Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (25 page)

In the same letter she made a plea for his kindness to her and to Alba, now renamed Allegra on Byron’s instructions. ‘Suppose that in yielding her to your care I yield her to neglect & coldness’, she worried. But she was in no position to bargain with him, and could only hope for his understanding. ‘My affections are few & therefore strong – the extreme solitude in which I live has concentrated them to one point and that point is my lovely child.’ Her description of their daughter bore out this sentiment and there is something timeless in her account of the bewildering emotions associated with the care of a small child: ‘She can neither speak nor walk but whenever she dislikes any thing she calls out upon Papa. The violence of her disposition is discouraging but yet it is so mixed up with affection & her vivacity I scarcely know whether to laugh or to cry.’
⁴⁹
She went on to tell Byron how much she envied the role he would play in Allegra’s life, and noted hopefully that she had seen him be kind to children and servants – to the weak and defenceless – that it was only to his equals that he was cruel. Claire was reconciled to the prospect of entrusting her daughter to Byron’s care (after all, she had received assurances she would be allowed frequent contact and she knew she had no choice in the matter) but she was afraid that his concern for Allegra’s welfare might be less ardent than hers. Claire wrote little of herself in this letter. All her energies were focused on ensuring that Byron’s dislike of her did not translate into neglect of their daughter.

At the end of January a buyer was found for the lease on Albion House and there was much rejoicing. Shelley, Mary and Claire were now able to turn their attention to the future, and to their journey to Byron in Italy. In the second week of February they arrived in London, accompanied by Elise Duvillard and Milly Shields, the servants who were to accompany them abroad, and took temporary lodgings while they finalised their plans for their departure. For a brief period they plunged once more into London social life and, as before, spent much of their time in the company of the Hunts. They visited the British Museum and went to the opera; Peacock and Hogg called frequently. Shelley joined in another sonnet-writing competition, this time with Hunt and Keats, during which all three wrote sonnets on the Nile. Shelley and Keats finished their poems within the allotted fifteen minutes, but Hunt became carried away and sat up late into the night working on his verse.
⁵⁰
They dined at Horace Smith’s, listened to Vincent Novello play the piano, and spent long days and evenings in the Hunts’ new home in Paddington. Hazlitt was giving a series of lectures on the English poets at the Surrey Institution and his friends congregated to hear one of their own establish himself as the most incisive critical voice of their generation.

All this activity could not mask the fact that the Shelleys’ imminent departure represented the loss of another strand of Keats’s ‘mingled yarn’. The group which had been so important to Hunt both intellectually and emotionally since his imprisonment in 1813 looked even more precarious with no Shelley and Mary to hold it together. The Shelleys were leaving their friends behind to take Claire’s daughter to Byron, who was the only person they knew in Italy. The fertile months of 1817 had given rise to a rich variety of work, much of which owed its genesis or fruition to the company of others. Such stimulating companionship would prove increasingly hard to find, both for Hunt in England and for Mary, Shelley and Claire in Italy.

On 10 March 1818, the Shelleys and Claire spent a last day in London. Bess had said her goodbyes the day before, but Hunt, Marianne and Godwin came to wish them well. Godwin made his way home after dinner, but Hunt and Marianne stayed on, talking late into the night. Eventually everybody fell asleep and when Shelley awoke it was to find that the Hunts had slipped away without waking him to say goodbye. From France he wrote to reproach them: ‘Why did you not wake me that night before we left England, you & Marianne. I take this rather as a piece of unkindness in you.’ Consoled by Hunt’s newly published volume of poetry, presented to him as a parting gift, he decided to forgive them, ‘in consideration of the 600 miles between us.’
⁵¹
Missing his friend badly, Shelley comforted himself with the thought that Hunt would be prevailed upon to leave London, and that they would all be reunited in Italy. But it would be four years before Hunt and Shelley met again.

PART TWO

Italy and England

5

Counts and Cockneys

As the Shelleys made their way by coach through France, Hunt marshalled his forces for a counter-charge against his critics.
Blackwood’s
had depicted him as the corrupt king of the Cockneys, and ridiculed both his friends and his style of poetry. A lesser man might have kept quiet in the face of such an assault, but Hunt had a history of refusing to creep away, and spiteful persecution brought out his literary and rhetorical talents far more effectively than sycophantic praise. In March 1818, he responded to his detractors by publishing a new volume of poetry,
Foliage
, which celebrated everything that
Blackwood’s
attacked.

In
Foliage
Hunt
brought together many of the poems he had written in the years following his release from prison in 1815. Some of these poems had previously been published in
The Examiner
, and some circulated in manuscript among the members of his circle. All were linked by the theme of friendship. The volume opened with a long poem, ‘The Nymphs’, begun at Marlow in 1817, in a dialogue with
Endymion
,
Laon and Cythna
and
Rhododaphne
. This was followed by sonnets addressed to Shelley, Keats, Marianne, Bess, Haydon, Novello, Horace Smith and Reynolds, and by longer epistles to Byron, Lamb, Hazlitt and Thomas Moore. These poems created a public picture of Hunt’s private life through the presentation of details – a fleeting glimpse of the books in his parlour, a sleeping Thornton, a laughing Mary Lamb shaking the snow from her coat.
Bess was depicted in a floral garden bower; Marianne as an artist at work, modelling a bust of her husband as he wrote a poem in tribute to her, and Shelley as a questing knight in search of the ‘spirit of beauty’.

Hunt prefaced his poems with an explicit statement of his philosophy of ‘sociality’. ‘I do not write, I confess, for the sake of a moral only, nor even for that purpose principally: – I write to enjoy myself; but I have learnt in the course of it to write for others also; and my poetical tendencies luckily fall in with my moral theories.’ The ‘main features of the book’, he continued, ‘are a love of sociality [and] of the country.’
¹
This Preface established a collection of light-hearted, ephemeral poems as a serious philosophical project, in which friendship fulfilled a moral, aesthetic and political function.

Moral, aesthetic and political functions were linked in
Foliage
through the depiction of creative practice. Hunt’s friends were idealised in the volume as admirable people in their own right, but also as sources of poetic inspiration. They were the impetus for his poetry, and were represented in
Foliage
as both subject and sustaining influence. Since the
Foliage
poems were passed between the group before their publication for comment, criticism and praise, this was an accurate reflection of the role Hunt’s friends played in shaping his work. Furthermore, sonnets written in competition with Keats and Shelley recalled similar poems written by them, some of which were published in
The Examiner
, suggesting that they too derived inspiration from the company of their friends.

Creativity for the first generation of Romantic poets was inherently solitary, since it stemmed from, and idealised, the genius of the individual spirit. Hunt’s poetry subverted this model of Romantic individualism, and suggested that inspiration was located in communality and in collaborative creative practice. He also located inspiration in tangible everyday things: firesides, tea parties and the Hampstead fields.
Foliage
thus represented an avowedly democratic project, since it suggested that anyone could be a poet, as long as he or she understood that poetic inspiration was present in the sights and relationships of ordinary life, and not just in the vistas of the Lake District, which were only accessible to those who could afford to travel. ‘I need not inform any reader acquainted with real poetry’, Hunt wrote, ‘that a delight in rural luxury has ever been a constituent part of the very business of poets as well as one of the very best things they have recommended . . . But I may as well insinuate that the luxuries which poets recommend, and which are thought so beautiful on paper, are much more within the reach of everyone, and much more beautiful in reality, than people’s fondness for considering all poetry as fiction would imply.’
²

In 1818, this was as radical as anything Hunt had written in
The Examiner
. In the words of the literary critic Jeffrey Cox, Hunt’s poems sought ‘to provoke the reader into new practice, to argue we should adopt what we might see as a counter-cultural lifestyle devoted to free nature, a liberated community and imaginative freedom.’
³
As Byron noted when he received his copy of
Foliage
in 1818, there was nothing particularly unified about the circle it represented: ‘men of the most opposite habits, tastes and opinions in life and poetry (I believe), that ever had their names in the same volume.’
⁴
 But for Hunt, this was an irrelevance. He viewed
Foliage
as a line in the sand: as a response to critical voices both from within and without his circle. In it he reasserted his central position in his network by proclaiming his affection and respect for its various members, and by codifying its activities as philosophically significant for English poetry.
Blackwood’s
had sought to destroy Hunt by imposing a pejorative collective identity on his friends and now Hunt proclaimed that identity in his own writing, wearing his leadership of the ‘Cockney School’ as a badge of honour. The combination of
Blackwood’s
and
Foliage
meant that in the public imagination figures such as Keats and Hazlitt now became indelibly associated with Hunt. As a result, his circle gained in significance as they came to represent a distinct ‘counter-culture’.

Such cultural significance, however, came at a high cost for the various members of the group, and it did little to shore up some faltering personal relationships. Haydon, the addressee of one of
Foliage
’s sonnets, was particularly angry at the enforced association with Hunt. ‘What affectation in Hunt’s title – “
Foliage!
”’ he wrote to Keats before adding, with seeming irrelevance, ‘I met that horrid creature Miss Kent, looking like a fury and an old maid, mixed.’
⁵

The consequences of being annexed to Hunt were particularly serious for Keats, and in April 1818, a month after the appearance of
Foliage
, the
Quarterly Review
published a vicious attack on
Endymion
.
In it, John Croker, the
Quarterly
’s reviewer, castigated Keats as a disciple of Hunt, and declared that his work was infected with silly ideas and uncouth language. Croker lampooned Keats as an even more appalling poet than his mentor: ‘the author is a copyist of Mr Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype.’
⁶
Keats was hurt by this review and his friends were outraged. They were convinced that his association with Hunt was damaging his career and that his reputation would only recover once he separated himself from the tainted Cockney School. Keats insisted that there was nothing Huntian about the Preface to
Endymion
while at the same time seeking to justify his debt to his friend, telling Reynolds that ‘it is my natural way, and I have something in common with Hunt’.
⁷
 He rejected Hunt’s critique of the overlong first book of
Endymion
, but this was partly motivated by jealousy of Shelley. ‘The fact is’, he informed his brothers, ‘he & Shelley are hurt & perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously & from several hints I have had they appear much disposed to dissect & anatomize, any trip or slip I may have made.’
⁸
And he too attributed his treatment by the
Quarterly
to his association with Hunt, noting, rather ruefully, ‘they have
smothered
me in “Foliage”’.
⁹
As his friends united around him in opposition to Hunt, Keats too turned away from him. He did not reject the creative model proposed by Hunt in
Foliage
, but he no longer wanted Hunt himself to be his source of inspiration. Instead, he embarked on a project to recast the stories of Boccaccio’s
Decameron
into poetry with Reynolds and, in the summer of 1818, left London to undertake an extended tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown.