Shelley: The Pursuit Read online

  The marriage was not one which old Bysshe would have regarded as a favourable coup, although the Pilfolds had some standing locally in the ranks of the Sussex squirearchy. Elizabeth was a large, handsome woman, with bold features, a mass of light brown curling hair and a strong mouth which seemed to curl with a suggestion of disdain. Timothy Shelley was proud enough of her to have both their portraits painted by George Romney. She had a reputation for being a determined woman, a good letter writer but not interested in literature. Her main love was for horses and the countryside, and she much enjoyed her popularity among the common people of Warnham and Horsham. As a child she had lost her own mother when young, and had been brought up in the family of Lord and Lady Ferdinand Pool, whose main distinction was in the field of racehorse breeding.25 There is a hint of a somewhat masculine character, and it was rumoured that she could be domineering and even violent within her marriage, but this is not certain.26 She had seven children in all, two sons and five daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Her second son John (who eventually inherited the baronetcy) was, however, not born until 1806, when Shelley was 14 and already at Eton, and his presence never really impinged on Shelley himself either in boyhood or adolescence, though the sense of maternal betrayal may have been emphasized by a transfer of attention from the elder son to the younger. For Shelley, the pre-Lapsarian land of Field Place was constructed from a society of sisters, and this was to have a marked affect on his later life in which the ‘sisterly’ ideal played a conscious part. His closest sister and greatest childhood friend was Elizabeth, born in May 1794, and it was with her that his first literary attempt was to be published. She was 8 when he first went to Syon House Academy. His other sisters were Mary, born in 1797, Hellen in 1799 and Margaret in 1801. It is again suggestive of the maternal influence that though they were all acknowledged to be markedly good-looking, only one of them eventually married.

  If he was strangely silent about his mother, Shelley was always outspoken about his relationship with his father Timothy. Timothy was to play a major part in the upheavals of Shelley’s life between the ages of 18 and 23, and from that time on Shelley always dramatized him as the worst kind of tyrant and hypocrite. Subsequently he also interpreted his early childhood as a time of extreme oppression, with his father in the role of persecutor, and he was later to develop a story that he suffered continually from illness, while on one occasion his father Timothy tried to have him certified and taken away secretly to a madhouse. Quite apart from having no evidence from Timothy himself on these matters, there is every reason to treat these melodramatic accounts with great caution. At another level they are extremely suggestive, for they show the earliest development of that mythopoeic faculty which was to become one of the major elements in Shelley’s creative power and originality.

  Shelley’s reaction against his family was also to develop a strong moral and political character. Writing from Shelley’s own point of view, this interpretation was to be put most thoughtfully by his Hampstead friend, the liberal editor Leigh Hunt, in an essay of 1828, long before the other memoirs and reminiscences of his boyhood had been collated or published.

  The family connexions of Mr Shelley belonged to a small party in the House of Commons, itself belonging to another party. They were Whig Aristocrats . . . to a man of genius, endowed with a metaphysical acuteness to discern truth and falsehood, and a strong sensibility to give way to his sense of it, such an origin, however respectable in the ordinary point of view, was not the very luckiest that could have happened for the purpose of keeping him within ordinary bounds. With what feelings is truth to open its eyes upon this world among the most respectable of our mere party gentry? Among licensed contradictions of all sorts? Among the Christian doctrines and worldly practices? Among foxhunters and their chaplains? Among beneficed loungers, noli-episcopalian bishops, rakish old gentlemen, and more startling young ones who are old in the folly of knowingness? In short, among all those professed demands of what is right and noble, mixed with real inculcations of what is wrong and full of hypocrisy. . . . Mr Shelley began to think at a very early age, and to think too of these anomalies. He saw that at every step in life some compromise was expected between a truth which he was expected not to violate, and a colouring and double meaning of it which forced him upon the violation.

  Hunt went on to indict the class in more general terms, concluding: ‘Whenever a character like Mr Shelley’s appears in society, it must be considered with reference to these systems.’27

  This is very much how Shelley expressed his own case in later life. At root it was a political case, but broadened out into a general claim for moral righteousness set over against the corruption of society.

  It was during the two years spent at Syon House, between 1802 and 1804, that Shelley first came to feel that in some sense society as a whole was a hostile force and something to be combated. Besides his rages and his nightmares, he found other weapons close at hand in the games and magic of Field Place: horror books, alchemy, ghost-raising, chemical and electrical experiments, astronomy and the delights of outrageous speculation all served their turn. With these he found he could make his own kind of freedom within the stone walls of the Syon House playground, and also, as with his sisters, he found he could exert certain kinds of power and respect among his fellow-pupils, even a kind of hidden fear. One contemporary subsequently wrote:

  During the time that I was there the most remarkable scholar was . . . Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was then about twelve or thirteen (as far as I can remember), and even at that early age exhibited considerable poetical talent, accompanied by a violent and extremely excitable temper, which manifested itself in all kinds of eccentricities. . . . His imagination was always roving upon something romantic and extraordinary, such as spirits, fairies, fighting, volcanoes, etc., and he not unfrequently astonished his schoolfellows by blowing up the boundary palings of the playground with gunpowder, also the lid of his desk in the middle of schooltime, to the great surprise of Dr Greenlaw himself and the whole school.28

  Tom Medwin recalled him taking up his favourite position by the southern wall, day after day in the playground, pacing backwards and forwards like a caged animal, with his weird, impetuous movements and animated face: ‘I think I see him now — along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world.’29

  One escape was simply to break bounds and go into Brentford. There was a brisk trade in battered dictionaries and old books which were sold by the weight to a local grocer in return for cheese, bread and fruit.30 Shelley’s great discovery was a cheap bookseller who stocked Minerva Press editions, in their distinctive blue paper covers, each priced sixpence. Minerva Press, which was perhaps the greatest of the contemporary popular publishing houses, operating from a narrow shop in Leadenhall Street, printed most of the best horror novels and gothic romances of the period. Tom Medwin saw his cousin purchase at Norbury’s dark shop in the High Street Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, a wild and sinister romance called Zofloya, or the Moor, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and many other promising titles. They made for him an alternative world of ‘haunted castles, bandits, murderers and other grim personages’, a world which never entirely left him, as his later friend, Thomas Love Peacock, was vividly to testify. This world was no longer so innocent as it has been at Field Place: the devil had entered in. Moreover, it was no longer a happily shared fantasy, but a secretive, isolated, one; a world of sleepwalking and bad dreams.

  Apart from Tom Medwin, Shelley found little companionship at Syon House, except for one romantic friendship, a ‘devoted attachment’ which he recalled gratefully many years after when analysing his own emotional development. ‘The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a character eminently grave, generous and gentle. . . . There was a delicacy and simplicity in his manner, inexpressibly attractive. . . . The tones of his voice were so soft and winning that every
word pierced into my heart, and their pathos was so deep that in listening to him the tears often have involuntarily gushed from my eyes.’ Shelley was so moved by this friendship that he wrote a long and enthusiastic letter to his mother at Field Place explaining the warmth of his feelings.

  I suppose she thought me out of my wits, for she returned no answer to my letter. I remember we used to walk the whole play-hours up and down by some moss-covered palings, pouring out our hearts in youthful talk. We used to speak of the ladies with whom we were in love, and I remember that our usual practice was to confirm each other in the everlasting fidelity, in which we had bound ourselves towards them and towards each other. I recollect thinking my friendship exquisitely beautiful. Every night, when we parted to go to bed, I remember we kissed each other.31

  The failure of his mother to respond on this occasion was one of the small indications to Shelley that her sympathy and affection was steadily being withdrawn. She merely thought he was a bit mad. Yet at Oxford, Hogg was to notice how he still loved to talk of his feelings for his mother and his sisters; especially his sister Elizabeth.

  The patterns of male love and friendship were to be very important in Shelley’s life, and he again reverted to this first close attachment outside the circle of Field Place, in his description of the statue of Bacchus and Ampelus in the Uffizi Gallery, which he saw at Florence when he was 27: ‘One arm of Bacchus rests on the shoulder of Ampelus . . . just as you may have seen (yet how seldom from their dissevering and tyrannical institutions do you see) a younger and an elder boy walking in some remote grassy spot of their playground with that tender friendship towards each other which has so much of love. The countenance of Bacchus is sublimely sweet and lovely, taking a shade of gentle and playful tenderness from the arch looks of Ampelus, whose cheerful face turned towards him, expresses the suggestions of some droll and merry device.’32 By this time, it was self-evident to him that school was just one of many tyrannical and perverse institutions.

  In his early twenties, Shelley deliberately attempted to establish a specific moment of revolt at Syon House, which he wrote about as having the quality and intensity of something like a religious conversion. Passages in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1816) and in the Dedication to The Revolt of Islam (1817) have become famous memorials of this, although the thin, high-pitched egotism of their tone largely vitiates them as poetry.

  Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first

  The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.

  I do remember well the hour which burst

  My spirit’s sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,

  When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,

  And wept, I knew not why; until there rose

  From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!

  Were but one echo from a world of woes —

  The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

  And then I clasped my hands and looked around —

  — But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,

  Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground —

  So, without shame, I spake: — ‘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.’ I then controlled

  My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.33

  That this moment ever had a definite historical existence during Shelley’s time at Syon House is doubtful. Yet it records faithfully enough the shock that the school experience had on him, and in Shelley’s elaborate private myth of his own childhood it forms one of the most significant parts.

  One teacher alone had any lasting positive effect on Shelley at Syon House, or made any real contact with his inner imaginative world. This was an itinerant, eccentric lecturer, Dr Adam Walker — a ‘mad doctor’ in the best eighteenth-century tradition of Priestley and Erasmus Darwin — who frequently made teaching tours of schools such as Winchester, Eton and their preparatory offspring. Walker was primarily an inventor and astronomer, who had made his name with a popular scientific textbook published in 1779, Familar Philosophy.[2] He lectured on the stars and the zodiac, on the planets of the solar system, on magnetism and electricity, on the possibilities of extra-terrestial life or the ‘plurality of worlds’, and above all on the practical use of the telescope and the solar microscope. These subjects grafted perfectly on to Shelley’s already thriving occult interests, and vastly enlarged his field for practical experiments, devices and fantastic speculation. Tom Medwin recalled his breathless curiosity as he gazed through one of Walker’s telescopes at Saturn, ‘its atmosphere seeming to him an irrefragable proof of its being inhabited like our globe’; and after another lecture, peering spellbound through a microscope at mites seething in cheese, the wing of a fly, ‘the vermicular animalculae in vinegar’ and other invisible forms of biological life. Later these revelations would form the subject for endless conversations, back and forth by the southern wall of the detested playground.34

  Shelley’s attitude to science was never to be ‘scientific’ in the empirical sense, but speculative and imaginative. Chemistry, electricity, astronomy fused easily with alchemy, fire-worship, explosives and psychical investigations. At Oxford, Hogg was to describe Shelley in his rooms as ‘the chemist in his laboratory, the alchemist in his study, the wizard in his cave’.35 His later adherence to Necessity shows the continuing desire for such a magical key to invisible laws, such as an alchemical formula of life. Yet Shelley was to be much more naturally inclined to the field of social sciences — sociology, psychology, even para-psychology — than the physical ones.

  At Syon House Adam Walker’s lectures fascinated Shelley above all with the ideas of new sources of power: steam power, electrical power, free flight and air power, chemical power controlling agriculture and the climate. Hogg records many of Shelley’s diatribes on these subjects at Oxford. It was Adam Walker’s assistant who sold Shelley — or helped him to build — his more advanced forms of electrical generators. Walker also procured Shelley his most precious piece of ‘philosophic’ equipment, the solar microscope in its rugged mahogany travelling box, which was to go with him on many of his subsequent voyagings.36

  The disruptive and in many ways traumatic effect of Shelley’s two years at Syon House gradually made itself felt during his holidays at Field Place. The house and garden still retained its paradisiac aura. He could still return temporarily to the old warmth and security and freedom, and his sisters were if anything more adoring and compliant companions and followers than before. But Shelley’s natural mischievousness had become more uncontrollable, his games and experiments more violent, and his authority over his sisters more domineering. Gunpowder devices and fire balloons were constructed in distant parts of the orchard, and his own and his sisters’ clothes were constantly stained and burnt by acids and caustics. Elizabeth alone was an entirely willing co-partner in these escapades; the other children were frequently terrified by their wild elder brother. Hellen wrote: ‘When my brother commenced his studies in chemistry, and practised electricity upon us, I confess my pleasure in it was entirely negatived by terror at its effects. Whenever he came to me with his piece of folded brown packing-paper under his arm and a bit of wire and a bottle (if I remember right), my heart would sink with fear at his approach; but shame kept me silent, and, with as many others as he could collect, we were placed hand-in-hand round the nursery table to be electrified.’37 Finally Shelley suggested that he would be able to cure their chilblains by this method of electrification, but his sister’s ‘terror overwhelmed all other feelings’ and she complained to their parents. Shelley was required to desist. A similar episode was recorded some six years later at Oxford by Hogg. Shelley kept his scout’s small simpleton son James under half-comic threats of sudden electrocution, so that James ‘roared aloud with ludicrous and stupi
d terror, whenever Shelley affected to bring by stealth any part of his philosophical apparatus near to him’.38

  Another victim of Shelley’s experiments at Field Place was a local tom-cat, which appears to have been wired up to what Tom Medwin called an ‘electrical kite’ flying in a thunderstorm overhead. The result of this test was not recorded.39 It was perhaps this cat that Shelley celebrated in his earliest recorded piece of juvenile verse, five stanzas about ‘a cat in distress’ written on a sheet of paper with a small cat painted on the top, probably by Elizabeth. The cat in question is suffering simply from hunger, but even at the age of eleven, Shelley gives its sufferings a characteristic supernatural twist:

  You would not easily guess

  All the modes of distress

  Which torture the tenants of earth;

  And the various evils,

  Which like so many devils,

  Attend the poor souls from their birth.

  The doggerel also contains a sly cross-reference to the relationship between Shelley’s father Timothy and old Bysshe, which shows the quickness with which he had seized on the nature of the feelings between father and son: