenci, for once ‘I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor.’ That last word takes us back to his own heady ambitions in 1811, when he had declared ‘metaphorical language’ to be explicitly for ‘useful & momentous instruction’.16 Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna might both be described as the work of a hugely well‐intentioned instructor. Laon and Cythna was the last of Shelley’s long poems to have been constructed entirely according to its own world of vision, aspiration and ‘ideal excellence’: and in December 1820 Shelley would describe how, like an ephemerid or day‐fly, it had 245



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lived for just a single day when published, its colours fading and growing watery like a vanishing rainbow, until … the shower fell, — the swift sun went his way. And that is dead: O, let me not believe That anything of mine is fit to live! That shows just how depressed Shelley had been by the awful failure of Laon and Cythna, which  –  he had resolutely remarked to its publisher, Ollier, in August 1819 – now ‘requires little attention’.17 He would, all the same, wittily and courageously brush off the savage attack on him and the poem which had appeared in the Quarterly Review in April 1819, and which he had seen by October.18 In this, John Taylor Coleridge had rejoiced in the end of Shelley’s poetic career: Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of ‘mighty waters’ closes in upon him behind, and a still deepening ocean is before him:—for a short time, are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blasphemous execrations are heard, his despair but poorly assumes the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him to the same ruin—finally, he sinks “like lead” to the bottom, and is forgotten.19

Shelley  –  struck how operatic this all was (‘when that tremendous concordant ­discord sets up from the orchestra, and everybody talks and sings at once’)  – produced a version of the review which was much funnier: It describes the result of my battle with their Omnipotent God; his pulling me under the sea by the hair of my head, like Pharaoh; my calling out like the devil who was game to the last; swearing and cursing in all comic and horrid oaths, like a French ­postillion on Mount Cenis; entreating everybody to drown themselves; pretending not to be drowned myself when I am drowned; and, lastly, being drowned.

But the fun (‘it is a much fitter subject for merriment than serious comment’20 he remarked in November) should not lead us to assume that the failure of his poem had not mattered to him.The lack of success of his work was a subject to which his letters would return over and over again.

Something of a change  –  sometimes  –  in the way he wrote may nonetheless be observed in the works he began between 1818 and 1819, including Prometheus Unbound, which – if this way of thinking about Shelley’s career is useful – might be 246



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seen to fall into two parts exactly as readers have tended to make it; Acts I–III being the older Shelley, Act IV being the newer. Another change would be to the kinds of lyric and shorter poem which he had always written, and which now began to figure more significantly in his output. If we call them all ‘lyrics’, we shall miss the way in which, at times, the analysis of human traits in his new work shows something different from what he had done before: it has been called a ‘conversational poetry of human relationship’.21 And while it is not true that The Cenci entirely enjoys the kind of ‘sad reality’ which the dedication to Hunt claims, any more than Shelley’s subsequent poetry always relinquished the ‘presumptuous attitude of an instructor’, it is interesting that he should now be thinking in such terms, and should have published self‐criticism of that kind. It is a sign that, after finding a reason for writing instructively political poetry (and finding ways of getting it into other people’s hands) as early as 1810, with the Posthumous Fragments, he had attempted to tell himself that very little of his future writing would be instructive. It was a sign of his sense of his failure as that kind of poet: and of his failure to capture an audience. By early in 1821, when he wrote his ‘Defence of Poetry’, he was able to insist that a poet ‘would do ill to embody his own conceptions’  –  he was thinking of ideas of right and wrong (659) – in his work: he had ended up, he declared, a great hater of didactic poetry, evincing the kind of distaste natural to someone who knew just how much of it he had himself produced. He had declared in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in August 1819, that ‘Didactic poetry is my abhorrence’ (187); such an assertion was part of his attempt to overrule his own old writing self, who had been didactic to within an inch of his life, and who still returned to haunt him. His best writing was turning out almost always to be against the grain: not only acknowledging, but finding ways of bringing to the surface and representing some kind of a conflict within himself, or some kind of opposition up against which he had found himself. It was in 1819, in fact, that he started to use his writing to convey violent emotion not of an ideal, demonstrative kind  –  as in Laon and Cythna – but as poetry addressed directly to and against England.

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24 Satiric Reality 1819

It was in Livorno, on 5 September 1819, that Shelley first read about the bloody attack by troops on crowds attending a reform meeting on 16 August at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, an event which quickly acquired the satirical name of ‘Peterloo’: it had taken place almost exactly 14 months after the victory of British and Prussian troops at Waterloo. Peacock had sent Shelley copies of The Examiner of 22 and 29 August, from which he learned how a number of people had been killed, and hundreds injured, when militiamen had been ordered to disperse the crowd. The day after hearing the news, ‘the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my viens’1 – his spelling having gone the way of the torrent. And less than three weeks later, on 23 September, he sent Hunt a lengthy new poem, The Mask of Anarchy: the final product, as it turned out to be, of his rooftop study at the Villa Valsovano. The problem of how to respond to such an event had hit him very hard: he felt so detached, so little awake to what was happening. In the notebook he was currently using, he had been drafting and correcting and emending his Preface to The Cenci, which consisted of a letter to Hunt; with a fine, dry pen‐nib he had started a sentence ‘It is a dreadful thing to see’, and had also experimented with some lines of a poem about Zephyr, ‘Awakener of the spirit’s Ocean’, ending ‘with thy gentle motion’. But then, from an abruptly ink‐laden nib, the first stanza of The Mask broke on to the page, almost complete. He first wrote ‘As I was asleep from’ but saw at once that that was not going anywhere: ‘from’ became ‘in’, to be followed by ‘Italy.’ And when writing ‘in Italy’ he may also have altered ‘was’ to ‘lay’, with its

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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suggestion of languor. He followed the line with a second, a third and a fourth, almost exactly as they would stand in the finished poem: As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the sea And with great power it forth led me In the visions of poesy2 By then he was really excited: his pen did not leave the paper after the final ‘y’ of ‘poesy’ but instead looped straight across towards the edge of the paper, so empowered to go on did he feel. At some point he went back and inserted ‘To walk’ at the start of line 4, giving it 10 syllables and establishing it as deliberately meditative.The poem he was creating would slip between seven and twelve syllables for its lines, its stanzas nearly all in quatrains; a format looser and more flexible than many of his experiments, but more appropriate for popular work. It counts as Shelley’s first mature work of angry satire: a genre he was to explore with energy over the next few months, and which would result in a great mass of poetry. He wanted a genre which did not encourage him to be Shakespearean, or Aeschylean, or Biblical, or Miltonic, or dramatic (there was a side to him which acutely enjoyed histrionic denunciation and display); but which yet allowed him to write with delight and, at times, with savagery about the people, the poetical and the political worlds he knew. Neither Prometheus Unbound (at least its first three Acts) nor The Cenci had allowed him to do such things, although he quoted The Cenci back at himself when he first heard the news of Peterloo: ‘Something must be done…What yet I know not.’ Although the remark also communicates the helplessness of a vengeful Lear (‘I will do such things, / What they are yet, I know not’), he felt ready for savagery as a response to injustice; and savage satire turned out to be one answer to his need both of a genre and of his old longing for belief in ­himself as doing something for the world. Satire could be a way of avoiding the impossible dreams of what ‘ought to be, or may be’ (273), while also addressing ‘the public’, not just ‘myself ’.3 He had previously tended to employ elegant and rather complex prose for his political commentaries; his political and polemical poetry from the second half of 1819, including The Mask of Anarchy and the poem ‘England in 1819’, would be driven neither by optimism nor by rational argument, but by metaphor and rage. It was (he told Hunt in November) ‘of the exoteric species’: that is, ‘Dealing with ordinary topics; commonplace, simple.’4

In England, meanwhile, the MP Sir Francis Burdett had on 22 August 1819 ­published a letter referring to the government’s ‘reign of terror and of blood’, and had declared Peterloo an action in which men and women had been ‘disfigured, 249



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maimed, cut down, and trampled upon by dragoons’. For the ‘seditious libel’ in his letter, Burdett was prosecuted and in March 1820 would be sentenced to a fine of £2000 and imprisonment for three months: ‘libel’ being defined by the prosecution at his trial as ‘any writing that was published with the intention of bringing the government of the country into hatred and contempt’.5 Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy was in such terms libellous to an even greater degree than Burdett’s letter. Hunt would have known at first glance, when Shelley’s poem arrived at the start of October, that its publication in the Examiner would be impossible if the newspaper were to survive.The second stanza named and shamed the Foreign Secretary, Robert Stuart (1769–1822), Viscount Castlereagh, who as Leader of the House of Commons had been of major importance in setting out the policy of the government of Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770–1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool; stanza four named the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon; stanza six the Home Secretary, Henry Addington ­(1757–1844),Viscount Sidmouth. Eldon got lines about his notorious capacity for shedding tears6 (and not noticing that he was incidentally killing children): Sidmouth got Clothed with the Bible, as with light, And the shadows of the night, Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode by. (357:22–25) Hunt was no coward. But late 1819 was an especially dangerous time, as Burdett’s prosecution would prove. Fines and prison sentences for convictions of seditious libel were substantially increased. For publishing The Mask of Anarchy, Hunt would have been fined heavily and imprisoned for even longer. He did not publish it; Mary did not even include it in her 1824 collection of Shelley’s work. Hunt finally brought it out in 1832, when no‐one could argue that the government was being libelled (Eldon and Sidmouth were, however, both still alive and could have read it). The authenticity of the indignation expressed in Shelley’s poem has been called in question. Sending the poem to Hunt has been called a demonstration of Shelley’s ‘self‐performing desire for influence’, and the poem itself declared an indulgence, sent ‘with either a guileless or a stubborn disregard of the risk to Hunt’: ‘if such forms [of political poetry] are calibrated to move and inspire a vast audience, they also expose a poetic self‐absorption…’7 Given the impossibility of publishing the poem in 1819, and Shelley’s sad ­experience of reaching almost no‐one with his writing, The Mask of Anarchy was certainly not ‘calibrated to move and inspire a vast audience’ (or Shelley’s calibration had been wildly inaccurate). But what should he have done? The only way to have behaved less self‐absorbedly would have been either to have written nothing, or to have kept his writing to himself (thoroughly self‐absorbed activities for a poet, both of them), or – somehow – to have run alongside fleeing people at Peterloo, shouting 250



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his poem aloud as he invented it, but not encountering the sabres of soldiers ­dispersing the crowd. Would such behaviour have been less ‘self‐performing’? No: Shelley’s poetry could, in such a case, have been seen as mattering more to him than the needs of the injured at his feet. It is impossible to win when up against such a critic or such an argument; political poetry will always run the risk of ‘seeming no more than an aesthetic processing of politics’, and the conclusion (that Shelley’s poem was ‘unable to affect the struggle it addresses’) is foregone. Sending such a piece to Hunt was, for sure, neither ‘guileless’ nor ‘stubborn’ (both parties knowing the political and publishing situation perfectly well) but one of the few things a writer might do who wanted to be read. At least Hunt would read the poem; and hardly anyone is in a better position to show around a piece of work, and make it known to a small circle, than the editor of a magazine in constant contact with his contributors. Two years later, a book would angrily complain that Shelley ‘has circulated poems in England, which he dare not publish’, confirming such a circle.8 But what confronts us today is a poem which works upon us not because we agree with it politically (it has outlived its topicality and has to be judged differently) but because  –  even when we know very little about the people being attacked – we are confronted by the work of a major poet. The real‐life Sidmouth is today vivid to very few people indeed: yet his being ‘Clothed with the Bible, as with light, / And the shadows of the night’ makes him vivid. And he does not just weep crocodile tears: he rides a crocodile (and grows correspondingly savage). Castlereagh is just as compelling, synonymous with Murder as he is: all we know is his mask, which is both his face and not his face (the dragon‐fly’s ‘mask’, the ­prehensile organ for holding prey to be devoured, hovers over the meaning). I met Murder on the way— He had a mask like Castlereagh— Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven bloodhounds followed him: (357:5–8) His face – if it is his face – is smooth; pain, guilt, responsibility leave no trace on him as he pursues his grim determination to murder. Before we even know what the bloodhounds are for, we know that they will be following blood. The poem enacts a mask (or masque): as well as the insect meaning, and the way that Anarchy disguises its features, there is the sense of ‘masque’ Shelley would have known from Milton’s Comus: A form of amateur histrionic entertainment, popular at Court and amongst the nobility in England during the latter part of the 16th c. and the first half of the 17th c.; o ­ riginally consisting of dancing and acting in dumb show, the performers being masked and habited in character; afterwards including dialogue (usually poetical) and song.9

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Castlereagh, Eldon, Sidmouth etc. are the ‘nobility’ staging and enacting a vicious and bloody performance, in costume and masks, while Shelley’s poetry approaches popular song in a way entirely appropriate for such a mixed entertainment. But it is also a masque of anarchy; in the words of the poet W. B.Yeats, writing exactly 100 years later about how, in a fractured society,‘Things fall apart’, Shelley knows that a ‘blood‐ dimmed tide’ had been unloosed, and – Yeats’s words directly recalling Shelley’s poem – ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ It was not a word Shelley had himself used in his poetry before 1819, but then he began to;10 it was appropriate for what he believed was happening. Events like Peterloo were the manifestation of something deeper, of a profound subversion of justice; his poem Hellas, two years later, would describe such a condition as that of ‘Ruin above, and anarchy below’ (524:268). But what is most remarkable of all about The Mask of Anarchy is that, for the first time, Shelley struck out what was even for him a new kind of writing: simple, direct, memorable at first reading or hearing. The ‘indignant Earth’ speaks with ‘an accent unwithstood’: Men of England, heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her, and one another; Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to Earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few. (361:139,145,147–155) That final irresistible call is perhaps the finest line in Shelley’s new writing: no‐one before ever having set down such a simple but prodigiously revolutionary fact.

The Mask is a surprisingly long poem (376 lines): its companion piece, written probably a couple of months later, is the sonnet we have come to call ‘England in 1819’:11 of Shelleyan complexity and, as usual in such work by him, intensely compacted. It lists, in six lines, the exponents of rule (King, royal family, government): it sets against them a single line about those ruled (‘A people starved and stabbed on th’untilled field’): proceeds through five lines listing the arms of authority (army, laws, religion and Parliament)  –  and then, in a final couplet, declares all these things to be ‘graves’, ‘from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our ­tempestuous day’ (405–406:7–14). Leaving aside for a moment the question of what kind of an ending that is, the first 12 lines are cogent and resonant, in spite of being constructed as a catalogue 252



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without a main verb. George III, in the first line, is simply gifted five adjectives: ‘old, mad, blind, despised and dying’.The seven royal princes are ‘dregs of their dull race’, and, being dregs, naturally ‘flow / Through public scorn’. But the poem’s extended metaphor does not stop there: they are also ‘mud from a muddy spring’, dirtily flowing from grubby royal origins (405:1,2–3). The army so savagely employed at Peterloo is a ‘two‐edged sword to all who wield’, making it not just dangerous for those upon whom it is used but potentially lethal to its users too: and what makes an army like that is ‘liberticide and prey’ (405:8–9). ‘Prey’ suggests what the army smells and hunts down, but ‘liberticide’ is odder and rarer. It was a word which by 1793 had entered the English language from the French,12 originally as an adjective (‘liberty‐killing’) to describe factions around the French royal family attempting to stop the Revolution. It became a noun over the next two years, used by Cobbett and then by Southey in his revolutionary poem Joan of Arc in 1796, which may have been Shelley’s provocation to adopt it. It had always been a rallying‐cry of the ­radical and the revolutionary; Shelley had first used it in May 1818, in his unfinished poem ‘Mazenghi’,13 and in the late autumn of 1819 he employed it in his Philosophical View of Reform (646). And it appears in ‘England in 1819.’ The army becomes an autonomous hunter, provoked by its job of killing liberty. ‘England in 1819’ was another unpublishable poem. Shelley sent it to Hunt on 23 December: ‘I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please.’14 And thus it became another work for private circulation only, as Shelley was well aware. Its ending has, however, troubled some.There is some overlap with Shelley’s pamphlet An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, written almost exactly two years earlier, 11–12 November 1817, and quoted at the start of Chapter 18. But there are more differences than similarities. The 1817 pamphlet can put a name to the ‘glorious Phantom’ which might arise from the grave (‘the Spirit of Liberty’). The 1819 poem imagines literal glory, i­llumination, unexpectedly bursting out of the troops of the dead and deadly it has constructed.These are the things which may illuminate. The more we look at the parallel, the less it looks like one: Shelley has at last realised what he could do with his (dead) metaphor. The critic F. R. Leavis nevertheless thought Shelley’s ‘Phantom’ ‘as vague as Demogorgon and as unrelated to actuality’.The reference to Demogorgon was very sharp of Leavis: with Spenser’s ‘Great Gorgon’ in mind, Shelley had tried out ‘Gorgon’ where the final draft of the poem would have ‘Phantom.’15 But Shelley only says it may illuminate ‘our tempestuous day’: that is, the world sketched by the poem, as yet mysterious to almost everyone living in it. The poem, like the Phantom, is doing its best to be a sudden burst of illumination. It may be one. But the poem claims no more than that, despite widespread critical assumption that it aims at  –  or even achieves – much more (‘The figure of a sudden apparition…delivers the oppressed’16). The poem remains totally uncertain whether any illumination might result from the contemplation of such graves, or might assist change, even if it resulted; while ‘Burst’, 253



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positioned as it is, almost inevitably suggests something exploding and destroying. Critics and biographers have been far too optimistic about Shelley’s optimism: the word ‘may’ is a hinge between optimism and pessimism.

It seems right to see such writing not just as ‘political’ but as primarily satirical, in its concentration on the comically characterised (obviously the princes: but in the older sense of comic, even George III, with the five monstrous adjectives c­ ulminating in the small word ‘King’). Not many readers of the poetry, thinking of Shelley’s output between 1819 and 1821, would single out as especially significant ‘Peter Bell the Third’ or ‘Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee?’, ‘To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]’ or Swellfoot the Tyrant, or the incomplete but fascinating ‘A Satire upon Satire’, though all in fact have a great deal to offer the modern reader. Attention to Shelley’s witty and often satirical intelligence reveals the standpoint − which might well remind us of Pope’s position in writing The Dunciad − of one who felt qualified to survey not only his poetic contemporaries but the social and political worlds he knew (we should not forget Shelley’s own potential career as an MP and his political contacts with Henry Brougham in 1817). It is hard to imagine ‘Peter Bell the Third’ or Swellfoot being interesting to the Shelley of 1813, or even of 1816, but they seem entirely natural to the Shelley of 1819 and 1820. Such an approach does something to disable the attitude to Shelley first propounded by Hazlitt in 1821, and which remained a kind of touchstone for much subsequent appreciation: that Shelley ‘does not grapple with the world about him, but slides from it like a river’, being ‘drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation and fancy’. It is a charge made many times, as in Leavis’s 1936 insistence on Shelley’s ‘weak grasp of the actual’.17 Writing like ‘England in 1819’ shows just how serious and bitterly comic a writer Shelley was. Although he would complain that Byron’s Don Juan was satire depending on ‘the bitter mockery of our common nature’18 – and ‘our common nature’ was what Shelley insisted he wanted to reveal and defend, not what he wanted to target – in practice he allowed himself to be every bit as bitter as Byron. It may well have been (as he suggests in ‘A Satire upon Satire’) that taking a judgemental line, in poetry, was reminiscent of the judgemental line commonly taken by politicians and priests: and with such people he did not want to associate himself. The bitterest pieces of writing he did remained unpublished, mostly as incomplete drafts showing every sign of being composed with relish. How about linking the three great poets of the age as political renegades? Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee? Proteus Coleridge, who shall find thee? Hyperprotean Proteus, Southey, 254



  1819  Who shall catch thee, who shall know thee? Hecate and the Trinity Are but feeble types of thee, Thou polyhedric polyglot And polymorph[…] I know what, Hundred‐headed lump of change;19

All are able to change shape – and thus side and opinion – at will, but are summed up in the most disliked, Southey, whom Shelley believed to have been the author of the savage attack on him in the Quarterly Review, and who had remarked that ‘he…knew me to be the blackest of villains’.20 When he thought this through, in his ‘Satire upon Satire’, Shelley found himself arguing from the proposition that if threats of violence, execution and hell were the only way ‘To make men just’ – and that sending out ‘priests to every hearth and home / To preach the burning wrath which is to come’ actually worked – then the best way to deal with Robert Southey would be to treat him with equivalent ­violence: ‘Lash on, and be the keen verse dipped in flame.’The person to write that kind of satire was Byron, both in his Dedication of Don Juan to Southey and then – attacked again by the Preface to Southey’s poem A Vision of Judgment – s­urpassing himself in his own response, The Vision of Judgment. When Shelley had heard Byron read aloud the Dedication to Don Juan, he had imagined just how Southey ‘will writhe under the lash’. It was Southey whom Shelley judged not just for that hateful review, but for spreading untruths about his conduct to Harriett, and about how he and Byron had the ‘League of Incest’21 with Mary and Claire in 1816 (Byron was entirely c­ onvinced of Southey’s culpability in that slander, and had convinced Shelley). So what was to be done? The answer would seem to be for the satirist to resort to priest‐like condemnation: ‘Flash on his sight the spectres of the past’ – all the things that once upon a time he had done and said. There would be no point in holding back any of the ‘armoury of hate and fear’.22 There is evidence of Shelley doing exactly that; Southey would figure several times in ‘Peter Bell the Third’, as written in the autumn of 1819: There is a S—th—y, who has lost His wits, or sold them, none knows which: He walks about a double ghost, And though as thin as Fraud almost— Ever grows more grim and rich. And there is a cheerful passing reference to ‘Pantisocratists’23 – recalling the utopian schemes of Southey and Coleridge in the 1790s: spectres from the past, indeed. But  the ‘Satire upon Satire’ in turn suggests that such satire is wrong. ‘Suffering makes suffering  –  ill must follow ill.’ For, after all, ‘all men should be friends & 255



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equals’24 (though, having written that line, Shelley deleted it: the poem’s satire of itself was getting too unreal). Wasn’t the real answer not to write or publish satire at all? Conversation between the parties would arguably be Far better than to make innocent ink With the stagnant truisms of trite Satire stink. Why not just tell Southey in a friendly way what he was doing? If any friend would take Southey some day And tell him, in a country walk alone, Softening harsh truths with friendship’s gentle tone, How incorrect his public conduct is And what men think of it – ’twere not amiss…25 Shelley would go so far as to suggest this himself to Southey himself, during a furious (if frigidly polite) exchange of letters between July and the autumn of 1820. Southey believed in Shelley’s ‘guilt’ – his responsibility for Harriett’s death – but Shelley still hoped that things might be different: ‘I hope some day to meet you in London, and ten minutes of conversation is worth ten folios of writing.’ Not for Southey, all the same: ‘here, sir, our correspondence must end’ he told Shelley. He regretted ever ‘having been led into it’.26 Well, the ‘Satire upon Satire’ had already started to peter out at that point; either because Shelley no longer believed in what he was saying (knowing his own desire to denounce Southey to his face) or because the poem had begun to end, anyway… but one final line suggests how Shelley had come to view the idea of private conversation as a proper corrective mode: Disdain and anger – such as – hear me Sir Those last five words perfectly capture the impatient helplessness of the person ­trying to put someone (like Southey) right who is, after all, refusing to attend. ‘Will you just listen’ he shouts. So much for friendship and equality, for the ‘sweet fountains of our nature’27 on which the poem has dwelled so lovingly. In reality, people are so annoying that you lose patience.There’s enough in the words ‘hear me Sir’ to make an author abandon his poem, as he starts to realise its impotence. Satire had allowed Shelley to get his teeth into what he really disliked, to offer a wickedly clever and wickedly funny new way of seeing the world. An acquaintance thought him – exactly as his family had always done – ‘full of life and fun’, and he himself happily suggested that the enormous nose of his friend John Gisborne ‘weighs on the imagination to look at it’. Claire, too, never forgot how ‘S. cd be very 256



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funny’ and could laugh ‘immensely’.28 When he was young, he had been far too confident to bother with any such thing as conflict except of an ideal kind, to be dealt with idealistically: and that sort of youthful confidence lingered deep into his twenties, far longer than we might have expected. In the spring of 1820, excited by reports that the Spanish King had been forced by a military uprising to restore the Constitution of 1812, The Examiner would produce a series of news items about what it saw as a radically new situation for the country; and Shelley would develop his optimism about the future via the stream of images he would deploy in his (at times) rather grotesque ‘Ode to Liberty.’ In his poetry from 1819 onwards, it was nearly always when he was at his angriest or most depressed – or most playful – that he wrote best: not when he was indulging his hopes.

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The Shelleys had never regarded the Villa Valsovano in Livorno as anything else than a temporary retreat in time of trouble.They were still looking for a place in Italy to settle: and a stone‐floored‐house which had been comfortably airy late in June was, by the end of September, cold and draughty: not only had it no fireplaces but it let the wind in ‘on every side’.1 The previous year they had planned to go to Florence, but then had followed their residence in Este, their desperate journey to Venice, and the terrible time of their daughter Clara’s death, followed by depression and pain in Naples, and the death of the boy William in Rome. They were not going to return to Naples, nor to Rome; it was time to try somewhere new. Mary’s health (she was now seven months pregnant) was the dominant consideration – and Dr Bell was going to be in Florence in the autumn. Shelley went there with Charles Clairmont (on a visit to Italy) at the end of September to look at rooms in a house owned by a friend of the Gisbornes, Madame Merveilleux du Plantis, and though (with his mind running on politics) he thought Florence only ‘the ghost of a republic’, as a city it possessed ‘most amiable qualities’.2 He took what were supposed to be ‘good apartments, comfortably furnished’, with a garden at the back, in the quiet du Plantis house, planning to spend six months there (the apartments cost £30 for six months, £20 for a quarter). By 4 October they were settled into the new place, which had no space for a study for Shelley, something to which the Villa Valsovano had accustomed him; the lack of one left him ‘irritated to death’3 (somehow he seems to have acquired one by January). As it turned out, they stayed in Florence for only four months, ‘cooped up in narrow rooms’ during the severest winter the city had experienced for 60 years, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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with Shelley suffering even more pain than usual. It was perhaps around now that, in an effort to control the problem, he started distilling the water he drank. He needed, he believed, water with a high alkaline quotient, which left him ‘much relieved’. But although he ended up, in April 1820, feeling that he had ‘done nothing’4 during the winter, he had achieved a vast amount. One idea had been with him for some time. Back in the summer of 1819, he had learned from Hunt’s Examiner that Wordsworth was publishing a new poem, Peter Bell (he also read that it had taken 19 years for Wordsworth to complete it). From another source he learned that a few days before the poem’s publication a parody calling itself Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad, by John Hamilton Reynolds, had appeared: this had had great fun with the characters of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. But quoted in The Examiner was a stanza of the authentically Wordsworthian Peter Bell which delighted Shelley: it showed Peter visioning something under water, while revealing just how savage Wordsworth was prepared to be about polite society. Is it a party in a parlour? Cramm’d just as they on earth were cramm’d— Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all damn’d! Three separate reviewers would single out that stanza as reprehensible – ‘Fie, fie, Mr. Wordsworth!’5 Shelley, however, was very taken with it, repeating it to Byron and using it as the epigraph for his own burlesque satire,‘Peter Bell the Third’, written in the stanza form of Wordsworth’s original (Hunt had sent him both Wordsworth’s poem and Reynolds’s parody). But Wordsworth himself never saw ‘Peter Bell the Third’; his 1839 edition of Shelley did not include it.6 Shelley had grown up admiring Wordsworth as the great modern poet; as late as December 1811 he had exulted in the way that Wordsworth ‘retains the integrity of his independence’ although ‘his poverty is such that he is frequently obliged to beg for a shirt to his back’.7 In his Preface to ‘Peter Bell the Third’, Shelley would recall an extract from Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ which had appeared in The Friend in 1809 and had reappeared (in a slightly different form) in Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems: Wordsworth’s declaration of his dedication to the very world, which is the world Of all of us, the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all! The emotional power of those lines lies ‘in the suggestion of communality or sharedness with which “we” are acquainted with “our” (plural pronouns) world’.8 259



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Shelley had read the lines as a radical, moving call for change. But Wordsworth was now producing not only poetry like The Excursion but, in 1816, patriotic propaganda such as his Thanksgiving Ode.This was reason enough for Shelley’s creation of a Peter Bell (Wordsworth himself) who is, to use the term Wordsworth himself employed, ‘Damned since our first Parents fell, / Damned eternally to Hell— / Surely he deserves it well!’ In Shelley’s poem, the devil buys Peter for half‐a‐crown and goes to the Lakes to get him: Then there came down from Langdale Pike A cloud with lightning, wind and hail; It swept over the mountains like An Ocean,—and I heard it strike The woods and crags of Grasmere vale. (375:56–60) Shelley knew that landscape from his 1811 visit. Peter crazily writes ‘odes to the Devil’ about ‘Carnage and Slaughter, / Thy niece and thy daughter’ (393:634,636– 637) (in his Thanksgiving Ode, Wordsworth had remarked of God: ‘Carnage is thy daughter’9) before finally growing respectable. His punishment is to have his writing turn impossibly dull, and for the dullness to spread not just to his reviewers but to his servants, dogs and kitten: ‘All grew dull as Peter’s self ’ (396:738–742). For many of Wordsworth’s readers, The Excursion had marked the point at which admiration gave way to a sense of loss, and Shelley suggests, in brilliantly alliterative phrases, how that poem had provided curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic‐stricken understanding. (391 n)

The central subjects of Wordsworth’s poems had barely changed, and the same penetrating sensibility lay behind them – and yet the sensibility had hardened, the ‘panic‐stricken understanding’ had found its consolation in Christianity and its security in ‘the feudal Power yet surviving in England’.10 It was tempting to upset such security by writing wicked things about the great man: Shelley drafted three lines about the youthful Wordsworth, for example: He of the pantheistic schism, Was, one immense concealed Don Juanism Committed He acted in his seventeenth year11 A lovely rhyme…though the lines were, sadly, unusable in ‘Peter Bell the Third’, their planned destination: being untrue both about the age and the Don Juanism. But Shelley could not resist identifying Wordsworth’s new ‘panic‐stricken’ state 260



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with the reaction which had brought about Peterloo: ‘Slash them at Manchester’ runs one of Peter’s odes (393:644) But Shelley could still respond to what a great poet Wordsworth had also been. An unused stanza insisted that ‘The beam‐anatomising prism / Of his keen spirit once was clear’:12 the prism, to Shelley’s scientific mind, not just dividing up the beam of light into its different colours but laying it open for analysis – as Wordsworth’s poetry had once laid the world open. On the one hand, burlesque of Wordsworth’s limitations allowed Shelley to be thoroughly disrespectful: He had as much imagination   As a pint‐pot:—he never could Fancy another situation From which to dart his contemplation,   Than that wherein he stood. (382:296,298–302) But Shelley also felt compelled to add stanzas of praise and insight: Yet his was individual mind,   And new‐created all he saw In a new manner, and refined Those new creations, and combined   Them by a master‐spirit’s law, That last line drew on Wordsworth’s own words ‘master spirit’ to describe poets like Marvell and Milton, who are able to teach ‘what strength was’:13 Thus—though unimaginative,   An apprehension clear, intense, Of his mind’s work, had made alive The things it wrought on; I believe   Wakening a sort of thought in sense. (383:303–312) Shelley is saying more precisely what Coleridge had suggested in his praise of Wordsworth’s ‘union of deep feeling with profound thought’.14

The poem was one of the first fruits of the Shelleys’ residence in Florence, and was apparently written during the second half of October. It reflected the energetic, imaginative and witty side of Shelley to which attention still needs to be drawn – and which to some extent Shelley himself denigrated. It is, for example, striking 261



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that – within a few days of finishing it – he should have written so disparagingly of ‘Peter Bell the Third’, calling it a ‘party squib’, insisting that he had ‘only expended a few days’ on it (‘& of course taken little pains’), and declaring it ‘a trifle unworthy of me seriously to acknowledge’.15 The important word is ‘seriously’. He was increasingly anxious about the reception of what he thought of as his serious work, and was conscious that he was ‘about to publish more serious things’ (Prometheus Unbound was on the point of appearing). ‘Peter Bell’ – a brilliant example of savage fun – must not be allowed to undermine the chances of the other poem. Shelley remarked about it that ‘The verses & language, I have let come as they would’,16 but by 1819 his instinctive control of his writing was such that what he simply ‘let come’ could not only be remarkable but be even more valuable than the ­consciously artful work.

One of the walks on which he, Mary and Claire also regularly embarked (until Mary’s pregnancy made it difficult for her) was through the wooded park of the Cascine on the north bank of the Arno, outside the Florence city walls; the fragment ‘A lone wood walk’ may well belong to this period, perhaps to the time when Mary was obliged to stay at home for the birth of her son Percy Shelley –  the only one of their children to live to maturity (he would not die until 1889) – on 12 November. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ was conceived in the Cascine, ­perhaps on the date 25 October inscribed on one of the manuscripts. As he recalled it a couple of months later, Shelley had started a poem describing ‘that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating’: wind prefiguring rain – and by the end of October in Florence, ‘We have had rains enough’, ‘as the Scirocco blows’.17 He would certainly have agreed with Goethe’s remark at the end of his poem ‘Nature and Art’ (appropriately a sonnet) of 1800: ‘It is in limitation that the master first shows himself, / And only regulation can give us freedom’. Donald H. Reiman counted Shelley between 1819 and 1820 making six experiments with terza rima.18 This metrical form had been irregularly experimented with in English (Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney and Milton had all used it on occasion), being notable for its ‘confinement and difficulty’; sufficiently uncommon for William Hayley, translating Dante’s Inferno in 1782, to believe that it had not previously been used in English, and for Byron early in 1820 to know no better: terza rima (‘of which your British Blackguard reader as yet understands nothing’) had not been ‘tried in our language, except it may be by Mr. Hayley’.19 It had been Shelley’s reading of Dante in Milan, in April 1818, which had accustomed him to the form, but now in Florence he also made each stanza of his new terza rima poem a sonnet, with a final couplet: thus confining himself to two of the strictest regulations a poet can employ. 262



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What is more, the first draft shows exactly how the first sonnet – or stanza – came into being and how terza rima came to be its guiding principle. The form emerged and took over. Shelley first wrote the confident line O wild West Wind thou breath of Autumns being But found the next three lines, obviously completing a quatrain, much harder:        from whose unseen presence                    spring Thou, which before whose swift path gather                 dead leaves                     dead Gather, & Are driven, like ghosts from an                 enchanter fleeing   Pestilence stricken nations     Yellow & black & pale & hectic red20 He was inserting rhyme words before filling in the lines leading to them; he had rhymes for lines 1 and 3 (‘being’ and ‘fleeing’, with ‘spring’ in reserve) and also for lines 2 and what became 4 (‘dead’ and ‘red’). It was only when the phrase ‘dark wintry bed’ emerged – suggesting a potential structure using three rhymes ‐ that terza rima became the way forward. This was what he was working out: O wild West Wind thou breath of Autumns being Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing Pestilence stricken nations Yellow & black & pale & hectic red       stricken multitudes thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold & low Like a dead body in a grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring doth blow Her clarion oer the dreaming earth, & fill With radiant flowers & living leaves The atmosphere investing plain & hill O spirit which art moving everywhere Destroyer & Preserver hear o hear21 263



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In line 12 as first drafted, ‘leaves’ had no partnering rhyme; the rule which Shelley finally evolved would demand that it rhyme with the final couplet, in welding sonnet with terza rima. The stanza was, nonetheless, two‐thirds and more there. Although these pencil lines may indeed have been scribbled down in the wood beside the Arno on 25 October, the whole poem was equally clearly not ‘chiefly written’ that day, only commenced; but (far more significantly) its elegant structure invented itself out of the work Shelley was doing. The poem he had thus begun to write would eventually consist of five terza rima sonnets.The first concentrated on the wind and the leaves, the second on cloud and storm, the third on the effect on the sea. The fourth stanza, however, marked a radical departure: the structure of the Ode (up to then appealing each time to the West Wind: ‘O hear!’) is interrupted by a narratorial ‘I’ who intensely regrets the loss of his own boyhood when he was, he reckons, like the wind: ‘tameless, and swift, and proud’. He sees himself now as ‘chained and bowed’ (400:55–56) – and ‘chained’ may well come with the force it would have in Epipsychidion in 1821, suggesting a partnership not only binding but imprisoning. The narrator is also confident that – when young – he would never have ‘striven / As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need’, or needed to pray ‘Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’ (400:51–52,61–62) He would just have stormed off in imagination (and self‐admiration) to be the wind’s ‘comrade’ in ‘thy wanderings over Heaven’ (400:49). Such a younger self sounds both attractive and unbearable: the older self has at least the decency to admit himself caught on ‘the thorns of life’ (400:54), though self‐pity is an inevitable concomitant, along with a suspicion that the political ideas in his writing, which he would have liked to see driven over the universe, may in reality only be ‘dead thoughts’: ‘Ashes and sparks.’ It is hard to be confident that such things might ‘quicken a new birth’ in an ‘unawakened Earth’; it seems possible that the ‘incantation’ (400:63–68) of the verse might manage it, but there is little cause for optimism. Stanzas drafted in the run‐up to the poem had even suggested that, for such a narrator, ‘as my hopes were fire, so my despair decay / Shall be as ashes covering them.’22 This lack of confidence in the ending of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is summed up perfectly in its last two lines, with their attempt at optimism and their too‐­ easily‐answered question: ‘O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ (400:69–70). An Octoberish answer would be ‘Yes, a very, very long way behind: winter hasn’t even started yet.’ It’s an unwise – if also the right – question to ask a howling autumnal wind: Shelley only in fact cast it in question‐form after inscribing the aphorism ‘When Winter comes Spring lags not far behind.’ But even ‘lags’ wasn’t enough to damp down the assertiveness, and for a poet who wanted to temper his ending ‘with uncertainty’,23 a question was even better. 264



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The poem has been more effective in suggesting the ‘heavy weight of hours’ bearing down on its narrator than in suggesting relief and escape; what is most uplifting about it is the display of skill in its versification and making. That is where the incantation lies; that is what has kept the poem effective.What must in October 1819 have felt like the folly of believing in the power of poetry to disseminate ideas would eventually turn into the success of a widely anthologised and much‐loved poem. But not in Shelley’s lifetime, and probably not for him. It is also a striking poem for a writer with Shelley’s political and satirical ambitions to have produced: so inherently doubtful about ‘my words among mankind’, about the way ‘my leaves are falling’ (from the trees, from his papers on the table, metaphorically from the man himself). But any writer with those marvellous but entirely unpublishable poems currently in London with Hunt should be excused such feelings. The autumn of 1819 saw the best of Hunt’s own generous attempts to respond to Shelley’s reviewers (in particular to the attacks of John Taylor Coleridge), but it was also a time which Shelley thought a desperate one in the history of his country for the way expression was increasingly controlled and suppressed (he was ‘struck with horror at the proceedings in England’: ‘These, my dear Hunt, are awful times’24). But he was angry, not depressed; he would spend three days in November, immediately after his ‘West Wind’ poem, writing an enormous letter to The Examiner about the trial of Richard Carlile in London for blasphemous libel. Carlile had published the third part of Paine’s Age of Reason, with its arguments for Deism; simply for that, he would be sentenced to a fine of £1500 and three years’ imprisonment, but as he refused to pay he would have to spend another three years in jail. Shelley protested as forcibly as he could in his letter: ‘The event…has filled me with an indignation that will not & ought not to be suppressed.’25 But Hunt again found Shelley’s writing too dangerous for The Examiner, and the letter went the way of The Mask, ‘England in 1819’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’: unpublished, unpublishable.

Not only had Shelley managed ‘Peter Bell the Third’ and his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ at the start of his time in Florence, in the wake of his letter to The Examiner he started to compose much of what survives of A Philosophical View of Reform, which was one of the most notable pieces of writing he ever did. He would inform the Gisbornes on 6 November that ‘I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics’; he finished his work in May. He would also produce the short essay ‘Love’: and a fourth Act for Prometheus Unbound. It was a wonderful series of achievements, in the teeth of illness. But the Shelleys had had almost no social life in Florence, which may have helped: ‘They see no 265



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company and live quite to themselves’26 wrote one of their housemates, rather shocked. This was the elegant Sophia Stacey, the ward of Shelley’s uncle Robert Parker, visiting Italy with a travelling companion and viewing a notorious member of the family in exile. But Mary was, too, agonised by the news that her father was in desperate straits financially, while Shelley had never felt the pains in his side worse: ‘he never in any other winter suffered such constant pain there’, noted Mary. He could not disguise his condition even from Sophia (‘Mr Shelley was talking to me when he was seized with spasms’27). Sophia, however, sang to the piano and to the harp – and, polite as ever, and always loving music, Shelley produced songs for her, almost certainly in the same metres as those in which he had heard her sing; he may have written especially for her, but probably also dug out suitable old things written for Claire. He produced for Sophia the kind of album poetry which subsequently did his reputation no good at all: ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’, ‘The odour from the flower is gone’, ‘Like the ghost of a dear friend dead’,‘The Fountains mingle with the River’,‘Time Long past’ and ‘Goodnight? no love, the night is ill’ – all these went to Sophia. She had a ‘sweet voice’ and ‘sings well for an English delettanti’, Mary ironically assented, but then noted – with the savagery she usually directed at someone refusing to do the work – ‘if she would learn the scales would sing exceedingly well’.28 On the one hand we need to acknowledge Shelley’s capacity to write resourcefully within the emotionally restricting conventions of the salon lyric; as gentleman poet, he could produce whatever was required. On the other, we need to ensure that such poems are not confused with other lyrics doing very different things. There has been some unnecessary attention paid to the entirely conventional Sophia Stacey poems, with biographers seeing them as ‘passionate love lyrics’, ‘erotic verses’ revealing Shelley imagining himself lying ‘between Sophia’s breasts’, recalling how she ‘kissed him’.29 She – and he – would have been outraged at any such idea. During the winter, Shelley had grown more and more keen to move to Pisa, where his health might be helped by the physician Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri (1772–1826), strongly recommended by Margaret Mason (1773–1835), another friend of the Gisbornes, an unconventional Englishwoman separated from her husband and living in Pisa, whom the Shelleys had met and liked back in August, and whom Claire would eventually adopt as a kind of second mother.30 The Shelleys also had problems with the ‘most formidable’ Mme. Merveilleux du Plantis: in December, Mary commented that ‘her head is a sive [sic] & her temper worse than wildfire it is gunpowder’. In the event the Shelleys suddenly left Florence two months early, at eight in the morning on 26 January 1820, ‘flown to Pisa’ (as Mary put it), travelling not in the old carriage31 but by boat, down the Arno; so that – after 20 months of not settling in Pisa, for various reasons  –  at last they did so; they quickly found lodgings in the Casa Frassi on the north bank of the Arno and had moved in by 29 January. 266



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In their rooms in Pisa they still had not much more space, though they may well have been aware from the start of the possibility of, later on, moving higher up in the house. But Shelley needed a doctor, came to like and trust Vaccà, and was pleased to discover over the next 18 months that ‘At Pisa I need not distill my water’:32 he suffered fewer spasms. Their months in Florence should all the same be celebrated for the marvellous outpouring of intelligence, wit and moral concern which characterised Shelley’s writing there. He remained unstoppable, despite the pain which assaulted him.

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On 26 May 1820, Shelley asked Hunt if he could advise him about the publication of a short book, A Philosophical View of Reform, which was, he claimed, ‘boldly but temperately written – & I think readable’. He had announced from Florence in December that he had ‘an octavo on reform’1 under way, and he now wanted to show a publisher what he had done, incomplete as it was. But no publisher saw it; and although she made a fair copy, Mary, too, decided not to bring the book into print, perhaps because Shelley would later use passages from it almost verbatim in his ‘Defence of Poetry.’ Much of it is amazingly ambitious. Its first chapter attempts a comprehensive survey of the movements towards liberty which Shelley had discerned, and offers examples not just from Europe but from Persia, Syria and Arabia, India and the West Indies. Some of these accounts seem rather unreliable, and might have appeared so to Shelley’s contemporaries. But it is an unfinished work; and even though at times the prose is not especially ‘readable’,2 there are brilliant moments, as when – describing how the power of the rich has increased – Shelley argues that ‘The name & office of King is merely the mask of this power’, and (an interlinear insertion) ‘Monarchy is only the string which ties the robbers bundle.’ He also argues for ‘generous enthusiasm’ in political argument: ‘It is in politics rather than in religion that faith is meritorious.—’3 An especially revealing moment comes in his account of what would happen after the Reform he favours. He points out that not everyone who would be adversely affected by such Reform is opposed to it: ‘There are individuals who can

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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be just judges even against themselves’, he suggests, and – ‘by study and self examination’  –  they are capable of judging in favour of ‘the greater number’.4 He is thinking of himself, and his own ‘unjust advantage’ as someone with a private income. He insists on his duty of responsibility; people like him must ‘take the lead in reform’, in an attempt to prevent a popular revolution. He confirms that privilege as currently established confers considerable obligations, and the writing he is doing demonstrates how he hopes to meet some of them. He retains, however, the basic outlook of one of his own class when confronted by ‘the poor’, who – he believes – are ‘sufficiently incapable of discerning their own genuine & permanent advantage’,5 and who need the guiding hand of the gentry. The chapters are full of energy and of practical suggestions (confronting armed soldiers with passive resistance, for example); it was typical of Shelley, too, that he should have insisted on the importance of sexual intercourse in the lives of those who have little money and less hope. He also admits that he would not personally award women the suffrage, but that this opinion may be simply ‘the result of despondency’ (‘depression or dejection of spirits through loss of resolution or hope’: he knows that he is not as hopeful as he ought to be). It is a book which, if it had been finished and published, would also have done something to alter his reputation as one who ‘does not grapple with the world about him’,6 although it would not have helped his reputation for sexual immorality. As it was, it vanished for nearly a hundred years.

His new thinking was even more striking. A letter which is a poem (or a poem which is also a letter) is especially fascinating for a literary biographer: but in the case of Shelley in 1820, another letter makes the poem still more intriguing.7 The Shelleys had first met Maria and John Gisborne – and Maria’s son by her first marriage, Henry Reveley, a marine engineer who lived with them – in Livorno in May 1818, spending time with them in 1818 and again during the desperate summer of 1819. John Gisborne ‘knows I cannot tell how many languages and has read almost all the books you can think of ’, Henry had ‘very great talents as a mechanic & engineer’, and Maria was ‘a very aimiable accomplished, & completely unprejudiced woman’: ‘a woman of sense’ Margaret Mason thought her. The Shelleys grew close, especially to Maria (Shelley found John Gisborne ‘an excessive bore’8): the Gisbornes were among the very few people to know about Elena Adelaide Shelley in Naples, and letters from Maria were long and warm‐hearted. During the Shelleys’ time in Florence in the late autumn and winter of 1819, and following their move to Pisa at the end of January 1820, Mary wrote and wrote to Maria Gisborne. And in Pisa they were again within range of the Gisbornes in Livorno. Starting in October 1819, Shelley had, too, been giving Henry all he could 269



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afford and more besides (something in excess of £270, all told) towards the building of the steamboat which had become Henry’s great project. Shelley exercised – both playfully and practically – his powers in describing ‘the birth of the cylinder’ and in applying this model ‘to the creation of the universe’:‘God sees his machine spinning round the sun & delights in its success, & has taken out patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture.’9 Shelley stayed with the Gisbornes in their Casa Ricci 3–6 March 1820, on a visit to Livorno; he also seems to have temporarily borrowed money from them about which he wrote to them on 8 March, with details of how it would be repaid, and the grateful comment: ‘A thousand thanks for your kindness & interest in me. Rivers flow to the sea which is rich in fatness; who ever heard before of them ­hastening to the barren wilderness—’:10 a phrase elegantly characterising his feelings about his own prospects. It was, too, almost certainly during this visit that he learned that the whole Gisborne family planned to go to England in May, and that Maria Gisborne reflected on the prospect ‘with horror’. Three days after his thank‐you note of the 8th, Mary and he both wrote letters to the Gisbornes suggesting that, instead, Maria might like to stay behind and live with them in Pisa. They were on the point of moving upstairs in the Casa Frassi to more spacious accommodation on an upper floor: ‘two bed rooms 2 sitting rooms kitchen servants rooms nicely furnished’, ‘very clean & new’, all for ‘4 guineas & a ½ a month’.11 Shelley saw Mary’s letter, but did not show her his own, and almost certainly did not tell her that he had written (he asked the Gisbornes to reply to him ‘at the Post’, so that Mary would not see their answer). He offered Maria Gisborne good reasons for staying in Italy: she was not needed for her husband’s business part of the journey, it would save them money if she did not go, and she would, ‘save the exhaustion of spirits, and perhaps of health’ contingent on travelling. But there were more and very worrying reasons for his letter, too, going back to the death of William in June 1819. Shelley was as honest as he could be, to someone he felt he could trust: Mary has resigned herself, especially since the death of her child, to a train of thoughts, which if not cut off, cannot but conduct to some fatal end. Ill temper and irritation at the familiar events of life are among the external marks of this inward change, and by being freely yielded to, they exasperate the spirit, of which they are expressions. Unfortunately I, though not ill tempered, am irritable, and the effect produced on me, awakens the instinct of the power which annoys me in her, and which exists independently of her strong understanding, and of her better feelings, for Mary is certainly capable of the most exalted goodness—If she could be restrained from the expression of her inward sufferings, the sufferings themselves, the cause having become obsolete, would subside—A new habit of sentiment would take place—But all my attempts to restrain exasperate—

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  1820  It needs a slight weight to turn the scale to good or evil. Mary considers me as a p­ ortion of herself, and feels no more remorse in torturing me than in torturing her own mind—Could she suddenly know a person in every way my equal, and hold close and perpetual communion with him, as a distinct being from herself; as a friend instead of a husband, she would obtain empire over herself that she might not make him miserable—In seeking to make another happy, she would find her own happiness— All this would change its aspect if Mrs. Gisborne came on a visit to us—Mary has the highest opinion of her intellectual faculties, and, I believe, a greater affection for her personally, than for any one else—Her presence would be a perpetual friendly check upon all evil, and a point round which all good would rally—How many ­persons have become moral ruins for want of a friend!12

It was an extraordinary appeal. But Maria Gisborne did not come. All we know is that, within a week of getting these letters from the Shelleys, the Gisbornes had politely turned down the idea of Maria remaining behind, though it seems likely that one or both of them also wrote to Shelley ‘at the Post’. On 1 May 1820, they left for England, as planned: they were away until 5 October. When in the 1830s Mary recovered the letters she and Shelley had sent to the Gisbornes, she almost certainly found – and, if so, destroyed – Shelley’s original letter of 11 March; it would have constituted another of the shocks which ­disrupted her duty of widowhood. A copy of the letter previously made by John Gisborne – he had copied huge numbers of letters between the families – nevertheless survives. Shelley tells Maria Gisborne that Mary not only torments herself with grief but torments him too. Being permanently the victim of ‘her inward sufferings’, she copes badly (if at all) with the troubles of the everyday; such things confirm her grief, and increase it. Shelley’s attempts to stop her grieving exasperate her even more; he feels under attack all the time so that, reacting against ‘the instinct of the power which annoys me in her’ – the old, imperious self which Godwin had seen in Mary when she was 14 – he quarrels with her. The fact that, in April 1820, he would feel that he had ‘done nothing’ recently may suggest that these feelings had especially developed during the period January to March 1820. Another remarkable sentence is: ‘Mary considers me as a portion of herself, and feels no more remorse in torturing me than in torturing her own mind.’ She does not consider the way she hurts him: she takes him utterly for granted. Significantly, nothing really seems to have changed since he had scribbled down those fragments of ‘My dearest M.’ the previous August, except that by April 1820 he had come to fear that what was happening between him and Mary would lead ‘to some fatal end’. If literally meant, then either he would kill her, or she would kill him, or one of them would kill him‐ or herself. If figuratively meant, which is more likely, then they would separate. 271



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From this point on in Shelley’s life, at least, we need to evade, so far as possible, Mary’s numerous attempts later in life to suggest that they continued to the end as a loving couple. There is little enough evidence either way, which is why what ­survives – like this letter – draws particular attention to itself. But it also helps us stay not too far removed from the realities of the situation. It is not surprising that Maria Gisborne failed to come and live with the Shelleys. It must have sounded a rather alarming prospect, and she was (anyway) committed to her husband and son. But it demonstrated Shelley’s desperation that he should have revealed so much in his letter; one which also demonstrated his capacity to analyse and objectively describe feelings and responses.

Another worry around now was that it had become clear to Mary and Shelley that Byron was not going to allow Claire to see Allegra again. Byron would write to Hoppner in September 1820 that he did not believe in his daughter growing up with an ‘atheistical mother’,13 and that he wanted her to have a convent education. And although Claire continued over the next two years to beg Byron for access to her daughter, nothing came of her requests. Claire had also now turned 21, but age brought no let‐up in the sisters’ quarrels: Claire noted in her journal for 4 July 1820,‘Heigh—ho the Clare & and the Ma / Find something to fight about every day—.’ In 1836 Mary was still feeling angry about how Claire ‘poisoned my life when young…I never we never loved each other.’14 Back in 1820 she would have been extremely keen on getting Claire out of the house. The possibilities for a well‐educated young woman would be as a companion to a titled or elderly woman, or as a nursery governess, or as a teacher of English (being not only childless but having no links to an illegitimate baby would be important for her in those roles). Over the next two years, Claire pursued all those possibilities, while Shelley went on supporting her financially; in 1820 she declared herself ‘always…grateful’ for his ‘kindness’15 in taking care of her. But caring for Claire mattered to Shelley. As we must assume they had previously arranged, around 15 June 1820 the Shelleys moved from Pisa to Livorno, into the Gisbornes’ Casa Ricci, for six weeks; and one miraculous product was ‘To a Sky‐Lark’, perhaps Shelley’s single most famous poem. Writing biographical notes in the late 1830s, Mary recalled how —It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire‐flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky‐lark…16

The evening commemorated in the poem with its ‘brightning’ clouds is, however, anglicised into one not with ‘fire‐flies’ but with ‘a glow‐worm’, ‘Scattering 272



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­ nbeholden / Its aerial hue / Among the flowers and grass.’17 The poem seems to u have been written during the last ten days of June; on 12 July Shelley sent it to Peacock (probably in the form of a copy made by Mary) for publication in the volume Ollier had recently prepared, containing (at last) Prometheus Unbound. Shelley knew Wordsworth’s identically titled ‘To a Skylark’, published in his 1807 and 1815 collections, and there are numerous small connections between the poems: Wordsworth writes of the bird, ‘There is madness about thee’, Shelley ­suggests that it would be natural to respond to the bird’s song with ‘harmonious madness’.18 What the poem does, in its first half, is convey the sense of outpouring which is so amazing in the sky‐lark, in contrast with the earth‐bound human ­limitation constantly addressed in the poem’s second half. The surviving fragmentary draft of the original first stanza shows that ‘Hail to thee blithe Spirit’,‘Bird thou never wert’, ‘From heaven’ and ‘Pourest thy full heart’ were all there from the very start (or near it) of the poem’s inscription; what was lacking was a fifth line, though Shelley knew that there would be one, and that its rhyme word would be ‘art’. He tried ‘Such sweet sounds’19 but what he eventually produced was the exceptionally meditated ‘In profuse strains of unpremeditated art’ (435:5). Never can anything so simple have been so burdened: but that is the point. The word ‘unpremeditated’ is academic and long‐winded: it perfectly catches the difference between us and our appreciative attempts at description  –  and this miraculous bird in song. There is nothing else quite like that line in the poem, which for the most part reads as if the narrator too had been so gifted that stanza after stanza (there are 21 in all) poured out, metaphor after metaphor thrown up and sustained – before the next one falls inevitably into place. In stanza four, The pale purple even Melts around thy flight, Like a star of Heaven In the broad daylight Thou art unseen,—but yet I hear thy shrill delight So even the evening only ‘melts’ around the invisible bird, keeping it as transparent as evening itself; over night we move to the sharpness of the light of Venus as the morning star, ‘that silver sphere’ which ‘narrows’ in the dawn: and yet the bird’s song does not diminish: ‘All the earth & air— / With thy voice is loud.’20 The irregular 12‐syllable fifth line of each stanza is frequently given the job of quietly commenting upon what preceded it, as in ‘A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want’, or ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’ (436–437:70,90). As those lines suggest, the poem – after its celebratory, 10‐stanza outpouring – spends 11 stanzas demonstrating the ways in which human beings suffer want, sadness, loss, 273



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shallowness, pain; incapable of joy, glutted with love, pining for ‘what is not’. The narrator apparently wishes concentratedly to learn ‘half the gladness / That thy brain must know’ (437:101–102), but what he really wants is to be carried away, as the bird is. For then he should produce something worth hearing:     Such harmonious madness      From my lips should flow The world should listen then—as I am listening now.21 And, in its turn, the world ought to attend to such madness: it does not attend to premeditated art, especially to profuse strains of it. But Shelley’s repeated ‘should’ reminds us, too, of the likely failure of such poetry. The last word of the poem returns us to the ‘now’ of the imagined situation, with the bird in full song (even if it also brings us back to the depressing fact of being only a human being listening, not being a marvellous bird singing). Earlier in the poem, a wry stanza had described the sky‐lark as ‘Like a Poet hidden / In the light of thought, / Singing hymns unbidden…’ (435‐6:36–38). Shelley’s own thoughtful, unbidden political poetry had remained as invisible to the general reader as a ­sky‐ lark in a bright sky. Having described the writing of the poem in her notes, Mary Shelley herself linked these six weeks in the summer of 1820 with a poetry fragment starting ‘Alas this is not what I thought life was’, and chose to dwell on the way her husband shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart…22

Such a way of thinking about him and his poetry was one which she cultivated extensively after his death, describing him as desiring to write poetry ‘defecated [i.e. purified] of all the weakness and evil which cling to real life’. She preferred to present him as one who ‘loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy’, whilst she, in contrast, was the realist; and as Julian Barnes has pointed out, ‘all Realism is essentially corrective’.23 The version of Shelley which Mary preferred to present in 1839, nearly 20 years later, not only played down the tough‐mindedness Shelley habitually displayed, but distracts us from another conclusion to which ‘To a Sky‐Lark’ should bring us: that it was a poem addressed to her, even aimed at her. Who was the individual seemingly incapable of joy in the summer of 1820, always dwelling on her ‘hidden want’? Who was always pining for what was not, and looking before and after? Who was managing to find ‘saddest thought’ in the sweetest experience? Whose love was

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currently damned up in sad satiety? It was easier for Mary in 1839 to remember Shelley as the one who had been unhappy in the summer of 1820, and who had needed to go to the baths at San Giuliano for what she called his ‘nervous ­instability’, though we know from his letter to the Gisbornes of 11 May something of what was making him ‘irritable’ and ‘miserable’.24

Sometime in the first half of June 1820, the Shelleys’ ex‐servant Paolo Foggi began to make trouble. He had ‘formed a scheme of extorting money from Shelley by false accusations’, and ‘came and laid an accusation’ in Livorno, meaning that he made a legal accusation imputing something discreditable. After quick work by the Shelleys’ lawyer Federico del Rosso, Paolo ‘was ordered to quit Leghorn in four hours’: ‘otherwise’, Mary believed, ‘we certainly should have been frightened again, if not excessively teazed’. But Paolo was also responsible for writing Shelley ‘threatning letters saying that he wd be the ruin of him &c’.25 We cannot be certain of what Paolo was threatening; we can only be sure that it was not with the full quota of horrible stories about the Shelleys which his wife Elise would pass on the following year, and which would apparently be new and shocking to Shelley in August 1821. The fact that it was Shelley who was apparently being threatened with ruin in 1820 may indicate that Elise had seen something – or thought she had – in Venice or Este in 1818, suggesting that Shelley was having an affair with his sister‐in‐law; and Elise may perhaps have known that incest was a charge that Shelley had previously been confronted by. But Mary and Shelley would both strenuously have denied any such thing, and Paolo had been sent packing. When Shelley told the Gisbornes about Paolo’s renewed attempts, in July 1820, it was together with the sad news (which would only have made sense to them) that ‘My Neapolitan charge is dead’.26 But it seems rather unlikely that Paolo could have had any substantive knowledge of Elena Adelaide before her death.

Almost simultaneous with the writing of ‘To a Sky‐Lark’ and Paolo’s threats, and while still living in the Casa Ricci, Shelley would send Maria Gisborne one of his loveliest and happiest poems, his ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, also written in the second half of June 1820. It was, sometimes, when Shelley relaxed his determination to write serious and complex poetry that his skills really showed themselves; his perceptions would amalgamate with the wit, judgement and constant invention and imagination of his poetry writing, so that – to borrow the terms of ‘To a

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Sky‐Lark’ – he became one of the ‘fountains’ of a ‘happy strain’ (436:71‐2). As a writer he also feels himself, spider‐like, at the centre of many webs: The spider spreads her webs, whether she be In poet’s tower, cellar or barn or tree; The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves; So I, a thing whom moralists call worm, Sit spinning still round this decaying form, From the fine threads of verse and subtle thought— (438:1–7) He is writing in Henry Reveley’s workshop, the working space of a marine ­engineer, which he has made his own study: Proteus transformed to metal did not make More figures, or more strange; nor did he take Such shapes of unintelligible brass, Or heap himself in such a horrid mass Of tin and iron not to be understood; And forms of unimaginable wood To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood: Great screws and cones, and wheels and grooved blocks, The elements of what will stand the shocks Of wave, and wind and time.—Upon the table More knacks and quips there be than I am able To catalogize in this verse of mine:— (439:45–56) What especially takes his fancy is ‘A pretty bowl of wood’ containing ‘quicksilver’ (439:7–8) in which – of course – he sets floating one of his trademark paper boats. Item after item is spelled out, focused by the verse, and is just as easily abandoned for the next object. For as long as the verse lasts, it is like being gifted with Shelley’s eyes, and with his capacity to write. He could have said, as he had done of ‘Peter Bell the Third’, that ‘The verses & language, I have let come as they would’: miraculously, the rhymes continue to arrive, each one whacking happily into the centre of the target, the underlying rhythms constantly generating forward movement. This is what facility can be like when it is not being facile, but recording a writer’s fascination with the world: Next Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steamboats, frigates and machinery quaint 276



  1820  Traced over them in blue and yellow paint. Then comes a range of mathematical Instruments, for plans nautical and statical; A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass With ink in it… Near that a dusty paint box, some odd hooks, A half‐burnt match, an ivory block, three books Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures—disentangle them who may. Baron de Tott’s memoirs beside them lie, And some odd volumes of old chemistry. Near those a most inexplicable thing, With lead in the middle—I’m conjecturing How to make Henry understand—but no, I’ll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo, This secret in the pregnant womb of time, Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme. (439–440:78–85,92–105)

Beautiful that ‘mo’ is indeed a self‐mockingly poor rhyme…perfectly used in f­ ailing to draw out the secret of the peculiar ‘thing, / With lead in the middle’ (heavily prosaic, yet aligned harmoniously in the verse). This verse letter has no designs on its readers except to ensure that the writer’s pleasure is shared; but it also offers Maria Gisborne its take on those whom she is visiting in London: You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind, Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair— A cloud‐encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls.— (442–443:202–208) Even verse as apparently spontaneous as this attends to the paradox and tragedy of Coleridge – such intensely illuminating ‘irradiation’ of mind, so little light getting out into the world: Shelley takes with real seriousness the case of a writer who ‘Flags wearily through darkness and despair.’ He had never met Coleridge but was both deeply impressed and depressed by him.27 Peacock is also eulogised: ‘His fine wit / Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it’ (443:240–241). Perhaps the saddest reference in the poem is to ‘That which was Godwin’ (442:197), Shelley mourning 277



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the great Godwin of the 1790s. It is, however, also remarkable that Mary Shelley, daughter of Godwin, should be entirely absent from the poem: Shelley invites the Gisbornes to pass next winter ‘with me’ (445:292). Mary’s absence may be one of the reasons why the poetry is so blithe. For, like ‘Julian and Maddalo’, the ‘Letter’ is the product of a sensibility finding a way of dealing with depression. Shelley had told the Gisbornes at the end of June how his verses had been started ‘the first day I came, which will show you that I struggle with despondency’:28 the struggle being manifest in the fact of the writing. One clue to Shelley’s extreme facility and productivity is the extent to which he used his writing to keep depression at bay: in this case, almost certainly his unhappiness with Mary. He devoted himself to writing: he lost himself in the other worlds it opened up to him. If we find a period when Shelley did not write very much, then we may well discover that he was feeling rather cheerful (his angry depression in Florence had gone along with massive productivity). But he also gave a clue to his depressive temperament when he remarked  –  in response to the question whether he believed in presentiments – that ‘the only one that he ever found infallible, was the certain advent of some evil fortune when he felt peculiarly joyous’.29 There speaks the hardened depressive (and a poem like ‘The Sensitive Plant’ shows how brilliantly he could allegorize that aspect of his own character). The verse ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, although not designed for publication, was still calculated to spread joy and happiness (Maria Gisborne was certainly right to show it to friends in London); but it did so only by missing out the writer’s actual feelings.

It was especially ironical that such a poem could have been written to someone who had started to change her mind about the Shelleys to a degree that made her wish to have few dealings with them. Maria Gisborne did not once write to Mary Shelley over the summer, to Mary’s astonishment: ‘I could not have believed when we parted at Leghorn, that for three months nearly I should not have seen a single line indited by the fairest faithless Maria.’30 John Gisborne wrote, but he was not the one from whom they wanted to hear.And when the Gisbornes got back in October, they failed to meet or visit the Shelleys; and after some awkward letters, and one brief meeting, by December Mary had made a decision: ‘all intercourse between the G’s & us is broken off…they have behaved so as to pain & disappoint us extremely’. What especially angered Mary was that the Gisbornes, while wanting little or no contact with the Shelleys themselves, expected Shelley to go on financing Henry’s steamboat project: ‘it is an affair of pelf…enough of them’, Mary concluded. Shelley had already told Claire, in one of his fearful fits of rage, that the Gisbornes were ‘people totally without faith’: ‘I think they are altogether the most filthy and odious animals with which I ever came in contact.’31 There is shock in 278



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that, as well as anger; he had trusted Maria. Either perfect politeness, or (verbally brutal) knocking down. Shelley’s alarming letter about the state of his marriage may have played some part in the Gisbornes’ behaviour, but the time which the Gisbornes had spent with the Godwins in London had been much more damaging. Godwin had clearly confided in Maria Gisborne, as he had done when he had fallen in love with her in 1799: but now he was not only ‘continually betraying his dislike of S in some shape or other’, but was full of stories about how Shelley had promised him money and had never handed it over (he pressed documents on Maria to prove it). Godwin also told Maria that Mary Jane Godwin ‘regards M as the greatest enemy she has in the world’, and Maria heard on one occasion from Mary Jane that she was sorry that they could not meet up that day, citing ‘the impossibility of seeing or conversing with any person who should be attached to Mrs. S the author of all her misery’.32 We do not know any detail of what was said, but it was clearly enough thoroughly to upset Maria Gisborne, whose memories of Mary went right back to the awful death of Mary Wollstonecraft. In fact, during the autumn of 1820, Mary needed to go on writing short, formal notes to the Gisbornes, making arrangements for the forwarding of parcels and boxes arriving by ship in Livorno, and addressed to the Casa Ricci; and by April 1821 the Shelleys were even able to receive the Gisbornes themselves as visitors, while Shelley had in turn once stayed with the Gisbornes in Livorno. But they never again grew as intimate as they had been in the summer of 1819 or the spring of 1820; and John and Maria Gisborne left Italy for good in the summer of 1821, Shelley angrily wondering in June ‘how much they will have the face to offer me as the produce of the wreck of the Steam‐boat’. In fact, the hull of the boat and the unfinished machinery had to be sold at auction, and the proceeds handed over to Shelley, who expected to receive ‘very little from the sale’.33 Henry, rather oddly, blamed Shelley for the project’s failure (‘at his own desire the undertaking was ­carried out on much too large a scale’) and recalled how ‘Shelley’s funds…diminished fearfully’ just at the crucial moment. But Shelley had by the autumn of 1820 determined ‘to advance no more money’ to Henry, finding by April 1821 that ‘my money seems to be as irretrievable as Henry’s character’ (meaning that Henry was irresolute and incapable). It had turned into a messy, damaging and horribly expensive business, and the Shelleys’ relations with the Gisbornes never recovered, though – after they had left Italy – Shelley was happy to tell them that they were ‘almost the only accessory I could desire’. Meaning that, ‘contributing in an ­additional and hence subordinate degree’ they were desirable: but no more.34

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It would not be for another year, in August 1821, that the Shelleys would discover that Paolo Foggi’s accusations had not after all been silenced by the Livorno lawyer. In 1820, they believed the matter settled, and what followed was one of the quieter times in their life together; at the start of August 1820 they moved out of the Casa Ricci, and the heats of Pisa in summer, eight kilometres up to the small spa town of San Giuliano, a town they must have passed through more than once while travelling around the region. It was here, in the Casa Prinni, surrounded by hills and flowing water, that Shelley wrote ‘The Witch of Atlas’, ‘poised, delicately mocking yet often affecting, always dazzlingly inventive’,1 as well as one of his most significant political works; he also wrote a parody of Greek tragedy and another Ode. Less than a week after moving in, he would exhaust himself getting all the way up to the top of the peak of San Pellegrino in Alpe, well to the north of Bagni di Lucca, and back again. We do not know what possessed him to make the whole journey in just two days, in which he covered over 150 kilometres; Mary believed that he had ‘exerted himself too much, and the effect was considerable lassitude and weakness on his return’.2 Nevertheless, after a day’s break he was hard at work on ‘The Witch of Atlas’, which had demanded to be written at once, as a product of the journey; Shelley relishing the difference between Wordsworth’s ‘slow, dull care’ in evolving ‘Peter Bell’ over a period of 19 years, compared with the three days which he had needed to set down his own poem (449:25–28,36). ‘The Witch of Atlas’ led to an argument. As we know from six extra stanzas which Shelley added, Mary criticised the poem for being written in what she called

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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an ‘abstract and dreamy spirit’ and  –  because its stanzas ‘tell no story, false or true’ – for lacking ‘human interest’.3 Shelley’s argument was that his poem did have ‘human interest’ because it was playful: ‘though no mice are caught by a young kitten, / May it not leap and play as grown cats do, / Till its claws come?’ (448:5–7). He knew a lot about play, as his games with children and his paper boats demonstrated. But although it is easy to do what Hunt did in 1828, and allegorize the ‘Witch of Atlas’ as a study of the operation of the imagination,4 it is still better to take it for what it is: a device for playing (in the person of the witch) with the idea of power, she being able to do anything. This made for a serious contrast with – and an inspiration for – the man exhausted by travel who had been conscious of this subject all his life, and who felt he had to set down his poem at once. The directions it takes the imagination, thus playfully set free, are profound. The Witch, for example, gives human beings a panacea against illness, but when eventually death oppresses ‘the weary soul’, and the once beautiful individual is buried, she takes it from its coffin (which she throws ‘with contempt into a ditch’), employs her own power to restore ‘the embalmer’s ruining’, and leaves the body alone in ‘a green and overarching bower’: And there the body lay age after age    Mute, breathing, beating, warm & undecaying Like one asleep in a green hermitage    With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing And living in its dreams beyond the rage    Of death or life …5 It is an extraordinary idea of a state beyond death, to be gently smiling, mute, warm and living in dreams beyond the ‘rage’ of everyday life – and not dying. Shelley promised himself and his reader a continuation of the poem ‘another time’: for it is A tale more fit for the weird winter nights Than for these garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see. (469:669–672) But even this poem never got into print in Shelley’s lifetime, in spite of his being careful to convey it into his publisher’s hands, and telling him that he was happy to have his authorship acknowledged, ‘as usual’.6 Ollier did nothing with it; it simply joined the stockpile of Shelley’s unpublished work in London. San Giuliano would, nevertheless, lead directly to his next work.The composition of ‘The Witch’ had taken from 14 to 16 August. He continued unstoppable, first 281



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writing an ‘Ode to Naples’ (see Chapter 21), and eight days later conceiving another project altogether, an even more profoundly playful one. Margaret Mason had come up from Pisa to San Giuliano, to visit us on the day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows: Shelley read to us his Ode … and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He compared it to the ‘chorus of frogs’ in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political satirical drama on the circumstances, to which the pigs would serve as chorus –7

He did not just imagine it: he wrote Swellfoot the Tyrant. ‘Oedipus’ means ‘swollen‐ footed’ and Shelley drew on a great range of sources and models: the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, for sure, but also the satyr‐plays of classical drama, while pantomime and the harlequinade also gave him models and ideas, as would have the cartoons of James Gillray (1756–1815) and George Cruikshank (1792–1878): he may have known Gillray’s cartoons ‘Pigs meat, or the Swine Flogg’d out of the Farm Yard’ (1798), ‘More Pigs than Teats’ (1806) and ‘The Pigs Possessed’ (1807). Contemporary magazine commentary and newspaper gossip also offered him material; he was satirising the current government’s attitude to ‘the swinish multitude’ of its own people (Edmund Burke’s phrase from 1790 having been kept alive during ‘thirty years of democratic protest’) in an extended burlesque of the great political question of the day, currently ‘the theme of all conversation among the English’:8 the claims of Queen Caroline on her husband, the Prince Regent. The couple had not lived together since the 1790s, and in 1818 the Prince – aware that his father would soon die and that he would become king – had initiated proceedings for divorce; Lord Castlereagh had placed on the table of the house of Commons one of the standard legal document holders, the so‐called ‘Green Bag’, supposedly full of evidence against Caroline. On the Prince’s ascent to the throne in January 1820 as King George IV, an attempt had been made to exclude Caroline’s name from the official list of the royal family, but she in turn had returned to England in June 1820 to claim her rights as Queen. On 17 August, the Government introduced a bill into Parliament to deprive her of those, and it was at exactly this point that Shelley conceived of his play: Margaret Mason may well have brought reports of the Government’s new tactic with her. (Although the bill would eventually be dropped, Caroline would be excluded from George’s coronation in July 1821; she died a month later.) Shelley and Mary had no sympathy for the royal family – a month earlier Mary had written how ‘it is too great a stretch of imagination to make … a heroine of Queen Caroline’ – but, like most radicals, they enjoyed the way in which Caroline’s threats forced King and government into increasingly defensive positions. ‘I wish 282



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with all my heart downfall to her enemies’ wrote Mary.9 Shelley concurred – and we can see his satyr‐play taking shape: ‘So the Green Bag is opened. I expect, at least, that the accusation is as terrible as that made against Pasiphae’ (the wife of King Minos of the underworld, who eventually gave birth to the fabulous Minotaur, a man with the head of a bull). Shelley suggested ‘that a Bill be passed in Parliament to declare that no Minotaur shall be considered as legal heir to the Crown of these realms’.10 It is a usual Shelley work: extremely learned, in one way, with Greek transcriptions and footnotes to Aeschylus and Cymbeline. It is sparkily written, with the Choruses always rhyming, so that the Chorus addresses ‘Iona Tauris’, ‘Joan Bull’ – Caroline –    T   hose who wrong you, wrong us;    Those who hate you, hate us;    T   hose who sting you, sting us;    Those who bait you, bait us; The oracle is now about to be Fulfilled by circumvolving destiny …11 A lovely word, ‘circumvolving’: late sixteenth‐century scientific, meaning revolving around an axis. But, for all its playfulness, Swellfoot follows a determined political agenda: the King’s court is the temple of Famine, ‘built of thigh‐bones and death’s‐heads, and tiled with scalps’, and individual members of the government are perfectly recognisable. ‘Purganax’ is a rough transcription from the Greek for ‘Castlereagh’ and ‘Dakry’ (Greek for ‘tear’) is the famously tearful Lord Eldon; ‘General Laoctonos’ (Greek for ‘people‐hater’) is the Duke of Wellington, who says little until offered wine to drink a toast: ‘Claret, somehow, / Puts me in mind of blood, and blood of claret!’12 All of them hate and fear the lean pigs of the general population, whose usual subsistence (‘hog‐wash’) has recently been reduced to ‘straw and water’, something stumblingly announced by Purganax to ‘The Boars in full Assembly’  –  that is, Parliament – in a way that sounds terribly modern: ‘a fact which is—you know— / That is—it is a state‐necessity— / Temporary, of course.’ Monarch Swellfoot in the following scene demands ‘For God’s sake stop the grunting of those pigs!’ only for Purganax smoothly to explain: ‘We dare not, Sire! ’tis Famine’s privilege’.13 It is, however, the only privilege the pigs still have. Those who demand ‘hog‐wash and clean straw, / And sties well thatched; besides, it is the law!’ are confronted by Swellfoot’s response: ‘This is sedition, and rank blasphemy!’ ‘Sedition’ was the standard legal response to attacks on the government, and ‘seditious libel’ the usual charge, while ‘blasphemy’ applied to criticism of Christianity – and the pigs have wickedly chanted ‘Happier swine were they than we, / Drowned in the Gadarean sea—’. Purganax in Parliament is quick to attack ‘Those impious pigs, / Who, by 283



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frequent squeaks, have dared impugn / The settled Swellfoot system’; they have luckily now ‘been whipped / Into a loyal and an orthodox whine’, so that things in the country seem to be back on course. And what currently and most fortunately unites the pigs is the idea that Parliament will show the Queen to be ‘Most innocent!’14 At the end of the short play Shelley develops a fantasy in which the government and court are themselves turned into animals by Caroline when she shakes the contents of the Green Bag over them, for them to be chased from the stage by ‘the Ionian Minotaur’ which announces itself to be ‘Ion’ – of course, John – Bull. The piece ends with Caroline ‘putting on boots and spurs, and a hunting‐cap, buckishly cocked on one side, and tucking up her hair, she leaps nimbly on his back’.15 And thus Caroline on her John Bull (together with the long‐abused pigs) drives the other animals from the stage. End of play; triumph for Caroline. We can only admire Shelley for his command of fashion in the phrase ‘buckishly cocked on one side’: it is a cartoon image too. He sent his piece – which like all good burlesque, attacks all sides equally – to Horace Smith, asking him to get it published anonymously. Smith passed it on to a London publisher and printer who regularly produced political pamphlets on both sides of the argument between government and reformers, but in spite of its claiming on its title‐page to be a ‘Tragedy … Translated from the Original Doric’, and having outwardly every appearance of being an entirely serious work, it would not have taken much effort to detect something beyond the scholarly earnestness. The title‐page itself bore the motto: — — — — —Choose Reform or civil‐war, When thro’ thy streets, instead of hare with dogs, A Consort‐Queen shall hunt a King with hogs, Riding on the IONIAN MINOTAUR. And by line three of the first scene, a King is admiring his own ‘kingly paunch’ as it ‘Swells like a sail before a favouring breeze.’ The little pamphlet was in fact seized as ‘a seditious and disloyal libel’16 as soon as it was put on sale in mid‐December 1820; only seven copies were sold before it was consigned to destruction. But at least the bookseller was not prosecuted. It was a shame that no more came of it; if Shelley had used its material in magazine contributions, perhaps, rather than putting all his eggs into the basket of a dangerous single publication, then more people might have been able to appreciate it. But – as usual – he did what he wanted, not what it might have been cannier to do. The ‘Ode to Naples’ was less problematic. To start with, it was a haunting recreation by Shelley of his own experiences 18 months earlier; later on, a panegyric of the kind he could produce at will, to be politically as effusive as possible for 284



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the cause of freedom and liberty in Europe in 1820. He certainly managed to develop what were – even for him – especially complex stanza and rhyme‐schemes for the two Odes he produced in 1820, to Liberty and to Naples, both addressed to what he and others took to be a slackening of tyranny in Spain and Italy. He seems to have started his ‘Ode to Liberty’ in May 1820, before the move to Livorno; he sent it to London in July and it duly appeared in the Prometheus Unbound volume in August, among the 65 pages of ‘Miscellaneous Poems’. He had first sent the poem to Peacock, who was overseeing the book’s production for fear Ollier might not know what to do in case he objected to some expressions in the fifteenth and sixteenth stanzas; and that you would do me the favour to insert an asterisk or asterisks, with as little expense of the sense as may be.17

Lines in the 15th stanza – ‘O, that the free would stamp the impious name / Of KING into the dust!’ (432:211–212) – made the poem unpublishable: they would immediately either have got the whole book destroyed or  –  if defended  –  have dragged the bookseller into court (and thence into prison) for seditious libel. But just as it was Shelley’s determination not to submit to such tyranny of ­censorship which made him send the poem to London uncensored, so it was his determination to have it published which made him give Peacock carte blanche. Peacock, sailing as close to the wind as was then advisable, replaced ‘KING’ with four asterisks: ‘It is not difficult to fill up the blank which has been left by the prudent bookseller’ commented Lockhart, when reviewing the volume in the Edinburgh Magazine, prudently not filling it up either. Lines in stanza 16 about the ‘pale name of PRIEST’ dwindling back into ‘the hell from which it first was hurled’ (433:228–229) were also most offensive but Peacock rightly judged might be left unchanged, though Lockhart called them ‘a versification of the foulest sentence that ever issued from the lips of Voltaire’.18 The poem had started with one of those scientific images which demands its reader’s full concentration: ‘A glorious people vibrated again / The lightning of the nations.’19 The word ‘vibrate’ had taken on a new meaning in the contemporary scientific understanding of light, as something transmitted not as particle, but as pulse: people send the lightning out. But the second line also apparently controls the first, with the lightning of the nations vibrating the people (making them electrically active). Which is the right reading? Both are right; the poetry demands all the possibilities it encompasses. The stanzas following had been provoked by the fact that, early in 1820, the absolute monarchy in Spain had been replaced by constitutional monarchy; and that provoked Shelley’s declaration that ‘England yet sleeps’ in spite of the way that ‘Spain calls her now’ (432:181–182). The poetry, it must be said, is the usual fascinating bombast of Shelley’s big public poems, with tortured multiple ­ 285



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rhymes – ‘Pelorus’ acquires not only ‘suspended o’er us’ and ‘enthroned before us’, but ‘every Aeolian isle’ fantastically ‘glares in chorus’ (432:186,188,193)  –  and phrasing ingenious but almost unreadable: ‘Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee’ (434:267). Most surprising of all is the ending, which, after eighteen stanzas of unremittingly upbeat rhetoric, stages a grand denouement, with the whole preceding poetic fabric – ‘My song’ as the narrator calls it – shot down and falling like a wild swan, ‘When the bolt has pierced its brain’: … o’er it closed the echoes far away Of the great voice which did its flight sustain, As waves which lately paved his watery way Hiss round a drowner’s head in their tempestuous play.20 In contrast with the ambitions of the ‘Ode to Liberty’, a sonnet written a few months later is notable for its precision: it turns out to be one of the most revealing political poems Shelley ever created, either in the late summer of 1820 in San Giuliano21 or – rather more likely – in Pisa early in 1821, and for which he tried out title after title: at one stage it was entitled ‘The Republican’, later still becoming ‘Sonnet / To the Republic of Benevento’, before eventually acquiring the undeniably peculiar title ‘Sonnet / Political Greatness.’ Like other radicals, Shelley had been heartened by what had happened in Naples and Benevento in July 1820. First, Ferdinand VII had been driven from Naples by a constitutional revolution on 1 July 1820 which – by 15 July – had established itself. Benevento was a Duchy (under the control of Pope Leo XII) some 50 kilometres from Naples which, back in 1799, had staged an uprising; in July 1820 it rebelled again and the Papal delegate fled. For its own safety – it was very small – it had requested annexation to Naples but had been refused. All that seems to have happened thereafter was a long wait for the Austrian troops requested by the Pope to be brought down and deployed to restore the old order. But news of the July revolution very much excited Shelley and others, and at some point between July and the following February he wrote about it. Although the untitled first draft of the sonnet on ‘Political Greatness’ was only a fragment, from the start of the period of composition its direction and attitude were clear. The mass of people are referred to as ‘Those herded slaves’ (originally ‘multitudinous slaves’); they are not attended by any of the virtues of skill, or strength, or happiness, or majesty; history is simply ‘the record of their shame’. The fragment contrasts such ‘slaves’ with an individual capable of ‘establishing his throne / On vanquished will’, though Shelley abandoned his draft when he had got that far.22 Such an individual sounds likely to have been a tyrant, of the sort regularly collaborating with slavery in Shelley’s poetry. 286



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Two more drafts carried the poem further into that confident description of the herd, so that the first nine‐and‐a half lines ended up: Nor happiness, nor majesty nor fame, Nor peace nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts Shepherd those herds whom Tyranny makes tame. Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts; History is but the shadow of their shame; Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts As to oblivion their blind millions fleet Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery Of their own likeness. What are numbers, knit By force or custom?23 Tyranny thus takes over the herd without a struggle. People’s hearts do not beat loudly enough for poetry to take notice of them, history only records how shamefully they have allowed themselves to be crushed, and their apparent religious belief is simply an ‘obscene’ version of self‐worship (God being made in the image of man). Mere ‘numbers’ stand for nothing, neither numbers of people nor numbers in the sense of ‘poetry’ (written ‘in numbers’).‘Ye are many—they are few’ (361:155) is a sentiment now apparently irrelevant. What, however, has such a poem to do with the Republic of Benevento and its precarious, heroic existence? Why is Shelley not doing as he had suggested in his ‘Ode to Liberty’, praising the heroic rebels as ‘the free’ who ‘would stamp the impious name / Of KING into the dust’? The answer lies partly with how he judged the situation in Italy, partly with how he thought revolutions should be conducted. The last third of the poem turns away from the mass of people and ­concentrates on the individual ‘who man would be’, who turns out not to be a tyrant at all:      Man, who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will; quelling the anarchy Of hopes & fears; being himself alone.24 So individuals need to become rulers (kings or emperors) over ‘the empire’ of themselves, and must establish their ‘throne’ by crushing their own individual wills (the poem had at one stage been awarded the title ‘Rex Sui’ – ‘The King of Oneself ’). This part of the poem defines the superior individual of whom we know Shelley approved: in Prometheus Unbound the Spirit of the Hour had described man as, 287



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i­deally, ‘the King / Over himself ’ (254:III.iv.196–197), just as Prometheus is proud to be ‘king over myself ’ (205:I.492), and just a few months earlier Shelley had ­written of his hopes that Mary would ‘obtain empire over herself ’.25 This starts to explain the mystery of how a poem about a popular revolution in Benevento could end up as one which Shelley called ‘Political Greatness.’ The greatness is that of the individual who manages to be king over himself; the only sort of person worthy of playing a part in a revolution, given the craven nature of the herd. He is also a person who, to Shelley’s mind, was the kind of superior person who might lead a popular revolution and keep it constitutional. The people of Benevento, so far as Shelley knew about them, had not made history; they had not done anything worthy of poetry being written about them. These things make it rather more likely that he was writing the final version of his poem early in 1821, by which time it seemed inevitable that the surviving republicans in Naples (and in states like Benevento and Pontecorvo) were not going to resist the Austrians. Byron would start a letter to Hobhouse in April 1821: ‘You know by this time with all Europe – the precious treachery and desertion of the Neapolitans.’ Resistance, as Shelley imagined it, could only take the form of what he called ‘a sudden & great impulse’ which might somehow, somehow, awaken in the populace at large. If the ‘cultivators of the soil’ could somehow be turned ‘into citizens & men’,26 then they might resist, having shown themselves to be men. Otherwise the republicans would indeed be crushed by the Austrian armies (Claire recorded in her journal in February the arrival of thousands of Austrian troops in Florence on their way south). Shelley, although very dubious about the capacity of the Italians to carry through any kind of revolution, never grew cynical about them or enjoyed disparaging stories about Neapolitan cowardice and absurdity. After their arrival in Pisa, and their assimilation into the English‐speaking community, Shelley, Mary and Claire had been made aware by one of their new acquaintances, Francesco Pacchiani (1771–1835) – Professor of Physics but an expert in logic and metaphysics – of a number of new and interesting people in Pisa: the Greek patriot, politician and statesman Alexandros Mavrokordatos (1791–1865), the 19‐year‐old daughter of the Governor of Pisa, Countess Teresa Emilia Viviani, and the political ‘improvvisatore’ and actor Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836). Sgricci had  –  to begin with  –  deeply impressed them: he would take suggestions from his theatre audience and work them up into improvised and impromptu poetry and drama. On 1 December, the Shelleys had heard him improvising ‘upon the future independence of Italy’,27 and they had invited him to dinner on a number of occasions during December. But by February 1821 (by which time he was in Florence) Sgricci was reportedly representing the Neapolitans as ‘a set of slaves who dare not to imitate the high example of clasping even the shadow of freedom’; he enjoyed telling the story of how, at a political meeting, ‘those few who were for the Constitution’ had ‘cried Viva la 288



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Costernazione [consternation] instead of Constituzione’. Shelley thought such anecdotes ‘base’ and condemned Sgricci as motivated by ‘cowardly envy’: something which – Shelley insisted – ‘I hate.’28 And yet he had himself described the people of Benevento as ‘herded slaves’, and his poem grew dangerously close to impersonating the improviser; the existence of another piece of his own verse, in the middle of an account of Sgricci which he had previously written, suggests that it may not have been the only occasion on which he became aware of how easily their points of view converged, and how the satirical mind is itself never far from cynicism.29 He was also happy to ignore (even to enjoy) the logical inconsistencies implicit in his decision about what was politically necessary. One gets rid of kings by being a king? Yes. Being a republican means – first of all – ‘ruling’? Yes. And ruling oneself? Yes, he would answer. We need to ignore the likelihood that individuals able to achieve what these lines describe would probably never go on to create republics or be republicans. Shelley had ended up with the point of view of a very jaundiced onlooker, convincing himself that only the strong‐minded superior individual matters. He went on hoping against hope that the ‘cultivators of the soil’ in places like Benevento might be rendered ‘instruments of a system of future social life before which the existing anarchies of Europe will be dissolved and absorbed’.30 But the chances of that happening were minimal, as he also knew; and the Austrian armies succeeded in driving out the revolutionary sympathisers. On 4 May 1821, Shelley would tell Byron that This attempt in Italy has certainly been a most unfortunate business. With no strong personal reasons to interest me, my disappointment on public grounds has been excessive. But I cling to moral and political hope, like a drowner to a plank.31

It was exactly such ‘moral and political hope’ which the individual concerned simply with ‘being himself alone’ would neither need nor care about. One who prided himself on ‘quelling the anarchy / Of hopes and fears’ would not have been so disappointed about the failure of ‘This attempt in Italy.’ Byron certainly had ‘personal reasons’ for caring about the revolution – it affected his mistress Teresa Gamba Guiccioli (1798–1873), whose brother Pietro Gamba (1800–1827) and father Count Ruggiero Gamba (1770–1846) were both involved in the revolutionary group the Carbonari – while Shelley only had ‘public grounds’. But nevertheless he preferred to cling to his plank and to go on caring, rather than detach himself and look on with god‐like detachment and contempt. As so often, his way of occupying numerous available points of view is what emerges from this group of political poems; we can see why Byron liked to call Shelley ‘the Snake’, as delighted by quickness and suppleness of mind as he was dismissive of his friend’s attitude to Christianity. Writing in December 1821, Byron had in mind the serpent who 289



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tempted Eve, and whom Goethe’s Mephistopheles calls ‘my Aunt the renowned Snake’, when he commented: ‘I always insist that Shelley is nothing but one of her Nephews, walking about on the tip of his tail.’ Shelley was, after all, ‘Bysshe Shelley’, and little grass snakes in Italian might affectionately be ‘biscelle’32 … But Shelley’s hopes for Italian revolution meant that he had condemned himself – politically – to being ‘a drowner’ and to going down with his plank. That, too, Byron would not forget.

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28 Epipsychidion v. Flesh & Blood 1820–1821

The Shelleys had felt happily settled in San Giuliano (they wondered about going back there the following year) and for their last 10 days, at the end of October 1820, they had Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin to stay. Mary had never met him and Shelley had not seen him for seven years (he had been in the Indian army until 1818, but was now retired on half pay). He had been enquiring in Pisa where Shelley had got to. October was late in the season still to be lodging in the little spa town; Medwin recalled that the baths were ‘quite deserted’, and the Shelleys knew they would shortly be moving on. What they did not expect was that their departure would be quite so dramatic. Drenching ‘autumn rains’1 towards the end of the month led to the Serchio overflowing its banks, followed by the whole network of canals stretching out from it – including the one behind the Shelleys’ Casa Prinni. The flood burst open their ground‐floor doors, back and front, and they ended up with four feet of water downstairs, and the town square at the front of the house awash. They had to escape from their upstairs windows by boat, to get from there by road to Pisa; where, even more fortunately, they had already arranged lodgings for November at the Casa Galetti, on the Lung’Arno, so that they only had to bridge a gap of a couple of days. Medwin moved into a room in the same house, though Mary soon tired of ‘the burthen of Tom’: he was ‘as silent as a fireskreen but not half so useful; except that he sometimes mends a pen’.2

Fairly soon after their return, Pacchiani made them aware of something odd and troubling: the fact that Teresa Viviani3 was now confined against her will in the The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Convent of St Anna, awaiting her father’s arrangements for her marriage. The nobleman Luigi Biondi and the advocate Francesco Danieli were suitors, but her father was unwilling to award her a dowry. She had been at the Convent as a schoolgirl; now she was in effect imprisoned there. Shelley must have thought of Harriett Westbrook. Mary and Claire visited Teresa late in November and Shelley apparently first saw her on 3 December; Teresa wrote letters to all three. When Shelley went alone, he must have been chaperoned: he may well never have been in a room alone with Teresa, who was an extremely beautiful, well‐educated young woman in a nasty situation: constrained, deprived. Mary described her in December 1820 as ‘beautiful – of great genius’, and writing ‘with an elegance and delicacy to equal the best authors of the best Italian age’. One essay on love still survives: Shelley would quote from it on the title‐page of his poem Epipsychidion,4 a word which he invented, and which is perhaps best rendered as ‘On the Subject of the little Soul’ (808); as a title it does its best to put off all except the very educated reader. Claire, Mary and Shelley employed Teresa’s name ‘Emilia’ after the woman caught between two suitors in Boccaccio’s poem Il Teseida della nozze d’Emilia, but they would also have known Chaucer’s version in the Knight’s Tale, of which Shelley translated a little into Italian, perhaps to show Teresa.5 Fragments of Italian in Shelley’s notebooks also suggest what he had started to say to her or write to her. One shows him telling her that, having in the past been ‘an open enemy to all ­tyranny political or domestic, I have all tyrants against me – and is the world not dominated by tyrants? I would offer you all that I have  –  oh that I could offer more!’6 That was the language of his characteristic and sometimes disastrous generosity, as well as of his energy in working for the victims of injustice. A second set of jottings would have been more practically helpful: I have spoken to a (woman) friend about you, and in order to interest her the more in your most unhappy fate I have made her read your last letter (forgive me the treachery for which my motives assure me your forgiveness) eventually she has promised me to write to the Father Prior of St. Nicholas at Pisa informing him of your unhappiness and asking him to call on you and to do everything possible to him to induce your father to give you a husband.7

The woman friend may well have been Margaret Mason. Some of Teresa’s letters survive: one to Shelley himself ends, in English, ‘I love you with all my heart, dear Brother, I am tenderly, your Sister and Friend, Emilia.’8 Another, written just a couple of weeks after the Shelleys started to visit her, ­concludes, in a superbly Italianate outpouring from someone well educated in conventional high‐style: ‘I do not love, nor shall I ever be able to love any thing or person so much as your family; for that I would abandon everything, and should 292



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lose nothing, since in it are included all that can exist of the beautiful, virtuous, amiable, sensitive and learned in the world.’9 The Shelleys were thoroughly sympathetic to Teresa’s fate, trapped as she was. They went on visiting her; Claire taught her some more English, Mary and Shelley passed on books, Mary gave her a necklace for Christmas. A scornful later reference by Mary to Shelley’s ‘Italian Platonics’, however, reveals the problems she had with Teresa. In August 1821 Shelley would tell Byron about his ‘intimacy with this lady’: back in January, he had found her able to ‘enchant me infinitely’. But he needed to caution Byron: ‘Pray do not mention anything of what I told you; as the whole truth is not known, and Mary might be very much annoyed at it.’10 He had almost certainly handed over money to Teresa which Mary knew nothing about. Furthermore, another notebook contains Italian fragments expressing love, albeit incoherently: the longest can be translated as follows. Your form, visible to the mind’s eye, surrounds me with the gentle shadow of its divine beauty. Many times thus to me [       ]. Your dark [     ], ever most beautiful, above me, it seems to me to feel your hand on mine, and that your lips – but then I close my eyes until you cease to love it – then it will be quenched like a flame which lacks fuel

This has been accepted as evidence that Shelley ‘expressed his intense infatuation in his Italian letters’,11 though such writing might also have been an attempt to work out – for the poem he was composing – how someone in love with an Italian Emily would express himself. Readers of modern editions of Epipsychidion are encouraged to conclude that although the poem may offer itself as a fiction or fantasy, it is ‘more intentionally autobiographical than his other poems’, and commentator after commentator has taken it as evidence that Shelley was in love with Teresa. More than one has claimed ‘infatuation’, one has even argued that because Shelley’s ‘description of sexual intercourse … in Epipsychidion is the most vivid erotic encounter in his poetry’, it must be founded on fact: ‘Shelley’s letters and poetry to Emilia suggest they shared physical intimacies.’12 Almost the only direct evidence of Shelley’s emotional state comes in his letters to Claire, who heard rather more about his feelings for Teresa than Mary did. On 16 January 1821, he told Claire: I see Emily sometimes: & whether her presence is the source of pain or pleasure to me, I am equally ill‐fated in both. I am deeply interested in her destiny, & that interest can in no manner influence it. She is not however insensible to my sympathy, & she counts it among her alleviations. As much comfort as she receives from my attachment to her, I lose.—

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He knew he could do nothing to affect Teresa’s ‘destiny’ as the intended wife of a rich Italian; all he could do was help her survive her solitude. He certainly found her attractions disturbing (he lost as much comfort as she gained): in March 1821, he would guardedly tell Peacock that she was ‘the only Italian for whom I ever felt any interest’. Even his grammar suffered when he wrote about her: ‘My conceptions of Emilia’s talents augments every day.—Her moral nature is fine—but not above ­circumstances—yet, I think her tender & true—which is always something—how many are only one of these things at a time!’ But, most significantly of all, he attempted to reassure Claire that ‘There is no reason that you should fear any mixture of that which you call love.’13 ‘Love’ as Claire would have understood it – the passion which would make a man leave his wife (as Shelley had left Harriett), or pursue a lover (as Claire had pursued Byron and Shelley) – played no part, Shelley was insisting, in his response to Teresa. Although attracted, he was entirely in control. At the end of April 1821, he would tell Claire that Teresa would soon be marrying and added: ‘A great & a painful weight will be taken off my mind by that event.’ She had become an onerous responsibility: he was still going to see her twice a week in mid‐May, when her suitor Danieli was apparently so desperate that – according to Shelley – Teresa ‘handed him over to me to quiet & console’. But then, shortly before her marriage, she asked the Shelleys for a considerable sum of money (‘If Lord Byron comes to Pisa … could you ask him to join you to make up the amount indicated’14). This was the last straw for Mary, who summed things up the following March: The conclusion of our friendship a la Italiana puts me in mind of a nursery rhyme which runs thus—

As I was going down Cranbourne lane, Cranbourne lane was dirty, And there I met a pretty maid, Who dropt to me a curt’sey; I gave her cakes, I gave her wine, I gave her sugar‐candy, But oh! the little naughty girl! She asked me for some brandy. Now turn Cranbourne Lane into Pisan acquaintances, which I am sure are dirty enough, & brandy into that wherewithall to buy brandy (& that no small sum pero) & you have whole story of Shelley [sic] Italian Platonics.

Not exactly the whole story: Cranbourne Alley in London was notorious for superior prostitutes,15 so the verse is even nastier than it appears. But Mary concluded that 294



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Teresa had taken advantage of them (and especially of Shelley). Teresa – ‘after a great deal of tumult’ – had married Luigi Biondi on 8 September 1821, and had gone to live with him at his parents’ house. Mary would write cheerfully how ‘we hear that she leads him & his mother (to use a vulgarism) a devil of a life’. Teresa and Biondi had four children but by the late 1820s they had separated.16

In January 1821, Shelley had taken some passages of poetry drafted in 1819 and 1820, and put them together with a lot of new work, urgently hammered out, to create Epipsychidion, some 604 lines long, finished by mid‐February and dedicated to ‘the Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia V— —, Now Imprisoned in the Convent of — ’ (474). He immediately sent it off to be printed in London by his English publisher Ollier in an edition originally planned for 100 copies; the number actually produced may have been 250. As an octavo costing 2/‐ (a hefty price for a 32‐page pamphlet) it was in the hands of the English public by mid‐May 1821. Epipsychidion is expressly founded on a fiction: it follows its dedication with a short ‘Advertisement’ explaining that its author died at Florence, having (according to one manuscript draft) thrown himself from the Ponte Santa Trinità into the Arno:17 ‘His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings’ (474). That is the first appearance in connection with this poem of the word ‘ideal’ which Shelley had used about the ‘melancholy’ of Rosalind and Helen: an insistence that experience consists not only in encountering the objectively real but in recognising how the mind’s creative ideas make the world we encounter, so that, for example, poetry never reproduces but always invents. Emily in Epipsychidion is what the poem’s narrator calls her, ‘The shadow of that idol of my thought’ (482:268), a projection of one of the ‘peculiar images which reside in the inner cave of thought’:18 a projection of the ideal being in which the narrator has always believed, and which he has now – in her – called into existence. She is a ‘soul out of my soul’ (481:238), ‘Youth’s vision thus made perfect’ (476:42) and she is greeted as ‘Spouse! Sister! Angel!’ (478:130) –­suggesting three kinds of love – and is finally invited to a special island and house ‘for our seclusion, close as Night’s’ (489:556), where she will become the narrator’s mistress too: Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, And our veins beat together; and our lips With other eloquence than words, eclipse The soul that burns between them, and the wells Which boil under our being’s inmost cells, The fountains of our deepest life, shall be Confused in passion’s golden purity … (489:565–571) 295



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Such an ‘Emily’ is very clearly an ideal, a concept, not a real person: the narrator knows it to be ‘the Vision veiled from me / So many years’ (484:343–344). Nevertheless, because the central figure has been awarded the name which the Shelleys and Claire had given to Teresa Viviani, these lines have been read as Shelley’s own thoroughly un‐Platonic feelings for Teresa Viviani. But she is a ‘Being’ the ­narrator has ‘oft / Met on its visioned wanderings’: so that when, indeed, the narrator meets her ‘on an imagined shore’, she is ‘robed in such exceeding glory, / That I beheld her not’ (480:190–191,197,199‐200). So he meets her, but he also doesn’t meet her. She is not to be seen: she is only to be imagined. The poem portrays a gorgeous escape of lovers from prison, constriction and restraint: ‘The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me’ (485:388). But Teresa Viviani’s actual incarceration is by now only a very distant starting point taken up by a poem in order to advance into its own special territory.What is liberated is an ideal of the beloved; the fictional Emily is an opportunity for poetry which imagines and ­temporarily creates that ideal. The poetry consigns its central figures to ‘the intense, the deep, the imperishable’: they are incarnated as ideas only. In the fullest sense of the word, they are ‘idealised’.The poem shows the ‘I’ figure wounded by his failures: in consequence, ‘the cold day / Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain’ (482:391,274–275). Even the weather plays itself out within the idealising consciousness of the narrator. And in spite of Emily’s voyage to the arms of her lover, the narrator expects her to remain ‘a vestal sister still’, while he will remain a being ‘of dull mortality’ (485:389–390). In the winter of 1820–1821,Teresa Viviani had made vivid to Shelley the l­ikeness of a woman combining the beautiful, the emotionally responsive, the intelligent and the well‐read, while also being committed to total loyalty towards those whom she loved. And Shelley immediately constructed a poem on the subject; one showing its heroine as the fulfilling ideal. He never believed Teresa was or could be such a person – a flesh and blood person he could himself ever have wanted to love or marry – but he realised he had been thrown a poetic lifeline, in the shape of an imprisoned heroine; and he retained her through writing which was not only about an ideal woman but about what sexual love could and should be like. In a way he was answering – and countering – the vague soulfulness of Teresa Viviani herself, who in her own little essay on love had committed herself to sentences like ‘The loving person, no, he is not to be confused with human beings, he does not drag his soul along, but elevates it, drives it on and crowns it with light, at the smile of the Divine.’ Medwin had been deeply impressed by such writing: for him, Teresa ‘had the purest and most sublime conception of the master‐passion’.19 Shelley, though, is far less interested in sublimity than in sexuality as the proper fulfilment of relationship. So his Emily goes all the way into sexual delight. Mixing up, rewriting lives of flesh and blood is dangerous, of course. People get hurt, feel estranged, and Mary ended up, in March 1822, regarding their acquaintance 296



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with Teresa as another ‘piece of ill luck’.20 Anyway, the problem with such a theory of the ideal as occupied Shelley is that his readers and commentators have proved themselves determined to do exactly what he does not want. They have assumed that he – not his narrator – is revealing some hidden truth about the life and loves of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Generations of readers have assumed – or been told – that the poem is autobiographical; and they have been compelled by it (especially by the erotic passages towards the end). It appeared both fascinating and crazy to Shelley’s contemporaries: ‘It is poetry intoxicated … It is poetry in delirium’ sighed a review in The Gossip of Brighton, while Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine tut‐tutted over ‘the impenetrable mysticism of its greater portion’ while licking its lips over ‘the ­delicious beauty of the rest’.21 It demands to be judged as a poem not about individual, identifiable people but about language and ideas; yet its readers have almost never allowed this to happen. What is more, it has been assumed that not just the story of Emily, and the ­passionate love in the last section of the poem, but the account of the women in what Shelley called the ‘idealized history of my life and feelings’22 which occupies the centre of the poem, and which he had drafted long before meeting Teresa Viviani, is also simply autobiographical. This section might, indeed, have been as problematic to Mary as the fantasy of escape with the beloved. There have been efforts for the last 140 years23 to identify the loves of Shelley’s life apparently ­presented in Epipsychidion: the main candidates being Harriet Grove, Harriett Westbrook, Claire and Mary herself. And some were fair—but beauty dies away: Others were wise—but honeyed words betray: And One was true—oh! why not true to me? (482:269–271) Shelley had produced some rather similar lines about women in his 1817 work on Laon and Cythna, where the very first draft ran: ‘And one was fair but faithless / The other heart was like a heart of stone’ (the poem’s published text would run ‘Yet never found I one not false to me, / Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone / Which crushed and withered mine’24). And, in the very late lyric with the first words ‘Bright wanderer’, the lines ‘Envy not this dim world, for never / But once within its shadow grew / One fair as thou but far more true’ would appear, again apparently with reference to women the narrator has known earlier. There has been nearly universal critical and biographical agreement that in these lines in Epipsychidion Shelley was recording judgements on Harriet Grove and Harriett Westbrook, and presenting Mary Godwin as the woman who was fair, who was true, though the language in which he did so was very far from flattering.When the narrator encounters the figure of the woman who promises ‘Deliverance’ (482:277) from his failures, she turns out to be a moon, a ‘shrine of soft yet icy 297



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flame’. She may be ‘Young and fair’ but she only ‘illumines’: she ‘warms not’ (482:283,285). Could Mary have read this as Shelley’s poetry at its own peculiar full stretch, creating an entirely symbolic and idealised figure, and in no way constituting a criticism of her? It seems unlikely, even if there is evidence of other figures not being biographically realistic either. Which Harriet is Harriett, for example? The majority of commentators think that if Harriet Grove was the one ‘dear but false to me’, then it must have been Harriett Westbrook who had a ‘heart of stone’ – and nothing in the record suggests either that she had, or that Shelley thought she had. On the other hand, if it had been Harriet Grove who had the ‘heart of stone’ (for not having anything to do with Shelley but marrying someone else) then Harriett Westbrook was ‘fair but faithless’ – and she was a brunette. So which was the one who was ‘true’ – but not true to him? It is an insoluble riddle: both fit, neither fits. We are confronted, as nearly always in Shelley, with poetry he was writing, in which he draws upon his own life – writers do – but not in ways that reveal his biography. What matters to him are the idealised human tendencies represented in the poem and which the burgeoning poetry make clear to him, and which he can develop and explore. Mary may well have contributed to his writing about the woman like a moon: Claire may have been in his mind when he wrote about yet another heavenly body, a ‘Comet beautiful and fierce’ (484:368). But assuming that such figures are Shelley’s portraits of actual people is silly. What in the end was by far the most significant thing about the whole Viviani episode was that it caused Shelley to bring together in one poem not just a series of reflections influenced by people he had known but his richest attempt so far to understand his own idealising nature. In a passage of poetry written by 19 December 1819 (so almost a year before he started to see Teresa), his narrator had told himself that he did not depend upon having a ‘mistress or a friend’ in his life, and that his own life by no means needed ‘one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe’ beside him, into whom the individual mistress or friend would inevitably turn. He loved many ­people, and intended to go on doing so; and Shelley now built that section into his new poem, with an insistence worthy of John Donne on difference, not identity, in partnership: We—are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar; Such difference without discord, as can make Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake As trembling leaves in a continuous air? (479:142–146) It is a perfect conclusion to the conceit – the air which trembles the leaves is also a musical air. 298



  1820–1821  Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt. (479:147–148)

By making it the Emily figure whose wisdom speaks, and who encourages the narrator to furnish beacons, and thus safeguard passage between the rocks of disaster, the idea of daring to add a partner to an existing relationship is cemented in place. But it is an idea: it is not a confession. We might, however, wonder what Mary thought when she read those lines, especially in the Epipsychidion remake, when what had been only an idea in the 1819 draft would become the proposition that the poem’s Emily should join the ‘friend’ already at the narrator’s side – a friend not just ‘sad’ but, in 1821, described as ‘chained’ (479:158).Was that because the friend was married? It sounds terribly like it; Shelley would very soon afterwards, in his poem ‘Ginevra’, characterise marriage as ‘life’s great cheat, a thing / Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining’. Mary would also have ­surveyed what Shelley had first described in 1819, and now repeated, as the ‘dreariest and the longest journey’25 ahead of those who remain chained together. It seems quite likely that, after the huge initial enthusiasm which had led him to write and put together Epipsychidion miraculously quickly, and then send it straight off to London to be printed and published, Shelley decided that he wanted the poem suppressed either because Mary believed it to be autobiographical or because he realised that it would be assumed by its readers to be so – which would be almost as bad for him, and even worse for Mary.26 He may have felt a fool for writing such a poem out of his reaction to Teresa: his only justification (to himself and to Mary) would have been that, just as he had done with so many other ‘mortal forms’ over the years, he had ‘rashly’ cast Teresa as ‘The shadow of that idol of my thought’ (482:268): the written ‘Emily’ being only a new version of the ideal being. That was certainly all that Teresa had ended up as: the delusive semblance of an old idealisation who had in real life become an awkward burden of responsibility and (eventually) someone rather disliked and distrusted. With, unfortunately, a poem irrecoverably published, embarrassing the present and haunting the future. At all events, Shelley wrote to tell Ollier ‘that the whole of the “Epipsychidion” should be suppressed’. Ollier had only disposed of 90 copies or so; the remaining 160 went into store.27 Shelley explicitly protested that a biographical reading of Epipsychidion was wrong. He told John Gisborne, in October 1821: I desired Ollier not to circulate this piece except to the Σύνετοι [cognoscenti], and even they it seems are inclined to approximate me to the circle of a servant‐girl & her sweetheart.—But I intend to write a Symposium of my own to set all this right.28

One can hear the irritation of a writer fed up with readers turning his poetry into autobiographical confession, and even sophisticated readers assuming that the 299



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author might be ‘approximated’ to the role of lover (as common and clichéd as ­servant‐girl and sweetheart: quite unlike superior Shelley). Shelley’s own admittedly peculiar understanding of love would take a piece as multi‐faceted as Plato’s to explain it. But he also knew what he was talking about: he had translated the Symposium into ‘choice English’ for Mary in July 1818.29 Yet in the mass of disparate materials which made up the finished poem appears some of Shelley’s best writing.There is the ‘longest journey’ poetry, with its Donne‐ like appraisal of love; there are people to whom this world of life Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife Tills for the promise of a later birth The wilderness of this Elysian earth. (480:186–189) The poetry is confident of the earth as essentially a place of happiness – ‘Elysian’ is one of Shelley’s favourite words – but the wilderness must be cultivated: most of the time we are trapped in what the narrator calls ‘the wintry forest of our life’ (481:249). Later he feels that he should be comforted by his determination, as demanding as that of any musician or writer, to call, as music does, The future from its cradle, and the past Out of its grave, and make the present last In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, Folded within their own eternity. (488:520–524) Making the present last is a great goal. And, perhaps above all, when the narrator is trying to define what it is like to be in love, he refers to ‘This world of love, this me’ (484:346) – and a wholly new self‐awareness, of an entirely modern kind, is not just generated but taken for granted, as it is when the narrator welcomes Emily to unite herself ‘as a bride’ with ‘the intense, the deep, the imperishable, / Not mine but me’ (485:391–393).Wordsworth might conceivably have used the phrase ‘This world of love’, but he could not have continued with ‘this me’. Epipsychidion positions itself firmly on the side of the poetry of Shelley’s idealising tendency and  –  at times – ­liberates him into being the rich and complex poet he wished to be, and increasingly feared he had failed to be. Shelley had more than one reason to insist that, in his poetry, ‘As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles.’ It would have been Mary’s profound hope that that was true. Their quarrels during January and February 1821 nevertheless contributed to what (in August) Shelley would call ‘the deep dejection of the early part of the year’ and Mary recalled as yet another ‘unlucky season’.30 When dispatching the poem to Ollier on 16 February 1821, Shelley had 300



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called it ‘a production of a portion of me already dead’,31 and although she included it in her collection of 1839, it was the only one of Shelley’s longer poems about which Mary never wrote anything in the notes she added; it seems to have worried her. Shelley expressed his own conclusion about it in June 1822: ‘The “Epipsychidion” I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace.’ So, having ­poetically embraced his Emilia as a goddess, Shelley ended up recoiling from the monster he had brought into existence (Ixion had taken a cloud to be the goddess Juno and had fathered a centaur – ‘An intimate union of two diverse natures’32  –  upon it). The person Shelley had imagined a marvellous woman had turned out as unsubstantial as a cloud: his poem had become a mythological monster.

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And it was at just this point – he may have aimed at reassuring Mary that he was not obsessed with Teresa Viviani but with serious, even scholarly matters  –  that Shelley embarked on his finest piece of prose writing, one in which he declared the ending of his sympathy with the idealising sensibility. For the first issue of a series which Ollier had proposed, a ‘Literary Miscellany in Prose and verse / By several hands / To be continued occasionally’, Shelley’s old friend Peacock had produced an essay entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ which attempted to be as controversial as p­ ossible about modern poetry. Not only did it divide poetry into the ages of iron, gold, silver and brass – consigning contemporary poetry to the age of brass – but it questioned whether there was any point in writing poetry at all, as the only possible inspirations were ‘the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment’; the resulting poetry being no more than ‘promiscuous rubbish’. Peacock argued that there were enough good poems already written, that other occupations were more useful than poetry‐writing, that the public for poetry was growing stupider, and that ‘intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels’  –  so that poets were nothing but ‘drivellers and mountebanks’.1 It was, however, notable that although Peacock castigated Scott, Moore, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Campbell and Byron by name, he did not mention Keats (dangerously ill by now) or Shelley.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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By 20 January 1821 Shelley had seen the essay: he told Ollier that it ‘excited my polemical faculties so violently, that the moment I get rid of my ophthalmia I mean to set about an answer to it, which I will send to you, if you please. It is very clever, but, I think, very false.’ He did not need to ask Ollier who had written it, though he asked for the names of the authors of two other pieces in the miscellany. He wanted to write a proper reply, and quickly: Ollier had offered to include one in his next Literary Miscellany. Shelley sent off what he planned as the first essay of three on 20 March. But no further Literary Miscellanies ever put in an appearance  –  Ollier had lost money on the volume containing Peacock’s essay – and Shelley’s essay, his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (its title taken from Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie of 1595), remained unpublished, like so much of his late work. It is irrelevant whether Peacock at some level meant all or indeed any of what he wrote. Shelley cheerfully described him as the ‘desperate rider of a hobbeyhorsical theory’,2 but nonetheless became entangled by Peacock’s polemic into writing a poetic history to replace the one Peacock offered (the poetry reading he and Mary had been doing for years had been an unplanned preparation for this). He also launched into a definition of love worthy of Socrates in the Symposium: ‘The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own’ (659). This is similar to what he had developed in his ‘On Love’ essay of 1818, except that in 1821 – after Epipsychidion – he would be especially concerned with a ‘going out of our own nature’, with getting away from the obsession with the ideal that our own nature is sure to engender; he writes as if it were possible to gain ‘rest’ or ‘respite’ for the poor, longing heart – something he had denied in 1818. But he also sets out to develop ideas about language, in particular, and attempts to say what it is that makes language the medium it is, and why poetry is therefore so important. He ends up with formulations the most famous of which are very often the most disputable: ‘Poetry is the record of the happiest and best moments of the happiest and best minds’ and ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (674, 678), for example, the latter cribbed from his own unpublished Philosophical View of Reform but also constituting ‘a claim to membership in an elect or an occult nobility’3 which was characteristic of Shelley. The best formulations in the essay represent a mind working hard to justify its investment in a medium which Peacock’s essay had declared pointless. Shelley is fascinated by metaphor, but also tries to say what it is, and what it does: he sees poetry as ‘vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before apprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension’ (653). Language itself, too, is a ‘direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being’, so that the words of a poet ‘unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth’ (655–656). He is 303



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trying very hard to pin down his subject, and very often does so: but as that last formulation reveals, at times it escapes him, as he reaches the kind of conclusion which is only roughly convincing. One of his problems is that – following his new poetic history – he does not answer Peacock: he makes no attempt to defend Coleridge against the charge that he was only concerned with ‘the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics’, or Wordsworth against the accusation of being just ‘a morbid dreamer’.4 Shelley, at this stage of what he saw as a lengthy piece of writing, pays no attention to the individual insults – he has decided not to ‘cite living poets’ – but is concerned with what he terms ‘Poetry in an universal sense.’ This can easily result in generalities like ‘Poetry turns all things to loveliness’ but it also enables him to grasp at formulations such as the way poetry ‘arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life’.5 Teresa Viviani had been just such a haunting apparition – now vanishing – in one of the darker times of his own life: Epipsychidion had (not at all happily) arrested her vanishing. But it was as if starting an answer to Peacock also unblocked the way for Shelley to develop an eloquent account of what he had been doing, and feeling, at just the time when he was questioning his own ability to be a writer. He would confess to Peacock in February 1821 that ‘nothing is so difficult as to write without a confidence of finding readers’, in May he told Byron that ‘what now I never shall do’ was ‘write anything worth calling a poem’, while in August he insisted that ‘I write nothing and probably shall write no more’. And Medwin found Shelley confiding in him that ‘I am disgusted with writing, and were it not for an irresistible impulse, that predominates my better reason, should discontinue so doing.’ Claire, too, would hear in December 1821 that ‘I am employed in nothing – read – but I have no spirits for serious composition – I have no confidence and to write [in] solitude or put forth thoughts without sympathy is unprofitable vanity.—’6 In October 1821 he had concluded that all he could do was to ‘try to be what I might have been, but am not very successfull’: in mid‐June 1822 he would comment: ‘I hope to forget what I might have been in my content with what I am.’ The resonance of ‘what I might have been’ in both sentences is profoundly sad, as is his unconvincing determination to be content ‘with what I am’. John Gisborne reported to Benjamin Haydon in 1825 that – when he asked Shelley if he ‘might have done more if he had acted otherwise with his talents?’ – Shelley had answered: ‘Certainly: he had made a mistake.’7 What particular mistake, he did not say. A reasonable guess would be that he thought he had been mistaken in believing that his own merits as a poet would inevitably be recognised. He should have published more, he should have written in a more popular style, he should have ignored his status as upper‐class man and have pushed for recognition. But by 1821, there was nothing to be done; his reputation was irretrievable, as was shown by comments in the cheap and influential weekly the Literary Gazette, which in May would offer the ‘frightful supposition, that his own life may have been a 304



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fearful commentary upon his principles’ – principles which, the Gazette suggested, had ‘happily deprived him of the superintendence of his infants’.8 With a great deal more of the same beside.

It was during the time they had been visiting Teresa Viviani in January 1821 that, via Thomas Medwin, Shelley and Mary had also first met Jane and Edward Williams (see Figures 9 and 10), an unmarried couple with two children who had come to Italy partly in hope of being introduced to the Shelleys. More than 50 years later, in 1872, W. M. Rossetti (1829–1919) found Jane of ‘fine height’ with ‘eyes dark purplish blue … brilliancy lost only very lately, I am told’.9 Like Medwin, Williams was a retired army officer on half pay. At first neither Mary nor Shelley cared much for Jane: Mary found her ‘certainly very pretty but she wants animation and sense;

Figure 9  Jane Williams Hogg, photograph (c. 1851) (The Bodleian Libraries,The University of Oxford, [Pr] Shelley adds. e. 8 facing page 1244)

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Figure 10  Edward Ellerker Williams, detail of pencil and crayon self‐portrait (1821–1822) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, [Pr] Shelley adds. e. 7 facing page 736)

her conversation is nothing particular, and she speaks in a slow monotonous voice’ (all Mary could say for her was that she was ‘good tempered and tolerant’). Shelley appears at first to have been even less positive – it took him until May 1821 to admit ‘I have got reconciled to Jane’, and a month later to concede that ‘I like her much better than I did’, though his preference for her husband was still clear in August 1821, when he sent his love to ‘the Williams’s and Williams especially’ – but, almost exactly a year after first encountering Jane, in January 1822, he would write, ruefully, ‘So much for first impressions!’10 Long before that, he and Mary had discovered that Jane’s singing voice was ‘very pretty’ and that she had ‘a taste and ear for music which is almost miraculous’, being ‘an accomplished … player on the harp, guitar, and piano’. And by 1822 Mary, too, could say ‘I like the Williams’ exceedingly’ and describe Jane in Wordsworth’s lines ‘A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye.’11 They had ended up seeing each other constantly, sometimes every day, the women taking walks and dining together. In the early summer of 1821, when the Williamses went to the Villa Poschi in Pugnano, near the Serchio river, the Shelleys went to their summer retreat at San Giuliano, just four kilometres further south, and they continued to see each other, often travelling by boat along 306

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the network of canals.Williams was an experienced sailor of small boats; he, Shelley and the occasional friend had frequently sailed along the Serchio and from Pisa along the Arno, and along the neighbourhood’s canals. At first they used a small, curricle‐like contraption of wood and canvas (ideal for shallow water) but then what had originally been a 10‐foot‐long high‐sided punt with a keel, bought cheaply by Henry Reveley, which – after capsizing and nearly drowning Shelley on the evening of 16 April 182112 – had been modified to give it greater stability, and to allow a more substantial mast. A glimpse of Shelley and Williams setting off from Pugnano on the last day of May 182113 appears in Shelley’s poem ‘The Boat on the Serchio.’ The Williams figure is in charge, giving orders to their boatman Dominic: ‘bring the oars and sails and mast / You see that those fore halliards are made fast / Now hoist the sails.’ The Shelley figure’s offer to help – ‘Would not this peak be best a little lowered?’ – is dismissed (‘No, now’s all right’). His job is simply to take charge of the eatables and the ‘bottles of warm tea’; later, he is peremptorily told: ‘Sit at the helm—fasten this sheet—all’s ready.’ Although starting late, they are going out for the day: as the Shelley figure puts it, ‘the stars we miss this morn, will light / More willingly our return tonight’: on at least one occasion, they sailed down the Serchio and around by sea to Livorno, in spite of their boat’s ‘diminutive size and frail nature’.14 One of their excursions from San Giuliano produced a fine example of the sheer complexity of poetry writing, compared with prose. A ‘roughly drafted’ fragment of poetry appears in one of Shelley’s notebooks opposite a piece of prose written ‘far more fluently and legibly’, both apparently inscribed in May or June 1821. The prose is simpler but rich in metaphor and observation of the moment: The mountains sweep into the plain—like waves that meet in a chasm—the olive woods are as green as a sea & are waving in the wind—the shadows of the clouds are spotting the green bosom of the hills—a heron comes sailing over me—a butterfly flits near—at intervals the pines give forth their sweet & prolonged response to the wind—The myrtle bushes are in bud & the soil beneath me is carpeted with odoriferous herbs & flowers—I am—

The little verse fragment reads: It is a savage mountain slope Which sweeps amain from Heaven’s cope Through the untrodden rifts the Earth Has15 Wonderful to use ‘amain’  –  usually either ‘with full force’ or ‘at once’  –  for the downward rush of the slope: ‘cope’ for the covering sky was regularly in Shelley’s 307



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vocabulary (twice in Laon and Cythna, in ‘To Constantia’, in Hellas). But there the fragment breaks off. Mary’s journal records how, on 16 May, ‘After dinner go to the Williams – walk up a mountain with them – a delightful evening’:16 some such visit provoked those two pieces of writing.

In London in 1817 and 1818, the Shelleys had briefly known Keats, and in August 1819 Shelley had arranged for copies of his own new books automatically to be sent to him. In July 1820, the Gisbornes had sent worrying news of the poor state of Keats’s health, and Shelley – knowing the beneficial effect of a warmer c­ limate on suspected consumption – had at once invited Keats to Italy: ‘Mrs. Shelley unites with myself in urging the request, that you would take up your residence with us.’ They were on the point of taking ‘a very pleasant & spacious apartment’, the Casa Prinni at San Giuliano (the Bagni di Pisa).17 Keats eventually did travel to Italy and, seven months after his first invitation, and now in Pisa itself, Shelley repeated his invitation, ‘without however inviting him to our own house. We are not rich enough for that sort of thing. Poor fellow!’18 Early in 1821, the Shelleys were oppressed by financial troubles, and their flat in the Casa Galetti was small. Keats would die in Rome three days after Shelley had written his second letter, the Shelleys knowing simply that he was desperately ill; they only learned of his death when Horace Smith (in London) wrote to them in mid‐April. Keats had been buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome where they had buried their own son William in June 1819, almost two years earlier. Shelley’s writing about the burial place is quite especially tender, especially in the Preface he composed to his memorial poem to Keats: ‘The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place’ (491). That second sentence contains a perfectly apposite reference to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – ‘I have been half in love with easeful death’19 – and an heroic attempt to come to terms with his own recollection. Having started to compose a very particular kind of elegy for Keats, probably by the middle of May 1821, by 5 June Shelley expected that it ‘will shortly be finished’. It appears to have grown very fast; on 8 June, he would promise Ollier a 40‐stanza poem; on 11 June he conceded that the finished poem, in 55 stanzas, was ‘little adapted for popularity’ – nothing new in that – but he also described it as ‘perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions’. He repeated that to Ollier three months later (‘The Adonais, in spite of its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions’). For Shelley, ‘least imperfect’ was an interesting claim: and he maintained his insistence on its particular quality (‘it is a favourite with me’) even when adjusting his tone to fit Peacock’s gentlemanly distrust of exaggeration, first asserting in 308



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August that ‘the composition of the poetry, and the taste in which it is written, I do not think bad’ and then, again, in January 1822,‘the composition … will not wholly displease you’. The Gisbornes, too, heard in June 1821 that they were among ‘the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it’, because ‘It is a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than any thing I have written.—’20 Every comment stresses ‘composition’: it would please those who could appreciate such a thing. Although the Preface which Shelley prepared for his poem goes into a few details ‘of the closing scene of poor Keats’s life’ (492), the poem itself (having cast Keats as Adonais) says rather little about the man or his writing, and in fact goes out of its way (for the most part successfully) not to address him. The elegist speaks directly to Adonais just twice, the first time in stanza XVI, and then ‘in the context of a mythological conceit’: To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both Thou Adonais … (496:140–142) ‘That final phrase “Thou Adonais” is powerful in its syntactical torsion, but the result is to escort Adonais into a stylized mythological world’: the poem shows Shelley composing an elegy in ‘formal Greek dress’.21 It became just what he described to Ollier in September 1821, an ‘image of my regret and honour’, written with enormous ingenuity and learning, based at times on the Greek poet Moschus’s Lament for Bion. Shelley knew his materials through and through: it was as if for years he had been readying himself for writing such a piece. (Medwin was not the only one who saw how ‘a book was his companion the first thing in the morning, the last thing at night. He told me he always read himself to sleep.’) If ever there were such a thing as ‘bookish art’,22 it is Adonais, even though it is also surprisingly available to the general reader. Its classicism was nevertheless an utterly appropriate, even combative, tribute to Keats. Keats’s poems Endymion and ‘Hyperion’ had both been on classical subjects, but their author had been savagely attacked by John Wilson Croker in a review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review as ‘unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has somewhere been called Cockney poetry’. With that thrust – Cockneys being uneducated London working‐class – Croker sarcastically assumed that Keats had no idea what to do with a classical subject: ‘Of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion’.23 It was this review, Shelley believed, which had been responsible for Keats bursting a blood‐vessel and had led to his death. The reviewer’s crime, as Shelley saw it, was not in underrating Endymion, of which in September 1819 he had himself been extremely critical (he thought he deserved ‘much praise for 309



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­ aving read’ it, ‘the Author’s intention appearing to be that no person should h ­possibly get to the end of it’ – Croker, too, complained that he had had to make ‘efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it’24). But what mattered to Shelley were the best parts of Endymion, which he reckoned ‘full of some of the highest & the finest gleams of poetry’; he had written complimenting Keats in July 1820 on ‘the treasures of poetry’ contained in the poem, though also sounding the cautionary note that such treasures were ‘poured forth with indistinct profusion’. By October 1820 Shelley had, however, been much more impressed by Keats’s ‘Hyperion’, which he reckoned ‘in the very highest style of poetry’.25 The Preface which Shelley composed for Adonais is filled with irony, rage, compassion and regret. Yet the poem itself only touches on those things, as in stanza XXXVII, in which Shelley’s anger with Croker (‘murderer as you are’26 as the Preface puts it) becomes something more like wishful thinking: Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame! Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me, Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! But be thyself, and know thyself to be! And ever at thy season be thou free To spill the venom when thy fangs o’erflow: Remorse and Self‐contempt shall cling to thee; Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow, And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt—as now. (502:325–333) The final ‘as now’ is that of a writer wishing to believe in his own transformative rhetoric; it seems unlikely that Croker ever trembled or burned with shame. Such an assault is rather less successful than the ‘interposed stabs’ at ‘the assassins’27 of Keats which he had promised Ollier in June 1821. But Shelley’s poem had adopted strategies which contributed to a considerable distancing of its concerns from both the person and the actual writing of Keats. Although the name Adonais ‘offers a Platonic pun on the Greek word for “nightingale”, ἀηδω̍ν’,28 the passing mention of a ‘lorn nightingale’ (497:145) is as close as the poem gets to a direct reference to Keats’s poetry, of which – after all – Shelley did not really approve: ‘the canons of taste to which Keats has conformed … are the very reverse of my own’.29 That may have been among the reasons why, on the title‐page Shelley provided when having the poem printed in Pisa, he explained that Adonais was ‘An elegy on the death of John Keats, author of Endymion, Hyperion etc.’: readers needed some such indication. For Shelley had taken it on himself to write an elegy packed with ‘densely allusive classicism’ as an appropriate defense of – and development of – Keats’s writing, 310



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but also as something which it especially pleased him to create. What we read is therefore a narrative of the mourning of Urania for Adonais, based on ‘Bion’s source story’30 of the mourning of Venus for Adonis; and as such it must have been immensely enjoyable to readers like Peacock or Hogg, who would have marvelled at the way Shelley was able to command both his sources and the ‘highly wrought’ use to which he was now putting them. That skill might have left other readers colder; as one critic puts it, Shelley’s classical celebration of the dead ‘has about it a quality that seems deliberately willed’.31 But readers are easily attracted to parts of the poem which do other things – in particular the end of the poem, from Stanza XXXIX on, when the conceit of Adonais not really being dead is developed: He hath awakened from the dream of life— ’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife … (503:344–346) Marvellous lines in Adonais such as ‘He hath outsoared the shadow of our night’ (503:352) and ‘He is a portion of the loveliness / Which once he made more lovely’ (504:379) are a direct result of the poem’s escape back into a world in which Goethe, Coleridge and Wordsworth can properly be invoked. It is in fact tempting to read the poem for its compelling incidental pleasures and excitements – like the writing about Rome at the very end – and against the grain of its existence as a commemorative poem. It operates at times as a work of extreme simplicity: Winter is come and gone, But grief returns with the revolving year; The airs and streams renew their joyous tone; The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear; Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons’ bier; The amorous birds now pair in every brake, And build their mossy homes in field and brere; And the green lizard, and the golden snake, Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake. (497:154–62) The ‘amorous birds’ which ‘pair in every brake’ are entirely conventional – Shelley’s skill as a writer at such moments being entirely adequate for covering the ground, as in his conventional love lyrics – but when the lizard and the snake are transformed to ‘unimprisoned flames’, then the poetry is really working. Given that Adonais was what Shelley especially believed in as a ‘work of art’, then we might be grateful for the comparative artlessness of many of his other later poems: less ‘highly wrought’, more direct, at times more evocative and more feeling. Edward Williams noted, after just a few months’ acquaintance, how marvellous 311



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Shelley’s everyday conversation was: ‘he sees things in the most singular and pleasing lights: if he wrote as he talked, he would be popular enough’. But Adonais was what a writer doubting his ability (‘I have no confidence’32 he told Claire in December 1821) could produce which was safer and more appropriate for a classicist and intellectual: it demonstrates one of the sorts of writer Shelley most certainly was, and as which he might have remained. Among the unsafe poems he was writing was an agonised, unfinished lyric drafted between the middle of April and the middle of May 1821, right at the start of the composition of Adonais, and particularly beloved of nineteenth‐century readers, though recently oddly neglected.33 A mostly wordless early version of how it might sound was reproduced in Chapter 3; this was how Shelley fair‐copied it.   O World o Life o Time   On whose last steps I climb Trembling at that where I had stood before   When will return the glory of yr prime?    No more, o never more           5       2     Out of the day & night     A joy has taken flight Fresh spring & summer      & winter hoar   Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight    No more, o never more         10 The gap in line eight – carried over from the draft – indicates the poem’s incompleteness.34 It has been accused of nostalgia (sin of sins), but there is no reason to read it as an autobiographical utterance; we can recognise just how beautifully shaped and formed it is, and also (in the best sense) how simple, too. But the fact that Shelley left it incomplete, even in his fair copy, is an unmistakable sign of his failure to get it right ‘in point of composition’. If he couldn’t manage that, no fudge would do. It is a piece he would not have published as serious work: its posthumous fame a fine anomaly.

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30 This Latest of my Orphans 1821

In August 1821, on a visit Shelley made to Ravenna, Byron showed him a ­confidential letter from Hoppner dating from September 1820. This outlined a great range of charges against Shelley and Claire, made by Elise to Mrs Hoppner in the summer of 1820. These included a claim that, in 1818, Shelley had not only had an affair with Claire but had got her pregnant, that he had tried to induce an abortion, that – having failed – he and Claire had managed to conceal everything from Mary and (after Claire had given birth to a child, in Naples, in December 1818) that Shelley had within half an hour consigned the baby to the Foundling Hospital, along the way awarding substantial bribes to servants, midwives and doctors for their complicity in keeping the whole thing hushed‐up. Shelley ­ and Claire had also – according to Elise – behaved ‘in the most brutal manner’ to Mary, Claire saying that she wished her dead, and doing her best to persuade Shelley to leave her.1 Paolo’s threats must have been to tell such stories either to Mary, or to Shelley’s friends and the English community, or to all of them, if Shelley did not pay up. The fact that Elise did eventually tell the stories to Marie Isabelle Hoppner may be a sign that Paolo’s blackmail attempts had been resisted, but that they could not stop his wife from talking: or it may have been the result of a specific threat to tell the Hoppners. Elise  –  well‐known to the Hoppners from her time with them in 1818 – would naturally have been believed: and Claire’s child with Byron, and now her supposed child with Shelley, would have been taken by the Hoppners as proof of how immoral the whole Shelley party had been. Such tales would, too, have

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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wrecked Claire’s potential career as companion or governess; and the stories ­certainly affected the way Shelley was viewed, during his lifetime and later, not just by the Hoppners but by the British community, and by some reviewers and commentators.2 The real facts about the baptism and registration of the baby in Naples at the end of February 1819 may have played no part in any of the charges Paolo and Elise were now making, unless the idea that there had been a baby born to (or registered by) Shelley in Naples had somehow come up  –  in the gossip of servants, for example, or via the cheese‐makers of Naples – and Paolo had got wind of it. But there may have been no more behind his allegations than Elise’s suspicions that Shelley had been having an affair with Claire, with the added detail that Claire had been ill at the end of December 1818, and that Paolo knew about the medicines which the doctors had been prescribing Shelley in the autumn of 1818: mercury and Cheltenham Salts (a popular purgative), and – later on – some sort of ‘caustic’:3 any of which might, in Paolo’s blackmail threats, conceivably have been used to ­provoke an abortion.These could then have been linked up with the fact that there was no love lost between Claire and Mary to produce the story of the pregnancy, attempts to induce a miscarriage, the birth – with the baby instantly spirited away to the one organisation in Naples which would certainly have taken it – and the sisters’ acrimonious relationship. It hit the Shelleys terribly hard when they discovered what Elise had been saying; what made it worse was that Hoppner and his wife had been totally convinced by her stories, and Hoppner had taken it on himself to warn Byron against Claire and Shelley. And back in 1820 Byron had accepted the stories as ‘true no doubt’: ‘Of the facts … there can be little doubt; it is just like them’ (though he would not have told Shelley that).The stories were also especially important because they helped Byron justify his decision to allow Claire no further access to Allegra; a month after putting Allegra in the convent (on 1 March 1821) he had told Hoppner that ‘to allow the Child to be with her mother – & with them and their principles – would be absolute insanity’.4 Such things as Paolo’s  –  and especially Elise’s  –  behaviour depressed Shelley badly. He had not only found himself anathematised by much of the press, but had been subjected to the attacks of the single cleverest literary journalist in London, William Hazlitt, who might – politically – have been expected to have been a supporter (in London in February 1817, they had argued together for republicanism5). In April 1821, however, Hazlitt mounted a dismissal of Shelley as a writer and a character assassination of him in his periodical the London Magazine (also in his ­collection Table Talk): No one (that I know of) is the happier, better, or wiser for reading Mr. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. One thing is that nobody reads it. And the reason for one or

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  1821  both is the same, that he is not a poet, but a sophist, a theorist, a controversial writer in verse. He gives us for representations of things, rhapsodies of words … This mixture of fanatic zeal with poetical licentiousness is not quite the thing.6

Shelley himself, ‘though a man in knowledge … is a child in feeling’, ‘an overgrown child with the power of a man’. Furthermore, Egotism, petulance, licentiousness, levity of principle (whatever be the source) is a bad thing in any one, and most of all, in a philosophical reformer.7

The charges of ‘licentiousness’ and ‘levity of principle’ were perhaps the old attack on Shelley for his abandonment of Harriett and his attraction to another woman while he was married (Southey himself could hardly have been clearer): but it is also possible that gossip about Paolo’s and Elise’s slanders had filtered through to London. The ‘petulance’ was Hazlitt’s own take, which rather few shared (though Robinson’s word ‘intolerant’8 clarifies it, as does Shelley’s belief in himself as ‘irritable’9): but it was a thoroughly disturbing idea that Shelley was emotionally so immature that he could neither handle adult relationships nor write poetry appealing to readers beyond adolescence. Such charges made an impression not just on Shelley’s contemporaries but on later readers like T. S. Eliot. And as for Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, ‘he is not a poet’ and ‘nobody reads it’. There, in three words, was the unforgiving confirmation of Shelley’s own remark in July 1820, as he prepared the work for publication: ‘I wonder why I write verses, for nobody reads them.’10 The sensation of being persecuted had haunted him since he had been rejected from his family home at the age of 18. There had been the long months of warfare with his father; there had been the attack on him for his private life, for a while mounted primarily by Robert Southey but  –  as Hazlitt showed – now common currency.There were Godwin’s running attacks on him in London; and more recently Maria Gisborne’s avoidance of him and Mary in October 1820, after listening to Godwin. He was constantly savaged not just by the intellectual press but by more popular, cheaper publications like the Literary Gazette. And now, he discovered, terrible stories about him and Claire had been circulating without his having any knowledge of them: stories which he at once linked with his awful reputation as a writer. He immediately got Mary to write a letter of rebuttal, to be given to the Hoppners by Byron, but it was found – opened – among Byron’s papers after his death. Byron had been firmly enjoined by Hoppner not to tell Elise’s stories to the Shelleys and had agreed: ‘You may be sure that I keep your counsel’.11 If he had passed on Mary’s letter, it would have been proof that he had broken his word.

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Alexandros Mavrokordatos had been one of the Shelleys’ acquaintances in Pisa since early in 1821; he had become a regular visitor to their house and a friend of Mary Shelley. Shelley nevertheless noted in May: ‘I reproach my own savage disposition that so agreable accomplished and aimiable person [sic] is not more agreable to me.’ And Mavrokordatos knew that Shelley was avoiding him, sending ‘complimens à Mr Shelley’ on 31 May 1821 and adding sarcastically: ‘I have not had the honour of meeting him for quite some years.’12 But accomplished Mavrokordatos certainly was, just a year older than Shelley but speaking seven languages and with a successful political career stretching back over his entire adult life; he and Shelley did manage to read together, and he attempted to teach Shelley some modern (as opposed to classical) Greek, while Mary taught Mavrokordatos English and thought him ‘a man much to my taste gentlemanly  –  gay learned and full of talent and enthusiasm for Greece’.When he left to take a ship to Greece in June 1821, Shelley noted that ‘He is a great loss to Mary, and therefore to me – but not otherwise.’13 He would all the same be the dedicatee of the poem Hellas which Shelley began to draft in June 1821 and eventually wrote in October; the cause to which Mavrokordatos was dedicating himself (the political recovery of Greece) being of real importance to Shelley. Along with others in their circle – notably Byron – the Shelleys had been deeply stirred by the ambitions of exiles to return to Greece in an attempt to overthrow the Ottoman empire’s rule of their country. Shelley avidly followed developments in the newspapers and from what he heard from the Greek exiles themselves, and a notebook he began to use in Pisa in the early summer of 1821 shows him, in only the second entry made in it, working out a poem (later called a ‘Fragment written for Hellas’) related to the news he was hearing about Greece.14 He insists that it would take an utter miracle to free poor Greece: Could Arethuse to her fountain run From Alpheus & the bitter Dorian Or could the morning shafts of purest light Return into the quiver of the Sun or could one thought from its wild flight Return into the temple of the brain Without a change, without a stain: Could aught that is, ever again Be what it once has ceased to be: Greece might again be free.15 But no more than sun beams could return to the sun, or a thought be unthought, could any such thing happen. The poem reveals an attitude entirely consistent with the depression Shelley had been feeling about what had happened in Italy in the early months of 1821. 316



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And down to its final Chorus Hellas would also be oddly negative, in spite of its dedication to Mavrokordatos. Having first considered a Prologue similar to the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ prefacing Goethe’s Faust Part I, Shelley had settled for a classical model: the first surviving tragic play, Aeschylus’ The Persians. The negativity of his own poem was inevitable, given the way he chose to structure it. The Persians had been a work celebrating the triumph of Greece while being set in the Persian capital; it had showed the news of the recent colossal defeat of Persia being gradually recounted by messengers, survivors and the ghost of Darius the Great. Shelley’s poem works in reverse, being set in a Turkish palace to which news is constantly brought of the successful assaults by the Turks, the British, the French, and others, on Greece and the Greek patriots. So the news is always bad. In the palace itself, the Chorus is made up of ‘Greek Captive Women’, and they refer miserably ‘To what of Greece remaineth now’, being horribly conscious of losing their country as well as their freedom: ‘And a name and a nation / Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!’ (518–519:83, 108–109). The central Turkish character, Sultan Mahmud II, himself fears oncoming disaster, but what ensues is constant rumour of Greek disarray (‘Our hills and seas and streams / Dispeopled of their dreams’) and threats of Ottoman power: ‘Four ­hundred thousand Moslems, from the limits / Of utmost Asia, ­irresistibly / Throng, like full clouds at the Sirocco’s cry’ (523–524:235–236, 275–277). And yet the story of the final massacre of the Greeks is concluded by a lengthy speech from a ‘dying man’ full of contempt for the victors, and looking forward to ‘A seraph‐winged Victory, bestriding / The tempest of the Omnipotence of God / Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom / And you to oblivion!’ (529:448–451). A Greek victory at sea is lovingly described and the piece is full of rumours and portents of ‘dying Islam’ (544:916), but it is unfortunately obliged to stick to the historical facts, the Greeks currently being ‘as a brood of lions in the net / Round which the kingly hunters of the earth / Stand smiling’ (545:932–934). The dominating ‘Anarchs’ are ‘Austria, Russia, England / And that tame Serpent, that poor shadow, France’, and the poem shows Britain’s involvement in maintaining the status quo: ‘British skill directing Othman might’: a ‘Voice without’ shouts ‘Let not a Greek escape!’ (546–547:967–968,1019,1022). Along the way, Shelley decided to include  –  to reveal the nature of popular feeling in Greece  –  a reference to how ‘The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West’, together with a Note explaining how It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a sea‐port near Lacedæmon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece. (534:598,551)

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Shelley’s distrust of ‘popular enthusiasm’ could hardly be clearer. And despite the first five lines of the famous, resounding final Chorus – The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam … The poem shows its real attitude in the metaphor of line six: ‘Like wrecks of a ­dissolving dream’ (548:1060–1065). ‘Wrecks’ in the sense of ‘disordered residue or remainder’, perhaps, but with a reminiscence of The Tempest’s famous ‘stuff / As dreams are made on’, with the dissolution of everything leaving ‘not a rack behind’.16 Shelley calls this final chorus indistinct and obscure as the event of the living drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophesies of wars, and rumours of wars &c., may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, but to anticipate, however darkly, a period of regeneration and happiness is a more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign. (552)

Elegant sentiments but not encouraging. All the Note to Hellas can do is look ­forward to ‘the possible and perhaps approaching state of society in which the “lion shall lie down with the lamb”’. It cannot hope, that is, for armed resistance or rebellion, only for a time of peace succeeding ‘the actual reign of evil which we endure and bewail’ (552). And the Note is all too well aware that even such an outcome is ‘indistinct and obscure’. It was not just in irony that, on the manuscript page facing the first draft of ‘The worlds great age begins anew’, Shelley should have also drafted the start of his Preface: ‘This poem deserves to be regarded as little more than an improvise inspired by the uncontrollable emotions of the moment.—’ He wanted it printed and distributed, but in April 1822 referred to it as ‘this last [i.e. latest] of my orphans’, about to be introduced ‘to oblivion, & me to my accustomed failure!’17 And he remained in his usual relationship with a publisher: in debt to him for printing, stitching and distributing, rather than earning money from him.

The visit which Shelley had made to Ravenna in August 1821 had had the usual problems for anyone entering Byron’s household: Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests

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  1821  which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up ­gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or ­fortnight, but I shall not try it longer.

The palace had its usual exotic contents: ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it … [P.S.] After I have sealed my letter, I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … I have just met on the grand staircase five Peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes.18

Deft, rich in fantasy, brilliant in a word like ‘unarbitrated’; who could ask for more? Shelley remained a writer even when depressed: the pleasure of being with Byron having been undermined, the first night he was there, by the news of what Elise had been telling the Hoppners. The most significant result of the visit to Ravenna, and the biggest change to all their lives, was Byron’s decision to come to Pisa. He needed to move to Tuscany because the Gamba family had been expelled from Emilia‐Romagna for their links with the Carbonari, and Shelley helped persuade Teresa Guiccioli that Pisa would be a better place to settle than Florence.What in particular would have helped persuade Byron to come to Pisa was the plan which he and Shelley developed, during Shelley’s days in Ravenna, to establish a new, radical quarterly magazine to rival Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review. They invited Leigh Hunt (whom Byron had known since 1813, when he had admired him for his talent and his integrity) to come to Italy to edit it; the original idea being that all three men would publish all their new compositions in it and share the profits.19 Ideal, but utterly impractical, Byron’s poetry being far more profitable than that of Hunt and Shelley’s not being profitable at all. Shelley in fact refused to be cast in the role of hanger‐on and, almost from the start, withdrew from any idea of sharing in what might be earned: he saw himself as an administrative link between Byron and Hunt, ‘until you can know each other and effectuate the arrangement’. They did know each other; but Shelley was conscious of how useful he would be in bringing them to work together. Because both the others were successfully able to command an audience with their writing, they could (Shelley told Hunt) assume ‘a station in modern literature, which the universal voice of my contemporaries forbids me either to stoop or aspire to’.20 He could not be induced to share the ‘borrowed splendour’ of an arrangement in which he would foreseeably have acquired readers (and money and reputation) because of his association with Byron: he would not let a connection with Byron give him a status he would not otherwise have had. 319



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His relationship with Byron had grown to be a very sore point. On 10 August 1821, after hearing him read Canto V of Don Juan, Shelley had written how It sets him not above but far above all the poets of the day: every word has the stamp of immortality. – I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.21

He had neither Byron’s reputation nor his earning power. He insisted that, in the uneasy relation between the two of them, ‘the fault is not on my side; nor is it likely, I being the weaker’. But it was the experience of being with Byron and listening to Don Juan which made him pour out to Peacock, later that day, his despair at having ‘my name classed among those who have no name. If I cannot be something better, I had rather be nothing.’22 For another person than Shelley, and another kind of writer, the magazine (Byron christened it The Liberal) would have been an excellent chance to be included in a publication which would certainly command a public: a real opportunity for a writer who knew he deserved to be better known. It tells us a great deal that – although believing that it would be an excellent thing to get Byron writing for a radical journal, and for Hunt to have Byron as his main contributor – Shelley determined to play no part in the magazine after helping set it up. The only area of life where he would allow himself to compete with Byron, after the latter had moved to Pisa, was at pistol shooting: that was sport. They would regularly ride out of town with Williams and others, including Pietro Gamba, Byron’s old friend Captain John Hay and their acquaintance Taaffe  –  Williams thought of them as Byron’s ‘Pistol Club’ – and engage in shooting practice (guns could not be fired in Pisa itself). Medwin, Williams and Hay were military men; Byron, Gamba, Taaffe and Shelley, as members of the upper‐classes, were used from childhood to going out shooting. Medwin recalled Shelley ‘making circles and bull’s eyes’ for targets, and Byron introduced them to shooting at a five Paoli piece,23 which Shelley ­regularly hit. But that was as far as he would go in competing with Byron.

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Part IV

No Rest or Respite 1821–1822

31 Ariel to Miranda 1821 –1822

One huge advantage of the Williams couple, for Shelley, was their ordinariness; ‘nice, good natured people’ were a great relief ‘after authors & pretenders to philosophy’ (Medwin bored Mary horribly).1 With Jane he had no need to wear ‘the idle mask / Of author, great or mean’ (558:29–30); unlike Teresa Viviani, she professed no respect for him as one of the ‘learned’ of the world. Back in August 1821 he had felt that it was unlikely that ‘I should continue an author’, but by early in 1822 Jane Williams had become one of the reasons for him to go on writing, driven as he was by that ‘irresistible impulse’2 to do what he was best at. There is a cluster of five poems and one song which he sent or gave to Jane but kept back from Mary: ‘To  —  ’ [‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’]; ‘To Jane. The Invitation’; ‘To Jane—The Recollection’; ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’; ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’; and the song for music ‘To Jane’. Two other songs – ‘Remembrance’ and ‘When the lamp is shattered’ – also went to Jane but Mary saw them. And other poems and songs were written with Jane in mind: certainly the ‘Indian Girl’s Song’, probably the fragmentary lyric ‘We meet not as we parted’, perhaps the intensely gloomy ‘Far, far away, o ye / Halcyons of Memory.’3 And Jane’s name would appear in the manuscript of ‘Bright wanderer’ (the first words of the rather neglected 58‐line poem previously known as ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’), though she probably never saw it.4 It used to be assumed that Jane was another idealised woman of the kind whom Shelley had more than once addressed, notably in Epipsychidion, in what has been called his ‘ongoing project’ as a poet, it now having ‘manifested itself in the later lyrics to Jane Williams’. But Jane was different. Shelley had lived in the same house The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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as her for months and in May 1822 was capable of concluding it ‘a pity that any one  so pretty and amicable should be so selfish’ (she had been squabbling over ‘saucepans to which no one can have a claim except herself ’5). ‘Emily’ as ideal projection of Teresa Viviani had been created within days or weeks of Shelley meeting her: he had only gradually been attracted to Jane, and his resultant writing was very different. The important thing was that she provoked him to write directly about his actual feelings: she was not an ideal projection. She also made him intensely aware of her love for Williams (after his death, she would refer to him as ‘my Angel’); the Jane figure in ‘The Magnetic Lady’ calls her partner ‘he / Who made and makes my lot’, and Shelley would imagine their life together as ‘full of flowers’ as his own was ‘of weeds’.6 He did his best to conceal from Mary his feelings for Jane, but went out of his way to ensure that Williams knew what he felt. It was implicit in what was perhaps the first poem he sent the Williams couple, on 26 January 1822, ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’: a very troubling piece. It confesses that he – ‘The miserable one’ (557:2–3,14)  –  can no longer go to Mary for love or indeed any kind of consolation; that he can – because he has to – bear her hatred, her scorn, her indifference (which indeed once hurt him); and that she no longer loves him – ‘“She loves me, loves me, not”’ being what he is told by every flower ‘oracle’ which he tries out (558:35,40). There is just half a moment when he hopes that, because Mary does not love him, he can ‘speak what you may know too well’ (558:38–39). Meaning that Jane probably knows all too well what he feels for her (but ‘She loves me … not’ applies to her too). It is an especially grim way of being honest with his friend and he apologises for sending him such a poem, ‘but that I know, / Happy yourself you feel anothers woe’.7 An undated scrap of a note written by Williams reveals the men’s bantering relationship: My dear S— Jane begs me to say that she can only answer your kindness in person. As for my movements I am going to shoot this Evening – that is, I feel I must parade you at 10 paces if you go on thus – If you will call yourself or send your second we will point out the ground.

We do not know to what ‘if you go on thus’ refers – Shelley had presumably been more than usually generous – but the note certainly does not convey the ‘jealous anger’ which has been claimed for it.8 It is a cheerful response – possibly to the gift of a guitar – reflecting the duelling currently threatened in the Pisa circle: Byron trying to engineer a duel with Southey, Shelley feeling he ought to challenge Byron over the way the latter was gossiping about Claire and her sexual life.

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It looks as if, for the months over which it endured – perhaps January to July 1822 – a peculiar odd balance of tact and attraction was maintained by three of the four people involved: Shelley not insisting too much, while finding out via his poetry what he felt about Jane,Williams enjoying his friend’s company and spending hours with him, Jane loving Williams and not Shelley but being flattered by – and enjoying – the latter’s attentions. It was Mary who was excluded. Just a few months earlier, in August 1821, she had committed herself to a tiny retrospect of her life with Shelley: 7 years are now gone – What changes What a life – we now appear tranquil – yet who know what wind – I will not prognosticate evil – We have had enough of it …9

But now this.

Beyond saying that Jane was ‘one fair form’, Shelley’s poems never describe her or say what she is like: they are about his feelings, about the way that, for him, she could now fill ‘with love’ not just the ‘thrilling silent life’ of a calm wood but ‘The lifeless atmosphere’ (562:51–52) of everyday life. Beside the poems (and the notes dispatched with four of them) there exist one brief letter and a solitary exchange of correspondence, quoted below. We can certainly discount the claim that the relationship was ‘a love‐affair, passionate on Shelley’s part and at least complaisant on Jane’s’. In no way was she disposed to comply with his wishes. But his feelings for her were more painful than allowed by one critic’s description of the relationship as ‘literary’ rather than ‘literal’.10 Jane made him angry with himself for loving her (in the poems he regularly apologised to her for doing so). But he also used the word ‘consolation’, a word of some significance for him, to describe what he felt she offered. He had told Claire in October 1820 that he had been ‘soothed’ by her ‘sweet consolations’, and he had hoped that his friendship with Teresa Viviani would bring them ‘to be perhaps a consolation to each other’.11 But life with Mary had, for Shelley, had for some time been a painful and, during these last months, had become a cold and distinctly unconsoling business. He had always believed in love and felt certain that, without it, ‘man becomes the living sepulchre of himself … the mere husk of what once he was’ (619). He could still be excited by art and literature  –  such things made ‘the pulses of my head beat’ – but ‘those of my heart have been quiet long ago’,12 he gloomily confessed on 12 January 1822. Having in Jane a focus of consolation, however unresponsive, was perhaps all he could now hope for. But especially in the

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music Jane made, she was able to create ‘some world far from this one’, as his draft of ‘To Jane’ struggled to suggest: Sing again though the sound overpowers Sing again – for thy voice is   revealing A tone  Of some world far from ours this one Where music & moonlight & feeling Are won Or, in the version he wrote out for Jane herself,‘Are one.’13 Experiencing something other than what he called ‘my heart’s winter’ (568:6) – managing to win ‘feeling’ and to respond to the heart’s pulses – was not just empowering but ­overpowering, and in a desperately wintry time led to poems. People who encountered Shelley and Mary together during these months ­certainly did not much like what they saw or heard. Even their new friend the adventurous Edward Trelawny (who had come to Pisa as a friend of Edward Williams, with the hope of an introduction to Shelley and Byron) felt very ‘uneasy’ with Mary for the ‘unkindness’ with which she usually treated Shelley.The ‘spirit of delight’ was – for Shelley – not something which ‘one like me’, in his own words, often enjoyed (he was too often concerned with struggle, with opposition), and that seems to have been especially so 1821–1822. But Trelawny’s recollection that, during the first six months of 1822, Shelley ‘did not laugh, or even smile, he was always earnest’ is especially striking (this was the time when Shelley also wrote about the ‘rare smile of woman’), and in old age Trelawny grew savagely condemnatory of Mary: ‘how she worried him with her jealousy & wailing’.14 Hunt too was troubled by what he heard about her, and had a terrible quarrel with her within six weeks of arriving in Italy, while Jane Williams was convinced that Mary no longer loved Shelley at all. It may be that Mary – having lived through Shelley’s fascination with Teresa Viviani – found the idea of a new attachment, just a year later, intolerable. Mary was a woman of strong, even violent feelings, which most people never realised, believing her rather cool and unfeeling. Hunt, all the same, described her as ‘a torrent of fire under a Hecla snow’: he knew she covered her feelings with icy reserve, but had experienced the volcanic rage of which she was capable. Shelley’s line ‘Of hatred I am proud,—with scorn content’15 in ‘To — ’ [‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’] suggests his experience of Mary’s anger. The ‘Jane’ poems are not ‘love poems’ in the confessional sense. Five of them are the most perfectly crafted lyrics about attraction and about how it cannot (will not, must not) be mutual or shared. The poetry is touching and evocative and nearly always painful. In almost all the poems, too, others are present who belong to the ‘magic circle’ of the group. In addition to Jane, we hear of ‘each accustomed visitor’, 326



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‘our beloved Jane’,‘some world far from ours’,‘a hand which was not mine’ (560:30, 568:90, 589:22, 565:15); there are ‘happy friends’ and ‘Dear friends’ (557:8, 558:18). ‘To Jane—The Recollection’ wonders whether Jane Williams may bring ‘momentary peace’ to ‘Our mortal nature’s strife’, but it is ‘Our’ strife, not just Shelley’s; she is at ‘the centre of / The magic circle’ (562:48; 562:49–50).This may well have been what the real‐life Jane insisted on, and what Shelley was obliged to accept as a condition of being devoted; the poems address her as the beloved member of a group. (An ‘Unfinished Drama’ on which Shelley was engaged in April seems in the same way to have been written for the group.16) At least three of the poems, too, went to Jane but not just to her. When Shelley first started writing poems to her as his ‘dear friend’ (558:18), perhaps in January 1822, they were all living in the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa in Pisa, the Shelleys on the extensive top floor ‘that overlooks the city & the surrounding region’, their windows ‘full of plants which turn the sunny winter into spring’.17 Poems could easily be dispatched to the Williams’s apartment below. Perhaps so as to ensure that Jane would and could read them, Shelley sometimes addressed them to Williams: the latter thus becoming complicit in Shelley’s feelings.The poem starting ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’ was sent down to Williams on 26 January with a note describing how its author found the verses ‘too dismal for me to keep’ but stating: ‘If any of the stanza’s should please you, you may read them to Jane, but to no one else, – and yet on second thoughts I had rather you would not’.18 Williams noted: ‘S sent us some beautiful but too melancholy lines’, the ‘us’ showing that they had assumed that the poem was for them both.The poem ‘Remembrance’ went to Jane with a note saying ‘How are you today? & how is Williams?’ Shelley then added – thus ensuring that Williams knew about the note he was attaching – ‘Tell him that I dreamed of nothing but sailing & fishing up coral’, before signing himself ‘Your ever affectionate PBS.−’ But there was nothing especially significant in such a signing off: to Williams he ended a note ‘Yours ever affectionately P.B.S.’19 On a third occasion, perhaps rather later in the spring of 1822, Shelley dispatched another new poem – ‘The Magnetic Lady’20 – to the Williamses: what survives is a kind of ritual object. He wrote out the poem on two pieces of paper, not using the back, and adding – at the very top of the first side – ‘For Jane & Williams alone to see.’ He then folded the sheets very small, so that the document was only 9 × 5 cm, and put that in an envelope made of another sheet of the same paper, folded to make a small packet 15.5 × 9 cm. On the packet he wrote ‘To Jane. Not to be opened unless you are alone, or with Williams.’ And then, having tucked one folded side within the other as would be common for a letter going into the post, he added a third concealment: an actual seal of his usual red wax, so that the contents were trebly guarded against other readers. Letters were sealed when going into the postal system; this document was not, and sealing‐wax by itself would have protected no secrets from a determined reader. 327



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Shelley was giving Jane (and Williams) an intimate, sealed‐up token of his love, one explicitly excluding Mary and the rest of the world. Such an item was committed ‘to your secrecy’ in a ceremony for the three of them. It is of course possible that other Shelley poems arrived in this sealed and packaged format, though no other wrapping survives. But other revealing manuscripts do: the song ‘To Jane’ had its paper folded even smaller than the manuscript of the ‘Magnetic Lady’, to create an object measuring c. 6.5 × 5 cm.21 And this only had to pass from one room to another in the Villa Magni in Lerici. The ‘Magnetic Lady’ shows a sleeper in the hands of a woman (unnamed until the end) who has ‘magnetized’ (hypnotised) him – and who (in the other contemporary meaning of ‘magnetic’) is also powerfully attractive. Four lines from the end of a 60‐line poem the name ‘Jane’ finally appears, as that of the hypnotiser and attractive woman. She asks the sleeper, following the treatment she has given him for pains in his head and side: ‘The spell is done — how feel you now?’ ‘Better, quite well’ replied The sleeper— So she asks him: ‘What would do You good when suffering and awake What cure your head & side?’ That is the crucial question, of course. The poem has been about the sleeper’s sickness of ‘head & side’ but also about his love for a woman who has been trying to hypnotise him into not loving her; she has been enunciating things like ‘forget me, for I can never / be thine’,22 and encouraging him to believe that, without her, other hopes may develop, ‘like a second youth again’. But her artful hypnotism (as opposed to what the narrator identifies as her own, natural magnetism) has – so far as he is concerned – not worked. The only thing which would rescue him from his love is death: nothing else would cure not only his head and side (‘My side torments me’ Shelley had told Claire on 10 April) but the whole, loving man. And “What would cure that would kill me, Jane “And as I must on earth abide “Awhile yet, tempt me not to break My chain.”

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The allusion is to Pope: ‘Death, only death, can break the lasting chain.’23

Two other poems – ‘To Jane.The Invitation’ and ‘To Jane—The Recollection’ – grew out of a walk from Pisa through the pine forest, down towards the sea, on 2 February 1822. But the most intriguing of the ‘Jane’ poems is ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, which probably dates from March or early April 1822. The poem has the line (or perhaps subtitle) ‘Ariel to Miranda’ as its opening surprise. Miranda in The Tempest falls in love with the young Ferdinand; the spirit Ariel, who serves her father Prospero, not only never addresses Miranda in the play but she has no knowledge of his existence (after all, like the speech of a poet, he is only air). But, in Shelley’s version, the watching, invisible Ariel is intensely attracted to Miranda. He is not, as an invisible spirit, in any state to offer her love; Miranda already has a partner whom she loves and who loves her. What Ariel can do is give her words (poems) and a guitar, to make music with. The fact that, in real‐life, Shelley gave a guitar in a beautiful, close‐fitting box24 to Jane Williams reflects upon this poem; but it is a poem, not a biographical confession. What survives of Shelley’s first draft was to accompany the gift: Ariel to Miranda — take This slave of music for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee And of the ardent harmony In which thou canst & only thou, Make his delighted spirit glow Till joy denies pleasures hides itself again And too intense is turned to pain For by permission & command Of thine own prince Ferdinand Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken.25 All that ‘Poor Ariel’ can do, from his own very special position, is – as a slave to music and to Miranda as music‐maker − send the guitar with the ‘permission & command’ of Miranda’s lover (Ferdinand, obviously: but also Williams, and Shelley himself in another manifestation), precisely because he knows he can say nothing and − if things stay as they are – he will have to be content simply with feeling ‘more than ever can be spoken’.

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Yet as potential lover and as actual guitar he can be touched into intense pleasure not only by Miranda’s playing on him (Shelley loved Jane’s music) but by his words playing on her, and by her responses in turn playing on him, with always the extra frisson of imagining what ‘Bright wanderer’ calls ‘The soft vibrations of her touch’ (590:22). The guitar poem grew: Ariel comes to think of himself as Miranda’s ‘guardian spirit’, watching over her from her ‘nativity’ (566–567:13,30), in ways that seem fatherly rather than erotic. And after all, he cannot touch her any more than he can tell her about his love; he can only point the way, for he (as Ariel) is a far better musician and performer than she ever will be, and (as Shelley) is more accomplished with words than she ever will be with music. But he is also only a guitar, a ‘slave of music’ waiting to be played upon, residing in his guitar box as Ariel was once imprisoned in his hollow tree, and may be so again until Jane Miranda chooses (or does not choose) to let him out. But, once a spirit, Ariel is now embodied, with all his feelings and desires: trapped ‘for some fault of his / In a body like a grave’ (567:38–39). That is what the body feels like, when a loved one does not respond. Worse still, when Miranda comes to ‘die’ (566:23) (like the moon, going through her ‘interlunar spell’) poor Ariel feels utterly abandoned, because she is the one person able to animate him, as man and as guitar. Most of the time he is simply shut up in his box (his room, his boat), ‘the living sepulchre of himself ’ (619), as good as dead.The old meaning of ‘die’, however, would also suggest Miranda’s orgasms with Ferdinand, and Ariel finds the thought of them desolating. The poem is a shape‐shifting construction of great complexity and ambiguity. It was occasioned by Jane Williams and her capacity for music  –  and her love for Williams – but it is only tangentially about her, though we can be hugely grateful that she could provoke Shelley into such writing. Ariel may be helplessly drawn to Miranda, but the poem goes on to celebrate the way in which a living tree ‘Died in sleep and felt no pain’ and is turned into guitar and guitar box, so that, exactly like the poem, the guitar might ‘echo all harmonious thought’ (567:56,44). Significantly, it only echoes: it does not, cannot, initiate. It is thus a poem not only for the Jane who is given the guitar but about the guitar and its maker: not just the artist in wood who ‘wrought this loved guitar’ (567:58) but the poet too, writing his beloved guitar poem in this Chinese guitar box of meaning. The poem describes at length the beauty of the natural world: like the woods, dreaming, some of autumn past And some of spring approaching fast, And some of April buds and showers And some of songs in July bowers And all of love,—and so this tree― 330



  1821 –1822  O that such our death may be― Died in sleep and felt no pain To live in happier form again (567:49‐56)

But Ariel (and Shelley) are also fantasising, and know it.The poem has not, after all, continued in the direction of a love poem. It is founded on determined devotion, but develops an extended conceit about the dream and mystery of poetry and music making. Almost a quarter of the poem is taken up with descriptions of the natural world which the guitar instinctively knows; it was a tree once, after all, and Shelley had drawn unimaginably numerous trees into his notebooks. And the guitar will, in the right hands, express such beauties again to the responsive listener, exactly as poetry expresses them in words. Those listening to the guitar − and the poetry – ‘who cannot question well / The spirit that inhabits it’ will be condemned to hear no more ‘than has been felt before’ (568:80–81,84).They will hear or read, that is, only the clichés of music and poetry. For the guitar ‘talks according to the wit / Of its companions’: the poem starts to concentrate on how the newly constructed guitar (or poem) works on those capable of attending. Guitar and poem are both taught ‘to reply / To all who question skilfully / In language gentle as thine own’: and the ‘hands of perfect skill’ which play the guitar (and write the poem) will feel flattered by the responses that ‘sweetly’ come (567–568:82‐3,59–61,87–88), either in music or in words, and will answer them, perhaps with other poems, perhaps by playing again tomorrow. But, in a final admission, the intensely individual Jane of the second part must once again become ‘our’ (568:90) Jane at the very end, now that we (listeners to the guitar music, those given sweet answers by music or poetry, Ariel himself, readers of the poem) have all acquired a share in her. Such are the ways not only in which Shelley responded to Jane Williams but in which he miraculously sustained the imaginations of a poem which, like the best of Donne’s poetry, is supremely fictional and hard‐edged with longing.

At the cost of feeling horribly irresolute, Shelley was determined ‘not to speak of love’ to Jane: it was perhaps the first time in his life when he had not done what he could to make a woman to whom he was attracted fall in love with him. But he had found a way of devoting himself to the idea of Jane, by writing about her, embedding himself in poems to her; love without consequences and in some sense honourable. In 1811 he had gone away with a woman whom he found attractive but who badly needed him and whom he felt obliged to protect; in 1814 he had gone away with a woman to whom he was strongly attracted and who badly wanted him; 331



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in 1818 he probably made love with a woman who had wanted him for years; in 1820–1821 he had attempted to free from imprisonment a woman who at first had apparently needed him, a sentiment which had warmed him into writing: he had then written poetry in which he had fantasised an ideal partnership of perfect unity. He had never written poem after poem about Mary. Jane in 1822, however, would give him a major subject for his writing: how she played the guitar and sang, how he felt his life ‘consumed’26 by her, how she refused his love, how she made him suffer. He could not write poems to her as an ideal, and that was hugely helpful. He put something of this into his unfinished poem ‘The Zucca’, which starts off with the narrator in love with the idea of love (‘Thou, whom seen no where I feel every where’) but ends with him knowing his heart not just ‘Unlocked’ but ‘loosed’, as he hears a voice singing to the accompaniment of what is probably a guitar: sounds of softest song Mixed with the instrument stringed melodies that won it   To leave the gentle    lips on which it slept Shook Unlocked the heart of him who sate & wept And loosed27 The poems to Jane are constructions in verse pushed to the limit of what can be made to work. Though they may, at times, have been opportunities taken to say what could be said in no other way, the very saying, in poetry, inevitably creates its own truth about what is being said. And that may not be the same as the facts of a real‐life situation. The late lyric fragment ‘We meet not as we parted’ shows a narrator agonised after his lover has ‘forbidden / The death which a heart so true / Sought in your burning dew’: as explicit a forbidding of sexual relationship as might be realised, given the meaning of ‘death’ as ‘orgasm’. But now That moment is gone for ever Like lightning it flashed & died Like a snowflake upon the river A sunbeam upon the tide — It might have been a poem recording a sexual refusal from Mary but for the fact that it was a single ‘moment so found, so lost!’28 If it has autobiographical significance, it almost certainly relates to Jane and to what Shelley imagined was a sexual refusal. Mary Shelley would not have left such a fragment unpublished if she had not found it personally hurtful, but she would have been as much repelled by the imagination of an encounter as by any actual event.29 It is tempting to set alongside this poem one of the odder things in Shelley’s manuscripts: a mix of desire and 332



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Figure  11  Detail of page of ‘Coliseum’ manuscript (post 1818) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 201v)

scientific fascination, perhaps, as much as self‐regard, leading him to add (at some date between late 1818 and mid 1822) an ink drawing, next to some financial ­calculations, of a slim, erect phallus (see Figure 11). That needs, perhaps, to be counterbalanced by a description of Shelley in his everyday clothes. Trelawny first encountered him in January 1822, and much later recalled his appearance as that of a ‘tall thin stripling’, a ‘mild‐looking, beardless boy’: He was habited like a boy, in a black jacket and trowsers, which he seemed to have outgrown, or his tailor, as is the custom, had most shamefully stinted him in his ‘sizings’.30

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Shelley did not wear the clothes expected of someone of his period, age or class; the extreme casualness of his dress defined him as a careless, probably upper‐class eccentric – or someone deliberately staying young – or both.

The manuscripts of the poems given to Jane needed, so far as possible, to be kept from Mary. In 1822, so that Mary would not come across them, Shelley often did not enter drafts of his poems in his notebooks (among the few exceptions is the surviving draft, ‘heavily revised and canceled’ of ‘We meet not as we parted’, scrawled with ‘a very poor, thick quill’ at the back of a notebook, perhaps very late in June 1822). In these late Pisan and Lerici lyrics, Shelley produced some of his greatest poetry. Understanding of his writing has moved on a long way since the ‘Jane’ poems could be described as ‘little irrelevant things’, ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’ as an ‘exquisite trifle’, Jane herself as ‘a charming diversion’.31 Shelley’s sheer need in 1822 to explore and express feelings which felt baulked on every side led him to write lyrics with greater intensity and point than ever before. He had all the technical skills he needed, practised and developed over years of writing; each poem occupies a different metrical form, in every case dictated by the demands of the poetry. And for once the poetry imagines and creates the speech of blocked and impossible feelings, rather than making either a warm or an intellectual plea for the world (or people) to change, or – like the Stacey poems – being primarily for elegant entertainment. The late poetry almost perfectly exemplifies Yeats’s insight that ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ Shelley had written to John Gisborne in October 1821 with some ironical amusement at himself, but an alarming honesty too: As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles,—you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as expect any thing human or earthly from me.32

But now, in the spring of 1822, with his heart desperately ‘unlocked’ and ‘loosed’, as in ‘The Zucca’, it was the fact of being trapped in human and earthly feeling which impelled the poetry; poetry as close to ‘flesh and blood’ as anything he ever wrote. The ginshop of the poet’s sensibility turned out, after all, to have legs of ­mutton in stock: bloody ones, too.

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32 To the Villa Magni 1822

As late as mid‐January 1822, Shelley had been enthusiastic about the way he and Byron had been ‘constant companions’ in Pisa: their friendship had been No small relief after the dreary solitude of the understanding & the imagination in which we past the first years of our expatriation, yoked to all sorts of miseries & discomforts.—

But by the middle of February, things had developed very differently: ‘Many circumstances have occurred between myself & Lord B. which make the intercourse painful to me.’1 And late in February, Shelley would tell Claire that it had become ‘of vital importance both to me and to yourself, to Allegra even, that I should put a period to my intimacy with LB’. No sentiments of honour or justice restrain him (as I strongly suspect) from the basest insinuations, and the only mode in which I could effectually silence him I am reluctant (even if I had proof) to employ during my father’s life.2

The fact that it was important not only to Claire (now doing her best to embark on a career as a lady’s companion or as a governess) but ‘to Allegra even’, shows that it was the old matter of Claire’s sexual relations, especially those with Shelley, about which (Shelley suspected) Byron was now telling tales to men like Medwin, Williams, Taaffe and Trelawny.3 Shelley reckoned that the only way to silence Byron’s ‘insinuations’ would be to challenge him to a duel, on his honour as a gentleman: a solution ‘I am reluctant … to employ during my father’s life’ (for if he The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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were to die, Mary and Percy would be left penniless, as would Claire). But the situation remained ‘intolerable to me’, and the only way was to put an end to what was by now a ‘detested intimacy’: months later, he would describe Byron as ‘the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome’4 in society. Byron was also continuing to refuse to allow Claire to see Allegra, in spite of all his old promises and Claire’s pleas to him renewed in February, when she wrote to him: ‘I can no longer resist the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her any more … I have often entreated Shelley to intercede for me and he invariably answers—that it is utterly useless.’5 And it was: Byron remained immovable. The huge row which blew up in Pisa at the end of March, following the rudeness of an Italian dragoon towards (and eventual physical assaults on) a group of Byron’s friends riding back after an afternoon’s Pistol Club – Shelley was knocked off his horse during the altercation – must have seemed just the sort of quarrel in which friends of the great man were likely to get involved. Byron made a great fuss about the affair (one of his servants wounded the dragoon in revenge and was arrested); but with all these rages and regrets, and Mary’s continuing anger and bad‐temper, Jane Williams seemed to Shelley not only ‘more amiable and beautiful than ever’ but ‘a sort of spirit of embodied peace in our circle of tempests’.6

Shelley had been trying to make progress with a recalcitrant play about Charles the First – which, given his political fascinations, might well have imagined ‘the establishment of a “Free Commonwealth”’ – but ‘a devil of a nut it is to crack’:7 he had abandoned it by the middle of June, while two other projects, translations of Goethe’s Faust and of the Spanish dramatist Calderón’s El mágico Prodigioso, remained fragments only. What probably attracted him to both were their variant versions of the Devil (Mephistopheles in Goethe, the Daemon in Calderón). Shelley’s essay ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ demonstrated his conviction that ‘Milton’s Devil as a moral being is … far superior to his God’ (632) and the Calderón, in particular, allowed him to offer a tragic version of the character. He worked intensely at them both, producing a workmanlike version of the Calderón and what is arguably the best nineteenth‐century translation of the Prologue to Faust. His German was not perfect but he had a real understanding of what Goethe was doing, and frequently produced rhymed verse where the original used rhyme, in an attempt to carry over something of the impact of the original. He also finished a version of the Walpurgisnacht scene of Faust and Mephistopheles with the witches on the Brocken mountain, an episode widely regarded by his contemporaries as too obscene for translation (Coleridge was anxious about what might be the effect on his ‘moral character’ if he were to attempt a translation of work he judged ‘vulgar, 336



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licentious and most blasphemous’). Shelley added lines where he wanted but simply ignored the vulgarity: where his German text would have read ‘Es f— —t die Hexe, es st— —t der Bock’ (easily guessable as ‘The witch farts, the billy‐goat stinks’), but needing a rhyme with ‘air’, he produced ‘Tell it who dare tell it who dare.’8

Where, though, should the Shelleys go for the summer? The obvious answer (so far as Shelley was concerned) was to the coast, specifically to the bay of Lerici in the Gulf of La Spezia.The idea had come from Edward Williams, who since December had been hoping to assemble ‘our party at Spezzia next summer’. More than once he and Shelley had sailed down to the mouth of the Arno: Williams records their being out 10 times during March 1822 alone.9 But they were still using the old converted punt which had nearly drowned Shelley in April 1821: and for the bay of Lerici they wanted a real, sea‐going boat. Shelley had been drawing boats and rigging in his notebooks for months; by December 1821, Williams was convinced ‘Have a boat we must.’ On 15 January 1822, Shelley and Williams committed themselves to the project without consulting their wives: Mary noted saying afterwards, to Jane, ‘to tell you the truth, I hate this boat, though I say nothing’, with Jane answering ‘So do I; but speaking would be useless, and only spoil their pleasure.’10 Trelawny, who arrived in Pisa in January, would show them the ‘model of an American schooner’ and would later claim to have ‘designed’ what was built; he was also originally to have been part‐owner, but Shelley got out of that arrangement and became ‘sole proprietor’, meaning that he also had to pay for the whole project: it cost him £80.That may, however, also have been a way of relieving Williams from having to find his share of the money (there is evidence of the Williams couple being hard up in 182111). The boat would be built in Genoa under the eye of a friend of Williams, Captain Daniel Roberts; a twin‐masted, gaff‐rigged little ketch around 28 feet long, eight feet or so in the beam, round‐bottomed (with a small keel) and with a draught of just four feet, but without decking except in the bows, where luggage could be stored.12 In March 1822 Shelley had gone to Lerici house‐hunting, as had Williams, but neither had found anything suitable, only a lonely white boathouse with arches called Villa Magni that was (anyway) too small for them all; the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa in Pisa had accustomed both households to space and comfort. Mary would certainly have been against the move; she enjoyed Pisa and its possibilities for social life, even if she too had begun to feel that getting away from Byron was desirable. But should they really be moving to the back of beyond, just so that Shelley and Williams could go sailing? She had somewhere ‘nearer Genoa’13 in mind. But then, late in April, a combination of circumstances allowed Shelley to force the issue. On 20 April 1822 the five‐year‐old Allegra died ‘of a fever’ in her convent, 337



  To the Villa Magni 

with Claire not having seen her since departing Venice with the Shelleys late in October 1818. Byron’s self‐justification to Shelley (‘I do not know that I have anything to reproach in my conduct, and certainly nothing in my feelings and intentions toward the dead’) would have done nothing but confirm to Shelley – loyal, as usual, to Claire – his conviction of the ‘great gulph fixed’ between Byron and himself, which ‘by the nature of things must daily become wider’. Allegra’s death would also have hurt him as that of yet another child lost in Italy (he had in effect been her father for her first two‐and‐a‐half years). But he also saw the advantage, just for the moment, of concealing the news from Claire: he and Mary dreaded the explosion they feared would follow, Claire and Byron being ‘Gunpowder & fire.’14 And the boat being built in Genoa would soon be ready for them. Shelley insisted that he and Mary, Percy and Claire move to Lerici: and that they go at once. What is more, without either family yet having a house or a flat to go to, the Williamses loyally elected to come too, with their children and furniture and possessions; this showed not only that Williams loved the prospect of sailing with Shelley but that neither Jane nor Edward Williams objected to Shelley’s feelings for Jane. Mary reluctantly went ahead to try and secure the house seen earlier but rejected, the Villa Magni (see Figure 12), right on the edge of the sea; this would be for her, Shelley, Percy, Claire and their two servants, she and Shelley having separate rooms. She had to go to Sarzana, the nearest town to Lerici; and while there she would also try to find something for the Williamses. But Sarzana not only turned out useless for finding another house, it appeared wretchedly bad for provisions too,15 while the hamlet nearest to the Villa Magni, San Terenzo, was even worse. And there was not even a road from the Villa Magni to Lerici, only ‘a winding rugged foot‐path’. One set of the steps up to the living quarters in the Villa Magni was really only a ladder; the house had ‘splatchy‐walls’ (‘which had once been whitewashed’),‘broken floor, cracked ceiling, and poverty‐struck appearance’, with just ‘one chimney for cooking’. In consequence, all the varieties of housekeeping would become, in Mary’s words, ‘rather a toilsome task’, meaning a terrible nuisance. She was scared that their Pisan servants would leave them; and inside the Villa Magni itself, the ‘tideless sea leaving no sands nor shingle’ roared so loud ‘that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship’.16 But in they moved, on 30 April. Edward and Jane Williams and their two children could, meanwhile, still find nowhere to live, even after arriving in Lerici. And then their furniture arrived, in two boats, leaving them ‘in a devil of a mess’.17 All they could do was bring both boats across the bay, unload them on to the rocky outcrops below the Villa Magni and pile everything into the house; and the next day, the Shelleys having ‘contrived to give us rooms’ – meaning a room for the parents on the main floor, and space for children and servants probably in the attics – they too moved in.Williams noted how they all spent their first evening ‘talking over our folly and our troubles’,18 sitting either in the large central saloon or on the long terrace outside.The best that 338



  1822 

Figure 12  ‘Casa Magni’, watercolour (1879) by Henry Roderick Newman, whereabouts unknown (copyright © City of London, Keats House, Hampstead)

could be said was that they would be spending a great deal of time outdoors, and so would not be on top of each other the whole time (the saloon was the only communal space for all the members of both families). But with Claire miserable and angry over the death of Allegra (they had been obliged to tell her the truth when she challenged them, and she had fired off a furious letter to Byron which he sent back to the Shelleys), and Mary hating everything, Shelley found the Williamses ‘in my actual situation, a great relief and consolation’ – that word again. And this even though Jane – ‘by no means acquiescent in the system of things’ – was irritated when the Shelley servants used her things (they were sharing the kitchen with the single fire). But Jane at least remained ‘amicable’,19 suggesting how unamicable Mary seemed. The event making sense of this in almost every way awkward and uncomfortable move to the Villa Magni occurred on 12 May 1822, when they had still not been there a fortnight: the boat built in Genoa for Shelley came sailing round the headland. They were all surprised at how large she seemed; that is, until they saw 339



  To the Villa Magni 

the boat which Byron had had built (‘intending to enter into a competition with us in sailing’:20 competitive to the last). The ‘Bolivar’, costing 10 times as much, was on another scale altogether; and, as a joke, Byron had instructed Captain Roberts not only to call Shelley’s new boat ‘Don Juan’, after his own poem, but to have the name painted large on the mainsail. After many attempts at cleaning it off, Shelley and Williams found that it could only be removed by having that part of the sail cut out and replaced with new canvas. So that was done. ‘I think the joke was carried too far’21 was Shelley’s restrained comment in mid‐May: the last thing he wanted to do was to sail around as an adjunct of the great Lord Byron. The ‘Don Juan’ – as it is still most sensible to call her – nevertheless turned out to be, as Williams put it, ‘a perfect plaything for the summer’. They loved her speed – ‘she fetches whatever she looks at’22 – and Shelley must have experienced, in a boat of his own, what in ‘The Witch of Atlas’ he had already described as the rush of water beneath ‘The swift and steady motion of the keel’ (461:416). As they got used to her,Williams and Shelley took her further and further, accompanied by an extra sailor (twin‐masted, she needed two sailors for anything beyond local pottering about: they employed the 18‐year‐old sailor boy who had helped bring her down from Genoa, Charles Vivian – ‘quick and handy, and used to boats’). They now had not only the bay of Lerici before them but the open sea; on a couple of occasions they got as far as Massa, 20 kilometres off. Along with Vivian, on 6 June they hoped to collect Claire from Viareggio (about 40 kilometres away) after she had been absent for a fortnight. And then, in mid‐June Shelley began a letter to Daniel Roberts asking about going up to Genoa (some 85 kilometres to the north) – he wanted to see Hunt, if possible: ‘How would you like a trip there & back with me & Williams.’23 They didn’t go, as it happened (Hunt left Genoa too soon); but with ‘his incessant boating’ and work outdoors, Shelley tanned, grew fit, had never looked healthier, and by the end of May had found he could ‘enjoy for the first time these ten years something like health’:24 what may have made the difference to his persistent anaemia would have been the fish‐filled diet imposed by life at the Villa Magni. The sea and the ‘Don Juan’ had for the moment become the centre of his life; he and Williams were out sailing on at least 10 of the first 14 days after her arrival. They could easily get across to Lerici, or over to Portovenere, or up to La Spezia; and when they were not sailing, Shelley would tuck himself up in the boat and write, well away from a house busy with servants and children (and in which his room was a confining box for studious Ariel). Like his boat at Marlow during the writing of Laon and Cythna, the ‘Don Juan’ served him ‘at once for a study & a carriage’: the ink on one notebook page he was using got splashed at some point, ‘causing it to blur’. In the evenings, they could either sit on the terrace or go out in the boat, to enjoy the cool and Jane’s music: Williams noted on 1 June ‘Sailed with the whole party in the evening.’25 Mary’s solitary recollection of happiness at Lerici 340



  1822 

centred on such an occasion: ‘My only moments of peace’, she recalled in the middle of August 1822, were on board the boat, ‘when lying down with my head on his knee I shut my eyes & felt the wind & our swift motion alone’. Interestingly, she makes no mention of Jane’s music, though Jane continued to play and to sing ‘under the summer moon, until earth appears another world’, late in May and early in June, as Shelley described: we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind … Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.’26

And accounts of these evenings recall that most unusual of events; Shelley not planning, or talking, or attempting to interest his friends in a new scheme, but simply enjoying the stillness and the evening light and Jane’s music. As he wrote at the end of June, I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas & sailing & listening to the most enchanting music … my only regret is that the summer must ever pass, or that Mary has not the same predilection for this place that I have, which would induce me never to shift my quarters.

The song ‘To Jane’ sent to Jane and Williams was probably private, and not for public performance, but a lyric certainly sung by Jane was the ‘Indian Girl’s Song’: she would write to Mary in December 1822 asking for a copy of Shelley’s words: she knew them from earlier in the year.27 Shelley’s lyric is entirely conventional in its mixture of the poignant and the sweet: he could do romance with one hand tied behind his back.

341

33 ‘The Triumph of Life’ 1822

Most people live most of the time as if they imagined so doing for ever. Shelley should be allowed to experience the summer of 1822 like that: wishing that it would never pass, wishing that Mary felt differently. Hindsight about his life which is sentimental (‘Beautiful as might be the passing hour, conscious as he might be of its unceasing flight and that with it joys were dying and hopes were sighing’) or determinist (‘this fragmentary poem … marked by the accents of a last testament’1) is unnecessary. In this book, Shelley has no idea what is going to happen to him: there will be no such things as last poems here. Instead the biography will follow what he was doing as a poet in June 1822, and three manuscripts survive of poetry he was drafting. The first is the famous long fragmentary poem in terza rima, ‘The Triumph of Life’; a second is the brief song ‘To Jane’ [‘The keen stars were twinkling’]; the third is ‘Bright wanderer.’ Behind the Villa Magni was a steep hill with ‘forest trees’, where ‘some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark massy foliage’,2 and at times Shelley chose to write there, on a ‘slope of lawn’ (571:36). He seems increasingly to have concentrated on his new piece written in the metre Dante had employed in La  Divina Commedia. Shelley’s vision is of a Roman Triumph, where the conquered (the great figures of human history) are led in procession, with multitudes whirling and dancing around them in unthinking (and doomed) celebration: ‘and as they glow / Like moths by light attracted and repelled, / Oft to new bright destruction come and go’ (575:152–154). Meanwhile philosophers, emperors,

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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poets, ‘the Wise  / The great the unforgotten’,3 those who have compelled the minds and bodies of the human race, including Voltaire and Immanuel Kant, are chained to the great ‘car of light’ (575:168) of the Triumph and are dragged onward by it. Shelley is for the first time writing a genuinely post‐French‐Revolutionary poem. Rousseau is now classed as ‘one of that deluded crew’, confessing himself ‘overcome / By my own heart alone’ (576:184, 578:240–241)  –  an interesting parallel with Shelley’s 1812 insight into the way his writing ‘gave licence … to passions that only incapacitate and contract the human heart’.4 But Rousseau is no longer the guiding spirit he had, for example, been for Shelley’s 1816 poem ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.’ Now he is only an ‘an old root which grew / To strange distortion out of the hill side’: the grass was but his thin discoloured hair And that the holes it vainly sought to hide Were or had been eyes.—5 There is a pictorial vividness in much of ‘The Triumph of Life’, something unusual in Shelley. But just as Virgil was Dante’s guide, Rousseau – though thus ‘fallen by the way side’ (588:541) – becomes Shelley’s guide to a reimagined and what looks to have been a profoundly pessimistic version of human history. It was Shelley’s first poem aspiring to the goal he had formulated in August 1821, ‘­producing something wholly new & relative to the age’.6 Because the poem is unfinished, we cannot be sure that he would not have done something to countermand the pessimism; but he could not have found a way back to the redemptive poetry of Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna. The verse he is writing here is arguably Shelley’s ‘greatest vision of doomed and fallen humanity’,7 life being merely a bubble on which ‘Figures ever new’ throw painted shadows: ‘We have but thrown, as those before us threw, / Our shadows on it as it past away’ (578:249–251). The amount of work the poem needed was, however, terrible, even by Shelley’s standards. Terza rima is an exacting discipline; Shelley had used it, most famously, for the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (see Chapter 25) but also for some stanzas of translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, before embarking on this new, much longer poem, creating a landscape in which the narrator looks out over what is strongly reminiscent of the bay of Lerici. Instantly we inhabit the world of Dante’s Purgatorio. Shelley’s ‘orient incense’ is ‘lit by the new ray’ (570:12) of the rising sun: Dante’s ‘oriental sapphire’8 gathers serenely. The poetry catches fire too: before me fled The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head 343



  ‘The Triumph of Life’ 

But then the narrator starts recounting the ‘Vision’ which ‘on my brain was rolled’ (571:26–28,40), a worrying premonition of the rumbling of the chariot at the centre of the Triumph. The fact that four openings of the poem survive gives us some idea of the difficulty even such a craftsman as Shelley found in producing a narrative poem in terza rima. It must to some extent, in fact, have been the sheer technical fascination of the form which drove Shelley onwards, finally to copy out a clean draft of the first 48 lines, on a number of occasions yet again changing his mind about phrasing. But that much of the poem is secure. It was one of his greatest achievements, the difficulty of the form forcing him away from easy solutions: the constant need to throw the rhyme forwards while simultaneously concentrating upon the present moment – such poetry has been described as ‘small units’ being ‘overwhelmed by ongoing enjambment’9 – makes for verse which is deeply concentrated while at times beautifully forward‐moving: Methought I sate beside a public way Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream Of people there was hy hurrying to & fro Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam All hastening onward yet none seemed to know Whither he went, or whence he came, or why But to liberate a text from this point onwards (the poem is nearly 550 lines in all), we have to decipher what one editor despairingly called ‘the tortured Bodleian manuscript’.10 The lines inscribed immediately following the fair copy of the ­opening look like this: He made one of the multitude, yet so Was borne amid the crowd; as through the sky like the million One of an army of autumnal leaves.—— summer’s leaves million leaves of autumn’s bier Old age & youth, manhood & infancy, Which On One of Brought each his chariot Each marshalled Each brought its chariots: Were mingled in one impulse, and did 344



  1822  Were Whirled Whirred        torrent Mixed in one mighty impulse did appear11

The reading of the manuscript as Shelley left it, with its cancellations and stanza breaks made clear, is therefore as follows: He made one of the multitude, yet so Was borne amid the crowd; as through the sky One of     of    leaves.—— million leaves summer’s & infancy, , and Whirred Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear One might wonder, at that point, whether there was a poem to rescue; but Mary Shelley – who had, after all, very nearly always made fair copies of Shelley’s manuscripts – printed the passage in June 1824 as follows: He made one of the multitude, and so Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky  50 One of the million leaves of summer’s bier; Old age and youth, manhood and infancy Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear, And the text of the most recent scholarly editors follows Mary Shelley’s very closely indeed, with a couple of restorations and insertions.12 Editors thus reveal the extent to which they conform to Mary’s desire for a poem to be constructed out of what Shelley left behind. He deleted the word ‘bier’ in l. 51 but – as the next stanza has ‘appear’ and ‘fear’ as its rhyme words – she re‐instated it, although Shelley apparently wanted it no more than he did ‘Old age & youth, manhood’ in l. 52. But, once again, he did nothing to replace those words, and they have been reimposed upon him. Editions also retain much of Mary Shelley’s punctuation; and they follow her in reading ‘Mixed’ in l. 53 where ‘Whirred’ was arguably Shelley’s replacement. Again, when later ‘what was once Rousseau’ is boasting of his influence, Shelley initially wrote: ‘If I have been extinguished, yet there then rise A thousand beacons from the spark I bore.—13 345



  ‘The Triumph of Life’ 

He then deleted both lines: if Mary Shelley had not printed them, it is doubtful whether any modern editor would have done so. But they appear (with variants) in every edition. The text of the poem has thus been rescued from an undetermined author. Ten or 12 lines may go by which simply need deciphering – itself no easy job of work, though one at which Mary Shelley excelled  –  but then comes a missing word, or a missing phrase or line, and she would often manage to supply it out of the multiple deleted draft words and phrases which Shelley had left behind. It was also she who had to ensure that the poem acquired a name. When Shelley copied the opening out for the last time, in his fair copy, he did not add a title; he simply left his normal space at the top of the page into which a title might be inserted. Mary Shelley found the title ‘The Triumph of Life’ on one of the ­superseded openings of the manuscript;14 we have to assume that it was indeed the  terrifyingly ironical title he still wanted, or that she had heard it from him. She doubtless felt she was honouring what she knew to be his aims. Her work as first editor was, all the same, not merely heroic but brilliant in reassembling and  –  where necessary  –  slightly improving the materials Shelley left in those scrawled, interlined, constantly worked‐over and deleted lines.15 He had never previously set out to use terza rima at such a length as this poem promised, and the poetry shows him more troubled by the form than we might have expected, ­especially in the scraps of dialogue. Rousseau complains that he himself experienced the agonies he describes in his writing: ‘I / Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!— / And so my words were seeds of misery’ (579:278–280). But at that point follow not only line after line of crossings‐out but a long passage of more‐ than‐usually unfinished writing. Mary Shelley rightly pointed this out and left lines of asterisks. Modern editors select a passage from some pages later to be the continuation of Rousseau’s complaint. It is editorially extremely ingenious to have linked up the passages, but nothing in the text indicates that they should go together: the poem at that point is an even more editorial construct than the passages which Mary Shelley pieced together. At other times, she and modern editors alike have left out materials they could see no way to incorporate; one such passage, nine lines long, was termed by its first modern editor ‘apocryphal’ and has been described as ‘abandoned’ and ‘superseded’. But it is neither abandoned nor superseded; it is part of the poem, even if editors can see no easy way of using it.16 For the poem is essentially unfinished, not only in the way it has no final title and no ending, but in the way Shelley left it ready for, and much in need of, more work (at least another copy, not yet a fair copy, to judge by the state of the 48 lines of the poem’s opening which he did attempt to leave as a fair copy).To treat what we have

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  1822 

as a finished poem, or to call it only ‘perhaps unfinished’,17 is wrong. But it is packed with marvellous sections and moments of poetry, as in the passage when Rousseau describes how, as he drank the potion which initiated ‘a new Vision’, ‘And suddenly my brain became as sand’ (583:411,405). The poetry is also extraordinary – to take just a single example  –  in the way it constantly evokes light: startling, blinding, insidious light. Having begun with a sunrise, the poem then evokes ‘a cold glare, intenser than the noon / But icy cold, obscured with [ ] light / The Sun as he the stars’ (572:77–79). This is the oncoming ‘chariot of light’, its occupant ‘a dun and faint aetherial gloom / Tempering the light’ (573:92–93), the chariot guided ­forwards, however, by ‘Shapes which drew it in thick lightnings’ (573:96), so that the following crowds are dazzled by ‘the beams that quench the Sun’ (573:102). And such crowds in turn Kindle invisibly; and as they glow Like moths by light attracted and repelled, Oft to new bright destruction come and go (575:152–154) There is barely a passage where we are not conscious of the light; even the light of a star ‘is like the scent / Of a jonquil when evening breezes fan it’ (584:419‐420). We are also conscious of ‘that light’s severe excess’ (584:424) and of A light from Heaven whose half‐extinguished beam Through the sick day in which we wake to weep Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost.— (584:429–431) We ‘hear not’ the celestial ‘sphere whose light is melody to lovers’ (586:479); our world is lit by ‘the glare / Of the tropic sun’ (586:484–485). An English sensibility like Shelley’s, accustomed to ‘the smoke of cities … the chilling fogs and rain of our own country’, discovered how the ‘loveliness of the earth & the serenity of the sky’ in Italy ‘made the greatest difference in my sensations’: ‘I depend on these things’. At Como he saw ‘the flashing light of waterfalls’, in Milan ‘dazzling spires relieved by the serene depth of this Italian Heaven’: and at the Villa Magni, in spite of all the difficulty and upset of their removal there following the death of Allegra, nature seemed ‘as vivid and joyous as we are dismal’.18 It can hardly be a coincidence, either, that dance should be such a presence in the poem. The feast days of San Terenzo (21 June), San Giovanni (24 June) and San Terentianus (26 June) all occurred while the Shelleys were at the Villa Magni; Mary Shelley remembered the inhabitants of San Terenzo (‘more like savages than any people I ever before saw’) spending ‘the whole night’ of festas ‘dancing on the sands close to our door running into the sea then back again & screaming all the time one

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  ‘The Triumph of Life’ 

perpetual air’.19 That kind of barbarity is something Shelley draws on, time and again, in the first part of his poem: The million with fierce song and maniac dance Raging around; such seemed the jubilee … (573:110–111) Swift, fierce and obscene The wild dance maddens in the van (574:137–138) To savage music … Wilder as it grows, They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure, Convulsed … (574:142–144) Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair, And in their dance round her who dims the Sun Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air (575:147–149) Grasp in the dance and strain with limbs decayed To reach the car of light which leaves them … (575:167–168) The poetry is fascinated by this wildness, because the dancers are actually ensnared by the Triumph, totally fascinated by ‘the car of light’: ‘in that light’, indeed, they seem tiny in comparison with ‘the splendour which forbade / Shadow to fall from leaf or stone’: the crew Seemed in that light like atomies that dance Within a sunbeam … (584:444–446) The poem contains some of Shelley’s greatest writing, in spite of the fact that there are ‘confusing & tantalizing’ passages which cannot be repaired even in the way that Mary trusted herself to recreate them. The poem known by modern readers is a tribute both to Shelley’s formidable imagination, and to the desire of Mary Shelley and modern scholars to generate his final major work. She admitted herself haunted by the way in which ‘much of the “Triumph of Life” was written as he sailed or weltered on that sea which was soon to engulf him’.20 Because he had been engulfed, his poetry had to be rescued.

348

34 Enchanted Heart 1822

Inscribed on a sheet of the same large‐sized paper which Shelley was using in his struggles with ‘The Triumph of Life’ – until (that is) the paper ran out, and he had to substitute whatever he could find – is the poem here called ‘Bright wanderer’: now a yellowing and much folded manuscript,1 inscribed in Shelley’s inimitable sloping scrawl, varied by nibs heavily or thinly charged with ink, sometimes producing no more than inky scratches on the paper, elsewhere thick and clotted, or blurred by ink coming through from the other side of the paper: and all now faded brown. At first glance the poem looks as fragmentary as ‘The Triumph of Life.’ But the manuscript, with the exception of its last two lines, is perfectly clear about its final readings; there are no crossings‐out to be restored, no lines gone dead which need to be resuscitated. A full text was printed only in 1961, and has received some critical attention; it is perhaps the Shelley poem above all others which (to use Wallace Stevens’s terms) almost successfully resists its writer’s intelligence.2 This Chapter will work through to its terrifying conclusion. Shelley ensured that some of his 1822 lyrics  –  because they were written as poems for Jane Williams – left no traces in his remaining papers and notebooks: some, indeed, survive only as the actual manuscripts given to her. ‘To Jane’ and ‘Bright wanderer’ are exceptions. Mary Shelley included the former in her 1839 edition, along with other ‘Jane’ poems, but ‘Bright wanderer’ appeared in none of her collections: not in 1824 nor 1839 nor 1840. She would have found it when sifting through Shelley’s papers, and she published survivals far less complete, such as ‘‘Far, far away, o ye / Halcyons of Memory’, and indeed ‘The Triumph of Life’. And

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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in her 1824 collection she added a section entitled ‘Fragments’ specifically so as to include more of the poetry Shelley had not finished. Her omission of ‘Bright wanderer’ was obviously a special case.3

To judge by the state of the manuscript, six lines – now numbered 7–13 – were already in Shelley’s mind when he first began to put anything on paper: he often started a new poem some way down the first side of his sheet, and this was no exception. What he imagined would be the opening lines of the new poem were set down in what looks very much like a single burst of writing; he may, indeed, have been working from an earlier draft, the writing looks so confident. She left me at the silent time When the moon had ceased to climb The azure dome of Heaven’s steep And like an albatross asleep Balanced on her wings of light Hovered in the purple night——

10

But having started with a human ‘She’, he decided to precede that opening with something more about the moon. He squeezed in six extra lines (three new couplets) in the space at the head of his sheet of paper, the last one finding space only by sprawling over the line starting ‘She left me.’ But this new start offered an entirely new context for the ‘She’ of what had now become line 7. Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, To whom alone it has been given To change & be adored for ever … … Envy not this dim world, for never But once within its shadow grew One fair as thou but far more true—

5

The comparison of the moon with the beloved (‘fair as thou’) is one of the oldest of all poetic conceits – and Shelley had used it in Epipsychidion. The insistence here is on the constancy of the beloved, in contrast with the coquettishness of the moon: the beloved is ‘far more true’. The question here might be ‘true to whom?’ but that is not asked. Nevertheless, ‘far more true—’ makes a disturbing context for the instantly following ‘She left me’: as if her leaving had been provoked by her fidelity. And it is a repeated leaving: after a line which went wrong, and a couple of new lines suggesting the moon’s eventual descent into the sea, we are back with another 350



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bleak statement of the beloved’s leaving the narrator, and the latter’s continuing enchantment. She left me, and I staid alone      Thinking over every tone, Which though now silent to the ear The enchanted heart could hear

15

How is a narrator – or a poet – to describe communication which is silent but which the ‘enchanted heart’ is confident it can hear – presumably because it is enchanted? Is such communication like music? A line tries out the idea but is unable to make it work: Like music pauses which That gets crossed out completely – which seems to assist the draft in leaping successfully another six lines forward with barely an interruption, as it explores ways of describing enchantment. Music is, after all, the right metaphor: Like notes which die when born, but still Haunt the echoes of the hill:   And feeling ever— o too much The soft vibrations of her touch As if her gentle hand even now Lightly trembles on my brow

20

The images are not only of haunting echoes but of the excitement of contact, although – despite the narrator feeling overwhelmed (‘o too much’) – it is perfectly possible that no actual touch has ever occurred (it is, anyway, a purely ‘As if ’ touch), any more than any actual music has been heard (the notes being still born).The way those lines cramped themselves into the remaining available space on Shelley’s first manuscript page showed, however, that they also came together in a single burst. And ‘Like notes which die when born, but still / Haunt the echoes of the hill’ is one of the great Shelleyan couplets. And yet – although the beloved is the source of what the narrator calls ‘feeling ever’ – she has just gone, and her touch is now only a recalled, echoing vibration: the narrator has hardly been reassured. We might even be led to wonder whether this leaving – and now invisible – beloved is any more ‘true’ than the inconstant moon. The narrator starts to struggle – and the writing of the poem does, too, as if Shelley’s turning over of his paper had led to problems. (This was work in progress, so he was using both sides of the paper, and his stock of this particular paper was limited.) Line after line now got deleted. The new manuscript page turned into a 351



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mess: there was, in fact, more deletion than poem. The next two lines Shelley inscribed were: And thus contented with a lot Which others, who have suffered not But three scratches of the pen got rid of both lines. Whatever intelligence made him come up with the idea of contentment? But he was learning from the writing the ways in which adoration was ‘o too much’: and for the first time the idea of the narrator’s suffering almost got into the draft, even though Shelley had no sooner articulated the idea than he rejected it as premature. What matters is what ‘her’ absence means to the narrator. Such a thought seems immediately to have chimed with the developing draft: two lines were set down – the second line needing work, and coming into focus when the word ‘Memory’ became its start. And thus although she absent were   25  Memory Fancy gave me of all other of her But then things got very difficult. The idea of being owed something, even to the point of being able to ‘claim’ it, is being developed, as the next lines show, but it took four attempts to produce anything which the writer thought worth keeping: the manuscript was going to end up with nearly half a page of crossings out. I dare to That fate I dare to That even fancy dares to claim.——— At least the line not crossed out supplies a rhyme, but otherwise it gets nowhere. For the moment, the poetry just does not come, although the rhyme is experimented with (same, name, tame): and a crucial name apparently makes an appearance, even if it is very carefully and oddly deleted. And I was happy. Jane Thus I was happy, if the name Of happiness the saddest thoughts Her presence Within her presence Charmed by her presence, meek & tame The demon of my spirit lay 352



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The idea of being ‘Within her presence’ is significant (interesting for a poem which had started ‘She left me’ and eight lines later had repeated the phrase). The draft has finally struggled through not only to describing what did happen in her ‘presence’ but to the originally deleted ‘meek & tame’, even if the problem remained of how the poem might go on from there. It might have something to do with a ‘spirit’ who is also a ‘demon’. A lot more crossing out resulted: Her presence had made weak & tame All passions, and Desire & fear – I was thought no more Of pleasures lost or sorrows Even from those deletions a couple more lines could be developed.The ‘All p­ assions, and’ line could be completed: All passions, and I lived alone, In the time which is our own    The past & future were forgot

30

The narrator is describing a state in which passions which devote themselves to anything (or anyone), as well as happiness, pleasures and sorrows, are all abandoned. He lives ‘alone’ together with his passions, untroubled by anything outside to which he might be attracted. A new line starts – and stops. As they would be No rhyme has immediately attached itself. Another line offers a rhyme for ‘forgot’: But now I desired, — I dare not However, that – with its troubling renewal of ‘desire’ – suggests no way forward: the line gets crossed out. The writer goes back to his unfinished line: and this time gets it completed, along with an intensely depressing couplet, before he reaches the ­bottom of this terribly worried‐through second side of paper, and the poem can continue on the facing, blank page: As they would be had been, & would be, not.— But now I desired, — I dare not But soon, the guardian angel gone The demon reassumed his throne 353

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[page break]

In my faint heart . . I dare not speak    35 My thoughts; but thus disturbed & weak I sate and watched the vessels glide Along the Ocean bright & wide Disturbed & weak, indeed: all the narrator can do is sit and watch. Who or what is the ‘guardian angel’? It sounds like that untroubled, guarded state of being, in which he feels nothing for anything or anyone; in which case the ‘demon’ (the ‘demon of my spirit’ in line 42) must be the part of him unable to resist enchantment. Shelley apologised to Jane Williams on the manuscript of ‘To Jane’ – a poem written around the same time, on an identical half side of paper – for the way ‘it was in vain to struggle with the ruling spirit, who compelled me to speak of things sacred to yours & Wilhelmeister’s indulgence’:4 ‘indulgence’ implying something of which he had no right to speak, but which, as a special favour, might be allowed. That irresistible ‘ruling spirit’ seems exactly akin to the ‘demon of the spirit’ operating here. The boats at which the narrator has been gazing turn out to be creations of fantasy as much as of reality: Like chariots of an element Elysian And again the poetry stumbles. An ‘ent’ rhyme is required, but ‘element’ is to be held back for a second line. Lines have to be crossed out and rewritten: but a continuation starts to take shape. Like chariots of an element Elysian [ … ] Like spirit winged chariots sent Oer some serenest element   40 To ministrations strange & far; As if to some Elysian star They went for some clear     sailed for drink to medicine Such sweet and bitter pain as mine.—— So ‘medicine’ is to be brought – as ‘drink’ – from ‘some Elysian star’, in peculiar ‘ministrations’ by ‘spirit winged’ boats (or chariots). It all sounds very ­ominous. Anything which might cure the ‘sweet and bitter pain’ of attraction seems likely to send the one who drinks it straight back to the isles (or stars) of the blessed. 354



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The poetry has grown reminiscent of the moment in ‘The Magnetic Lady’ when the woman asks the narrator whether he has been cured of his pain, and he answers: ‘“What would cure that would kill me, Jane”’ (566:42): death is the only real cure for attraction. Both pieces of writing are, to be sure, poetry, not confession. Two particular events might, still, appear to be linked with them.There was Shelley’s request to Trelawny on 18 June 1822 to procure him a small quantity of ‘the Prussic Acid’ in Pisa: I have no intention of suicide at present, — but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest.

And, on 22 June,Trelawny promised to see to the matter for him. It was known that Byron ‘always kept a dose of poison close by for his own possible future use’: it was perhaps as remarkable that Shelley had not previously acquired something similar for himself, against ‘needless suffering’.5 It was this fact which probably made Trelawny (in the later and much less reliable version of his memoir) make great play with an anecdote deriving from Jane Williams. In old age, Jane told W. M. Rossetti, ‘unsought’, the story of Shelley’s going out in a boat with her and the children, and suddenly asking her whether she and Shelley should forthwith ‘try the great Unknown’. She replied (as she tells me …) ‘Hadn’t we better land the children first?’ – which was conceded. After this, she did not again venture out on the water with Shelley.6

It could have been a joke: an invitation to go on and on in the boat, for ever, into the great unknown; and for that (of course) you don’t want your children on board. But it has been Trelawny’s 1878 memoir which has mattered in Shelley biography, which makes it an extended story about a ‘suffering’ Shelley proposing suicide for himself and Jane ‘together’ – something which Jane, though ‘Spellbound by terror’ and terribly conscious of ‘death in his eyes’, is clever enough to escape, saving herself and her children.7 Although it is even unclear whether the anecdote belongs to Lerici or months earlier, to Pisa,Trelawny makes it fit Shelley’s June 1822 request for Prussic acid (the latter recalled a few pages earlier in his memoir). And yet, even if Shelley had acquired – and used – that Prussic acid, it would have been because of a complex knot of feelings, many of them to do with his sense of being cut off and his work rejected, as well as his consciousness of how he and Mary would be living for the foreseeable future.That was an idea being explored in poetry like ‘Bright wanderer’. He would not have killed himself to escape the pain of loving Jane Williams; and he would most certainly not have killed her or her children.

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At the end of ‘Bright wanderer’, rocks on the shore‐line are going to be of great importance. Are the gliding vessels and the rocks coming together here, in some ominous conjunction? The narrator makes two attempts in the draft to see what might follow if the rocks became significant at this point: I saw the dark rocks I watched the dark rocks frown & yawn The second line works rhythmically … but is either premature or goes in the wrong direction.What the piece needs is more about that sweet and bitter pain, the disturbance and the weakness. Both lines have to go. They are replaced by a messy set of four couplets, of which only the first gets written down with little need for correction. The second (with a ‘sand’/’land’ rhyme) gets deleted – probably immediately – while the third (with a ‘lay’/’spray’ rhyme) never really works, in spite of a couple of attempted revisions, and has to be removed (‘disentangled spray’ probably seeming not a formulation worth developing). And the fourth couplet never gets finished at all. The bottom of the third side of the manuscript and the top of the fourth side began to look like this: I watched the dark rocks frown & yawn And the wind that far winged their flight   45 From the land came fresh & light So on that on the sifted sand Which divided sea and land Like silver Only a thread of moonlight lay Upon On the disentangled spray murmuring left And the warmth of day had strewn With And the breath of night Six draft lines have proved false leads forward; so everything following ‘From the land came fresh & light’ gets crossed out and the writer goes back to the dawn wind. It isn’t anything on the sand, or in the spray, and is nothing like a thread of moonlight on which the poetry needs to concentrate; it is on the idea of the dawn bringing the end of the night, and ‘the sweet warmth of day’: And the scent of sleeping flowers And the coldness of the hours Of dew, & the light sweet warmth of day 356



  1822  Was scattered oer the twinkling bay   50 Which

Is the conclusion, then, going to be the full brilliance of day? Not quite: as yet the light is only ‘twinkling’. But the moment for the dark rocks has apparently come: the narrator starts to explain. I saw the dark roc And stops. The piece is not quite there: the line gets deleted. What matters is going to happen on the rocks: it is not what the rocks do or are. The rhyme word ‘damp’ is inscribed before the rest of its line can be filled in, but the whole line is then deleted. I saw the dark roc And the fisher with his lamp In the dark rocks        damp And spear, about the low rocks damp Watching to destroy the Crept, and struck the fish who came To worship the delusive flame. The man with the lamp is a wholly unexpected development – as one critic put it, ‘we turn one last corner on “And” and find him waiting in ambush’8 – but, though unforeseen, he is perhaps the point to which the poem has been heading. The fish are oddly humanised by the word ‘who’ but we are not thinking only of fish; we imagine human beings overwhelmingly attracted to a delusive light, whether it be a fisherman’s lamp, or a coquettish moon, or a woman who may be ‘true’ but who for this narrator is delusive. Sympathy with the creatures endangered by such lights (sympathy here in danger of being self‐pity) is no sooner inscribed than deleted: Poor things it’s beauty The really happy ones are those utterly deluded – like the fish worshipping the light, and getting speared. It took Shelley many attempts to get this line right, but it had become crucial to the piece. He first started ‘Too happy’, followed it with ‘who the’, crossed that out, tried ‘these’, crossed that out, inserted ‘one’, tried ‘they’ (and left both of them). And then finished the line ‘whose pleasure sought’. The manuscript is almost unreadable: they these whose Too happy, who one the pleasure sought 357

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A reading text, followed by the uncorrected line which follows, would be Too happy they whose pleasure sought  55 Extinguishes all sense & thought So one’s natural, intelligent safeguards – ‘sense’ and ‘thought’ – get ignored when one is enchanted in such a way, lured by the prospect of such delusive pleasure. ‘Too happy’ indeed: Shelley wrote (also on 18 June), none too happily, how ‘I think one is always in love with something or other.’ The carelessness of the phrasing suggests just how bitterly unfortunate such being ‘in love’ might be; how it might simply mean getting stupidly speared. As he had recalled in August 1821, love had been for him ‘the source of all sort of mischief ’.9 The draft lacks an ending. And that, Shelley never wrote. What he did write was an incomplete line (a rhyme word, such as ’leaves’, is lacking): Of the regret that pleasure And followed it with Destroying life not peace. His underlining of ‘not peace’ was possibly a way of insisting that the words were to stand, rather than that they should be in italics. He then inserted very faintly ‘alone’ over that line and added beneath the line Seeking ‘Seeking’ is probably designed to replace ‘Destroying’, but it is not quite clear what is to be done with the word ‘alone’.The word, however, already has a history in the poem, being linked with the narrator’s attempt not to feel passionate. Editors have constructed various endings out of these materials: the more optimistic ones preferring a ‘Seeking’ ending, the pessimistic ones reimplementing ‘Destroying.’ But Shelley did not write an ending: he left ‘a kind of moral – sardonic, obscure and unfinished’.10 He may have been too appalled at what he had discovered: that being attracted to an enchanting woman was akin to getting speared while staring into a delusive light. Mary, Claire, Teresa and Jane might all have been in his mind. It was not poetry which he had perhaps ever wanted to write – it may well have been the sort of thing that made him refer to ‘thoughts which must remain untold’ which kept him ‘as wakeful as the stars’ (570:21–22). But it was what he had written. This is the complete poem:

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  1822  Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven, To whom alone it has been given To change & be adored for ever … … Envy not this dim world, for never But once within its shadow grew   5 One fair as you, but far more true— She left me at the silent time When the moon had ceased to climb The azure dome of Heaven’s steep And like an albatross asleep       10 Balanced on her wings of light Hovered in the purple night—— Ere she sought her Ocean nest, In the chambers of the west.——— She left me, and I staid alone       15 Thinking over every tone, Which though now silent to the ear The enchanted heart could hear Like notes which die when born, but still Haunt the echoes of the hill:       20 And feeling ever— o too much The soft vibrations of her touch As if her gentle hand even now Lightly trembles on my brow And thus although she absent were    25 Memory gave me all of her That even fancy dares to claim.——— Her presence had made weak & tame All passions, and I lived alone, In the time which is our own      30 The past & future were forgot As they had been, & would be, not.— But soon, the guardian angel gone The demon reassumed his throne In my faint heart . . I dare not speak    35 My thoughts; but thus disturbed & weak I sate and watched the vessels glide Along the Ocean bright & wide Like spirit winged chariots sent Oer some serenest element       40

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Figure 13  Final page of manuscript of ‘Bright wanderer’ (1822) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Oxford, Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 36v)

To ministrations strange & far; As if to some Elysian star They sailed for drink to medicine Such sweet & bitter pain as mine.—— And the wind that winged their flight   45 From the land came fresh & light And the scent of sleeping flowers And the coldness of the hours Of dew, & the sweet warmth of day 360



  1822  Was scattered oer the twinkling bay   50 And the fisher with his lamp And spear, about the low rocks damp Crept, and struck the fish who came To worship the delusive flame Too happy, they whose pleasure sought  55 Extinguishes all sense & thought Of the regret that pleasure Seeking life alone not peace.

The experience of the narrator seems utterly unlike the ‘consolation’ which Shelley continued to insist he derived from Jane Williams, and of which ‘indeed, I have great need’.11 The poem may in fact have been the place where such sensible and rational thinking came starkly up against actual feelings of rage and desolation. While the ‘Don Juan’ was having modifications made to her masts, stern and rigging in the second half of June (a leaf of the ‘Triumph of Life’ manuscript shows a beautifully detailed drawing for the carved ‘billet head’ and stern which she now acquired12), Williams and Shelley endured a 13‐day pause in the sailing trips which had been occupying them. Shelley may have taken his chance to bring ‘Bright wanderer’ to his almost concluded conclusion, but ‘The Triumph of Life’ would remain as unfinished poetry when he and Williams got their boat back on 29 June 1822.

However, just after Rousseau has described in the longer manuscript how he has ‘fallen by the way‐side’, along with the others ‘from whose forms most shadows past’ (588:541–542), Shelley scribbled in between the lines, in tiny writing, ‘Alas, I kiss you Jane’:13 a way, perhaps, of writing a line of poetry for another ‘To Jane’ poem. Such words incidentally tell us that he was not sharing this writing with Mary. If ever Jane saw the manuscript, the kiss is what she might have found; we can only hope that she did not find ‘Bright wanderer’ too.

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35 Upon a Precipice 1822

Mary’s situation during these weeks at the Villa Magni went from bad to worse. She had not only resented the loss of Pisa, but from the start hated the Villa Magni. And then, at the start of June, three months or so pregnant, she felt herself on the verge of a miscarriage; and at eight in the morning on Sunday 16 June, just as ‘the days became excessively hot’, she miscarried and began to haemorrhage. She lost blood for seven hours and would probably have died if Shelley had not managed to acquire ice and stop the haemorrhage before the doctor could get to them. Many people would have been baffled by the problem of acquiring a quantity of ice, in the heat of an Italian summer. But Shelley was utterly resourceful and never took no for an answer; he may have sent servants to the rich people in the neighbourhood for permission to raid their locked and guarded ice‐houses; he is more likely to have bought all the ice he could get (doubtless at ruinous prices) from the café‐ owners of Lerici and Sarzana. The ice, at any rate, arrived at the Villa Magni before a doctor could; Claire and Jane were too scared to use it, but Shelley insisted on ‘an unsparing application’, ‘making her sit in ice’. And Mary was saved … but now, ‘ill and convalescent’, would take weeks to recover her strength, while her sufferings ‘were accompanied by a depression of spirits beyond any thing I had ever felt before’.1

Daniel Roberts had arrived in Lerici aboard Byron’s yacht the ‘Bolivar’ in mid‐June, and agreed with Williams and Shelley to modify the ‘Don Juan’ by fitting top‐sails, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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in order to get more speed out of her.This involved extensions to the masts, adjustments to the rigging and an extended bowsprit: and Williams would also construct and add a false stern, to make the boat look more impressive. Refitting took 12 days, 17–28 June. But with the Hunts  –  Hunt, his wife Marianne, and their six children – at last on the point of arriving in Livorno, and going up to Pisa, Shelley knew that he ought to be there, as they embarked on a life (in effect) as Byron’s dependents, with Hunt working to set The Liberal going. It was for the purpose of starting the magazine – and living more cheaply – that, indeed, the whole Hunt clan had left England, to settle in Pisa; and Byron had offered them accommodation in his Palazzo Lanfranchi. But Shelley knew that he needed to help them reach the agreements that were going to be necessary; and because Mary’s miscarriage had made him want to stay on at the Villa Magni, he was now leaving later than planned. The solution was to sail down to Livorno, where he could greet the Hunts, and then go up to Pisa for a couple of days to help negotiations between Byron and Hunt. Going by boat would mean that Williams would have a chance to give the boat its head in its new form; and Daniel Roberts would come with them, too, perhaps interested to see how his creation now sailed. The ‘Don Juan’, a good deal taller, with the extra sails, spars, rigging and other modifications, also now needed more ballast but – according to Williams – ‘floats 3 inches lighter than before’; the weight of the new stern may have been causing her to sit with her bows higher out of the water, but it is also striking that there was so little freeboard that three inches, one way or the other, were noticeable. It has been calculated that such a boat would have needed three to five tons of ballast: the old ballast of iron pigs weighed just two tons, so the boat  –  especially in its new form – would only have been safe ‘for pleasant weather sailing’, not ‘for heavy seas’. But on her journey back from Livorno the boat would also be carrying 16 bags of sand ballast, showing that some attempt had been made to deal with the way ‘she was very crank in a breeze’ (as Trelawny put it) – meaning that she canted over sideways.2 Shelley and Williams went out for the first time in the refitted ‘Don Juan’ on the 29th; the next day they tried out the new top‐sails and made some adjustments, before setting off south to catch up with the Hunts in Livorno.

Their trip south, nevertheless, came at a time in Shelley’s life when the way he was living felt increasingly unsustainable. Back in October he had acknowledged to Hogg how his spirits were ‘by no means good, & I feel sensibly la noia e l’affanno della passata vita [the boredom and sadness of the past life]’. In April 1822 he had told Claire that not only did his side still torment him, but that ‘my mind agitates the frame which it inhabits, and things go ill with me – that is within’.3 His writing 363



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was also in trouble; on 18 June he had told Gisborne that he was, after all, not going to continue with his ‘Charles the First’ play: I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past, to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater, peril, and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment.

There are a number of things he might have meant by that, but one is that – in spite of ‘the wrecks of my once prosperous fortune’ – he had, with difficulty, got Mary, Percy, Claire and himself into a ‘precarious situation’ where they could afford to live (with care) in Italy: with his own writing up until now continuing to interest him. But they would remain cut off from England and all its particular ties and links (‘O that I could return to England!’)4 At the start of 1822 he had got even more deeply into debt by supplying Hunt with £150 – to help pay the bills resulting from the Hunt family’s delays in travelling: Shelley yet again doing the generous thing and ignoring the cost to himself. At the end of January he had to be reminded to repay Byron something near £200 which Byron had loaned him: that was probably where the money for Hunt had come from. Shelley settled the bill, but that was yet another debt which would lead Mary, on 7 March, to confess that they were currently ‘too poor’ to write a cheque, for fear it would bounce. They were unable to go to Florence to visit Claire; their financial state seems to have communicated itself to the ever‐ trustworthy Horace Smith, who wisely declined lending the ‘70 or 80 guineas’5 which Shelley wanted to spend on a harp for Jane (she got a guitar instead). In April Shelley would reckon that he might, with luck, be able get his massive debt total reduced to some £14 000 or £15 000 – but those were still huge sums, over £700 000 in modern money. It was impossible for him to return to England before his father’s death; and Sir Timothy showed no sign of dying. Mary missed England, could not bear solitude and ended up mortally hating the house at Lerici: ‘I wish I cd break my chains & leave this dungeon’,6 she told Hunt at the end of June. The fact that she was now, after the miscarriage, utterly exhausted and depressed, in desperately hot weather, made everything worse for her. But nothing in their immediate situation could change. This was the precipice they had ascended. Shelley’s own individual precipice was that he did not know what kind of a writer he wanted to be, but it also looks as if he had started to want other things altogether, in a life without Mary, or at least differently with Mary. But there was nothing he could do about Mary without abandoning everything they had. Mary could not afford to live without his support;7 he would not have taken his surviving child away from her. The same day that he had written so desperately to John 364



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Gisborne, 18 June 1822, Shelley would give an indication of his depressed state by voicing the idea of suicide, and asking Trelawny to supply him with that portion of Prussic acid. ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Bright wanderer’ are, too, among the most gloomy poems he ever wrote, even if among the best. What he had done in the spring of 1822 was insist on taking the Villa Magni (totally isolated, away from all the social contacts of Pisa, staring out over the ocean) because sailing with Williams, working on the boat, seeing rather less of Mary and seeing Jane constantly were the things he thought would make life bearable. May to June 1822 – which Mary would, for the sake of an upbeat narrative, later recall as the happiest time of his life, and when he was certainly less in pain – also got him out of the house, in a way that only poetry writing (as in Marlow) had previously done. And his health was better. But apart from the new writing, all he was doing, for the moment, was going with the boat and the wind and the tide. He was living for nothing but the moment.

As a central member of the charmed circle, Jane Williams knew very well what life had been like at Villa Magni during the summer of 1822. She told two people: one was Hunt. The other, back in England in September, was Hogg (who had fallen in love with her). Jane began to tell him things about Mary that made him (no stranger to Mary, after all) believe that Mary’s later feelings were put on. Hogg summed up the situation to Jane as he now understood it: Mary’s conversation, when she too returned to England in 1823, he believed, will be painful, just as her letters are, because, to those who saw behind the scenes, the subject of it is a mere fable; our loss is real, your’s, dearest girl, I acknowledge, in spite of my hopes, irreparable, mine bad enough, but her’s, however painful, is in fact imaginary for to suppose that matters cod have continued as they were, wod have been the vanity of vanities, & any other termination wod have been for her, except as to money‐matters, infinitely worse.—8

Meaning that the Shelleys could not have gone on as they were (‘the vanity of vanities’ means ‘futility’) but that if Shelley had left Mary – the most likely ‘termination’ of their relationship – then he would at least have taken care of her, financially. In every other way, though, it would have been ‘infinitely worse’ for Mary to have been abandoned. For Jane – and for Hogg – the Shelleys’ relationship was finished. Jane believed that the devotion Mary later showed to Shelley was a sentimental pretence, and had nothing to do with how they had felt about each other, during the spring and summer of 1822. For twenty‐first century readers, the problem is simple: how far 365

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should Jane’s account of the Shelleys be taken as truthful? Jane has been accused of merely ‘scandalmongering’ and telling ‘spiteful tales’.9 We should, all the same, wonder how it might have benefited Jane to confide in two close friends how little Mary had really loved Shelley. Jane had had the problem of being trusted and depended upon by Mary. During July and August 1822 she needed constantly to be supportive, in person; and then later in letters, just when she herself also badly needed support. In September 1824, when they were both in London, Mary described Jane as ‘my only consolation’ but added ‘yet she does not console me’.10 Jane seems to have tried to do her best for Mary, but against the grain of her own feelings. Telling Hogg about how Mary had really behaved would have been a way for Jane to help herself cope.

There is evidence of Shelley being in considerable distress by June 1822; the Villa Magni had been the site of terrifying nightmares and imagined encounters. He had told Williams that he had seen a naked child rise from the sea, clapping its hands and smiling (shades of Allegra); and Mary – assuming that his unhappiness in June had been a response to her state (after all, she ‘considers me as a portion of herself ’11) – wrote to Maria Gisborne in August 1822 how the fright my illness gave him, caused a return of nervous sensations & visions as bad as in his worst times. I think it was the saturday after my illness [i.e. 22 June] while yet unable to walk I was confined to my bed—in the middle of the night I was awoke by hearing him scream & come rushing into my room; I was sure that he was asleep & tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed & ran across the hall to Mrs W’s room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately—she let me in & Williams went to S. who had been wakened by my getting out of bed—he said that he had not been asleep & that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him—But as he declared that he had not screamed it was certainly a dream & no waking vision—

It was a nightmare: He dreamt that lying as he did in bed Edward & Jane came into him, they were in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated—their bones starting through their skin, the faces pale yet stained with blood, they could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest & Jane was supporting him—Edward said—Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house & it is all coming down.” S. got up, he thought, & went to the his window that looked on the terrace & the sea & thought he saw the sea rushing in. Suddenly his vision changed & he saw the figure of himself strangling me, that had made him rush

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  1822  into my room, yet fearful of frightening me he dared not approch the bed, when my jumping out awoke him, or as he phrased it caused his vision to vanish.

Mary recalled Shelley telling her, when they talked it over in the morning, that he had had many visions lately—he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him—“How long do you mean to be content”12

She reckoned those ‘No very terrific words.’ But, together with the dreams, they are horribly suggestive of a man brooding on the break‐up of the household, believing Williams the most vulnerable of them, and wondering just how long he could go on as he was. Mary’s account will also make us wonder whether, when Shelley rushed into Mary’s room, it had not really been with the intention of strangling her. Williams himself was more prosaic in the note he made on the Sunday morning: ‘S sees spirits and alarms the whole house.’ The ‘figure of himself ’ who spoke to Shelley seems to correspond to the ‘familiar’ with whom – according to Byron – Shelley had conversations.13 The unconscious takes many forms, in our imagination of it. In 1822, a ‘familiar’ would – to an intensely scholarly man like Shelley – have been as natural an idea as any other embodied manifestation of the understanding. Mary’s miscarriage and subsequent weakness and depression would, all the same, have delayed him in doing anything to change their situation: he would not have enforced a ‘termination’, to use Hogg’s word. Hence perhaps the terrifying urgency of the dreams. Shelley’s own comment on his relations with Mary in the summer of 1822 offers an oddly ambiguous series of statements. This tells us not just about his uncertainty but his unhappiness: it was not like Shelley to write convoluted prose. He had written to John Gisborne just a couple of days after Mary’s miscarriage: As to me, Italy is more and more delightful to me, and yours and Mrs. Gisborne’s presence here is almost the only accessory I could desire, though if my wishes were not limited by my hopes, Hogg would be included. I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not.The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this, perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.The Williams’s are now on a visit to us, and they are people who are very pleasing to me. But words are not the instruments of our intercourse. I like Jane more and more, and I find Williams the most amiable of companions.14

Shelley misses people ‘who can feel, and understand me’; Mary cannot manage to do so because they are too much on top of each other (‘proximity’) and are too 367



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Figure  14  Percy Bysshe Shelley, pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (Newman Ivey White. Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940, Volume II, facing page 524)

used to each other (‘continuity of domestic intercourse’). It is not really a matter of them lacking others, but of having each other always in view, within hearing; the Villa Magni would certainly have exacerbated such ‘proximity’. And so on, through four complex sentences. Mary has ‘excellent powers’ and a ‘pure’ mind but is like Tantalus in the way she is unable to take hold of the things which are necessary for the everyday: she cannot apply her mental capacity to ‘domestic life’, i.e. everyday life with other people, especially – as Shelley phrases it – everyday life with him. This was something of which Mary was at least partly aware, knowing herself ‘tinged with irresolution & an incapacity of action’.15 All that seems clear until we notice how Shelley’s preceding sentence doubles back on itself: ‘The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this perhaps.’ Is it she who needs to conceal from herself those of her own thoughts which would pain her, or do we need to ensure that such thoughts

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never actually reach her? Shelley also structures his sentence so that ‘The necessity … necessitates’, before rounding off with ‘perhaps’: diminishing the very certainty upon which his repetition of ‘necessity’ had insisted. He is trying to understand himself and Mary and what (from his perspective) is going wrong. He does not successfully explain it either to Gisborne or to himself, but he locates his relationship with Mary as the seat of his distress.

Following her miscarriage on 16 June, there could be no question of Mary going with Shelley to meet the Hunts; and although by the end of the month she ‘had begun to crawl from my bedroom to the terrace’, she remained thoroughly depressed: ‘bad spirits succeeded to ill health’. On Monday 1 July, the day the men hoped to set off, Williams was up at 4 a.m. making still further adjustments to the rigging of the top‐sails. Shelley was perhaps working on the ‘little poem’ which he wrote ‘welcoming Leigh Hunt to Italy’16 (every scrap of it now lost). The day turned out hot and still, but a nice breeze developed around 12 o’clock; they would see if they could manage to get to Livorno in the day (Williams was sure they could). They needed a boat boy; Charles Vivian was on hand. And they would pick up Roberts in Lerici. By early afternoon, they were on their way south. Mary probably crawled out on to the broad terrace of the Villa Magni to wave goodbye: Jane too.

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At the start of his own last illness, Byron recalled Shelley saying ‘that he would end his life by drowning’; Leigh Hunt remembered how fond Shelley had been of the sea, and had ‘been heard to say he should like it to be his death‐bed’.1 But such things are not perhaps as revealing as they sound: Shelley’s death was bound to make people recall them. What really mattered was that sailing on rivers and canals, of which he was so fond, had – at sea – turned into what we would today call extreme sport (‘having a high level of inherent danger’), with its own attraction to someone of his temperament. Trelawny remarked, more than once, ‘Fear was positively unknown to Shelley’, and Mary would write in 1823 how ‘From his earliest years all his amusements and occupations were of a daring, & in one sense of the term lawless nature’. He had himself written, back in 1817, how ‘Danger which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate.’2 It was not simply that he could not swim – in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, Maddalo remarks to Julian ‘if you can’t swim / Beware of Providence’ (167:117–118) – or that life jackets were rare, and that he never wore any such thing.3 Some sailors could not swim, either, believing that swimming would only prolong the agony of drowning. But it seems to have been the exhilaration of undisputed freedom which Shelley most enjoyed in his sailing. Ever since Eton, he had been trying to live in a way that corresponded with his desire not to be compelled. If Mary really saw him happier in Lerici than she had ever known him, it was because he was at last experiencing such freedom – and not only accepting but enjoying its risks, too.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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We know of five occasions when he was in danger of drowning; there may have been others. The first had been with Mary when – according to her – they had time ‘to reflect and even to reason on death’4 on their first voyage together, across a stormy English Channel in 1814 in too small a boat (see Chapter 11).The second was near Saint‐Gingolph on Lake Geneva, with Byron, in June 1816 (see Chapter 14). On the third, coming up the ‘broad and deep’ canal between Livorno and Pisa in April 1821 with their friend Henry Reveley, Edward Williams managed to capsize their newly modified and untried little boat. Williams could swim and got himself to safety, but Reveley (knowing that Shelley was helpless) grabbed him and shouted that he would save him. Reveley recalled: ‘His answer characteristic of his unbounded courage was “All right never more comfortable in my life do what you will with me.”’5 It sounds as much like unbounded politeness as unbounded courage (as Coleridge phrased it, ‘we feel the gentlemanly character present to us, whenever… with the ease of a habit, a Person shews respect to others’).6 But Reveley got him out: back on land, Shelley fainted, probably from cold and shock. The fourth occasion came about when Trelawny offered to teach him to swim, in the Arno at Pisa in the spring of 1822. If we can believe Trelawny, Shelley doffed his jacket and trowsers, kicked off his shoes and socks, and plunged in; and there he lay stretched out on the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save himself. He would have been drowned if I had not instantly fished him out.7

We can marvel only at the way Trelawny, as ever, effortlessly makes himself the hero of the anecdote. The fifth occasion lies at the heart of this Chapter.

In the delighted words of Williams, on 1 July 1822 the ‘Don Juan’ managed ‘a run of 45 to 50 miles in 7 hours and a half ’.8 Even travelling along the coast, probably about 8 kilometres out, this was serious – and speedy – ocean sailing.They got into Livorno between 9 and 10 that evening and all four slept on board, so as to escape the problems of officials and health checks; they made up beds with cushions from Byron’s ‘Bolivar’, having moored next to her. The next day, Shelley was able to welcome the Hunts on what was in fact their fourth day in Livorno (they had originally been greeted by Trelawny), and a day later could travel up to Pisa with them. He was, he told Hunt, ‘so inexpressibly delighted!’ to see him again. Roberts went about his business;Williams and Vivian stayed behind in Livorno (extra ballast may have been ordered and taken on at this point).The weather was extremely hot 371



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and very dry: on Thursday 4th, Williams  –  stuck in Livorno, wanting to go home − noted Fine. Processions of Priests & religiosi have for several days past been active in their prayers for rain – but the Gods are either angry or Nature is too powerful.9

Shelley remained in Pisa, doing his best to get Hunt and Byron to work together. He could hardly have been there at a worse time. Marianne Hunt had been declared mortally ill with tuberculosis, while Byron intensely disliked having the whole Hunt ménage living on the ground floor of his Palazzo (the six children were loud and obstreperous). But what was even more significant to him was the fact that Teresa’s family, the Gambas, were now being expelled from Pisa for their Carbonari connections. The date originally set for their expulsion was Thursday 4 July, extended to Saturday 6th, and then to Monday 8th: just the days when Shelley was there. By the 8th, the Gambas had transferred themselves to Lucca and Byron was involved in correspondence about their rights and his own plans; on the 6th, he declared his determination to leave Pisa and go with them. He had no desire to think about collaboration on a magazine: Mary was well aware that, during his days in Pisa, Shelley (beside ‘arranging the affairs of the Hunts’) had to work on ‘skrewing LB’s mind to the sticking place about the journal’.10 What made matters worse was that Byron seems to have grown increasingly unhappy about the Liberal enterprise, in spite of having invented it. He had originally wanted to set it up with his friend Thomas Moore (1779–1852), and then with Shelley; but he had been persuaded that Hunt was ‘a good man’,11 and – because Shelley had pressed him to – ‘in an evil hour I consented’. Having invited Hunt and his family to Italy, Byron felt morally and financially obliged to continue with the plan; but even providing his own poetry for The Liberal – which meant getting it out of the hands of his publisher, John Murray – was proving difficult, and would in fact lead to his final break with Murray. Almost the first thing Hunt would have heard, too, was Byron declaring ‘that he did not wish his name to be attached to the work’. In the event, all contributions were anonymous, although Byron’s were instantly recognisable. The first issue of The Liberal (in October 1822) would contain – after it had been extracted from a reluctant Murray – Byron’s marvellous new poem The Vision of Judgment, his satire on Southey. But by that time Byron would be declaring himself ‘afraid the Journal is a bad business  –  and won’t do’; he complained how ‘in it I am sacrificing myself for others – I can have no advantage in it’. For publishing The Vision of Judgment, Hunt’s brother John would be prosecuted and eventually fined £100; but Byron was annoyed that John Hunt had used the poem to advertise the magazine and drum up customers (‘That d— —d advertisement … is out of the limits I did not lend

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him my name to be hawked about in this way’). Relations with Leigh Hunt were hardly better, with Byron complaining in November 1822: ‘Am I to see you – or are we to scribble notes Two words of mouth – explain better than fifty reams of paper.’12 It was Shelley’s job to bring together these distracted and very different people: ‘You have no idea how I am hurried & occupied’, he would tell Mary on Thursday 4th: ‘Every body is in despair & every thing in confusion.’ He intended to stay as clear of the business as he could; as he had said at the start, ‘I am, and I desire to be, nothing’  –  an interesting reflection on his state of mind as well as of his non‐ involvement with the journal.13 He was, too, very conscious of obliging Williams to hang around in Livorno while he was in Pisa; he wrote to ‘Madame Williams’ on the Thursday (originally dating his note ‘5’ July before changing it to ‘4’) that he would urge her husband to sail with the first fair wind without expecting me. I have thus the pleasure of contributing to your happiness when deprived of every other, – and of leaving you no other subject of regret, but the absence of one scarcely worth regretting.—14

What a finely turned sentence, defining his role as one who would like to be regretted, but offering himself as barely worth it (even his signature was a lonely and isolated ‘S.—’). He told Jane that he feared she might be ‘solitary & melancholy’: ‘I figure to myself the countenance which has been the source of such consolation to me, shadowed by a veil of sorrow— — —.’ At least he liked her to think that she had consoled him. He was writing, he told her, only ‘for the pleasure of tracing what will meet your eyes’, and recalled the hours ‘in which we have lived together so intimately so happily!–’ Such hours had fled past: ‘how slowly they return to pass so soon again, & perhaps for ever’.15 Jane’s reply was very tart: ‘Why do you talk of never enjoying moments like the past, are you going to join your friend Plato or do you expect I shall do so soon?’ Friend Plato being very long gone, in spite of Shelley’s attachments à la Plato. Jane insisted that it was only Shelley’s ‘visionary veil’ which made her sad: her own countenance was ‘animated with the hope of seeing you return with far different tidings’. Her response sounds more than a little teasing, in spite of her reference to ‘Neddino’.16 But Shelley may never have seen her letter: it went to Pisa, and he was in Livorno by Sunday night. On the Friday he also heard from Mary, who had sent to Pisa a letter ‘of the most gloomy kind’, ‘a desponding note’. Hunt was ‘distressed’ by the pain Shelley revealed when he read it and, during their days in Pisa, Hunt also heard directly from Shelley about his problems with Mary (Shelley mentioning ‘several circumstances on that subject’17). Mary may well have been reinforcing her insistence that

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Shelley should not invite the Hunts to Lerici, that she hated the way she felt trapped in the house, and that she was (understandably) terrified about Percy’s health, with no doctor for miles.

At last, late on the evening of Sunday 7 July, Shelley got back to Livorno, having done what he could to reconcile the Hunts to Italy and Byron, Byron to Hunt and the magazine, and both of them to the fact that he himself would be playing no further part. Margaret Mason thought he was ‘in better health and spirits than she had ever known him’ when he left Pisa on the Sunday afternoon, after sorting out Byron and Hunt; the following morning, Roberts also observed Shelley ‘in one of those extravagant fits of high spirits in which you [Maria Gisborne] have sometimes seen him’. Byron had loaned him £50, which would certainly have made him cheerful. There was shopping for the Villa Magni to be done (‘eatables &c for our solitude’18); the wind was favourable, ‘light and favourable from the S.E.’ (though later it went round to the north‐west); they weighed anchor ‘at a little after twelve’.19 The ‘Don Juan’ was going to have just three on board for the journey back: Shelley, Williams and Vivian. Years later, Roberts would tell some English visitors that ‘Trelawney was to have been of the party’ but that Shelley ‘had had words’ with him that morning, which was why he did not go. According to Trelawny’s own account, he had wanted to sail back with Shelley and Williams, but in Byron’s ‘Bolivar’; he was prevented from doing so because he had no port clearance.20 For the moment it is enough that Roberts said he saw the ‘Don Juan’ two hours after she had left, 10 miles along the coast and taking in sail,21 before she was hidden by mist. Roberts and others competed for the role of the person with the best understanding of and the most reliable information about what followed, but visibility in such conditions was not likely to have been as good as he claimed.The boat was probably carrying, at least at first, rather too much sail for an open‐decked boat in weather which might quickly turn squally or worse. But Williams wanted to get home as quickly as possible, and the wind was favourable, if weak. Those at the Villa Magni had no certain idea when to expect them home; Williams had simply promised ‘Tuesday Evening at furthest’ in a letter which arrived on Monday 8th (letters took just two days between the Villa Magni and Pisa or Livorno). From what he had written to her the previous week, Jane expected her husband, at least, to arrive in the ‘Don Juan’ accompanying the ‘Bolivar’, and they had heard that both boats had left on Friday 5th. Jane even believed that she had seen the ‘Bolivar’ sail past Lerici on the morning of the 6th,22 but she was mistaken: the ‘Bolivar’ (like the ‘Don Juan’) was still at Livorno. Anyway, unless Shelley had 374



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answered Mary’s desponding letter, the Lerici household heard nothing more after Williams’s letter arrived on the Monday.

Trelawny was the person to take charge of almost everything that happened next, and which had to be made to happen; a person in a thousand, resourceful, intelligent, practical, persuasive and devoted. Hearing later in the week that the ’Don Juan’ had still not arrived, he went to Viareggio and identified two items washed up on the beach as having been on board; and he was alerted by the coastguards when, seven or eight days later, the remains of two bodies were washed up, which (too) he was able with difficulty to identify as Williams (on the stretch of beach near the Torre Riccardi, just below the mouth of the Serchio) and Shelley, on the beach at Viareggio. Trelawny was there to break the news to Mary and Jane. He then took on the responsibility for getting permission to organise cremations on the beaches. The partial remains of Charles Vivian were found later, some distance further north, at Massa, and were buried in the sand‐dunes.23

The ‘Don Juan’ was discovered by local fishermen and brought ashore in September;24 the fact that this was possible demonstrates that she was not in very deep water. She had not capsized – her ballast and the trunks on board had remained in place, and were recovered when she was raised – but she must have shipped a lot of water very fast and gone straight down. The real problem with accounts of the sinking of the ‘Don Juan’ is that Roberts and Trelawny, the two people who knew most about it, were also those most likely to feel to blame. As a result they were determined (on the one hand) to show themselves anxious about the journey; on the other hand, to absolve themselves of responsibility for what happened. Trelawny might well have felt that – if he had been on board – things would not have turned out as they did: and he was in part responsible for the design of the boat. Daniel Roberts had actually constructed her, and had thus played his part in producing a craft which would not just be speedy (as Williams and Shelley demanded) but also, without decking, inherently dangerous. By 1828, Roberts’s account of what happened had settled down into an extended version of what he first proposed in 1822: that in the storm which overtook the ‘Don Juan’ some two to three hours after she left Livorno, she had been rammed and sunk by another vessel. The wreck had therefore nothing to do with him. In 1822, he had blamed a Livorno fishing boat; by 1828, the fishing boat had grown 375



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into a merchant ship. The only evidence was an oar from the ‘Don Juan’ spotted in another vessel at Livorno; and the fact that something had been fished out of the water by another boat shows simply that it had floated away from the wreck. After seeing the salvaged boat in September, Roberts at first agreed that she ‘must have been filled by a heavy sea’ – when raised and emptied, she floated,25 proving that she had not been ‘stove in’ – before he went back to (and stuck to) his story of the boat having been rammed. It looks overwhelmingly likely that the ‘Don Juan’ (and those on board) had been unable to cope with the violent, thundery squalls prevalent that afternoon. Although top‐sails are ‘the most difficult of all sails to lower’, they managed to get them down.26 But with the boat heeling over sideways at an angle because of wind suddenly coming from an unexpected quarter, water would have started to come over the lee side in quantities. In 1828, Trelawny imagined very vividly how the ‘Don Juan’ was suddenly taken clap aback by a sudden and very violent squall; and it is supposed that in attempting to bear up under such a press of canvass, all the sheets fast, the hands unprepared, and only three persons on board, the boat filled to leeward, and having two tons of ballast, and not being decked, went down on the instant27

Even with the experienced Roberts in charge, or with Trelawny on board, they would have been lucky to have survived such a squall. And they were not lucky.28 The only report which might be reliable had reached Hunt by 25 July: It was on the 8th instant, about four or five in the evening, they guess. A fisherman says he saw the boat a few minutes before it went down: he looked again and it was gone. He saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails.29

Vivian would have been reefing the top‐sails. Theories about another boat running her down, or about Shelley refusing to reef the boat in an attempt to commit suicide, or out of sheer devilry, can be discounted. He would not have extended suicide to his friend Williams − nor to Jane Williams − nor to Charles Vivian. A lot of nonsense has been written about Shelley’s uselessness as a sailor. Trelawny started it, with an account of Shelley’s attempt to steer the ‘Don Juan’ while reading, with Williams ‘over‐anxious’ and  –  as a sailor – lacking in ‘practice’.Trelawny was determined to shift the blame away from himself. Shelley had on occasion sailed the ‘Don Juan’ on his own, and Williams knew the boat through and through.30 When Williams was aboard, too, there was no doubt who was captain: Williams, not Shelley. Putting himself at risk was nevertheless Shelley’s love: and with Williams eager to get back, it is easy to imagine Shelley happily agreeing, in the high spirits he had demonstrated that day. He would have been pleased with what he had managed to 376



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accomplish in Pisa, and a trip in his own boat in potentially strong winds would also have been a pleasant prospect; it might even have kept him cheerful on his way to what threatened to be rather a grim reuniting with Mary.

The fact that Williams’s body was found closest to the place of sinking, with its arms attempting to pull his shirt over his head, without trousers and minus one boot, suggests that he at any rate (like Byron and Shelley on Lake Geneva six years earlier) had been readying himself to be in the water,31 before perhaps being caught up in a tangle of ropes and sails. Shelley’s body was still wearing jacket, trousers, boots and socks. He had expected to spend the journey reading; there were at least two books in his trunk, and Hunt’s copy of Keats’s Lamia, Isabella,The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems was found stuffed into his jacket pocket, ‘open and doubled back, as if it had been thrust in, in the hurry of a surprise’.32 What else might have been in his pockets (Prussic acid from Trelawny, perhaps) we do not know. Williams’s last identifiable impulse, at any rate, was to try to swim: Shelley’s, to thrust away his book for later. Shelley’s body was washed up at Viareggio after eight days in the water, face, hands and scalp lost to what he had himself recently imagined as ‘the dog‐fish hastening to their feast’ (531:522). It was buried on the beach temporarily under quicklime, as Italian regulations demanded; the corpse of Williams was also buried and the place marked.33 The remains of both men, in an even more lamentable state – truly ‘a heap / To make men tremble who never weep’ (414:20‐21) – were dug up again a month later, to be burned under logs of wood on the portable iron furnace which the incomparable Trelawny had had made. Having cremated the remains of Williams on 14 August, the party – including Byron and Hunt – went to Viareggio on the 15th. Shelley’s remains were exhumed: His dress and linen had become black, and the body was in a state of putridity and very offensive. Both the legs were off separated at the knee joint — the thigh bones bared and the flesh hanging loosely about them — the hands were off and the arm bones protruding — the skull black and no flesh or features of the face remaining.The clothes had in some degree protected the body — the flesh was of a dingy blue.

What remained of Shelley was then slowly incinerated, with salt and wine and oil added as libation. Byron, who was there, wrote how ‘You can have no idea what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has, on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back‐ground and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame.’ Trelawny’s memories, 50 years later, were differently evocative: The white sandy beach.The air tremulous with the intense noonday heat. Not a weed or green tuft; everything brown and scorched, and desolation all round …34

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It was as if an attempt were being made, worthy of Sir Timothy’s implacable hostility, to obliterate him for ever. All that had been Shelley was reduced to what Byron nervelessly summarised as ‘his burnt‐out brain, and sapless cinders’ after a day’s ‘grilling’.35 Even so, a surprising amount seemed recoverable. The ashes went to Rome, to be buried beside Shelley’s son William, but Trelawny managed to rescue what he believed to be the blackened heart; Mary kept it for the rest of her life. Found crumbling in her copy of Adonais, in 1889 it was buried with Sir Percy, Shelley’s only surviving son, who inherited estate and title from Sir Timothy. Trelawny showed W. M. Rossetti ‘a bit of Shelley’s jawbone’ and gave him ‘a little piece … of Shelley’s skull’; the British Library holds some crumbs of bone and ash as well as a lock of hair; the Bodleian Library has hair from 1816 and 1822. From somewhere Hunt also had surprisingly large fragments of jaw‐bone, originally kept in a velvet‐lined box, later in a jar.36 Byron and Trelawny had made an attempt to rescue the skull, but it broke in pieces; in the Pforzheimer Collection in New York to this day, however, there are ‘2 larger and ca. 30 smaller fragments’ of human skull, claimed by Trelawny as Shelley’s, catalogued as ‘realia’.37 Of his bones are realia made.

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Compared even with the surviving shards of bone, Shelley’s writings rise not only ‘in unvanquishable number’ (361:152) but show him more skilled in more literary forms than perhaps any other English writer. From verse polemic (‘Men of England’) to prose analysis (‘On the Punishment of Death’), from epigram (‘Crime is madness. Madness is disease’ ‐ 101) to essay (‘A Defence of Poetry’), translations from the Greek, German, Italian and Spanish, literary criticism (‘Peter Bell the Third’), epic poem (Prometheus Unbound), verse satire (Swellfoot the Tyrant), theatre (The Cenci), lyric (‘To a Sky‐Lark’), Shelley has the bases covered. Only mature prose fiction is missing, although he wrote hundreds of pages of gothic romance as a teenager: he did, though, start a French Revolution novel, Hubert Cauvin, ­compose the first four chapters of a political romance, The Assassins, and serve as man‐­ midwife to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.1 And yet, in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound in 1819, he had imagined that his main job as a writer would be to ‘produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society’ (187); between 1819 and 1820 he spent months on his unfinished book A Philosophical View of Reform, and then took a great deal of time, probably in 1821, planning and working on a ‘Treatise on Morals.’ He had noted earlier that year: ‘I consider Poetry very subordinate to moral & political science’, insisting that, if he could recover his health, ‘certainly I should aspire to the latter’.2 If he had indeed concentrated on it, he would have deprived us of much of the poetry for which today he is known.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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He did some very bad writing. The early novels are madly absurd even by contemporary gothic standards. Looking back, he criticised his own early work for being written ‘in the most furious style’, and even his shorter poems sometimes seem too long, because his energy and facility lead him to what Timothy Webb calls an ‘inability to stop’: Webb thinks Shelley’s writing sometimes grew ‘emotionally over‐weighted’, carried away as he was ‘by his own excitement’: a poem like ‘A Vision of the Sea’ suggests that. Shelley confessed that writing a poem was, in one way, all too easy for him: ‘when once I see and feel I can write it, it is already ­written’.3 He was a great writer whose larger works are nearly all problematic in one respect or another (Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna, Rosalind and Helen, Epipsychidion, Adonais), as are his plays (The Cenci, Hellas) while his longer prose works are unfinished. The poem commonly reckoned his best (‘The Triumph of Life’) also remains unfinished, and we have no idea how it might have ended. The work for which he deserves to be best known was all written in the last four‐and‐a‐ half years of his life: ‘Ozymandias’, ‘On Love’, ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, Prometheus Unbound, ‘On the Devil, and Devils’, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ‘Mine eyes were dim’, the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘Peter Bell the Third’, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, ‘The Boat on the Serchio’, ‘The Triumph of Life’, ‘Bright wanderer’ and the eight or so late lyrics linked with Jane. Unlike Keats and Byron and Coleridge and even Wordsworth, Shelley failed to make a name for himself during his early twenties; the reason being that he had never attempted to live by his writing, and therefore did not publish anything except a tiny portion of what he was doing. Very few people saw his work; he acquired no name in literary circles, although he did acquire a scandalous reputation. This had consequences. Alastor, his first publicly issued book, came out when he was 24, and none of its reviewers had ever heard of him. He was, however, soon perceived to be a friend of Byron and one of the school of Leigh Hunt, both of them damaging perceptions. And before his 26th birthday he had gone abroad for good, vanishing from the London literary world. As late as April 1820, when he was closer to 28, a long and serious review of The Cenci would start ‘We are not familiar with the writings of Mr. Shelley’; three months later, no less a figure than Coleridge would admit that he had read nothing by him. In 1819 Shelley had explained that ‘my great stimulus in writing is to have the approbation of those who feel kindly towards me’, but – apart from Hunt – the only people who seemed to know his work well were those who attacked it. He received not only criticism but ‘denunciations’:4 The Cenci was ‘a noisome and noxious publication’ characterised by ‘intellectual perversion, and poetical atheism’, the language of Prometheus Unbound was a ‘Babylonish jargon … found in every wearisome page of this tissue of insufferable buffoonery’, the ‘Triumph of Life’ was ‘an example of the waste of power, and of genius … devoured by its own elementary ardours’.5 That last dismissal came from Hazlitt: the comments on The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound appeared in 380



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The Literary Gazette, whose review of Shelley’s reissued Queen Mab in 1821 would ask what a ‘disciple following his tenets’ would do, and spelled out a version of Shelley’s own life, showing how terribly well‐known its outlines were: it would be a matter of perfect indifference to rob a confiding father of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all the branches of a family whose morals were ruined by the damned sophistry of the seducer; to such it would be sport to tell a deserted wife to obtain with her pretty face support by prostitution; and, when the unhappy maniac sought refuge in self‐destruction, to laugh at the fool while in the arms of associate strumpets.

No writer can easily survive in the public domain, or even stay published, if that kind of thing regularly appears; by 1824 it could be confidently concluded that ‘public opinion … has doomed the name of Shelley to unmixed reprobation’.6 In April 1820, Shelley had mournfully written how Byron and Thomas Moore were, to him, writers who knew ‘the road to success’: he was ‘one who has sought and missed it’. He was, he had told Peacock, ‘speaking literarily, infirm of purpose. I have great designs & feeble hopes of ever accomplishing them’: To be sure, the reception the public have given me, might be enough to damp any man’s enthusiasm. They teach you, it may be said what only what is true. Very true, I doubt not, & the more true the less agreable— I can compare my experience in this respect to nothing but a series of wet blankets—7

Early in 1821, he was on the point of making the reception of his work the test of whether he would even go on:‘I write what I write chiefly to inquire, by the reception which my writings meet with, how far I am fit for so great a task, or not.’8 Its reception was – he insisted – threatening his very existence as a writer: I write nothing, and probably shall write no more. It offends me to see my name classed among those who have no name. If I cannot be something better, I had rather be nothing …

Although his motive in writing had never been ‘the infirm desire of fame’, he had now come to feel that reputation mattered: ‘if I should continue an author, I feel that I should desire it’.9 He had, though, invited some of the wet blankets. He had been happy for the joint hero and heroine of Laon and Cythna to enjoy an incestuous relationship. He had never disguised his antipathy to the Christian religion; he had extended a similar antagonism to the monarchy and towards most of the institutions of society. Down to his late twenties, because he was confident that he understood so much that no‐one else did, he believed he could bring the world and the people in it up 381



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to his level of understanding, and set it on the road to improvement. He felt himself not just ready for the task but destined for it: it was his social and moral responsibility. At the age of 18, he had attempted to convince his acquaintances and his schoolmates at Eton that the Christian religion should be abandoned. A year later, he attempted the same with the senior figures of the University of Oxford. At the age of 20, he believed that he could make a significant difference to the politics and the structure of society in Ireland by speaking forcibly (and selling pamphlets) in Dublin: so he went there, and spoke, and produced pamphlets. Between 1812 and 1817 he went on to write Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, two long poems addressed to the problems of his age, full of advice and enthusiasm about how a new society could be worked for, and a new state of mind developed and maintained; they were the improving words to his contemporaries of an extravagantly talented, profoundly thoughtful, utterly remarkable member of the gentry. He approached the world with the sort of care for it which Hogg recalled in 1823 as ‘gentleness & patience’,10 but also with a passion to do all the things to change his society which someone like his father had not done and never would do. The causes which he supported over the course of his short life, in prose and poetry, included Parliamentary reform for representative government, abolition of the monarchy, abolition of the death penalty, abolition of Christianity as state religion, abolition of the slave trade, repeal of the Act of Union with Ireland, religious toleration extended to Jews and Muslims, Roman Catholic emancipation, civil as opposed to church marriage, vegetarian diet (no wonder he continues to appear modern). His ‘expatriation’ would lead him to a peculiarly deep‐felt ‘exile, & solitude’,11 in spite of constant letters to and from England, and friendship with individuals he valued in Italy – Byron from the start, for a while Maria Gisborne, in Pisa eventually Margaret Mason, Edward and Jane Williams. The Shelley marriage was nevertheless put under considerable strain, with the two of them always confined in what Shelley referred to as ‘proximity’,12 and their way of life in Italy leaving Shelley with nowhere to which he felt he belonged. He found only a series of temporary homes and apartments, selected if possible either near doctors or people he knew, or in the right place for warmth in winter or coolness in summer. But this in consequence meant an increasing stress on the importance of his writing as the only link he could effectively manage with the outer world – his only way of reaching out to people: writing which, in turn, he would increasingly feel was in danger of being pointless. Over the six years of his published career, he had failed to find a readership and by June 1822 was in despair: he may have hoped powerfully to affect his contemporaries (he had always believed himself ‘their benefactor and ardent lover’), but had come to feel powerless: I write little now. It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write. Imagine Demosthenes reciting a Philippic to the waves of the Atlantic!

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Poetry, however musical, seemed no more than ‘jingling food for the hunger of oblivion’.13 At Lerici he would despair about many things, and it would be wrong to take those remarks as indicative of a set attitude; in August 1821, for instance, he had felt ‘full of thoughts and plans’ and had still thought he might ‘do great things’. But at the start of March 1822 he would wonder aloud, to Hunt (with quotations characteristically buried in his sentence: St Augustine’s reference to ‘the God of my own heart’, the Fool in King Lear saying ‘For there was never yet faire woman, but shee made mouthes in a glasse’, perhaps Wordsworth writing of the ‘still, sad music of humanity’): What motives have I to write.—I had motives—and I thank the god of my own heart they were totally different from those of the other apes of humanity who make mouths in the glass of the time—but what are those motives now?

Apparently the only reason to go on writing was to earn money – ‘& that it seems I cannot’. He was still undergoing the crisis in his existence as a writer which he had described in 1821. By June 1822 it was worse. All he believed he could do was ‘read Greek and think about writing’.14 (Typically, he was not just thinking at the time but working immensely hard at ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Bright wanderer’.)

Although Shelley was (as Trelawny eventually saw him) ‘a resolute, self‐sustaining man’, by the summer of 1822, without a supportive publisher and in effect no public, and confined to exile, he was still not an established writer. Although he complained about his lack of readers, Peacock had told him in February 1822 that ‘when you write, you never think of your audience’: the small editions Shelley had published would, as he well knew, attract only an ‘enlightened public’, while his poetry had only appeared in a handful of newspapers and journals.15 He had unpublished work in the hands of Ollier which would certainly have been more accessible and, for a general public, more attractive. But Ollier was not much interested in Shelley, who had still not found the kind of writing – nor even the sort of poetry – to carry him into his thirties. He was still finding out, in Eliot’s phrase, ‘really what he could do well’.16 One of the problems, oddly, was that he had never had to work as a professional writer. Because he had had an income, he had uninhibitedly written what he liked – and had not only ignored the fact that he had a minimal audience for it, but had at first enjoyed having such an audience. Things got harder when he went abroad in 1818 and began to suffer a ‘dreary solitude of the understanding & the imagination’.17 Hogg had been the only person to read and criticise his work: and Hogg had little time for poetry. Byron was the next person whom Shelley respected 383



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who was also able to offer criticism of his work, but Byron really knew very little of it: he described The Cenci as ‘a work of power, and poetry’ and commented that ‘His Islam had much poetry.’ Hunt had always praised, Peacock had been cautious and reserved. Keats wrote to Shelley in August 1820 after reading The Cenci: You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and ‘load every rift’ of your subject with ore. The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furl’d for six Months together.18

By ‘magnanimity’, Keats may have meant ‘high‐minded indifference to praise or criticism’ but indifference in this case also undoubtedly implied detachment. Keats wanted more actuality (or ‘ore’), more discipline, less idealisation. Shelley was not being enough of an artist: he was using his facility to write detachedly, he was always soaring off on those unfurled wings. But that was how Shelley had been,‘self‐sustaining’ as he had been obliged to be; he had indeed submitted to no ‘discipline’ beside what he had himself imposed.The fact that he spent the last four years of his life effectively in exile made this worse. It is one thing to go abroad when – like Byron – your reputation is established and you have a literary community eager for your work. When Shelley left, he was still largely unknown. He could have been a razor‐sharp and immensely lucid writer of political satire and commentary, and ‘once thought to study these affairs & write or act in them’;19 he could not be such a writer because he could only learn about events in England from newspapers and letters arriving weeks late. His association with Hunt had probably hurt him rather than helped him, though Hunt had done what he could for Shelley; but even Hunt’s arrival in Italy in the summer of 1822, with a magazine to set up which would have welcomed Shelley’s contributions with open arms, was something from which Shelley backed away. Publishing alongside Byron was not something he intended to do. And he never did (though Mary gave some pieces to The Liberal). Yet this summary of his achievements – he might well have deemed it a product of the ‘owl‐winged faculty of calculation’ (673) – is also extremely unfair to Shelley who, if he had left us nothing else than the drafts of work in his notebooks, and otherwise no finished work at all, would eventually have come to be regarded as one of the most notable writers in English. His notebooks and manuscripts show thousands of corrections and fragments; anyone going through them finds marvellous things lying in wait. A front pastedown has: the spring rebels not against winter but it succeeds it— the dawn rebels not 384



  Beyond this Life  against night but it disperses it—

That might be a poem in itself; it sits alongside a rough sketch of trees in a landscape.20 On another page, some drafted material for Shelley’s essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’ stops in mid‐air, two‐thirds the way down the page – but something else had been inscribed there first: And through the silent interstellar air superlunar21 Shelley awarded that little fragment three intertwined rose‐forms for its particular bounds. Fragments often failed to become poems, but created poetry;22 the packed and overwritten pages leave us wondering how he could ever have done anything else in his life than write.

He had lost his family at far too young an age; he felt himself unnaturally hindered by his father in his attempts to live and be active in social change as the gentleman he knew himself to be. When he met someone whom he felt (for a while at least) to be – if not an intellectual equal – then at least someone to be assisted and advised (first Hogg, then Elizabeth Hitchener, then Godwin, and then Peacock), he remained a supportive friend until such friendships weakened or foundered; this was not helped by his spending so much time (and finally all that remained of his life) abroad. Such relationships did not become emotionally supportive. All four were, in their own different ways, loners, and they ended up as malicious about Shelley as if they had never been friends at all. For the most part Shelley had to be contented with the friendships of men like Trelawny – who turned out to be a good friend to the Shelley family – and Edward Williams, whom he met in 1821, and who regarded Shelley as someone very special, talented and sympathetic, and with whom he could happily spend weeks doing things. But Shelley assuredly preferred working with Williams on the rigging of the ‘Don Juan’ to discussing the latter’s attempts as a dramatist and  –  Williams recalled – ‘assuring me that the subject is beyond my powers’.23 The only man with whom he seems to have developed – at times – a complex emotional relationship was Byron, in part because with Byron he no longer felt superior. In 1816, they were able to go off together for a week’s tour of Lake Geneva, confident that upper‐class politesse would ensure that they would get on together; and it did. From 1817 onwards, unfortunately, Byron’s hugely successful 385



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poetry made Shelley feel ‘the burden’ of his own ‘insignificance and impotence’.24 It was a very rare experience for him to look up to someone: people always regarded him as the special one. In Byron, however, Shelley knew – and came to be horrified by – someone he regarded as a genius. This had mattered less in 1816, when the two men were at their closest, and when Byron still cared for Claire. When Shelley met him again in Venice in 1818, Byron was committed to a career as a rakehell which Shelley found antithetical; and even though Byron might have brought Shelley on side when he was partnered by Teresa Guiccioli – who thought very highly of Shelley – they never recovered the relationship they had had in 1816. The first reason, oddly enough, was Byron’s poem Don Juan, by which Shelley was bowled over, the more he saw of it. He grew seriously envious of Byron: ‘The demon of mistrust & of pride lurks between two persons in our situation poisoning the freedom of their intercourse.’25 That seriously damaged their relationship just at the time, during their last months in Pisa, when Byron’s attitude to Claire – and to Allegra – was growing intolerable, and Byron’s insinuations about Claire and Shelley were impossibly insulting. This led Shelley to abandon a very important friendship. But it had been Shelley’s admiration which also made him so ferociously critical of Byron. He felt let down when he experienced the weaknesses and failures of a man he admired so much, and whom he knew to be possessed of so much that he himself did not have. Byron knew this: ‘of all men, Shelley thought highest of my talents,—and, perhaps of my disposition’. But that did not mean that he wanted Shelley as a friend. As he told Mary about friendship, four months after Shelley’s death: ‘I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired and esteemed him.’ Byron’s were what he called ‘men‐of‐the‐world friendships’, with men of the same class, background, income and attitude; he had grown up with many of them. Shelley, whom Byron summed up as ‘crazy against religion and morality’, was too unconventional: in Byron’s politer words, ‘a very singular man’. He could not – although ‘very good’ and ‘very clever’ – be a friend.26 It is especially striking that  –  as Byron saw  –  a man so etched by class and background as Shelley should also have been such a rebel. On the one hand, Shelley was constantly defined by the assumptions of his period, his upbringing and his class: in his attitudes towards women, for example, whom he tended to see as provided for the pleasure of men, to be taken up when desired and let go when no longer desired. It is probable that, although frequently experiencing powerful sexual attraction to women, Shelley never fell in love again as he had with Harriet Grove, to whom he was in 1810 (according to her brother) ‘more attached … than I can express’,27 and whom he always regretted. He seems to have married Harriett Westbrook because he felt attracted, compromised and obliged; having been begged by Harriett to run off with her, he had also married her, being a moral man touched by modern ideas of responsibility and good relationship (we can imagine how his 386



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father or grandfather would have acted in such a case). He even married her again in March 1814, when the legality of their first marriage seemed in doubt, to ensure that she inherited from him. But when, three months later, another and most desirable woman, Mary Godwin, fell in love with him, within a fortnight he had abandoned Harriett and thereafter grew increasingly impatient with her refusals to fall in with his plans for her. Going away with Mary in July 1814 was a marvellous adventure. She seemed to Shelley the incarnated ideal of his dreams: circle and circumference, fair, wise and true: and sexually enticing too. Other women came and went in his imagination of them, and in 1818 he and Claire may have fallen into each other’s arms; while his belief that Mary no longer loved him – or could no longer show her love – encouraged him to look elsewhere. But he chose women he could write poetry about: Claire, Teresa Viviani, Jane Williams. By the winter of 1820–1821 he no longer had the confidence that he was always going to make the right choices in life, could no longer trust ‘the god of my own heart’28 – what a phrase! – as once he had. He had known for years what a mess he had made of Harriett’s life by marrying her. By the early 1820s he had come to believe that in his relationship with Mary Godwin he had made another mess, this time of his own life, by partnering himself with a woman who was an excellent intellectual and reading partner, but who wanted him only as a man who would (when she chose) give her children, who was hardly ever able to show her love for him, and who was irritably angry with him for much of the time: his deepest feeling being that of ‘a spirit already more than bent’, his love for her being ‘a Vision long since fled’ (557–558:13,36). In this second marriage, his desire to go his own way, to be empowered with the freedom which had always been one of his ambitions – and to empower others too – had brought him to breaking point. The sailing to which he devoted himself during his last two years seems to have been a kind of fantasy of an ideal state, allowing him to be responsive only to the moment, to remain ‘extraordinarily young’ and to devote himself to the exercise of uncompelled freedom. In reality he was marooned on his precipice and felt (he told Trelawny) like a man of 90.29 What his life would have been like if he had lived into his forties and fifties is hard to guess. Yet he was also a man who wrote tirelessly about social change and the responsibilities of men like himself; who did his best, as an adult, to write what was appropriate and best for the coming society; though, in such terms, ‘The Triumph of Life’ is an even more pessimistic work than it might at first appear. Byron was deeply impressed by Shelley’s ‘sacrifices … for others’; he came to think Shelley ‘the best and least selfish man I ever knew’.30 That is, he wondered at Shelley’s selflessness in giving himself – his energy, his time and his money – to the people and the causes in which he believed. But Shelley had also talked to Byron persuasively and excitingly about Greek independence, and probably about the role 387



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which Byron might play. It has been argued that he became a major moral and intellectual influence on Byron’s idealistic dedication of himself and his resources to the Greek cause, in the summer of 1823: While Shelley lived, even his persuasive powers had had their limits. It was Shelley’s death that catapulted Byron into commitment of a kind he might never otherwise have made. Byron’s war, as it entered its final phase, was to be above all a tribute to everything that Shelley had come to represent in his imagination.31

Just a few days after the first anniversary of Shelley’s death, Byron would sail from Genoa, en route to his own death at Missolonghi; his commitment to Greece being Shelley’s final, fatal gift to him.

Within months of Shelley’s death in July 1822, Mary Shelley had developed a determination to see every bit of his work published that she could bear to contemplate. Such work helped her deal with her overpowering sensation of loss and loneliness: ‘such a nullity as I now am’. As early as August 1822 she had started collecting unpublished poetry and transcribing it; her work taught ‘all subsequent editors how to read Shelley’s rough draft hand’.32 By November 1823 she had texts ready of nearly all the unpublished poems she could find. Such a gathering was not something with which Shelley himself had ever been concerned. To judge by her journal, however, Mary spent months after Shelley’s death without uttering a word of self‐reproach: indeed, going on the offensive about the accusation she had heard (probably from Hunt) that she had a ‘cold heart’, and how even her friends ‘look on me as one without affections  –  without any sensibility – my sufferings are thought a cypher’.33 It seems very likely that Jane and Hunt had discussed how cold Mary seemed in her response to the awfulness, and that Jane (believing that Hunt knew Mary well, and would not be surprised) had told him things about Mary’s behaviour to Shelley which Hunt took so seriously that – following his horrible row with her over the possession of the object they took for Shelley’s heart – his relationship with her was ‘exceedingly embittered’ and made him ‘cold and almost inhospitable’ to her during the rest of 1822 and much of 1823. In September 1822, he had commented on Mary’s ‘extreme and apparently unmitigated bad temper’ (Shelley had written two years before about her ‘Ill temper and irritation at the familiar events of life’ and about the exasperated spirit ‘of which they are expressions’34). It was in July 1823 that Hunt for the first time witnessed ‘Mary bitterly repenting of the trouble she had occasioned Shelley’: he found her, in her own words, at last ‘willing to expiate as far as I cd the evil I had done’.Thinking of Shelley, she had 388



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written in her journal ‘I was unworthy of you.’35 It was very probably the ­anniversary of Shelley’s death which provoked her to write her poem ‘The Choice’, dated July 1823. She would summarise her time with Shelley as ‘A tale of u ­ nrequited love’, which in the context she offers can only mean that she had not reciprocated his love for her. Furthermore, the story of their life together … speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes That blindly crushed thy heart’s fond sacrifice:— My heart was all thine own – but yet a shell Closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable …36 The image of that heart like a shell, ‘Closed in its core’ and ‘impenetrable’ is unforgettable, but exactly coincides with a few surviving comments made by Shelley himself. He drafted a poem, perhaps in the autumn of 1819, in part ­recoverable as follows: One is lovely but cannot love Another loves but still must grieve That frown which doth his kiss reprove Leaves him unrequited—37 If Mary had seen that in Shelley’s notebook  –  it is a scrawl on a front paste‐ down – she might have been struck by the word ‘unrequited’. Mary immediately follows her line ‘A tale of unrequited love’ with ‘It was not anger’, because she was aware of people saying that she cannot have loved Shelley, having always been so angry with him.That she rejects and explains how, after quarrelling, she and Shelley would grow reconciled with ‘many a kind / Caress or tear that spoke the softened mind’: her softened mind. But in August 1823 she would write to Jane Williams about her regret at ‘Not having been all I shd have been … not making my S.— as happy as he deserved to be’, in 1828 she would tell Jane that ‘the remorse of love haunts me often’, in 1839 would admit herself ‘torn to pieces by memory’.38 And all along she was probably horribly conscious of the line in ‘Mine eyes were dim’: ‘As you, sweet love, requited me’ (106:16), in case it had been addressed to Teresa Viviani or (even worse) to Claire.

Her conviction of guilt and responsibility in the summer of 1823 would have done nothing except strengthen her subsequent dedication to his work; she returned to England late in August and began to prepare the volume which came out the following year as Posthumous Poems. It was as if she felt reinvigorated after the first year 389



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of her widowhood, spent mostly in Genoa in company with the Hunt family and ending with deep regret about how she had behaved: but she also needed money. She nevertheless did not include all of Shelley’s unpublished work. She certainly knew the poems here designated ‘We meet not as we parted’ and ‘Bright wanderer’, but she ignored them in Posthumous Poems, just as she would in 1839 and 1840; they struck too closely at her. On the other hand, she could not include ‘The Magnetic Lady’, ‘With a Guitar.To Jane’, ‘To Jane’ and ‘To — ’ [‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’] in her 1824 collection. She probably still had no idea that Shelley had written them. It was probably not until Medwin published versions of ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, ‘The Magnetic Lady’, and ‘To Jane. The Invitation’39 in 1832 that Mary ever saw them, though she did know the ‘Ariette for Music’ of which Medwin produced a version (omitting the stanza with ‘Jane’ as its rhyme word, just as he avoided the name in the other three poems). In November 1832, too, Fraser’s Magazine published ‘To — ’ [‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’] in a version entitled ‘STANZAS BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. / TO * * * * *’.40 After her initial burst of optimism, there were times when all Mary’s initial work of transcribing and writing out clean copies – ‘the labour of putting it together was immense’ she commented later – seemed likely to amount to little. Shelley’s reputation was so low that no publisher wanted to touch another book by him.The Olliers had given up as his publishers;41 the fact that in the autumn of 1823 they had still had 41 copies remaining of the 100 copies of Adonais which Shelley had sent them, and no indication of any money having been earned by sales – any more than any other item of Shelley’s work had made money for anyone – shows how inevitable it was that the Olliers’ link with him should come to an end. And after first being happy to publish Mary’s new collection, by the early months of 1824 even John Hunt required the sum of £500 invested by three sympathisers and acquaintances, as a guarantee against the loss which he was confident the collection would make. Although Posthumous Poems was on sale from the second week of June 1824, it took very little time for William Whitton to hear about it, to inform Sir Timothy, and for the latter immediately to demand that it be withdrawn – or Mary Shelley’s tiny allowance would be stopped. She had no option; by August the book was withdrawn, with 100 copies or so having got out into the world before the ban. The investors must have covered the financial loss but Shelley’s reputation was a still greater loser. Pirated editions of some of the poetry appeared in 1826, but it was 1829 before the French publisher Galignani – who had been interested in Shelley’s work while its author was alive ‐ issued a book containing much of the work of Shelley and Keats (both dead) and of Coleridge. But whereas Coleridge played no part in the production of this volume, and Keats’s descendants did not do so either, Mary Shelley supplied errata;42 Sir Timothy could not prevent that. The following year, and again in 1832, unauthorised volumes of The Beauties of his poetry were 390



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p­ ublished, succeeded in 1834 by a very nearly complete edition of everything known to be Shelley’s; another volume of selections came out in 1836 and a fat little piracy of an even more extensive selection appeared in 1836 and 1837.43 These were the years when Mary felt herself increasingly ‘shut out from all things … by poverty & lonliness’.44 But the pirated editions, as well as the constant reprints of Queen Mab, showed that there was real interest in Shelley’s work. In 1838 Mary at last acquired permission from Sir Timothy to publish her own, corrected editions, which would include two volumes of prose. By now, she had come into possession of texts of all the surviving ‘Jane’ poems, and believed it ‘my duty to publish every thing of Shelley’. This was not something that he would probably ever have desired; we know how strongly he reacted against the republication of ‘all the bad poetry’ in Queen Mab in 1821: ‘I doubt not but that it is perfectly worthless in point of literary composition’.45 Mary simply ensured that her printed versions of the ‘Jane’ poems did not betray the direction of Shelley’s feelings: perhaps for Jane’s sake, certainly for her own. Titles and poems which included Jane’s name were revised so as to exclude the name. ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’ turned into ‘With a Guitar’, with Medwin’s substitution of ‘friend’ for ‘Jane’ in the last line; Mary Shelley also printed Medwin’s 1832 version of ‘The Magnetic Lady’, so that ‘What would cure that would kill me, Jane’ became ‘’T’would kill me what would cure my pain.’ Where it was impossible to revise, dashes or unrevealing asterisks (‘To – – –’, ‘Dear * * * !’46) were substituted. Mary included an unbowdlerised version of the final Chorus to Hellas and its eighth Note (previously missing because of their comments about Christ), but she did not include the suppressed attack on the Government in the Preface. Sir Timothy had given permission for the edition but not for any accompanying memoir: he wanted his son to remain lifeless and unrecognised, so far as he was able to manage it (Mary Shelley, notwithstanding, added notes to the poems which contained a great deal of biographical material). Her 1839 collection still lacked some significant items  –  a full text of both Queen Mab and its Notes, the poems ‘To Jane. The Invitation’ and ‘To Jane—The Recollection’, as well as ‘Peter Bell the Third’ and Swellfoot the Tyrant. But her publisher was Edward Moxon, Wordsworth’s publisher, and Moxon would have been bitterly opposed to including ‘Peter Bell the Third’ in the very first authorised collection of Shelley’s poetry: a handsome, four‐volume edition, accompanied by the authenticating ‘EDITED BY MRS. SHELLEY’, which Moxon and she hoped would establish Shelley in the poetical pantheon. Best to hold back such material – along with other pieces lacking – for another edition. This would be the cheaper, single‐volume and double‐columned Poetical Works which came out at the end of 1839 but which was dated 1840.This contained very nearly all the Queen Mab Note material: Mary Shelley was able to state that ‘At my request the publisher has restored the omitted passages of Queen Mab.’47 And other missing poems also appeared. In her note on the 1819 poems, however, she described 391



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how, ‘like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot’, ‘Peter Bell the Third’ ‘must be looked on as a plaything’. Her comments – written with Moxon in mind – do their best to undermine the whole force of the poem: I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem … His idea was that a man gifted even transcendently as the Author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning – not as a narration of the reality.

Shelley would surely have interrupted that he had intended to be personal, and that Wordsworth really was dull. But with the 1840 publication, Mary Shelley reckoned that she had finally done her duty by her husband and his poetry – ‘I do not foresee that I can hereafter add or take away a word or line’48 – though she did add some corrections to Moxon’s edition of Shelley’s Minor Poems in 1846 and still others to the Works in 1847.

Shelley’s death in July 1822 – and the kind of death it had been – had, for his poetry, been a more fruitful mode of ending than an unhappy separation from Mary, or a slow decline into pain, mortality and the sour ignominy of non‐recognition would have been. Mary Shelley ensured not only his survival but his reappearance, as myth and as poet. She had worked to recover, transcribe and publish his work, to make his reputation and to establish her own role as keeper of the flame: the only entirely reliable portrait of her dates from late 1839 or early 1840, when she was 42 (see Figure 4). She died in 1851. It seems extremely unlikely that Shelley himself – who, after all, had ‘left so many of his works as rough or roughish draft’49 – would ever have been so successful at preserving and transcribing his own work, or at publishing it, or at publicising himself. The final irony of his writing career was that a reputation and career as a professional poet was invented for him posthumously, after he had spent his own writing life creating no such thing.What he had written jokingly in 1812, signing himself off in a letter – Yours beyond this being most imperishably / P. B. S.50

– after his death became the truth about him and his writing. The inerasible, imperishable Shelley who today offers us so much – the dead ‘always have more life, more time to give’, as Richard Holmes has remarked – was the result of Mary Shelley’s dedication to him. She enabled us to celebrate a writer who escaped the constraints of the present just as, at the age of 19, he had hoped he might: ‘I will live beyond this life.’51 392

Notes

Foreword 1 Robert Browning, ‘Memorabilia’ [c. December 1851], Men and Women, 2 Vols. (1855), i. 162:1–4. 2 National Portrait Gallery (NPG 1234); Amelia Curran to MWS, 6 Oct. 1822, MS. Abinger c. 46 f. 7v; CC ii. 375 n6. 3 Hearth 56; locks of hair are in the Bodleian Library (Shelley Relics 36) and the British Library (Ashley 5022); LH, ‘Mr. Shelley’, Lord Byron and some of his contemporaries (1828), p. 174; CC ii. 657. 4 MSL i. 512; ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, SMW 664; cf. the ‘delight in things’ Ann Thompson notes, ‘Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne”: tact and clutter’, Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool, 1982), p. 159 n20. 5 Medwin, Dowden, Jeaffreson, Peck, White, Cameron and Bieri (1st ed.) were in two ­volumes, Hogg planned four: Mac‐Carthy’s life to 1813 occupied 408 pages, Ingpen’s life to 1817 took 711 pages: Holmes and Bieri (2nd ed.) are around 830 pages. 6 Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015), p. 118. 7 SL i. 4, SC ix. 59; SL i. 6 (‘Pouch the reviewers – 10£ will be sufficient’). 8 In 1844, the printer was still pressing the Shelley family for the debt. 9 SC v. 446. 10 SL ii. 269. 11 SL ii. 380; SL i. 59. 12 The only book to go into a second edition was The Cenci, in 1821; but it has been argued that the money he might have earned from this  –  perhaps £40  –  would have been absorbed by his need to pay his printer for the first edition (Charles E. Robinson, ‘Percy

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

393



  Notes to pages xix to 5 

Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood’, Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest, Leicester, 1983, pp. 183–226). 13 SL ii. 408. 14 SL ii. 257. 15 He was knocked down in Keswick in 1812 and fell while fighting in Tan‐yr‐allt (see Chapter 8); on 18 June 1816, Polidori recorded PBS telling him how ‘a man…challenged him. Shelley refused, and was knocked down: coolly said that would not gain him his object, and was knocked down again’ (John William Polidori, The Diary of John Polidori, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London, 1911, p. 128: that may refer to Keswick or to Tan‐yr‐allt); he was knocked down in some kind of ‘adventure’ (CCJ 110, MSJ i. 262) with ‘a parson’ (Trel.Letters 224) in the Post Office in Rome on 5 May 1819; he was thrown from his coach on 6 August 1821 (SL ii. 315); he recorded being ‘struck from my horse’ on 24 March 1822 (SL ii. 401). 16 Martin Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Shelley (2013), p. 260. 17 Tom Paulin, cited back cover of Paul O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland (London and Dublin, 2002); Fraser’s lvii. 654; Donald Reiman and James Bieri, ‘Shelley and the British Isles’, OHPBS 26. 18 Middlemarch (1872), chapter li. 19 BSM xvi. 220–221. I have in general relied on the facsimiles in BSM and MYRS when citing manuscript readings; where I have consulted originals, I have made that clear.

Chapter 1 1 SL i. 504: in 1804 Napoleon met Pope Pius VII (brought to France to crown him emperor) at Fontainebleau: the ‘master theme of the epoch’ was the betrayal implicit in the taking of imperial power by the revolutionary soldier (Napoleon would call Fontainebleau ‘the true residence of Kings’); SL ii. 305. 2 SL i. 110; SC iii. 347; ‘Preface’ to Laon & Cythna, CPPBS iii. 114:64–66. 3 H. J. Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system: English landownership, 1650–1950 (Oxford, 1994), p. 62; Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story (1946), p. 271; Charles MacFarlane, Reminiscences of a Literary Life (New York, 1917), p. 2. See, too, Donald H. Reiman, ‘Shelley as Agrarian Reactionary’, SPP 589–599. 4 Cf. Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War (Cambridge, 2013), p. 134; BLJ xi. 81; The Diary of John Polidori, ed. Rossetti, p. 108. 5 Hogg i. 208 [em. BL MS 43805, 12–13]. 6 LB, Childe Harold, iii. 70: Fraser’s lvii. 657–658; MYRS vi. 48–49;Trel.58 67;W. M. Rossetti, ‘Talks with Trelawny’, The Athenaeum, 2855 (15 July 1882), p. 79. 7 OED; The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, rev. ed., ed. Thornton Hunt (1860), p. 233; Bieri 166. 8 Stockdale’s Budget of ‘all that is Good, and Noble, and Amiable, in the Country’, II (20 December 1826), 9; PS iii. 731, 734–735; SC vi. 846; Gisborne 47. 9 Hearth 132; BLJ vii. 192.

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  Notes to pages 5 to 9 

10 BLJ x. 69: Hogg reported LB as saying ‘Never did a more finished gentleman, than Shelley, step across a drawing‐room’ (BL MS. 43805, 12) 11 Teresa Guiccioli, Lord Byron’s Life in Italy, ed. Peter Cochran, tr. Michael Rees (Newark, 2005), p. 325; Jacqueline Mulhallen, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (2015), p. xiii; SL i. 116 (the Greek κράτος means rule, sway, authority); SL ii. 345. 12 SL ii. 136; Stuart Curran, ‘Horace Smith’s Obituary Panegyric on Shelley’, K‐SJ, ­xxxvii (1988), 33. 13 SL i. 517. 14 LH, ‘On the Suburbs of Genoa and the Country about London’, The Literary Examiner, viii (23 August 1823), 119: for the date of the incident see Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005), p. 284. 15 SL i. 125, 127; CPPBS ii. 249:36–38. 16 CPPBS ii. 27:62. 17 Curran, ‘Horace Smith’s Obituary Panegyric on Shelley’, K‐SJ, xxxvii, 32. 18 S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Vol. II (Princeton, 1969), 350 [1810 version]. 19 Sylva Norman, Flight of the Skylark (1954), p. 163; Reminiscences of Horsham: Recollections of Henry Burstow (Horsham, 1911), p. 49; Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree (Toronto, 1998), p. 149. 20 PWS i. 174:143–146. 21 Godwin (1756–1836) married Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) in 1795: she already had a child  –  Fanny Godwin (1794–1816)  –  by her previous partner Gilbert Imlay (1754–1828), and died giving birth to her child with Godwin, MWG/MWS (1797–1851). Godwin brought up Fanny and MWG as his own: in 1801 he married Mary Jane de Vial (?1766–1841), who brought with her two children – Charles (1795–1850), her child by Charles de Gaulis (d. 1796), and CC (1798–1879), her child by Sir John Lethbridge (1746–1815): Godwin and Mary Jane had one child, William (1803–1832). 22 James Spedding, Edinburgh Review (January 1839), vii. 438; SL i. 518. 23 MSL i. 23–24, 322; SL i. 522; SC v. 478–482; see SC x. 1144–1145. 24 PWS i. 235:188–190; SL i. 334. 25 PE 16:12; cf. Peter McDonald, ‘For impious gold’, TLS (23 February 2013), p. 12; Mr Forester in Peacock’s Melincourt, 3 Vols. (1817), who bears some resemblance to PBS, refuses to allow sugar into his house, insisting that ‘it is the duty of every one, thoroughly penetrated with the iniquity of the slave‐trade, to abstain entirely from the use of colonial produce’ (i. 65). 26 ‘An Ode, Written, October, 1819’, PS iii. 165:9. 27 SL ii. 43; ‘Ode to Liberty’, 2016 429:103; ‘Liberty’, PS iii. 322:20; Laon and Cythna, CPPBS iii. 155:II.731; Hellas, 2016 532:557; Queen Mab, 2016 36:II.176; ‘The Retrospect’, CPPBS ii. 146:88. 28 SL ii. 305; see e.g. SL i. 106. 29 SL i. 196, 268, 577, ii. 394. 30 SL ii. 31 [em. PS ii. 266]; BSM vi. 396–397; SL ii. 263; Michael O’Neill, ‘Introduction’, OHPBS 2; 2016 507:489–490. 31 SL i. 120.

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  Notes to pages 9 to 15 

32 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, rev. ed., p. 243. 33 LH draft letter, July 1823, BSM xxii. II. 309–309; Robinson i. 212; Hogg i. xxix (Hogg aiming his 1858 remarks at the ‘necessarily vulgar’ LH: see note 5 above). 34 SL i. 4; SC ix. 59, 66. 35 SL ii. 372. 36 BLJ vi. 61. 37 SC iv. 751. 38 CC i. 169 n7, 167 & n7. 39 SL i. 362. 40 The Letters of Bysshe and Timothy Shelley, ed. Susan C. Djabri and Jeremy Knight (Horsham, 2000), p. 117.

Chapter 2 1 Hogg i. 20. James Bieri points out that Timothy Shelley also had an illegitimate elder son, later ‘Captain Shelley’ (Bieri 3); whether PBS or any of his siblings knew about this is unrecorded. 2 Bieri 25: ‘fellow’ here is affectionate and (from a mother) oddly companionable: probably OED 5.c. 3 BSM xxi. 244–245. 4 PBS claimed that ‘part of the Epithalamium’ was omitted ‘in numbers of the copies, – that which I sent to my Mother of course did not contain it’ (SL i. 23).The parts to which she might have been expected to object (starting with the ‘Chorus of Spirits’ at l. 74 and its ‘Symphony’, including the line ‘Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!’) appeared on the last leaf of Signature B in the 1810 Munday printing, towards the bottom of p. 15: the half leaf containing B3 and B4 (pp. 13–16) could have been removed (thus also extracting references to the ‘nuptial bed’ at l. 72 and the ‘long, long night of bliss’ at l. 102) while the poem’s rapturous style would have disguised the omission (the last line on p. 12 even ended with a full‐stop). No such copy survives, however, and the prominently printed page numbers would have revealed the page gap removal unless a copy had been specially printed. 5 PBS called him ‘Taffy’ (Anglicism for ‘Daffyd’ – David), period slang for a Welshman but not the Rev. Mr Edwards’ name. 6 Med.47 i. 14. 7 See SL i. 328, Hogg i. 70, CCJ 54: an expensive and desirable scientific instrument (PBS pawned his for £5 in October 1814). 8 Hogg i. 9. 9 Trel.78 131. 10 Med.47 i. 44. 11 See Dowden i. 23–39. 12 MSL i. 475. 13 Junior boys at a boarding school were obliged to make beds, clean shoes, fill kettles, toast muffins, etc. for senior boys: see Angus Graham‐Campbell, ‘Some Notes on Shelley’s Eton Days’, Keats‐Shelley Review, viii, no. 1 (1993), 153.

396



  Notes to pages 15 to 22 

14 BSM xxii. II. 274–275. 15 According to BSM xiii. 200–201, ‘youths with of strength mature’; PS ii. 50 [em. BSM xiii. 198–199]. 16 BSM xxii. II. 274–277. 17 SL i. 303, 230. 18 BSM xxii. II. 268–269. 19 Hogg i. 124; e.g. Dowden i. 23–24, 29n. 20 ‘The Boat on the Serchio’, PS iv. 366:105–114. 21 E.g. ‘it is hard to believe that he was twice actually expelled from Eton’ (SL i. 228 n1): ‘there is no independent evidence for…the expulsion’ (Holmes 104). 22 John Taylor Coleridge, anonymous review of LH’s Foliage: or, Poems Original and Translated (1818), Quarterly Review, xviii (May 1818), 327: the accusation mentioned ‘old trees’. 23 SL i. 228, 89. 24 SL i. 28; BSM xxii. II. 268–269. 25 BSM xiii. 200–201. 26 BSM xiii. 198–199, 192–193. 27 CPPBS iii. 632. 28 SL i. 227–228, 303, CPPBS iii. 127:108–109, 641. 29 Hogg i. 18. 30 Hogg i. 16. 31 Hogg i. 7. 32 Hogg i. 9: Hellen Shelley’s recollection of ‘a bit of wire and a bottle’ suggests that  PBS  employed a Leyden Jar and a group holding hands as described by George Adams, An Essay on Electricity, explaining the Principles of that Useful Science (1799), pp. 112–113, 224. 33 Hogg i. 11, 26. 34 Hogg i. 11. 35 Hogg i. 10. 36 Med.47 i. 152. 37 SL i. 87. 38 Hogg i. 10–11. 39 Hogg i. 26; Rossetti, ‘Talks with Trelawny’, The Athenaeum (15 July 1882), p. 79: cf. Dowden ii. 120 n; SL i. 42.

Chapter 3 1 Nora Crook has convincingly argued (CPPBS i. 297–298) that ‘A Cat in Distress’ should be dated 1810–1811. 2 Hogg i. 14. 3 Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources, ed. Jane Shelley, 2nd ed. (1859), p. 6: the friend was Charles Packe, the publisher John Robinson of Paternoster Row. 4 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, rev. ed., p. 233. 5 Hogg i. 15.

397



  Notes to pages 22 to 26 

6 Hogg i. 16. 7 SC ix. 179–180; Hogg i. 14: Charles Mathews (1776–1835) was an actor known as the ‘Comedian’. 8 SL i. 14. 9 Ascriptions in CPPBS i. 155‐7 are followed; CPPBS i. 7. 10 ‘Cazire’ appears in the novel Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer by Charlotte Dacre (see CPPBS i. 155). 11 Hogg i. 15. 12 CPPBS i. 23 and n, 27 and n. 13 SL i. 227; Med.47 i. 30. 14 Hogg i. 15, 8. 15 Ingpen 64–65. 16 SL ii. 367–368; PBS named her ‘Claire’ ‘for her transparency at times’ (CC i. 29). 17 See Peck ii. 305–312. 18 CPPBS i. 30, 184; see PS i. 32; St.I 232; Ambrosio: Or,The Monk: a romance, 3 Vols., 4th ed. (1798), i. 156. 19 1839 iii. 72. 20 C. L. Cline, Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle (1952), p. 24; Med.47 i. 29. 21 Zastrozzi 137 and n.; Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, [‘The History of Almamoulin’], no. 120 (11 May 1751): Johnson was also responsible for ‘this frigorifick power’ (The Rambler, no. 159, 24 September 1751); The Batchelor: or speculations of Jeoffry Wagstaffe, Esq, Vol. III (Dublin, 1773), 168. 22 Hearth 35; PE 15:10, [20]:3. 23 Hearth 34; Zastrozzi 64, 142; CPPBS i. 82:279. 24 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Vol. I. (1791), 33: see too the ‘scintillations’ of St.I 236; W. H. Ireland, The abbess, a romance … In four volumes,Vol. I (1799), 128. 25 Hearth 35; St.I 200; SL i. 90. 26 St.I 251; Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book VI,Vol.VII (1646), 308. 27 SL i. 66; MSYR iv. 400–401. 28 PS iv. 229; CPPBS ii. 116:8, i. 84:329. 29 CPPBS i. 59:204, 64:122–123: in Lewis’s Ambrosio, Vol. II, the Wandering Jew unbinds the headband he is wearing to show ‘a burning cross impressed upon his brow’, 84 (CPPBS ii. 216–217); cf. CPPBS i. 56:99–100. In an obscure book of 1771, an ‘intellectual devoté attempts to fillet her amiable brow’ (Benjamin Thomas, The political and religious conduct of the dissenters vindicated, Marlborough, 1777, p. 30); however, The favorite village a poem (Bishopstone, Sussex [1800]), by James Hurdis (Professor of Poetry at Oxford), contains ‘On its rude forehead, filleted around, / Bearing distinct the trench of ancient war’ (p. 30), paralleling PBS’s usage; cf. the lines of Paradise Lost cited at the start of canto III: ‘his face / Deep scars of thunder had intrenched’ (i. 600–601). 30 CPPBS ii. 141:119–120, 128: for ‘deathy’, see William Blake, ‘King Edward the Third’, Poetical Sketches (1783), 51:494: it also appeared in Edward and Sophia, by ‘A Lady’ (1787), 135, and Southey used it in the 1790s (see ‘Donica’ and ‘Poor Mary’); CPPBS ii. 141:137–138.

398



  Notes to pages 26 to 31 

31 CPPBS ii. 142:146, 148, 157; ii. 140, 142:102, 166; ii. 143:179–180, 175; St.I 166. 32 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2Vols. (1851), ii. 474:Wordsworth owned the 1829 Paris edition of The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats: he also acquired Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mary Shelley (1840) (Chester and Alice Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library: A Catalogue, New York and London, 1979, pp. 61, 234). 33 MYRS i. xiii; see ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’ and ‘To Jane. The Invitation’; The Mask of Anarchy; ‘To Jane—The Recollection’ and ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’; ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’; ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’. 34 See PS iii. 384–385, 632–633; W. H. Auden, ‘Review of The Poems of William Dunbar. Edited by W. M. Mackenzie’, Criterion, xii, no. 49 (July 1933), 677; The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3, ed.Valerie Eliot & John Haffenden (2012), p. 654. 35 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (2016 136:50–51), Laon and Cythna (CPPBS iii. 257:VIII. xiv. 123, 125), Prometheus Unbound (2016 191:I. 103–104), ‘Arethusa arose’ (PS iii. 337:52–53), ‘Peter Bell the Third’ (2016 379:184–185) and the translation of Calderón’s El Magico Prodigioso (The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 1912, 736:III.57–60): Jeaffreson detected a Sussex accent (The Real Shelley, 1885, p. 3) but H. Buxton Forman was certain that ‘it is an affectation current among persons who are, or pretend to be, of the aristocratic caste…to drop the final g in these cases’ (The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Verse and Prose, 8 Vols., 1880, iv. 31 n1). PBS’s only other rhyme for ‘pursuing’ was ‘renewing’ (2016 182:37–39). 36 PS iv. 24–25; see Rogers 204. 37 MYRS vi. 46–47; see Chapter 29. 38 The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (Oxford, 1977), pp. 261–262. 39 BSM iv. II. 20–21. 40 2016 267:415–417 [em. BSM ix. 56–57]. 41 Hogg i. 18. 42 Hogg i. 18. 43 Hogg i. 17. 44 Hogg i. 44, 26. 45 SC ix. 510. 46 SC ii. 513, 533, 571. 47 SC ii. 575, 577, 573; Hogg ii. 550–551. 48 SC ii. 590; SL i. 13. 49 Hogg i. 18. 50 Hogg i. 114–115; SL i. 266. 51 SL i. 36; Hogg i. 18; SL i. 2. 52 SL i. 26, 70. 53 SL i. 27: by early October 1811, Harriet Grove would be engaged to William Helyar of East Coker (d. 1841): they were married on 14 November; cf. the title − Things as They Are: Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams − of Godwin’s 1794 novel commonly known as Caleb Williams.

399



  Notes to pages 32 to 36 

Chapter 4 1 Arrival by 21 October would have meant the completion of necessary attendance by 2 December: PBS was in London on 7 December (SL i. 28) on his way home to Sussex, so perhaps arrived not much later than 21 October. 2 Henry Slatter to Robert Montgomery, 18 December 1833, Oxford 165: a ‘freak’ is ‘a product of irregular or sportive fancy’ (OED 4.a). 3 SL i. 55 [em. MS. Abinger c. 66]. 4 SL i. 20; Reminiscences of Captain Gronow…Anecdotes of the camp, the court, and the clubs, at the close of the last war with France (1862), p. 78. 5 They had printed the seven‐book poem (Gebirus is the Latin version) and then co‐published it with R. S. Kirby of London: Hogg described PBS avidly reading the original, Gebir (1798), in 1810–1811 (i. 201–202); Cambridge University Library copy S721.b.77.3 of Posthumous Fragments was sent – stitched but not bound – to the Rev. James Plumptre (1771–1832) of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who received it on 21 November 1810 (as he pencilled on the half‐title) ‘by the coach, in a parcel, which had come through London, where 2s & 2d. had been paid out. No note accompanied it’. Plumptre was known as a playwright and for writing about the theatre. 6 Margaret Nicholson had a brother (questioned during the enquiries) who ‘keeps a public house in Milford‐Lane in the Strand’ (The Plot Investigated, 1786, p. 34). 7 Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, ed. A. Allardyce, 2 Vols. (1888), i. 442; CPPBS i. 94:37–38, 47–48. 8 CPPBS i. 96:40, 36; SL i. 23, 27. 9 SL i. 23; Oxford 165: Slatter recalled PBS ‘directing the profits to be applied to Peter Finnerty’ but was confusing Posthumous Fragments with the PE, also printed by Munday and Slatter. 10 SL i. 53. 11 SL i. 19; the Newdigate prize for 1811 was won by Richard Burdon of Oriel (see SL i. 129–130); copy (inscription page damaged) at Trinity College Cambridge. 12 Hogg ii. 74. 13 Peck ii. 410. 14 Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (1951), p. 81, Hogg i. 74; Hogg i. 239–240. 15 Articulated (‘his utter deficiency in humour’) by Matthew Arnold (The Nineteenth Century, January 1888, xxiii. 32) and from the 1920s to the 1960s a commonplace: e.g. ‘He never had a sense of humour’ (A. Clutton‐Brock, Shelley: The Man and the Poet, 2nd edn., 1923, p. 69); ‘the man was humourless, pedantic’ (T. S. Eliot, ‘Shelley and Keats’, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933, p. 89); ‘as humourless as Shelley’ (Jacob Bronowski, The Poet’s Defence, 1962, p. 66); ‘Shelley (if he had had any sense of humor)’ (W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, 1963, p. 390). 16 The Cambridge University Library catalogue names Hogg as co‐author; Hogg i. 261–265. 17 Hogg i. 265.

400



  Notes to pages 36 to 42 

18 Hogg i. 268. 19 E.g. Hogg altered PBS’s recollection of how he and his childhood friend every night ‘kissed each other.’ (BSM xxi. 244–245) to ‘kissed each other, like children, as we still were!’ (i. 24); Hogg i. 52–53. 20 Trel.78 52; B. C. Barker Benfield, ‘Hogg‐Shelley Papers of 1810‐12’, Bodleian Library Record, xiv (October 1991), 21. 21 Robinson i. 398. 22 Hogg to Jane Williams, ‘Saturday’, 16 August 1823, MS. Abinger c. 68 f. 20v; Robinson i. 398; Two hundred and nine days; or,The journal of a traveller on the continent (1826), p. 16. 23 Robinson i. 398; Nick Spencer, Atheists: The Origin of the Species (2014), p. 164; SL i. 29. 24 Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, ed. Allardyce, i. 442–443: ‘Moore’ is Thomas Moore (1779–1852, the Irish poet), ‘Frank’ is François Ravaillac (1578–1610, assassin of the French King Henri IV), ‘Charlotte’ is Charlotte Corday (1768–1793, assassin of the Jacobin journalist Jean Paul Marat). 25 Hogg i. 221; comment ‘scribbled on the margin of a page’ of Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth (1838) by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (Ingpen 192), the Diary (i. 91–92) having quoted a letter by Sharpe of October 1811 describing PBS’s expulsion: twenty‐seven years later, Sharpe supplemented it. 26 Experiments and observations on different kinds of air. By Joseph Priestley. LL.D. F.R.S., 2nd ed. (1775), p. xiv. 27 SL i. 230. 28 SL i. 18–19. 29 SL i. 35; Southey to Charles Danvers, 13 January 1812, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Four: 1810–1815, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt (www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/southey_letters), no. 2016: ‘julip’ (or julep) was ‘a medicated drink’ soothing irritation. 30 See Robin Darwall‐Smith, ‘The Student Hoaxers: The New Shelley Letters’, University College Record, xiv. no. 1 (2005), 79, 82. 31 SL i. 39, 44, 35: see too PE 6; SL i. 100, 102. 32 SL i. 44–45, 46, 47. 33 SL i. 46. 34 Letter from PBS and Hogg to Felicia Browne, mid‐March 1811: see Barker Benfield, ‘Hogg‐Shelley Papers of 1810‐12’, Bodleian Library Record, xiv, 23–25; Hogg i. 15. 35 Dowden i. 123; Hogg to PBS 29 January 1822, MS. Abinger c. 67 f. 23v. 36 PWS i. 5:87–88; Hogg i. 272–273, supported by an undated letter by C. J. Ridley (d. 1854) (Dowden i. 123); Enquiry IV. vi. 37 PWS i. 2:7–8. 38 SL i. 100; Med.33 58: Medwin prints ‘“that —— atheist Shelley?”’ the omitted word being either ‘damned’ or something stronger. 39 Cobbett’s Political Register, xxi (January–June 1812), 752. 40 SL i. n4. 41 SL i. 27; Ingpen 189.

401



  Notes to pages 42 to 46 

42 Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory, or, a Storehouse of Armory & Blazon (Chester, 1688), Part III, p. 122; in the Advertisement: words were also omitted or added in the sentence ending ‘leaves the cause in the obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible’ (PWS i. 4:60–62). 43 A copy of Original Poetry may well have been consulted by the printer of the title page of The Necessity of Atheism: the layout (e.g. printer’s place and name) is similar.

Chapter 5 1 SL i. 51. In 1814, PBS would himself publish A Refutation of Deism. 2 PBS specified ‘in the 3rd page’ (SL i. 52), where it would (in the Saturday number) have mingled with court news and the Naval Register; SL i. 228. 3 PBS sent Godwin his copy on 24 February 1812 (SL i. 260). A copy survived in the ­possession of the Rev. James Wood (1760–1839) of St John’s College, Cambridge; it is possible that he was a recipient, PBS knowing the name and address from the title‐page of his Elements of Algebra (1795, 1798) and Principles of Mechanics (1796): Wood was College President (Senior Fellow) from 1802 and its Master from 1815: his copy went to St John’s library. 4 SL i. 26; Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘Robert Parker’s “Letters on Atheism”: An Early Response to Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism’, Review of English Studies, lxiii, no. 261 (September 2012), 608–633. 5 SL i. 118; G. S. Faber heard from ‘an elderly clergyman…signing himself Charles Meyton’ (Barker Benfield,‘Hogg‐Shelley papers of 1810–1812’, Bodleian Library Record, xiv, 15–16). 6 Oxford 167; see Dowden i. 118 and n.; Oxford 169. 7 Oxford 167 n. 2.; Ingpen 193–194. 8 Oxford 169. 9 Louise Schutz Boas, “Erasmus Perkins’ and Shelley’, Modern Language Notes, lxx (June 1955), 412. 10 SL i. 45, 52. 11 SL i. 52; MS. Abinger c. 10, f. 114v: the letter was produced on a sample of Wedgwood’s copying paper, such as PBS had received on 25 February 1811. 12 The term ‘sent down’ dates only from the 1840s. Bieri (123) and White (i. 599) count ‘nine’ versions, assuming that ‘five’ derive from PBS: Bieri suggests that PBS later ‘significantly changed what he said at his hearing’ (123), but what PBS’s friends, between one and forty years later, recalled him as having said inevitably varied: only two brief versions, entirely consistent with each other and dating from 1811 and 1812, derive directly from PBS (SL i. 56, 228). 13 SL i. 228; Dowden i. 119n. 14 At Oxford, the college‐parlour to which the fellows retire after dinner. 15 SL i. 56, 228; Dowden i. 124. 16 Guitar 30. 17 Barker Benfield, ‘Hogg‐Shelley Papers of 1810‐12’, Bodleian Library Record, xiv, 15; Carol L. Thoma, ‘Thomas Jefferson Hogg’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004).

402



  Notes to pages 46 to 53 

18 SL i. 56. 19 Hogg i. 44. 20 SC ix. 184. 21 SL i. 372 n1, 57 n2, 149. 22 B. Crosby were well‐known London publishers: having published Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1794, in 1811 their list ranged between the fashion book The Mirror of Graces or The English Lady’s Costume and Cottage Poems by the Rev. Patrick Brontë (father of the Brontë sisters). 23 SL i. 42; PE 17:19–20—18:1. 24 PE 11:16, 13:1, 14:9, 15:20; 12:20—13:1 25 Oxford 165. 26 Eclectic Review,Vol.VII, Part II (August 1811), 744 (the italics do not appear in the pamphlet text, nor does the exclamation mark after ‘be’; the slightly inaccurate quotation puts 13:3–4 together with 13:19–20); see TLS (27 November 2015), p. 6. 27 PE 12:9–11, 11:7, 10–11, 16:15–16. 28 Nora Crook, ‘Unplucked  –  A previously unpublished Shelley poem finally emerges’, TLS (20 November 2015), p. 15; Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian in the University of Oxford, BBC Radio 4, 11 November 2015. 29 White i. 599–600; the price of ‘1/6’ was recorded by the Eclectic Review: the claim by the Dublin Weekly Messenger in 1812, from ‘undoubted’ authority, that the pamphlet raised nearly £100 for Finnerty (PWS i. 298), meaning a sale of over 1000 copies, must be wrong. 30 He once insisted on ‘Harriett…with two ts’ (SL i. 154) and although he did not always follow his own rule, it has been adopted here wherever possible. 31 Fraser’s lxi. 98; Hogg i. 18. 32 SC ii. 726–727: Henry Slatter misremembered these two transactions when recalling events 20 years later: he wrote how PBS ‘obtained a loan of 20l.’ from John Slatter ‘which enabled him to pay his travelling expenses to London, leaving a written memorandum of his having borrowed it’ (Oxford 168) but PBS had acquired the money before his expulsion. 33 Oxford 165–166. 34 Bonds given by a borrower (PBS), securing to the lender (here Howard and Gibbs) a sum of money to be paid on the death of a specified person (in this case Timothy Shelley) from whom the borrower has expectations: their use was ‘widespread’, the Prince of Wales being rumoured in 1751 ‘to have £140 000 on post obits’ (Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system, p. 270). 35 Reminiscences of Captain Gronow, p. 78. 36 Oxford 166. 37 John Brown, The Northern Courts: containing Original Memoirs (1818), p. vii. 38 SL i. 61. 39 Oxford 166. 40 Ingpen 629–630: ‘tolerably’ not meaning ‘bearably’ but ‘rather’. 41 SL i. 75. 42 SL i. 88.

403



  Notes to pages 53 to 62 

43 SL i. 594: PBS suggested that Munday stock The Revolt of Islam and advertise it, and Munday apparently agreed: he was not named in the letter PBS sent to his bank (SL i. 599) listing people whose bills were to be honoured when he left the country two months later; Oxford 166. 44 SL i. 130 & n. 1. 45 See SL i. 89 n. 46 SL ii. 176;Timothy Shelley paid the 1811 bill (Ingpen 178–179); Review of English Studies, lii (2001), 233–234; SL ii. 208.

Chapter 6 1 SL i. 56; sold by the Shelley family in 1918, now at the University of Texas. 2 SC i. 739–740; SL i. 58. 3 Ingpen 243; SC ii. 740. 4 Ingpen 253: ‘cast’ meaning ‘kind’ or ‘sort’. 5 SL i. 78, 66, 274. 6 Eliza married Robert Farthing Beauchamp of Walford House, West Monkton, Somerset, in 1822, bringing (according to the Gentleman’s Magazine) £70 000 to the marriage; they had no children. 7 SL i. 76, 162. 8 SL i. 85, 90, 55, 209 n1. 9 SL i. 85. 10 Bieri takes for granted Mrs Elizabeth Shelley’s ‘“native” sexually active role’ and assumes that the second verse letter ‘strongly suggests’ her ‘affair with Graham’ (146): cf. too Seymour 67; SC ix. 154. 11 CPPBS i. 140:5, 3, 142:41–42. 12 CPPBS i. 143:26, 144:38, 143–14:29–30. 13 Such writing has been assumed to be either because Mrs Elizabeth Shelley really was having an affair with Graham, or because PBS was fantasising that she was, ‘until he half convinced himself of its truth’, such being the ‘psychological pattern’ within which e.g. Cameron, The Young Shelley, pp. 343–344 n98 believes him to have been trapped: i.e., even if the affair had never happened, PBS − given his psychological pattern – would have half‐believed that it had. 14 SL i. 55, 127, 144; SC ix. 140, 143–144. 15 SL i. 98. 16 SL i. 82–83; SC ii. 868–869. 17 SL i. 118, 121, 162. 18 SL i. 127–128: only the mountains and some of the trees of ‘that lovely spot’ (SL i. 2n.) are visible today: the Nantgwyllt and Cwm Elan valleys were flooded in the 1890s to make the reservoir of Careg‐ddu. 19 Bieri 160; Holmes 78; David Duff, ‘The 1813 Volume of Minor Poems’, The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (2009), p. 55. 20 SL i. 122–123; SC ii. 854.

404



  Notes to pages 62 to 72 

21 SL i. 162. 22 SC ii. 761; SL i. 162. 23 SC ii. 856–857: ‘matrimonialism’ is a nonce‐word invented by PBS (OED). 24 SC ii. 856. 25 SC ii. 856. 26 SL i. 162. 27 SC ii. 862; SL i. 163. 28 BLJ ix. 119; B. C. Barker‐Benfield,‘The Honeymoon of Joseph and Henrietta Chichester, with Daniel Roberts’ Memories of Byron and Shelley’, Bodleian Library Record, xii (April 1986), 122: Daniel Roberts knew PBS 1821–1822 and though he believed that Harriett had become pregnant, the idea of reparation and marriage may be true; CC i. 18. 29 Hogg ii. 554. 30 SL i. 162, 133, 133. 31 SL i. 144, 163, 133. 32 SL i. 162. 33 SL i. 133: SC ii. 862. 34 SL i. 135. 35 See e.g. Med.47 i. 166, Peck i. 185, White i. 154, Cameron, The Young Shelley, p. 94, SC ii. 860, Holmes 81, Bieri 158, Seymour 67, Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (London, 2007), p. 6; SC ii. 870. 36 White ii. 517; Dowden i. 173; SL i. 163.

Chapter 7 1 SL i. 194; Enquiry VIII. vi. 850–851. 2 PWS i. 142:105–106; Enquiry VIII. viii. Appendix (1798). 3 SC ii. 748, 740; there could be no question of PBS being prosecuted for sleeping with a minor: the age of consent remained at 12. 4 SL i. 97 & n1, 198. 5 SL i. 232, 291, 193, 263, 292, 195. 6 SL i. 193. 7 SL i. 149–150, 152, 159, 161 n2. 8 Hogg i. 16. 9 SC ix. 160. 10 Seymour 69–70, 89; SL i. 163–164. 11 SL i. 72, 85; SC ii. 786. 12 SL i. 328, 377 n. 13 SL i. 148. 14 SL i. 165 n3. 15 SL i. 163, 273–274: Hogg and Peacock thought Harriett (by the standards of the young women they knew) ‘well educated’, Hogg complimenting ‘her education at school’ (Hogg i. 457), Peacock recalling: ‘She read agreeably and intelligently. She wrote only letters, but she wrote them well’ (Fraser’s lxi. 96).

405



  Notes to pages 72 to 79 

16 SL i. 341, 347, 353. 17 SL i. 401; SC ii. 68; SL i. 152. 18 SL i. 168–169. 19 Robert Southey to Mary Barker, 8 January 1812 (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, no. 2014). 20 Paul Foot, ‘Preface’, O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland, p. 10. 21 SL i. 263, 271. 22 PWS i. 33:977–978. 23 SL i. 279–280 n5. 24 PWS i. 59:75–78, 58:70–71, 56:1, 57:40–41, 58:56–58. 25 SL i. 281, 251. 26 SL i. 320 n6, i. 321–322. 27 SL i. 331 n3. 28 SL i. 336, 331 n3. 29 SL i. 327 n8. 30 SL i. 326 n8. 31 SL i. 327. 32 SL i. 362–363; on 6 August 1822, H. Holste (executor) applied to Timothy Shelley ‘respecting a Debt owing by your Son Mr. Percy B. Shelley to the Estate of the late Miss Hitchener of Edmonton’ (NYPL, Pforzheimer Collection). 33 SL i. 292, 302. 34 See SL i. 339; the doctor, however, was never paid the £6 he claimed. 35 SL i. 292, 323, 337.

Chapter 8 1 SL i. 225 n2; Medwin recalled the ‘personal courage which particularly distinguished him’ (Med.33 19),Taaffe ‘his unquenchable courage’ (Cline, Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle, p. 24); Med.47 i. 110; when Timothy Shelley forbade PBS returning home in 1811, PBS wrote for ‘clothes papers gun &c.’ (SL i. 137). 2 Fraser’s lxi. 100; Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley. By One Who Knew Him’, Atlantic Monthly, xi, no. 64 (February 1863), 185. 3 SL i. 358, 359, 355, 357. 4 H. M. Dowling, ‘The Attack at Tannyrallt’, K‐SMB, xii (1961), 34, emended from Louise Schutz Boas, Harriet Shelley: Five Long Years (1962), p. 116: ‘hoxter’ is not to be confused with ‘hoaxer’ (not used in print before 1800, first usage dated 1814 by OED, meaning ‘one who ridicules another’, not ‘one who tricks another’). 5 Transportable burglary was ‘The breaking and entering the house of another in the night time, with intent to commit a felony therein, whether the felony be actually committed or not.’ 6 See Hogg ii. 212; Fraser’s lvii. 653: in spite of assertions that both Hogg and Peacock went to Tan‐yr‐allt themselves to investigate (e.g. SL i. 356 n3), neither did; Holmes 195. 7 See Hogg ii. 212; Fraser’s lvii. 654.

406



  Notes to pages 80 to 86 

8 SL i. 356, 355 n2; cf. ‘at his worst he imagined being attacked and invented highly coloured events’ (Theresa Kelley, ‘Life and Biographies’, The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton, Cambridge, 2006, p. 18); Boas, Harriet Shelley, p. 115; as the intruder spoke English, he may have been the employee of someone with English or Irish servants. 9 The Hon. Robert Leeson (1773–1850), fourth son of Joseph Leeson, Lord Milltown (1701–1783): see Dowling, ‘The Attack at Tannyrallt’, pp. 32–33. 10 Dowling, ‘The Attack at Tannyrallt’, p. 33; SL i. 356 n2; Robert Leeson to John Williams, April 1812 (Gwynedd Records XD8/2/113). 11 SL i. 356; SC ix. 186. 12 SL i. 356. 13 See Holmes 187; The Cambrian, Saturday 25 January 1812, p. 3: Medwin’s belief, derived probably from Madocks, that ‘not even a robbery’ had taken place in the neighbourhood ‘for twenty years’ (Med.33 20) was untrue; SL i. 357. 14 Cumberland Pacquet, 28 January 1812 (Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, Whitehaven Record Office and Local Studies Library). 15 Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, [January 1812] (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, no. 2026); Bieri cites William Calvert’s daughter Mary Stanger – aged seven in January 1812  –  late in life stating that Keswick residents ‘supposed that Shelley was laboring under an illusion as to the attack’ (Dowden i. 227 n, ix), but by the 1870s PBS’s reputation for delusion had been established.

Chapter 9 1 A View of Death: or, the soul’s departure from the world. A philosophical sacred poem, with a copious body of explanatory notes (1725), by John Reynolds (1667–1727), appears to be the only other extant ‘philosophical…poem’ with notes before 1813; SL i. 29. 2 See PS i. 325 nn. 3 CPPBS ii. 30:41, 2016 34:II.129; CPPBS i. 61:III.16–22, 2016 68:VII.176–183; 2016 40:III.80–83, CPPBS ii. 86 n. 4 CPPBS ii. 63–64:58–69, 295:29–40. 5 SL i. 324. 6 2016 26:I.102, used e.g. by Akenside and others; 28:I.149, used e.g. by Cowper; 29:I.205, used e.g. by Southey. 7 2016 46:IV.101; cf. too ‘meteor eye’ in St.I 218. 8 2016 31:I.264, 33, 38:II.76, 257 [em. CPPBS ii. 176]. 9 Hogg recalled that ‘Volney’s Ruins was one of Harriet’s text‐books, which she used to read aloud for our instruction and edification’ (Hogg ii. 183) 10 Book I. chapter XXIV. 11 www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/V2notes/ruins 12 Book I. chapter XXI; 2016 62:VI.190, 197. 13 King Lear I. ii.; The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Paris, 1794), p. 30.

407



  Notes to pages 87 to 91 

14 [Edward Young], The Complaint: or Night‐Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 2 Vols. (1749), ii. 196–197. 15 SL i. 152; 2016 77:VIII.236–238. 16 CPPBS iii. 52:239–252. 17 The Age of Reason, p. 29; see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works I (Pt. I), ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, 2001), 513:25. 18 2016 187: he ironically recorded his debt to ‘a Scotch philosopher’, i.e. the clergyman and advocate Robert Forsyth (1766–1845), whose Principles of Moral Science, II (Edinburgh, 1805) entitled chapter xvi ‘Of the Passion for reforming the World’ (283), arguing that such passion led to frenzies and disaster: Peacock would employ the phrase (ascribing it to Forsyth), showing Scythrop Glowry (who owes much to PBS) ‘troubled with the passion for reforming the world’ (Nightmare Abbey, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky, Cambridge, 2016, p. 13). 19 SL i. 354, 361. 20 It was even omitted from MWS’s printing of the poem in 1839 when she also omitted the anti‐matrimonial Note 9 and the other specifically anti‐Christian Notes 12, 13, 14 and 15. 21 SL i. 361. 22 CPPBS iii. 248. 23 See Charles E. Robinson, ‘Shelley to Byron in 1814: A New Letter’, K‐SJ, xxv (1986), 104–106. 24 SL i. 368 n3. 25 The Address supplied no printer’s name, just the address ‘Dublin’: the Proposals gave their printer as ‘I. Eton, Winetavern‐Street’ but there was no printer in Dublin at that address, nor with that name at any other: the name was homage to Daniel Isaac Eaton, the radical London printer who a year later would be imprisoned for printing Paine’s work, and for whom PBS would argue in his Letter to Lord Ellenborough (a pamphlet without a printer’s name or address, though printed by a respectable bookseller, William Syle of the High Street, Barnstaple). 26 Boas,‘“Erasmus Perkins” and Shelley’, Modern Language Notes, 410; SL i. 368 n3; Signature A is a bifolium consisting of the title‐page and (on the third side) the dedicatory poem: it has been claimed that the dedication was ‘suppressed’, e.g. ‘the dedication‐leaf, which Shelley later tore out of other copies’ (Guitar 47), but it would have been almost impossible to remove that half‐leaf without removing the title‐page, unless the remaining half‐leaf title‐page were then pasted or restitched in place: no such copy apparently survives, but only after mid‐1814 would PBS have found the distribution of a ‘foolish dedication’ (SL ii. 298) annoying. 27 CPPBS ii. 524: the copy, initialled ‘J. L.’, showing a later corrected variant, is in the Houghton Library at Harvard (*EC8.Sh445.813q); a ‘mutilated’ copy (Bodleian) was given to William Francis, a schoolmaster in Marlow (where PBS lived 1817–1818); another copy went to Nicholas Waller, later Nicholas Waller Procter (1802–1877) (SL i. 566–567). 28 CPPBS iii. 6; SL i. 368 n. 3; PBS’s counsel at the Chancery hearing, determined to make Queen Mab’s dissemination sound as restricted as possible, stated that ‘not 20 ever got abroad’ (White ii. 515): PBS claimed in 1821 that ‘a few copies only were struck off ’ (SL ii. 304). 29 Romilly argued that Queen Mab showed PBS’s irreligion and his opposition to the institution of marriage: PBS on principle concurred: ‘If I have attacked religion, it is agreed

408



  Notes to pages 92 to 97 

that I am punishable, but not by the loss of my children; if I have imagined a system of social life inconsistent with the constitution of England, I am also punishable, but not by the loss of my children’ (Dowden ii. 86). 30 SL i. 350. 31 CPPBS ii. 509: it was pirated by Clark in 1821: in 1822 Richard Carlile produced an edition using the stock of PBS’s 1813 copies: he produced three other editions during the 1820s, all with the Notes translated and all cheap. 32 Godwin, ‘Of Avarice and Profusion’, The Enquirer, Pt. II, Essay II (1797), p. 177; CPPBS ii. 248:3–9. 33 Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment (Oxford, 2012), p. 7. 34 A ‘mutilated’ copy of Queen Mab, partially marked up by PBS (Pforzheimer): an ‘unmutilated’ copy of Queen Mab, partially marked up by PBS (BL Ashley MS 4040). 35 SL ii. 305; SC iv. 545, 547, 556; 2016 78:IX.48 (MWS continued to cut this line in 1840), 75:VIII.165; SC iv. 559. 36 SL i. 238. 37 SL ii. 163; SC iii. 154–184: on 5 July 1813, Charters would leave his previous business partner James Stewart and ‘continue the trade…on his sole account’ (London Gazette, 6–10 July 1813, p. 1343): PBS’s must have been one of the bills he carried over. 38 In the ‘Hymn to Adversity’ by ‘Peter Pindar’, the upwardly mobile individual is encouraged to ‘Throw by his wheel‐barrow, and keep a carriage’ ([John Wolcott], The Works of Peter Pindar Esq., 4 Vols., 1796, iv. 356), the ‘wheel‐barrow’ being derogatory for a light carriage drawn by a single horse: in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, ‘My father’s a gentleman, and keeps his carriage’ is a schoolboy insult to a grocer’s son around 1800 (Vanity Fair [1848], ed. John Carey, 2001, p. 48). 39 Timothy Shelley was also ‘doing all in his power to prevent his being arrested’, presumably to safeguard the family name (SL i. 377 n). 40 Anne Williams to ‘Mrs Sandbach’, 28 March 1860 (MS. Abinger c. 68, f. 48); Ingpen 631–632. 41 Sophia Stacey – in Florence November–December 1819 – recorded that ‘He keeps his carriage – not horses’ (Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and his Friends in Italy, 1911, p. 96). PBS exactly reflected the attitude of LB towards paying for his carriage, built to his own specifications in 1816: seven years on, LB insisted that his carriage‐builder  –  Charles Baxter of Long Acre – must wait ‘at least a year’ to be paid: two months later he explicitly forbade his London banker paying Baxter anything at all, including interest: see SC iii. 153–179. Charters did not suffer too badly, dying in 1847 leaving property worth ‘about £30 000’ in his (disputed) will: see Notes of Cases in the Ecclesiastical & Maritime Courts, 1846–1847,Vol. 5 (1848), 487; BLJ x. 110, 153.

Chapter 10 1 Fraser’s lxi. 94; PS iv. xv. 2 SC iv. 973. 3 SC iv. 1056–1057.

409



  Notes to pages 97 to 100 

4 Fraser’s lvii. 654; see Dowden i. 436–438: in her 1835 novel Lodore, MWS showed a marriage between a loving couple terribly damaged by the young woman’s mother, who lives in the same house and creates an ‘insurmountable barrier’ between them, making Lodore feel he ‘was one apart, banished’ (Lodore, Paris, 1835, p. 53). 5 SC iv. 925. 6 SL i. 402. 7 SL i. 336: see, however, Harriett’s letter of 10 September 1813 in which she quotes from Queen Mab (‘playing a losing game into each other’s hands’ – 2016 42:172–173). 8 CC i. 18. 9 Fraser’s lxi. 96; SL i. 424. 10 SL i. 401–402. 11 In 1793, Harriet Collins had married Jean‐Baptiste Ignace Chastel de Boinville (1756– 1813), who died during the French retreat from Moscow; they had two children, Cornelia (1795–1874) and Alfred (b. 1797): Harriet had moved in radical circles in England, being an acquaintance of Godwin, with John Frank Newton and Dr William Lambe as relations: she had been known to wear the red sash,‘the badge of republicanism’ (Thomas Constable, Memoir of the Reverend Charles A. Chastel de Boinville, 1880, p. 10): her daughter Cornelia had (via Godwin) met the lawyer Thomas Turner and had married him in 1812: Turner needed to spend time in London, and in 1813 the 18‐year‐old Cornelia was living with her recently widowed mother in Bracknell. 12 SL i. 530, 384. 13 SL i. 387. 14 SL i. 377; see SC iii. 336. 15 See SL i. 387‐388; Elopement 11. 16 SL i. 379 n. 17 SC iii. 263; Bieri 263. 18 Dowden ii. 541; CC ii. 659: both Dowden and Rosalie Glynn Grylls noticed that CC was rewriting sections of the letters while copying, as well as using the initial ‘C.’ (Mary Jane Godwin never called her daughter anything but ‘Jane’). There were also obvious mistakes: one letter of 7 April 1815 described how it had been months before Mary Jane had been able to see PBS, MWG and CC on their return from the continent in September 1814, she having no idea where they might be, but in fact she had seen CC within two days of their arrival in September: Harriett, too, knew where they were living. All the CC copies have however been lost, along with the originals; all that survive are the quotations from and accounts of the copies which Dowden printed in 1886 (‘Appendix B’, ii. 541–551), supplemented in 1939 by Grylls, who seems to have been the last person to see the material, and who added a few extra passages (Claire Clairmont, 1939, ‘Appendix D’, 276–280). See too CC i. 11 n2. 19 Dowden ii. 543. 20 E.g. she wrote how Shelley at Bracknell fell in love with Mrs. Turner. Madame de Boinville and Mrs. Turner were indignant, and broke off his acquaintance; but Harriet Shelley

410



  Notes to pages 101 to 102  continued to visit them, and remained at Bracknell, while Shelley took refuge in London. The stanzas dated April, 1814, are addressed to Madame de Boinville and Cornelia Turner. In August, 1813, Shelley came of age. He was at Edinburgh, and his first act was to marry Harriet in an Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, their marriage of 1811 having taken place at Gretna Green. Early in 1814 he fell in love with Mrs. Turner; in April of that year he fell in love with Frances Godwin; and in July eloped with Mary Godwin. (Dowden ii. 549)

The errors of fact and date, and the malice of the final synopsis, are clear. 21 CPPBS i. 328: ‘a poem addressed in secret to her’ (Holmes 227). Conscious of the fact that ‘doubts’ either had ‘or shall or may arise, touching or concerning the validity of the aforesaid Marriage’ (Fraser’s lxi. 94)  –  i.e. their Scottish marriage  –  and also to ensure that Harriett and Ianthe would inherit from him, on 22 March 1814 PBS acquired a licence to remarry Harriett: they married in Hanover Square on the 24th in the presence of her father, and either shortly before or afterwards she conceived: her son Charles would be born on 30 November 1814, with Harriett declaring him ‘an eight months’ child’ (SL i. 422 n), suggesting that she could recall the occasion of his conception. 22 SL i. 389. 23 E.g.Tatsuo Tokoo in BSM xiii. xxi; Donald H. Reiman in SC viii. 994; Reiman and Neil Fraistat in SPP 91. 24 CPPBS ii. 479, 481 (cf. Seymour 91: ‘he almost believed Cornelia was already his’); CPPBS ii. 486–488 shows that the poem inscribed in the hand of Harriett in ‘The Esdaile Notebook’ entitled ‘May 1813: To Harriet………’, with ‘Cum Elam’ at the end (MYRS i. 186–187), was addressed to Harriet Grove, the additions being Harriett’s attempts to possess the poem. 25 Peck thought that PBS’s poem ‘Thy dewy looks’ ‘could scarcely have been addressed to any other person than Cornelia Turner’ (i. 343): White referred to PBS’s ‘affair with Cornelia Turner’ (i. 329–330): Cameron described how PBS ‘was turning towards Mrs. Boinville’s daughter Cornelia Turner’ (SC iii. 278) and Holmes (although sometimes confusing Cornelia with her mother) believed Cornelia one of the women with whom PBS had been most intimate (632): Reiman called PBS’s relationship with Harriet de Boinville ‘the greatest of Shelley’s infatuations with older women’ (SC viii. 994–996): the Johns Hopkins edition of PBS’s poetry twice describes PBS as ‘infatuated’ with Cornelia, and twice refers to his ‘flirtation’ with her (CPPBS ii. 481, 482, 478, 482), while Bieri mentions ‘Shelley’s passion for Cornelia Turner’ (272) and refers to his ‘affair’ with her (321): CPPBS iii. 430 further describes PBS as ‘enmeshed in…successive, frustrated infatuations with Harriet de Boinville and her married daughter Cornelia Turner’; SL i. 384. 26 SL ii. 92. 27 SC iii. 278; Fraser’s lvii. 655; Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley, ed. H. F. B. Brett‐Smith (1909), pp. xiv–xv. 28 Fiona Sampson, In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), p. 56; Hogg ii. 502.

411



  Notes to pages 103 to 112 

Chapter 11 1 CCJ 431; SC vi. 846; Charles and Mary Cowden Clark, pp. 37–38; there is no reliable portrait of MWG and none of MWS before 1839–1840 (see Figure 4). 2 MWS, The Last Man, ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook (1996), p. 23; Elopement 10. 3 Elopement 14. 4 Date strongly suggested by PBS’s journal entry of 4 August 1814: ‘Mary told me that this was my birth day. I thought it had been the 27th of June’ (MSJ i. 9); for Godwin family details, see Chapter 1 note 21; W. M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences, 2 Vols. (1906), ii. 353. 5 MSJ i. 1, SL i. 421 n2. 6 SL i. 389. 7 Elopement 11. 8 Elopement 11. 9 Elopement 11. 10 ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks’, BSM xv. 38–39. 11 BSM xv. 8–11. 12 MSJ i. 2, Dowden ii. 544: the information comes from the copy of a letter written by Mary Jane Godwin and from comments by CC late in life, as discussed in Chapter 10 notes 18 and 20; SL i. 403; Rossetti, ‘Talks with Trelawny’, The Athenaeum (15 July 1882), p. 79. 13 SL i. 421 n2; SC iv. 805. 14 In October PBS referred to her ‘exertions’ over this (SL i. 403); see MSJ i. 8. 15 SL i. 403; Dowden ii. 545: CC’s account is neutral and possibly reliable. 16 Henry Sotheran’s 1923 Catalogue 784, no. 841, quoted William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (1989), pp. 361–362; SL i. 403. 17 MSJ i. 6 [PBS’s text]. 18 CC, many years later, remembered: ‘The Postillions had said that they were going to Dover’ (Grylls, Claire Clairmont, p. 276); Elopement 12–13. 19 SC iii. 351. 20 PS iv. 175:6–10; cf. 2016 149–154. 21 MSL i. 243. The fact that she gave birth to what PBS called a ‘not quite 7 months’ (MSJ i. 65) child on 22 February 1815 shows that they believed she had conceived late in July 1814. 22 MSJ i. 7 [PBS’s text, paper torn]; Elopement 13; MSJ i. 8 [PBS’s text]. Captain Davison took the packet boat Dover across the Channel. 23 SL i. 402. 24 SL i. 402; Godwin to E. Fordham, 13 November 1811: C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, 2 Vols. (1876), ii. 213. 25 Godwin recorded ‘Shelleys & E Westbrook dine’; MWG had returned from Scotland the previous day (http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk: 10–11 November 1812). 26 MSJ i. 8 n1. 27 MSJ i. 11. 28 MSJ i. 17; Godwin, Fleetwood [1805], ed. Pamela Clemit (1992), p. 71.

412



  Notes to pages 112 to 121 

29 Polidori recalled PBS telling him that they had ‘merely £26’ (The Diary of John Polidori, ed. Rossetti, p. 107) for this part of the journey (‘to England along the Rhine in bateaux’) but his recollections are not reliable: ‘£26’ might have been the sum with which PBS, MWG and CC had departed London in July 1814.

Chapter 12 1 SL i. 389, 393 n5. 2 SL i. 389. 3 SL i. 390. 4 Enquiry VIII. vi. 852–853. 5 SL ii. 232: PBS’s Note 9 to Queen Mab would exactly coincide (see 2016 90). 6 SL i. 421 n2, 390. 7 SL i. 390, 392. 8 MWL ii. 271. 9 SL i. 394–395, 396. 10 SL i. 394–395. 11 SL i. 394–395. 12 SL i. 397. 13 SL i. 399–400. 14 SL i. 404–405. 15 SL i. 410; MSJ i. 25 n1. 16 CCJ 54. 17 MSJ i. 41; CCJ 56; MSJ i. 40, 58. 18 SL i. 421 n2. 19 OED 2.a. cites Harriett’s usage in its definition: ‘transf. A person of a malignant and loathsome character, esp. one who preys ruthlessly upon others; a vile and cruel exactor or extortioner.’ 20 SL i. 424 n3, 396, 399, 398, 400, 397. 21 Notebook 11: see BSM xviii. 10–13. 22 Holmes 231. 23 See SC iv. 591 n6; Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system, p. 268. 24 Enquiry VIII. vi: the 1798 third edition modifies this to ‘But it may happen that other men will feel for her the same preference that I do. This will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; her choice being declared, we shall all be wise enough to consider the sexual commerce as unessential to our regard’ (VIII. viii. Appendix). 25 SL i. 184. 26 SC iii. 436–437; MSL i. 7–9; SC iii. 438. 27 MSJ i. 65: see Chapter 11 note 21; MSJ i. 7 [PBS’s text, paper torn]. 28 SC iii. 472. 29 SC iii. 470–471: ‘to quiz you’ means ‘to make fun of you’. Hogg is so sensible of the value of MWG as ‘exquisite possession’ that he wishes PBS’s absent from London, enabling him to ‘prize’ MWG (‘prize’ also meaning ‘force open’).

413



  Notes to pages 121 to 131 

30 MSJ i. 77. 31 MSJ i. 78 (common short form of Exeter Exchange, a menagerie in the Strand, closed in 1826); MSJ i. 78–79. 32 MSL i. 35. 33 SC iii. 473. 34 MSJ i. 35–36; CC i. 38. 35 CC ii. 319.There is no evidence at all for the suggestions that CC was sent away because she was pregnant and perhaps had a child by PBS (Seymour 131–132; Janet Todd, Death & the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle, Berkeley, 2007, p. 167; Sampson, In Search of Mary Shelley, p. 114). 36 BLJ v. 162: when Southey accused PBS of having ‘lived with two of Godwins daughters in Switzerland’ (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, no. 3005), he ­ also  meant ‘slept with’; CC i. 38; Rossetti, ‘Talks with Trelawny’, The Athenaeum (15 July 1882), p. 79.

Chapter 13 1 Fraser’s lxi. 98; cf.‘the man who had done unforgettable things, which for long will be called to mind, was called alastor’ (The Greek Questions of Plutarch, ed.W. R. Halliday, Oxford, 1928, pp. 126–127): Halliday glosses ‘alastor’ as ‘(1) a person who has committed an abominable crime, (2) a spirit who avenges such a crime, (3) an evil spirit or fiend’ (p. 127). 2 CPPBS iii. 377; PS i. 462 n2–3. 3 CPPBS iii. 374–375. 4 1839 i. 142. 5 PS iii. 733–734. 6 LB 50:51–52. 7 1839 i. 141. 8 MYRS iv. 392–395 [1840 127]. 9 ‘Once in a blue moon’ had meant ‘very rarely or never’ since the sixteenth century; OED 2.b., but PBS’s moon recalls the ‘blue blasted light’ of the moon in Landor’s Gebir v. 17–18 (see Chapter 4 note 5). 10 For attempts to make ‘Mine eyes were dim’ an 1814 poem to her, see PS i. 442. 11 CPPBS iii. 34:9–10. 12 2016 113; PBS could hardly have hit on the form of the quotation appearing in 1810 without having remembered it from The Friend no. 21 (original and 1812 reprint being identical here). A boy he knew at Eton, John Taylor Coleridge (1790–1876), was a subscriber to the magazine, but so were William Calvert (?1770–1829) and Robert Southey, and he may have consulted their copies in Keswick 1811–1812: see Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Rooke, ii. 292, 419, 421, 459. 13 See MSJ i. 76; ‘Ode’, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca  and London, 1983), 271:6; 2016 113:3, 114:26, 131:713: see Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, Poems, in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, 206:8–9;

414



  Notes to pages 131 to 141 

The Excursion 83–107, i.  301–302, iii. 267, 967–[last line]; ‘Tintern Abbey’, LB:94– 100, 80–3; ‘Ode’, Poems, in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, 142, 56–57, 713; ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ll. 18–22. 14 LB 164:5; Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, 268:53–54. 15 LB 119:99–103. 16 CPPBS iii. 34:10. 17 Medwin, Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron: noted during a residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in…1821 and 1822 (1824), p. 192. 18 MSJ i. 25; see Chapter 1. 19 SL i. 439. 20 C. [Richard Carlile], ‘On the Writings of Shelley’, Newgate Monthly Magazine, ii. 12 (1 August 1826), 570. 21 Samuel Hamilton, printer in Weybridge, Surrey, 1797–1818; in London 1799–1805. 22 Monthly Review, lxxix (April 1816), 433; Hearth 105; SL i. 552, ii. 208. 23 Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals, ed. Tom Taylor, 3 Vols., 2nd ed. (London: Longman, &c. 1853), i. 362.

Chapter 14 1 SL i. 459. 2 SL i. 473 & n4, 472. 3 Holmes 312. 4 SL i. 453. 5 Letters Written by the late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope Esq., 2 Vols. (1774), ii. 293; Mary Shelley & P. B. Shelley, History of a six weeks’ tour (London, 1817), p. 56. 6 SL i. 262 n8. 7 SL i. 244, 313 n1, 337. 8 SL i. 473. 9 SL i. 453. 10 SL i. 460, 453. 11 SL i. 461. 12 See William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (London, 2013). 13 PBS included such boats in his surviving sketches of the lake (BSM xi. 144, 154). 14 CC i. 65. 15 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Oxford, 2008), pp. [2], 276. 16 BLJ, v. 161. 17 PS i. 519 [em. BSM xi. 140–141]: Michael Erkelenz (BSM xi. xiii–xxiv) suggests that the pen and hand in which this item is inscribed on f. 65 are the same as appear in a minor correction on f. 64 and that therefore the item postdates June.

415



  Notes to pages 141 to 146 

18 Wordsworth thought the poetry ‘not caught by B. from Nature herself but from him, Wordsworth, and spoilt in the transmission’: see David Ellis, Byron in Geneva (Liverpool, 2011), pp. 41–43. 19 Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 2 Vols. (1830), ii. 613, 23; Robinson, ‘Shelley to Byron in 1814: A New Letter’, K‐SJ, xxv (1986), 106–110, argues for ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, though see CPPBS iii. 439. 20 CC i. 31; BLJ v. 91. 21 BLJ v. 82: in September, LB was still recalling having been ‘in some danger on the lake’ (v. 91); SC vii. 32 (‘a swamp’ meaning ‘being inundated with water’ appears to be PBS’s coinage). 22 History of a six weeks’ tour, p. 121; BLJ v. 82. 23 BLJ vi. 126; SC vii. 32. 24 CC received £6155/16/7, including interest, on 1 April 1845 from the ‘Real Estate of Percy Bysshe Shelley’ after the death of Timothy Shelley (Pforzheimer CLCL 0063). 25 BLJ v. 162. 26 SL i. 488. 27 BSM xi. 138–139. 28 PWS i. 251–252:215–229. 29 SL i. 497. 30 SL i. 497. 31 SL i. 500. 32 BSM xi. 7; assisted by the Swiss‐German poem of Frederike Brun: see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works I (Pt. 2), ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, 2001), 717–718. 33 Gavin de Beer’s essay ‘An “Atheist” in the Alps’, K‐SMB, ix (1958), 1–15, and Peter Cochran’s Byron and Bob: Lord Byron’s Relationship with Robert Southey, 2010, pp. 68–69) can be corrected from the leaf (at Trinity College, Cambridge) which shows – on 23 July – PBS’s Greek comment and a subjoined Greek rebuttal [‘the fool hath said in his heart, there is no god’], and on 26 July an entry by CC as a Swiss ‘Pheoffteiygne’ (‘fifteen’), not the ‘Theossteique’ [‘hater of God’] transcribed by Southey. Hobhouse’s recollection (Italy: Remarks made in Several Visits,Vol. I., 1852, 1–2) of LB (on 30 August 1816) ‘scratching’ out PBS’s name in a visitors’ book was, in fact, of his scratching out CC’s name (who beside LB might have wished it deleted?) and then removing the leaf (it survived with Hobhouse). The other instance, of the names of the Shelley party and a Greek inscription, from Montenvers, no longer survives: Southey copied it into his diary (Keswick Museum, Catalogue Number 433) for 26 June 1817: ‘Mr Percy Byssche Shelley’ / ‘Madame son Epouse’ / ‘Theossteique la soeur’, with ἕκαστοι ἄθεοι [‘atheists one and all’] in Greek against their names and an unsigned Greek comment [‘If this is true they are fools and unfortunates in their stupidity; if not true, they are all liars’]. Southey told others about ‘atheists one and all’ (see The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, no. 3005), and John Taylor Coleridge referred to it in his review of LH’s Foliage in the Quarterly Review, xviii (May 1818), 329: cf. Med.47 ii. 335, Gisborne 37, Trel.78 82. 34 ‘Letter VIII’, The Poems of Mr. Gray.To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings. By W. Mason, 2 Vols. (Dublin, 1776), i. 79; an observation about scenes which ‘inspire most forcibly’ was extended by another visitor with ‘the love of God’.

416



  Notes to pages 146 to 155 

35 2016 140:6; an earlier draft (141:6) offers ‘a sound not all its own’. 36 The Faerie Queene, IV. x. 45: PBS’s lack of belief in a creative God rules out the usual definition of ‘daedal’ as ‘cunningly wrought’: he is defining earth’s spontaneous generation of its own phenomena, whether flowers, earthquakes or hurricanes. 37 SL i. 499, 500. 38 2016 146:125–126; CPPBS ii. 52:248. 39 Ellis, Byron in Geneva, p. 91; SL i. 337. 40 Pynson Wilmot Longdill (?1780–1823) of Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn, ‘has an almost Jewish face, is a confident talker, high in his politics and manners, and yet a friend of Shelley’s’ (Robinson i. 222). 41 SL i. 502. 42 See Richard Holmes, Sidetracks (2000), pp. 271–282.

Chapter 15 1 See BLJ v. 105–107; SL i. 504. 2 SL i. 505. 3 CC i. 73, ‘itty’ meaning ‘little’. 4 Gisborne 39; Godwin’s statement ‘may not have been far short of the truth’ (Seymour 170): Fanny ‘had been, it seemed, in love’ with PBS (Wroe, Being Shelley, p. 67); SL i. 424 n3. 5 CC i. 54–59; see Chapter 1 note 21. 6 Kegan Paul, William Godwin, ii. 213; CC i. 56–57. 7 Dowden ii. 546. 8 Kegan Paul, William Godwin, ii. 213; Robinson i. 203; SL i. 327 n8; SC x. 1136 & n11. 9 Robinson i. 203; Robinson’s source was Charles Lamb, in February 1817. 10 CC i. 49. 11 CC i. 81–82, 74. 12 SL i. 508; Robinson i. 162; CC i. 74. 13 CC i. 58. 14 See SL i. 397. 15 CC i. 81; SL i. 509. 16 CC i. 81. 17 CC i. 80–81, 82. 18 MSJ i. 138, 139, 141, 143 n2. 19 Fanny would have arrived 8–9 a.m. on 8 October if she had caught a coach p.m. from London the previous day. Her letter arrived on the 8th (MSJ i. 139) but no longer survives: Jane Shelley, in 1872, recorded it saying ‘that she was coming through Bath on her way to join their Wollstonecraft relatives in Wales’ (CC i. 85 n1): a meeting in Bath on 8 October between her and PBS is argued for by Stocking (CC i. 87–88). 20 Quoted by Godwin in MS. Abinger Dep. c. 524, p. 2; CC ii. 629: she remembered it as ‘calling on him to come and bury her’: written down only in 1875, so potentially unreliable, but with some accurate dates and details. 21 MSJ i. 139; according to CC in old age, PBS ‘jumped up thrust his hand in [his] hair – I must be off ’ (Bieri 355); MSJ i. 139.

417



  Notes to pages 155 to 159 

22 SL i. 510; MSJ i. 140. 23 The Cambrian, Saturday 12 October 1816, p. 3. 24 The Cambrian, 12 October 1816, p. 3. 25 Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (London, Berlin, New York, 2010), p. 101; The Cambrian, Saturday 19 October 1816, p. 3; CC, in old age, remarked ‘Fanny G. inters w S. at Bath’, meaning that Fanny was interred while PBS was at Bath; she also stated ‘When Shelley got to Swansea she [Fanny Godwin] was dead & buried’ (Bieri 355, 734 n20). 26 Todd believes that PBS – having left Bath ‘early’ on Friday 11th – not only got hold of the suicide letter and removed the signature, thus keeping Fanny’s identity secret, but managed to bribe both the coroner and the newspaper reporter: she claims that PBS ‘clung’ to his ‘remnants of respectability’, hence his ‘decision’ not to identify Fanny and to ‘refuse’ to do anything which might have led to a ‘decent burial’ for her (Death & the Maidens, pp. 235–237). 27 The Cambrian, 12 October 1816, p. 3; it is tempting to link PBS’s visit with the recollection of Rees Howell Gronow (1794–1865) (even though he dates it to 1810) of PBS coming ‘in a state of great distress and difficulty to Swansea, when we had an opportunity of rendering him a service; but we never could ascertain what had brought him to Wales’ (Reminiscences of Captain Gronow, p. 214); MSJ i. 141. 28 MS. Abinger c. 66 ff. 18–19; Robinson i. 199, 203. 29 CC to LB 27 October 1816 (CC i. 89). 30 BSM xxi. 22–23 [em.]. 31 BSM xxi. 22–23. 32 BSM xxi. 24–25.

Chapter 16 1 SL i. 424 n3. 2 SC iv. 775. 3 SC iv. 778: the address given for HS at the inquest (the last officially known) was 7 Elizabeth Street, Hans Place: the street continued as Queen Street, running into Brompton Row, which was the address for her body to be taken ‘home to her residence’ (777) after the inquest; SC iv. 805; CC, in old age, believed that Harriett had hidden herself ‘to conceal the affair from Shelley’ (SC iv. 788). 4 Not the Chapel Street (today Alford Street) near Grosvenor Square, where the Westbrook family lived, but the Chapel Street running (then and now) north‐east from Belgrave Square. 5 SC iv. 805. 6 SL i. dated this ‘Sat. Eve.’ letter ‘[?9 Nov. 1816]’ but Harriett had been in her new lodgings for a while: her drowning seems likely to have been on Saturday 30 November – her son Charles’s birthday – with her body found 10 days later: in the cold water of winter, it is unlikely to have come to the surface earlier, but testimony was given at the inquest that it could still be recognised as Harriett (SC iv. 778), so a period longer than 10 days is unlikely.

418



  Notes to pages 159 to 164 

7 MSJ i. 151–152; SC iv. 787–788; CC ii. 629, 631–632; Henry George Davis, The Memorials of the Hamlet of Knightsbridge: With Notices of its immediate Neighbourhood, ed. Charles Davis (1859), p. 237: Harriett was probably interred in the burial ground then to the north of Hyde Park. 8 SL i. 519 n1. 9 Peck ii. 410: meaning that she first lived with a man, and was then a prostitute; SL i. 521; the name may amalgamate the name of the street with the way Harriett was named at the inquest. 10 See e.g. The trial of William Barber, for criminal conversation, with Jane Fay, wife of Lawrence Fay (Dublin, 1797), p. 25; SC iv. 777. 11 SL i. 521; see SC iv. 786–787, 791. 12 SL i. 530. 13 SL i. 530. 14 SC iv. 805: the document that survives may well be a copy, not the original. 15 Robinson i. 199: Robinson told her ‘that as Mr. Shelley has lived in adultery himself he could not obtain a divorce at Doctors’ Commons, and so could not obtain one in Parliament’. 16 Robinson i. 211. 17 SL i. 521. 18 SL i. 521. 19 The article responsible for sending LH to prison had been ‘The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day’ in The Examiner, 22 March 1812, p. 179: LH and his brother John (The Examiner’s printer) had been prosecuted for libel: on 3 February 1813 they were sentenced to imprisonment, fined £500 and required to pay £250 as a guarantee of good behaviour: they remained in jail until 1815. 20 SL i. 353; Hearth 109. 21 LH, Lord Byron and some of his contemporaries, p. 186; Peck ii. 410. 22 SL i. 530: he told LB that ‘a far severer anguish’ − compared with Harriett’s death – had affected him ‘far more deeply’, but his letter was enclosed with one from MWS, and he would not have wanted any sentiments of regret for Harriett to have got back to MWS: he was, too, contrasting the shock of Harriett’s death with the anguish of Fanny’s; 1839 i. 375. 23 SL i. 522. 24 MSJ i. 25, 150; http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (9 November 1816). 25 MSL i. 24–25. 26 SL i. 528. 27 SC v. 392. 28 http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (30 December 1816); SL ii. 460; MSJ i. 152. 29 I.e. ‘unbecoming freedom of conduct (said esp. of women)’ (OED). 30 Godwin to William Thomas Baxter, 12 May 1817 (SC iv. 787). 31 http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (5 May 1817); Godwin to Mary Jane, 14 May 1817, MS. Abinger c. 42. 32 SL ii. 232 n11. 33 See Gisborne 48 n60; SL ii. 232 n11. 34 SL ii. 231.

419



  Notes to pages 164 to 168 

35 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 Vols. (Oxford, 1956– 1971), vi. 850; Boas assumes that, ‘in their contact in 1816’ (there is no evidence that Harriett and PBS saw each other in 1816), Harriett once again found ‘traces of the Shelley she loved’ (which sounds unlikely), so that she and PBS made love and she became pregnant (Harriet Shelley, p. 215): Seymour declares that an army captain being the unborn child’s father is only slightly more likely than the idea that PBS was and imagines PBS ‘seeking to comfort Harriet at a time when he was leaving the country for an undetermined period’, so that he ‘made love to her’ (175): Todd argues that an army lover is unlikely because, in the summer of 1816, Harriett offered her assistance to Mrs Newton and gossiped to Mrs Boinville about MWG and PBS, and ‘These images of Harriet do not fit well with a woman in the midst of an affair or concerned with the retention or loss of a new lover’:Todd offers no other evidence for her belief that Harriett ‘had been impregnated by Shelley’ except that PBS found ‘once more…sympathetic companionship with the loving Harriett, still legally his wife, still very young and beautiful’, Harriett being thus ‘fooled once more by Shelley’ (Death & the Maidens, pp. 177–179, 246): see too Roe, Fiery Heart, p. 281. 36 Fraser’s lxi. 102. 37 Fraser’s lxi. 102; SL i. 522; PS i. 572. 38 PS i. 554; actually the wrong date, as although the Princess gave birth to her stillborn son on 5 November, she herself died in the early hours of 6 November. 39 BSM xviii. 30–33. 40 PS i. 556; SL i. 414: nothing in the ‘1815’ poem even denotes the gender of the figure described: the word ‘bosom’ appears in ‘The cold Earth slept below’ but PBS regularly used it for men: e.g.‘Athanase’, l. 89 (PS ii. 318),‘Fiordispina’, l. 14 (PS iv. 66) and ‘Charles the First’, I. ii. 21 (BSM xii. 220). 41 Nora Crook, ‘Mary Shelley’s Concealing “To—”: (Re)addressing Poems’, Wordsworth Circle, xliii (Winter 2012), 18. 42 Judith Chernaik called the central figures of most of PBS’s major poems ‘idealized self‐ portraits’ (The Lyrics of Shelley, Cleveland & London, 1972, p. 9); Bieri, publishing the final version of his biography in 2008, referred to the ‘autobiographical character’ of Laon in Laon and Cythna (68) and to Epipsychidion as ‘Shelley’s most starkly autobiographical work’ (554). 43 PS i. 440:1–3. 44 Philip Larkin, ‘The Mower’, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (1988), p. 214. 45 SL i. 577; CC ii. 632.

Chapter 17 1 2 3 4

SC vii. 26, 28; SL i. 501. BLJ x. 15, vi. 7. SL i. 504, 507–508. The house was leasehold: in October 1817, PBS observed ‘We gave we will say 1200 for the house’ (i.e. £800 for contents, around £400 for the house) but MWS wrote ‘we

420



  Notes to pages 168 to 174 

cannot hope to sell the house for £1200’ (SL i. 562 & n2); they sold it (including ­contents) on 25 January 1818 for £1000 (CCJ 81, SL ii. 209). 5 Fraser’s lxi. 100; Blunden, Shelley, p. 170; The Times 16 December 1817. 6 SL i. 520. 7 SL i. 527; Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1913), p. 463. 8 Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Forman, p. 470. 9 SC v. 390. 10 SL i. 531. 11 See Ingpen 506–511: according to a friend, the marriage of Caroline (1787–1841) and the Revd. Dr Thomas Hume (1769–1850) was unhappy (Richard Harris Barham, ‘Thomas Hume’, Personal Reminiscences by Barham, Harness, and Hodder, ed. Richard Henry Stoddard, New York, 1875, pp. 99–100): PBS paid £30 a quarter for the children; see SC ix. 283. 12 SL i. 555 n3 offers three occasions when he might have seen Charles but Longdill’s draft letter to Lord Eldon of 20 September 1817 refers to PBS as ‘never havg seen’ him (SL i. 555). 13 CPPBS iii. 116:105–106; PS ii. 320:144–145. 14 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 7 February 1817,Vol. XXXV, cc. 292, 297; 29 January 1817,Vol. XXXV, c. 84. 15 MSJ i. 163. 16 PWS i. 175–176:192–193. 17 Christopher Hill points out that because such an electorate is in the hands of landlords and clergy (illiterate people cannot enjoy a secret ballot) it may be surprisingly r­ eactionary (God’s Englishman, New York, 1972, p. 207). 18 PWS i. 171:14–16. 19 Quarterly Review, xvi (January 1817), 552 [issued April 1817]. 20 [LH], ‘The Quarterly Review, and Revolt of Islam’, The Examiner, no. 615 (10 October 1819), p. 653. 21 1839 i. 376; SL i. 545. 22 Laon and Cythna; Or,The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of The Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser; Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge MA, 1974), p. 311. 23 SL ii. 154. 24 PBS knew the poem well (1839 iii. 72). 25 PS ii. 27. 26 CPPBS iii. 181–182:IV.1415, 1442–1443. 27 CPPBS iii. 197:V.1830–1836. 28 W. B.Yeats, ‘Edmund Spenser’, Essays and Introductions (1961), p. 379. 29 CPPBS iii. 186:IV.1534–1536, 215:V.2277–2280. 30 The Story of Rimini, iv. 79 (1816), p. 86; CPPBS iii. 317:XII.4760, 152:II.667. 31 CPPBS iii. 248:VII.3104–3108. 32 CPPBS iii. 157:II. 802–804, 784–785. 33 CPPBS iii. 311:XII.4605–4607. 34 SL i. 90; CPPBS iii. 198:V.1839–1840, 206:V.2045, 2047–2049; CPPBS iii. 114:43.

421



  Notes to pages 174 to 180 

35 SL i. 547. 36 Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody, p. 116; MSL i. 54; SL i. 543, 561. 37 SL i. 556; Thomas Beddoes, A Lecture Introductory to a course of popular instruction on the constitution and management of the human body (Bristol, 1797), p. 19; SL i. 560. 38 BSM vii. 54–55. 39 Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley’, Atlantic Monthly, xi. 187; SC v. 466–467. 40 [LH], ‘Biographical Memoir of Mr. Shelley’, The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1830), pp. ix–x; SL i. 576 n2; Robinson, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood’, Shelley Revalued, ed. Everest, p. 204. 41 SL i. 568 n1: 1839 i. 377. 42 Fraser’s lxi. 104; BLJ x. 15. 43 MSL i. 44; SL i. 560. 44 SL i. 570; The Diary of John Polidori, ed. Rossetti, p. 101;Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley’, Atlantic Monthly, xi. 189. 45 SL i. 570, 573, 587: i.e. ‘constantly concerned with his own ailments’. 46 LB is the only other correspondent to whom a letter survives mentioning health problems so severe as to necessitate Italy (SL i. 556). 47 CPPBS iii. 113:3–4: Wordsworth had wanted his Lyrical Ballads ‘to be considered as experiments’ (LB 738:4) and had referred to ‘the temper of the public mind’ in the 1816 ‘Advertisement’ to his Thanksgiving Ode volume (Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham, Ithaca, 1989, 178:40–41). 48 CPPBS iii. 563, 626 (in a presentation copy, PBS would bracket the sentences with the change and write ‘The Printer’s insertion. PBS’ – PS ii. 46 n); SL i. 571. 49 SL i. 579. 50 Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley: Supplementary Notice’, Fraser’s Magazine, lxv (March 1862), 346; CPPBS iii. 304:XII.4447; see Nora Crook and Stephen Allen, ‘The Marlow expurgation’, TLS (22 February 2013), pp. 14–15. 51 CPPBS iii. 288:X.4063. 52 As late as 1829, Ollier’s sheets of Laon and Cythna were being used to create copies of The Revolt of Islam (BSM viii. xvii). 53 CPPBS iii. 120:255–256; SL i. 577; CPPBS iii. 318:XII.4774–4775. 54 CPPBS iii. 319–320:XII.4805–4806, 4818, 4815, corrected from CPPBS iii. 905–906: see The Faerie Queene, I.xii.1 (‘the haven nigh at hand’) 55 SL i. 577. 56 See Chapter 23 & n17.

Chapter 18 1 PWS i. 447. 2 SL i. 566; its 1843 publisher, Thomas Rodd, claimed it to be a facsimile of an original edition of 20 copies (Thomas James Wise, A Shelley Library, 1924, p. 46); such an edition might have been in existence by 15 November 1817 (MSJ i. 184, PWS i. 447–448), nine days after the Princess’s death.

422



  Notes to pages 180 to 189 

3 The Treason Act of 1814 had removed the requirements for disembowelling and quartering; the men would be among the last in Britain to suffer judicial decapitation. 4 PWS i. 239:322, 327–333. 5 SL ii. 84; name appearing in The Examiner under ‘Ozymandias’, 11 January 1818, from Latin glis (dormouse) and Greek ἐραστής (eraste s̄ ) (lover): ‘Dormouse’ had been a pet name for MWG/MWS since 1815 (see MSL i. 12–13); adjective invented from ‘conch’, the spiral shell often inhabited by the hermit‐crab; three shells appeared on the Shelley family coat of arms and PBS termed himself ‘The Hermit of Marlow’ (PWS i. 169, 229). 6 SC v. 308; SC v. 284–288 speculates about the name’s fitness for various visitors, but the Demogorgon personage was significant: Frankenstein had recently been (anonymously) published amid speculation that PBS had written it; Hogg corrected this on 25 February 1818 to John Newton (a visitor to Marlow) while insisting that the authorship ‘is a profound secret & no more to be divulged without dread than the name of D‐m‐g‐rg‐n’ (see SC v. 502–503): MWS as author and Demogorgon being thus a possibility. 7 Eliot, ‘Shelley and Keats’, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 89. 8 SC v. 339–342, 345–347. 9 SC v. 371–372. 10 SC v. 380–381. 11 SC v. 382–383. 12 SC v. 383. 13 SC v. 388–389. 14 Diodorus Siculus (Book 1, chapter xlvii. 4), tr. Charles Henry Oldfather;Vivant Denon’s Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, tr. Arthur Aikin (1803) mentioned ‘the pedestal’ and recorded that ‘nothing’ of the statue ‘remains but a shapeless rock of granite’ (p. 93). 15 The Examiner, no. 527, 1 February 1818, p. 73. 16 BSM iii. 342–343 [em.]. 17 The Examiner, no. 524, 11 January 1818, p. 24. 18 Simon Haines, Shelley’s Poetry:The Divided Self (1997), p. 119. 19 SL i. 475. 20 At first rejected but they changed their minds; PBS apparently sent them a post‐obit certificate early in 1822 (SL ii. 373–374, Guitar 168). 21 SC viii. 1003, 1001. 22 See SC iv. 765–768, v. 478–484: the £2000 (with interest) grew over the next 27 years to a debt of £4500, which MWS did her best to evade in 1844 but eventually had to pay (SC v. 484). 23 SL ii. 226, 179, i. 541 & n., ii. 259; the ‘cabinet piano’ a saving compared to ‘a grand one’: PBS’s debt fell due in 1820; he managed to postpone payment (SL ii. 179–180, 259) and it seems unlikely that Kirkman was paid. 24 SL i. 599: Robert Madocks, agent for the owner, was unrelated to William Madocks of Tan‐yr‐allt. 25 SL ii. 177 n4, 374–375 n6. 26 Dowden ii. 120, 123–124;Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley’, Atlantic Monthly, xi. 186; see Shelley Relics 25 (Bodleian). 27 SC v. 496–497; SL ii. 163, i. 475.

423



  Notes to pages 194 to 201 

Chapter 19 1 SL ii. 8: cf. Milton, Il Penseroso: ‘And storied Windows richly dight, / Casting a dimm religious light’ (ll. 159–160). 2 SL i. 598; BLJ vi. 69. 3 E.g. CCJ 85–86, 92. 4 SL ii. 11. 5 SL ii. 16. 6 BSM iii. 166–167:1–2, 11–16. 7 MSJ i. 208; SC v. 455. 8 SC x. 1141. 9 Catherine Anne North, Lady Glenbervie (1761–1817), cited John Gisborne, MS. Abinger d. 25 f. 17; letter from Maria Gisborne to Mary Shelley, 21 June 1818 (MS. Abinger c. 45, Dep. c. 516/16). 10 SL ii. 26–27; Horace Smith to PBS, 15 June 1821, MS. Abinger c. 67 f. 9v. 11 SL i. 475, ii. 98; Ingpen 539. 12 SL ii. 20. 13 On 15 June 1821, Hogg – not knowing what PBS had already done – would advise him to translate Plato (‘unfortunately little read even by scholars’) (MS. Abinger c. 67 ff. 4–5); see BSM x. 126–127. 14 ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks’, BSM v. 106–107. 15 2016 618–619 [em. BSM xv. 4–5, 8–11]. 16 PS ii. 399:505–506 [em. BSM iii. 152–153]. 17 PS ii. 405: 599–600, 605–606 [em. BSM iii. 274–275]. 18 Bieri 4. 19 PS ii. 304:1252, 1243, 1246–1248. 20 SL ii. 198. 21 PS ii. 268; MSL i. 43. 22 PBS, Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, p. v. 23 SL ii. 199. 24 BLJ vi. 39, viii. 97, ii. 84. 25 SL ii. 35; travel from Padua to Venice using ‘a burchiello or covered boat’ took ‘eight hours’ and cost £1/8/6: a gondola from Fusina to Venice cost only about 5/‐ for the five‐mile trip but one had to pay for travel from Padua to Fusina (Thomas Martyn, A Tour through Italy. Containing full directions for travelling in that interesting country; with ample catalogues of every thing that is curious, 1791, pp. xii, 415–416). 26 BSM xv. 84–85. 27 SL ii. 36–37. 28 BLJ vi. 43, 16; today Villa De Kunkler; from April 1818 onwards LB – although having rented the Este house – was in love with Teresa Guiccioli and unwilling to spend time away from Venice or Ravenna. 29 BLJ vi. 69 (a ‘pucker’ is ‘a state of agitation’). 30 SL ii. 37, 91. 31 BLJ vi. 16–17; MSJ ii. 492:77–78.

424



  Notes to pages 202 to 211 

32 SL ii. 43; 1839 iii. 161. 33 See BSM xxii. II. 190–235 and MSJ i. 177. 34 MSJ i. 200. 35 SL ii. 4. 36 SL ii. 8; PS ii. 365–369. 37 SL ii. 39–40; BSM ix. 76–77 [I. 1–2]. 38 BSM ix. 200–201 [I. 521], ix. 204–205 [I. 538]; see Jacqueline Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 153–156. 39 PS ii. 456–468, e.g. consistently refers to it as a ‘poem’. 40 LB, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, 7 Vols. (Oxford, 1980–1993), iv. 32:35–39.

Chapter 20 1 SL ii. 36, 39; MSJ i. 224. 2 SL ii. 37. 3 SL ii. 38; MSL i. 79; SL ii. 39. 4 BLJ vi. 64. 5 1840 229; Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 Vols. (1844), ii. 79. 6 MSJ ii. 492:63–64: writing in 1823, MWS almost certainly meant PBS’s by ‘His’; SL ii. 42. 7 Christine Gallant, Shelley’s Ambivalence (1989), p. 53; Hay states that MWS ‘attributed Clara’s death directly to Shelley’s actions and to the long journey she had made’, with the consequence that PBS ‘found her distant and cold in the months that followed’ (Young Romantics, p. 156); Barbara Johnson, taking PBS’s ‘neglect of his children’ for granted, asserts that ‘Mary blamed Percy for their daughter’s death’ (A Life with Mary Shelley, Stanford, 2014, pp. 88, 90–91); White ii. 47, Seymour 215. 8 CC i. 309. 9 SC vi. 692–693; the editors of SC are unsure whether PBS wrote ‘revive’ or ‘relive’, but while PBS never used ‘relive’ in his poetic output, he used ‘revive’ (and its derivatives) regularly. 10 SL ii. 368; CC i. 309. 11 MSL i. 206; see BLJ vi. 76. 12 See Haines, Shelley’s Poetry, p. 194. 13 Nora Crook, ‘Mary Shelley’s Concealing “To—”: (Re)addressing Poems’, Wordsworth Circle, xliii (Winter 2012), 15. 14 See Jan Abram, The Language of Winnicott (1996), p. 90; SL ii. 371, 367. 15 SL ii. 242, 400; CC i. 38. 16 SL ii. 367; Hay, Young Romantics, p. 308. 17 Bieri 419: SL ii. 41: SC vi. 692–693. 18 SL ii. 241–242 (em. SC x. 962–963). 19 PS ii. 444–445.

425



  Notes to pages 211 to 222 

20 BLJ vi. 16; PBS left Venice to collect Allegra on 24 October and returned to Venice with her on 29 October; he is less likely to have taken her with him to Arquà Petrarca on the return trip. 21 PS ii. 427: it is unlikely that he rode up to that ‘highest peak’ to experience the sunrise (around seven in the morning: it would have taken him three to four hours to get from Arquà Petrarca to the summit of Monte Venda, at 601m.); scholars and critics have attempted to link particular features of the area to references in the poem (see e.g. PS ii. 440n and Bieri 420), but the ‘hoary tower’ (l. 303) may have been influenced by the ruins of the Mastio Federiciano on the Colle della Rocca on the ‘flowering island’ of Monselice, which PBS could see from the garden at Este: it is possible to see Padua and the outlines of Venice from the Colle della Rocca and PBS may have visited the Torre Ezzelino there: cf. the references to ‘Ezzelin’ – i.e. Eccelino da Romano, 1194–1259 – as the prize to be won either by Sin or Death (PS ii. 438–439:238–240): see too SC vi. 983:1078. 22 MSJ i. 25, 31, 353. 23 SL ii. 339. 24 2016 162:370–373 [em. PBS, Rosalind and Helen, p. 86]. 25 MYRS vi. 238–239. 26 PS ii. 415 n. 27 PS ii. 415 n. 28 PBS, Rosalind and Helen, p. v. MWS gave it the date ‘May, 1819’ in 1824 26, but in August 1819 PBS said it was ‘composed last year at Este’ (SL ii. 108): he did not finish it there (see PS ii. 655) but the recollection is significant. 29 SL ii. 108; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge, 2005), p. 75; Gallant, Shelley’s Ambivalence, p. 70; e.g. PS ii. 662. 30 SL ii. 108. 31 G. M. Matthews ‘established that the poem was carefully structured to contain and frame the maniac’s soliloquy’ (BSM xv. 173): see Matthews, ‘Julian and Maddalo: The Draft and the Meaning’, Studia Neophilologica, xxxv (1963), 62–63, 73. 32 2016 167:132–140 [em. BSM xv. 82–83]. 33 See e.g. Michael O’Neill and Paige Tovey, ‘Shelley and the English Tradition’, OHPBS 509, Bieri 423–325, 475–478, PS ii. 657–660; Kelvin Everest,‘Shelley’s Doubles’, SPP 682. 34 BSM xv. 71, 111. 35 BSM xv. 112–113. 36 BSM xv. 120–121. 37 See Bieri 476–477, where the Man’s regrets about his relationship are taken to be descriptions of PBS’s own ‘agonised marital situation’, so that ‘Shelley seemingly accuses Mary of wishing he had castrated himself ’ (476–477). 38 SL ii. 108 [em. SC vi. 851–852]. 39 Mariana Starke, Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent (Paris, 1826), p. 385.

Chapter 21 1 See Bieri 437–445, Med.47 i. 324–331. 2 MSJ i. 244.

426



  Notes to pages 223 to 228 

3 The European Magazine, lxxx (October 1821), 361. 4 SL ii. 63. 5 SL ii. 73; PS iii. 632; cf. ‘And even the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body’, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, ll. 45–47. 6 Michael Rossington, ‘Claire Clairmont’s fair copy of Shelley’s “Ode to Naples”: a rediscovered manuscript’, Review of English Studies n.s. lvi (2005), 68: the asterisk identifies the ‘City’ as ‘Pompeii’. 7 1839 iii. 162; SL ii. 76: chiefly sulphate of soda, with a small mixture of common salt ; Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody, p. 113; 1839 iii. 162. 8 MSL i. 206. 9 MSL i. 86; SL ii. 76. 10 1839 iii. 162. 11 ‘Ode’, Poems, in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, 271:9; SL i. 432. 12 BSM iii. 164–165; PS ii. 367–369, 446–447. 13 SL ii. 288. 14 SL ii. 64; 1839 iii. 162–163. 15 1839 iii. 162. 16 SL ii. 269, 246; notebook e. 11 (BSM xv). 17 It was in Naples late in February that PBS met Charles MacFarlane (1799–1858) who described him in Reminiscences of a Literary Life, written around 1855; the progress of MWS’s pregnancies is always recorded in her diary and no such records exist for such a pregnancy. See note 27. 18 CC ii. 645. 19 The profession is inscribed in one case as ‘caciolio’, in the other as ‘casolio’: both men had presumably been asked ‘E tu, che mestiere?’ or ‘che cosa fai?’ and answered ‘cacio e olio’, i.e. ‘cheese and oil’. 20 SL ii. 319; more than 60 years ago, Ursula Orange asserted the ‘possibility’ that the child was the daughter of Elise and PBS (K‐SMB, vi, 1955, 34); in 2015 Charlotte Gordon suggested Elise as mother and LB as father (Romantic Outlaws, pp. 297–298). 21 As MWS wrote at length about Elise’s wickedness in telling such stories, without saying that Elise was guilty of the offence of which she was accusing others, we can be confident that MWS did not think her the baby’s mother (MWS had her examined for a pregnancy in December 1818 or January 1819: see MSL i. 206). 22 A code for adoption was produced for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1819, but its complexity ‘tended to make its use impracticable’ (Joseph W. McKnight, ‘The Shifting Focus of Adoption’, Critical Studies in Ancient Law, Comparative Law and Legal History: Essays in Honour of Alan Watson, ed. John Cairns Jr. and Olivia Robinson, 2001, p. 325): adoption remained only ‘an occasional legal ruse’ (323) and even children in institutions could not be adopted unless the institution ‘had acquired the parental power to relinquish a child for adoption’ (323). 23 A couple could support an abandoned and nameless child by registering its birth and giving it their name; Elena Adelaide Shelley was registered as born at the Shelleys’ Naples home, 250 Riviera di Chiaia: the Shelleys’ name was the foster parents’ assurance that the expense and responsibility they were taking on would be worthwhile, and that financial support would continue, but the girl’s status meant that she could be removed from them

427



  Notes to pages 228 to 235 

if ever the legal parents believed she could or should be cared for elsewhere: in June 1820 PBS expected to have ‘my Neapolitan…come as soon as she recovers’ from her illness (SL ii. 208) – they would have taken her in to educate her, as they had Polly Rose in Marlow – but she died before she could be brought to Livorno. 24 SL ii. 175–176. 25 SL ii. 206, 208, 211. 26 MSJ i. 249; Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), unchanged in the revised 1785 6th ed. 27 MWS may have learned from pregnancies in July 1814 and April 1815 that she conceived easily; her subsequent pregnancies (Clara born September 1817, Percy born November 1819, her miscarriage at 3–4 months in June 1822) were probably planned: ‘Not only did she never have more than two children at any one time but she appears, with one exception, to have tried to maintain that number at two and to space them out at least a year apart. When a child dies, it is replaced a few months later—with the exception of the two‐year interval 1820–1821.That interval is occupied by her researching and writing her lengthy historical novel Valperga. Only when Valperga has been shipped off to find a publisher does she become pregnant again’ (Nora Crook, ‘Pecksie and the Elf: Did the Shelleys Couple Romantically?’, Romanticism on the Net, Numéro 18, May 2000).

Chapter 22 1 See 1839 ii. 273–274. 2 Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, New Jersey, 1970), p. xi: see p. 204 for the portrait; SL ii. 89. 3 SL ii. 92. 4 National Portrait Gallery (NPG 1271); Guitar 193; see Peck facing 440. 5 SL ii. 104. 6 MSJ i. 101, 100, ii. 465; SL ii. 97. 7 MSL i. 102, CCJ 114: the house (Via Filippo Venuti 23, Livorno) with a plaque recording the Shelleys’ residence June–September 1819 is not near Monte Nero, and the Villa Valsovano as photographed by William Hall Griffin (d. 1907) in the 1890s (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen, 2 Vols., 1909, ii. facing 694, SC vi. 856) is a different building; 1840 159. 8 PS ii. 709:1–9 [em. BSM xviii. 216–217]. 9 BSM xviii. 216–217 [em.]. 10 SC x. 1141; MSL i. 106; 1839 ii. 276. 11 SL ii. 189 (MS damaged). 12 William Gell, Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott’s Residence in Italy 1832, ed. James C. Corson (1957), p. 30; SL ii. 126; SC x. 1142; MSL i. 106. 13 1839 ii. 279; Fraser’s lvii. 658; SL ii. 181. 14 Fraser’s lxi. 105: there was a private performance in London in 1886. 15 SL i. 90.

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  Notes to pages 235 to 245 

16 Gallant, Shelley’s Ambivalence, p. 11; CPPBS iii. 120:256–257. 17 Hamlet IV. v. 18 2016 296:II.i.124–128 [em. Cenci 26]. 19 2016 283:I.i.140–144 [em. Cenci 8]. 20 Macbeth II. i.; 2016 297:II.i.181 [em. Cenci 28] & Macbeth I. v. 21 2016 298:II.i.192–193 & Macbeth II. ii. 22 2016 323:IV.i.142–143 & King Lear I. iv; 2016 321:IV.i.92 & King Lear II. iv. 23 2016 327:IV.iii.5–6 & Macbeth V. I; 2016 352:V.iv.56 & King Lear I. v. 24 SL ii. 198. 25 Cenci 99 [V. iv. 48–59]; cf. Measure for Measure III. i. (the parallel was pointed out in F. R. Leavis, Revaluation:Tradition & Development in English Poetry, 1936, pp. 225–227. 26 2016 353:V.iv.72–73; cf. Hamlet III. i. 27 2016 355:V.iv.159–165 [em. Cenci 103]. 28 SL ii. 102. 29 SL ii. 189 [MS damaged].

Chapter 23 1 MYRS iv. 392–393 [1840 127]. 2 Rhododaphne: Or,The Thessalian Spell. A Poem (1818), pp. 179–81. 3 Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (Princeton, 1981), p. 222. 4 Lucan’s Pharsalia, tr. into Engl. verse by N. Rowe (1718), p. 270. 5 See G. M. Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, ELH, xxiv, 3 (September 1957), 220–228. 6 Paradise Lost, I. 63. 7 PE 6. 8 E. g. Barbara C. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York and Oxford, 1992), p. 211. 9 Michael O’Neill (Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life, 1989, p. 81) compares the lines in the speech about ‘the links of the great chain of things’ which ‘Sway and drag heavily’ (2016 230:II.iv.20–22) with PBS’s observation of convicts ‘heavily ironed’ in Rome in April 1819 (SL ii. 93). 10 Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, p. 263. 11 SL ii. 94, 103, 108, 111, 120. 12 SL ii. 164, SC vi. 1098–1099; 1839 ii. 132; the first three Acts were dispatched by ship in mid‐December; the fourth Act may have arrived first, at the start of January 1820. 13 The System of the World, 2 Vols., tr. J. Pond (1809), ii. 63–65. 14 Cf. Paradise Lost I. 94–96:‘yet not for those / Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage / Can else inflict, do I repent or change’; 2016 272:570–578 [em. BSM ix.142–143, 146–147]. 15 SL ii. 96: though written in August, the Dedication would be given the date ‘May 29, 1819’: PBS may have been recalling the last days when William appeared to be getting better; ‘incidental’ not in the sense of ‘accidentally’ part of but ‘liable to happen to’ (OED 2.). 16 SL ii. 96; SL i. 98.

429



  Notes to pages 246 to 253 

17 PS iii. 565; SL ii. 31. 18 It has been stated that PBS saw the review on ‘going one day into Delesert’s reading‐ room’ (Rogers 217) at Florence; Medwin wrote that PBS was seen reading it there by ‘A friend of mine’ (Med.47 i. 358–359), i.e. Henry Augustus Dillon‐Lee, 13th Viscount Dillon (1777–1832): although Delesert’s establishment (‘Delesseau’ in Medwin’s The Angler in Wales, 1834, ii. 190) has been taken for granted for a century and a half (e.g. Dowden ii. 300,White ii. 155, SC iii. 153 n2), the name enlarged into ‘Delesert’s English Library’ (Holmes 543; Gordon, Romantic Outlaws, p. 329) and even into ‘Delesert’s English lending library’ (Bieri 494), no such place apparently existed: Medwin was recollecting a Florentine library with a French name,Vieusseux’s Gabinetto Scientifico e Letterario in the Palazzo Buondelmonti, which from December 1819 offered books and periodicals (including the Edinburgh Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Monthly Review) to an international clientele. 19 Hearth 142. 20 SL ii. 128, 134. 21 Haines, Shelley’s Poetry, p. 194.

Chapter 24 1 SL ii. 117 & n8. 2 MYRS iv. 42–43. 3 SL ii. 117; Cenci 38; King Lear II. iv.; SL ii. 116. 4 SL ii. 152, OED 2. 5 Fairburn’s Edition of the Trial of Sir F. Burdett, on a Charge of a seditious libel against his Majesty’s Government; including The Defence at full length (n.d. [1820]), pp. 5, 3. 6 It was ‘with tears’ that he acknowledged George III’s illness in 1804 (Lord Grey to Mrs Grey, 4 June 1804, Grey MSS, Durham University Library) and cf. Charles Abbot’s memory of him as Attorney General, ‘too much inclined to draw the whole debate into a question about the vindication of his own conduct. One night…he was in tears upon this topic’ (The Diary and Correspondence of Charles Abbot, 1861, i. 22). 7 Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, 1997), p. 195. 8 [John Watkins], Memoirs of the life and writings of the Right Honourable Lord Byron, with anecdotes of some of his contemporaries (1822), pp. 410–411. 9 OED 2. 10 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ (1919), ll. 4–5; i.e. ‘Ode to Liberty’ 427:129 (1820), ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’ 470:13 (1820–1821), ‘Prologue to Hellas’, l. 156 (1821), Hellas 524:268, 546:990 (1821), Translation of Magico Prodigioso, iii. 2 (1822), ‘The Triumph of Life’ 579:285 (1822). 11 PBS originally supplied no title; he wrote but deleted ‘A Mad ——’ in the final draft, (BSM xviii. 218–219); MWS first entitled it ‘England in 1820’ but in 1839 supplied ‘England in 1819’ (iii. 193). 12 First appearance 1792 (Jean‐Gabriel Peltier, Dernier tableau de Paris, 2 Vols., Londres, 1792, ii. 245), first appearance in English 1793 (Authentic trial at large of Marie Antoinette, late

430



  Notes to pages 253 to 259 

Queen of France, Before the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris, on Tuesday, October 15, 1793, 1793, p. 15); not ‘in the 1780s’ (PS iv. 269). 13 PS ii. 355:30. 14 SL ii. 167. It first appeared in print in 1839. 15 Leavis, Revaluation, p. 228; The Faerie Queene I. i. stanza 37:332: ‘Prince of darknesse and dead night’; BSM xviii. 214–215 (em.). 16 PS iii. 192 n13. 17 Hearth 270; Leavis, Revaluation, p. 206. 18 SL ii. 198. 19 PS iii. 161:1–9 [em. MYRS iv. 362–363]. PS prints ‘polymor[phic]’: MWS read ‘polymorphian’ (Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s Fair Copy Book, Bodleian MS. Shelley Adds. d. 9, ed. Irving Massey, Montreal, 1969, pp. 180–181); PBS  –  if using that form – would probably have spelled it ‘polymorphean’. 20 SL ii. 66; PBS certainly knew Peacock’s poem Sir Proteus (1814), an attack on Southey, dedicated to LB. 21 PS iii. 274:24; SL ii. 452; BLJ vi. 76. 22 PS iii. 275:31, 35. 23 BSM i. 50–51; PS iii. 137:583n. 24 PS iii. 275:37, 276 n49. 25 PS iii. 276:50–51, 45–49. 26 SL ii. 230–231, 233. 27 PS iii. 276:55, 276:43. 28 Gisborne 158; SL ii. 114; CC ii. 658.

Chapter 25 1 MSL i. 107. 2 SL ii. 121. 3 Starke, Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent, p. 373; SL ii. 180. 4 SL ii. 336, 180. 5 William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca and London, 1985), 91:556– 560; in 1820 – although believing the stanza ‘one of the most imaginative in the whole piece’  –  Wordsworth removed it, so as ‘not to offend the pious’ (William Wordsworth: The  Critical Heritage, Volume I, 1793–1820, ed. Robert Woof, London and New York, 2001, pp. 653, 689, 1024; Robinson i. 98; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, III [IV], The Later Years, Pt. I, 1821–1828, 1978, 646). 6 William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, ed. Woof, p. 909 (according to Medwin, LB thought the stanza ‘inimitably good’); Shaver and Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library, p. 234. 7 SL i. 208. 8 PBS may have read the extract at Eton in The Friend no. 11 (26 October 1809) (see Chapter 13 note 12); he remembered it as ‘this world which is…—the world of all of us, and where / We find our happiness, or not at all’ (2016 370–371); Seamus Perry, ‘Against the Same‐Old Same‐Old’, TLS (3 November 2016), p. 32.

431



  Notes to pages 260 to 269 

9 Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl Ketcham (Ithaca and London, 1989), 188:282. 10 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, Mary Moorman, Alan Hill et al., 8 Vols. (Oxford, 1967–1993), iii. 508. 11 PS iii. 158:3–5. 12 BSM vii. 44–45; PS iii. 134 n. 13 ‘Great Men have been among us’, Poems, in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, 166:13, 8. 14 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria i. 80. 15 SL ii. 135, 189. 16 SL ii. 135. 17 SL ii. 132. 18 Goethe, ‘Natur und Kunst’, ll. 12–14 [‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, / Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben’]; SC vii. 152. 19 Orlando Furioso: translated from the Italian of Lodovico Ariosto; with notes: by John Hoole (1783), I. lxvi; William Hayley, An essay on epic poetry; in five epistles to the Revd. Mr. Mason. With notes (1782), p. 173; LB, ‘Preface’ to ‘The Prophecy of Dante’, Marino Faliero (1821), p. 214; BLJ vii. 58. 20 MYRS vi. 366. 21 MYRS vi. 364–367. 22 PS iii. 197:19–20 [em. MYRS vi. 322–323]. 23 PS iii. 212 n. 24 Hearth 143–150; SL ii. 148, 169. 25 SL ii. 136. 26 SL ii. 150; Angeli, Shelley and his Friends in Italy, p. 96. 27 MSL i. 122; Angeli, Shelley and his Friends in Italy, p. 101. 28 MSL i. 118 29 Bieri 504; Wroe, Being Shelley, pp. 83, 79, 217. 30 Margaret Mason (1773–1835), née King; from 1791 Countess Mount Cashell, protégée of Mary Wollstonecraft; lived with George Tighe, took the name of Mason. 31 MSL i. 122; Sophia Stacey heard of the old carriage in December 1819; the Shelleys probably sold it before leaving Florence. 32 SL ii. 339.

Chapter 26 1 SL ii. 201, 164. 2 E.g. SC vi. 973:516–531. 3 SC vi. 1002:2004–2007, 2010–2012; 1051:4251–4252, 4258–4260. 4 SC vi. 994–995:1578–1580, 1580–1581, 1594–1596. 5 SC vi. 997: 1708–1710, 1712–1713, 1719–1721. 6 SC vi. 1046:4031–4032; Hearth 270. 7 Cf. Timothy Webb, ‘Scratching at the Door of Absence: Writing and Reading “Letter to Maria Gisborne”’, The Unfamiliar Shelley, pp. 119–136.

432



  Notes to pages 269 to 280 

8 SL ii. 119; Margaret Mason to MWS, 21 December 1819 (MS. Abinger c. 45, Dep. c. 517/2); SL ii. 114. 9 See SC ix. 286–287 n7; Timothy Webb, ‘An Uncelebrated Facility’, The Neglected Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: 2015), p. 32; SL ii. 158. 10 SL ii. 176. 11 MSL i. 131, 136. 12 Marion Kingston Stocking and David M. Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi (1980), 2–3. 13 BLJ vii. 174. 14 CCJ 153; MWL ii. 271. 15 CC i. 145. 16 1839 iv. 50. 17 2016 435–436:13, 46, 48–50; ‘unbeholden’ (to rhyme with ‘golden’) is PBS’s invention (for ‘unbeheld’). 18 Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, ed. Curtis, 117:12; 2016 437:103. 19 BSM v. 206–207. 20 2016 435: 16–20, 22, 26–27 [em. MYRS v. 95–96]. 21 2016 437:103–105 [em. MYRS v. 100, which shows PBS twice using ‘should’ in his MS]. 22 PS ii. 415–417; 1839 iv. 52–53. 23 1839 i. 375, iv. 53; Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open, p. 58. 24 MSL i. 125; cf. 1839 iv. 50; Stocking and Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi, 2. 25 MSL i. 155, 206. 26 SL ii. 211. 27 Coleridge was told – perhaps by John or Maria Gisborne – that PBS, late in life, ‘had in those moments, when his spirit was left to prey inwards, expressed a wish, amounting to anxiety, to commune with me, as the one only being who could resolve or allay the doubts and anxieties that pressed upon his mind’ (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs, vi. 850n): ‘to prey inwards’ suggesting how a baneful influence makes inroads into, and is sustained by, what it devours. 28 SL ii. 207. 29 1840 324. 30 MSL i. 154 31 MSL i. 167; SL ii. 243. 32 Gisborne 38, 43, 45, 47–48, 39, 42. 33 SL ii. 296; SC x. 1145, SL ii. 243. 34 SC x. 1144; SL ii. 288, 435; OED.

Chapter 27 1 O’Neill, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life, p. 134. 2 MSJ i. 328–329 (he had had the idea of climbing it since July 1818 – MSL i. 74): assisting  MWS’s most recent literary project, her novel Valperga, may have been a motive

433



  Notes to pages 281 to 289 

(PS iii. 552–553); 1839 iv. 51. On 12 August he must have used coach or horse transport for the 44 km from Lucca up to Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, there joining the pilgrims going on foot to the shrine (and guest‐house) at the summit of San Pellegrino, 30 km away: on Sunday 13th he not only retraced his journey but got back to San Giuliano, another 14 km down the road. 3 1839 iv. 51 [1840 278]; 2016 448:4, dedication; cf. Dr Johnson declaring that Paradise Lost lacked ‘human interest’ (The Lives of the most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 Vols., Oxford, 2006, i. 290). 4 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Visionary Rhyme’, OHPBS 360 & n4. 5 2016 466–467:598–599, 602, 609–614 [em. BSM iv. I. 148–149]. 6 SL ii. 269. 7 1840 191; MWS identified the ‘Ode’ read aloud as PBS’s ‘Ode to Liberty’, but the new ‘Ode to Naples’ was more likely. 8 PS iii. 659 n; 1840 191. 9 MSL i. 156. 10 SL ii. 218. 11 PS iii. 699:II.i.147–152. 12 PS iii. 659, 704:II.ii.35–36. 13 PS iii. 691–692:II.i.1, 23–25; 704:II.ii.40–41]. 14 PS iii. 666:I.i.65–67, 55–56, 692:II.i.25–30, 695:II.i.73. 15 PS iii. 709:II.ii.115. 16 PS iii. 654 [em. Wise, A Shelley Library, facing p. 57]; PS iii. 660:I.i.3–4; PS iii. 651. 17 SL ii. 213–214. 18 Hearth 231. 19 2016 427:1–2: ‘Vibrates’ follows seventeenth‐century usage, meaning ‘launch or hurl’ (OED 7). 20 2016 434:277, 281–285: although ‘drowner’ had existed from the sixteenth century, PBS appears to have been the first to mean ‘One who suffers drowning’, previous users meaning either ‘that which drowns’ (OED 1.) or one who drowns others (e.g. Cobbett, A Bloody Buoy, 1797, p. 19). 21 For careful disagreements about the dating and the poem’s attitudes to the ‘herd’, see Michael Rossington, ‘Shelley’s Neapolitan‐Tuscan poetics: “Sonnet: Political Greatness” and the “Republic” of Benevento’, The Unfamiliar Shelley, pp. 137–156; the uprising in Benevento started on 15 July 1820. 22 BSM vi. 398–399. 23 See BSM vi. 396–397; BSM xxii. II. 318–319. 24 BSM xxii. II. 318–319. 25 Stocking and Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi, 3. 26 BLJ viii. 99; SL ii. 266. 27 CCJ 190. 28 CCJ 207–208; SL ii. 266; PS iii. 621. 29 See PS iii. 379–387. 30 SL ii. 266–267.

434



  Notes to pages 289 to 299 

31 SL ii. 290–291. 32 BLJ ix. 81; see PS iv. 374–375: SPP 475 n2 claims that ‘the Italian bischelli’ means ‘a small snake’: there is no such word, but ‘biscelle’ sufficiently expresses ‘Bysshe Shelley’.

Chapter 28 1 Med.47 ii. 2; MSL i. 166. 2 1839 iv. 53–54; MSL i. 180. 3 ‘Teresa’ here is Teresa Emilia Viviani and ‘Emilia’ the person to whom MWS and PBS referred in their letters, ‘Emily’ the heroine of Epipsychidion. 4 MSL i. 163, 165; see 2016 474, PS iv. 120 and Enrica Viviani della Robbia, Vita di Una Donna (Florence, 1936), p. 98. 5 The passage cited in SL ii. 449 as ‘Letter 4’ is the translation: see PS iv. 120. 6 BSM vi. 172–173. 7 BSM xiv. 38–39; the draft may date from February, when we know that PBS was trying to persuade CC, then in Florence, to get a formal Petition from Teresa presented to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany (see SL ii. 267), but the ‘(woman) friend’ is more likely to have been Margaret Mason. 8 ‘Venerdi sera’ [Friday evening], Abinger c. 67 f. 13v. 9 Viviani della Robbia, Vita di Una Donna, p. 81. 10 SL ii. 254, 347. 11 PS iv. 49 [em. BSM vi. 122–123]; Bieri 552. 12 Gallant, Shelley’s Ambivalence, p. 49; Hay, Young Romantics, p. 205; Julian Roach, Shelley’s Boat (York, 2005), p. 29; Bieri 552. 13 SL ii. 276, 256. 14 SL ii. 288, 292;Viviani della Robbia, Vita di Una Donna, pp. 131–132. 15 MSL i. 223; Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge, 1986), p. 11. 16 SL ii. 347; MSL i. 223. Medwin says she was married ‘for six years’, i.e. until 1827–1828 (Med.47 ii. 79); Feldman and Scott‐Kilvert state that she left her husband in 1826 (MSJ ii. 596); when Medwin saw her in the late 1820s or early 1830s, he ‘could scarcely recognise a trace of the once beautiful Emilia’ (Med.47 ii. 79). 17 BSM iv. II. 29. 18 Cf. PWS i. 261:580–581; PBS cites Francis Bacon and his ‘idola specus’ (‘idols of the cave’). 19 Viviani della Robbia, Vita di una Donna, p. 98; Med.47 ii. 67. 20 SL ii. 398. 21 Hearth 277, 282. 22 SL ii. 434. 23 PS ii. 52. 24 BSM xiii. 228–2231; 2016 149:51–53. 25 PS iv. 210:37–38, iv. 175:16; 2016 479:158. 26 CC opined that PBS ‘was a lover of hers’, but – although sometimes accepted by modern biographers (e.g. Bieri 551) – such opinions belong to CC’s angry and jealous old age and are not to be trusted: Rossetti told Richard Garnett in 1869 that, in a letter to PBS,

435



  Notes to pages 299 to 309 

Teresa Viviani addressed him as ‘sposo adorato’ (Letters about Shelley: interchanged by three friends  –  Edward Dowden, Richard Garnett and Wm. Michael Rossetti, ed. R. S. Garnett (1917), pp. 28–29) but she may have meant not that he was a husband to her, but that he was an adored husband to MWS. 27 PS iv. 118; Sylva Norman, Flight of the Skylark: The Development of Shelley’s Reputation (1954), p. 46. 28 SL ii. 363. 29 Christopher Goulding, ‘An Unpublished Shelley Letter’, Review of English Studies, lii (May, 2001), 234. 30 SL ii. 363, 332, 398. 31 SL ii. 262–263. 32 SL ii. 434; OED 2.a., 2b; in 1820, LB would ask, in Don Juan, ‘Why don’t they knead two virtuous souls for life / Into that moral centaur, man and wife?’ (v. 158).

Chapter 29 1 Olliers Literary Miscellany in Prose and Verse, pp. 197–198, 200. 2 BSM iv. II. 120–121. 3 SC vi. 993:1474–1475; Christopher Hitchens, ‘Foreword’, The Romantic Poets: Percy Bysshe Shelley (n.p. [2010]), p. 6. 4 Ollier’s Literary Miscellany in Prose and Verse, pp. 196, 198. 5 2016 676, 677, 675; Milton’s Samson Agonistes (‘Hid in her vacant interlunar cave’, l. 89) influenced all subsequent references to the moon between the old and new, but PBS’s word was his own invention. 6 SL ii. 262, 289, 331; Med.47 ii. 6; SL ii. 368; PBS inscribed ‘write &’ where he probably intended ‘write in’. 7 SL ii. 364, 439; Benjamin Robert Haydon, Correspondence and Table‐Talk, ed. F.W. Haydon, 3 Vols. (1876), ii. 290–291 (Haydon noted: ‘I put this down within two minutes of Gisborne leaving me, because I think it is important’). 8 Hearth 55–56. 9 The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Bornand, p. 177. 10 MSL i. 180; SL ii. 292, 296, 324, 376. 11 MSL i. 221; Med.47 ii. 239; MSL i. 221, 223. 12 See Chapter 36 and note 5. 13 BSM xii. li. 14 PS iv. 365–366:99–101, 104–105, 117, 364:87–88: MWS omitted in 1824 the description of the men getting the boat ready for its journey: it may have reminded her of the events of July 1822 or she may not have thought it sufficiently poetic; SC x. 1149. 15 PS iv. 345–347. 16 MSJ i. 367. 17 SL ii. 221, 222. 18 SL ii. 268. 19 John Keats, Lamia, Isabella,The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), p. 110. 20 SL ii. 299, 434, 355, 330, 374, 294.

436



  Notes to pages 309 to 318 

21 Michael O’Neill, ‘Shelley’s Pronouns’, OHPBS 399; see PS iv. 282:140–142; PS iv. 248. 22 SL ii. 355; Med.47 ii. 46; Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open, p. 9. 23 Quarterly Review, xix (April 1818), 204–205 [issued September 1818]. 24 SL ii. 117; Quarterly Review, xix (April 1818), 204. 25 SL ii. 117, 221, 252–253. 26 2016 492: the reviewer in the Quarterly Review, xix (April 1818), 204–208 was anonymous (actually John Wilson Croker, 1780–1857, though PBS never knew his identity). 27 SL ii. 297. 28 PS iv. 253. 29 SL ii. 253. 30 PS iv. 248–249. 31 O’Neill, ‘Shelley’s Pronouns’, OHPBS 400. 32 Edward Williams to Trelawny, April 1821, Trel.58 13; SL ii. 368. 33 It is not included in SPP, SMW or 2016, nor is it referred to in OHPBS. 34 BSM xix. 310–311; see Nora Crook, ‘“Casualty”, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel’, Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality, ed. Graham Allan, Carrie Griffin and Mary O’Connell (2008), 66.

Chapter 30 1 SL ii. 318 n5; a search of the records of the Ospedale Annunziata (‘the only foundling hospital in Naples at the time Shelley was there’) confirmed ‘that no child was deposited there or withdrawn by Shelley’ (CCJ 97 n7). 2 Todd concludes that the Naples baby ‘may have been Shelley’s…by Claire’ and that – separated from her in 1821  –  Shelley was ‘pining for Claire’ (Death & the Maidens, pp. 257–258). 3 Bieri 419; SL ii. 76, 82. 4 BLJ vii. 191, viii. 98. 5 Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt:The First Modern Man (2008), pp. 208–209. 6 Hearth 272 (em. [William Hazlitt], Table‐Talk IX: ‘On People of Sense’, London Magazine, iii, April 1821, 370). 7 Hearth 271. 8 Robinson i. 212. 9 Stocking and Stocking,‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi, 2. 10 SL ii. 213. 11 BLJ vii. 191. 12 MSL i. 183; SL ii. 292 (the ‘a’ missing before ‘person’ is most likely an error but possibly mimicry of Mavrokordatos’ English); MS. Abinger c. 45, f. 92. 13 MSL i. 182; SL ii. 297. 14 E. 7: see BSM xvi. 245 (the item immediately follows his inscription of ‘Unfathomable Sea’). 15 BSM xvi. 244–245 [em.]: ‘Arethuse’ is Milton’s version in Lycidas (1637), l. 85. 16 The Tempest IV. i. 156–157. 17 BSM xvi. 197; SL ii. 406; Trelawny, late in life, also reported hearing PBS say ‘Mine is a life of failures’ (Trel.78 131).

437



  Notes to pages 319 to 327 

18 SL ii. 330–331. 19 See SL ii. 344; PBS told LH that the idea was LB’s (‘He proposes that…’). 20 SL ii. 344. 21 SL ii. 323. 22 SL ii. 324, 331. 23 Trel.58 15; Gisborne 159; Hogg i. 18; Med.47 ii. 143; Gisborne 116; a Tuscan coin worth around 2 shillings, the size of a half‐crown.

Chapter 31 1 SL ii. 302–303. 2 Viviani della Robbia, Vita di Una Donna, p. 81; SL ii. 331; Med.47 ii. 6. 3 ‘One word is too often profaned’ is probably not addressed to Jane: MWS included it in 1824, where she gave it the title ‘To ———’ (200), but there is no title in her transcript (BSM ii. 32–33), and modern scholarship links it with the previous item in her notebook, the ‘Unfinished Drama’ which PBS was drafting in the spring of 1822 (see 2016 844). 4 That title should be in square brackets, being the invention of an editor (this biography has adopted the poem’s first words): it is not included in the index to OHPBS, though cited and quoted (57): the draft is much concerned with the moon and its presence in the sky until dawn, there having been such a moon 28 May–11 June and then again 27 June–11 July 1822: see MYRS viii. 351–353. 5 PS iv. 48; SL ii. 427. 6 2016 565:11–12, 13; MSL i. 298 n8. 7 2016 559:55–56 (em. MYRS viii. 412–413). 8 Guitar 178; Bieri 620. 9 MSJ i. 377 [em. Guitar 163]. 10 G. M. Matthews, ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, Review of English Studies, xii, no. 45 (1961), 46; Bryan Shelley, Shelley and Scripture (Oxford, 1994), p. 145. 11 SL ii. 416, 242 (em. SC x. 962); BSM vi. 170–171 [‘per essere forse un reciproco sollievo’]. 12 SL ii. 374. 13 BSM i. 214–215; MYRS viii. 436–437. 14 Seymour 324; PS iii. 348:1, 7; Trel.78 55; BSM xii. 344–345; Wise, A Shelley Library, ­facing p. 154; see too p. 24; Gisborne 165; the quarrel had been over what was believed to be PBS’s heart: Trelawny had given it to LH but MWS believed it should be hers and eventually LH gave it to her. The item was almost certainly the liver: in cremation, ‘The heart, being hollow and smaller, is easily destroyed; but the liver, a moist and solid mass, repels intense heat, and ultimately deposits an ash of pure carbon, which no continued burning or increase of temperature can further change’: the human liver can thus ‘remain almost intact after the heart has totally disappeared’ (A. S. Bicknell,‘The “Cor Cordium”’, The Athenaeum, no. 3009, 27 June 1885, p. 823). 15 Hekla, snow shrouded, is an extremely active Icelandic volcano and LH believed it had erupted in the winter of 1821 (see The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, rev. ed., p. 262); 2016 557:9. 16 See Cian Duffy, ‘Percy Shelley’s “Unfinished Drama” and the Problem of the Jane Williams Poems’, European Romantic Review, xxvi, 615–632.

438



  Notes to pages 327 to 337 

17 SL ii. 373–374. 18 MYRS viii. 413. 19 SL ii. 387, 384. 20 The language of ‘Magnetism’ and ‘animal magnetism’ was available from the 1780s, and ‘mesmerism’ from the early 1800s; ‘hypnotism’ only from the early 1840s. 21 MYRS viii. 436–437, 433–434; the sheet folded as described made sense of the ‘secrecy’ specified in PBS’s message (436–437). 22 2016 566:37–41, 565:26–27, 34 (em. MYRS viii. 400–401). 23 SL ii. 404; MYRS viii. 401:44–47; ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l. 173. 24 The guitar and box (Bodleian) were made in Pisa in ?1817 (Guitar 176); another guitar, also with box (Pforzheimer), made in Naples in 1817, may have belonged to CC. 25 BSM xix. 204–205; 2016 566:1–12. 26 MYRS vii. 272–273. 27 BSM xii. 346–347, 328–331. 28 MYRS vii. 268–269, 270–273, 278–279 [em.]. 29 Peck described ‘an unpublished letter’ from PBS to LB admitting to ‘the actual fulfillment of passion’ with Jane ‘one evening, after an Italian festa which they together had attended’ (Peck ii. 199): Peck could however neither produce PBS’s letter nor state where he had seen it (White ii. 626–627). 30 Trel.58 20–21. 31 MYRS vii. 250–251; Rogers 303; Shelley Memorials, ed. Jane Shelley, p. 193. 32 Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), p. 29; SL ii. 363.

Chapter 32 1 SL ii. 373, 390,‘expatriation’ being ‘The banishing of a person from his own country’ (OED). 2 SL ii. 391, 392. 3 I.e. ‘the people by whom he is surrounded’ (CC i. 172); LB had e.g. told Hoppner that CC had been ‘living with [i.e. sleeping with] a man & his wife…having planted a child in the N foundling &c.’ (CC i. 165). 4 SL ii. 393, 399, 434. 5 CC i. 169 6 SL ii. 376. 7 Nora Crook, ‘“Charles the First” and the “Unfinished Drama”’, The Unfamiliar Shelley, p. 311; SL ii. 373. 8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl R.Woodring, 2 Vols. (London and Princeton, 1990), i. 343; BSM xix. 90–91. 9 Trel.58 16 (‘Spezzia’ for ‘Spezia’ being common at the time); Gisborne 132–141. 10 Trel.58 16; Shelley Memorials, ed. Jane Shelley, p. 179. 11 Trel.Letters 20; SL ii. 435; SL ii. 324. 12 Gisborne 125; MSL i. 248; Donald B. Prell, ‘The Sinking of the “Don Juan” Revisited’, K‐SJ, lvi (2007), 150–151; Joseph A. Dane, ‘A Nautical Perspective on the Sinking of the “Don Juan”’, K‐SJ, xlvii (1998), 79–81. It has been affirmed that Roberts’s drawing of

439



  Notes to pages 337 to 342 

the bay at San Terenzo, showing the Villa Magni, also shows the ‘Don Juan’ (Bieri 634, Shelley’s Ghost, p. 93), but the boat in the drawing is decked for almost its entire length (as is shown by a dog walking on it). It might, however, represent the boat Roberts wished he had constructed. 13 SL ii. 438, 398. 14 BLJ ix. 147; SL ii. 429 [citing Luke xvi. 26: ‘Between us and you there is a great gulph fixed’]; SL ii. 323. 15 Cf. Williams’s journal for 3 May: ‘Went to Lerici with S being obliged to market there, the servant having returned from Sarzana without being able to procure anything’ (Gisborne 146). 16 Trel.58 91, 170:‘splatchy’ means ‘marked or coloured in a splashy manner’ (OED); 1839 iv. 229. 17 Gisborne 146. 18 See MSL i. 244; there were three individual rooms (the biggest with its own staircase) on the first floor, with the saloon between them: MWS had the biggest, overlooking the terrace (CC probably shared with her at first), PBS the other room overlooking the terrace, Jane and Williams the third, at the back: the children must have been up in the attic rooms with tiny windows, under the roof, with the servants; Gisborne 146. 19 SL ii. 416, 427, 430. 20 Gisborne 126. 21 SL ii. 422. 22 Gisborne 148: ‘fetch up’ has the nautical meanings of ‘come up with, overtake’ and ‘reach’ (OED 21.g & h): PBS is learning a new idiom. 23 Trel.58 104; SL ii. 440. 24 MSL i. 237; SL i. 427 (it was nearly nine‐and‐a‐half years since he had incurred what he believed to have been physical damage at Tan‐yr‐allt); Jane Williams, in old age, recalled ‘his suffering from spasms, but not in any very frequent or alarming degree’ (Rossetti, ‘Talks with Trelawny’, The Athenaeum 29 July 1882, p. 145). 25 SL ii. 420; MYRS vii. 269, 246; Gisborne 152. 26 MSL i. 244; SL ii. 435–436. 27 SL ii. 443; Jane to MWS 22, 26 December 1822, MS. Abinger c. 46 ff. 22–23: Bieri assigns the poem ‘possibly’ to 1819, following Angeli, Shelley and his Friends in Italy, p. 98; but see BSM xvi. lii–liii and MYRS viii. 331, 336. Jane may have sung the words to the music of Mozart’s ‘Ah perdona al primo affetto’ from La Clemenza di Tito (1791): see Jessica K. Quillin, Shelley and the Musico‐Poetics of Romanticism (2012), pp. 140–142.The poem’s reference to the ‘champak odours’ (l. 14) shows a knowledge of the plant not shared by (e.g.) Thomas Moore (1779–1852), whose reference in Lalla Rookh (1817), Part II, to ‘the Champac’s leaves of gold’ makes no reference to the distinctive ‘strong aromatick scent’ of the Champak, well known to Europeans specialising in botany or with direct Indian contacts: e.g. The Works of Sir William Jones. In Six Volumes, Vol. 2. (London, 1799), ‘Botanical Observations on Select Indian Plants’, 94–95.

Chapter 33 1 Rogers 288; O’Neill, ‘Shelley’s Pronouns’, OHPBS 404. 2 1839 iv. 228–299.

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  Notes to pages 343 to 350 

3 2016 577:208–209 [em. BSM i. 174–175]. 4 PWS i. 52:429–430. 5 2016 576:182–183, 185–188 [em. BSM i. 173]. 6 SL ii. 323. 7 Haines, Shelley’s Poetry, pp. 227, 239. 8 Dante, Purgatorio I. 13. 9 Michael O’Neill, ‘Sonnets and Odes’, OHPBS 332. 10 BSM i. 140–141; Rogers 273. 11 BSM i. 144–145. 12 1824 75; see SPP 485, SMW 605, 2016 571: Reiman justifies his decision to include a line ‘completely canceled in MS’ to maintain the rhyme‐scheme (Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study, Urbana, 1965, p. 141). 13 BSM i. 174–175. 14 BSM i. 274–275. 15 In 1839 MWS described how, in 1822–1824, she had been faced by ‘so confused a mass, interlined and broken into fragments’ that ‘the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses, which might seem rather intuitive than founded on reasoning’ (iv. 226n). She actually guessed very rarely: sense was ‘joined’ by using PBS’s deletions, which she took for granted she had a right to reinstate. 16 BSM i. 334:16–24; G. M. Matthews, ‘The “Triumph of Life” Apocrypha’, TLS (5 August 1960), p. 503; adopted by Reiman in his 1965 edition of the poem (see BSM i. 332); Goslee 199; another section  –  ll. 392–405  –  appeared in 1824 but no MS source survives. 17 Paul Hamilton, ‘Literature and Philosophy’, The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Morton, p. 180. 18 SL ii. 3–4, 6–7, 415. 19 Gisborne 155; 1839 iv. 229, MSL i. 249. 20 MSL ii. 330; 1839 iv. 231, ‘weltered’ meaning rolled ‘to and fro (on the waves)’ (OED 3).

Chapter 34 1 The textual readings of ‘Bright wanderer’ have been drawn from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4 folios 35r–36v; PBS used half a sheet of the same paper in the draft ‘To Jane’ (BSM i. 194–195, 214–215, 290–291), for which he also wrote out a fair copy (MYRS viii. 436–437); this appears to be one of the few sheets in Shelley adds. c. 4 to have been folded more than once, which might suggest that it had at some stage been kept separately. 2 G. M. Matthews, ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, Review of English Studies, xii, 41–43; Stevens first wrote a prose aphorism (‘The poem must resist the intelligence successfully’) but inserted ‘almost’ before using it in ‘Man Carrying Thing’ (Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates, New York, 1989, p. 326). 3 See MYRS vii. 284–295 and BSM ii. 116 (MWS included ‘Far, far away, o ye / Halcyons of Memory’ in both 1824 and 1839); MWS however omitted material around the fragmentary late lyric published as ‘We meet not as we parted’: see MYRS vii. 268–283.

441



  Notes to pages 354 to 364 

4 MYRS viii. 436–437; ‘Wilhelm Meister’, the central figure of Goethe’s second novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796), fascinated by theatre, must be Williams, though PBS may have known of the continuation Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821). 5 SL ii. 433: Prussic acid is hydrocyanic acid (‘an extremely poisonous volatile liquid with an odour like that of bitter almonds’), with which Polidori had poisoned himself in 1821: ‘Your letter shall be attended to respecting the two poisons of gold and Prussic Acid for they are of near kin’ (MS. Abinger c. 67 f. 34.); Ellis, Byron in Geneva, p. 74; SL ii. 433. 6 Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Bornand, p. 178. 7 Trel.78 142–144. 8 William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York, 1984), p. 232. 9 SL ii. 434, 339. 10 Garnett produced ‘Of the regret that pleasure leaves, / Destroying life alone not peace!’ in his 1862 Relics of Shelley (47); The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Hutchinson, agreed (667); Matthews preferred ‘Of the regret that pleasure / Seeking Life alone not peace.’ (‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, p. 43); Chernaik selected ‘Of the regret that pleasure [] / Seeking life not peace’ (The Lyrics of Shelley, p. 276); SPP chose ‘Of the regret that pleasure [] / Destroying life alone not peace.’ (481); SMW and 2016 printed ‘Of the regret that pleasure [], / Seeking life alone, not peace.’ (603); Keach, Shelley’s Style, p. 232. 11 2016 589–590:1–58 [em. BSM i. 200–207]; SL ii. 445, 416. 12 BSM i. 240; Gisborne 155. 13 BSM i. 268, fol. 52v l. 18: Reiman (‘Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”: The Biographical Problem’, PMLA, 78, December 1963, 536–550) argues that the last word is ‘Julie’, but it is of only four letters, without an ascender for an ‘l’: older photographs of the page now disclose more than the original: e.g. Joan Rees, Shelley’s Jane Williams (1985), facing p. 147.

Chapter 35 1 See Moore, Lord Byron Accounts Rendered, p. 277; MSL i. 244, SL ii. 715; Seymour comments ‘it is hard not to wince’ at MWS’s word ‘unsparing’ (299); PBS recorded only that he ‘took the most decisive resolutions’ (SL ii. 715); MSJ i. 412; MSL i. 558. 2 Prell, ‘The Sinking of the “Don Juan” revisited’, p. 153; Holmes’s 2004 essay ‘Shelley Undrowned’, arguing that the boat carried too much ballast (This Long Pursuit, 2016, p. 251), was written before Prell’s essay; one of the sailors who brought the ‘Don Juan’ ashore listed the contents he recalled, including iron pigs and ‘16 sacchetti di rena per zavorra’ [‘16 bags of sand as ballast’] (Guido Biagi, Gli ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, Firenze, 1892, p. 124);Trel.58 97. At a rough estimate, the 16 sacks might (each sack weighing 94 lbs.) have added around a third of a ton of ballast weight; not inconsiderable, but not enough. 3 SL ii. 361, 404. 4 SL ii. 436, 226, 227, 98. 5 See Moore, Lord Byron Accounts Rendered, p. 251; MSL i. 221; see SL ii. 378–379, 400. 6 SL ii. 409: items like the bond for £5000 signed in Livorno on 9 October 1821 (Pforzheimer PBS O256) contributed to his debts; MSL i. 238. 7 He remained dependent on the £220 a quarter he continued to receive from his father (£250 minus £30 for the support of Ianthe and Charles), as demonstrated by a scare in

442



  Notes to pages 365 to 373 

the spring of 1821 when the money (following a series of accidents) abruptly stopped (SL ii. 281–282). 8 Hogg to Jane Williams, 16 August 1823, MS. Abinger c. 68 f. 20v. 9 Seymour 317–318. 10 MSJ ii. 482. 11 Gisborne 147; Stocking and Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi, 3. 12 MSL i. 245;Trelawny’s version, perhaps deriving from PBS, was: ‘I have followed from my room the embodied or shadowy image of myself ’ which had then said ‘“Shelley are you satisfied” – ’ (Peck ii. 407). 13 MSL i. 245; Gisborne 155; Julius Millingen, Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece (1831), p. 130: PBS would have known a familiar as an attendant spirit: cf.‘some declare / Your a familiar spirit – as you are – ’ (PS iv. 178:5–6 em. BSM xviii. 94–95). 14 SL ii. 435. 15 MSL i. 316. 16 Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources, ed. Jane Shelley, p. 193.

Chapter 36 1 Millingen, Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece, p. 130; LH to Horace Smith, 25 July 1822, Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt (1862), i. 195. 2 The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Bornand, p. 170; BSM xxii. II. 270–271; CPPBS iii. 116:130–131. 3 Life‐preservers (or cork‐jackets) had existed since the 1760s, and were sufficiently common for Sir Walter Scott, in 1818, to refer to ‘the cork‐jacket which carries the heroes of romance safe through all the billows of affliction’ (The Heart of Mid‐Lothian, chapter I): Southey offered a cork‐jacket to his guests when they went out on Derwent Water: see Southey to Charles Danvers, 4 September 1808 (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, no. 1501). 4 ‘Preface’, Essays, Letters from Abroad,Translations and Fragments, ed. Shelley, i. xii. 5 SL ii. 288 (see too Guitar 157 for details and an improved boat design by Williams); SC x. 1148. 6 S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 Vols. (Princeton, 1969), ii. 210 [1810 version]. 7 Trel.58 58–59. 8 Gisborne 156; Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley’, Atlantic Monthly, xi. 189–190. 9 Gisborne 156. 10 MSL i. 248. 11 BLJ ix. 218 (see too Peck ii. 409). 12 BLJ x. 13, xiii. 66. 13 SL ii. 444, 344; PBS’s translation of the Walpurgisnacht scene from Faust (I.121–138), the ‘Indian Girl’s Song’ (II.397) and the brief ‘Lines to a Critic’ (III. 187–188) were the only pieces by him. 14 SL ii. 445.

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  Notes to pages 373 to 376 

15 SL ii. 445 [em. BL MS 38650E]: ‘Casa Magni’ appears regularly (e.g. Med.47, Peck,White, Holmes, Figure 11), but PBS (SL ii. 415 and 445) and two friends writing to him (BSM i. 244–245, 284–285) used ‘Villa Magni’. 16 Gisborne 160–161: Thornton Hunt remembered PBS, between 3 and 7 July, ‘reading aloud some passages from Plato’ to LH, ‘partly in admiration, and partly with some sense of oddity in the passages’ (The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt, 2 Vols., 1862, i. 183); ‘Neddino’ is an Italianate and diminutive ‘Ned’ (abbreviated rebracketing of ‘Edward’). 17 Gisborne 162, 166. 18 MSL i. 248. 19 Trelawny in ?1823 document (Bieri 646). 20 Barker‐Benfield, ‘The Honeymoon of Joseph and Henrietta Chichester, with Daniel Roberts’ Memories of Byron and Shelley’, Bodleian Library Record, xii. 122; Trel.58 115. 21 Roberts’s account says ‘off shore’ but there would have been no point in the ‘Don Juan’ sailing so far out; he probably meant ‘ten miles away, offshore’, though it seems rather unlikely that he could have seen them so far off, that afternoon. 22 Gisborne 163, 161. 23 PBS’s body was near where pine woods approached the beach, the sea then coming within a few metres of what is now the Piazza Paolina (Biagi, Gli ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, p. 118 n1); Trel.58 121. 24 In 1828, Roberts would claim to have found her, and raised her, following assistance from the merchant ship responsible for ramming her: he described her as being in 13 fathoms of water, and had apparently advertised a reward for her discovery. In 1892, however, Guido Biagi showed that the boat had been found by fishermen employed by Signor Baroni of Viareggio, off the coast near the mouth of the Serchio: they brought the boat into Viareggio from about five miles out (Gli ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, pp. 113– 127) and only then was she handed over to Roberts. 25 Roberts to MWS, 14 September 1822, BL Add. MS 52361; quoted from Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years, p. 101; Barker‐Benfield, ‘The Honeymoon of Joseph and Henrietta Chichester, with Daniel Roberts’ Memories of Byron and Shelley’, Bodleian Library Record, xii. 122; Biagi, Gli ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, p. 122. 26 Dane, ‘A Nautical Perspective’, pp. 80–81; MSL i. 335. 27 LH, ‘Mr. Shelley’, Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, p. 199: ‘taken clap aback’ means having her mainsail suddenly clapped against the mast by a sudden gust of wind, ‘an accident exceedingly dangerous in a strong gale’ (OED): ‘leeward’ is the side of the boat away from the wind. 28 Clarissa Bramston née Trant (1800–1844), touring Italy with her father in 1826, recorded her memory of John Taaffe recalling having heard that an Italian captain had described offering rescue: A shrill voice, which is supposed to have been Shelley’s was distinctly heard to say NO. The Captain, amazed at their infatuation continued to watch them with his Telescope. The Waves were running Mountains high – a tremendous surf dashed over the boat which to his astonishment was still crowded with sail – “If you will

444



  Notes to pages 376 to 378  not come on board for God’s sake reef your sails or you are lost” cried a sailor thro’ the speak trumpet – One of the gentlemen (Williams it is believed) was seen to make an effort to lower the sails – his companion seized him by the arm as if in anger. Oh what a moment for two such men to be summoned before the Judgement Seat of God! – It was their last…(Diary, 26 March 1826, Essex Record Office D/DLu 15/4)

It is a thoroughly unreliable chain of reports. How could the captain have taken them on board with the sea running as it was? How did the ‘Don Juan’ continue ‘under full sail’ without going under immediately? Clarissa Trant was, however, determined to show PBS (to her, a notorious atheist) receiving his just deserts. Holmes’s comment that ‘The “Don Juan” went down into the Gulf of Spezia…under full sail’ (729), for which Trant is the sole evidence, has been hugely influential: see e.g. Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, Oxford, 2006, p. 1051, and Jonathan Wordsworth’s ‘Introduction’ to the reprint of the 1820 volume PBS had with him: ‘Half in love with death, Shelley had “given” the unfurled sails of the “Don Juan” to a Mediterranean tempest – driven the boat under in the eye of the storm’ (Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, Otley, 2001, p. [ix]). 29 Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt, i. 194: the hands on PBS’s watch (Bodleian, Shelley Relics (g)) are stopped at 14 minutes past five (Guitar 136). 30 See Duncan Wu, 30 Great Myths about the Romantics (Oxford, 2015), pp. 165–174;Trel.58 102–104; in some of his sketches of boats and rigging, PBS drew fascinating impossibilities as well as possibilities (see e.g. BSM xix. 207 [e. 18, 106r]); Gisborne 156. 31 PBS’s body wore a double‐breasted jacket, nankeen trousers, socks and boots (Biagi, Gli ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, pp. 62–63): it seems likely (as the Italian authorities, with ­experience of wind and tide, assumed, and as one of the sailors interviewed in 1890 confirmed) that the ‘Don Juan’ sank opposite the tower of Migliarino, about five miles off shore and that Williams’s body came ashore nearby (possibly suggesting that, having got caught up in the wreck, he went down with it) while the bodies of Vivian and PBS were carried some distance to the north. 32 Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed.Thornton Hunt, i. 194; the Keats volume helped identify the corpse, but was burned along with it; Medwin states that it was doubled back at ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (Med.47 ii. 291) but his source is unknown. 33 Trelawny identified ‘the tower of Migliarino, at the Bocca Lericcio’ (160): although Biagi dismissed ‘the Bocca Lericcio’ as ‘unknown’ (The Last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1898, p. 81), if Trelawny had heard a nearby stream referred to as ‘the Lericcio’, the fact that it had vanished by the 1890s may simply indicate that local drainage had put an end to it. 34 Trel.Letters 12; Trel.58 134; BLJ ix. 197; W. M. Rossetti, ‘Shelley’s Life and Writings, Two Lectures’, Lecture I, The University Magazine,Vol. I (February 1878), 154. 35 Don Juan, xi. 61, the canto written in October 1822, the stanza following one discussing the death of Keats; Trel.58 203. 36 The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Bornand, pp. 146, 167; BL Ashley MS 5022: Shelley Relics 36: a jaw‐bone fragment is preserved in the Keats‐Shelley house in Rome (see Wu’s 30 Great Myths, p. 177) but the fact that Trelawny recovered Williams’s

445



  Notes to pages 378 to 385 

jaw‐bone,‘the only bone whole’ (Trel.Letters 9), strongly suggests that the fragment in the Keats‐Shelley house is his. 37 Under the title ‘Fragments of the skull of Percy Bysshe Shelley [realia]’ (Pforzheimer): the skull according to Trelawny ‘was unusually thin and strikingly small’ (Trel.Letters 13): in the US, ‘realia’ are ‘Objects which may be used as teaching aids but were not made for the purpose’ (OED).

Chapter 37 1 Trelawny in old age commented that ‘Novels were totally uninteresting to him’ (Trel.78 54) but the reaction may be linked to Trelawny’s dislike of MWS. 2 SC iv. 743–744; SL ii. 71. 3 Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford, 1976), p. 195; SL ii. 300, 269. 4 Hearth 176; Gisborne 37; SL ii. 109 [em. SC vi. 852]; SL ii. 320. 5 Hearth 168, 223; Hazlitt, Edinburgh Review, xl, no. lxxx (July 1824), 503. 6 Hearth 59; ‘Edward Haselfoot’ [W. S. Walker], ‘The Anniversary’, Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, iii. 1 (August 1824), 183. 7 SL ii. 184; SC x. 1037. 8 SL ii. 269. 9 SL ii. 331. 10 Hogg to Jane Williams, 21 July 1823 (BL Add. MS 41686). 11 SL ii. 373, 98. 12 SL ii. 435. 13 SL i. 459, ii. 436, 374. 14 SL ii. 345; Confessions, Book VI, i.: King Lear III. ii.; ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, l. 89: SL ii. 394, 436. 15 Trel.78 179; Abinger c. 67. ff. 27–28; SL ii. 330; ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, Examiner (19 January 1817); ‘Ozymandias’, Examiner (11 January 1818); ‘To Constantia’, Oxford University and City Herald (31 January 1818); ‘Ode to Naples’, Morning Chronicle (26 September 1820), republished Military Register and Weekly Gazette (1 & 8 October, 1820). 16 The Letters of T. S. Eliot,Vol. I, ed.Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (2009), p. 259. 17 SL ii. 373. 18 BLJ viii. 103, vii. 174; The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, 1958), ii. 323. 19 SL ii. 442. 20 BSM xix. 4–5. 21 BSM iv. II. 284–285; ‘interstellar air’ is a rehearsal for Hellas (2016 539:771) with ‘superlunar’ recalling Pope’s ‘super‐lunar’ (Dunciad iv. 451), but ‘superlunary’ had been common since the start of the seventeenth century. 22 Distinction made in CPPBS ii. xxvii–xxviii, but 1824 began the practice of printing fragments: MWS entitled 1839 ‘The Poetical Works’, not ‘The Poems’ and included the word Fragments in the title of her 1840 edition of PBS’s prose.

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  Notes to pages 385 to 392 

23 Gisborne 125. 24 SL i. 530. 25 SL ii. 324. 26 BLJ x. 34, vii. 174, v. 107. 27 SC ii. 575, 577, 573; Hogg ii. 550–551. 28 SL ii. 394. 29 Gallant, Shelley’s Ambivalence, p. 4; Trel.58 12; Trel.78 130. 30 BLJ ix. 119, 189–190 31 Beaton, Byron’s War, p. 139. 32 MWS to Hogg, 9 September 1822 (MS Gisborne d.23. f.143); Crook, ‘“Casualty”, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel’, 66. 33 MSJ ii. 444, 440: a cypher is ‘a mere nothing’ (OED 2.a.). 34 Gisborne 165; LH to Elizabeth Kent, 26 September 1822 (Pforzheimer); Stocking and Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi, 2. 35 Gisborne 166; MSL i. 354; MSJ ii. 467. 36 MSJ ii. 491:28, 33–38. 37 PS iii. 22:1–8 [em. Nora Crook: see BSM xviii. 2–3]: for ‘kiss reprove’ PS suggests ‘?[passion] move’. 38 MSJ ii. 491:31–32; MSL i. 366–367, 491 n1; MSJ ii. 559. 39 Med.33 117–119, 120–122; The New Anti‐Jacobin: a monthly magazine of politics, commerce, science, literature, art, music and the drama, 2 (May 1833), pp. 196–197. 40 When she included the poem in 1839 iv. 161–162, she took her text from Medwin (either Med32,‘Memoir of Shelley’, Athenaeum, 11 August 1832, pp. 522–523 or Med.33) so that ‘chased’ for PBS’s ‘charmed’ (2016 565:16) and other errors were repeated; Med.33 114–115; pp. 599–600. 41 MSL ii. 300; their final act was to allow Simpkin and Marshall to issue Poetical Pieces in 1823, consisting of sheets from Rosalind and Helen, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci and Hellas (the title Prometheus Unmasked was awarded to the second item). 42 Charles H. Taylor Jr., The Early Collected Editions of Shelley’s Poems (New Haven, 1958), 19–22, 28n. 43 The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley (various publishers, 1830–1832); The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with his Life (John Ascham, 1834); The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley, etc. (John Ascham, 1836); The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Charles Daly, 1836); Shelley’s Poetical Works (Charles Daly, 1837). 44 MSL ii. 210. 45 MSL ii. 326. 46 1839 iv. 162–164, Med.33 119, 122; 1840 306. 47 1840 xi.: in Note 17, the especially anti‐Christian ending (‘Who can wonder’) to the paragraph starting ‘Crime is madness’ was still omitted in 1840 (2016 102) but this may have been accidental. 48 1840 253, xi. 49 Crook, ‘“Casualty”, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel’, 73. 50 SL i. 237. 51 Holmes, This Long Pursuit, p. 259; SL i. 214.

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[Coleridge, John Taylor], review of The Revolt of Islam & Laon and Cythna, Quarterly Review, xxi (April 1819), 460–471 The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats (Paris, 1829) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 Vols. (Princeton, 1969) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Poetical Works I (Pt. I), ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, 2001) Dacre, Charlotte, Zofloya; or,The Moor [1806], ed. Adriana Craciun (Ontario, 1997) Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden; a Poem, in Two Parts (1791) Davis, Henry George, The Memorials of the Hamlet of Knightsbridge: with Notices of its immediate Neighbourhood, ed. Charles Davis (1859) Gell,William, Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott’s Residence in Italy 1832, ed. James C. Corson (1957) Godwin,William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793], ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, 2013) Godwin, William, Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams [1794], ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford, 2009) William Godwin’s Diary, ed. David O’Shaughnessy, Mark Philp and Victoria Myers http:// godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/diary The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings. By W. Mason (Dublin, 1776) Gronow, Rees Howell, Reminiscences of Captain Gronow…Anecdotes of the camp, the court, and the clubs, at the close of the last war with France (1862) Guiccioli, Teresa, Lord Byron’s Life in Italy, ed. Peter Cochran, tr. Michael Rees (Newark, 2005) Haydon, B. R., Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals, ed. Tom Taylor, 3 Vols., 2nd. ed. (1853) Haydon, B. R., Correspondence and Table‐Talk, ed. F. W. Haydon, 2 Vols. (1876) Hunt, Leigh, ‘On the Suburbs of Genoa and the Country about London’, The Literary Examiner, viii (23 August 1823), 113–120 Hunt, Leigh, ‘Mr Shelley’, Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries: with recollections of the author’s life, and of his visit to Italy (1828), pp. 174–229 [Hunt, Leigh], ‘Biographical Memoir of Mr. Shelley’, The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1830), pp. v–xviii The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, rev. ed., ed. Thornton Hunt (1860) The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt, 2 Vols. (1862) Hunt, Thornton, ‘Shelley. By One Who Knew Him’, Atlantic Monthly, xi, no. 64 (February 1863), 184–204 Ireland, W. H., The Abbess, a Romance … In four volumes (1799) Jeaffreson, John Cordy, The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet’s Life (1885) Johnson, Samuel, The Rambler, [‘The History of Almamoulin’], no. 120 (11 May 1751); no. 159 (24 September 1751) Keats, John, Lamia, Isabella,The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, 1958) The Letters of Bysshe and Timothy Shelley: and other documents from Horsham Museum & the West Sussex Record Office, ed. Susan C. Djabri & Jeremy Knight (Horsham, 2000) Lewis, M. G., Ambrosio: Or,The Monk: A romance, 4th ed., 3 Vols. (1798) Lucan’s Pharsalia tr., into Engl. verse by N. Rowe (1718)

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  Bibliography 

Mac‐Carthy, Denis Florence, Shelley’s Early Life from Original Sources ([1872]) Martyn, Thomas, A Tour through Italy. Containing full directions for travelling in that interesting country; with ample catalogues of every thing that is curious (1791) Medwin, Thomas, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: noted during a residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in…1821 and 1822 (1824) Medwin,Thomas, ‘Memoir of Shelley’, Athenaeum, no. 247, 21 July 1832, pp. 472–474; no. 248, 28 July 1832, pp. 488–489; no. 249, 4 August 1832, pp. 502–504; no. 250, 11 August 1832, pp. 522–524; no. 251, 18 August 1832, pp. 535–537, no. 252, 25 August 1832, pp. 554–545 The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Thomas Medwin, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1913) [Merle, Joseph Gibbons], ‘A Newspaper Editor’s Reminiscences’, Fraser’s Magazine, xxiii (June 1841), 700–714 Millingen, Julius, Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece (1831) Montgomery, Robert, Oxford: A Poem, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1835) Moore, Thomas, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 2 Vols. (1830) Ollier, Charles, ed., Ollier’s Literary Miscellany in Prose and Verse. By several hands, etc., No. 1 (1820) Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Paris, 1794) Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man [1791–1792], Common Sense [1776] and other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, 1995) Paul, C. Kegan, William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, 2 Vols. (1876) Peacock, Thomas Love, Rhododaphne: Or,The Thessalian Spell: a Poem (1818) Peacock, Thomas Love, Nightmare Abbey [1818], ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky (Cambridge, 2016) The Symposium of Plato:The Shelley Translation, ed. David K. O’Connor (South Bend, 2002) Polidori, John William, The Diary of John Polidori, ed. William Michael Rossetti (1911) Priestley, Joseph, Experiments and Observations on different Kinds of Air, 2nd ed. (1775) Robinson, Henry Crabb, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 Vols. (1869) The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (Oxford, 1977) Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, ed. A. Allardyce, 2 Vols. (1888) [Shelley, Elizabeth and Percy Bysshe Shelley], Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (Worthing, 1810) Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus [1817], ed. Charles E. Robinson (Oxford, 2008) Shelley, Mary, The Last Man [1826], ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook (1996) Shelley, Mary, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 Vols. (1844) Shelley, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’Tour (1817) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Necessity of Atheism (Worthing [?], [1811]) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Essays, Letters from Abroad,Translations and Fragments, ed. Mary Shelley, 2 Vols. (1840) The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Verse and Prose: now first brought together with many Pieces not before published, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 8 Vols. (1880) Posthumous Poems of Shelley: Mary Shelley’s Fair Copy Book, Bodleian MS. Shelley Adds. d. 9, ed. Irving Massey (Montreal, 1969)

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  Bibliography 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems [facsim. 1820], Hellas [facsim. 1822], The Cenci [facsim. 1821], Rosalind and Helen, [facsim. 1819], Posthumous Poems [facsim. 1824] (Cambridge, 2013) Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources, ed. Jane Shelley, 2nd. ed. (1859) The Shelleys of Field Place, ed. Susan C. Djabri with Annabelle F. Hughes and Jeremy Knight (Horsham, 2000) The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer www.rc. umd.edu/editions/southey_letters Starke, Mariana, Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent (Paris, 1826) Stockdale, John Joseph, Stockdale’s Budget of “all that is Good, and Noble and Amiable, in the Country”, nos. I–XXVI (13 December 1826 – 6 June 1827) Volney, Compte de, see Chasseboeuf, Constantin François [Walker,W. S.],‘Edward Haselfoot’,‘Shelley’s Posthumous Poems’, Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, iii. 1 (August 1824), 182–199 Wordsworth, Christopher, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851) [Young, Edward], The Complaint: or Night‐Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 2 Vols. (1749)

Later Biographical and Scholarly Material Angeli, Helen Rossetti, Shelley and his Friends in Italy, 1911 Barker‐Benfield, B. C., ‘The Honeymoon of Joseph and Henrietta Chichester, with Daniel Roberts’ Memories of Byron and Shelley’, Bodleian Library Record xii (April 1986), 119–141 Barker‐Benfield, B. C., ‘Hogg‐Shelley Papers of 1810–1812’, Bodleian Library Record, xiv (October 1991), 14–31 Beaton, Roderick, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge, 2013) Behrendt, Stephen C., Shelley and his Audiences (Lincoln, 1989) Blunden, Edmund, Shelley: A Life Story (1946) Boas, Louise Schutz, Harriet Shelley: Five Long Years (1962) Brenton, Howard, Bloody Poetry (1985) Buxton, John, Byron and Shelley:The History of a Friendship (London and New York, 1968) Cameron, Kenneth Neill, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (1951) Cameron, Kenneth Neill, Shelley:The Golden Years (Cambridge MA, 1974) Carlson, Julie A., England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore, MD, 2007) Chernaik, Judith, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland and London, 1972) Cline, C. L., Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle (1952) Cochran, Peter, Byron and Bob: Lord Byron’s Relationship with Robert Southey (2010) Crook, Nora and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge, 1986) Crook, Nora, ‘Pecksie and the Elf: Did the Shelleys Couple Romantically?’, Romanticism on the Net, Numéro 18 (May 2000) Crook, Nora, ‘“Casualty”, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel’, Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality, ed. Graham Allan, Carrie Griffin, and Mary O’Connell (2008), pp. 61–74

451



  Bibliography 

Crook, Nora and Stephen Allen, ‘The Marlow Expurgation’, TLS (22 February 2013), pp. 14–15 Crook, Nora, ‘Unplucked – a previously unpublished Shelley poem finally emerges’, TLS (20 November 2015), pp. 14–15 Curran, Stuart, ‘Horace Smith’s Obituary Panegyric on Shelley’, K‐SJ, xxxvii (1988), 27–34 Dane, Joseph A., ‘A Nautical Perspective on the Sinking of the “Don Juan”’, K‐SJ, xlvii (1998), 63–86 Darwall‐Smith, Robin, ‘The Student Hoaxers: The New Shelley Letters’, University College Record, xiv (2005), 78–87 De Beer, Gavin Rylands, ‘An “Atheist” in the Alps’, Keats‐Shelley Memorial Bulletin, ix (1958), 1–15 Djabri, Susan Cabell, The Shelleys of Field Place: The Story of the Family and Their Estates (Horsham, 2000) Dowling, H. M., ‘The Attack at Tannyrallt’, Keats–Shelley Memorial Bulletin, xii (1961), 28–36 Duffy, Cian, ‘Percy Shelley’s “Unfinished Drama” and the Problem of the Jane Williams Poems’, European Romantic Review, xxvi (2015), 615–632 Duffy, Edward, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1979) Eighteenth Century Collections Online http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco Ellis, David, Byron in Geneva:That Summer of 1816 (Liverpool, 2011) Ellis, Frederick Startridge, A Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892) Engelberg, Karsten Klejs, The Making of the Shelley Myth: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism 1822–1860 (1988) Fernyhough, Charles, Pieces of Light: the New Science of Memory (2012) Foot, Paul, Red Shelley (1980) Foot, Paul, ‘Preface’ to Paul O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland, pp. 9–11 Fraistat, Neil, ‘Poetic Quests and Questioning in Shelley’s Alastor Collection’, K‐SJ, xxxiii (1984), 161–181 Fraistat, Neil, ‘Interrelations in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Volume’, The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill, 1985), pp. 141–187 Fuller, Jean O., Shelley: A Biography (1968) Garnett, R. S., ed., Letters about Shelley: interchanged by three friends – Edward Dowden, Richard Garnett and Wm. Michael Rossetti (1917) Garrett, Martin, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Shelley (2013) Gilmour, Ian, The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in their Time (2002) Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton, Claire Claremont and the Shelleys (Oxford & New York, 1992) Gordon, Charlotte, Romantic Outlaws: the Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (2015) Graham‐Campbell, Angus, ‘Some Notes on Shelley’s Eton Days’, K‐SR, viii, no. 1 (1993), 151–157 Grylls, Rosalie Glynn, Claire Clairmont (1939)

452



  Bibliography 

Habbakuk, H. J., Marriage, debt and the estates system: English landownership, 1650–1950 (Oxford, 1994) Hahn, Daniel, Poetic Lives: Shelley (2009) Hamilton, Paul, Percy Bysshe Shelley (2000) Hawkins, Desmond, Shelley’s First Love:The Love Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Harriet Grove (1992) Hay, Daisy, Young Romantics:The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (London, Berlin, New York, 2010) Hebron, Stephen and Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family (Oxford, 2010) Holmes, Richard, Sidetracks (2000) Holmes, Richard, This Long Pursuit (2016) Israel, Jonathan I., Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750– 1790 (Oxford, 2012) Jeffrey, Lloyd N., Shelley’s Knowledge and Use of Natural History (Salzburg, 1976) Johnson, Barbara, A Life with Mary Shelley (Stanford, 2014) Joukovsky, Nicholas A., ‘Robert Parker’s “Letters on Atheism”: An Early Response to Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism’, Review of English Studies, lxiii, no. 261 (September 2012), 608–633 Matthews, G. M., ‘Shelley and Jane Williams’, Review of English Studies, xii, no. 45 (1961), 40–48 Matthews, G. M., ‘Julian and Maddalo: The Draft and the Meaning’, Studia Neophilologica, xxxv (1963), 57–84 McDonald, Peter, ‘For impious gold’, TLS, 5734 (23 February 2013), pp. 12–13 McKnight, Joseph W., ‘The Shifting Focus of Adoption’, Critical Studies in Ancient Law, Comparative Law and Legal History: Essays in Honour of Alan Watson, ed. John Cairns Jr. and Olivia Robinson, 2001, pp. 323–325 Mills, Howard, Peacock: his Circle and his Age (Cambridge, 1969) Moore, Doris Langley, Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (1974) Mulhallen, Jacqueline, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (2015) Mulhallen, Jacqueline, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge, 2010) Norman, Sylva, Flight of the Skylark (1954) Notopoulos, James A., The Platonism of Shelley (Durham, NC, 1949) O’Brien, Paul, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland (London and Dublin, 2002) O’Neill, Michael, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004) Prell, Donald B., ‘The Sinking of the “Don Juan” Revisited’, K‐SJ, lvi (2007), 136–154 Prell, Donald B., Edward John Trelawny: fact or fiction (Palm Springs CA, c.2008) Rees, Joan, Shelley’s Jane Williams (1985) Reiman, Donald H., Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study (Urbana, 1965) Roach, Julian, Shelley’s Boat (York, 2005) Roe, Nicholas, Fiery Heart:The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005) The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Part C: Shelley, Keats and London Radical Writers, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 2 Vols. (New York and London, 1972)

453



  Bibliography 

Rossington, Michael, ‘Claire Clairmont’s fair copy of Shelley’s “Ode to Naples”: a rediscovered manuscript’, Review of English Studies n. s. lvi (2005), 59–89 Rossington, Michael, ‘Introduction to Shelley’s Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things’, The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2015 http://poeticalessay.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ about‐the‐text Sampson, Fiona, In Search of Mary Shelley:The Girl who wrote Frankenstein (2018) Schmid, Susanne, and Michael Rossington, The Reception of P. B. Shelley in Europe (2008) Seznec, Jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (Princeton, 1981) Shaver, Chester and Alice Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library: A Catalogue (New York and London, 1979) Shelley’s Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, 1954) Shelley:The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (1975) Spencer, Nick, Atheists:The Origin of the Species (2014) Smith, Robert Metcalf, The Shelley Legend (New York, 1945) St Clair, William, The Godwins and the Shelleys:The Biography of a Family (1989) Stocking, Marion Kingston, and David M. Stocking,‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, K‐SMB, xxxi (1980), 1–9 Sunstein, Emily W., Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston, Toronto and London, 1989) Taylor, Charles H., Jr., The Early Collected Editions of Shelley’s Poems (New Haven, 1958) Thoma, Carol L., ‘Thomas Jefferson Hogg’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004) Todd, Janet, Death & the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (Berkeley, 2007) Viviani Della Robbia, Enrica, Vita di una Donna (Firenze, 1936) Wise, Thomas James, A Shelley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts and Autograph Letters (1924) Woof, Robert, Shelley: an ineffectual angel? (Grasmere, 1992) Wordsworth, William, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY, 1983) Worthen, John, The Life of William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography (2014) Wroe, Ann, Being Shelley:The Poet’s Search for Himself (2007) Wu, Duncan, William Hazlitt:The First Modern Man (2008) Wu, Duncan, 30 Great Myths about the Romantics (Oxford, 2015)

Criticism and Commentary Abbey, Lloyd, Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley’s Poetic Skepticism (Lincoln and London, 1979) Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool, 1982) Bandy, Melanie, Mind Forg’d Manacles: Evil in the Poetry of Blake and Shelley (University, Alabama, 1981) Barnes, Julian, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015) Bennett, Betty T. and Stuart Curran (eds.), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore and London, 1996) Blank, G. Kim, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York, 1988)

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  Bibliography 

Bornstein, George, Yeats and Shelley (Chicago, 1970) Brown, Nathaniel, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge, MA, 1979) Butter, Peter, Shelley and the Idols of the Cave (Edinburgh, 1954) Chandler, James,‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, The Cambridge Companion to English Poets, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 344–359 Clark, Timothy, Embodying Revolution: the Figure of the Poet in Shelley (1989) Clark, Timothy and Jerrold E. Hogle (eds.), Evaluating Shelley (Edinburgh, 1996) Colbert, Benjamin, Shelley’s Eye:Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Burlington,VT, 2005) Cox, Jeffrey, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge, 1998) Cronin, Richard, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (1981) Curran, Stuart, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, 1970) Curran, Stuart, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis:The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, 1975) Dawson, P. M. S., The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford, 1980) DeMan, Paul, ‘Shelley Disfigured’, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et  al. (1979), pp. 39–73 Duff, David, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge, 1994) Duffy, Cian, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (New York, 2005) Eliot, T. S., ‘Shelley and Keats’, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), pp. 87–102 Everest, Kelvin, ed., Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference (Leicester, 1983) Farnell, Gary, ‘Rereading Shelley’, English Literary History, lx (1993), 625–651 Gallant, Christine, Shelley’s Ambivalence (1989) Gelpi, Barbara C., Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York and Oxford, 1992) Glen, Heather and Paul Hamilton, Repossessing the Romantic Past (New York, 2006) Goslee, Nancy M., Shelley’s Visual Imagination (Cambridge, 2005) Grimes, Kyle, ‘Private Visions / Public Responsibilities:The Alastor Volume’, A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle’s Utopian Project, ed. Darby Lewes (Lanham, MD, 2003), pp. 63–80 Haines, Simon, Shelley’s Poetry:The Divided Self (1997) Hoagwood, Terence Allan, Skepticism & Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx (Iowa City, 1988) Jones, Steven E., Shelley’s Satire:Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb, 1994) Keach, William, Shelley’s Style (New York, 1984) Kipperman, Mark, ‘History and Ideality: The Politics of Shelley’s “Hellas”’, Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991), 147–169 Leavis, F. R., Revaluation:Tradition & Development in English Poetry (1936) Leighton, Angela, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge, 1984) Lowe, Peter, Christian Romanticism:T. S. Eliot’s Response to Percy Shelley (Youngstown, NY, 2006) Matthews, G. M., ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, Shelley: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George M. Ridenour (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), pp. 111–131 Milnes, Tim, ‘An unremitting interchange’, The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 105–144 Morton,Timothy, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste:The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1995)

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  Bibliography 

Morton, Timothy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge, 2006) O’Neill, Michael, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life (1989) O’Neill, Michael, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford, 1989) O’Neill, Michael, ed., Shelley (Harlow, 1996) Pulos, C. E., The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Skepticism (Lincoln, NE, 1954) Quinney, Laura, The Poetics of Disappointment:Wordsworth to Ashberry (Charlottesville, 1999) Reiman, Donald H., Percy Bysshe Shelley (Boston, 1969) Reiman, Donald H., ‘Shelley: the Mythology of Aspiration’, Intervals of Inspiration: The Skeptical Tradition and the Psychology of Romanticism (Greenwood, FL, 1988), pp. 213–261 Roberts, Hugh, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry (University Park, PA, 1997) Robinson, Charles E., Shelley and Byron: the Snake and the Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore & London, 1976) Ruston, Sharon, Shelley and Vitality (New York, 2005) Sandy, Mark, Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre (Burlington,VT, 2005) Scrivener, Michael, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton, 1982) Shelley, Bryan, Shelley and Scripture:The Interpreting Angel (Oxford, 1994) Sperry, Stuart M., Shelley’s Major Verse:The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1988) Steinman, Lisa M., Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and Work in Thomson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson (New York, 1998) Stock, Paul, The Shelley‐Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (2010) Verma, K. D., The Vision of ‘Love’s Rare Universe’: A Study of Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ (Lanham, MD, 1995) Vicario, Michael. Shelley’s Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background (New York, 2007) Wallace, Jennifer, Shelley and Greece (1997) Webb, Timothy, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford, 1976) Webb, Timothy, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (Atlantic Highlands, 1977) Weinberg, Alan M., Shelley’s Italian Experience (London and New York, 1991) Weinberg, Alan M. and Timothy Webb (eds.), The Unfamiliar Shelley (Farnham, 2009) Weinberg, Alan M. & Timothy Webb (eds.), The Neglected Shelley (Farnham, 2015) Weisman, Karen A., Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia, 1994) West, Sally, Coleridge and Shelley:Textual Engagement (Burlington,VT, 2007) Wheatley, Kim, Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Columbia, 1999) Wolfson, Susan J., Formal Charges:The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, 1997) Yeats, W. B., ‘Edmund Spenser’, Essays and Introductions (1961), pp. 356–383 Yeats, W. B., Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918)

456

Index

Page numbers in bold denote an illustration Addington, Henry see Sidmouth,Viscount Aeschylus, 21, 202–4, 283, 317 Prometheus Chained, 202–3; The Persians, 317 Aglietti, Dr Francesco, 208 Albertus Magnus, St, 16 Allegra Byron, Clara, 170, 177, 188, 193–4, 199–201, 207–9, 211, 232, 272, 314, 335–9, 347, 366, 386 birth, 167; convent education, 314, 337; death, 337–9 Apennines, 194–5, 201 Archimedes, 83 Argyle, George William Campbell, 6th Duke of, 14 Arno, River, 262, 264, 266, 295, 307, 337, 371 Arquà Petrarca, 211–12, 426n20 Augustine, St, 383 Austen, Jane, 7 Austria, 208, 214–15, 286, 288–9, 317 Bacon, Francis, 41 Bagni di Lucca, 195–7, 200–2, 207, 280 Casa Bertini, 195

Ballantyne, John & Co., 23 Barnes, Julian, xviii, 179, 274 Bath, 98, 105–6, 149–51, 153–7, 159, 168, 187 Baxter, William PBS’s letters to, 181–3 Beddoes, Thomas, 175 Bell, Dr John, 231–2, 258 Benevento, 286–9, 434n21 Berlinghieri, Dr Andrea Vaccà, 266–7 Bible, 43, 171, 250–1 Binfield, 91 Biondi, Luigi, 292, 295 Bisham, 172, 181 Bishopsgate, 124, 148 Bishopsgate Heath, 124 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 5, 297, 319 Booth, David, 182–3, 198 Booth, Isabella (‘Izy’), 181, 198 Bracknell, 91, 94, 97–100, 102, 105 Bristol, 154–6 Brougham, Henry, MP, 170, 254 Brown, John (also Bird), 50–4 The Northern Courts, 50

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

457



  Index 

Browne, Felicia, 25, 40, 50 Browne, Sir Thomas, 25 Browning, Robert, xvii ‘Memorabilia’, xvii; ‘My Last Duchess’, 220 Brunnen, 112 Bryant, William, 152 Burdett, Sir Francis, MP, 48, 60, 249–50 Burke, Edmund, 282 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord, ix, 10, 47, 149, 151, 156, 176–7, 200–2, 208, 222, 254–5, 262, 288, 294, 302, 316, 318–20, 326, 336–7, 355, 370, 380, 382–8 appearance, 140 attributes as aristocrat & gentleman, 4, 5, 10, 134 as gossip, 201, 209, 335, 386, 439n3 ‘Bolivar’ yacht, 340, 362, 371, 374 Greece, feelings for, 316, 387–8 horror stories (& Frankenstein) encouraged, 140 in Geneva, 4, 122, 132, 138, 145, 148, 371, 377, 385; in Villa Diodati, 139, 203; in Arquà Petrarca, 211; in Venice, 194, 199–202, 208, 215, 386, 424n28; in Ravenna, 313, 318–19, 424n28; in Pisa, 311, 319–20, 324, 326, 335–9, 363, 372, 374 PBS, attitude towards, 5, 64, 122, 132, 142, 167, 200–1, 209, 289–90, 313, 367, 370, 374, 378, 384, 386–7; & PBS’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’, 216–18, 220; attends PBS’s cremation, 377–8 see also PBS, relationships, with LB publisher John Murray, 10, 149, 372 relationships with CC, 122–3, 138–9, 143, 145, 157, 194, 200–1, 209, 210, 211, 272, 313–14, 336, 338–9, 386, 439n3; with daughter Allegra, 167, 177, 194, 199–201, 211, 272, 313–14, 336, 338–9, 386; with Teresa

Guiccioli née Gamba, 5, 289, 319, 372, 424n28; with William Wordsworth, 132, 141; with Shelleys, 139, 151, 193–4, 211, 313, 315; with Richard Hoppner, 199, 201, 272, 313–15, 439n3; with Robert Southey, 209, 255, 324, 372; with Gamba family, 289, 319–20, 372 see also Carbonari; with Hunts, 319–20, 363, 372–4 The Liberal his plan, 319–20, 363, 372 theatre, interest in, 203–4 Writing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4, 10, 90, 141, 149, 171, 172; Don Juan, 198, 254–5, 320, 340, 386, 436n32; ‘Prometheus’, 141, 203, 205–6; Sonnets, 141; The Prisoner of Chillon, 172; letters, 182; The Vision of Judgment, 255, 372 Byron, the Hon. Augusta, 194 Caernarfon, 77, 94 Calais, 109, 111, 193 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 236, 336, 341 see also PBS, Translations Calvert, William, 73 Campbell, Thomas, 182, 302 Carbonari, 289, 319, 372 Carlile, Richard (printer & publisher) PBS writes about, 265 Caroline of Brandenburg‐Ansbach, Queen, 169, 282–4 Cary, Henry, 194 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord, 48, 250–2, 282–3 see also PBS, Poetry, Mask of Anarchy Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 157 Chamonix, 145–7, 167 Hôtel de Londres, livre de police, 146 Charlotte Augusta of Wales, Princess, 165, 180–1, 420n38 Charters, Thomas, 94, 116–17, 119, 148–9, 187, 189, 409n37, 409n41

458



  Index 

Chaucer, Geoffrey The Knight’s Tale, 292 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord, 136, 279 Christianity, xix, 8, 25, 30–1, 37–41, 43, 46–7, 59, 86, 235, 238, 260, 283, 289, 381–2 see also PBS, Prose, ‘On Christianity’ Clairmont, Charles, 64, 97, 122, 127, 150, 156, 258, 395n21 Clairmont, Claire, ix, 11, 117, 119, 122, 141, 145–6, 149, 154–7, 189, 202, 222–3, 256, 262, 288, 338, 340, 362, 364, 395n21 appearance, 104, 138, 139 assists & accompanies MWG’s elopement, 106, 108–12, 114–15, 117, 193 & Allegra, 167, 170, 194, 199–201, 208, 211, 227, 272, 313–14, 324, 335, 336, 338 child‐care, 138, 150, 208 journal, 112, 141, 288 musicality, 109, 195, 229, 266 name, xvi, 398n16 Pheoffteiygne not Theossteique, 416n33 love for PBS, 24, 138–9, 209–11, 294; PBS writes about, 118, 165, 210, 298, 387, 389; financial support from PBS, 122, 143, 175, 272, 336, 364; PBS her lover? 122–3, 152, 209–211, 297, 313–14, 335, 358, 387, 389; supposed child by PBS, 164, 209, 227, 313–15, 472n2; PBS’s letters to, 211, 278–9, 293–4, 304, 312, 325, 328, 335, 363; loyalty to PBS, 338 relationship with Mary Jane Godwin, 100, 109–10, 153–4, 157; with MWG/MWS, 115, 117, 119, 122, 146, 149, 177, 208, 210, 272, 313–14; with LB, 123, 138–43, 145, 149, 154, 156–7, 167, 177, 193, 194, 200–1, 209,

255, 272, 294, 324, 335, 336, 338–9, 386; with Margaret Mason, 266; with Emilia Viviani, 292–3, 296 potential career, 272, 314, 335 unreliable later testimony, 100, 106, 166, 209–11 Clapham, 29, 58, 61 Clark, William (publisher) Queen Mab piracy, 90 Clint, George, ix, 231–2, 232 Cobbett, William, 41, 253, 434n20 Political Register, 45 Coleridge, John Taylor, 246, 265, 397n22, 414n12, 416n33 review of Laon and Cythna, 246 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6, 24, 47, 73, 89, 93, 130, 141, 146, 164, 172, 213, 254, 255, 261, 277, 302, 304, 311, 336, 371, 380, 390 Writing ‘Christabel’, 141; ‘Hymn Before Sun– Rise. In the Vale of Chamouny’, 146; ‘Kubla Khan’, 89; ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, 24, 172, 213; The Friend, 130, 259 Collingwood, Samuel & Co. (printer), 53 Como, Lake, 194, 197 Copleston, the Rev. Edward, 45 Corday, Charlotte see PBS, Poetry, ‘Fragment. Supposed to be an Epithalamium’ Croker, John Wilson, 309–10, 437n26 Crosby & Co., B. (publisher), 47 Cruikshank, George, 282 Cumberland Pacquet, 81 Curran, Amelia, ix, xvii, 11, 139, 139, 231–2, 232 Cwm Elan, 9, 53, 61–2, 75–6, 98 see also Nantgwyllt House Dacre, Charlotte Zofloya, 23 Dallaway, the Rev. James, 34 Danieli, Francesco, 292, 294

459



  Index 

Dante Alighieri, 193–4, 262, 342–3 Inferno, 194, 262; La Divina Commedia, 342; Purgatorio, 343 Dare, Gideon, 81 Darwin, Erasmus, 25 The Loves of the Plants, A Poem.With Philosophical Notes, 83 Davies, Scrope Berdmore, 141, 148 de Boinville, Cornelia see Turner, Cornelia de Boinville de Boinville, Harriet, 98–102, 113, 410n11, 411n20, 411n25 del Rosso, Federico, 228, 275, 280 Demogorgon see PBS, Drama, Prometheus Unbound d’Holbach, Paul‐Henri Thiry, Baron, 84 Diodorus, 183–4 Dominic, 307 Donne, John, 298, 300, 331 Dover, 108–9, 111, 188 Dowden, Edward, 100 Dublin, 9, 73–6, 382 du Plantis, Madame Merveilleux, 266 house in Florence, 258 Duvillard, Louise (Elise), 175, 193, 199–200, 224, 227, 313 employed as nurse for William, 139, 145, 148, 150, 167, 170; with Allegra, 194, 199–201, 209; leaves MWS & PBS, marries Paolo Foggi, 224; blackmailing, 209, 222, 275, 313–15, 319; not mother of Naples baby, 427n20; & MWS, 427n21 Eaton, Daniel Isaac (printer), 41, 84 Eclectic Review, 48 Edinburgh, 52, 67, 97, 99 Edinburgh Magazine, 5, 285 Edwards, the Rev. Evan, 14 Eldon, John Scott, Lord, Lord Chancellor, 168–9, 250, 252, 283 see also PBS, Poetry, Mask of Anarchy Chancery Hearing (1817), 89, 91, 164, 168, 200

Eliot, George, xxi Eliot, T. S., 315, 383 & PBS’s ‘gift for versification’, 27 condemns PBS as letter writer, 182 Elise see Duvillard, Louise Ellenborough, Edward Law, Lord, 41, 84, 91, 169 see also PBS, Prose, ‘A Letter to Lord Ellenborough’ England, 3, 26, 67, 98, 109, 115, 136, 138, 141, 146–8, 162, 176–7, 184, 188, 193, 194, 199, 200, 228, 232, 243, 244, 247, 249, 251, 260, 265, 270–1, 282, 285, 317, 363–5, 389, 410n11, 413n29 PBS’s desire to leave, xx, 137, 177, 193; PBS’s ties with, 167–8, 186, 189, 252, 364, 382, 384; in A Poetical Essay, 48–9; ‘England in 1819’, 249, 252–4; in The Mask of Anarchy, 252 English, English & Becks, 168, 186–7 English, Edmund, 187 Este, 201–3, 206–11, 216, 221, 224, 240, 258, 275 ‘I Capuccini’, 201 Eton College, xviii, 15–19, 21, 23, 29, 32, 35, 38, 46–7, 196, 370, 382 see also Lind, Dr James PBS’s expulsion, 16–17, 33, 397n21 Euganean hills, 27, 201, 211–12, 215, 216 see also PBS, Poetry, ‘Lines written among the Euganean hills’ Euripides, 196–7 Examiner, The, 5, 161, 171, 180, 184, 248, 250, 257, 259, 265 see also Hunt, Leigh PBS writes to, 265 Faber, the Rev. George S., 44 Field Place, Sussex, 18, 20, 30–1, 40, 57, 59, 64–5, 68, 70, 127, 129, 137–8, 170 Finnerty, Peter, 48, 52, 54, 400n9, 403n29 Florence, 200–1, 207, 224, 233, 258, 261–2, 265–7, 268–9, 278, 288, 295, 319, 364, 409n41, 430n18, 432n31, 435n7

460



  Index 

rooms in du Plantis house, 258; severe winter, 258–9; Cascine, 262; no social life, 265–6; Ponte Santa Trinità, 295 Foggi, Paolo, 201, 207, 221, 222, 224, 226, 227, 280 blackmailing, 209, 275, 280, 313–15; marries Elise Duvillard, 224 Fontainebleau, 3, 149, 394n1 France, 93, 110, 149, 189, 193, 317, 394n1 Franklin, Benjamin, 43, 48 French language, 21, 83, 90, 108, 111, 200, 253 French Revolution see Revolution, French Fusina, 208, 215 Galignani, A. & W., 390 Gamba family, the, 319, 372 Count Ruggiero, 289; Pietro, 289, 320 see also Guiccioli, Teresa, née Gamba Gebirus see Landor, Walter Savage Geneva, 132, 135, 150, 177, 197, 224 CC provokes trip, 122, 138; LB & PBS sail around the lake, 4, 142, 385; near drowning provokes PBS’s will, 142–3, 371, 377 see also 143; Villa Chapuis, 139, 145, 148;Villa Diodati, 139, 203 Genoa, 337–8, 340, 373, 388, 390 George III, 34, 253–4 George IV, 282 see also Prince Regent, the German language, 336–7, 379 Gibbon, Edward, 47 Gibbs, Sir Vicary (Attorney General 1807–1812), 41 Gillray, James ‘More Pigs than Teats’, 282; ‘Pigs meat, or the Swine Flogg’d out of the Farm Yard’, 282; ‘The Pigs Possessed’, 282 Gisbornes, the, 195, 201, 222, 228, 230, 233–4, 258, 265, 266, 269–72, 275, 278–9, 308–9, 433n27

kind & helpful, 195, 201, 233; know about Cenci family, 230; know about Elena Adelaide Shelley, 269, 275; ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, 275–8, 380; & Godwins, 279; see also Livorno, Casa Ricci & Gisbornes Gisborne, John, 195, 243, 256, 269, 271, 278, 299, 304, 334, 364–5, 367, 369, 436n7 Gisborne, Maria, 195, 234, 269–72, 275–9, 315, 367, 374, 382 see also Reveley, Henry MWS’s letters to, 269–70, 278, 279, 366; PBS’s letters to, 270–2, 275, 278–9 Godwin, Fanny, 108, 136, 138, 149–157, 162, 395n21 appearance of, 151; dependent role, 151; distress, 150, 151–4, 157; feelings for PBS, 152; Godwin’s opinion of, 151; PBS writes about, 156–7; relations with MWG & PBS, 151, 153; suicide, 150, 154–6, 159, 168 Godwin, Mary see Shelley, Mary Godwin, Mary Jane née Vial, 100–1, 103–5, 108–10, 112, 130, 136, 149–56, 160–4, 193, 279, 395n21 Godwin, William, 7, 30, 73, 99–100, 103–9, 111–12, 114, 119, 130, 149–157, 162–4, 177, 195, 277–9, 315, 395n21, 410n11 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 7, 18, 37, 67, 114, 120; ‘Of Avarice and Profusion’ & Queen Mab, 92; diary entries, 106, 108, 162–3, 165; Fleetwood, 111; Mandeville, 150, 152; editing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works, 116; Caleb Williams, 399n53 relations with Fanny Godwin, 150–7: with MWG/MWS, 7, 106, 108, 110, 135, 150–1, 156–7, 160, 163, 271

461



  Index 

Godwin, William (cont’d) influence on PBS, 7, 18, 41, 67, 92, 111, 114, 120, 122, 136, 277; PBS gives financial support, 7, 54, 98–9, 103–7, 110, 119, 137, 149, 151, 153, 187–8, 385; PBS writes to, 16, 38, 73, 130, 135–7, 149, 152–3, 156, 177; PBS sends copy of The Necessity of Atheism, 41, 44–5, 402n3; on marriage, 67, 114, 120; financial distress, 103, 117, 148, 150, 152–4, 266; shop, 107, 118; attempts to get more money from PBS, 135–6, 148; & Harriett Shelley’s death, 160, 162–5; & Maria Reveley, 195 Godwin, William Jr., 175 Godwinian, 67, 120, 122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 311, 336 see also PBS, Translations ‘Nature and Art’, 262; Faust, 290, 317, 336, 341; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 442n4 Gossip, The, 297 Graham, Edward Fergus, 44, 53, 60 assists PBS in London, 44–5; PBS’s letter poems to, 59; & Elizabeth Shelley (mother), 59–60; & Elizabeth Shelley (sister), 70 Gray, Thomas, 146 ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’, 15 Greece, 85, 316–17, 388 Greek islands, 57; Greek sexuality, 196–7; Greek drama, 204, 280 see also Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles; Greek language (ancient), 21, 83, 90, 146, 197, 283, 310, 379, 383, 395n11, 416n33, 423n5; Greek language (modern), 316 Griffith, Dr James, 46–7 Gronow, Rees Howell, 418n27

Grove family, 32, 76 Charles (Harriet’s brother), 30, 64–5, 71; Harriet, 29–31, 38, 49, 53, 58, 118, 129, 297–8, 386; PBS’s letters to, 29–30; John (Harriet’s brother), 65; Thomas (Harriet’s father), 30–1; Thomas Jr. (Harriet’s brother), 61 Guiccioli, Teresa, née Gamba, 5, 289, 319, 372, 386, 424n28 Gulf of La Spezia, 337, 340 Halliday, Walter S., 29, 46 Hampstead, 6, 165 Harris, Thomas, 234 Harry (Marlow gardener), 175 Harvey, Mrs E. (Marlow seamstress), 175 Hay, Captain John, 320 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 134, 304 Hayley, William, 262 Hazlitt, William, 170, 254, 314–15, 380 Table Talk, 314 Healey, Daniel (servant), 76, 78 Hedges, John (money‐lender), 50–3 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 84 Hemans, Mrs see Browne, Felicia Hill, Thomas, 163 Hitchener, Elizabeth, 68–70, 72–3, 75–7, 93, 129, 137, 166, 385, 406n32 PBS’s letters to, 68–70, 72, 75, 93; as ‘Brown Demon’, 75 Hobhouse, John Cam, 138, 148, 288 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 5, 9, 12, 25, 30, 35–8, 39–41, 44–8, 53, 57–8, 60–5, 67–9, 77, 83, 100–1, 102, 129, 172, 181, 226, 235, 311, 363, 365–6, 367, 382–3, 393n5, 395n10, 396n33, 400n5, 400n16, 101n19, 405n15, 406n6, 407n9, 423n6, 424n13 appearance, 35; PBS’s early writing, 26; The Necessity of Atheism, 31, 36, 40–7, 49, 57; Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, 35–6;

462



  Index 

friendship with PBS, 36–7, 64, 68, 72, 129, 367, 385; PBS’s letters to, 36–7, 39, 42, 62–3, 69, 100–1, 106, 121; Leonora, 42; Timothy Shelley sees as ‘original corruptor’ of PBS, 57; attempts to seduce Harriett, 72, 120; subsidises PBS, 72; 1815 relationship with MWG, 120–2, 413n29; & Adonais, 311 see also PBS, Prose, The Necessity of Atheism Holmes, Richard, 79, 392 Homer, 89, 172 Hone, William (printer), 178 Hookham, Thomas (publisher), 80, 84, 90–1, 105, 147, 159–61 hears PBS’s reaction to Harriett’s suicide, 164 Hoppner family, the, 200–1, 208, 222, 313–15, 319 Hoppner, John Rizzo, 200; Hoppner, Marie Isabelle, 199–200, 208, 313–14; Hoppner, Richard Belgrave, 199–200, 272, 313–15, 439n3 Horace, 72 Howard & Gibbs (moneylenders), 50 Hume, David, 40–1, 43 Hume, Joseph, 153 Hume, Thomas & Caroline, 169, 421n11 Hunt family, 5, 6, 363–4, 369, 371, 374 stay with the Shelleys, 171, 181; move to Italy, 363, 372, 374; PBS concerned for, 372; lodge in LB’s Palazzo, 363, 372–4; move to Genoa, 390 Hunt, John (printer), 372, 390 Hunt, Leigh, 170, 173, 376, 396n33, 419n19, 444n16 radical, 5, 161, 170; editor of The Examiner, 5, 161, 171, 180, 250, 259, 265; editor of The Liberal, 5, 319, 363, 372, 384; as ‘La Caccia’, 181; poetry, 184, 319

relationship with LB, 319–20, 363, 372–4; relationship with MWS, 326, 364–5, 369, 373–4, 388, 390; with Jane Williams, 365, 388 relationship with PBS meets, 6, 21, 159, 161; subsidised by, 7, 161, 364; sees PBS as gentleman, 5, 9; told about Harriett’s suicide, 160–1, 164; competes with at poetry writing, 184; Hunt family with Shelleys, 171, 176, 181; PBS as link with LB, 319, 363, 372, 374; journey to Italy, 326, 340, 363–4, 369; PBS eager to see, 340, 363, 371; PBS writes ‘little poem’ to welcome, 369; gives copy of Keats’s poems to PBS, 377; attends PBS’s cremation, 377–8; recollects PBS, xix‐xx, 127, 160, 176, 370, 376; PBS as friend, 373, 380 PBS’s writing A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote, 170; An Address . . . on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, 180; ‘Julian and Maddalo’, 216, 220; PBS dedicates The Cenci to, 245, 247; sent PBS’s The Mask of Anarchy, 248–51, 265; sent PBS’s ‘England in 1819’, 249, 253, 265; sent PBS’s letter to Richard Carlile, 265; defends PBS’s work against reviewers, 265, 380, 384; A Philosophical View of Reform, 268; ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 281; PBS’s letters to, xix, 6, 33, 161, 220, 248, 249, 265, 268, 319, 383 Hunt, Marianne, 232, 363, 372 Hunt, Thornton, 175, 177, 188 Hutchinson, Thomas ed. The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley (Oxford, 1904), 118

463



  Index 

‘Ianthe’ as heroine of Queen Mab, 84–5, 89, 90–1, 128 ‘Ianthe’ as name for daughter of PBS & Harriett, 84, 90–1 Imlay, Fanny see Godwin, Fanny Imlay, Gilbert, 395n21 Incest PBS accused of, 164, 209, 255, 275, 381; PBS’s literary use of, 172, 178, 235, 381 Ireland, 8, 73–5, 82 see also PBS, Poetry, ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’, Prose, An Address, to the Irish People Act of Union, 73–4, 382; Fanny Godwin hopes to teach in, 152, 154–6; PBS & Harriett visit, 73–5, 82, 382; CC visits (later claiming to be ‘Irlandoise’), 122 Israel, Jonathan Democratic Enlightenment, 92–3 Italian language, 100, 194, 230, 290, 292–3, 379, 435n32, 444n16 Italy, xix, xx, 5, 27–8, 41, 169, 175–7, 183, 189, 194–5, 201, 207–8, 221, 230, 248–9, 258, 266, 270, 279, 305, 308, 319, 326, 338, 364, 369, 372, 374, 382, 384, 422n46 PBS’s first plan to visit, 138; his love for, 195, 229, 347, 367; political situation of, 285, 287–90, 316 Jenkinson, Robert Banks see Liverpool, Earl of Kant, Immanuel, 343 Keats, John, 5, 9, 134, 184, 202, 302, 308–10, 377, 380, 384, 390, 445n32, 445n35 see also PBS, Poetry, Adonais Poetry Endymion, 309–10; ‘Hyperion’, 309–10; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 308, 310

Keswick, 72–3, 81–2, 97, 114, 130, 394n15, 407n15, 414n12 Kinnaird, Douglas, 10 Kirkman, Joseph, 187, 423n23 Lamb, Charles, 156, 417n9 Landor, Walter Savage, 47 Gebirus 33, 400n5, 414n9 Lane, William (publisher), 23 Laplace, Pierre‐Simon, 244 Latin language, 16, 41, 72, 83, 90 Leavis, F. R., 253, 254, 429n25 Leeson, the Hon. Robert, 80–1 Lerici, 334, 337–8, 340, 343, 355, 362, 364, 369, 370, 374–5, 383, 440n15 Villa Magni, 328, 337–40, 342, 347, 362–3, 365–6, 368–9, 374, 440n12; as Casa Magni, 339, 444n15 Les Echelles, 202–3 Lewis, Matthew ‘Monk’, 22–4, 148 Liberal,The, 5, 320, 363, 372, 384 Lind, Dr James, 16–17, 60 Linnell, John, 91 Literary Gazette,The, 304, 315, 381 Literary Miscellany in Prose & verse, 302–3 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of, 250 see also PBS, Poetry, Mask of Anarchy Livorno [Leghorn], 228, 230, 233, 243, 248, 258, 269–70, 272, 275, 279–80, 285, 307, 363, 369, 371, 373–5 early destination for Shelleys, 195; Gisbornes there, 195; return after death of William Shelley, to Aquila Nera hotel, 233;Villa Valsovano, 233, 248, 258, 428n7; Monte Nero, 233, 428n7; Casa Ricci & Gisbornes, 270, 272, 275, 279–80; PBS writes ‘To a Sky‐Lark’, 272–4; Paolo Foggi threatens, 275, 280; PBS writes ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, 275–8; Hunts travel there to meet

464



  Index 

PBS, 363, 371; harbour for ‘Bolivar’ & ‘Don Juan’, 371; Williams & Vivian wait there for PBS, 371–2, 374 Locke, John, 30, 40–1 Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, 30 Lockhart, J. G., 5, 285 London, xix, 11, 19, 22, 29, 40, 42, 44–7, 49–53, 57–8, 62–3, 65, 77, 79–80, 82–3, 91, 94, 97–100, 105–6, 112, 120–2, 124, 134, 138, 149, 151, 154–6, 158–9, 161–2, 165, 167, 176, 184, 187, 189, 203, 234, 238, 244, 256, 265, 277–9, 281, 284–5, 295, 299, 308–9, 314–15, 366, 380 Barclays Bank, 1 Pall Mall E, 148; Chancery Lane, 189; Chapel Street, 158–9; Cooke’s hotel, Albemarle Street, 93–4, 176; Cranbourne Alley, 294; 7 Elizabeth Street, 158–9; Fleet Street, 103; Grosvenor Place, 159; Marchmont Street, 26, 150; Poland Street, 46; Serpentine river, 19, 150, 159, 165; Skinner Street, 103, 107–8, 135, 152, 154; St Mildred’s Church, Bread Street, 163 Theatres Covent Garden, 22, 121, 234; Drury Lane, 203, 235; Lyceum, 22 London Magazine,The, 314 Longdill, Pynson Wilmot, 148–9, 151, 168, 169 Lord Chamberlain as censor, 193, 234, 238 Lord Chancellor see Eldon, John Scott, Lord Lucan, 172 Pharsalia, 241 Lucca, 231, 372 Lucretius, 83 Lynmouth, 76, 122

Madocks, Robert, 188 Madocks, William, 54, 76–7, 79–81 Manchester, 248, 261 Marlow, 6, 150–1, 159, 167–8, 170, 172, 175–8, 181, 186–8, 195, 202, 228, 241, 340, 365 see also Rose, Polly Albion House, 168; West Street, 168 Marshall, James translator of Volney’s Les Ruines, 86 Marvell, Andrew, 261 Mason, Margaret, 266, 269, 282, 292, 374, 382 Massa, 340, 375 Mathews, Charles (actor), 22 Mavrokordatos, Alexandros, 288, 316, 317, 437n12 McMillan, Buchanan (printer), 177, 178 Medwin, Pinfold (2nd cousin), 49 Medwin, Thomas (2nd cousin), 14–15, 19, 47, 238–9, 291, 296, 304, 305, 309, 320, 323, 335, 390–1 as biographer, 14–15, 309, 320; ‘as silent as a fireskreen, but not half so useful’, 291, 323 Meillerie, 142 Milan, 193, 202–3, 262, 347 Milly see Shields, Amelia Milman, Henry Hart, 35 Milton, John, 84–5, 204, 241, 245, 251, 261–2, 336 Comus, 251; Samson Agonistes, 204; Paradise Lost, 21, 172, 398n29 Missolonghi, 388 Mont Blanc, 139, 141, 145–7 see also PBS, Poetry, ‘Mont Blanc’ Montagu, Basil, 168–9 Montagu, Sir George, 52 Montalègre, 139, 147 Montanvert, 145 Mer de Glace, 145 Monte Nero see Livorno Monte Venda, 212, 426n21 Montpensier, Antoine‐Philippe, Duc de, ix, 14

465



  Index 

Moore, Thomas, 38, 302, 372, 381 Morning Chronicle, 49 Moschus Lament for Bion, 309 Mountcashell, Margaret Jane King, Countess of see Mason, Margaret Moxon, Edward (publisher), 391–2 Munday, Joseph (printer), 32–4, 36, 42, 44–5, 47–8, 50–3, 187 Murray, John (publisher), 10, 149, 372 Nanney, David Ellis, 79 Nantgwyllt House, 75–6, 98–9, 102, 107 see also Cwm Elan Naples, 27, 221–9, 231, 240, 243, 258, 269, 286, 288, 313–14 250 Riviera di Chiaia, 221, 227; Baiae, 222;Vesuvius, 222–3; Herculaneum, 222; Pompeii, 223, 228; PBS’s illness, 223–4; PBS composes ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’, 224–6;Vico Canale, 227; San Giuseppe in Riviera del Chiaia, 227; registration of Elena Adelaide Shelley, 227–9; Paestum, 228; Foundling Hospital, 228, 313 Napoleon Bonaparte, 110, 137 Nash, Andrew John & George Augustus, 103, 119 ‘Neapolitan charge, my’ see Shelley, Elena Adelaide Newman, Henry Roderick, x, 339 Newton, John Frank, 241 Nicholson, Margaret, 14, 33–6, 38 Norfolk, Duke of, 35, 98 Nugent, Catherine, 75 Ollier, Charles (publisher), xix‐xx, 176, 178, 180, 188, 197, 226, 243, 246, 273, 281, 285, 295, 299, 300–1, 302–3, 308–9, 310, 383, 390, 422n52 Ollier, James, 390 O’Neill, Eliza (actress), 234

Ovid, 72, 89, 122 Metamorphoses, 90 Oxford, xx, 14, 17–18, 20–1, 30, 32–5, 37, 39–40, 42, 45–54, 58, 60, 127, 170, 382 High, the, 20, 32, 45; Leicester Exhibition, 32; Munday & Slatter shop, 33, 42, 44–5, 50–3, 187; Magdalen Bridge, 35; New College, 44; Newdigate Prize, 34, 35; Oriel College, 45; University College, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 42–3, 45–7, 50 Oxford University & City Herald, 44, 48, 52 Pacchiani, Francesco (Professor), 288, 291 Padua, 200–1, 207–9, 211, 214 Paine, Thomas, 408n25 The Age of Reason, 86, 89, 265; The Age of Reason Part the Third, 41; The Rights of Man, 74; The Rights of Man Part the Second, 83 Paracelsus, 16 Paris, 86, 111 Parker, Robert (uncle), 44, 266 Parliament, British, 73, 252, 282–3 Peacock, Thomas Love, xx, 177, 181, 188, 226, 241, 285, 304, 320, 383, 384, 385, 406n6 coins ‘self‐delusion’, xx, 79; PBS subsidises, 7, 119, 175, 188, 385; & Harriett, 49, 96–9, 164, 405n15; describes PBS, 78; & Cornelia Turner, 101; & Alastor, 125, 127; at Marlow, 150, 167; & Laon and Cythna, 178; & Demogorgon, 181, 241; Rhododaphne, 181, 183, 241; helps PBS, 188, 203, 248; & The Cenci, 234; & Prometheus Unbound, 243; & ‘To a Sky‐Lark’, 273; in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, 277; & ‘Ode to Liberty’, 285; hears about Teresa Viviani, 294; & Adonais,

466



  Index 

308, 311; ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, 302–4; Melincourt, 395n25; Nightmare Abbey, 408n18; Sir Proteus, 431n20 PBS’s letters to, 141, 145, 147, 194–6, 226, 294, 320, 381 Pelham, Thomas, Earl of Chichester, 75 Pentrich Martyrs & Revolution, 180–1 Peterloo, 248–50, 252–3, 261 Petrarch, 211 Phillips, C. & W. (printers), 22–3, 33, 42, 44 Phillips, Janetta, 53–4 Pieces of Irish History, 75 Pilfold, John (uncle), 68, 70 Pisa, 11, 269–70, 272, 280, 282, 286, 288, 291, 294, 307, 308, 310, 316, 319–20, 324, 326, 329, 335–7, 355, 362–3, 365, 371–4, 377, 382, 386 the Shelleys’ first visit, 195; PBS hopes for better health, 266–7; Casa Frassi, 266, 270; Casa Galetti, 291, 308; Lung’Arno, 291; Convent of St Anna, 292; Father Prior of St Nicholas, 292; Tre Palazzi di Chiesa, 327, 337; ‘Pistol Club’, 320, 336; LB in Palazzo Lanfranchi, 363, 372 see also LB: Gamba, Pietro: Hay, John: Mason, Margaret: Mavrokordatos, Alexandros: Pacchiani, Francesco: Sgricci, Tommaso: Taaffe, John: Trelawny, Edward:Viviani, Emilia: Williams, Jane & Edward Plato, 35, 196, 300, 310, 370, 373, 424n13, 444n16 Symposium, 196–7, 299–300, 303 Platonics, Italian, 293–4, 296 Pliny the Elder see PBS, Translations Polidori, Dr John, 141, 177, 394n15, 413n29, 442n5 diary, The Vampyre, 141 Pope, Alexander ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, 329; The Dunciad, 254, 446n21

Pope Pius VII, 286, 394n1 Priestley, Joseph, 38 Prince of Wales, Frederick, 403n34 Prince Regent, the, 161, 253–4, 282 see also George IV Pugnano, 306–7 Villa Poschi, 306 Quarterly Review, 171, 246, 255, 309, 319, 397n22, 416n33, 437n26 Ravaillac, François see PBS, Poetry, ‘Fragment. Supposed to be an Epithalamium’ Ravenna, 313, 318–19, 424n28 Reni, Guido supposed portrait of Beatrice Cenci, 230–1 Reveley, Henry, 7, 269, 276, 278–9, 307, 371 Revolution, French, 3, 74, 86, 93, 167–8, 172, 205, 253, 343, 379 Revolution, Italian, 286–90 Reynolds, John Hamilton Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad, 259 Roberts, Daniel, 337, 340, 362–3, 369, 371, 374, 375–6 1828 account of PBS, 64, 374–6 Roberts, Dr William, 77, 94 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 9, 37, 151–2, 156, 160–1, 315, 417n9, 419n15, 429n9 Roe, James, 34 Rome, 85, 139, 229–33, 234, 240, 243, 258, 311, 378, 394n15, 445–6n36 Shelleys’ first sight of, 221, 224, return to, 227, 229; Cencis & Palazzo Colonna, 230–1; fears of malaria, 231; Amelia Curran & lodging at top of Spanish Steps, 231; illness & death of William Shelley, 231–2, 258; Protestant cemetery, 232, 308, 378; Shelleys leave for Livorno, 233; & death of Keats, 308

467



  Index 

Romilly, Sir Samuel, 91, 408n29 Romney, George, ix, 12, 13 Rose, Polly, 188–9 Roskilly, Dr John, 223, 228 Rossetti, W. M., 305, 355, 378 Rothwell, Richard, ix, 104 Rousseau, Jean‐Jacques, 43, 142, 144, 343, 345–7, 361 Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 142 Rowe, Nicholas, 241 see Lucan Saint‐Gingolph, 142, 371 Salt Hill (village near Slough), 117, 121–2 San Giuliano, Bagni di, 275, 280–1, 286, 291, 306–7 Casa Prinni, 280, 291, 308 San Pellegrino, 280 San Terenzo, 338, 347 Sarzana, 338, 362 Scott, John see Eldon, Lord Scott, Sir Walter, 234, 302 Serchio, River, 291, 306–7, 375, 380, 444n24 Sgricci, Tommaso, 288, 289 Shakespeare, William, 83, 236, 237, 238 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 241; Cymbeline, 283; Hamlet, 21, 26, 235, 238; Henry V, 84; King Lear, 86, 236, 237, 249, 383; Macbeth, 21, 64, 236, 237; Measure for Measure, 237; Othello, 236; Richard III, 237; The Tempest, 88, 318, 329 Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick, 5, 45 Shelley, ‘Captain’ (illegitimate brother), 396n1 Shelley, Charles Bysshe (son), 101, 119, 143, 158–60, 162, 168, 170, 177 death, 170 Shelley, Clara (daughter), 175, 181, 188, 193, 207–9, 211, 213, 228, 258 birth, 174; death & burial, 208 Shelley, Elena Adelaide (adopted daughter), 227–9, 269, 275 birth, 222, 227; registration of birth, 227; ‘Neapolitan charge’, 228; death, 211, 227, 275

Shelley, Eliza Ianthe (daughter), 98, 99, 102, 143, 159, 160, 168, 170 birth, 97 Shelley, Elizabeth (mother), ix, 12–13, 13, 20, 38, 59–60, 68, 70–1, 157 PBS’s letters to, 13, 70–1, 157 Shelley, Elizabeth (sister), xviii, 12, 20, 22–3, 28, 30–1, 62, 65, 69–71 see also PBS, Poetry, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire Shelley, Harriett (1st wife), 9, 11, 78–9, 80, 82, 151, 167, 175, 189, 292, 297–8 first acquaintance with PBS, 49–50, 54, 58–9; fears PBS’s atheism, 58; PBS’s interest in develops, 58–9, 61; progress to marriage with PBS, 61–7; relationship with PBS, 67–70, 72, 75–7, 93–4, 96–102, 110, 112, 129–30, 386–7; PBS not in love with, 67, 77, 386; anger with PBS, 152–3; end of marriage to PBS, 104–8, 110, 113–20, 143, 294, 315; on Elizabeth Hitchener, 75; & sister Eliza, 58, 61–3, 65, 72, 75–7, 79, 93, 97–9, 158–60, 162, 164; PBS wants to see as ‘sister’, 113–14; denigrated by Godwin, 162–4; suicide November 1816, 62, 150, 158–66, 168, 255–6; letters to PBS, 61–3; PBS’s letters to, 68, 97, 98, 105–7, 113–17 Shelley, Hellen (sister), 12, 18–23, 29–31, 40, 49 Shelley, John (brother), 12, 19 Shelley, John (great uncle), 119 Shelley, Margaret (sister), 12, 14, 19 Shelley, Mary (2nd wife), ix, 7, 103–12, 113–23, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130–1, 138, 145, 146, 149–57, 158, 159–62, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176–7, 181, 186, 189, 193, 195–6, 201–2, 207, 208–9, 210–11, 213,

468



  Index  220, 221, 222, 223–4, 227, 228–9, 230–1, 233–4, 244, 255, 266, 270–2, 275, 278, 280, 282–3, 288, 291, 295, 297, 299, 302, 305–6, 313, 323, 324, 325–6, 327, 332, 334, 336, 337–8, 341, 345, 364–9, 370–1, 372, 373–4, 375, 377, 378, 386–7, 388–9, 395n21 birth, 105; appearance, 103–4, 104, 392 children first pregnancy, 109; birth of premature child, 120; pregnant with William (son), 121, 124; birth of William, 124; pregnant with Clara (daughter), 168, 174; birth of Clara, 174; death of Clara, 208; pregnant with Percy (son), 229, 231, 258, 262; death of William, 231–2; birth of Percy, 262; miscarriage, 362, 363, 367, 369; children’s illness, 207, 208 ‘desponding note’, 373–5; household accounts, 175; quarrels & anger, 300, 326, 336, 339, 388; jealousy, 123, 162, 326; loneliness, mourning & unhappiness, 208, 226, 232–3, 270–1, 274–5, 325, 391 PBS they meet, 96, 104, 110; MWS’s love for, 101–6, 111–12, 118, 387; PBS’s attraction to MWG, 100, 105, 116, 118, 119–23, 129, 138, 161, 165, 358, 387; PBS’s letters to MWG/MWS, 107, 161, 165, 201, 207, 213; their elopement, 108–12, 116–17, 387; MWS in PBS’s will, 143; their marriage, 160–1, 162–3, 168, 299; PBS unfaithful to MWS? 209–11; PBS believes MWS unloving, 106, 225–6, 324, 326, 387; MWS denies Elise’s stories about, 315; PBS’s unhappiness with MWS,

469

216, 219–20, 278, 300, 367–8, 388; MWS’s sketch of PBS, 231; MWS attempts to present marriage as loving, 272; PBS considers leaving, 364, 365, 392; MWS writes of their ‘unrequited’ love, 389; MWS’s allowance from PBS’s father, 390; MWS’s memories of, xvii, 15–16, 24, 103, 111, 136, 172, 176, 193, 208, 213, 224, 230, 266, 272, 274–5, 300, 338, 340, 365, 367, 370, 391 PBS’s writing PBS’s poetry for, 118, 129–30, 138, 172, 177, 194, 198, 332; not shown PBS’s poetry, 156–7, 224–5, 323, 334, 361, 390; PBS translates for, 196–7, 300; copies PBS’s work, 196, 202, 223, 243–4, 268, 273, 345–6; edits PBS’s work, 197, 209, 250, 345–8, 349, 388, 389–90, 391–2; criticises PBS’s work, 280–1; hurt by PBS’s work, 299, 301; PBS writes poems repellent to her, 332, 349–50; moon symbolism, 298 mother Mary Wollstonecraft, 104, 195, 279; pet name ‘Maie’, 120, 121, 272; reaction to Wordsworth, 132; reading, 157, 303 relationships Amelia Curran, 231; CC, 115, 117, 119, 122–3, 149, 177, 272, 314; Fanny Godwin, 152–3, 162; Gisborne, Mary & John, 201, 269–71, 278–9, 315; William Godwin, 106–7, 130, 135, 151, 195, 266; Harriett Shelley, 107, 114, 117, 162, 164; Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 120–22; Jane Williams, 305–6, 366; Alexandros Mavrokordatos, 316; Thomas Medwin, 291, 323; Teresa Viviani, 292–5, 296–7



  Index 

Shelley, Mary (2nd wife) (cont’d) Writing History of a six weeks’ tour [with PBS], 54, 112, 147; Frankenstein (first version), 140–1; Frankenstein, 183, 202, 379; ‘The Choice’, 389; Valperga, 433–4; journal, 112, 122, 141, 153–154, 162–163, 202, 222, 224, 232, 308, 388 death, 392 Shelley, Mary (sister), 49, 58 Shelley, Percy Bysshe appearance, ix, xvii, xviii, xx, 11, 14, 20, 189, 232, 232, 340, 368; Exotic, 24; phallus see 333 I Background, Foreground family & PBS as gentry, 4–11; family crest (three whelk shells), 65; PBS birth, 3; upbringing, 3, 12–13; mother, 12–14; at Syon House Academy, 14–15; at Eton, 15–18; siblings, 18–20; poetry writing, 21–8; & Harriet Grove, 29–31; University College, Oxford, 32–5; friendship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 35–7, 39–42; The Necessity of Atheism written & distributed, 40–2, 44–5; PBS & Hogg expelled from Oxford, 46; publication of A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, 47–9; dedication to Harriett Westbrook, 49–50; loans & debts, 50–4 II Lover of Mankind, Democrat & Atheist resident in London, 57; relations with father, 57, 59–60; relations with Harriett Westbrook, 58–9, 61–3; possible career as MP, 60, 254; as surgeon, 60; at Cwm Elan, 61–3; feels obliged to marry Harriett, 64–5; ‘elopement’ & marriage with Harriett, 66–7, 72; relations with father broken off, 68, 70–1; correspondence with Elizabeth

470

Hitchener, 68–70; Hogg attempts seduction of Harriett, 72; Shelleys & Eliza to Keswick, meet Southey, 72–3; to Ireland, campaigning for reform, 73–5; Shelleys & Eliza joined by Elizabeth Hitchener, 75; Elizabeth Hitchener leaves, 75–6; Shelleys & Eliza to Lynmouth & Tremadoc, 76–7; night attack at Tan–yr–allt, 78–82; Shelleys & Eliza to Dublin & back, 82; birth of Ianthe Shelley, 84; PBS at work on Queen Mab, 83–90, 91–2; Notes for Queen Mab, 90–1; financial problems, 93–5; future with Harriett at Nantgwyllt planned, 96–9; no affair with Cornelia Turner, 100–2; post–obit money for Godwin, 99, 103, 105; MWG falls in love with PBS, Godwin enraged, 96, 103–8; 110, 113; PBS loves MWG, tells Harriett, 106–7; elopes with MWG & CC, 108–12; returns with no money, 112; corresponds with Harriett, 113–17; father awards PBS £1000 a year, 119; MWG an affair with Hogg? 120–2; PBS an affair with CC? 122–3; CC to Devon & Ireland, 122; birth of William Shelley, 124; PBS writes & publishes Alastor, 124–34; CC starts affair with LB, 138; PBS, MWG & CC to Geneva, 138–9; with LB, Frankenstein written, 139–41; PBS & LB sail round Lake Geneva, 142–5; PBS, MWG & CC to Chamonix, 145–7; return to England, 149; Fanny Godwin’s suicide, 150–7; Harriett Shelley’s suicide, 158–66; PBS & MWG marry, 163;Westbrooks win Shelley children in court of Chancery, 89, 168–70; Shelleys resident in Marlow, 170–89; PBS



  Index  composes & publishes Laon and Cythna, 171–4, 177–8; birth of Clara Shelley, 174; PBS’s bad health, 175, 177; ideas of leaving England, 177, 183; ‘Ozymandias’, 184–6; Shelleys leave England 12 March 1817 with CC,William, Clara, Elise & Milly Shields, 189 III Expatriation several species of exile, 193; Milan, Pisa, Livorno (meet Gisbornes), Bagni di Lucca, 193–5; Allegra sent to LB, 194; PBS translates (Symposium, Cyclops), 196–7; Rosalind and Helen completed, 197–9; PBS & CC to Venice, Este: an affair? 199, 201, 209–11; PBS & LB together, 200–1; PBS starts Prometheus Unbound, 202–6; MWS brought to Este with sick Clara by Paolo Foggi, 207–8; Shelleys desperately to Venice, death of Clara, 208; PBS writes ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’, 212–14, 221; starts Julian and Maddalo, 216–21; Shelleys & CC with Elise & Paolo to Naples,Vesuvius, Pompeii, 222–3; PBS treated for liver disease, 223–4; Elise & Paolo marry, 224; ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’, 224–6; registration of birth of Elena Adelaide Shelley, 227–8, 229; Shelleys & CC to Rome, 229; PBS starts The Cenci, 230–1; with Amelia Curran, portrait of PBS, 231; illness & death of William, 231–2; MWS’s distress, 233; Shelleys & CC retreat to Gisbornes & Villa Valsovano, 233; PBS completes The Cenci, 234–9; unacceptable to London theatre, 234; Prometheus Unbound completed, Demogorgon included, 240–5; PBS sums up poetic career, 245–7; hears of Peterloo massacre,

471

writes The Mask of Anarchy, 248–9; impossibility of publishing it & ‘England in 1819’, 250–4; PBS as comic satirist, 254–7; to Florence for the winter, 258; PBS writes ‘Peter Bell the Third’, 259–62; birth of Percy Florence Shelley, 262; PBS writes ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 262–5; begins A Philosophical View of Reform, 265; poems for Sophia Stacey, 266; Shelleys & CC move to Pisa, Casa Frassi, 266–7; PBS on reform, 268–9; relations between PBS & MWS, 269–72; to Livorno, PBS writes ‘To a Sky–Lark’ & ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne, 272–8; death of Elena Adelaide, 275; Shelleys’ problems with the Gisbornes, 278–9; to Casa Prinni in San Giuliano, PBS writes ‘The Witch of Atlas’ after visiting San Pellegrino, 280–1; Swellfoot the Tyrant, 282–4; political poetry & hopes, 285–90; Medwin arrives, Shelleys & CC flooded out, return to Pisa, 291; Shelleys & CC visit Teresa Viviani, 291–4; PBS writes Epipsychidion, 293–301; quarrels between the Shelleys, 300–1; PBS reads Peacock, writes ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 302–4; friendship with Jane & Edward Williams, 305–7; summer at San Giuliano & Pugnano, 306–8; news of death of Keats, PBS writes Adonais, 308–12; visits LB in Ravenna, hears of Elise’s slanders, 313–14; PBS’s reputation damaged, 314–15; MWS rebuts slanders, 315; MWS’s friendship with Mavrokordatos, 316; PBS & Greece, writes Hellas, 316–18; LB decides to move to Pisa, 319; PBS & LB’s reputation, 320



  Index 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (cont’d) IV No Rest or Respite PBS’s poems to Jane Williams, 323–34; relation between PBS & Edward Williams, 324–5; problems between MWS & PBS, 324–6, 355, 367–9, 387; Trelawny comes to Pisa, 326; PBS writes ‘The Magnetic Lady’, 327–9; ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, 329–331; new relationship between PBS & LB, 335–6; translates Calderón & Goethe, 336–7; plans new boat with Williams & Trelawny, 337; death of Allegra, 337–8; sudden move of Shelleys & Williamses with CC to Lerici, 337–9; the ‘Don Juan’, 339–41, 362–3; PBS writes ‘The Triumph of Life’, 342–8, ‘Bright Wanderer’, 349–61; MWS’s miscarriage, 362; PBS depressed about debts & writing, 363–5; nightmares & visions, 366–7; belief in freedom, 370; with Williams,Vivian & Roberts to Livorno, 371–2; problems with Hunt & LB in Pisa, 372–4; letters from MWS & Jane Williams, 373; final letter to Jane Williams, 373; last voyage of the ‘Don Juan’, 374, 375–6; death of PBS, 375, 388; discovery & cremation of bodies, 375, 377–8; PBS’s ashes, 378; heart or liver, 378, 388, 438n14; range & nature of PBS’s writing, 379–80; reputation as writer, 380–2; expatriation & exile, 382; despair, 382–3; not a professional writer, 383–4; friendships 385–6; with LB, 386–8; MWS’s legacy of publication, 388–92 Concerns & characteristics Beliefs, conceptions, fears, ideals & practices

472

anarchy, 252, 287, 289; atheism, 31, 38, 40–1, 43, 57, 58, 68, 71, 145–6, 168–9, 242, 380, 401n38, 416n33, 445n28 see also PBS, Prose, The Necessity of Atheism; attitudes of upper–class man, 5, 6, 7, 11, 22, 27, 60, 80, 91, 95, 176, 213, 227, 304, 320, 334, 385; authority, opposition to, 24, 34, 37–8, 43, 83, 85, 92, 230, 235, 252, 395n11; Deism, 17, 38–9, 41, 43, 74, 265, 402n1; equality & equal rights, 3, 6, 37, 67, 74, 88, 170, 174, 243, 255–6, 271; freedom, political, 8, 74, 85, 93, 111, 172, 245, 285, 288, 317; freedom, untrammelled personal, 11, 15, 85, 182, 370, 387; political intervention, created, xix–xx, 48–9, 73–5, 170–1, 176, 249–51, 254, 264–5, 268–9, 274, 282–4, 292, 336, 379, 382, 384; political thinking, xix, 3, 18, 37, 38, 84, 247, 286, 288–90, 379; reform as goal, 3, 7, 73–4, 88–9, 92, 170–1, 199, 248, 265, 268–9, 284, 315, 381–2, 385 see also PBS, Prose, A Philosophical View of Reform; revolutionary concerns, 3, 73, 171–2, 235, 252–3, 269, 286–90, 394n1 see also Revolution, French; support for the deserving, 5, 6–7, 76, 80, 136, 175–6; vegetarian diet, 84, 174, 340, 382 Boats & sailing, 370 paper boats, 19, 276, 281; lateen– rigged sailing boat, Lake Geneva, 142, 143; curricle–like contraption, 307; 10–foot punt with keel, 307, 337; danger of drowning, 307, 337, 370–1, 434n20; the ‘Don Juan’, 11, 337–9, 340, 361–3, 371, 374–6, 385, 442n2, 444n21, 445n28, 445n31; with MWS, 340–1; with Jane Williams, 355



  Index  Devils, interest in, 19, 24, 90, 144, 260, 336 see also PBS, Prose, ‘On the Devil, and Devils’ Gentlemanly characteristics (also estimated in others) amiability, 4, 58, 101, 183, 216, 258, 269, 316, 336, 367; ferocious anger, 193, 215, 225, 256, 279, 310, 367; knocking down, 136, 279; pistols, use of, xvii, xx, 4, 31, 78–9, 89, 108, 320; politeness, 4, 9, 12, 75, 136–7, 142, 199, 256, 266, 279, 371, 385; respect for others, 371 Illness, xx, 174–5, 177, 179, 226, 265 anaemia (suspected), 174, 340; chronic urinary condition, 175; depression, 57, 157, 213, 225–6, 228, 246, 257, 269, 277–8, 314, 316, 319, 353, 363–5, 433n27; dysentery (fear of), 234; food poisoning, 207; side pains (kidney problems?), xx, 78, 175, 223, 266, 328, 363; tuberculosis (suspected), xx, 175, 177, 222, 308; ophthalmia, 303 Marriages see Shelley, Harriett; see Shelley, Mary Money, inheritance & debts allowance from his father, xix, 53, 57–9, 61, 68, 71, 93, 119, 176; attitude to creditors, 99, 103, 116, 117, 120, 187–9; debts, xix, xx, 4, 22–3, 33, 42, 52–4, 58, 94, 116, 119, 133, 134, 135, 138, 147, 148, 152–3, 168, 175, 177, 186–8, 196, 318, 364, 393, 406n32, 423n22, 423n23; family inheritance, 4, 5, 7, 58, 69, 77, 80, 119, 136, 143; post–obit loans, 94, 99, 103, 110, 119, 137–8, 147, 167, 187, 403n34, 423n20; wills & testaments, 137–8, 142–3, 198, 409n41

473

Poetic concerns conversational poetry of human relationship, 247; didactic poetry, 92, 128, 172, 179, 247; facility, 23, 24, 27, 129, 276, 278, 380, 384; Gothic fascinations, xviii, xix, 5, 22–4, 27, 34, 60, 69, 84, 165; piracies of his poetry, 90, 93, 390–1; poetry of extreme states (Constantia work), 165, 308; reception & reviews, xviii, 25, 48, 133–4, 138, 179, 246, 255, 259–60, 265, 285, 297, 314, 380–1, 393n7, 430n18; salon lyric, 266; terza rima, 27, 194, 262–4, 342–4, 346; tyrants & slaves, 8, 17–18, 172, 174 see also Swellfoot the Tyrant Pseudonyms Fitzvictor, John, 34; Meyton, 44; Peyton, 62; Peyton, the Rev. Charles, 44; Shelly, the Revd. Percy B., 39; Sidney, Philippe, 40; Stukeley, Jennyngs, 45; ‘The Hermit of Marlow’, 166, 180, 423n5;Victor, xviii, 22–3, 34 Reading, 15, 16, 23–5, 32–3, 36, 83, 130–1, 138, 142, 157, 171, 183, 193–4, 202, 224, 248, 259, 260, 262, 282, 303, 304, 309–10, 316, 341, 373, 376, 377, 383, 387, 400n5, 430n18, 431n8, 434n7, 444n16 Regret for the ‘old aristocracy’, 7; for England, 193, 195–6, 232, 265, 317, 335, 364, 382, 384, 409n29; for Harriet Grove, 30–1, 386; for marrying Harriett Westbrook, 61, 64–5, 419; for Harriett’s suicide, 161, 387; for Fanny Godwin & her suicide, 155–7; for indomitable youth, 264; for ‘what I might have been’, 304; for John Keats, 309–10; for the loss of the Villa Magni & of Jane Williams, 341, 373; that pleasure leaves, 358, 361, 442n10



  Index 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (cont’d) Relationships with Harriet Grove, 29–31, 38, 49, 53, 118, 129, 297–8, 386, 399n53, 411n24 with Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 5, 12, 25–6, 30, 31, 35–42, 44–6, 48, 53, 57, 60–5, 67–9, 72, 77, 83, 100–1, 102, 106, 120–2, 129, 172, 181, 226, 235, 311, 363, 367, 382, 383, 385, 393n5, 100n16, 407n9, 413n29, 424n13 see also PBS, Prose, The Necessity of Atheism with Harriett Westbrook see Shelley, Harriett (1st wife) with Elizabeth Hitchener, 68–70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 93, 129, 137, 166, 385, 406n32 with Harriet de Boinville, 98–102, 113, 410n11, 411n20, 411n25 with Cornelia Turner, 100–2, 194 with Mary Godwin see Shelley, Mary (2nd wife) with CC, care & affection for, 24, 108–9, 143, 211, 272, 298, 325, 338; admiration for, 109, 118; loyalty to, 143, 338; confides in, 304, 335–6, 363; CC loves PBS, 108, 122, 138, 153, 200, 209–11, 313–14; PBS becomes CC’s lover? ‒ 122, 209–11, 297, 313–14, 358, 387, 389 with LB, 10, 64, 90, 122, 132, 139–42, 145, 148, 149, 161–2, 164, 167, 175, 193–4, 198, 200–3, 205–6, 207–8, 211, 215, 216–18, 225, 226, 255, 259, 289–90, 293, 304, 313–15, 318–20, 324, 335–6, 337–8, 340, 364, 367, 370, 371, 372, 374, 380, 381, 382, 383–4, 385–6, 387–8 admiration for LB’s writing, 142, 198, 216, 254–5, 320, 381, 385–6

474

with Teresa Viviani, 118, 209, 291–2, 293–9, 302, 304, 305, 323, 324, 325, 326, 358, 387, 389 with women as sisters, 72, 109, 114, 172, 295, 296 Scientific interests astronomy & chemistry, 15; chemical apparatus, 35, 38; education, 18; electrical machine, 18–19, 38; language, 25, 84, 243, 283, 285; medicine, 60; solar microscope, 15, 17; vision, 88–9, 244, 261, 332–3, 333 see also Walker, Alexander Sense of humour, 5, 35, 37, 59, 111, 122, 238, 257 Suicide attempt? 106; extended suicide discounted, 355, 376; Fanny Godwin’s, 150–5, 157, 418n26; Harriett Shelley’s, 62, 158–61, 166; request for Prussic acid, 355, 365; suicidal imaginations, 30–1, 106, 157, 365; William Godwin threatens, 163 Trees knowledge, love & drawings of, 17, 19, 61, 76, 127, 265, 330–1, 342, 385 Drama ‘Charles the First’, 336, 364 Hellas, 252, 308, 316–18, 380, 391 ‘Fragment written for Hellas’, 316 Prometheus Unbound, 27–8, 32, 181, 202–3, 213, 221, 233, 240, 242, 245–6, 249, 262, 265, 273, 285, 287, 314–15, 379–80 Demogorgon, 181, 241–2, 244–5, 253 Swellfoot the Tyrant [Oedipus Tyrannus], 197, 254, 280, 282–3, 379, 391 The Cenci, xix, 230, 233–4, 236–40, 243, 247, 249, 379–80, 384 The Cyclops see PBS, Translations ‘Unfinished Drama’, 327, 438n3



  Index  Poetry ‘A Dialogue—1809’, 84 A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, 8, 25, 47, 49, 133 ‘A Satire upon Satire’, 254–6 ‘A shovel of his ashes took’, 141 ‘A Vision of the Sea’, 213, 380 Adonais, xix, 8–9, 229, 308–12, 378, 380, 390 Alastor, xix, 54, 93, 118, 124–5, 127–34, 138, 161, 167, 178, 380 ‘Alas this is not what I thought life was’, 274 ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King’ see ‘England in 1819’ ‘As you will see I wrote to you’ (1st letter poem), 59 ‘Bright wanderer’, 297, 323, 330, 342, 349–61, 365, 380, 383, 390 ‘Dear dear dear dear dear dear Græme!’ (2nd letter poem), 59 ‘England in 1819’, 249, 252–4, 265 ‘Epithalamium’ see ‘Fragment. Supposed to be an Epithalamium’ Epipsychidion, 9, 109, 264, 291–3, 295, 297, 299–301, 303–4, 323, 350, 380 ’Esdaile Notebook‘, 27, 75, 97 ‘Far, far, away, o ye / Halcyons of Memory’, 323, 349 ‘February 28th 1806 – To St Irvyne’, 21, 23 ‘Fragment. Supposed to be an Epithalamium’, 34, 401n24 ‘Ghasta Or, the Avenging Demon!!!’, 24 ‘Ginevra’, 299 ‘Goodnight? no love, the night is ill’, 266 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 18, 141, 144, 179, 343 ‘Indian Girl’s Song’, 323, 341 ‘It is a savage mountain slope’, 307 ‘It is not blasphemy to hope that Heaven’, 84, 96

475

‘Julian and Maddalo, A Conversation’, 200, 216–21, 225–6, 278, 370, 380 Laon and Cythna, xix, 16, 18, 167, 171–4, 177–80, 183, 187, 202, 245–7, 297, 308, 317, 340, 343, 380–2, 384 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ (3rd letter poem), 275–8, 380 ‘Lift not the painted veil’, 215, 226 ‘Like the ghost of a dear friend dead’, 266 ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills, October 1818’, 8, 199, 212–14, 221, 223, 380 ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’ see ‘Bright Wanderer’ ‘little poem’ for Leigh Hunt, 369 ‘Mazenghi’, 253 ‘Mine eyes were dim’, 118, 209, 380, 389 ‘Misery. – A Fragment’, 215 ‘Mont Blanc’, 141, 144, 146 ‘My dearest M. wherefore hast thou gone’, 233, 271 ‘O mighty mind, in whose deep stream’, 211 ‘O thou bright sun!’, 96 ‘O World o Life o Time’, 28, 312 ‘Ode to Liberty’, 8, 27, 257, 285–7 ‘Ode to Naples’, 223, 280, 282, 284–5 ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 27, 262–5, 343, 380 ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’, 8 ‘One is lovely but cannot love’, 389 Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire [with Shelley, Elizabeth], xviii, 22–3, 28, 30, 34, 42, 90, 133 ‘Otho’, 141 ‘Ozymandias’, 183–4, 186, 199, 380 ‘Parthenon’, 34 ‘Peter Bell the Third’, 198, 254–5, 259–60, 262, 265, 276, 379–80, 391–2



  Index 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (cont’d) Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, 14, 33–8, 42, 49, 90, 133, 247 Posthumous Poems (1824), 118, 197, 250, 345, 349–50, 389–90, ‘Proteus Wordsworth, who shall bind thee?’, 254 Queen Mab, xix, 8, 66–7, 82–4, 86–7, 90–3, 95, 97, 105, 125, 128, 132–3, 138, 142, 167, 169, 171, 178, 245, 343, 380–2, 391 Notes, xix, 39, 67, 83–4, 86, 90–3, 169, 178, 391 ‘The Dæmon of the World’, 93, 132, 147 ‘The Queen of the Universe’, 93 Queen Mab piracy, 90, 93 ‘Remembrance’, 323, 327 Rosalind and Helen, 141, 177, 198–9, 203, 295, 380 ‘Song’ for Tasso, 225 ‘Sonnet / Political Greatness’, 286, 288 ‘Stanzas written in Dejection – December 1818, near Naples’, 215, 224–6 ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’, 101, 129, 132 ‘That time is dead forever’, 165 The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1830, 1832), 390 ‘The Boat on the Serchio’, 307, 380 ‘The cold earth slept below’, 164 ‘The Dæmon of the World’ see Queen Mab ‘The Fountains mingle with the River’, 266 ‘The keen stars were twinkling’ see ‘To Jane’ (‘The keen stars were twinkling’) ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’, 323–4, 327–8, 355, 390–1 The Mask of Anarchy, xix, 8, 75, 248–52, 265

476

The Minor Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1846), 392 ‘The odour from the flower is gone’, 266 The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829), 390 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete (1836, 1839), 391 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839), 118, 226, 259, 274, 301, 349, 390–1 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840), 349, 390, 392 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1847), 392 ‘The Retrospect’, 96 The Revolt of Islam see Laon and Cythna ‘The Sensitive Plant’, 214, 278 ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’, 323–4, 326–7, 390 ‘The Spirit of Solitude’ see Alastor ‘The Triumph of Life’, 27, 342–3, 346, 348–9, 361, 365, 380, 383, 387 ‘The Wandering Jew’, 21–6, 30, 38, 83–4 ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 280, 340 The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1834), 391 ‘The Zucca’, 332, 334 ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’, 266 ‘Thy dewy looks sink in my breast’, 100 ‘Thy look of love has power to calm’ see ‘To Harriet’ (‘Thy look of love’) ‘Time Long past’, 266 ‘To a Sky–Lark’, 272–6, 379 ‘To Constantia’, 165, 308 ‘To Harriet’ (‘Thy look of love’), 97, 101



  Index  ‘To Jane’ (‘The keen stars were twinkling’), 27, 323, 326, 328, 341–2, 349, 354, 390 ‘To Jane. The Invitation’, 323, 329, 390–1 ‘To Jane—The Recollection’, 323, 327, 329, 391 ‘To Laughter’, 141 ‘To Liberty’, 84 ‘To MWG’, 118 ‘To Wordsworth’, 132 ‘Upon the wandering winds’, 141 ‘Verses written on receiving a Celandine’, 141 ‘We meet not as we parted’, 323, 332, 334, 390 ‘When the lamp is shattered’, 323 ‘Whose is the love that gleaming thro the world’, 84, 97 ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, 323, 329–31, 334, 390–1 Prose ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 225, 237, 247, 268, 303, 379–80, 384–5 ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks’, 196 ‘A Letter to Lord Ellenborough’, 84, 169 A Philosophical View of Reform, 253, 265, 268–9, 303, 379 A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote, 170–1 A Refutation of Deism, 402n1. A Vindication of Natural Diet, 84 ‘Advertisement’ to Epipsychidion, 295 An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, 180–1, 253 An Address, to the Irish People, 73–4, 90–1, 408n25 ‘And through the silent interstellar air’, 385 Declaration of Rights, 74–6, 90–1 Dedication of The Cenci, 245, 247 Essays, Letters from Abroad (1840), 391

History of a six weeks’ tour [with MWS], 54, 112, 147 Hubert Cauvin, 379 Introduction to Rosalind and Helen, 199 ‘Note on Shakespeare’, 240 Note to Hellas, 318 ‘On Christianity’, 144 ‘On Love’, 196, 265, 303, 325, 330, 380 ‘On the Devil, and Devils’, 336, 380 ‘On the Punishment of Death’, 379 Preface to Alastor, 125 Preface to Hellas, 318 Preface to Laon and Cythna, 170 Preface to ‘Peter Bell the Third’, 259 Preface to Prometheus Unbound, 247, 379 Preface to The Cenci, 177–8, 237, 248 Proposals for an Association of those Philanthropists, 74, 90–1 Reviews, 183 St. Irvyne, xix, 23–6, 33, 44, 49, 54, 58 The Assassins, 379 The Necessity of Atheism [with Hogg, Thomas Jefferson], 31, 36, 40–2, 45–6, 49, 75, 84, 90–1 ‘The mountains sweep into the plain’, 307 ‘the spring rebels not against winter’, 384 ‘Treatise on Morals’, 379 Zastrozzi, xviii, 21, 24–5, 30, 49 Translations Pliny’s Natural History, 16 Calderón’s El mágico Prodigioso, 336 Euripides’ The Cyclops, 196–7 Goethe’s Faust, 336–7 Plato’s Symposium, 196–7, 300, 303 Shelley, Percy Florence (son), 336, 338, 364, 374, 378 birth, 262, 428n27 Shelley, Bysshe (grandfather), 58, 69, 94, 115, 119, 137–8, 197, 387 death, 119, 135

477



  Index 

Shelley, Timothy (father), xix, xx, 4, 6–7, 8, 16, 17, 19–20, 32–3, 34–5, 37, 39, 43–4, 46, 47, 50–1, 52–4, 57–61, 68–71, 93, 99, 115, 119, 135–6, 138, 149, 152, 157, 176, 186–7, 196, 197, 282, 315, 335, 364, 378, 385, 386–7, 390–1, 396n1, 403n34, 404n46, 406n32, 406n1, 409n39, 416n24, 442–3n7 as MP, 4, 6, 60, 75, 249, 254, 382; rather PBS ‘killed in Spain’ than expelled, 47; offers to send PBS to ‘the Greek Islands’, 57; hears that PBS is married, 68, 71; wishes PBS ‘humbl’d’, 71; becomes Sir Timothy, 119 Shelley, William (son), 137–8, 139, 145, 148, 150–3, 157, 167, 170, 188, 193, 201, 207–8, 231 birth, 124; appearance, 232; death, 232, 258, 270, 429n15; burial in Protestant cemetery in Rome, 232, 308, 378 Sheppard, Thomas, 6, 7 Shields, Amelia (Milly) 175, 193, 201, 207 Sidmouth, Henry Addington,Viscount, 250–2, see also PBS, Poetry, Mask of Anarchy Sidney, Philip, 262 see also PBS, Pseudonyms The Defence of Poesie, 303 Slatter, Henry, 32, 34, 44–5, 48, 50, 52–4, 400n9, 403n32 Slatter, John, 50–3, 58, 403n32 Slatter, R. see Munday & Slatter Smith, Adam, 43 Smith, Horace, 170, 183–7, 284, 308, 364 Sophocles, 240, 282 Oedipus Tyrannus, 282 see also PBS, Drama, Swellfoot the Tyrant Southey, Robert, 39, 47, 73, 81, 84, 89, 130, 138, 171, 226, 254–6, 302, 324, 398n30, 407n6, 414n12, 416n33, 431n20, 443:3

sees PBS as his own younger self, 73; attacks PBS on moral grounds, 114, 163–4, 209, 255, 315, 414n36; PBS’s letters to, 164, 256; reaction to revolution, 171, 253; in PBS’s ‘Proteus Wordsworth’, 254–5; in PBS’s ‘Satire upon Satire’, 254–6; in PBS’s ‘Peter Bell the Third’, 255; satirized by LB, 255, 372; attacks PBS as atheist, 416n33 Writing A Vision of Judgment, 255; ‘English Eclogues’, 198; Joan of Arc, 253; Thalaba the Destroyer, 86, 126, 172; The Curse of Kehama, 172; ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’, 24 Spanish language, 336, 341, 379 Spenser, Edmund, 27, 171, 173, 179, 277 The Faerie Queene, 146, 172, 253, 277 Spinoza, Baruch Ethics, 40 St Pancras Churchyard, 104 Stacey, Sophia, 266, 334, 409n41 Stevens, Wallace, 349 Stewart, Robert see Castlereagh, Lord Stockdale, John (Dublin publisher), 75, 82 Stockdale, John Joseph (London publisher), 5, 22–3, 33, 38, 54, 58, 187 Sussex, 4, 7, 27, 35, 42, 44, 68, 97, 136, 195 Swansea, 155–7, 418n25 Cambrian, the (coach), 155 Mackworth Arms, 155 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 47 Switzerland, 110–11, 114–16, 136, 141, 167, 189, 195 Syon House Academy, 14–15 Taaffe, John, 24, 320, 335, 406n1, 444n28 Tahourdin, Gabriel, 110 Tan‐yr‐allt, xx, 75, 77–83, 394n15, 406n6, 423n24, 440n24 Tasso, Torquato, 202, 225 Tennyson, Alfred Lord ‘Ulysses’, 220

478



  Index 

Thames, River, 127, 168 The Friend see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor The Globe, 44 The Times, 49, 161 Thomson, James, 84 Trelawny, Edward, 374, 385, 387 problematic recollections of, 4, 15, 355, 371; meets PBS & LB in Pisa, 326; first encounter with PBS, 333; & LB, 335; & the ‘Don Juan’, 337, 363, 375–6; PBS asks for Prussic acid, 355, 365, 377; greets the Hunts in Livorno, 371; organises cremations, 375, 377–8; opinions of PBS, 4, 15, 355, 370–1, 376, 383, 437n17, 443n12, 445–6n36 Tremadog, 76, 80, 81, 94, 176 see also Tan‐yr‐allt Turner, Cornelia née de Boinville, 100–2, 194, 410n11, 411n20, 411n25 Turner, Thomas, 100 University College, Oxford see Oxford Venice, 8, 194, 199–202, 208–12, 214–16, 258, 275, 338, 386 Gondolas, 27, 200, 208, 209, 217, 424n25; death of Clara Shelley, 208; Lido, 200, 208, 212, 216; Protestant cemetery, 208 Versailles, 3, 149 Viareggio, 340, 375, 377–8, 444n24 Viganò, Salvatore, 202 Villa Magni see Lerici Vincenzo, 229 Virgil, 72, 172, 343 Vivian, Charles, 340, 369, 371, 374–6 Viviani, Teresa, 118, 209, 291–9, 302, 304, 305, 323, 325, 358, 387, 389, 435n3, 435n7, 436n26 in circle of Shelleys, 288; in convent, 291–2; writes to & hears from

the Shelleys, 292–293; & MWS, 293, 294–5, 296–300, 326; PBS tells CC about her, 293–4; asks for money, 294; PBS dedicates Epipsychidion to her, 295; her essay on love, 296; ‘Emily’ PBS’s ideal projection of her, 296–7, 299, 324 Volney, Constantin François Chassebœuf, Comte de Les Ruines, 85–6 Voltaire (François‐Marie Arouet), 37, 83, 285, 343 Wales, xx, 9, 61, 63, 75–6, 79, 99, 102, 108, 119, 151, 154, 228, 417n19, 418n27 Walker, Alexander, 14–15 Walker, the Rev. John, 44 Webb, Timothy, 380 Wedgwood, Josiah, 39 Wedgwood, Ralph, 44 PBS’s & Hogg’s letters to, 39–40 Wellington, Duke of, 283 Westall, Richard, ix, 140 Westbrook family, 61–2, 91, 159–60, 162, 168–9 Eliza (Harriett’s sister), 11, 58, 61–3, 65, 72, 75–9, 82, 93, 97–9, 158–60, 162, 164, 404n6; John (Harriett’s father), xix, 49, 61–3, 65, 68, 91, 99, 158–60, 411n21 White, Newman Ivey, 228 Whitton, William, 57–8, 68, 70, 390 Williams couple, the, 306, 323–4, 327, 337–9, 341, 367, 382 Williams, Edward Ellerker, ix, xvii, 11, 16, 305–8, 311, 320, 324–30, 335, 337–8, 340, 354, 361–3, 365–7, 369, 371–7, 385; appearance, 306 & PBS, 306–7, 311–12, 324–5, 327–8, 340–1, 354, 363, 366, 369, 374; portraits of PBS see xviii, 368

479



  Index 

Williams, Jane, ix, 231, 305–6, 323–7, 331, 336–9, 355, 358, 361–2, 365–7, 369, 373–6, 389; appearance, 305 friendship with MWS, 306; as musician, 306, 330–2, 340–1, 364; & PBS’s poetry, 118, 210, 323, 326–32, 334, 342, 349, 354, 361, 380, 387, 390–1; letters from PBS, 325, 327, 373; discusses PBS & MWS with Hunt & Hogg, 365–6, 388 Williams, John, 79, 81, 94 Winnicott, D. W., 210 Wolfson, Susan J., 250 Wollstonecraft, Everina, 152, 156 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 104, 110, 114, 116, 154, 157, 195, 279, 395n21 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 105 Wollstonecraft relations, 154 Wordsworth, William, 9, 26–7, 35, 47, 73, 93, 128, 130–3, 141, 147, 171, 177, 182, 198, 223, 225, 254, 259–61, 273, 280, 300, 302, 304,

306, 311, 380, 391–2, 399n32, 416n18, 422n47 Poetry ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’, 131; ‘A violet by a mossy stone’, 306; ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, 131; Immortality Ode, 35, 131, 225; ‘Lines left upon a seat in a yew‐tree’, 128; Lyrical Ballads, 259; ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’, 414n13; Peter Bell, 259, 280, 431n5; Poems, Including Lyrical Ballads (1815), 128, 130–1, 259; Resolution and Independence, 131; The Excursion, 131–2, 260; The Prelude, 130–1, 259; Thanksgiving Ode, 260; ‘Tintern Abbey’, 130–1, 383; ‘To a Skylark’, 273 Yeats, W. B., 173, 252, 334 York, 62, 65, 67, 72, 160, 378 Young, Edward The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts, 86–87

480

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