Shelley: The Pursuit (30 page)

From this time forth Shelley was never absolutely frank in his letters to Godwin about his most extreme political views. In the
Proposals
Shelley had specifically derided the Godwinian approach to reform. Speaking of liberty, Shelley had written: ‘It will not be kept alive by each citizen sitting quietly by his own fireside and saying that things are going on well, because the rain does not beat on
him
, because
he
has books and leisure to read them, because
he
has money and is at liberty to accumulate luxuries to
himself
.’
²⁹
And again: ‘I think that individuals acting singly with whatever energy can never effect so much as a society.’

Yet Shelley had seen enough of Dublin, and he was contemplating departure. Godwin’s letter, though he did not agree with, it, was the final stroke. ‘I have withdrawn from circulation the publications wherein I erred & am preparing to quit Dublin,’ he wrote repentantly to Godwin from Grafton Street. ‘The part of the City called the Liberty exhibits a spectacle of squalidness and misery such as might reasonably excite impatience in a cooler temperament than mine. But I submit. I shall address myself no more to the illiterate, I will look to events in which it will be impossible that I can share, and make myself the cause of an effect which will take place ages after
I
shall have mouldered into dust.’
³⁰
Reading this passage, Godwin later remarked that his disciple was going ‘from one extreme to the other’. This was true, for Shelley wanted to convince Godwin that he had acquiesced in his reasoning, while in fact he found Godwin’s remonstrance merely gave him a convenient way out of a position he had already decided to abandon.

He did not give up the argument over associations though: they were ill-timed, but not dangerous. ‘My mind is by no means settled on the subject.’ He also omitted to tell Godwin about the newspaper and publishing scheme with Lawless, or the fact that he was already printing a new radical document, a
Declaration of Rights
which was soon to see very active service in Devon.
‘Fear no more for any violence or hurtful measures in which I may be instrumental in Dublin,’ he told Godwin soothingly, ‘I acquiesce in your decisions. I am neither haughty reserved or unpersuadable.’
³¹

Shelley now began a strategic retreat from Dublin. He sent instructions and explanations through Harriet to Miss Hitchener at Hurstpierpoint the same day. ‘Dispense the Declarations. Percy says the farmers are very fond of having something posted on their walls. Percy has sent you all his Pamphlets with the Declaration of Rights, which you will disperse to advantage. . . . All thoughts of an Association are given up as impracticable. We shall leave this noisy town on the 7th of April, unless the Habeas Corpus Act should be suspended, and then we shall be obliged to leave here
as soon as possible
.’ On the 20th Shelley hurried off a note to Medwin, his faithful financial standby, asking him to arrange a loan of £250 over eighteen months for Lawless’s book. ‘As you will see by the Lewes paper, I am in the midst of overwhelming engagements.’
³²
Miss Hitchener had been keeping the local Sussex press well primed with cuttings from the Dublin papers with a view to softening up the ground for Shelley’s next campaign, and his activities sounded more impressive in England than they really were in Dublin.

For the Irish mission was a defeat. When Shelley did return to England it was not to carry the fight into any of the disturbed urban centres of the North or West — Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester or Carlisle. He sought rural seclusion to recoup his energies and meditate on what he had experienced. But if it was a defeat, it was also an invaluable lesson. The confrontation with the physical facts of poverty, disease and brute ignorance was an experience which never left Shelley, and they were to fill his best writing with images of macabre force. The issue of violent change was brought forward as a central question in his political thinking. The idea of the ‘association’, and of political change fertilized by tight-knit communities of advanced thought, was one that never left him, and he continued to experiment with it in his own pattern of living for the next ten years. Looking back at the whole thing two weeks later, he summed it up without prevarication or bravado. ‘The Habeas Corpus has not been suspended, nor probably will they do it. We left Dublin because I had done all that I could do, if its effects were beneficial they were not greatly so, I am dissatisfied with my success, but not with the attempt.’
³³

The Shelleys finally departed from Dublin on Saturday, 4 April. They had sent ahead a large deal box containing the pamphlets, the broadsheets, the
Declaration
and a printed version of poor Redfern’s letter from the Portuguese army, the whole thing directed to Miss Hitchener as material for the development of the Lewes Association. They tried to persuade Mrs Nugent to join their little errant commune, but she looked up from her needlework and said simply
‘she had never been out of her country, and [had] no wish to leave it’.
³⁴
They did take with them the Irish servant who had first been employed in giving out pamphlets: his name was Dan Healy and Shelley had forgiven him for announcing that his master had peculiar political views since he was only ‘15 years of age’.
³⁵
Dan was now a dedicated member of the cause, and their only Irish convert. They left Dublin harbour tacking out to sea in a heavy headwind.

[1]
John Philpot Curran (1750–1817), lawyer and one-time radical whose appointment as Master of the Rolls (1806) signified the end of active social dissent. His itinerant daughter Aemelia later painted the famous flat-faced sentimental portrait of Shelley in Rome in 1819. See Chapter 20.

[2]
Like many untested revolutionaries, Shelley believed for a time that the two things were necessarily consequent upon one another. Though his beliefs changed, the eruptive symbol of the volcano remained, and he eventually drew an ink sketch of it in an Italian Notebook of 1821: Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 9, p. 336.

[3]
Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751–1834), an erstwhile member of the Society of United Irishmen, pamphleteer and propagandist.

[4]
The sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Faustus Socinus (nephew of Laelius Socinus), a figure calculated to appeal to Shelley. Socinus travelled from Siena to Cracow attacking fundamental Christian dogma such as the Divinity of Christ, the Trinity and Original Sin. He was a personality of hectic charm and welcome enlightenment in European university circles.

[5]
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759–97), Author, radical feminist, educationalist, traveller. One of the most remarkable intellectual figures in the background of Shelley’s career. Here it is sufficient to note that she was a tutor in Ireland with the Mountcashell family (see Chapter 24); lived with the American Imlay in Paris during the Terror; published
The Rights of Women
in 1792; travelled alone through Scandinavia; and married William Godwin a few months before her death in 1797. Their love-child, also Mary, was aged 14 at the time of Shelley’s Irish trip.

[6]
The latter was achieved in 1829; the former has proved a rather more difficult objective.

[7]
Shelley’s autographed and annotated copy of Vol. 2 of Barruel is in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Its condition suggests that it was a constant source of reference.

[8]
John Lawless (1773–1837), a stagey radical, who cultivated the use of his quizzing glass and his nickname ‘Honest Jack’. He published
A Compendium of the History of Ireland
in 1814, a republican view of the English colonization.

[9]
For once Shelley’s political instinct was sound: the editor of the
Weekly Messenger
was William Conway, a supposed liberal, who secretly corresponded with Lord Sidmouth at the Home Office on radical activities in Ireland. See MacCarthy,
Shelley’s Early Life: From Original Sources
, pp. 305–7.

[10]
Harriet’s letters to Mrs Nugent thus become one of our main sources of information concerning Shelley’s domestic affairs during the years 1811–14. Sadly, Harriet never saw Mrs Nugent again after this first acquaintance.

6. A Radical Commune

The crossing took them thirty-six hours of extremely rough sailing, during which time they had nothing to eat. They arrived off Holyhead at 2 a.m. on Monday, 6 April, and were put ashore on the beach nearly a mile from the inn. The sailors led the way with storm lanterns across the rocks and shingle in the pouring rain. Harriet survived the best, for she had curled up in a dry corner of the boat and slept placidly for almost the entire voyage. Both Shelley and Eliza were almost too weak and exhausted to cover the ground, but when at last they reached the inn Shelley surprised Harriet by ordering a large meal including
meat
. ‘You will think this very extraordinary,’ she wrote to Catherine Nugent.
¹

Once recovered, they set off to find a new home and base for their activities. Shelley had long been planning to get Miss Hitchener to join them in Wales, and if possible to get Godwin and his family to come as well. But it was not easy to find the kind of place that would suit them; Shelley wanted considerably more than a cottage, but at the same time he could afford almost nothing in ready cash. Some kind of arrangement would have to be made to get a lease on security, or on borrowed capital. This meant finding a sympathetic landlord. They travelled rapidly southwards through Caernarvonshire and Merionethshire — ‘every Inn we stopped at was the subject of new hopes, and new disappointments’.
²

At Barmouth they discovered that travelling into Cardiganshire would be cheaper by boat than by following the tortuous coastal road which turns to follow the inlets and river mouths for several miles inland and snakes among the foothills of the Cader Idris range. Nothing daunted, they took to the sea again. The boat was open, but they had fine sparkling spring weather, and they slipped easily down the coast for thirty miles into the harbour at Aberystwyth. Later Shelley used the experience as the background for a rambling poem, ‘The Voyage’, which contains praise for the ‘peculiarly engaging and frank generosity
of seafaring men’. Although Harriet and Eliza had spent their previous summer holiday there, Aberystwyth did not attract them. Shelley had finished with large towns for the time being. As he wrote feelingly in ‘The Voyage’:

Lo! here a populous Town

Two dark rocks either side defend,

The quiet water sleeps within

Reflecting every roof and every mast.

A populous town! it is a den

Where wolves keep lambs to fatten on their blood.

Tis a distempered spot. Should there be one,

Just, dauntless, rational, he would appear

A madman to the rest.
³

So they pressed on, taking the eastern road that climbs away from the coast into the hills in a series of coiling hairpins, and catching a last glimpse of the sea, descended gradually into the rolling plains and valleys of Radnorshire. They reached Rhayader, where Shelley, knowing the district from the previous year, at last discovered that there was a house unoccupied no more than a mile from his cousin’s estate in Cwm Elan. He had come a full circle.

They arrived at Nantgwillt, near Rhayader, on 14 April, and within forty-eight hours had begun negotiations to secure the lease, stock and grounds consisting of 200 acres of arable land and some woodlands. In the meantime the landlord allowed them to occupy the farm, as the Shelleys’ family name carried a respectable weight in the locality. Harriet and Shelley were suddenly overflowing with delight, gazing upon a place that might become their own, and they bubbled with plans for the coming summer. The farm land could be sub-let, thereby paying three-quarters of the annual rent on the whole property, which anyway was cheap, as Shelley said, at £98 a year. The £500 to purchase the stock could be borrowed in Sussex. There were enough rooms to put up not only Miss Hitchener, but the Godwins, and even Mrs Nugent if she could be persuaded to come. The largest room could be fitted out as a library of classical and radical texts — ‘this luxury is one that we are entitled to’.
⁴
The whole place, with its beautiful views, its blue woodland full of spring flowers, and its ‘mountains & rocks seeming to form a barrier around this quiet valley which the tumult of the world may never overleap’
⁵
might at last become the physical basis of the commune which they had so long desired to establish, both the ‘asylum of distressed virtue’ and more militantly, the ‘rendez-vous of the friends of liberty and truth’.
⁶

From this place of retirement and concealment, Shelley’s eye continued to play watchfully over the scenes of political development. He urged Miss
Hitchener to distribute the
Declaration of Rights
to the houses of the Sussex farmers: ‘it was by a similar expedient that Franklin propagated his commercial opinions among the Americans’. He himself planned to circulate the Redfern letter in Wales.
⁷
He observed that ‘Manchester, Carlisle, Bristol & other great towns are in a state of disturbance’, and cursed the Prince Regent for his demands of money from the people. ‘If the murderer of Marr’s family containing 6 persons deserves a gibbet, how much more does a Prince whose conduct destroys millions deserve it.’
⁸
Later, however, seeing how the disturbance progressed, he was inclined to fear that ‘hunger is the only excitement of our English riotings’. This was a sharp disappointment, for, as he noted shrewdly, ‘the Local Militia that body of soldiery nearest approaching & immediately mingling with the character of citizen have been called out near Carlisle & other great towns to quell the populace. That the government has dared to call the Local into action appears to be an evidence that at least they do not think that disaffection to Government (except so far as directly connected with starvation) has any share in these tumults.’
⁹
When the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival, was shot down in the lobby of the House of Commons, Shelley and Harriet could only wish that it had been Castlereagh who had been killed instead — ‘it had been better’.
¹⁰