Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (46 page)

Despite its premature failure,
The Liberal
occupies an important place in the history of British Romanticism. It was the final statement from a group of writers who had known and influenced each other for ten years. By the time the Hunts had dealt with the remaindered copies of
The Liberal
, the network celebrated in
The Examiner
, Keats’s
Poems
(1817),
Foliage
and
Frankenstein
had dispersed.
The Liberal
was a celebration of this network, but it was also its elegy: a monument to both the exiles and the paradise Shelley envisaged in ‘Julian and Maddalo’. The shattered group who united to piece
The Liberal
together – Hunt, Byron and Mary in Genoa; Charles Brown in Pisa; Hogg, Hazlitt and John Hunt in London – was held together only by fragile and unstable allegiances, and by memories of a shared past.

The winter of 1822–1823 tested Mary’s fortitude to its limits. Isolated and depressed, she started a new diary, which was quite different in tone and scope from anything she had kept before. Her previous diary entries were brief and to the point: lists of books read, letters written, places visited, or calls made and received. Now, in the bleak privacy of her unheated rooms at Casa Negroto, she poured out her private agony in a journal which still makes painful reading. More than any other document, this journal gives the lie to the accusation – levelled by both those who knew her and by posterity – that Mary was a cold, unfeeling woman. Mary felt this accusation deeply.  ‘Oh my beloved Shelley’, she wrote, in her first entry, ‘it is not true that this heart was cold to thee . . . did I not in the deepest solitude of thought repeat to myself my good fortune in possessing you?’
³³

The contrast between the life she had known and the future to which she was condemned dominated her private writing, alongside imaginary conversations with Shelley in which she poured out her heart to him. These conversations seemed more real than those which punctuated her isolated life in Genoa. They were certainly more emotionally fulfilling than the conversations she had with the living. ‘My own Heart’, she wrote on 2 October, ‘I would fain know what you think of my desolate state – what you think I ought to do – what to think.’ Shelley, she decided, would answer thus: ‘seek to know your own heart & learning what it best loves – try to enjoy that.’  But she was unable to take much comfort from this imagined advice. ‘When I meditate or dream on my future life, one idea alone animates me – I think of friends & human intercourse . . . [and] I weep to think how unstable all that is.’
³⁴
She had been deserted by her ‘Father, Mother, friend [Edward], husband, children’
³⁵
and had little hope that the Hunts’ presence would relieve her loneliness.

In this, she was quite correct. Marianne continued to be unwell and lethargic, and Hunt barricaded himself in his study, where, according to Byron, he ‘sweated’ articles for
The Liberal
.
³⁶
In the evenings Mary was compelled by intense cold to sit with the Hunts in the only room where a fire burned, but Hunt’s attitude towards her made these evenings a penance to be endured rather than a bright spot in her day. She knew that Hunt considered her to be unfeeling and therefore unworthy of Shelley, but – since she did not know that Jane had spread gossip about her – she was unable to understand why. ‘No one seems to understand or to sympathize with me’, read one bewildered diary entry. ‘They all seem to look on me as one without affections – without any sensibility – my sufferings are thought a cipher – & I feel myself degraded before them; knowing that in their hearts they degrade me from the rank which I deserve to possess. – I feel dejected & cowed before them, feeling as if I might be the senseless person they appear to consider me.’
³⁷
As Mary wrote desperate, deeply private meditations on her grief and her loneliness, Hunt poured out his troubles to his friends, writing to the Novellos and to his nephew Henry about how much he missed Shelley.  

Hunt’s behaviour exacerbated Mary’s guilt about the depression leading up to her miscarriage which had blighted her final weeks with Shelley. As she slowly began to gather his poems and manuscripts together, she was made aware that, at times, she had not been the companion he desired. In the second week of October her writing desk arrived from Peacock, as she had requested. It was full of letters written by her to Shelley during the autumn of 1817, letters which recalled scenes dominated by William, Clara and Allegra – three children who died before their sixth birthdays.  This was painful enough, but her Marlow letters were also full of demands about petty domestic issues: linen, houses, and the need to reunite Allegra with her father. They were written at a time of great anxiety for both Mary and Shelley, when their future looked uncertain and precarious. But stripped of their extenuating context they presented Mary with a picture of her younger self as a less than ideal wife, who bore little resemblance to the idealistic girl with whom Shelley had fallen in love.

It was equally difficult to read the verses to Jane Williams Shelley had written at the end of his life, which were scattered throughout his papers. ‘Dearest Shelley’, Mary pleaded, ‘raise me from self depression – fill me, my chosen one, with a part of your energy.’ ‘I am not mean or base’, she protested, ‘yet I feel at times as if I were – I am not unfeeling – my hourly agonies prove that, yet the presence of those who do not love me, makes me feel as if I were of marble.’
³⁸
Hunt would have been horrified had he read this. Even without knowledge of Mary’s suffering, his behaviour during this period does not do him much credit. Mary was punished for not acting as others expected her to act. It was a cruel way to treat a woman who, at twenty-five, had lost her husband and three of her children, and for whom the future promised so little.

Despite Hunt’s coldness, Mary remained loyal to both him and Marianne throughout the winter. She mediated between him and Byron when they fell out over the gossip spread by John Murray, and did her best to make Byron understand the difficulty of Hunt’s position by appealing both to his good nature and his business sense. After all, she argued, if
The Liberal
was characterised as a work of charity, designed only to help the Hunts, then few people would bother to buy it. ‘Hunt is a very good man’, she reminded him. ‘Shelley was greatly attached to him on account of his integrity.’
³⁹
She tried not to dwell on the contrast between evenings spent in gloomy silence with Hunt and Marianne and those she had enjoyed with Shelley, Edward and Jane in Pugnano, where, she wrote wistfully to Jane, ‘we used, like children, to play in the great hall or your garden & then sit under the cypresses & hear [Edward] read his play.’
⁴⁰
But memories of the past constantly recurred to make the present painful and the future frightening. Conversations with Byron were particularly upsetting, since his voice was indelibly associated in her memory with Shelley’s. Talking to him reminded her of evenings at the Villa Diodati, and of the ‘other sounds and objects from which it can never disunite itself . . . When Albe speaks & Shelley does not answer it is as thunder without rain, The form of the sun without heat or light, as any familiar object might be shorn of its dearest & best attribute.’
⁴¹

Trelawny, who based himself in Genoa during the winter of 1822, provided welcome relief from Hunt’s disapproval and the memories awakened by Byron’s presence. He visited Mary regularly and she was grateful for his company, particularly since he was happy to sit and talk of Shelley’s greatness for hours on end.  However, a degree of constraint entered their relationship when she realised that Trelawny was writing passionate love letters to Claire while simultaneously enjoying an intrigue with the wife of one of his Genoan acquaintances. Still, Mary missed his company badly when, in April 1823, he travelled to Rome to take on a starring role as Shelley’s ashes were interred in the Protestant cemetery. Trelawny commissioned a headstone for Shelley, and bought the plot next to his grave, so that he could eventually be buried there himself. Mary had wanted Shelley’s remains to be buried in William’s small grave, but when the grave was opened it was found to contain the skeleton of an adult rather than that of a child. News that William’s bones had disappeared represented yet another loss for his mother.

Life at Casa Negroto was complicated by Marianne’s seventh pregnancy.  The Hunts could ill afford another child, but Vaccà (Mrs Mason’s Pisan doctor) had suggested that a pregnancy might, in the long term, benefit Marianne’s health. It is hard now to see how any doctor could have thought that another baby would help a woman worn out by childbearing, and throughout Marianne’s pregnancy those closest to her felt that childbirth was more likely to kill than to cure her. Mary was determined not to abandon Marianne or her children until the outcome of her pregnancy was known. Throughout her stay in Genoa, she only publicly expressed real anger towards Hunt when he disturbed Marianne’s peace by suggesting that Bess should be allowed to join them in Italy. ‘Poor Marianne’, Mary wrote to Jane. ‘I hope life will afford her some of the pleasures that she is capable of enjoying as long as Hunt continues well and kind. You may guess to whom I allude in the last word – Her arrival would be a death blow to poor Marianne – but if it be delayed, yet some time or other I fear it will occur.’
⁴²
Thankfully, Mary was later able to report, Hunt saw the wisdom of allowing Marianne to have her way. He ‘has had the humanity to permit her to decide concerning the coming of Miss K.’, she reported to Jane in April. ‘So it will not be for the present. H. could not at so terrible a moment have acted against her wishes – and I think it would have killed her if that most selfish of human beings had arrived to disturb by her self will & violence the comparative peace she enjoys.’
⁴³

Mary’s disapproval of Bess, whom she had not seen since 1818, was informed by Marianne’s view of her sister. Despite their difference in age, Mary and Marianne had maintained a quiet and affectionate friendship since their first meeting in 1816. Each had a good deal of sympathy for the plight of the other, although Marianne was too absorbed in her family and her own ill health to offer Mary much comfort during the winter they spent together in Genoa, and Mary found Marianne’s perpetual pregnancies exasperating. ‘A woman is not a field to be continually employed either in bringing forth or enlarging grain’, she told her rather sharply in March 1820, before adding a pointed instruction: ‘take care of yourself.’
⁴⁴

There is little doubt that Hunt’s separation from Bess contributed much to his unhappiness and that after Shelley’s death he felt her absence badly. He seems, however, to have made little effort to hide this from his wife. He acquiesced to Marianne’s demand that her sister should remain in England, and conveyed the news of this stipulation himself, writing to Bess that Marianne ‘fears, though I do not, that some troubles might arise to us from the less considerate parts of your temper’.  Moreover, he wrote, as if to soften the blow of Marianne’s disapproval, there were other reasons for them to remain apart. ‘Rumours have been industriously circulated that you are with us’, he reported. ‘Hobhouse, when he was in Italy, affected astonishment at not finding you; and Ld. B. is not a man to prevent the unpleasant effects of gossiping of any kind, or to make your neighbourhood to him the more comfortable.’ All this was perfectly reasonable, and demonstrated a degree of loyalty to his wife, as well as his concern for his sister-in-law’s reputation. But, in an extraordinary aside, he comforted Bess with the thought that her presence should certainly be required in Italy should Marianne die. ‘Should anything happen to your sister meanwhile, of course I should want your support as instantly as I could obtain it’, he told her. There was something thoroughly strange about the second half of Hunt’s letter. ‘Let the allusion which I have made to an event that has never before been alluded to between us, be the proof I wish it to be; or I shall have gone through the anguish of it to no purpose. I think circumstances altogether warranted it; and you know with what heart-felt sincerity I say all that I do, of everybody, – how truly upon my heart and upon my honour.’
⁴⁵

In the spring of 1823, as the Casa Negroto household watched and waited for the birth of Marianne’s baby, Mary was forced to confront the problem of her own future. At first, it seemed unimaginable that a new year should begin without Shelley. ‘When Spring arrives’, she wrote in her diary, ‘leaves you never saw will shadow the ground – flowers you never beheld will star it – the grass will be of another growth.’
⁴⁶
She knew, however, that she could not remain indefinitely with the Hunts, and it was clear that, wherever she lived, she would need to earn her own living. Sir Timothy Shelley grudgingly offered to support Percy if Mary would relinquish all claim to her son, but he had no intention of aiding the woman with whom his own son had lived in sin, and at whose behest he had deserted his first wife. Mary was appalled by the idea that she should part with Percy, the only reason for her continued existence. She was thus deeply hurt when Byron advised her to accept Sir Timothy’s offer to raise the little boy. It was a disagreement which introduced an unwelcome formality into their relationship.