Shelley: The Pursuit (39 page)

The Shelleys were now preparing to return to Wales. Harriet and Eliza had determined that Elizabeth Hitchener could no longer be a member of the group, and they saw that a showdown had to be brought off before returning to Tan-yr-allt, and Hogg’s aid was enlisted. On Sunday, the 8th, Miss Hitchener was given a farewell dinner, which Hogg also attended, and it was agreed that Shelley should pay her a stipend of £100 a year, for her troubles. The private arrangement between her and Shelley was probably that she should continue to work for the cause in Sussex. But the stipend was not paid more than once, and there is evidence that a separate sum of £100 which she had loaned them in June was applied for but never refunded.
²¹

When she returned to Hurstpierpoint, Miss Hitchener found that she was the subject of much laughter and scandal, and generally regarded as Shelley’s cast-off mistress. Merle heard that she insisted that ‘their union was purely platonic’, but felt she was not generally believed. In her disappointment and shame, Miss Hitchener rather understandably turned on Shelley, writing letters threatening vengeance, the worst of which was denunciation to the government of his political schemes. Merle found her the next year in such a state that he would not have been surprised ‘had her wanderings led to insanity’. In fact, Miss Hitchener’s whole life showed her toughness and spirit, and it did not fail her here. She went abroad, married an Austrian officer, and finally returned to run a successful school at Edmonton, dying in 1822.
²²
She looked back at her time with Shelley with fondness and regret, and referred to him as her one inspiration in life in her Poems.

Nevertheless Shelley did not come well out of this incident. It indicated a certain callous indifference to those he had grown disenchanted with, an ill omen for the future. After the way he had hymned her and begged her to join them a mere five months previously, there was a coldness about his concern, and hypocrisy in his fair-mindedness. He wrote to Hogg in jocular vein: ‘The Brown Demon, as we call our late tormentor and schoolmistress, must receive her stipend. I pay it with a heavy heart and an unwilling hand; but it must be so. She was deprived by our misjudging haste of a situation, where she was going on smoothly: and now she says, that her reputation is gone, her health ruined, her peace of mind destroyed by my barbarity; a complete victim to all the woes mental and bodily that heroine ever suffered! This is not all fact: but certainly she is embarrassed and poor, and we being in some degree the cause, we ought to obviate it.’ Thus far he seemed fair, but he could not forbear to add with a sudden grimace and stab: ‘She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman, and my astonishment at my fatuity, inconsistency, and bad
taste was never so great, as after living four months with her as an inmate. What would Hell be, were such a woman in Heaven?’
²³
It has been suggested that this passage was produced for the benefit of Harriet and Eliza, who certainly read Shelley’s letters to Hogg. But the phrase ‘hermaphroditical beast’ is a spontaneous one, and suggests a degree of sharp sexual revulsion. It is likely that Miss Hitchener met Shelley’s own passionate outpourings with what amounted to a frank physical offer, since she was already the Sister of his Soul, and both were agreed on the ‘Godwinian system’. Shelley may or may not have taken it up with any seriousness — the limited circumstances of their lives at this period suggest that if so, it was clandestinely done, the consequence of their walks along the rocky shores of Lynmouth, when they were observed together by the locals. In all events, poor Miss Hitchener quite clearly bore the markings of a woman scorned.

Harriet, writing to Miss Nugent in November of the once-beloved Portia, expressed a note of sharpness quite new to her, the note of a woman who is jealous. ‘We were entirely deceived in her character as to her republicanism, and in short everything else which she pretended to be. We were not long in finding out our great disappointment in her. As to any noble disinterested views, it is utterly impossible for a selfish character to feel them. She built all her hopes on being able to separate me from my dearly beloved Percy, and had the artfulness to say that Percy was really in love with her, and [it] was only his being married that could keep her within bounds now.’ It was clear from this, at any rate, that the sexual issue had been brought out into the open, though it was convenient for Harriet (or Eliza) to see Shelley as the victim of assault, rather than vice versa. ‘It was a long time ere we could possibly get her away,’ concluded Harriet, ‘till at last Percy said he would give her £100 per annum. And now, thank God, she has left us, never more to return.’
²⁴

On 13 November 1812 the newly purified party of Utopians set out for Wales stopping over night at Stratford. Shelley’s mind had already moved beyond Miss Hitchener and he was turning over the radical cause once again, shaking off the dust of the city, the hateful sights of its poverty and the softness and compromises of the social round. He wrote a poem, ‘On Leaving London for Wales’:

Hail to thee, Cambria, for the unfettered wind

Which from the wilds even now methinks I feel

Chasing the clouds that roll in wrath behind

And tightening the soul’s laxest nerves to steel!

Again he confirmed the revolutionary goal he had set himself, although now mediated through the Tremadoc project:

. . . the weapon that I burn to wield

I seek amid thy rocks to ruin hurled

That Reason’s flag may over Freedom’s field,

Symbol of bloodless victory, wave unfurled —

A meteor-sign of love effulgent o’er the world.

The verse was not notably better than the Lynmouth sonnets, but the sense of a real problem being worked into expression had become more vivid. Shelley confronted his wild and undisciplined hatred of poverty and exploitation, and the dangers of involving himself in a movement that led towards violence, with greater clarity:

Do thou, wild Cambria, calm each struggling thought;

Cast thy sweet veil of rocks and woods between

That by the soul to indignation wrought

Mountains and dells be mingled with the scene;

Let me forever be what I have been,

But not forever at my needy door

Let Misery linger, speechless, pale and lean.

I am the friend of the unfriended poor;

Let me not madly stain their righteous cause in gore.
²⁵

His head full of these ‘visions’ and ‘sad realities’, Shelley and his party plunged back into Wales, leaving the coachline at Capel Curig, and ‘jumbled in a chaise’ down the wild valley to Tremadoc, and Tan-yr-allt on the hill. ‘The road passes at the foot of Snowdon; all around you see lofty peaks lifting their summits far above the clouds, wildly wooded vallies below, and dark tarns reflecting every tint & shape of the scenery above them.’
²⁶
Three newly hired maidservants awaited them. Books and papers were unpacked; Harriet and Shelley established themselves in one of the large bedrooms with a view south over Tremadoc and the Treath, the curt square façade of Morpha Lodge, owned by the local quarry owner, the Hon. Robert Leeson, facing them across the valley on the further hill. The Ellis-Nanneys, who had helped them with domestic arrangements, paid a formal neighbourly call, and Harriet and Mrs Nanney soon struck up amicable relations, with Harriet sending over the latest London scores, music and songs. As December drew in, the weather grew wilder and colder, and the mail coaches reached them with less and less frequency.
²⁷

[1]
Thomas Edwards, a six-foot-two quarry-worker from the Parry Mines, was captured while trying to cross Treath Bach at low tide below Portmeirion. While being escorted at night by six constables to Dolgelley, he again escaped, and terrorized the district for several days. He was prosecuted by David Ellis-Nanney in the 1813 sessions, and was convicted and executed. For further macabre details, see the
Chester Chronicle
, 18 September 1812. The indictment remained in Shelley’s mind during the winter.

[2]
Tan-yr-allt boasted the first operating water closet in the principality, although this did not prove a great sales attraction locally.

[3]
The Hampden Clubs were founded by Major John Cartwright (1740–1824), one of the great radical figures of the nineties. They acted both as political meeting centres and corresponding societies and were the first notable reform organizations to emerge in England since the Treason Trials of 1794. The most notable Clubs were in the industrial Midlands and North, especially Manchester and Birmingham. Shelley’s idea for ‘associations’ reflected the Hampden pattern, and he mailed copies of his later pamphlets directly to them. See Chapters 14–15.

[4]
The source of this debt is still a mystery. It was paid off in October with the aid of a solicitor Mr John Bedwell in London, and bail was recovered. But Dr Roberts was still applying to Shelley’s executors for repayment of a further loan of thirty pounds as late as 1844.

[5]
The ‘deed’ was never traced; nevertheless Shelley was definitely expecting to inherit money on his majority in August 1813.

[6]
John Glas (1695–1773), a Scottish minister, founder of an extreme sect of millennial and egalitarian dissenters known as Glassites or Sandemanians. They were distinguished from their brother Moravians, Inghamites, Muggletonians, etc., by their intellectual rigour and approval of theatre and literature for didactic purposes.

[7]
The first of these,
Headlong Hall
, appeared in 1816, and contained recognizable caricatures of William Madocks (Squire Headlong), Southey (Mr Night Shade), Coleridge (Mr Panoscope), Hogg (Mr Jenkinson). The wildly fluctuating debates between Mr Foster the perfectibilian and Mr Enscott who believes in material degeneracy, reflect one aspect of the intellectual clash between Godwin and Shelley.

8. One Dark Night

During the winter months Shelley established a regular pattern of life that was quite new to him. He put himself under Williams��s command, and walked or rode each morning to the site-office at the edge of the Embankment to help with the work. His main job seems to have been following up the promised payments made by local farmers and gentry into the Embankment fund. Some of his letter reminders still exist, and they show that Shelley took the work seriously, indeed with a degree of zeal that quickly made him several enemies. The Caernarvon solicitor, John Evans, was a person of some weight in the district who handled Madocks’s financial affairs, while also acting as local agent for Madocks’s creditors, such as Girdlestone. But Shelley adopted an imperious and really rather offensive manner with Evans, who had promised £50 to the fund. Shelley wrote him one reminder soon after returning to Tremadoc on 3 December 1812. About a week later, he sent a second reminder. It was hardly a masterpiece of public relations. ‘Sir, In reply to a message which I sent you by Mr John Williams you asserted that you had never received my letter. — To obviate the repetition of so
singular
an occurrence I send this by personal messenger. — The substance of my former letter, was to remind you, by right of being a fellow subscriber, of your debt to the Tremadoc Embankment, which being a debt of honour ought to be of all others the most imperious, & to press the necessity of its immediate payment, to lament also the apathy & backwardness of defaulters in such a case. Sir Your Humble Sert.’
¹
Turning the tables on Evans, and using the jargon of the debt-collecting agency to
him
, gave Shelley undisguised satisfaction. For it was Evans who had dealt with Shelley’s own £70 debt at Caernarvon. Evans was a dangerous man to alienate, for he was influential with the local forces of law and order, and it so happened that he also was clerk to the sheriff of Caernarvon.
²

Another of the important figures in the Tremadoc community whom Shelley managed to antagonize was the Honourable Robert Leeson. Leeson owned and
directed the local quarry at Innys Towyn which supplied the Embankment with most of its stone.
³
He was the largest employer of manual labour in the area, and his attitude was tough and ‘realistic’, typical of the new class of capitalist owners who had lost the old eighteenth-century paternalism without gaining the new social evangelicalism — one hesitates to call it socialism — of Robert Owen of New Lanark. He was sensitive to Madocks’s own financial precariousness, and while viewing the Embankment itself as a shrewd capital investment, continually put pressure on Madocks’s agent, Williams, to adopt a more stringent policy towards local labour. One note he sent to Williams at this time reads typically: ‘Money
must be got
as some people who never complained before are now clamorous . . . . I think John it is madness feeding so many mouths if it could be dispensed with, as most of the men eat more than their work is worth.’
⁴
Politically, Leeson was a hard-line Tory and a fanatical admirer of Wellington,
⁵
and his attitude to his labour force was characteristic of the son of a great Irish landowner,
[1]
who had been brought up to regard men on the land as nothing more than feudal peasantry. In private, he seems to have been a man of culture and intelligence, and it is perhaps significant in the light of subsequent events that Leeson had a passion for amateur dramatics, and later, when he returned to Dublin, he bought a house which contained a small theatre on its upper floor.
⁶