Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (33 page)

Byron was soon drawn into the political intrigues of Teresa’s father and brother, Ruggiero and Pietro Gamba. Through them he became involved with the Carbonari, a secret society who agitated for independence for Romagna. The year 1820 saw a resurgence of revolutionary activity in the Italian city states as their inhabitants sought to throw off the imperial rule imposed upon them following the partitioning of Europe at the Congress of Vienna. None of these movements was successful. A revolution in Naples was quickly crushed and Byron came to realise that the Carbonari were inefficient and unlikely to achieve their ambitions. Nevertheless, he was initiated into their ranks, stored arms for them and acted as the keeper of their records.
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The Carbonari provided him with his first experience of direct political action, for which he was to acquire a taste.

By the summer of 1820, Teresa was living in her father’s country house outside Ravenna, waiting for the Pope to issue her with a decree of separation from her husband, and Allegra had been dispatched from Venice and installed in a villa near the Gambas’ home. There she was visited occasionally by her father and more frequently by Teresa, who sent Byron encouraging reports of his daughter’s improving health. Teresa was fond of ‘Allegrina’ and reported that the little girl was comically like her father. Allegra was depicted in Teresa’s letters gleefully teasing Byron’s manservant, and showing an unholy delight while watching Pietro Gamba kill birds: a delight Teresa sensibly attributed to ‘that type of cruelty that one observes in all Children’.
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The brief glimpses of Allegra in the letters are of an imperious, funny little girl much petted by servants and her father’s mistress, her every need catered for, denied only the love and attention of her mother and father.

Byron made elaborate arrangements for Allegra’s comfort but he was deeply unsure about what to do with her. His disquiet was exacerbated by Claire, who started writing to him again on the subject of their daughter in 1820. Claire had not seen Allegra for well over a year, and she was determined to spend the summer with her. In March, she sent Byron a polite letter asking him to send Allegra to visit her in Pisa. Byron did not answer this letter and on 23 April Claire wrote again, informing him that in the absence of instructions from him she was planning to come to Ravenna to collect Allegra herself. Knowing that Byron would not wish to see her, she asked him to send Allegra as far as Bologna, where the Shelleys could collect her more easily. She assured Byron she did not wish to annoy him with her presence and reiterated that the hot Romagna summer would not be good for their daughter’s health.

However, Byron’s attitude to both Claire and the Shelleys had shifted since Claire’s last meeting with her daughter in November 1818. By 1820 he was finding headstrong little Allegra increasingly troublesome, and he was quick to attribute all her negative characteristics to her mother. Richard and Isabelle Hoppner, who had briefly housed Allegra, Claire and the Shelleys, had passed on gossip about an affair between Shelley and Claire which, although he did not entirely believe it, provided Byron with grounds to dispute Claire’s claims to moral authority.  Claire was not to know that Byron had grown more conservative with age, or that he was increasingly sceptical about the Shelleys’ unorthodox lifestyle. She learnt this in the cruellest possible way, when Isabelle Hoppner forwarded her a letter from Byron. ‘About Allegra’, he wrote, ‘I can only say to Claire – that I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children’s treatment in their family – that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital. – Is it not so? Have they
reared
one? – Her health here has hitherto been excellent – and her temper not bad – she is sometimes vain and obstinate – but always clean and cheerful – and as in a year or two I shall either send her to England – or put her in a Convent for education – these defects will be remedied as far as they can in human nature. – But the child shall not quit me again – to perish of Starvation, and green fruit – or be taught to believe that there is no Deity.’
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Claire’s response to this letter, with its cruel jibe at the double tragedy the Shelleys had suffered, was a model of restraint. She reminded Byron that he had given her a solemn promise that she should see Allegra at regular intervals, and that eighteen months had elapsed since their last meeting. She assured him that she respected his right to dictate the particulars of Allegra’s diet and her religious upbringing but could not refrain from a reproof of his mean-spirited dismissal of Shelley’s ideas, reminding him ‘though my creed is different from Shelley’s I must always feel grateful for his kindness.’
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Byron’s response was to write directly to the Shelleys reiterating his reasons for keeping Allegra with him. This letter, now lost, was evidently quite as cruel as that sent to Richard Hoppner, since it produced an anguished response from Claire in a letter which she drafted, but may never have sent.

Byron’s lost letter must have reiterated his proposal to put three year old Allegra in a convent for her education, a suggestion which Claire understood as a threat; as an act of revenge against her. ‘You answer my request by menacing if I do not . . . continue to suffer in silence, that you will inflict the greatest of all evils on my child.’ She reminded him of the care she had lavished on Allegra before their parting: ‘I injured my health by my attentions to Allegra whom I nursed night & day the first year of her infancy as your friend Hunt and also his wife well knew, for they were the only people I saw & used to remonstrate with me.’ And, in a flash of sisterly loyalty, she reproached him for his cruelty towards Mary. Having watched her stepsister’s agony as her children died, she would not allow Byron to treat such suffering casually. ‘You are in the wrong’, she told him, ‘when you impute neglect . . . as the cause of Mary’s losing her children.’
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Shelley and Mary were also hurt by Byron’s suggestion of neglect. They were furious with the Hoppners, whom they suspected of spreading gossip about them, but they knew that their position with regard to Byron and Claire was fragile. Shelley wrote his own dignified response to Byron, in which he tried to convey some sense of Claire’s anxiety without appearing to be too partisan, as well as his own concern for Allegra’s welfare. ‘I smiled at your protest about what you considered my creed’, he wrote lightly.
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Given the context of Byron’s comments, which used the deaths of William and Clara to reproach the Shelleys, it is doubtful whether this was really true. In any case, Byron remained unmoved, and Claire and Allegra remained apart.

Claire’s preoccupation with Allegra now became a source of serious vexation for Mary. Mary was sympathetic to her stepsister’s plight, but she had suffered great tragedy too and was entirely absorbed in caring for her new baby, whose health caused her quite as much obsessive anxiety as the absent Allegra’s caused Claire.  Claire may also have found it difficult to see Mary occupied with an infant while she remained separated from her own child. This did not make for peaceful coexistence.  ‘Heigh-ho the Claire and the Ma/ Find something to fight about every day’, Claire wrote in her diary in July.
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Shelley, caught between a fractious pair of step-siblings, now felt himself to be the chief victim of the tension between Mary and Claire. In a private communication with Maria Gisborne he reported that ‘Mary, who, you know, is always wise, has been lately very good. I wish she were as wise now as she will be at 45, or as misfortune has made me. She would then live on very good terms with Claire.’
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Other sources of stress emerged in the summer of 1820 which taxed everybody’s patience and fortitude.  Mary, Shelley and Claire spent a quiet spring in Pisa, during which Mary and Shelley worked on a joint translation of Spinoza and two collaborative verse dramas,
Proserpine
and
Midas
. But their peace was shattered in mid-June when they discovered that Paolo Foggi, their former manservant, was attempting to blackmail them. Paolo had been in Naples in the winter of 1818 and had married the nursemaid Elise. Although the specifics of his blackmail attempt are not known, it is clear that it concerned Elena Adelaide, whom Shelley was still supporting financially. It may have related to the birth certificate that Shelley filed just before his departure from Naples, or to the mystery of Elena’s parentage. On 12 June, Mary’s diary entry read ‘Paolo . . . dine and spend evening at Casa Silva – sleep there.’
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‘Paulo’ was followed by a half-moon symbol, which Mary periodically used in her diary to denote crises or serious problems. Claire’s diary for the same day was only marginally more informative: ‘Bother & Confusion with packing up – We sleep in Casa Silva. Oh Bother.’
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Paolo’s actions prompted the Shelleys and Claire first to take refuge with Mrs Mason, and then to leave Pisa altogether, and go to the Gisbornes’ empty house in Livorno.  There, Shelley consulted the lawyer through whom he was channelling funds for Elena, who helped rid them of Paolo’s threats.

Once the fuss caused by Paolo subsided, Shelley, Mary and Claire found themselves alone once more, without the sustaining companionship of Mrs Mason. In the Gisbornes’ deserted house they were surrounded by memories of their friends, who had recently departed on their visit to England. Seated at Henry Reveley’s desk, which was covered by the detritus of his steamboat designs (‘a dusty paint box, some odd hooks,/ A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books’), Shelley wrote his ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, an elegiac evocation of the social circle she would meet in London. Like ‘Julian and Maddalo’, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ took its inspiration from the thoughts of friends: Godwin (‘greater none than he/ Though fallen – and fallen on evil times’); Hogg (‘He is a pearl within an oyster shell/ One of the richest of the deep’); Peacock (‘his fine wit/ Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it’); Horace Smith (in whom ‘wit and sense,/ Virtue and human knowledge’ are combined) and, most importantly, Hunt, whom Shelley depicted in the cheerful chaos of his study, surrounded by his ever-faithful female companions:

                                  one of those happy souls

Who are the salt of the Earth, and without whom

This world would smell like what it is, a tomb –

Who is, what others seem – his room no doubt

Is still adorned with many a cast from Shout
*

With graceful flowers tastefully placed about,

And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,

And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,

The gifts of the most learn’d among some dozens

Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins.

The wistfulness of ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ was most apparent in its concluding stanza, which presented a dream of a future in which the bitterness of the past could be buried and forgotten:

Next winter you must pass with me; I’ll have

My house by that time turned into a grave

Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care

And all the dreams which our tormentors are.

Oh, that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith were there,

With everything belonging to them fair!

‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ imagined the gatherings of Marlow and London transported to Italy for a utopian summer. As in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, Shelley used the evocation of friends as a vehicle for discussion of a particular aspect of his philosophy. In the earlier poem he had presented Byron’s nihilistic pessimism in order to interrogate the intellectual foundations of his own optimism; in the later, the memory of friends acted as a springboard for a meditation on the relationship between memory, knowledge and the poetic imagination. ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ illustrated that the act of imagining one’s friends could be intellectually stimulating, but that, emotionally, doing so was no substitute for their physical presence. ‘I send you some verses’, Shelley told Maria in a letter accompanying his verse epistle, ‘which will show you that I struggle with despondency.’
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Mary was once more, in Shelley’s words, in ‘agony’ about Godwin; and she and Claire were finding each other impossible.