Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (21 page)

Reading descriptions of these evenings now, they can sound rather contrived and smug. But this obscures the fact that the evenings had a serious political and philosophical purpose, first elaborated by Hunt during his time in Surrey Gaol. In the 1790s Godwin and his contemporaries formed coteries within which they could exchange and disseminate ideas partially protected from an ever-present threat of espionage. Now, following their example, Hunt developed his conception of sociability as an oppositional idea, as an instrument for binding together individuals with shared ideals. When he and his friends argued about politics and religion, they kept alive debates which were being stifled by a government determined to restrict the free exchange of opinions.
The Examiner
and other newspapers were vulnerable to repressive new laws, particularly after a stone was thrown through the window of the Prince Regent’s carriage and the government seized the opportunity to threaten gagging acts and suspend Habeas Corpus. But as long as reformist ideals continued to be discussed in private, no laws could prevent their gradual spread.

The communal activities of the group were oppositional in other ways too.  Making music in the home, for example, undermined an elite monopoly on culture by making it available to everyone. In 1819, when Hunt and Novello prepared a co-authored manual for democratic, domestic music making, they offered a model which was based on their own practice. In so doing, they wanted to show that music could be appropriated by anyone who cared to claim it. The political prize, Hunt believed, was the subversion of a cultural hegemony in which the voices of opposition and reform were silenced. In Hunt’s parlour, the Hampstead fields and the Novellos’ sitting room the communal practices of Surrey Gaol were repeated and extended until sociability – the self-conscious enactment of friendship – was transformed into a weapon in a battle for liberal survival.

Hunt’s political philosophy soon had an impact on Shelley’s work. In January and February, as he moved between Hunt and the Godwins, his discussions with Hunt and his experiences in Hampstead began to filter through into his writing. Week by week Shelley watched Hunt produce a political column for
The
Examiner
. These columns demanded the reformation of politics through the constant invocation of the will of the people – a will thwarted by government, the Prince Regent, incompetent monetary policy and corruption. In response to this Shelley began work on his
Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote
. Here, he put his faith in the collective good sense of the British people and advocated a referendum on reform.  Through Crown and Anchor meetings (public gatherings in taverns) and a nationwide petition, the people would make their voices heard and the Government would submit to their will. In Shelley’s proposal the entire population (or at least adult males who paid tax – this was not a call for universal suffrage) would come together to support reform, just as Hunt’s friends joined together to resist repression. ‘We the undersigned therefore declare . . . our firm and solemn conviction that the liberty, the happiness and the majesty of the great nation to which it is our boast to belong have been brought into danger and suffered to decay thro’ the corrupt and inadequate manner in which members are chosen to sit in the Commons’ House of Parliament.’
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Such an explicit demand from Shelley marked a departure from his earlier writing. The voice of Hunt – the reformer and crusading journalist – echoed throughout the pamphlet.

At the end of January, Mary left Claire, William and Alba in Bath and joined Shelley in London. She was warmly welcomed by both Hunt and Marianne, and, with Shelley, hosted dinner parties at Godwin’s house and made friends with Horace Smith and other members of the Hunt circle. But the round of parties was disturbed by an event noted in typically brief fashion in Mary’s diary: ‘Miss K is ill.’
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On 15 February, Bess attempted to drown herself.  Haydon dismissed her suicide attempt as attention-seeking silliness and was still giving comic accounts of the incident twenty-five years later. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of his recipients:

Never shall I forget one day at Hampstead – Leigh Hunt had invited a large party to breakfast, I was lodging at Hampstead for bad health & was invited, as I knew the poetical irregularity of Hunt’s domesticities I told Keats I should breakfast
before
I went & be over about 11 – saying I’ll bet 5 to 1 by that time you will not have seen the breakfast Cloth.

At 11 I walked over & found Keats and a party patrolling before the House on the grass, in doleful sarcasm, as they had been there two hours without a morsel – I laughed ready to drop & said What’s the matter, for this is worse than usual – Oh said Keats his Wife’s Sister, who is in love with Hunt, tried to drown herself this morning in one of the ponds, and it was so shallow, she only tumbled in the black mud, & has just gone in covered, being pulled out by
two labourers
!
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Bess’s suicide attempt was far more serious than Haydon’s account suggests. The Hampstead ponds were a series of reservoirs, and, as Nicholas Roe has shown, on the day Bess attempted to kill herself they were full from two nights of rain.
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The pool behind the Vale of Health – just a few minutes’ walk from Hunt’s cottage – would have been quite deep enough to drown in.  

What drove Bess to the Hampstead ponds in February 1817? It is certainly the case that she had been under a good deal of strain since the publication of
The Story of Rimini
the previous year. The poem inspired public speculation about her private life, exacerbating existing tensions between her and her sister. When Shelley arrived in Hampstead he increased that strain, since although his bodily needs were few – he ate and drank little, and only burdened the household with his laundry when Marianne, acting on a request from Mary, told him to do so – he was an exhausting guest, hyperactive, argumentative, eloquent, sometimes a little grandiose. More significantly, he displaced Bess as Hunt’s soulmate. She had already watched as her brother-in-law lavished praise and affection on Keats, another frequent visitor at the crowded cottage. But with Shelley installed on the sofa in the parlour she became even more superfluous to Hunt’s emotional and intellectual requirements. He did not need to talk to her about his
Examiner
columns when Shelley was on hand with praise and advice, and she had to stand by and watch as her brother-in-law lost his heart to his brilliant new friend. Since her relationship with Hunt was predicated on her ability to offer him the intellectual companionship absent from his relationship with Marianne, this was a bitter blow.

Mary’s arrival made matters even worse. Mary had everything that Bess did not: a loving husband, striking good looks, a baby she adored, an intellectual pedigree, an impressive education and brains in abundance. She was writing a novel, was admired by Hunt, and was years younger than both Marianne and Bess. Her presence only made Bess feel her own inadequacy more bitterly. Why, she must have asked herself, would Hunt continue to value the company of a dame-school educated spinster when he now had such brilliant friends to entertain him?

There were other factors motivating Bess’s suicide attempt, factors which were also linked to Shelley and Mary. As Shelley and Hunt discussed the progress of the court battle with the Westbrooks, Harriet’s fate hung over their conversation.  Bess knew that Harriet had drowned herself and that in so doing she had found an escape from her marginalised, twilight existence as a wife without a husband. And since Shelley kept little from Hunt, Bess probably knew too about the death of Fanny, another sister who had grown tired of her nebulous, indebted existence. Whatever prompted her to try to drown herself – and the examples of Harriet and Fanny may well have played a significant part in her decision – it must have been appalling to find herself dragged out of the muddy water and carried home in full view of Hunt’s waiting breakfast guests. For Haydon the incident represented ineptitude at its most ludicrous: Bess could not even commit suicide properly. For Hunt and Marianne (who frightened everyone a few days later by staying out on the heath late into the evening), Bess’s attempt to drown herself was much more upsetting. It certainly reminded Shelley and Mary of their obligations towards another sister. Claire was sent for, and arrived in London three days later, with William and Alba in tow. She was installed in lodgings while Shelley made preparations to move his family into their new home: Albion House in Marlow.

By the last week in February, they had all formulated a plan. The Hunts agreed to a prolonged visit to Marlow which would take place in the spring, once the Shelleys were settled and after Godwin, who very much wanted to visit, had been and gone. The invitation provided Hunt with an ideal opportunity to retrench and he decided to give up his lease on the Hampstead cottage. Both he and Shelley attempted to persuade Keats to join the Marlow household, but he refused and instead embarked on a tour of southern England.

Keats was now a published poet, and his first volume of poetry, which came out in March, was a collection of short verses dedicated to Hunt. The dedication was appropriate, since many of the verses were directly influenced by their dedicatee, but
Keats was anxious about his reliance on Hunt, and was already rather embarrassed by his own early work. He was keen to assert his poetic independence by moving away from the Hampstead circle, and from this point onwards he would play a lesser role in the intellectual and social life of the group. In a series of lonely boarding houses, he began work on a more ambitious project, entitled
Endymion
. At a little over 4,000 lines, this was his first long poem. It was a retelling of classical myth and was crucial to Keats’s conception of himself as a poet. He described the poem as ‘a test of invention’, a ‘task’ which would take him closer to the ‘Temple of Fame’.
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 It would both stretch and prove his imaginative powers and it would do so through an assertive rejection of the ideas of both the older Hunt and the aristocratic Shelley.

Writing in September to his friend Benjamin Bailey, Keats outlined the ways in which his work now differed from Hunt’s. ‘I have heard Hunt say’, he reported, ‘why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer – Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading: which may be food for a Week’s stroll in the Summer? ... You see Bailey how independant my writing has been – Hunts dissuasion was of no avail – I refused to visit Shelley, that I might have my own unfettered scope.’
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But despite his protestations,
Endymion
was deeply engaged with the ideas of both Hunt and Shelley.  The poem displays the same lack of narrative impetus which characterises Hunt’s
Story of Rimini
, and it incorporates Huntian effects throughout its four rambling books. Like
Rimini
, its tone is set by ornate and sensuous imagery (exemplified by the description of Endymion’s eyes, which widen ‘as when Zephyr bids/ A little breeze to creep between the fans/ Of careless butterflies’) and its version of the pastoral is – like that envisaged by Hunt’s poems about Hampstead – distinctly suburban. The bower in which Endymion pours out his troubles is domestic, with its ‘couch, new made of flower leaves’ and its arbour ‘overwove/ By many a summer’s silent fingering’. This is remarkably similar to the bower evoked by Hunt in a sonnet ‘To Miss K’ in which Bess is celebrated as a ‘rural queen’ sitting in state under a canopy of flowers.
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More generally,
Endymion
is a meditation on the consequences of isolation. It attempts to mediate between the sociability of Hunt’s poetry and the intense solitude of Shelley’s
Alastor
, and it finds both kinds of existence wanting. Its stylistic indebtedness to both poems (like
Alastor
,
Endymion
is a quest-romance) indicates how richly troubling Keats found the poetic models offered by Shelley and Hunt. His first long poem was an assertion of independence, but it remained rooted in the ideas and discussions of the spring of 1817. It may even have come about as a result of a challenge issued by Shelley. According to Shelley’s cousin and biographer Thomas Medwin, Shelley and Keats ‘mutually agreed in the same given time (six months each) to write a long poem, and . . . Endymion and [Shelley’s] Revolt of Islam were the fruits of this rivalry.’
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Medwin was never the most reliable of witnesses, but he seemed sure of his facts on this occasion, repeating the story several times in his various memoirs. It has also been suggested that Hunt’s own long poem, ‘The Nymphs’, may have arisen from the same challenge.
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