Shelley: The Pursuit Read online

  Some a living require,

  And others desire

  An old fellow out of the way;

  And which is the best

  I leave to be guessed,

  For I cannot pretend to say.40

  A similar kind of humorous self-assurance, which verges on the cynicism of a spoilt child, was shown in his first known letter dating from the summer before he went to Eton. He invites a girl-friend, a certain Miss Kate of Horsham, to a picnic expedition boating on Warnham Pond. The letter is franked ‘free’, as if it had been posted by his father under parliamentary privilege, though it was actually carried by Tom Medwin. The letter ends: ‘Mama depends on you bringing Tom over tomorrow, and if you don’t we shall be very much disappointed. Tell the bearer not to forget to bring me a fairing, which is some gingerbread, sweetmeat, hunting-nuts, and a pocket book. Now I end. I am not, Your obedient servant, PBShelley.’41 Yet underneath the confident façade, the nightmares and the anxiety continued, and the sense of betrayal. It was first noticed at this time that Shelley began taking his pony out for long periods, or going on mysterious night-time expeditions. The old servant of the family was sent to follow him at a discreet distance, but he returned to report with a puzzled shake of his grey head: ‘Master Bysshe only took a walk and came back again.’

  In 1804, Shelley left Syon House Academy and the protective friendship of Tom Medwin; and in September of that year, one month after his twelfth birthday, he was sent to Eton College. On the morning of his departure, a fire was discovered in the washroom at Field Place, started by one of Shelley’s ‘chemical preparations’ ignited in the fire grate with the chimney valve closed. It seems to have been timed to coincide with his leave-taking. His sisters remembered that ‘much was made of this incident’.42

  Shelley was at Eton for six years, one of 400 Oppidans and some seventy scholars. The latter lived in College, had their fees paid, and were distinguished by their black academic gowns. The former, of which Shelley was one, were fee-paying, and lived in various school houses and lodgings. The years were divided into ‘elections’, with a strict and brutally enforced system of social hierarchies, and it was traditional that the junior election always ‘fagged’ — acting as menial servants for senior boys. At the time of Shelley’s election, the Lower School were ruled by the notorious, squat, roaring figure of Dr Keate, soon to become the headmaster of the whole College when he earned his sobriquet ‘Flogger’. He was both a feared and a ridiculed figure, with a grimacing bulldog face glaring out beneath a large tricorn hat, whose harsh military régime set the tone for barbaric behaviour among the boys until they reached the relative civilization of the Remove and the Sixth Form in their last two years.

  Shelley lodged during his first years in the house of Mr Hexter, the writing master; and latterly in the liberal sanctum of the classics master, Dr Bethel. A fragment of a letter which has survived to his father, ends characteristically: ‘PS. I can equivocally promise (a good) account from Mr Hexter. . . .’43 He was quickly recognized as an exceptional Latin scholar, and a remarkable nonconformist, and the bullying from fellow-pupils was extremely severe. He refused to valet for his fagmaster Matthews, and thus forfeited the traditional right of protection which senior boys exercised when bullying in a junior election had become too severe. He was consequently disliked by his senior year[3] and was tormented by his peers. In his second and third years, he even found that the junior elections mocked him for his ‘wild and marked peculiarity’, and the best account of the bullying and Shelley-hunting was left by a boy one year below.

  He was known as ‘Mad Shelley’; — and many a cruel torture was practised upon him for his moody and singular exclusiveness. Shelley was my senior; and I, in common with others, deemed him as one ranging between madness and folly. . . . Conscious of his own superiority — of being the reverse of what the many deemed him — stung by the injustice of imputed madness, by the cruelty, if he were mad, of taunting the afflicted, his rage became boundless. Like Tasso’s jailer, his heartless tyrants all but raised up the demon which they said was in him. I have seen him surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull, — and at this distance of time I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his paroxysms of revengeful anger.

  The madness which Shelley subsequently wrote into his own childhood probably had its root here. On winter evenings, while waiting in the cloisters to go into the upper school for supper, there was a particular game called ‘nailing’ in which a muddy football was kicked through the crowd and shot as hard as possible at one agreed target. Frequently this was Shelley.

  There were other diversions of the mob.

  The particular name of some particular boy would be sounded by one, taken up by another and another, until hundreds echoed and echoed the name. . . . The Shelley! Shelley! Shelley! which was thundered in the cloisters was but too often accompanied by practical jokes, — such as knocking his books from under his arm, seizing them as he stooped to recover them, pulling and tearing his clothes, or pointing with the finger, as one Neapolitan maddens another. The result was, as stated, a paroxysm of anger which made his eyes flash like a tiger’s, his cheeks grow pale as death, his limbs quiver, and his hair stand on end.44

  Shelley remembered these first years at Eton with an intensity of loathing that affected many of his later attitudes towards organized authority and social conformism. To Thomas Love Peacock, a close friend of later years, he recounted them with feelings of abhorrence which Peacock never heard him express on any other subject except the Chancellor Eldon.45 He told Peacock that he had been provoked once into striking a penknife through the hand of one of his tormentors and pinning it to the desk; the incident reappeared in one of his poems written at the age of 25.46 Mary Shelley recalled in 1825: ‘I have often heard our Shelley relate the story of stabbing an upper boy with a fork. . . . He always described it, in my hearing, as 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.’47 Such sudden outbreaks of violence were to recur.

  The bullying at Eton, after it had entered Shelley’s own adult mythography, was later passed on to admirers and biographers as a glowing part of Shelley hagiography. By 1839, Mary Shelley was to put the matter on the plane of divine heroism and angelic self-sacrifice:

  Inspired with ardour for the acquisition of knowledge, endowed with the keenest sensibility and with the fortitude of a martyr, Shelley came among his fellow-creatures, congregated for the purposes of education, like a spirit from another sphere. . . . To a devoted attachment to those he loved he added a determined resistance to oppression. Refusing to fag at Eton, he was treated with revolting cruelty by masters and boys: this roused instead of taming his spirit, and he rejected the duty of obedience when it was enforced by menaces and punishment.48[4]

  But Mary Shelley, as an imaginative writer, was also deeply interested in the realities of Shelley’s mind and upbringing. Prevented from anything more than superficial biography, she was to turn to fiction, in order to unravel further the real nature of Shelley’s conflict with school authorities and fellow-pupils. In her fourth novel, Lodore (1835), which follows the career of a vaguely Byronic hero called Fitzhenry, there is an early passage about his unhappiness at school which represents much of her own reflections on Shelley’s childhood.

  Many individual details recall the Field Place upbringing and the school in the novel is stated to be Eton. But Mary’s portrait is not quite straightforward. She seems deliberately to split Shelley’s characteristics between two personae: Fitzhenry and his schoolfriend Derham, and the friendship itself recalls the ones that Shelley referred to at Syon House. The device of splitting Shelley’s characteristics between two personae is one she used in other novels. Lodore is now obscure and difficult to obtain, and it is worth quoting it here at length.

  The distinction that Lord Lodore’s title and residence bestowed upon Longfield, made his son and heir a demigod among th
e villagers. As he rode through it on his pony, every one smiled on him and bowed to him; and the habit of regarding himself superior to all the world became too much a habit to afford triumph. . . . He would not wantonly have inflicted a pang upon a human being; yet he exerted any power he might possess to quell the smallest resistance to his desires. . . . Any poor family visited by rough adversity, any unfortunate child enduring unjust oppression, he assisted earnestly and with all his heart. He was as courageous as a lion, and, upon occasion, soft-hearted and pitiful; but once roused to anger by opposition, his eyes darted fire, his little form swelled, his boyish voice grew big, nor could he be satisfied except by the most entire submission on the part of his antagonist. Unfortunately for him, submission usually followed any stand against his authority. . . .

  At the age of thirteen he went to Eton, and here everything wore an altered and unpleasing aspect. Here were no servile menials nor humble friends. He stood one among many — equals, superiors, inferiors, all full of a sense of their own rights, their own powers; he desired to lead, and he had no followers; he wished to stand aloof, and his dignity, even his privacy, was continually invaded. His school fellows soon discovered his weakness — it became a bye-word among them, and was the object of such practical jokes, as seemed to the self-idolizing boy, at once frightful and disgusting. . . . He fixed his large dark eyes on them, and he curled his lips in scorn, trying to awe them by haughtiness and frowns, and shouts of laughter replied to the concentrated passion of his soul. He poured forth invective, and hootings were the answer. He had one other resource, and that in the end proved successful: — a pitch battle or two elevated him in the eyes of his fellows, and as they began to respect him, so he grew in better humour with them and himself. . . . He resented injustice wherever he encountered or fancied it; he equally spurned it when practised on himself, or defended others when they were its object — freedom was the watchword of his heart.49

  The character here drawn is deliberately made too extroverted and dignified for Shelley as he was; but the general outline is strongly reminiscent of him, and it is interesting to see Mary locate part of the fault in his own background and character, rather than purely in the savagery of the school. To compensate the portrait, Mary drew in Fitzhenry’s friend Derham, an extreme version of the other side of Shelley’s nature, the introverted one. Derham, whom the older boy befriends and protects, is small, beautiful, ‘effeminate’ and strangely foolish, being totally unable to learn in class.

  The boy was unlike the rest; he had wild fancies and strange inexplicable ideas. . . . He seemed incapable of feeling the motives and impulses of other boys: when they jeered at him he would answer gravely with some story of a ghastly spectre, and tell wild legends of weird beings, who roamed through the dark fields by night, or sat wailing by the banks of streams: he was struck, he smiled and turned away; he would not fag; he never refused to learn, but could not; he was the scoff, and butt, and victim, of the whole school.50

  Somewhere between these two fictional creations, in a combination of their aggressive egotism and their wild private fantasies, Mary Shelley’s final view of Shelley as a child seems to lie.

  Of the damage that the early Eton experience did to him, repeating and reinforcing the Syon House pattern and reaction, there can be little doubt. Fear of society en masse, fear of enforced solitude, fear of the violence within himself and from others, fear of withdrawal of love and acceptance, all these were implanted at the centre of his personality so that it became fundamentally unstable and highly volatile. Here too seem to lie the sources of his compensatory qualities: his daring, his exhibitionism, his flamboyant generosity, his instinctive and demonstrative hatred of authority.

  Shelley’s changing conduct in the vacations at Field Place bears out the profoundly disturbing effect of school upon him between the ages of 12 and 16. There are stories of him wandering about the garden in disguise, of spending whole nights locked in Warnham Church, and of applying to the local Horsham lawyer for work as a gamekeeper’s boy, wearing ragged clothes and speaking in heavy Sussex dialect.

  When the Shelleys went to pay a summer visit to their cousins the Groves at Fern House in Wiltshire, Shelley’s presence was largely remembered for the expedition he led into the private plantation where he chopped down several young fir trees, much to Mr Grove’s displeasure.51 This was also the first time he met his beautiful cousin Harriet Grove, one year his senior. They hardly spoke to each other.

  During another summer at Field Place, Shelley took all four of his sisters on a secret and illicit expedition to Strood, travelling cross-country. They made their way by sunken fences and stiles, but where there was a wall Shelley eschewed the gate and made everyone clamber over the stonework. Hellen remembered that she was ‘big enough to be pulled over’, but little Margaret — who was then about five — was unable to manage so she was ‘gently thrown across’ on to the grass. On the way back she was so tired Shelley carried her in his arms, telling her to ‘be careful to hold her feet’ so that his trousers did not get damaged. They all arrived back in the evening sadly soiled, as Hellen remembered, and Shelley’s escapade met with frowns. But it was repeated in various forms whenever, as his sister put it, ‘he could steal away with us’.52 The curious parental fear that Shelley was in some way trying to make off with his sisters was to become a definite alarm from the time he entered Oxford onwards. He was rebuked for playing too roughly with the baby John, and crashing his push-carriage in a strawberry bed. It was not thought amusing either that the first word he taught him to speak was ‘devil’, which came out ‘debbee’.53

  Shelley was still closest to Elizabeth, and it was at this period that he wrote his first play with her, which they sent to Matthews the comedian in London. It has not survived, but one of his contemporaries at Eton remembered Shelley’s attempts to put on plays at school during his third or fourth year. ‘The boys often invited him to rehearse these productions with a mock interest, and then, just when he thought the audience were thoroughly enraptured, burst out into fits of laughter.’54 So the counterpoint between school and home continued. A temporary alliance was formed between Shelley and his grandfather — now Sir Bysshe — and he was encouraged to put some of his own and his sisters’ poems into print in a private edition published by a local bookseller, the bill paid by the baronet. Shelley urged all his sisters to work on macabre themes, and he especially praised Hellen for producing the line, ‘an old woman in her bony gown’.55 It seems that old Bysshe had the pleasure of watching his grandson shock his son, for once one of these publications was discovered by the authorities at Field Place it was instantly bought up and destroyed.

  In 1806 or 1807, he was sent home from Eton for several weeks with a feverish illness, and was nursed at Field Place. Shelley was later to describe this as an expulsion, and said that his father in a fury tried to put him in a madhouse. There is no independent evidence for either this or the expulsion, but the illness certainly occurred. Little Margaret vividly remembered seeing him walking round the garden by himself during his convalescence, and coming to find her at the dining-room window. But he had been forbidden to talk to her, and she remembered him somehow trapped outside, his nose and lips pressed against the glass in a kiss.56

  By 1808, Shelley’s fourth year at Eton, he finally began to rise out of the miseries of the lower elections, and establish something of his own freedom and identity. He had now moved to Dr Bethel’s house, in a room directly above the Doctor’s study, and he began to make himself felt with his experiments, on one occasion electrifying his housemaster who inadvertently put his hand on a wired-up doorknob, and on another being discovered in a circle of blue spirit flame apparently trying to raise the devil. He blew up an old tree stump near his lodgings with an advanced gunpowder device, and later had his whole library of chemical books banned by Bethel and sent back to Field Place.57 His co-fag and one friend of the early days, Andrew Amos, was alienated by these brushes with authority, and he was rather
bitterly taunted by Shelley as ‘Amos Apyrist’ — the man who hates or fears fire.

  His interest in the occult remained part of the developing world of scientific magic. Another friend, Walter Halliday, recalled: ‘We used to wander for hours about Clewer, Frogmore, the Park at Windsor, the Terrace; and I was a delighted and willing listener to his marvellous stories of fairyland, and apparitions, and spirits, and haunted ground; and his speculations were then, (for his mind was far more developed than mine), of the world beyond the grave.’58

  Hogg gave a detailed summary of Shelley’s pursuits in this direction when he first described them at Oxford, two years later:

  He was passionately attached to the study of what used to be called the occult sciences, conjointly with that of the new wonders, which chemistry and natural philosophy have displayed to us. His pocket money was spent in the purchase of books relative to these darling pursuits — of chemical apparatus and materials. The books consisted of treatises on magic and witchcraft, as well as those more modern ones detailing the miracles of electricity and galvanism. Sometimes he watched the livelong nights for ghosts. At his father’s house, where his influence was, of course, great among the dependents, he even planned how he might get admission to the vault, or charnel-house, at Warnham Church, and might sit there all night, harrowed by fear, yet trembling with expectation, to see one of the spiritualized owners of the bones piled around him.59

  Peacock, who always understood this side of Shelley better than Hogg and was prepared to write about it more carefully, says that in after-life Shelley himself laughed over many of these incidents, yet ‘he often spoke of them to me’. Peacock felt it was worth putting on record the fact that ‘if he had ever any faith in the possible success of his incantations, he had lost it before I knew him’.60 Peacock was cautious, for he knew that Shelley’s cast of mind was deeply affected by these adolescent interests, which were not so much abandoned as developed, intellectualized, refined and further sophisticated. Many curious incidents in later life can be traced to this root.