Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (20 page)

As you form his infant mind so you will reap the fruits hereafter. Now comes the sad task of saying farewell – oh I must be quick. God bless & watch over you all. You dear Bysshe. & you dear Eliza. May all happiness attend ye both is the last wishes of her who loved ye more than all others. My children I dare not trust myself there. They are too young to regret me & ye will be kind to them for their own sakes more than for mine. My parents do not regret me.
⁶⁸

It was the second such note Shelley had read in as many months. In the days following Harriet’s death Hunt was a constant source of support. Shelley stayed at his house in Hampstead, propped up by his ‘affectionate attentions’. ‘Leigh Hunt has been with me all day’, he reported to Mary, ‘& his delicate & tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of you, have sustained me against the weight of the horror of this event.’
⁶⁹
Hunt’s kindness went further than sympathetic speeches, and he offered to take charge of Shelley’s children and prepare them for a new life with their father. In the light of his pressing financial obligations and his own noisy and ever-growing brood this offer was truly generous. But Eliza Westbrook declined to hand over the children and ignored Shelley’s suggestion that she should make an appointment with Hunt to do so.

Shelley and Hunt’s friendship had begun in the spirit of mutual admiration, but it was now strengthened by crisis and adversity. Harriet’s death drew them together and thus brought about a unification of their separate worlds. It was an important moment for them, their families and their friends. From this point onwards, their friends would meet each other in a kaleidoscopic series of shifting configurations, all of which had Shelley and Hunt at the centre. And all these configurations had their roots in the dark days of December 1816, when Shelley and Hunt joined forces in a battle for Shelley’s neglected children.

At the end of December Mary left William with Claire and travelled to London. On the penultimate day of the year, she and Shelley were married at the city church of St Mildred’s, in the presence of a beaming Godwin, who was allowed to believe that Claire remained in Bath for some unidentified reason related to her health. Shelley thought that marrying Mary would strengthen his case against the Westbrooks; Mary found that after two and a half years of exile she was re-admitted to her family home. ‘The ceremony so magical in its effects was undergone this morning’,
⁷⁰
Shelley told Claire, rather dismissively. But despite his tone, he too felt the benefits of these ‘magical effects’.  Marriage ended his exile from Skinner Street, regularised his relationship with Mary and removed some of the stigma attached to little William’s birth. It also legitimised the baby Mary conceived around the time of the wedding: her third pregnancy in two and a half years.

By the end of 1816, Mary and Shelley were fully integrated into both the Hunt and the Godwin households. Mary was reconciled with her father, and despite the disparity in age and education, she found common ground with Marianne Hunt.  Both were married to men battling conventional prejudice with their pens; both had to cope with troublesome sisters; and both were newly pregnant. Shelley was the new star in Hunt’s firmament; he was confident he would win his custody battle; and he received his first favourable notice in the press. Hunt’s financial problems were temporarily relieved by Shelley’s generosity; Shelley praised
Rimini
and his political writing; and Keats also entered his life. It was a different story for the women outside this charmed coterie, especially those troublesome sisters, Claire and Bess, each trapped in her own way in a no-man’s land of social indeterminacy. But the year ended well for Mary and Shelley, and for Marianne and Hunt, ensconced in a circle of friends.

4

Children

Shelley initially expected to be able to claim his children quickly, and he was taken aback by the actions of Harriet’s family. John and Eliza Westbrook began to assemble documents for their court case: letters which revealed how Shelley had neglected Harriet, and extracts from
Queen Mab
which demonstrated its author’s atheistic and republican views. But Shelley had wealth and precedent on his side. In English law children were assumed to be the property of their father, and while Shelley’s views were unorthodox, his antecedents were impeccably aristocratic. At the beginning of January he and Mary returned to Claire in Bath to make arrangements for the future.  Claire’s baby was almost due; Mary was pregnant again, and it seemed more than likely that they would soon need to make room in their home for Ianthe and Charles.  Their Bath lodgings were not suitable for such a rapidly expanding brood, and house-hunting took on a new urgency. Shelley bought a lease on a house in Marlow, and made preparations for a spring move.

On 12 January 1817, Claire gave birth to a baby girl. It was Byron’s right to name her, so, in the absence of any instructions from him, Claire temporarily called her Alba, in a tribute to Byron himself, whom the Shelleys affectionately nicknamed ‘Albe’. From the start Claire was a devoted mother and she found her infant daughter a constant source of surprise and delight. Absorbed in her baby, she wrote few letters, and any diary she kept during this period has not survived. But the diary she started a year later was filled with references to her ‘darling’; to baths and games and walks with ‘my Da’. Claire would later eradicate these references, but the ink she used to obscure her words has faded. As a result, it is once again possible to read the record of her happy experience of motherhood.

Byron was informed of the birth of his daughter by both Mary and Shelley.  Through Mary he received messages from Claire: ‘she sends her affectionate love to you and begs me to say that she is in excellent spirits and as good health as can
be
expected
.’
¹
From Shelley he received a brief description of his daughter: ‘a creature of the most exquisite symmetry . . . betraying, even at its birth, a . . . sensibility very unusual.’
²
 Byron greeted the news of an illegitimate addition to his family in typically laconic fashion. Although he was more than ready to cast aspersions at Claire (‘is the brat
mine?
’),
³
he was lazily pleased to hear he had gained a pretty daughter. He was, however, quite uninterested in making plans for the future of his by-blow. By the time news reached him of Alba’s birth he was in Rome and was absorbed in Italian scenery, Italian women and his current literary project, a drama entitled
Manfred
.

The presence of Claire and her baby did little to make Shelley’s household more orthodox. This mattered when his morals were under scrutiny in a courtroom, but Byron remained unhelpfully silent. Shelley’s custody battle commenced on 24 January and dragged on into February and March. The case was heard by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, who was unsympathetic to Shelley, and was inclined to read
Queen Mab
and Shelley’s early prose pamphlets as signs of his inherent depravity.  Shelley returned to London and spent much of his time closeted with his lawyers and Godwin, thinking of arguments which would undermine the Westbrooks and blacken Harriet’s name.

It was a relief to be able to retreat from the painful legal dispute to Hunt’s cottage, where the constant stream of visitors offered plentiful distraction. Shelley found himself plunged into Hunt’s circle and he relished the opportunities for debate and the exchange of opinions it offered. It was a group quite unlike any he had known. For a start, it was bigger and more complicated. Hunt, Haydon, Keats, Reynolds, Lamb, Cowden Clarke, Hazlitt and Novello all met regularly, but in different configurations and at different points. Within the group there were factions and rivalries, and its leading members frequently clashed over differences in politics, religion and character. Haydon possessed an explosive temper; Hazlitt frequently found Hunt infuriating and spent hours arguing with him about politics and literature.  One such argument, about monarchy and republicanism, started after supper one evening and lasted until three in the morning, ending only when the participants fell into an exhausted sleep. Keats and Reynolds periodically took offence at Hunt’s proprietorial pride in their work, especially when they felt he was attempting to claim the credit for their success. As Haydon, Cowden Clarke and Hunt argued away the hours and Keats and Reynolds affected poses which were simultaneously overawed and supercilious, Lamb and Novello watched the emotional dramas of their younger friends with amused  – if faintly baffled – detachment.

Shelley found the clash of ideas and egos highly stimulating, and he enjoyed the fluidity of the group, which was intermittently swelled by Horace Smith (whose
Rejected Addresses
had taken London by storm several years before), Bryan Waller Procter (another young poet, and an ardent Hunt disciple), and by Novello’s own eclectic group of friends. It was an artistically varied set. Novello was a musician; Haydon a painter. The writers in the group were authors of poetry, essays, political journalism and drama. Shelley’s lawyer Basil Montagu sometimes joined the party so that the professions as well as the arts were represented. Mary Lamb, Mary Novello and Bess Kent, meanwhile, were strong-minded women, who contributed to discussion and debate on their own terms in a circle which was, nevertheless, shaped by the preoccupations and the friendships of men.

Hunt’s delight at Shelley’s presence in his circle was boundless, but others were irritated by the change it wrought in Hunt. Keats found himself displaced in his mentor’s affections and was suspicious of Shelley, interpreting his advice that Keats should postpone publication of his poems (advice which was kindly meant and which was drawn from Shelley’s own scarring experiences with
Queen Mab
and
Alastor
) as a patronising denigration of his abilities and his background. Haydon was revolted by hearing Shelley ‘hold forth to Mrs Hunt & other women present . . . on the wickedness and absurdity of
Chastity
’, but he was even more disgusted that Hunt championed Shelley’s ideas without having the courage to put them into practice. Shelley at least acted on his principles, while Hunt merely defended them, content with a ‘smuggering fondle’.
⁴
 Meanwhile Bess – the object of Hunt’s fondles – found herself edged out of Hunt’s inner circle, first by the advent of Keats and then by Shelley. She became increasingly miserable.

The tension caused by Shelley’s prolonged stay in Hampstead erupted one evening during a dinner party at the house of Horace Smith, when Hunt and Shelley baited the deeply religious Haydon about Christianity. Shelley quoted lines from
Cymbeline
which suggested religious doubts on the part of Shakespeare, and Hunt laughed at the literalism of his friend’s religious belief. He masked his mockery with ironic sympathy for Haydon’s predicament, telling him there was ‘no disgrace in acknowledging an error’. At the end of the evening, as Marianne and Bess were getting ready to go home, Hunt ‘looked at them both with an air of interest’ and, guessing something of Haydon’s tortured preoccupation with Bess, asked ‘are these creatures to be damned?’

The onslaught reduced Haydon to enraged incoherence, and he devoted several pages of his diary to a furious account of the evening. He was particularly angry that he had been laughed at and humiliated in front of Marianne and Bess (whose giggles, he claimed, incited Shelley to ever more offensive rhetorical heights), and he delivered damning verdicts on his assailants. Hunt, he prophesied, would ‘go out of the World the dupe of his own sophistications, the victim of his own vanity, with the contempt of his enemies, and the sorrow of his Friends.’ Shelley was no dupe, but an immoral hypocrite: ‘Shelley said he could not bear the inhumanity of Wordsworth in talking of the beauty of the shining trout as they lay after being caught . . . Ah, thought I, you have more horror at putting a hook into a fish’s mouth than giving a pang to a Mother’s bosom. He had seduced Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter & enticed away Mrs Godwin’s own daughter, to her great misery. He has now married the former, but this only shews the nature of his mind.’
⁵

Other evenings were more convivial. Several descriptions survive of parties at the Novellos during which the guests gathered around the piano to hear Novello play and Hunt sing. Mary Cowden Clarke (Novello’s eldest daughter) later recalled these evenings, ‘where poets, artists and musicians, friends of the master of the house, met in kindly, lively converse . . . Keats, with his picturesque head, leaning against the instrument, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed between his hands; Leigh Hunt, with his jet-black hair and expressive mouth; Shelley, with his poet’s eyes and brown curls, Lamb, with his spare figure and earnest face; all seen by the glow and warmth and brightness of candlelight.’
⁶
Charles Lamb described such evenings, too, in one of his Elia essays.  His version focused on the food – the beer and cheese which comprised an informal supper. It focused too on the glory of Novello’s music, and on the virtues of the ‘pleasant-countenanced host and hostess’.
⁷
In between music and food Novello, Hunt and Lamb swapped puns and told jokes. For Shelley, accustomed to the more cerebral humour of Peacock and Hogg and Byron’s scathing wit, the joviality of such evenings was an entirely new experience.