Shelley: The Pursuit (29 page)

Among the audience were two English special agents, Michael Farrell and Thomas Manning, who later dispatched an abbreviated report of the meeting to Lord Sidmouth’s Home Office in Whitehall. This was to be the first time that Shelley’s name was officially filed for subversive activity. Manning’s note, now in the State Papers of the Public Records Office, read: ‘On this resolution . . . a young boy, delivered a speech of considerable length and replete with much elegant language; the principle matter it contained of notice was, that he lamented that the Regent should abandon Mr Fox’s principles and join in a shameful coalition, or that he had been so far
womanized
— here he was interrupted by a question of order.’ Farrell added that Mr Shelley ‘stated himself to be a native of England’, and forwarded with the report a copy of the
Dublin Evening Post
for the following day. ‘Mr Shelley requested a hearing. He was an Englishman, and when he reflected on
the crimes committed by his nation on Ireland
, he could not but blush for his countrymen, did he not know that arbitrary power never failed to corrupt the heart of man. (Loud applause for several minutes) . . . He walked through the streets, and he saw the
fane of liberty converted into a temple of Mammon
. He beheld beggary and famine in the country, and he could lay his hand on his heart and say that the cause of such sights was the union with Great Britain.’ The report was stamped by the Lord Lieutenant and sent on to London.
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After the initial euphoria of the night, and the dispatch of duplicate newspaper
cuttings to Godwin and Miss Hitchener the next day, Shelley’s intelligence began to warn him that the whole affair had been a hollow one. His considered verdict was severe: ‘My speech was misinterpreted . . . the hisses with which they greeted me when I spoke of
religion
, tho in terms of respect, were mixed with applause when I avowed my mission. The newspapers have only noted that which did not excite disapprobation.’
¹⁹

Shelley now began to realize the wild disorganization of the liberal wing, the severity of sectarian divisions and the nervousness of the opposition newspapers which strove to give a false impression of ‘fictitious unanimity’. He also guessed that many of the old radicals had traded in their green coats for government sinecures. Yet he found it difficult to discuss the implications of this with Harriet, and he did not at first like to admit it in correspondence with Miss Hitchener — and certainly not in his philosophic letters to Godwin. For the time being he found it difficult to admit to himself.

On 2 March, two days after Fishamble Street and nearly three weeks after his arrival in Dublin, Shelley’s second pamphlet
Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists
was duly published. Casting all doubts aside, Shelley once again began vigorous distribution. But he had now shifted the field of his attention away from the ordinary man in the street. His plan was now for ‘proselyting (
sic
) the young men at Dublin College’, and for reaching a generally more educated Dublin readership. He imagined the possibility of founding not merely one, but a whole chain of associations relying wholly on the support of young intellectuals and enlightened members of the middle class. ‘This Philanthropic Association of ours is intended to unite both of these,’ he informed Miss Hitchener. He allowed his thoughts to play for a moment over a wide horizon. ‘Whilst you are with us in Wales, I shall attempt to organize one
there
, which shall correspond with the Dublin one. Might I not extend them all over England, and
quietly
revolutionise the country?’
²⁰

Behind Shelley’s idea of the ‘quiet revolution’, the revolution from within, rising silently through society like a yeast from an ever-extending chain of linked associations, lay the unmistakable form of Illuminism. At a time when the Corresponding Societies and early Union clubs had been suppressed, and even William Godwin could not conceive of anything in the middle ground between fireside discussion and mob violence, Shelley secretly turned to the Masonic conception of revolutionary brotherhood as a viable form of reform organization. He was attracted especially by its occultism, its tight communal solidarity, and ‘seeding’ of subversive political ideas. He never wrote of Illuminism to Godwin, who would have been appalled, but to Miss Hitchener in this same letter he recommended the authoritative book on the subject, by the Abbé Barruel,
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
, a translation in four volumes,
1797–8. ‘To you who know how to distinguish truth, I recommend it.’
²¹
[7]
This letter marked the high point of Shelley’s political hopes in Ireland.

But from March onwards, Shelley knew the tide was turning inexorably against his whole mission. He gradually became disillusioned by the lessons of the Fishamble Street meeting, although it had brought him into contact with the liberal editor and publicist John Lawless.
[8]
Moreover, he was shaken by Godwin’s first reactions to his campaign which were just beginning to reach him. For the first time too, he seemed suddenly to become aware of just how bad the conditions were in Dublin itself. On 8 March he wrote bitterly to Godwin, as if his eyes had been opened for the first time:

I had no conception of the depth of human misery until now. — The poor of Dublin are assuredly the meanest and most miserable of all. In their narrow streets thousands seem huddled together — one mass of animated filth! . . . These were the persons to whom in my fancy I had addressed myself; how quickly were my views on this subject changed! . . . I do not think that my book can in the slightest degree tend to violence . . . . A remedy must somewhere have a beginning.
²²

By 10 March, the impressions of physical suffering and degradation had become almost overwhelming. Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener were now steadily emptied of political theory which was replaced by detailed descriptions of human squalor, poverty and individual injustice. He explained that he was writing to Sir Francis Burdett to help prosecute the case of a man called Redfern, an expatriate Irishman who had been ‘torn from his wife and family in Lisbon’ and pressed into the army. On one occasion Shelley had found a little boy, ‘starving with his mother, in a hiding place of unutterable filth and misery’ and had rescued him and was ‘about to teach him to read’ when they were seized by constables. The boy ‘has been snatched on a charge of false and villainous effrontery to a magistrate of
Hell
, who gave him the choice of the
tender
or military service. He preferred neither yet was compelled to be a soldier.’ It was the poor Cumberland woman’s story all over again.

Everywhere Shelley met the horrors of poverty and cruelty on the streets, and whenever he intervened, the result only increased his anger and despair. ‘A widow woman with three infants were taken up by two constables. — I remonstrated, I pleaded. — I was everything that my powers could make me. The landlady was overcome. The constable relented, and when I asked him if he had
a heart, he said “to be sure he had as well as another man, but — that he was called out to business of this nature sometimes twenty times in a night”. The woman’s crime was stealing a penny loaf. — She is however drunken, & nothing that I or anyone can do can save her from ultimate ruin and starvation.’
²³
He was also disenchanted with the Irish reformers whom he had originally been so eager to contact: ‘I have daily numbers of people calling on me;
none
will do. The Spirit of Bigotry is high.’

At the very moment when he realized just how radical a reform was required to reach these poor miseries on the street, he found his own idealistic schemes were faltering. ‘The Association proceeds slowly, and I fear will not be established. Prejudices are so violent in contradiction to my principles that more hate me as a freethinker, than love me as a votary of Freedom . . . . I have at least made a stir here, and set some men’s minds afloat. I may succeed, but I fear I shall not in the main object of Associations.’ Walking round the streets he had entered so eagerly, he felt disgusted and angry. ‘I am sick of this city & long to be with you and peace,’ he told Miss Hitchener. ‘The rich
grind
the poor into abjectness and then complain that they are abject. — They goad them to famine and hang them if they steal a loaf . . . . My own dearest friend in the midst of these horrors thou art our star of peace.’
²⁴
He vented some of his frustration by writing a violent letter to the ‘Editor of the panegyrizing paper’, the
Dublin Weekly Messenger
, which had carried an article describing his mission in glowing terms, on 7 March.
[9]

Few of Shelley’s contacts in Dublin had turned out well. His introduction to Curran did not mature, and though he dined with him twice, Curran refused to talk politics and only angered Shelley with his ribald humour. Godwin told Shelley that his pamphlet had probably ‘frightened him’. John Lawless, the editor, sensing that Shelley had money to spend, promised him ‘a share in the management of a paper’, and as March drew on, interested him in the publication of his
Compendium of the History of Ireland
which he was planning. Shelley undertook to raise some money for this venture, and it was some time before he learnt to distrust ‘Honest Jack’. Lawless turned out to be the author of the ‘panegerizing’ article.

The best friend that the Shelleys made in Dublin was Catherine Nugent, a spinster of solid artisan background and strong republican sympathies. During the United Irishmen’s rebellion she had regularly visited the political prisoners awaiting trial or execution in Dublin jail. She now supported herself by doing needlework at a furrier’s, and had met Shelley through reading one of his
pamphlets. Catherine Nugent was a great practical help and support to them all during the difficult month of March, and by the 10th they had moved from Sackville Street to take new rooms at 17 Grafton Street, since Mrs Nugent lived at No. 101.

When Shelley, with his usual attentiveness to new female company, inquired if Mrs Nugent was married, he received the conclusive reply that ‘her country was her only love’.
²⁵
Harriet found her ‘an agreeable, sensible woman’, and formed a close friendship with her that lasted over several years.
[10]
She corresponded freely with Mrs Nugent until her death, and did not hesitate to write frankly or even jokingly of Shelley. Harriet never quite liked to do this when writing to Miss Hitchener, the Sister of his Soul. Shelley had recently taken up vegetarianism, almost an act of defiance, at this time, and Harriet joined the ‘Pythagorean’ system. On 15 March she wrote, ‘Mrs Shelley’s comps. to Mrs Nugent, and expects the pleasure of her company to dinner, 5 o’clock, as a murdered chicken has been prepared for her repast.’
²⁶
Three days later Mrs Nugent was again visiting, and sat in their room ‘talking to Percy about Virtue’, as Harriet put it for Miss Hitchener’s benefit.

During these mid-March days Shelley’s political optimism continued to wane. ‘As to an Association my hopes grow daily fainter on the subject, as my perceptions of its necessity increase.’
²⁷
He still looked forward to the ‘command of a paper, with Mr Lawless’, though even Lawless had made it clear that he regarded Shelley’s ultimate hopes as ‘visionary’. A new note of despondency crept in with the rumour that Habeas Corpus was about to be suspended, and there were possibilities of surprise arrests. Harriet had been ‘very much alarmed at the intelligence’ of this, though she hoped it was ill-founded: ‘if it is not where we shall be is not known, as from Percy’s having made himself so busy in the cause of this poor Country, he has raised himself many enemies who would take advantage of such a time & instantly execute their vengeance upon him’. To anger and disgust, fear had now been added; Shelley’s period of education in practical politics was continuing rapidly towards its end.

On 18 March, almost exactly five weeks after Shelley’s arrival, a letter of grand remonstrance arrived from Godwin. He had read with mounting horror an extract from Shelley’s second pamphlet,
Proposals for an Association
in the
Weekly Messenger
. The Advertisement had read: ‘I propose an Association for the following purposes: first, of debating the propriety of whatever measures may be agitated; and, secondly, for carrying, by united and individual exertion, such measures into effect when determined on. That it should be an Association
diffusing knowledge and virtue throughout the poorer classes of society in Ireland . . . .’ To these activist proposals, Godwin demanded:

Can anything be plainer than this? Do you not here exhort persons, who you say ‘are of scarcely greater elevation in the scale of intellectual being than the oyster: thousands huddled together, one mass of animated filth’ to take the redress of grievances into their own hands. . . . Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood! If your associations take effect to any extensive degree, tremendous consequences will follow, and hundreds, by their calamities and premature fate, will expiate your error. And then what will it avail you to say, ‘I warned them against this; when I put the seed into the ground, I laid my solemn injunctions upon it, that it should not germinate?’
²⁸