Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (24 page)

There was further trouble in December when Charles Ollier was forced to withdraw the early editions of
Laon and Cythna
from sale. The first readers of the poem reacted angrily to its depiction of incest, and the threat of prosecution was real.  As printer, it was Ollier rather than Shelley who was liable for the poem, and other publishers had been convicted of blasphemous libel that year. Shelley had already distributed copies of the poem among his friends, but in order to ensure its sale he was forced to agree to a series of alterations. Ollier arrived in Marlow with an annotated copy of the poem and laid out the changes which needed to be made in order to make it publishable. Peacock described how a ‘literary committee’ was formed, consisting of Ollier, Shelley, himself, Mary and Claire. Together they worked out changes which would make the poem acceptable and it was reissued at the beginning of 1818 as
The Revolt of Islam
, its explicit attacks on Christianity and its overt depictions of incest removed. It was a humiliating compromise. In the spring the inhabitants of Albion House had provided Shelley with his inspiration. Now a different configuration of friends was censoring his poetry; hemming and cutting his verses so that they conformed to the hypocritical taboos of the society Shelley had sought to transform.

Throughout the autumn Hunt continued to provide Shelley with practical, intellectual and emotional support. His house provided a London base, freeing Shelley from the necessity of staying too regularly with the Godwins. November saw the two friends engaged once more in a productive exchange of ideas, as they turned their attention to the melodramatic public grieving which followed the death of Princess Charlotte.  Charlotte was the only daughter of the Prince Regent and his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick. She was very popular, and attracted much public sympathy after her refusal to marry Prince William of Orange led her father to confine her to her house and sack her ladies-in-waiting (
The Examiner
had been among many newspapers loud in its support of her).  In May 1816 she married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and in November 1817 she died shortly after giving birth to a stillborn son.

Charlotte’s death was greeted with an outpouring of public grief and a display of massed sentiment quite unlike anything the country had ever known. The bells of churches up and down the country tolled her passing, from St Paul’s cathedral in the capital to tiny parish churches. In Liverpool the ships in harbour flew their flags at half-mast, and in London shops closed, theatrical performances were cancelled and all other public entertainments suspended. The opprobrium heaped on the doctor who attended the Princess in childbirth was so great that he committed suicide a few months later. Both Shelley and Hunt were saddened that a figure who seemed to offer hope for a more virtuous monarchy had died so prematurely, but they were disgusted by the behaviour of those who could watch the sufferings of the masses with equanimity, but not contain their grief when a rich girl shared the fate of thousands of neglected women.

Within days of Charlotte’s death, both Hunt and Shelley settled down to work on essays on the politics of her demise. In a series of
Examiner
editorials Hunt articulated the hypocritical contradictions exposed by her death, focusing his ire on a popular press which used extravagant mourning for Charlotte as a way of avoiding discussion of the real issues of the day.
The Examiner
devoted one black-rimmed editorial to praise of Charlotte, before moving on to discuss other matters of foreign and domestic policy. Three weeks later Hunt launched a broadside against ‘the uncharitable slavishness of the flatterers of
royalty
’. Their activities, he proclaimed, did a disservice both to Britain and to the memory of the young woman they purported to mourn: ‘It is not in this way that royalty is to be upheld, and the community made to believe that it’s sympathies are in common. It is not in this way; neither is sympathy of any kind to be expressed by perpetual and ostentatious talking.’
⁴³
Shelley’s pamphlet,
An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte
, was published on 15 November, and extended Hunt’s arguments and his rhetoric until Charlotte’s death was transformed into a pale imitation of the death of English liberty:

Mourn then People of England. Clothe yourselves in solemn black. Let the bells be tolled. Think of mortality and change. Shroud yourselves in solitude and the gloom of sacred sorrow. Spare no symbol of universal grief. Weep – mourn – lament. Fill the great City – fill the boundless fields, with lamentation and the echo of groans. A beautiful Princess is dead: – she who should have been the Queen of our beloved nation, and whose posterity should have ruled it for ever . . . LIBERTY is dead. Slave! I charge thee disturb not the depth and solemnity of our grief by any meaner sorrow. If One has died who was like her that should have ruled over this land, like Liberty, young, innocent, and lovely, know that the power through which that one perished was God, and that it was a private grief. But
man
has murdered Liberty, and whilst the life was ebbing from its wound, there descended on the heads and heart of every human thing, the sympathy of an universal blast and curse.
⁴⁴

This was not a welcome response to the death of a much-loved figure, and Shelley struggled to find a printer and readers for his pamphlet, while Hunt’s editorials only served to widen the gap between
The Examiner
and popular patriotic feeling. But at stake for both Shelley and Hunt in these writings was a battle for emotional engagement. They watched as the press whipped the public up into a state of communal grief, which blinded them to their real grievances and allied them sympathetically to the royal family. Hunt’s editorials and Shelley’s pamphlet attempted to channel that emotion towards causes more deserving and more needful of public sympathy. Both showed an innate understanding of the role choreographed emotion could play in public life and felt that Charlotte’s death was being used to manipulate a vulnerable populace into a state of political pliability. A private sorrow was being distorted by government papers to undermine the will of the public and it thus represented a complete aberration of the philosophy – demonstrated by Hunt in his personal, engaging
Examiner
columns and by Shelley in the autobiographical elements of
Laon and Cythna
– that one’s private life should be lived as an example for the public good.

At the end of 1817 this philosophy rebounded on Hunt when
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
published the first of its ‘Cockney School’ articles. (In this context ‘Cockney’ referred to suburban vulgarity, rather than to the East End of London.) The ‘Cockney School’ series was published under the pseudonym ‘Z.’, but the articles were actually written by
Blackwood’s
’
chief rabble-rouser, John Lockhart, and were a series of attacks on Hunt and his circle. They underscored Hunt’s alienation from the literary establishment more brutally than ever before, and they tarred all his friends in a similar manner, by highlighting their unorthodox religious views, their radical politics, and their unusual domestic arrangements with indiscriminate zeal. In the first article, the ‘extreme moral depravity’ of the Cockney School was explored and Hunt’s poetry used to suggest his family were legitimate targets for rhetorical assault: ‘His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl.’ Lockhart was explicit about the relationship between the private man and the public figure and was uncompromising in his equation of the two: ‘There can be no radical distinction between the private and public character of a poet. If a poet sympathises with and justifies wickedness in his poetry, he is a wicked man. It matters not that his private life may be free from wicked actions.’
⁴⁵

The
Blackwood’s
articles were devastating because of their scope and their brilliant, virulent wit. The label ‘Cockney School’ stuck and is still used by literary commentators on the Hunt circle today. Hunt was represented in the articles as the ‘King of the Cockneys’, and Lockhart presented himself as the brave slayer of a corrupt monarch. ‘I will not part with your Majesty till I have shewn your crown, which you imagine is formed of diamonds and pearls, to be wholly composed of paste and parchment.’ Everything associated with Hunt was ridiculed – smug suburban tea-parties (poor Charles Lamb, Lockhart reported, had his brains sucked ‘at tea-drinkings and select suppers’), sonnet-writing competitions (‘this fashion of firing off sonnets at each other was prevalent in the metropolis a short time since among the bardlings, and was even more annoying than the detonating balls’), and Hunt’s friends all attracted Lockhart’s attention. Hazlitt was lampooned, Haydon mocked, and Keats’s poetry destroyed by Lockhart’s pen. When
Endymion
was published in the spring of 1818,
Blackwood’s
pulled it apart before it had any chance of reaching a sympathetic readership. ‘Endymion is not a Greek shepherd, loved by a Grecian goddess; he is merely a young Cockney rhymester, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full of the moon.’ Keats was mocked for his Cockney incomprehension of the classics, and for his adherence to the ‘Cockney School of Politics, as well as the Cockney School of Poetry.’
⁴⁶

These attacks were extremely damaging. Lockhart’s anonymity made it hard for Hunt to fight back in the pages of
The Examiner
, which was itself the subject of ribald insults. Those members of the ‘Cockney School’ who were ambivalent about their connection with Hunt found themselves lampooned in print for their loyalty to him. By the end of 1817 Hunt found himself attacked from all sides. John Hunt criticised a series of
Examiner
editorials on ‘seamen suffered to die in the streets’ on the grounds that they were unfocused and unjust. Tensions with Haydon erupted into a furious quarrel about money and Marianne’s failure to return some silver she had borrowed. Haydon ended the year by despatching a bitterly unkind letter to Hunt in which he described his former friend as ‘a man totally absorbed in yourself, whose perceptions have actually been deadened by the pernicious flattery of humble advocates.’  ‘I was never more so thoroughly disgusted with your conduct’, he continued. ‘Nothing you can say or do will ever in my mind raise you to the state of affection I once had for you.’
⁴⁷

As old friendships disintegrated, Keats distanced himself from Hunt’s coterie. ‘I went to Hunt’s and Haydon’s who live now neighbours’, he told his friend Benjamin Bailey. ‘Shelley was there – I know nothing about any thing in this part of the world – every Body seems at Loggerheads – There’s Hunt infatuated . . . there’s Horace Smith tired of Hunt. The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn.’
⁴⁸
Members of Hunt’s circle continued to meet in shifting formations: Shelley and Horace Smith held a sonnet-writing competition, during which Shelley wrote his greatest sonnet, ‘Ozymandias’, and at the end of the year Haydon held a dinner party to celebrate his progress on
Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
, a painting of which he was justifiably proud and which contained portraits of several of his friends. In an evening much described by both Haydon and his guests, Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb and others joined together to celebrate Haydon’s achievements and the delights of friendship. Hunt, however, was noticeable by his absence. It was as if he had lost control of his own circle – the poets and painters he championed and supported had abandoned him in his hour of need. Just as the ‘Cockney School’ came into being in the public consciousness, its ‘mingled yarn’ began to unravel, pulled apart from without by
Blackwood’s
and from within by its
soi-disant
members.

By the beginning of January 1818 Shelley was back in Marlow. He was unwell; a bout of ophthalmia made it difficult for him to read and Albion House had become so cold it was almost uninhabitable. A quiet January was punctuated by visits from Godwin and Hogg and by the arrival of early copies of
Frankenstein
and
The Revolt of Islam
. The publication of
Frankenstein
was an exciting moment for Mary, establishing her as a startlingly original novelist. Shelley celebrated her achievement by sending a copy of her novel
to Sir Walter Scott for review, and Claire was extremely impressed by her stepsister’s work. She spent one evening writing a ‘criticism’ of
Frankenstein
and in one of the many unanswered letters she sent to Byron reported that it was a book full of genius, which made her ‘delight in a lovely woman of strong & cultivated intellect’.