Shelley: The Pursuit (75 page)

At Le Havre, they embarked for Portsmouth, as Shelley knew that arrival in London with Claire would only complicate matters unnecessarily. They docked on 8 September, and Shelley watched anxiously while the customs officer leafed through the MS of
Childe Harold
, apparently looking for lace concealed between the pages. He drove into Somerset, and quickly established Mary and Claire in a house at No. 5 Abbey Churchyard, a discreet corner of Bath, and within three days was himself in his old London lodgings at 26 Marchmont Street. He had much business. There was Murray to deal with; and Peacock’s negotiations for a house at Windsor; and the old, endless wrangle with Godwin over money he could not supply, and loans he could not convincingly underwrite. While he stayed in London between the 10th and 14th, Fanny Godwin came to visit him in the evenings, partly as Godwin’s messenger, and partly on her own account. Then he went to Peacock’s at Marlow, and Mary joined him, but no house was immediately available, so they determined to winter in Bath.
[7]

From there, at the end of the month, Shelley wrote to Byron, apprising him of their plans, the 2,000 guineas Murray had agreed on for ‘the Childe’, and their hopes for all meeting again in the spring. The picture was cosy and domestic: ‘We are all now at Bath, well and content. Claire is writing to you at this instant. Mary is reading over the fire; our cat and kitten are sleeping under the sofa; and little Willy is just gone to sleep. We are looking out for a house in some lone place; and one chief pleasure which we shall expect then, will be a visit from you.’
⁵⁵
But as autumn darkened into winter, the little household was shaken and transformed by a series of disastrous blows, and they were drawn back, one more time, into the whirlpool of London. The summer was long over.

[1]
Byron did raise the question of paternity with Shelley, but only briefly, and he soon dismissed it as certainly his child. But writing to his friend Douglas Kinnaird, he implied that Shelley did not deny
previous
sexual relations with Claire: ‘. . . Is the brat mine? I have reason to think so, for I know as much as one can know such a thing — that she had not lived with S[helley] during the time of our acquaintance — and that she had a good deal of that same with me.’

[2]
Coleridge himself was somewhat concerned at the witch’s revelation of the ghastly deformity of her breasts, and in later editions changed the penultimate line to, ‘A sight to dream of, not to tell!’

[3]
A close connection with Shelley’s earlier description of such states, in the writings of 1815, is manifest here.

[4]
Mary’s solitariness during this night, if accurately recalled, suggests that it occurred when Shelley was already away on the lake with Byron; however this may have been a literary device, as was the imagined landscape — it was the Jura that were ‘beyond’ the lake; the Alps lay behind Montalègre, to the south.

[5]
Shelley kept a small sketch book with him in which he pencilled rough drawings of the lake and drafts of his diary-letter to Peacock, (Bodleian MS Shelley Adds. e. 16.) On p. 37, perhaps after his return to Montalègre, he wrote cross-wise in ink:

My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,

The verse that would invest them melts away

Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:

How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,

Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!

[6]
Here, too, Coleridge had been before him, and had come back with his ‘Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni’. But for Coleridge the almighty God was safely in residence ‘On thy bald aweful head, O sovran Blanc!’

[7]
On 24 September 1816, Shelley delivered his will to the solicitor Longdill. It gives an interesting indication of his sense of attachments and responsibilities at this time. The residue of his estate was left directly to Mary Godwin. Harriet Shelley was to receive a sum of £6,000, and her children Ianthe and Charles £5,000 each. Claire Clairmont was to receive a sum of £6,000, together with an invested annuity of a further £6,000 which Shelley perhaps intended to make the care and upbringing of the forthcoming child independent of Byron if Claire so chose. Peacock was to receive £500, and an invested annuity of £2,000. Hogg and Lord Byron were each left gifts of £2,000. Byron and Peacock were appointed the trustees. The comparative provisions made for Claire and for Harriet are especially suggestive of Shelley’s feelings; as is also the complete absence of William Godwin’s name from the document.

14. The Suicides: London 1816

On the 9 October 1816, an extremely depressed note from Fanny Godwin arrived at Abbey Churchyard. To their surprise the Shelleys saw it carried a Bristol postmark. Both Claire and Mary were familiar with Fanny’s profound depressions, and Shelley was immediately dispatched to Bristol to seek out the girl. He returned at 2 a.m. without news. That night, in a small upper room in the Mackworth Arms, Swansea, Fanny committed suicide by overdosing herself with opium. Her pathetic suicide note explained nothing, and the Godwins were left to conclude that she had killed herself because of unrequited love for Shelley. There were in fact several other possible motives, including the recent discovery of her own illegitimacy, but her agonizing and loveless suspension between the Godwin and Shelley households was clearly the root circumstance. Godwin himself reacted by imposing a complete silence on the matter both at Skinner Street and on the Shelleys at Bath. Someone tore off the name from the suicide note, and Fanny’s identity never reached the local papers. Godwin forbade the Shelleys to go to Swansea or claim the body, and he himself was so discreet as to turn back his own journey at Bristol. No one went to see Fanny buried, and relatives were at first told that she had gone to Ireland; and later that she had died from a severe cold. Charles, her half-brother, was still not informed of her death by the following summer.

Neither Shelley’s nor Mary’s correspondence contain the least overt reference to Fanny’s death at this time, which demonstrates among other things how secretive they could be about personal matters if they so chose. Claire wrote to Byron that Shelley’s health was upset by Fanny’s death (she did not herself mention suicide), and it has normally been assumed that Shelley was distraught. But there is no other evidence for this in Mary’s journal, or elsewhere. Shelley continued to read
Don Quixote
out loud, and began to keep records of the amount he ate, in grams. Mary took drawing lessons, and began to study chemistry with Shelley, reading Sir Humphry Davy’s
Elements of Chemical Philosophy
. Claire
was moved to a nearby address at 12 New Bond Street, for her approaching confinement, probably with Elise in attendance. It seems that only months later, when Shelley looked back at the grim pattern of that autumn and winter, did he accept the full implications of Fanny’s death. Several poems he wrote in the following year seem to grope towards realization and acceptance. There is the famous, ‘Her voice did quiver as we parted’, but also the following lyric in which he himself is pictured and placed:

They die — the dead return not — Misery

Sits near an open grave and calls them over,

A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye —

They are the names of kindred, friend and lover,

Which he so feebly calls — they all are gone —

Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone,

This most familiar scene, my pain —

These tombs — alone remain.
¹

But of course, in reality, Shelley did not sit over Fanny’s poor anonymous grave.

The rest of October and November passed in an ominous calm. The retired domesticity of Shelley’s life at Bath was almost unbroken. He moved between Mary at Abbey Churchyard and Claire at New Bond Street, writing letters from both addresses. Claire was now expecting her child within six or eight weeks and his presence was her main comfort. They all walked up to the Royal Crescent to view the solar eclipse, but it was cloudy, and Mary amused herself watching the many disconsolate people with burnt glass.
²
Shelley put forward a few tentative literary feelers, writing to a Monsieur Pascoud in Geneva concerning a French translation of
Political Justice
he had undertaken, and sending a fair copy of his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ to Hunt at the
Examiner’s
offices in London. For the time being there was no response from either quarter. He noted that Murray was rapidly preparing to bring out
Childe Harold
, though he himself had been ousted from the job of proof-reading by the critic Gifford. This minor professional snub, which Shelley passed off as best he could, was caused by Byron pretending to take him further into his confidence about the poem at the Diodati than he actually had. Shelley diverted his spleen by attacking the
Edinburgh Review’s
criticism of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. There was some genuine comfort for the author of
Alastor
in the fact that this volume, which also contained ‘Kubla Khan’, was so superciliously dismissed by a liberal review: ‘. . . there is literally not one couplet in the volume before us which would be reckoned poetry, or even sense, were it found in the corner of a newspaper, or upon the window of an inn.’
³
Lord Byron and he could sympathize equally in the callous treatment of Coleridge.

At
Bath, Shelley had time to take in and read much of the liberal press, including the
Examiner
and Cobbett’s
Register
. More and more, he was drawn back into the reform movement. The revival of the political impulse, which had begun at the end of the summer in Switzerland, showed in the increasing space it took up in his letters. Throughout England generally there was a powerful renaissance of the reform movement in the autumn of 1816. Men like Cobbett, Henry Hunt the orator, Francis Burdett the MP for Westminster and Francis Place the radical, re-emerged as public leaders who were prepared to encourage at the grass roots a new pattern of mass meetings and local associations. New figures also arose, who had not been soured by the experiences of the nineties, and believed passionately in the processes of self-education and democratic reform. These were men like Samuel Bamford the radical weaver from Manchester, and Richard Carlile the London publisher. They were not revolutionaries in the conspiratorial or Jacobin sense, though they held the monarchy and Liverpool’s administration in contempt. They did not believe in the Tory nightmares of mass violence of Parisian-style revolution, but they were doggedly prepared to go to jail in the name of democratic rights that had not yet become English laws. They also believed in the power of class solidarity in a new way. Shelley clearly saw a major confrontation on the horizon, and described his attitude, in terms of deliberate moderation, in his letters to Byron.

Of course you have received intimations of the tumultuous state of England. The whole fabric of society presents a most threatening aspect. What is most ominous of an approaching change is the strength which the popular party have suddenly acquired, and the importance which the violence of demagogues has assumed. But the people appear calm, and steady even under situations of great excitement; and reform may come without revolution. Parliament will meet on 28th January; until which — for the populace have committed no violence — they only meet, resolve and petition — all classes will probably remain in a sullen and moody expectation of what the session will produce. The taxes, it is said, cannot be collected — if so, the national debt cannot be payed — and are not the landed proprietors virtually pledged to the payment? I earnestly hope that, without such an utter overthrow as should leave us the prey of anarchy, and give us illiterate demagogues for masters, a most radical reform of the institutions of England may result from the approaching context.
⁴

Shelley’s
caveats
are almost as interesting as his hopes. His distrust of democratic leadership — automatically ‘demagogic’ — was still typical of the Whig-liberal pattern which he himself had rejected; and his attitude to the arm-lever which the tax-payers could assert over the landowners was still markedly
ambiguous. Such political attitudes remained in a state of flux, and only matured slowly and painfully. But his feeling that reform must be ‘most radical’ never changed; nor his fear that a revolution, though he himself might support it in principle, could easily overreach itself and run through the grim dialectical pattern exemplified by the Paris Revolution: anarchy followed by military dictatorship. But even this fear itself matured, for finally Shelley was to recognize that under certain degrees of social extremity the risk of anarchy, and even civil war, not only could be but must be embraced, in order to prevent the moral and political suppression of an entire stratum of the population.

Some light is thrown on Shelley’s more private feelings in this matter, in the remarkable friendship with Leigh Hunt which sprang up at the end of November and the beginning of December. The opening was not altogether auspicious. A letter from Hunt arrived at Bath on 1 December, which apparently stated that Hunt had mislaid the manuscript of the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, though he wished to publish it in the
Examiner
. At the same time Hunt asked Shelley for help in a financial matter. From Shelley’s cheques,
⁵
it would appear that Hunt had asked for a loan, rather than an outright gift, probably in aid of a reform cause or prison fund that he was organizing, and Shelley immediately sent fifty pounds, explaining that it came from ‘a friend’ who required no interest. Hunt then wrote back, feeling slightly awkward at Shelley’s ‘precipitancy’ and insisting that at least he would pay interest in a proper businesslike fashion.
⁶
His letter contained five pounds. As Hunt had just given Shelley a favourable notice in the famous Young Poets issue of the
Examiner
on 1 December, which also mentioned Keats and John Reynolds, he found the situation was potentially embarrassing. But Shelley was in no way abashed. He wrote back on the 8th that he had actually missed the current number of the
Examiner
by ‘some fatality’, and that though his friend ‘accepts the
interest
& is contented to be a Hebrew’,
⁷
he was himself returning a gift of five pounds. This happened conveniently to match Hunt’s ten per cent ‘interest’ on the loan. Shelley’s two cheques were cashed on the 9th and the 19th, the fifty pounds last, suggesting that it had indeed been transferred to some other account or fund. But how far Shelley was making a personal payment to Hunt remains a mystery, for Hunt had also mentioned personal ‘distress’.