Shelley: The Pursuit (79 page)

But there was hidden in the Hermit’s pamphlet a single logical trick which made the radical democratic point well enough. For, ideologically speaking, Shelley’s proposal in fact
assumed already
what it pretended to question. Once the reader found himself agreeing that the whole of the ‘individual adult’ population of Great Britain had a right to be consulted on the reform issue — that is, on a fundamental political issue — then the principle of universal adult franchise was already in practice established.

Five hundred copies of the pamphlet were advertised by Ollier (together with Keats’s first volume of poems), and began to appear in the first fortnight of March. Shelley pressed Ollier to advertise unsparingly, and drew up for him a mailing list which shows clearly that he was addressing himself to the very centre of the controversy. Among those who received his pamphlet were
Cobbett, Major Cartwright, Francis Burdett, Place, Brougham and Robert Owen. Bundles of copies were also sent to Hunt at the
Examiner
, and the Hampden Clubs of London and Birmingham. In April Shelley had some direct negotiations with Hone, probably about reprinting this or another of Shelley’s political works, but as far as is known nothing came of it directly. But this is perhaps how Shelley’s name came into the circle of working-class radical publishers, and how Richard Carlile himself approached Shelley in the summer about publishing
Queen Mab
.
³⁴
A copy eventually reached the
Quarterly
, and was later scathingly reviewed in a collection of anonymous and semi-seditious pamphlets by Robert Southey.

The publication of the pamphlet brought Shelley no personal reactions outside the circle at Marlow and Hampstead, but from now on he felt himself back inside the reform movement and he followed the process of public meetings, political trials of editors, publishers and working leaders, with close attention. As he settled into the spring at Marlow, he turned the whole question of radical political and social change over in his mind and began to read further studies of the French Revolution. More and more he came to believe that the way in which he and his contemporaries interpreted the French Revolution would decide the way in which they would fight for or oppose the present struggle for democratic reform.

[1]
At the present time two manuscripts of this letter are extant, one in the British Museum (Ashley 5021), and the other in the Bodleian (Bod. MS Shelley c. 1, F135-138): both have doubtful postmarks or signatures. For a lively discussion, see Robert M. Smith,
The Shelley Legend
, New York, 1945, with a gentlemanly reply by the distinguished trio of Shelley scholars N.I. White, K. N. Cameron and F. L. Jones. The overall point is exemplary of Shelley sources: where events reveal Shelley in an unpleasant light, the original texts and commentaries have attracted suppressions, distortions and questions of doubtful authenticity, originating from Victorian apologists.

[2]
Shelley had some cause for this caveat: there is no proof that he had even seen Ianthe since spring 1814, two and a half years before.

[3]
Like Elizabeth Hitchener presumably.

[4]
‘[Shelley] went to Charles Richards, the printer in St Martin’s Lane . . . about the printing of a little volume of Keats’ first poems . . . the printer told me that he had never had so strange a visitor. He was gaunt, and had peculiar starts and gestures and a way of fixing his eyes and his whole attitude for a good while, like the abstracted apathy of a musing madman.’ The opinion of Mr John Dix in his
Pen and Ink Sketches of Poets, Preachers and Politicians
(1846).

15. The Garden Days: Marlow 1817

By the end of February 1817, Shelley had at last secured a twenty-one-year lease on Albion House, and after several delays, on 18 March Shelley and Mary took possession of their new home. Claire had come up from Bath, bringing with her Elise, little William and her own beloved Alba. Albion House was the most determined effort at a permanent residence that Shelley ever made in England. It was a rather long, low, two-storey building roughly finished in a kind of white pebble-dash, with tiny attic windows peering over the top of a mock gothic balustrade. The slightly quaint impression was enhanced by the curious shape of the window frames, which were also mock gothic, each one rising to a pair of gnomish points. The front door, which gave directly on to the street, was fenced round and embowered by a lattice-work porch and balustrade over which wisteria and wild ivies climbed in profusion. The rooms were large inside, though they tended to be slightly dark and damp. The pride of the house was an enormous library which gave on to the back garden, and Shelley immediately began stocking it with books from Ollier and furnishing it in the approved Hunt fashion with full-size statues of Venus and Apollo. The garden itself at the back was very fine, about an acre in size, partly enclosed by a high, mellow red-brick wall, and already set out with neat lawns and dominated by a floating, dark green cedar tree. Its peripheries were somewhat darkened by firs and cypresses, closely planted. At the bottom of the lawn was a mound, where they sometimes sat in the evenings to see the view over the meadows, and behind this a vegetable garden where ornamental plants were inclined to appear idiosyncratically among the cabbages. At the end of the garden, the ground fell away down a steep chalk bank into a hidden lane. There are several records of Shelley hiding from uninvited visitors in this lane; of his leading his ladies up the chalk bank after walks; and using it as a slide to shoot past the enraptured Hunt children ‘in a cloud of chalk dust’.
¹
One of the first books Shelley ordered was Mawe’s
Gardening Calendar
, and his newly engaged gardener, Harry, was put to
work sowing the Alpine seeds they had brought back from Switzerland. Mary also hired a cook and a housemaid.

Albion House stood on the main London coaching route to Henley, about 200 yards to the west of the centre of Marlow and the solid three-storey brick establishment where Peacock lived with his mother. Across the road, and about three minutes over a hayfield, was the Thames, Marlow steps and the weir. Shelley kept a small skiff permanently moored here throughout the spring and summer for his water expeditions. Southwards from the Thames, across about a mile of shining water-meadows rose the steep green escarpment of Bisham Woods, loosely timbered with beech, birch and fir trees. Here Shelley loved to walk, turning secluded spots into open-air studies, or indulging in horse-play with Peacock and Hogg and the Hunt children, slithering down more dust slides and carving Greek hieroglyphics and revolutionary slogans on the trees. They even set up an altar to Pan, which Hogg and Peacock were solemnly to visit long after Shelley had gone abroad.

Mary was anxious to play the hostess from the start, and in March she invited the Hunts: ‘I am now writing in the Library of our house in which we are to sleep tonight for the first time — It is very comfortable and expectant of its promised guests. The statues are arrived and everything is getting on. Come then, dear, good creatures, and let us enjoy with you the beauty of the Marlow sun and the pleasant walks that will give you all health spirits &
industry
.’ Hogg and Peacock, however, were a reminder of former things, and Mary was not unduly enthusiastic about Shelley’s old friends from the unsettled days. ‘Hogg is at present a visitor of Peacock. I do not like him and I think he is more disagreeable than ever. I would not have him come every week to disturb our peace by his illhumour and noise for all the world. Both of the menagerie were very much scandalised by the praise & sonnet of Keats and mean I believe to petition against the publication of any more.’
²
Mary omitted to mention that Shelley’s opinion of Keats was correspondingly low; or that at Hampstead, with his own
Queen Mab
and
Alastor
behind him, he had solemnly advised Keats to avoid publishing young.

The first proper guest was Godwin, who came in the early days of April. The weather had turned cold, and the whole visit was something of a strain, but Shelley manfully organized boating trips to Medmenham Abbey, Henley and Maidenhead, and talked with his father-in-law about the progress of his new novel
Mandeville
and the old issues of ‘perfectibility’. Claire had deposited Alba with Marianne Hunt and her sister Bessy Kent at Hampstead, and came down to Marlow immaculate again under her maiden name. A few hours after Godwin’s departure, the whole Hunt family arrived, bringing besides their own children, a little ‘cousin’ of theirs whom Aunt Claire had kindly agreed to take care of for
the summer. Thus with Shelley’s careful management Alba was slipped easily into the Marlow household. With the arrival of the Hunts, the weather seemed to improve, regular expeditions took to the water or disappeared for the day into Bisham Woods. Shelley set himself on a concentrated course of Spenser’s poetry and Lacretelle’s
Short History of the French Revolution
, with the idea for a big political poem steadily forming in his mind. Mary meanwhile began to revise and fair copy her
Frankenstein
which had been thrown aside during the crises of the winter.

Shelley took much trouble to fit Claire smoothly into the household. He wrote twice to Ollier to secure her ‘a print done from a drawing by Harlowe of Lord Byron’, specifying carefully how it should be framed. At the end of April he negotiated a loan of seventy-five pounds to buy a first-class concert piano from Vincent Novello upon which Hunt and others might accompany her singing. This piano, needless to say, was still not paid for in 1821.

He wrote to Byron a cheerful but somewhat wry description of Claire and her little baby at Marlow. ‘[Alba] is very beautiful, and though her frame is of a somewhat delicate texture, enjoys excellent health. Her eyes are the most intelligent I ever saw in so young an infant. Her hair is black, her eyes deeply blue, and her mouth exquisitely shaped. She passes here for the child of a friend in London, sent into the country for her health, while Claire has reassumed her maiden character. Indeed all these precautions have now become more necessary than before on account of our renewed intimacy with Godwin, which has taken place in consequence of my marriage with Mary, a change (if it be a change) which had principally her feelings in respect to Godwin for its object. I need not inform you that this is simply with us a measure of convenience, and that our opinions as to the importance of this pretended sanction, and all the prejudices connected with it, remain the same.’ Shelley went on to discuss in general terms Alba’s future. He assumed without question that Byron would honour his obligations to the child herself, but tacitly admitted that Byron might well feel less obliged towards the mother. He and Mary would, of course, he said, give ‘all our care’ to the child in Byron’s absence. Shelley did not add that Mary regarded Claire as one of the main burdens of her life: ‘
absentia Clariae
’ still being one of the preconditions of her happiness. All in all, he felt it best that Byron should try to come back to England to settle the matter himself. In the event Byron was to be fully occupied in Venice.
³

For the rest, Shelley drew a picture of tranquillity. Though he feared that ‘a criminal information’ might arise from the Chancery case concerning the political and religious contents of
Queen Mab
, for the time being he was determined to extinguish rather than be extinguished by the anxiety.
[1]
He was content,
he told Byron, with his garden, his books and the boat. At Marlow, the apple trees were in blossom.

Marianne Hunt, Bessy and the children seem to have stayed on at Albion House for most of May and June, with Hunt himself paying flying visits whenever he could get away from the
Examiner
. The children were happy in each other’s company, and with the combined nursery forces of Bessy, Elise and Claire to look after them, they played for long sunny hours in the enclosed garden. William soon became attached to little Alba, and together they endured the rigours of Shelley’s cold-bath routine. Shelley would escape alone, or with Hunt and Peacock, for whole days on end in the boat.

It was during May that he began the first autobiographical cantos of the long political poem which he intended to call
Laon and Cythna, or, The Revolution in the Golden City
. Much of it was actually written in the boat, or sitting on the leafy heights in Bisham Woods. Shelley used a series of thick, small sketching books, and wrote at tremendous scrawling speed in soft pencil, each page rarely containing more than two of the nine-lined Spenserian stanzas he had adopted for the work.
⁴
His protagonists were to be a brother and a sister, who were also lovers, and who became leaders of a city insurrection and revolution apparently in the Far East, but actually modelled on the Paris Revolution. Some of the later passages were written more carefully, in pen, and suggest that Shelley also worked occasionally in the library at Albion House. It is notable that these sections contain the most dense and finely worked poetry, in a work that suffers overall from the diffusion of its loose philosophical narrative. There is no indication that Shelley, as he began the poem in May, had any clear outline of the shape and pattern of the plot. After a formal Spenserian allegory of an eagle fighting a serpent, in Canto I, the poem moves through several layers of autobiographical narrative about Shelley’s childhood, much of it extended into a semi-heroic disguise of epic and myth. After some 1,500 lines, it gradually begins to concentrate on recognizably contemporary public and political events in Canto IV. Altogether the poem was to last 4,818 lines, over eleven cantos, and to occupy Shelley until September. It was the longest work he ever wrote, and served the purpose of completely clearing the creative block which had hindered him since the spring of 1816. He was in fact trying to write that poem on the French Revolution, the ‘master theme of the epoch’, which he had originally recommended to Byron.