Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (26 page)

As Keats’s admirers beyond Hunt’s circle coalesced around him, the group celebrated in
Foliage
changed once again. By the time Keats and Brown arrived back from Scotland, Haydon and Reynolds had moved out of Hunt’s orbit of influence, and Keats was himself more independent. He was also preoccupied by nursing his brother Tom, who was slowly dying from tuberculosis.  By the beginning of 1819, Keats was bemoaning Hunt’s mannerisms and his poetry. He described how he and Brown were taken by Hunt to Novello’s house, only to be ‘devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns’.
¹⁰
Musical evenings, which had once been the centrepiece of the group’s social calendar, were now presented by Keats as a penance; as something to be avoided at all costs. But as the group began to splinter, Hunt’s assertions of its strength and importance increased.

The reasons for this were twofold. First, Hunt still had a close group of supporters and acolytes who gathered around him. Even if Keats, Haydon and Reynolds no longer formed part of his immediate circle, and the Shelleys were abroad, Charles and Mary Lamb, the Novellos, Charles Cowden Clarke and Hazlitt continued to visit and to contribute material to his various publications. Second,
Foliage
altered the significance of the group for Hunt. It transformed it from a social network into an imaginative construct which had the potential to democratise English poetry. Throughout 1818 and 1819, Hunt’s literary efforts centred on creating more examples of the ‘counter-cultural’ practice exemplified in
Foliage
.
The
Examiner
carried reviews of work by Shelley and Charles Lamb, as well as occasional pieces by Keats and John Reynolds. Towards the end of 1818, Hunt was to be found working on a new project, the first of several
Literary Pocket-Books
. Part-diary, part-anthology, these books contained work by Hunt, Shelley, Keats, Cowden Clarke and other poets who once formed part of his Hampstead set. The irony was that the group was stronger in the realms of ink and the imagination than it was in reality. The Cockney School finally attained solidity and coherence through the ephemera of newsprint and anthologies. But even as it became a powerful literary ideal, the relationships of its founding members remained strained and difficult.

For Shelley, Mary and Claire, travelling through Europe for a third time, the ideal community represented in
Foliage
had to suffice for the absence of the real thing.  Shelley was delighted with the volume, which he read as they made their way through France.  ‘It is truly
poetical
’, he told Hunt, ‘in the intense & emphatic sense of the word.’
¹¹
Their journey towards Byron took them further and further away from the friends who had come to mean so much to them – Peacock and Hogg, and Hunt and his circle. They made their way slowly through northern Italy, with thoughts of their London acquaintances foremost in their minds. Mary noted in her diary how much the Italian scenery would please Hunt and wrote a long letter to him and Marianne from Milan in which she described the countryside through which they were passing. From Milan Mary and Shelley travelled onwards to Lake Como, leaving Claire in charge of the children. They hoped to find a house there for the summer, where Byron might be persuaded to join them. But no houses were available, and Byron showed no interest in leaving Venice. He refused to collect Allegra himself, and instead sent a messenger to escort her to her new home.

Shelley was taken aback by Byron’s absolute refusal to enter into negotiations with Claire about Allegra’s future. In Geneva, Byron had given undertakings that Claire would be allowed to see her daughter at reasonable intervals, but these now seemed to count for little. Honourably, Shelley told Claire that if she decided she was unable to surrender her daughter to Byron he would continue to support both of them. Mary was worried by this turn of events; for at first Claire held on to Allegra desperately, protesting that she was ill and could not be sent across Italy with a stranger. Letters went back and forth. Claire begged for a promise that Allegra would be well cared for; Byron wrote grudgingly to Shelley that every effort would be made to make her happy. Mary offered to send Elise, the nursemaid who had looked after the Shelley children since 1816, to Venice with Allegra, so that they would at least know that Claire’s daughter was being cared for by a responsible adult.

Eventually Claire herself made the final decision. ‘I have sent you my child because I love her too well to keep her’, she told Byron bleakly.
¹²
She recognised that she could not provide Allegra with a secure future, and that Byron, whatever his faults, would be generous in his provision for her. The day after Claire’s twentieth birthday, Elise and fifteen-month-old Allegra left for Venice, escorted by Byron’s messenger. They took with them letters to Byron from Shelley and Claire, as well as copies of
Foliage
and
Frankenstein
. Claire’s letter was a heartbreaking plea for understanding. ‘My child was born in sorrow and after much suffering’, she wrote. ‘Then I love her with a passion that almost destroys my being she goes from me.’
¹³
Shelley’s letter was more neutral, written with Byron’s callous conduct still vivid in his memory. They were moving to Pisa, he reported, in the hope that a change of scenery might divert Claire’s attention and relieve her suffering.

The Shelleys and Claire left Milan on 1 May 1818, and travelled slowly south, stopping at Parma, Modena and Bologna en route. They arrived in Pisa a week later, but left again almost immediately, having decided that the town was claustrophobic and unpleasant. Mary was particularly horrified by the sight of chained criminals labouring in the streets while their armed guards stood over them. So, rather than remain in an unfriendly town, they decided to make use of a letter of introduction provided by Godwin to his old friend, Maria Gisborne, who was living with her husband and son at the nearby seaside port of Livorno.

On 9 May Shelley, Mary and Claire made the short journey south to Livorno, where they sought out the Gisbornes. In the two months since their departure from England they had met few people and made no new friends. Yet again, they were flung together, although this time it was Claire’s anxiety which made her a difficult companion. It was therefore a relief to meet an old acquaintance. Maria Gisborne had looked after Mary and Fanny in the weeks following Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, and when her first husband died in 1799 Godwin asked her to marry him. She refused, and instead married John Gisborne, with whom she moved to Livorno in 1815.

The Gisbornes and the Shelleys warmed to each other immediately. There was a nice symmetry to the two parties, and Maria Gisborne’s grown-up son, Henry Reveley, was rather taken with Claire. As had happened before when Shelley and Mary formed new friendships, a pattern of communal daily activities was quickly established. In the mornings Mary and Claire read and practised their Italian and in the evenings the Gisbornes and the Shelleys walked together, discussing the day’s reading and Henry Reveley’s plans to build a commercial steamboat. Mary’s friendship with Maria Gisborne was one of the most important she would form in Italy. After the Shelleys left Livorno in mid-June she and Maria maintained a regular correspondence which provided twenty year old Mary with motherly support of a kind she had never known before.

After a pleasant month in Livorno, the Shelleys and Claire travelled northwards again, to the house Shelley had taken for the summer. Their new home was a day’s journey away, in the Appenine spa town of Bagni di Lucca. The house Shelley found, the Casa Bertini, was a small, colourful building surrounded by chestnut woods and delightful walks. A river ran nearby, and the house was freshly painted and newly furnished. There was a shady laurel arbour in the garden and in the evenings Mary, Claire and Shelley sat outside watching the fireflies make strange patterns in the darkness. After an itinerant few months it was good to be settled for a while, and Mary wrote cheerful descriptions to Maria Gisborne of their ‘quiet pleasant life’.
¹⁴

She had reason to be contented that summer. Allegra was settled with her father (in whose house, she told the Hunts, she was dressed ‘in little trousers trimmed with lace & treat[ed] like a little princess’),
¹⁵
Claire was more cheerful after a mild flirtation with Henry Reveley, they had a house they could call a home again, and Peacock wrote enclosing flattering reviews of
Frankenstein
. One such review was by Walter Scott, who, having received a copy from him upon its publication, attributed authorship of the novel to Shelley. Mary was quick to relieve him of this misapprehension. ‘I am anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing Mr Shelley guilty of a juvenile attempt of mine’, she told him, rather coyly.
¹⁶
Moreover, Italy was a stimulating place to read, and she immersed herself in sustained study of English and Italian poetry and history.

Shelley was more ambivalent about the solitude of life at Bagni di Lucca.  Surrounded by quiet and natural beauty, he found himself unable to write, and the productivity of the previous summer in Marlow proved frustratingly elusive. He retreated alone into the woods, and spent much of his time at a natural pool ‘formed in the middle of the forests by a torrent’.
¹⁷
There he would sit on the sunny rocks reading Herodotus, before diving into the clear water to cool down. His great achievement of the previous year,
Laon and Cythna
,
was written amongst friends and in their absence Shelley found it hard to sustain his creativity. He finished
Rosalind and Helen
, a poem begun some years earlier, and produced a translation of Plato’s
Symposium
.  This translation was highly accomplished and it built on the neo-Platonic philosophy developed two years before in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’, but such activity was a poor substitute for the composition of original poetry. News from England served to increase Shelley’s isolation. In the same letter which reported that
Frankenstein
was well received, Peacock informed Shelley that his name was linked (by implication) with Hunt’s in a cutting review of
Foliage
in the
Quarterly Review
.  Shelley found himself under attack as a direct result of Hunt’s praise for him in
Foliage
, and his reputation was damaged by Hunt’s public acknowledgement of their friendship.

As Shelley was dismissed by the critics as a Huntian disciple, he received further reminders of the way things had once been. Peacock wrote to tell him of his walks with Hogg through the Buckinghamshire countryside, walks which recalled the republican ramblings Shelley himself had enjoyed the year before. ‘We think’, Peacock reported, ‘of walking to Chalgrove field, where Hampden was killed, and to Chequers, the seat of Cromwell in the Chiltern Hills.’
¹⁸
How delightful it would have been to be part of Peacock’s party, Shelley replied. ‘My thoughts for ever cling to Windsor Forest, and the copses of Marlow, like the clouds which hang upon the woods of the mountains, low trailing, and though they pass away, leave their best dew when they themselves have faded.’
¹⁹
Letters from the Hunts were equally evocative, as Marianne sent amused descriptions of Hogg (‘you will hardly know him, he is grown such a beau’)
²⁰
and Hunt glowing accounts of his reading of Italian literature and his various literary projects.

Separated from his friends, Shelley turned to his imagination to compensate for their loss. Just as
Foliage
described a group of friends at the very point at which it began to fracture, so Shelley began to explore lost and damaged relationships in his writing. Indeed, some of the most moving and personal poetry he would write in Italy stemmed from this impulse. Among friends, Shelley had created his vision of the solitary poet in
Alastor
. Now he was parted from those friends, he turned his attention to the men and women who had inspired him.