Shelley: The Pursuit Read online

  From the age of nineteen, Shelley passed through a series of personal crises, dictated partly by chance but increasingly by choice, which had the cumulative effect of forcing him further and further away from the family, class and cultural background into which he had been born. By the time his life was cut short, one month before his thirtieth birthday, he was a complete exile, both geographically and spiritually. The encroaching condition of exile plays a highly significant part in his story. At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally unspeakable in England, an object to be torn apart between the conservative and radical reviews, but not on the whole to be mentioned in polite London society. In this he was quite unlike his aristocratic friend and rival Lord Byron who, though similarly exiled, always had a tremendous popular following in England, and who by sailing to Greece instantly canonized himself on the altars of English liberalism. Moreover, while Byron had achieved perhaps the greatest international readership of the age, Shelley had achieved almost none. Thus while exile had brought Byron fame and the kind of notoriety that is quickly transmuted into fashionable glamour, it brought to Shelley both literary obscurity and personal disrepute. A few days after Shelley’s death, Byron wrote to Tom Moore in London, ‘there is thus another man gone about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken’ — but it was a mistake which his Lordship himself had frequently helped to compound.

  Shelley’s exile, his defection from his class and the disreputability of his beliefs and behaviour, had a tremendous effect on the carefully partisan handling of his biography by the survivors of his own circle and generation, and even more so by that of his son’s. In the first, the generation of his family and friends, fear of the moral and social stigma attached to many incidents in Shelley’s career prevented the publication or even the writing of biographical material until those who were in possession of it, like Hogg, Peacock and Trelawny, were respectable Victorians in their sixties, who were fully prepared to forget, to smudge and to conceal. With one exception, almost no significant biographical material appeared until more than thirty years after his death. Shelley’s second wife, Mary, was the key to his biography both in her own experiences and in her access to papers. Yet Mary Shelley was actually prevented from writing anything fuller than the brief introduction to Galignani’s edition of the Posthumous Poems in 1824, and the editorial ‘Notes’ to the first Complete Works of 1839–40. She was prevented partly by the same considerations of propriety as Shelley’s friends, but even more by the fact that Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, specifically forbade any such publications until after his own death, on pain of the removal of the annuity, Mary’s only regular source of income, with which she was just able to support herself and her son — Sir Timothy’s grandson and heir — Percy Florence Shelley. Sir Timothy did not hesitate to remind Mary of this interdiction through his solicitor Whittan, and made the ban singularly effective by outliving his detested son by twenty-two years, and dying at the age of 90 in 1844. Mary, who had contented herself with enshrining the remembered image of her husband in a series of noble and emasculated figures in her fiction, especially The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835), died without further revelations only seven years later in 1851.

  In the second generation, control of the Shelley papers passed to Boscombe Manor and Sir Percy Florence’s wife, Lady Jane Shelley, who made it her life work to establish an unimpeachable feminine and Victorian idealization of the poet. The main obstacles were the irregularities of Shelley’s love-life, the radicalism of his political views and the philosophic difficulty of much of his major work. She substituted for them the image of the gentle, suffering lyric poet, a misunderstood man more sinned against than sinning, whose reputation and social standing were gradually rehabilitated. Suppression, alteration and even destruction of certain journals, letters and papers here began in earnest; though to be fair these were not much worse than those already carried out by friends like Hogg. But the cumulative distortion became large. Moreover, the vetting and control which Lady Jane exercised over the chosen scholars who were allowed into the sanctuary, notably Richard Garnett and Edward Dowden, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, was strict and to some degree ruthless. This is witnessed most particularly by the entirely unscrupulous handling of the Harriet Shelley material; but there are many other places where the record was intentionally falsified, and details of the more significant ones are discussed in the course of my narrative for they frequently throw much light. They may also be gathered from the Garnett, Dowden, Rossetti correspondence which has been published, and a wild but spirited polemical attack by Robert Metcalf Smith in The Shelley Legend (1945). This crucial period of Shelley studies was crowned by Edward Dowden’s two-volume standard Life (1886), whose damaging influence is still powerfully at work in popular estimates of Shelley’s writing and character.

  The decisive modern reinterpretation of Shelley began in America. It may be said to date from the biographical work of Newman Ivey White, and the textual scholarship of F. L. Jones. Together with a third American scholar, Kenneth Neill Cameron, who became the first editor of the Shelley Collection in the Pforzheimer Library in New York, these men began a movement which has started a complete transformation of the assessment of Shelley’s life and work. Their monuments are White’s two-volume Shelley of 1940, and Jones’ two-volume Letters of 1964; full details of the rest of their work appear in my references. They returned everywhere to original manuscript sources and contemporary material, meticulously comparing printed versions and frequently having recourse to infra-red equipment, and launching a new younger generation of researchers. Any modern English biography must be profoundly indebted to this scholarship, and for me it has been both the indispensable foundation of this book, and an inspiring example.

  While the biographic material of Shelley’s life has taken more than a hundred years to begin its re-emergence from the penumbra of Victorian proprieties, many of Shelley’s actual writings have suffered from an equivalent languishing fate. This too has led to a great distortion in the literary estimate of Shelley’s importance. The publishing history of many of Shelley’s major poems is a curious one, while the last reasonably complete edition of his prose in England was in 1880. His most important political essay was first published in a limited private edition one hundred years after it was composed, while several of his best poems have only been authoritively edited and printed in the last decade. With the exception of Carl Grabo’s The Magic Plant (1936), and an essay by W. B. Yeats, there is virtually no literary criticism or critical commentary which is worth reading before 1945. Again, details of the history of Shelley publication occur in the body of my narrative where they throw light on Shelley’s reputation, as in the extraordinary case of Queen Mab. Probably the most faithful, effective and discriminating of Shelley’s earliest publishers were the band of radical pirate printers who fought the battle for a free press in the 1820s, and later the battle for Chartism.

  In a field across which immense troops of scholars are now constantly being deployed, one hesitates to claim originality. The reader who asks what is literally ‘new’ partly misunderstands the nature of this kind of biographical research. It is more the case that perspectives change, ‘old’ facts and events and documents take on new significance and relations, while fresh local research puts events and experiences in a new setting, drawing in elements that before had not been given proper consideration. What is constantly new is not the past itself, but the way we look back on it. My book will be found to be different from previous biographies in several ways, apart from the original local research upon which it is based. I have used both Mary’s and Claire’s Journals more fully than previous writers, and for the first time I think Claire is given her full and proper place in Shelley’s life. I have offered fully documented reinterpretations of the two great biographical mysteries in Shelley’s career — the ‘assassination’ attempt in Wales in 1813, and the problematical ‘Neapolitan�
�� child born in the winter of 1818. I have made constant reference to Shelley’s manuscript working notebooks in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in an attempt to show more clearly how Shelley’s great poetic themes were gradually conceived and progressively executed. Finally, I have redrawn the critical estimate of both Shelley’s major poetry and his prose, and attempted to set it as vividly as possible in its immediate physical setting, and against the disturbed and excited political period which brought it into being, and which flashes up through the years towards our own. This last is a comparison that I have never presumed to mention, since that has not been my task. But it stands there for anyone who has eyes to see, ears to hear, or heart to feel, sometimes so close that Shelley’s life seems more a haunting than a history.

  SHELLEY

  1. A Fire-Raiser

  His bedroom window looked west, towards the setting sun. There was a wide lawn, with a shallow bank to roll down, and then a cluster of enormous trees, elms with rooks in, cedars, American redwoods brought back to England by his grandfather, and further and darker, rhododendrons and fir trees. Through the trees was the lake. Then there was the orchard and the south meadow, and beyond an even bigger lake which was called Warnham Pond. It was two lakes really, joined by a stone bridge. His father kept the boat there, and the fishing lines. His father stood among the reeds and shot the wild duck, with their bottle-green feathers, and the snipe. In Warnham Pond there lived the Great Tortoise. Sometimes at night it rose out of the depth of the water and came trundling over the lawns. In the woods there was another monster, the Great Snake. He talked to his nurse about it. She said it lived in St Leonard’s Forest and was at least three hundred years old. His nurse came from Horsham, and talked with a soft Sussex burr. Sometimes he told his sister Elizabeth about the Great Tortoise and the Great Snake, and she was very frightened. But she was only two.1

  The house was called Field Place. There was a tall oak staircase, which shone in the candlelight when he went to bed. Field Place had once been a Tudor farmhouse, and it still had a great stone-floored kitchen, and many little cupboard rooms and locked doors and attics with cobwebbed beams. The new part was Georgian, a stately symmetrical façade, with high windows, and two wings enclosing a central portico, that looked out over the lawn. At the back were the new stables built by his grandfather. The carriages were kept here, and the horses. The groom pretended to play cards with him: ‘Be I to play trumps, Master Bysshe?’2 His mother loved riding. She was very beautiful, and everyone admired her in the village when she rode through on her horse. She gave money to the poor people. She told him that he must learn to ride a horse, and fish, and shoot game in the woods.3 He had his own pony. The steward Lucas helped him to learn things. Lucas sometimes lent him money to give to the poor people.

  When his father Timothy came down from Parliament he sat in his study. He was very tall, and fair-haired, and dressed very carefully. On one wall of his study was a picture of Christ crucified, and on the other an Italian print of Vesuvius erupting.4 His father made all the family and the servants go to church, but he preferred not to talk about God. The servants liked him because he was kind. Timothy had a long nose, and very fair arched eyebrows. Every day he sent a messenger about grandfather’s health. Grandfather Bysshe lived in Horsham in a little cottage by the river Arun. When Timothy went to see him, old Bysshe shouted curses and oaths. Old Bysshe was very rich and stuffed banknotes behind the sofa. Timothy was frightened of him.

  When he was six years old his father sent him to the little day school run by the vicar of Warnham church, the Reverend Edwards, a Welshman. He went each morning down the lane to the vicarage carrying a bundle of books under his arm, and he learnt the rudiments of Latin and Greek. His father liked him to learn passages of Latin poetry, and he would recite them by heart in the drawing-room after tea, acting out the meaning with his arms. His sisters Elizabeth and Mary watched Bysshe in silent admiration, amazed not only that he could remember so many words but that he could show by the expressions on his face and the waving of his arms that he knew what they meant.5 His mother liked him to recite the comic mock-melancholy of Gray’s lines on The Cat and the Goldfish. To Elizabeth and Mary, and even little Hellen who was born when Bysshe was seven, he seemed infinitely wise and full of mysterious knowledge, like a kind of magician.

  He told them stories, made up from his explorations in the garden, and in the woods, and round the lake, and in the old part of the house. Sometimes he came to their nursery, and sometimes in the evening he gathered them into a corner of one of the main rooms. A long time afterwards his sister Hellen recalled: ‘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. Another favourite theme was the “Great Tortoise” that lived in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was accounted for by the presence of this great beast . . . .’6

  Elizabeth, who was only two years younger than Bysshe, sometimes contributed to these magical and monstrous creations, but it was Bysshe who was always the leader, who alone had access to the arcane knowledge brought back from his lessons at the vicarage, from his moonlight rides around the woods, from the shadow-land of locked rooms, and from his store of mysterious books. Long after, a battered copy of M. G. Lewis’s Tales of Terror was found in the children’s library at Field Place, its margins annotated with grotesque children’s sketches which Bysshe had made of devils, horned monsters and spirits.7 As a mature man, Bysshe’s working notebooks were to be annotated with the same ghastly homunculi. His sisters adored him, and they feared him. Bysshe, the favourite of the servants, and secure in his position as tribal chief, ran riot at Field Place. Even to the grown-ups he seemed full of ‘pranks’ and ‘mischief’ and driven by his ‘wonderfully exuberant imagination’.

  Hellen could remember only incidents, ‘but nothing that either preceded or followed them, connectedly’.8 Bysshe had a way of disappearing for hours on end, and then coming back with marvellous adventures to relate, which usually had some strange twist. Hellen remembered ‘on one occasion he gave the most minute details of a visit he paid to some ladies, with whom he was acquainted at our village: he described their reception of him, their occupations, and the wandering in their pretty garden. . . . There must have been something peculiar in this little event, for I have often heard it mentioned as a singular fact, and it was ascertained almost immediately, that the boy had never been to the house.’ No explanation was forthcoming; it was regarded as peculiar by his parents, but not punished.9 On another occasion, he became obsessed with the idea of finding the secret hiding-place of one of his apparitions in the upper floors of Field Place, and it was found that he had taken a long stick and driven it repeatedly through the ceiling of a little low back passage of the house in an effort to plumb the secret chamber. The damage was extensive, and he was rebuked.10

  He was fascinated by moonlight and candlelight, and fire very soon entered into his rituals as a storyteller, ghost-raiser and alchemist. His sisters — there were now four of them, since little Margaret had been born when Bysshe was eight and a half — were more and more drawn into his world of magic and supernatural horror. ‘. . . we dressed ourselves in strange costumes to personate spirits or fiends, and Bysshe would take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable liquid and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back door; but discovery of this dangerous
amusement soon put a stop to many repetitions.’11 On another occasion, perhaps in retaliation for the ban, he was rumoured to have set fire to the rotund form of the butler, Mr Laker. Timothy, an easy-going man, but a father concerned with proprieties, decided that he must think of sending his son away to school. There were consultations in the family: Timothy wanted to send Bysshe to Eton, but he was still too young for that, and first the boy’s classics would need a wider grounding. His mother talked to her sisters in Horsham, one of whom was married to Timothy’s legal agent in the district, T.C. Medwin. Their son Tom was at a preparatory school near London, where the headmaster was a Scotsman and a classical scholar. This seemed to promise well both for Bysshe’s character discipline and his academic education. At the age of ten, he was sent away from Field Place and the adoring society of his sisters, and entered at Syon House Academy, Isleworth, just south of the Thames near Brentford.

  The only boy whom Bysshe vaguely knew at the school was his cousin Tom Medwin, four years his senior. Medwin later summed up his experience simply: ‘Sion House was indeed a perfect hell to him.’12 It was a sombre brick building, standing back from the Brentford road, and its gloomy walls were entered by a forbidding gate. In the seventeenth century it had belonged to a Bishop of London, and the dark-panelled, echoing, freezing banquet hall now formed the main schoolroom. The food was sparse, and the washing facilities consisted of a cold plunge. On Saturdays the great school treat was a stew made up from all the nutritious leftovers of the previous week. There were about sixty boys in all, but they ranged in age from 8 to 18, and nearly all of them were sons of London merchants and shopkeepers and successful traders. None of them had Bysshe’s county background, or his rural upbringing. The focus of school life was an outside play-yard, surrounded on four sides by high stone walls and a paling fence, with a battered elm tree in the middle. The tree was not like those at Field Place: it carried the school bell, which summoned them to the cold plunge, the refectory, the classroom, and the dormitory. The Bell Tree ruled their lives with a harsh clang that even Medwin could not remember years later without flinching at the sound of its ‘odious din’ jarring in his ears. In this playground, with its prison walls, and its roar of voices, shouting, calling, laughing and yelling, the bullying took place.