Shelley: The Pursuit (4 page)

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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley found himself in a new and hostile world. For the first time he was conscious of his own appearance, and his own physical limitations. At Syon House he was remembered as a tall, thin, awkward boy, somehow both large and slight. He had a long face, with the marked Shelley nose and brow, and a ruddy, freckled country-child complexion. His eyes were large, blue, staring. His hair was longer than most of the London boys wore it, and curled and tangled round his face in natural profusion.
¹³
His hands and features were fine, with that characteristic girlish delicacy of bone structure belonging to English upper-class children. In the tribal universe of a lower-middle-class preparatory school,
with its brute system of physical loyalties and rigid conformism, Shelley was almost completely without recourse. Medwin, who obeyed the schoolboy code, and did not interfere — ‘we all had to pass through this ordeal’ — recalled the early days and weeks. ‘All tormented him with questionings. There was no end to their mockery, when they found that he was ignorant of pegtop or marbles, or leap-frog, or hopscotch, much more of fives or cricket. One wanted him to spar, another to run a race with him. He was a tyro in both these accomplishments, and the only welcome of the Neophyte was a general shout of derision.’
¹⁴
When he was alone, Medwin observed Shelley crying quietly.

In the schoolroom, Shelley watched Dr Greenlaw construe Homer and take snuff and make jokes about farting like ‘the winds in the Cave of Aeolus’.
¹⁵
He was a small, red-faced man, with a sharp Scottish accent, and a gift for extracting schoolboy humour out of Greek and Latin texts, calling them
facetiae
. He carried his spectacles perched, with faintly mocking intent, on the top of his eyebrows, except when he grew angry, and lowered them with silent menace onto his broad rubicund nose with its snuff-taking nostrils. His clouts were aimed over the side of the head, and could knock a schoolboy from his desk.
¹⁶
Shelley found time to sketch the trees of Field Place in his exercise books, and gaze out of the schoolroom window to watch the swallows gathering for their autumnal migration.
¹⁷
His Sussex childhood seemed very far away. Only two things offered themselves as possible resources to be drawn on: one was his imaginary world of monsters and demons and apparitions. The other was an unexpected discovery — he found he had inherited something of his grandfather’s character, and had a violent and absolutely ungovernable temper once he grew angry.

‘Poor Shelley,’ exclaimed Medwin of the bullying, ‘he was always the martyr.’ Yet Shelley was frequently a fighter as well, and was soon renowned for his paroxysms of fury. Tom Medwin preferred to give only a hint of this in his
Life
, for he wanted to present an angelic childhood: ‘he was naturally calm, but when he heard or read of some flagrant act of injustice, oppression or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of horror and indignation were visible in his countenance’. But other pupils remembered Shelley’s temper with more distinctness. ‘The least circumstance that thwarted him produced the most violent paroxysms of rage; and when irritated by other boys, which they, knowing his infirmity, frequently did by way of teasing him, he would take up anything, or even any little boy near him, to throw at his tormentors.’
¹⁸
Another recalled that when he had been flogged, he would roll on the floor, not from pain, but overcome with frustration and indignity. When he hit out, it was frequently without control, ‘like a girl in Boys’ clothes’, lashing out with open hands. All his life, Shelley was to detest violence and the various forms of ‘tyranny’ which it produced. Yet the exceptional violence in his own character, the viciousness with which he
reacted to opposition, was something he found difficult to accept about himself. Much later, his passionate belief in a philosophy of freedom was to be weakened and contradicted by problems of political violence and active resistance which he found it hard to resolve.

The shock of the school experience also darkened and distorted the monsters and romantic demons of Field Place. Isolated and at bay, his mind became increasingly unsettled, and while his days were full of persecutions, his nights now seemed no less tormented. The occurrences recorded half-jocularly by Tom Medwin and others have a counterpart in many a boy’s childhood. But with Shelley they were different, for they hung on beyond boyhood; they hung on all his life.

He was subject to strange, and sometimes frightful dreams, and was haunted by apparitions that bore all the semblance of reality. We did not sleep in the same dormitory, but I shall never forget one moonlight night seeing Shelley walk into my room. He was in a state of somnambulism. His eyes were open, and he advanced with slow steps to the window, which, it being the height of summer, was open. I got out of bed, seized him with my arm, and waked him — I was not then aware of the danger of suddenly rousing the sleep walker. He was excessively agitated, and after leading him back with some difficulty to his couch, I sat by him for some time, a witness to severe erethism of his nerves, which the sudden shock produced.
¹⁹

The visions and sleepwalking recorded by Mary Shelley in the last weeks of Shelley’s life — he was then aged 29 — correspond to these earliest ones. Medwin’s mention of ‘erethism of the nerves’ — abnormal excitement of them — is also the first record of the mysterious complaint, part constitutional and part psychosomatic, which becomes a permanent feature of Shelley’s life from the age of 20.

Shelley’s experiences at Syon House Academy might not in themselves have been important if they had not been so strongly reinforced by the events and experiences of later life. But looking back, it seemed to him that the first ten years of his life at Field Place had been a magic circle of freedom and love, a pre-Lapsarian Paradise, and the entry into school, which was the first part of his entry into the outside world, was like the Fall. As a man, he was very rarely to refer to Field Place explicitly in his writing, for the sense of betrayal was overwhelmingly strong and bitter. But in a notebook of 1816, there is a fragment which he wrote in Switzerland at the age of 24:

Dear Home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,

The least of which wronged Memory ever makes

Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.
²⁰

At the very end of his life, in a mood of more distant reminiscence, he scrawled in one of his Italian notebooks a rough string of visionary verses that recall this first decade in terms of the garden world of a lost Eden:

A schoolboy lay near a pond in a copse

Blackberries just were out of bloom

And the golden bloom of the sunny broom . . .

The pine cones they fell like thunder drops

When the lazy noon breathed so hard in its trance

That it wakened the sleeping fir-tree tops.

Under a branch all leafless & bare

He was watching the motes in their mimic dance

Rolling like worlds through the dewy air

And he closed his eyes at last to see

The network of darkness woven inside

Till the fire-tailed stars of the night of his brain

Like birds round a pond did flutter & glide

And then he would open them wide again.
²¹

These first ten years of Shelley’s life had been extremely sheltered. Yet they were also the last years of the eighteenth century, and a time of exceptional disturbance in the affairs of men, ‘the times that try men’s souls’. Events that had occurred far beyond the narrow circle of his knowledge were henceforth to effect the whole tenor of his career.

Shelley had been born in 1792. It was the year in which Tom Paine published his
Rights of Man
, and the year in which the French Revolutionary forces declared war on Europe. It was the beginning of a decade of unprecedented upheaval which affected most of Europe and had repercussions not only in politics but also in literature and science. England, which was to stand firm against the French Revolutionary pressures from without, was shaken and transformed by the forces of change acting within. The nineties in England saw the first meetings of the Radical London Corresponding Society, and the formation of the early tenuous network of Working Men’s Associations across the major industrial cities of the north. It saw an unprecedented increase in the national production of cotton and metal goods with a corresponding shift of the population into the manufacturing centres and the undermining of the old rural patterns of life which were so accurately studied and lamented by William Cobbett in his travel essays and polemic journalism.

The nineties saw the circulation of the revolutionary political works of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine and Home Tooke, beside a flood of subversive pamphleteering. From the Continent, a wave of new
ideas arrived in popular translations of Condorcet, d’Holbach, Voltaire, Volney and Laplace, together with reports of transactions in the Revolutionary Conventions. The transformation of the solid, eighteenth-century English sensibility, with its Johnsonian cast of insular common sense, was marked most strikingly and simply by the transformation in subject matter which now attracted English writers and artists. Robert Southey, a future poet-laureate, wrote a verse play about the agrarian leader Wat Tyler, and his friend Coleridge composed a powerful drama
The Fall of Robespierre
. William Blake produced his first prophetic books,
The French Revolution
and
America: A Prophesy
. William Wordsworth, who had himself witnessed some of the early stages of the revolution in Paris, turned to stories of poverty, low rural life, insanity and the supernatural in the most representative book of the period,
Lyrical Ballads
. The first genuinely popular reading market developed in response to the glut of lurid gothic tales and romances published in cheap editions, tales of horror by M. G. Lewis — who soon earned the sobriquet ‘Monk’, after his best-selling title — and novels of pursuit and haunting by Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, Joanna Baillie, and even by the philosopher Godwin in his book
Caleb Williams
, a story of obsessional pursuit, pointedly subtitled,
Things as They Are
.

In painting, the macabre work of Henry Fuseli, himself a frequenter of the Godwin circle, and the demoniac vision of Blake, characteristically achieved through a brilliant series of technical innovations in printing method, quickly dominated the visual frontiers. The old order of Joshua Reynolds faltered and gave way, and the young Turner first exhibited his oils in the Royal Academy.

In science, the first experimental work on electricity, gases and combustion was beginning to yield striking and hitherto unexpected results. In Manchester, John Dalton was preparing his theories on the absorption of gases; in Clifton, the young superintendent of the Pneumatic Institution, Humphry Davy, was completing his early researches into nitrous oxide, voltaic batteries and the elements of chemical composition. The first sociological study of major importance was published by Thomas Malthus in 1798,
An Essay on Population
.

The decade saw revolutionary activities as diverse as the idealism of Bristol Pantisocracy, illicit leveller associations like the Spencean Society, and the LCS working movement for popular education and democratic rights which led to the Treason Trials of Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall. The newspapers and the taverns throughout the land were full of talk of French informers and bloodthirsty Jacobins who wished to destroy the whole fabric of society, and the cartoonists drew huge guillotines dripping with gore and grotesque figures with mad eyes and red caps of liberty. For the first time in English history, an institution at Whitehall called the Home Office began to develop a nationwide network of surveillance, and throughout the nineties there was a steady extension
of judicial controls and civilian spy systems among the ordinary people. Directed first by William Pitt, and later by his successor to the premiership Lord Liverpool, there was an increasingly rigid imposition of political and religious censorship in the courts: the two great instruments of the Lord Chancellor in this respect being the twin laws of Seditious and Blasphemous Libel.