Shelley: The Pursuit (60 page)

A ‘transient connection with a cultivated female’ would be, surely, a reasonably adequate description of ‘free love’ as normally understood. But Shelley attacked it with peculiar force on this occasion. The new emphasis on reciprocity and equal obligation within sexual relations was not entirely caused by Hogg’s reappearance. Shelley was thinking of his experience with Harriet, and the reproof of Hogg’s moral levity contained more than an element of self-reproach. Yet he was divided by the implications of Prince Alexy’s sentimental education, and concluded that the narrative was ‘an unweeded garden where nightshade is interwoven with sweet jessamine’. Shelley praised Hogg for his perceptive handling of female characters, and again stressed the need for moral sensitivity. Above all, the crudeness of conventional morality and the brutal slavishness of desire must be banished from intimate human relations.

In the delineation of the more evanescent feelings and uncommon instances of strong and delicate passion we conceive the author to have exhibited new and unparallelled powers. He has noticed some peculiarities of female character, with a delicacy and truth singularly exquisite. We think that the interesting subject of sexual relations requires for its successful development the application of a mind thus organized and endowed. Yet even here how great the deficiencies; this mind must be pure from the fashionable superstition of gallantry, must be exempt from the sordid feelings which with blind idolatry worship the image and blaspheme the deity, reverence the type and degrade the reality of which it is an emblem.
⁴⁶

This was, in its way, a formal if guarded invitation to Hogg.

By a curious irony, in the same week that Shelley was writing this review and gradually introducing Hogg back into his household, Harriet was writing to her
old friend Mrs Nugent from Chapel Street. In a detailed letter dated 20 November, she finally revealed the full extent of the disaster that had wrecked her life. She took her own view of domestic reciprocity. ‘My dear Mrs Nugent, Your fears are verified. Mr Shelley has become profligate and sensual, owing entirely to Godwin’s
Political Justice
. The very great evil that book has done is not to be told. The false doctrines there contained have poisoned many a young and virtuous mind. Mr Shelley is living with Godwin’s two daughters — one by Mary Wollstonecraft, the other the daughter of his present wife, called Clairmont. I told you some time back Mr S. was to give Godwin three thousand pounds. It was in effecting the accomplishment of this scheme that he was obliged to be at Godwin’s house, and Mary was determined to seduce him. She is to blame . . . and here I am, my dear friend, waiting to bring another infant into this woeful world. Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire.’
⁴⁷

Shelley’s last letter, a request for thirty pounds to save him from prison, had been written to Harriet about a month previously, on 25 October. He had not informed her of his change of address, to Nelson Square, and he knew nothing about the state of her health or finances as the birth of the second child approached. Harriet in fact gave birth to a boy, rather sooner than she expected, on 30 November. She called him Charles. News only filtered through to Shelley a week later via Hookham. Shelley was walking out with Claire ‘as usual, to heaps of places’, as Mary put it, when a note arrived in the evening. Mary treated the event with considerable bitchiness in their shared journal. ‘A letter from Hookham, to say that Harriet has been brought to bed of a son and heir. Shelley writes a number of circular letters of this event, which ought to be ushered in with ringing of bells, &c, for it is the son of his
wife
. Hogg comes in the evening; I like him better, though he vexed me by his attachment to sporting. A letter from Harriet confirming the news, in a letter from a
deserted wife!!
and telling us he has been born a week.’
⁴⁸
Mary’s tone is understandable, considering her own pregnancy, her growing jealousy of Claire and the ill-health that kept her frequently marooned in the parlour at Nelson Square. The next day, Shelley went out with Claire to visit the lawyers, and then on to Harriet in Chapel Street. They came home irritable and dispirited, having been caught in the rain. He told Mary that Harriet had treated him ‘with insulting selfishness’, and as far as one can tell, he did not try to see Harriet again until the following April.

Harriet’s side of this last brief interview, as given to Mrs Nugent four days later, was profoundly miserable. ‘Ianthe has a brother. He is an eight month child, and very like his unfortunate father, who is more depraved than ever. Oh,
my dear friend, what a dreadful trial it is to bring children into the world so utterly helpless as he is, with no kind father’s care to heal the wounded frame. After so much suffering my labour was a very good one, from nine in the morning till nine at night. He is a very fine healthy child for the time. I have seen his father; he came to see me as soon as he knew of the event; but as to his tenderness to me, none remains. He said he was glad it was a boy, because he would make money cheaper. You see how the noble soul is debased. Money now, not philosophy, is the grand spring of his actions.’
⁴⁹
There was a certain truth in what she said about money. It did fill most of Shelley’s day, as the journal showed, and as far as he was concerned, she and her children were now just one more of his financial problems.

As Christmas approached, they went out less, except to Pike’s the moneylender, and much of the day was spent reading. Their reading lists have survived, a macabre mixture: political philosophy and horror novels. The works of Tom Paine, Godwin, Voltaire and Mary Wollstonecraft stand beside Weber’s
The Sorcerer
, Lewis’s
The Monk, Edgar Huntley
and other Brockden Brown novels, Joanna Baillie’s
Plays
, and Ann Radcliffe’s
The Italian
. They also read travel books, and
The Lives of the Revolutionists
by John Adolphus. Shelley cleansed his palate in private with Cicero, Petronius and Suetonius’s
Lives of the Caesars
.

Wordsworth’s
Excursion
, which Hookham had published that autumn, was passed from hand to hand with frowns of disapproval. Shelley still admired the spiritual penetration of Wordsworth’s poetry, and the quality of high moral austerity in his style was something that corresponded with a growing need in his own creative development. Yet Wordsworth was for Shelley a political traitor, a deserter of the French Revolution, branded with the same mark as Southey. It was about now that he first sketched out the lines which finally became his sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, in which he expressed both his admiration and his disgust. The image of what Wordsworth once had been, reflected a continuing literary-political ambition for what Shelley himself might become.

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

That things depart which never may return:

Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,

Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine

Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.

Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine

On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:

Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

Above the blind and battling multitude:

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be,
⁵⁰

The complete poem was first published in 1816. His conception of what Wordsworth’s ‘desertion’ involved, in personal and historical terms, was still immature. Six years later in Italy, he was to return to the theme with real understanding, in one of his most colourful and brilliant satirical pieces,
Peter Bell the Third
.
[12]

Hogg was now rapidly finding his feet at Nelson Square. Adaptable to his old friend’s interests, he soon helped to resuscitate the horror sessions in a slightly lighter and more sociable vein that was more to Mary’s taste. Three days before Christmas he spent the evening with great success. ‘Hogg comes. He describes an apparition of a lady, whom he had loved, appearing to him after her death; she came in the twilight summer night, and was hardly visible; she touched his cheek with her hands, and visited him many successive nights; he was always unaware of her approach, and passed many waking hours in expectation of it. Interesting conversation interrupted by Clara’s childish superstition. Hogg departs at 12.’ Mary remembered the story, and years later she wrote it up and published it with three others, collected from a later period of ‘horrors’, in the
London Magazine
for March 1824.

On Boxing Day, a significant note appeared in the journal: Shelley referred to Mary as ‘sweet Maie’, one of several cosy nicknames, including ‘Pecksie’ and ‘the Dormouse’ (because she always seemed to be in bed), which Hogg had introduced into the household. An intimacy was now developing between her and Hogg, and this appropriately complemented the time which Shelley and Claire spent away together in town. In the last days of December, they went several times in the evenings to lectures given at one of the city institutes by a Mr Garnerin, ‘on electricity, the gasses, and the phantasmagoria’. On 30 December, Shelley and Claire did not return ‘till past 7, having been locked into Kensington Gardens; both very tired’. But Hogg came to cheer Mary up in the evening.
⁵¹

One week into the new year saw a sudden and wholly unexpected change in Shelley’s prospects. On 7 January 1815, while Shelley and Claire were out walking in search of new lodgings, Mary and Hogg found the death of Sir Bysshe
Shelley announced in the papers. Almost immediately Hookham appeared on a social call, and to Mary’s wry amusement, ‘is very gracious’.

When Shelley heard the news, he was wholly delighted. The death of old Bysshe meant nothing to him emotionally, but it promised to mean very much financially. He moved rapidly. A large apartment was taken at Hans Place, in the fashionable area of Chelsea and Kensington, and they moved there, with Hogg’s help, on the 10th. Shelley then left Mary in Hogg’s care, and took Claire with him to the formal reading of Sir Bysshe’s will at Field Place. He did not go to the funeral, but the trip took two days and they stopped the night at Kingston, returning for a late breakfast with Mary on Friday the 13th. Shelley related with glee how he had been forbidden to enter the house, so sat instead ostentatiously on the doorstep, where all the relatives and servants could see, reading a copy of Milton’s
Comus
with Mary’s name prominently written in the fly-sheet. Mary recorded the scene: ‘The will has been opened, and Shelley is referred to Whitton. His Father would not allow him to enter Field Place; he sits before the door and reads [my] “Comus”. Dr Blocksome comes out; tells him his father is very angry with him. Sees my name in Milton. Shelley Sidney comes out; says that it is a most extraordinary will. Shelley returns to Slinfold. Shelley and Clara set out, and reach Kingston that night. Shelley goes to Whitton, who tells him that he is to have the income of £100,000 after his father’s death if he will entail his estate.’
⁵²
The question of the entail was one which would eventually cause enormous difficulty and complication. Shelley had always said he wished to break up the estate from the time he left Oxford and quarrelled with Timothy; but for the moment his prospects looked glowing. A preliminary settlement was not to come into Shelley’s hands until three months later.

The story of these early weeks of 1815 is obscured by one of the most strange and suggestive destructions of the manuscript record as it has come down to us. For the period of 7 January to 6 May 1815, no less than nine separate sections have been torn from the manuscript of Mary and Shelley’s shared journal. The deletions fall fairly evenly through January, February and April; but between 14 and 28 January, two weeks are missing; between 29 March and 6 April eight days are missing; and between 23 April and 4 May, another eleven days are missing. Apart from these three extended sections, it is notable that the suppressions tend to fall over weekends. Altogether, in the four-monthly period between January and May, no less than thirty days have been deleted.
⁵³

It is also intriguing that other primary sources suddenly become very thin. In the same period, between January and May, there are only seven extant Shelley letters, all of which are brief notes, most of them to solicitors. Claire’s diary has not survived. Hogg’s second and last volume of his unfinished
Life
breaks off, perhaps significantly, in the middle of spring 1815. The only other informative
source is a series of eleven love-notes written from Mary to Hogg between 1 January and 26 April, which show that Hogg had been fully accepted into the household as Shelley’s closest friend and Mary’s proposed lover.

In January Hogg was a regular, usually daily, visitor, and from 10 March onwards, when the law vacation began, he lived continually with Mary, Shelley and Claire, and slept at the house.
⁵⁴
From this same date, Mary’s exasperation with Claire was openly expressed in the journal: ‘Friday 10th March. — Hogg’s holidays begin. Shelley, Hogg and Clara go to town. Hogg comes back soon. Talk and net. Hogg now remains with us. Put room to rights.
11th March
. — Very unwell. Hogg goes to town. Talk about Clara’s going away; nothing settled; I fear it is hopeless. She will not go to Skinner Street; then our house is the only remaining place, I see plainly. What is to be done? Hogg returns. Talk, and Hogg reads the “Life of Goldoni” aloud.
12th March
. — Talk a great deal. Not well, but better. Very quiet all the morning, and happy, for Clara does not get up till 4.’
⁵⁵