Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (35 page)

Claire knew that it made sense for her to try to live apart from Shelley and Mary, but the transition was lonely and difficult. Apart from brief visits back to Pisa (during which she stayed with Mrs Mason rather than the Shelleys) she was alone for much of the winter, surrounded by strangers who knew nothing of her troubled past, and who therefore could offer her little sympathy. It was important that matters remained thus, since if Florentine society had discovered that Claire was the mother of Byron’s illegitimate daughter she would not have been received in the grand houses frequented by the Bojtis.  She was therefore compelled to turn to her diary for comfort, and spent her time writing long meditations on the direction of her life, the events of her past and the activities of her acquaintances. These meditations give a poignant insight into her state of mind during this period. ‘Think of thyself as a stranger & traveller on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world, belong and who has no permanent township on the globe’, she wrote on 29 October, a few weeks after her arrival in Florence.
⁴
An entry from the following spring presents a bleak picture of an empty life. ‘After dinner walk in Boboli – I mounted the hill & sat an hour at the foot of the statue of Ceres. Below the groves of evergreens were shaken by a high wind, and the noise resembled the dashing of waves on the sea-shore.  Being alone there, with such a sound brought to my mind the many solitary hours of Lynmouth.’
⁵
Many of her musings focused on Byron, whom she presented in prose caricatures as a semi-demonic figure. In an entry entitled ‘Hints for Don Juan’ she recorded the words she wished to say to Byron himself. ‘You are dead to everything beautiful, whether of shape or essence; you rot and are corrupted, while the light of Truth is upon you, as a Corpse which putrifies in the rays of the Sun.’
⁶

Claire knew that her anger at Byron increased her unhappiness, recording rather guiltily that ‘one of Madame M[ason]’s rules [is] to consider a prejudiced person as one labouring under a serious illness’,
⁷
but Byron’s actions made it impossible for her to moderate her dislike of him. In March 1821 he placed Allegra in the Capuchin Convent at Bagnacavallo in the north-east corner of Romagna, and sent word of his decision in a letter to Shelley. It was not unusual for Italian families to send their daughters to convents for their education, but at four years old Allegra was very young for such treatment. Indeed, she was the youngest resident at Bagnacavallo.

Byron had a variety of reasons for placing her there. Ravenna, where he was living, was no place for a child in 1821. It was unsettled politically and at one point it looked as if the Carbonari, inspired by the example of the Neapolitans, might be about to start a revolution. Allegra had not yet received any formal education and Byron thought it important that she should start to learn to read and write. Teresa Guiccioli had been granted a decree of separation from her husband and although she was fond of Allegra she had little interest in acting as stepmother to Claire’s daughter. In any case, it seems that Byron initially intended Allegra’s residence in Bagnacavallo to be temporary and that he planned to make more permanent arrangements for her once Ravenna calmed down. But Claire was not to know this, and she was horrified by his decision. Byron had promised her in Geneva that Allegra would always live with one or other of her parents, and he had broken his word. She wrote to warn him that his actions would be attacked by all who learnt of Allegra’s fate:

Allegra’s misfortune in being condemned by her father to a life of ignorance & degradation, in being deprived . . . of the protection & friendship of her parents friends (so essential to the well-being of a child in her desolate situation) . . . will be received by the world as a perfect fulfilment on your part of all the censures passed upon you.  How will Lady Byron never yet justified for her conduct towards you be soothed and rejoice in the honourable safety of herself & child, and all the world be bolder to praise her prudence, my unhappy Allegra furnishing the condemning evidence. I alone, misled by love to believe you good, trusted to you, & now I reap the fruits.
⁸

This letter made Byron both furious and defensive, and he refused to consider Claire’s suggestion that Allegra should be placed in an English boarding school at her (by which she meant Shelley’s) expense. He sent a self-justifying letter to the Hoppners in which he blackened Claire’s name, was rude about the Shelleys (‘to allow the Child to be with her mother – & with
them
& their principles – would be absolute insanity’) and denied making Claire promises at Geneva.
⁹

Byron was angry about Claire’s accusations of neglect, partly because he knew that they contained a grain of truth. Allegra had become an encumbrance and she threatened to restrict both his freedom of movement and his relationship with Teresa (who, Claire later claimed, was jealous of Allegra). Once Allegra was safely installed at Bagnacavallo he appears to have made little effort to visit her. Geographical distance and Byron’s attitude combined to make it impossible for Claire to visit the convent either, and she was left with the knowledge that she exercised no influence over Byron, that he was deaf to her pleas for kindness, and that her daughter was now being cared for by strangers. Alone in Florence, she had only her diary for comfort, and she used it to record disturbing dreams in which she was reunited with Allegra.

Shelley and Mary’s loyalties were divided on the subject of Allegra. Although they pitied Claire, they were anxious not to alienate Byron, who wrote to them complaining of the tone of Claire’s letters. Neither of them had seen the letters, but they knew from experience that Claire could be intemperate and demanding. Nevertheless, given Claire’s distress, Shelley’s response to Byron does not reflect particularly well on either him or Mary. They were certainly not prepared to sacrifice their friendship with Byron for Claire’s sake. A more charitable explanation of their response is that they knew Byron could not be won over by reproaches and demands, and that it was therefore important they maintained a cordial relationship. ‘I never see any of Claire’s letters to you’, Shelley reminded him, rather passively. ‘I can easily believe, however, that they are sufficiently provoking, and that her views respecting Allegra are unreasonable. Mary, no less than myself, is perfectly convinced of your conduct towards Allegra having been most irreproachable, and we entirely agree in the necessity, under existing circumstances, of the placing her in a convent near to yourself.’
¹⁰

With Claire absent, Shelley and Mary spent a peaceful summer and autumn in San Giuliano, a tiny hamlet buried among the mountains outside Pisa. They took a spacious house in the village’s single run of buildings, which looked out towards San Giuliano’s one imposing building, the eighteenth-century bathhouse, and the lower reaches of Monte Pisano. There Shelley wrote ‘The Witch of Atlas’, a poem which revealed in its dedication a disagreement between him and Mary about the direction his work was taking. Mary felt that his work was at its best and most politically potent when – as in
The Cenci
– he focused on the experiences of humanity, rather than on abstraction and mythology. Shelley responded with a dedicatory poem in which he made her the following plea: ‘Prithee, for this one time,/ Content thee with a visionary rhyme.’

They also eagerly followed the progress of the trial of Queen Caroline in the bundles of
The
Examiner
sent out from England. Inspired by Hunt’s
Examiner
accounts of events in London, and perhaps also by Mary’s representations about the importance of focusing on reality, Shelley produced a dramatic satire on the trial, ‘Swellfoot the Tyrant’, in which a jury of pigs is arraigned to try Swellfoot’s wife, Queen Iona. Shelley’s friend Horace Smith subsequently arranged for the publication of ‘Swellfoot’, but was threatened with prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the drama remained unpublished until Mary’s 1839 edition of Shelley’s poems.

For her part, Mary embarked on her second novel, set in medieval Italy. She spent much of her summer absorbed in research, reading Sismondi’s monumental
History of the Italian Republics
. When the Shelleys moved back to Pisa in the autumn she was able to make full use of the rich resources of Pisa’s university libraries. The resulting novel,
Valperga
, drew its setting from a wide variety of historical sources, and presented its vividly realised characters against a carefully researched background.

Valperga
was deeply engaged with Italy’s past, but it was also a meditation on Italy’s present and her future. Mary set her novel in fourteenth-century Lucca, an Italian city state in what is now Tuscany. Her subject was the defeat of  Guelph Florence by the Ghibelline Castruccio Castracani, Duke of Lucca. Written in the period following the Neapolitan Revolution of 1820–1, Mary’s novel deliberately avoided what the literary critic Tilottama Rajan has termed ‘historical consolations’.
¹¹
 It ends with Castruccio’s death and makes no attempt to describe the peace and prosperity of Renaissance Italy which followed the civil strife of the fourteenth century. The Italy of
Valperga
is in its inception, and reveals the intellectual and libertarian possibilities of the unformed nation state. The parallels between the past and the period in which Mary researched and wrote her novel pointed towards the possibilities of the fledgling nationalist revolutions taking place in Italy and elsewhere in the southern Mediterranean in 1820 and 1821. The failure of these revolutions,
Valperga
suggests, should not negate the fact that they took place. In a later biography of the Italian poet and nationalist hero, Vittorio Alfieri, Mary would claim that Italy needed to rise out of political lethargy in order to achieve its independence. The characters of
Valperga
do just that and their actions herald the unspoken possibility of political and cultural renaissance. Mary’s second full-length novel was a significant work of fiction, but it was also an important engagement with the reality of the power struggles shaking Europe at the beginning of the 1820s.  It represented a major development in her work since the introversion of
Matilda
, written the previous winter.

Valperga
was influenced by Mary’s reading, but it was also a response to changing social circumstances, as she and Shelley were drawn into a new circle of writers and intellectuals. Through Mrs Mason they met Francesco Pacchiani, a former Professor at the University of Pisa. He was witty, brilliant and socially unreliable, and although the Shelleys soon tired of him he introduced them to other Pisan intellectuals, with whom they formed more lasting friendships. These included John Taaffe, an earnest Irish writer working on a rather laborious translation of Dante, and Tommaso Sgricci, a minor celebrity and
Improvvisatore
– a theatrical declaimer of spontaneous poetry, of the type depicted by Madame de Staël in
Corinne
. A more important acquaintance made through Pacchiani was Alexander Mavrocordato, an exiled Greek nobleman who was preparing to lead the fight for Greek independence.  Mavrocordato was rather enamoured of Mary, and the two became close allies. They came to an arrangement whereby she taught him English in return for lessons in Greek. He called frequently, and sent apologetic notes when he was unable to visit her. Together they walked and discussed Greek politics and when the Shelleys moved back to San Giuliano in the spring of 1821 he frequently made the journey out of Pisa to see her. He proved himself to be a steadfast and attentive companion, and was the first friend of her own generation Mary had made independently since her elopement.  Shelley was less keen on him, confessing to Claire that ‘I reproach my own savage disposition that so agreeable accomplished and amiable a person is not more agreeable to me.’
¹²

One cannot help but wonder whether Shelley’s feelings towards Mavrocordato were influenced more than he realised by the fact that, at twenty-three, Mary had acquired her first close male friend. Moreover, even though Mavrocordato was barely a year older than twenty-eight year old Shelley, he was glamorous, well-connected, and intimately involved with the political progress of Europe.  Mavrocordato seems to have taken some pleasure in Shelley’s discomfort. In May, as he was preparing to leave Italy, he wrote triumphantly to Mary of the transport which was to take him to war in Greece. His letter contained a dig at Shelley, who had recently acquired a small sailing boat to carry him up and down the Arno. ‘My departure cannot be delayed much longer’, he told Mary. ‘I have a brigantine at my disposal, a ship was sent to me by my compatriots, who are inviting me to move close to them. If Mr Shelley was most proud to have a small boat . . . at his disposal, imagine what my pride must be now that I have a brigantine which carries eighteen at my disposal.’
¹³
Although Shelley subsequently dedicated his verse drama
Hellas
to Mavrocordato ‘as an imperfect token of the admiration, sympathy, and friendship of the Author’, his letters suggest he did not lament his departure for Greece as Mary did.