Very likely Shelley enjoyed his first sexual experience with a woman around this time. He wrote a poem celebrating Margaret Nicholson, who had attempted to murder George II. It includes a fragment that seems to be a paean to oral sex:
Soft, my dearest angel, stay,
Oh! You suck my soul away:
Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!
Tides of maddening passion roll,
And streams of rapture drown my soul.
Now give me one more billing kiss,
Let your lips now repeat the bliss,
Endless kisses steal my breath,
No life can equal such a death.
Shelley and Hogg’s own relationship was so intense that it was like a love affair, though there was no overt sexual component. Shelley wrote Hogg twenty-three letters over the thirty-one-day Christmas holiday, when they were separated for the first time. Shelley developed the idea that Hogg should fall in love with Shelley’s sister Elizabeth and talked her up so much that his friend became attracted without even meeting her.
Shelley’s study of Godwin hardened the young man’s belief that any true reform required the destruction of religion. When he and Hogg returned to Oxford after Christmas, they set out to expose the “fraud” of Christianity by writing a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. It got the two friends expelled from Oxford; Shelley borrowed enough money to take them to London. The expulsion caused a breach with his father that never healed. His father wrote a letter about his son to his solicitor, in which he blamed Percy’s trouble on the pernicious influence of Godwin. “He is such a Pupil of Godwin,” he wrote, “that I can scarcely hope he will be persuaded that he owes any sort of obedience or compliance to the wishes or directions of his Parents.”
Refusing his father’s demands to renounce his atheism and to abandon his friend Hogg, Shelley set out to make a living with his pen. One of his first purchases in London was a copy of a poem entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in a shop on Oxford Street. Shelley had never heard of the author, Lord Byron, but was impressed by Byron’s taking poetic revenge on the reviewers who had been harshly critical of his earlier poetry. Shelley read the poem aloud to Hogg and was inspired.
In the spring Shelley went home to try to make peace with his father and family. His uncle interceded for him, and Sir Timothy granted Percy an allowance of two hundred pounds a year. For someone else this might have been adequate, but for Shelley it was never enough; he would spend much of his life trying to avoid financial disaster and keeping ahead of debt collectors. While at Field Place, Shelley again tried to get his favorite sister Elizabeth interested in Hogg. She was not enthusiastic but Percy smuggled Hogg into Field Place, where he hid in Shelley’s bedroom. Nevertheless, Elizabeth still refused to see him. Hogg only got a peep at the girl through the windows of the local church. Such matchmaking efforts were ultimately doomed. Three of Percy’s sisters never married and the fourth, after giving birth to three children, deserted her husband for another man, causing a scandal that had to be settled in the House of Lords.
Hogg went home to York to pursue a legal career, leaving Shelley alone in London. He was plagued by bad dreams and, as he often did in times of stress, started to sleepwalk again. Two of his sisters, Hellen and Mary, went to a boarding school in the city and Shelley often visited them. On one occasion he met their fifteen-year-old friend Harriet Westbrook, who soon became another of Shelley’s hero worshippers. She parroted his opinions on everything, including atheism. Soon Harriet claimed that she was picked on by her teachers and others at the school because of her new, enlightened views. Shelley had found a disciple.
Thomas Peacock, another young author who became Shelley’s friend, said of Westbrook: “Her complexion was beautifully transparent; the tint of the blush rose shining through the lily. The tone of her voice was pleasant; her speech the essence of frankness and cordiality; her spirits always cheerful; the laugh spontaneous, hearty and joyous.” Hellen Shelley thought she looked “quite like a poet’s dream.” Though Percy probably never passionately loved Harriet, the idea of rescuing her from a school where she was being persecuted, and from her overbearing father as well, increased his desire for her. “I was in love with loving,” he later wrote, quoting what was originally a Latin epigram by St. Augustine, “I was looking for something to love, loving to love.” At the same time that he was courting Harriet he wrote to Hogg, “Your noble and exalted friendship, the prosecution of your happiness, can alone engross my impassioned interest.”
Percy had learned from reading Godwin that the institution of marriage was a form of slavery, but changed his mind after reading Amelia Opie’s novel Adeline Mowbray, which Harriet sent to him. The novel, written by a former friend of Mary Wollstonecraft who was now the wife of John Opie (whose portrait of Mary hung in the Godwin home), showed that the problems for a woman who lived with a man and gave birth outside of marriage were far worse than for the man in the relationship. (Ironically, the novel appears to have been roughly based on Mary Wollstonecraft’s own life; life and art constantly intersected for Shelley.) On August 25, Shelley and Harriet, aged nineteen and sixteen respectively, met in London and spent the day hiding in a coffeehouse. They took the night coach to Scotland, where after three days of travel they married.
Because Shelley was low on money, he wrote Hogg, asking him to meet them in Edinburgh. Hogg was enchanted with Shelley’s wife, finding her “radiant with youth, health and beauty.” Shelley departed to attempt to pry more money from his family, and in his absence Hogg made an attempt to seduce Harriet. She turned him down. After Shelley heard of the refusal, he was strangely disturbed because he cared as much about Hogg as Harriet and did not want to lose his friendship. After Hogg left, Shelley wrote to him, “Jealousy has no place in my bosom. I am indeed at times very much inclined to think that the Godwinian plan is best. . . . But Harriet does not think so. She is prejudiced: tho I hope she will not always be so—And on her opinions of right and wrong alone does the morality of the present case depend.” Clearly Shelley would have shared Harriet with Hogg if she had agreed. His second wife would face similar problems.
Joined by Harriet’s sister Eliza, the newlyweds traveled around, trying to find a place to settle. Eliza was twelve years older than Harriet, and Shelley resented her influence on her sister; he referred to Eliza as a “loathsome worm.” Their travels included a stop in the Lake District, where they visited the poet Robert Southey, a flaming radical in his youth, now turned conservative. Shelley had once loved the older man’s poetry but came away unimpressed. They moved on.
Shelley had thought about establishing a community in which people would live according to Godwin’s principles, with the goal of providing an example to guide the world to a higher form of civilization. In early 1812 Shelley and Harriet became part of a commune in Wales; a little later he tried to form his own commune in Lynmouth. Failing at these efforts, he and Harriet went to Dublin, where they distributed in the streets copies of a tract Shelley had written in support of home rule for Ireland. Sometimes Shelley threw the pamphlet into the windows of passing carriages; he knew that the wealthy passengers might not read it, but hoped their sons and daughters might. Next the earnest couple moved to the north coast of Devon, where Shelley tucked into bottles copies of a manifesto titled Declaration of Rights, based on the American and French revolutionary documents, and set them adrift in the sea. A local official found one of the bottles and reported that it appeared “intended to fall into the hands of the Sea-faring part of the People . . . and do incalculable mischief among them.” Shelley seemed to take up almost any popular cause that presented itself: protesting the executions of Yorkshire workmen who had deliberately destroyed spinning machines that put hand laborers out of work; protesting the prison sentences meted out to writer Leigh Hunt and his brother for “libelling” the prince regent in their magazine. The causes and places went by in a blur. All this activity must have been a strain on Harriet, but she loyally stuck by h
er husband through every new enthusiasm.
Even those who sympathized with Shelley sometimes found his radical sentiments a little extreme. His friend Thomas Love Peacock satirized him in his novel Nightmare Abbey as a perpetual do-gooder:
He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world. He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati. . . . As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable elutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conversations in subterranean coves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico dressing gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator.
In January 1812 Shelley was taking laudanum for his nerves, and the medication may have set off a strange episode in which Shelley believed that he had been attacked at his cottage door. A neighbor heard his screams and came running only to find him unconscious and no one else around. Later Shelley played down the incident. The next year Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza were staying in a house in Wales when one night Shelley heard a noise and went downstairs with a pistol. Those upstairs heard a shot and rushed to help. Shelley claimed that a man leaving through a window had fired a pistol at him. Shelley urged his wife and sister-in-law to go back to bed while he and a servant waited up. Around four a.m., while the servant was in another room, more shots rang out. This time Shelley claimed that the same man had fired at him through the window and then fled. Shelley made a sketch of the so-called assassin; it resembled not a human, but a Satanic figure with horns.
Shelley had written some childish poetry, but in 1812 he set out to make his mark on the world through verse. He began working on his first long poem, Queen Mab, which was published the next year. Shelley was not writing to entertain; he saw himself as leading the way to a social revolution that would mirror the political changes of the American and French Revolutions. Shelley boldly declared, “Poets . . . are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and in fact, long after Shelley’s death, the Chartists, a radical movement of working-class Britons, used Queen Mab to educate and inspire their followers.
The poem combined two different traditions; it was both an elaborate allegorical fairy tale and a historical political argument. The poem describes the fairy Queen Mab with her girl pupil Ianthe traveling away from the earth through space in a magic chariot to envision a new organization of society. In more than two thousand lines, Shelley attacks war, the church, monarchy, and the consumption of meat—all in verse. He advocates freedom of speech, dietary reform, repeal of the Act of Union, and Catholic emancipation. Appended to the poem were Shelley’s extensive notes explaining his philosophy more fully.
Queen Mab also attempted to discredit marriage. Though Shelley was a married man and dedicated the poem to Harriet, he shared Godwin’s dim view of the institution. In the notes he wrote: “A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny.” He added, “Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.” Fair warning to Harriet.
While at work on the poem, Shelley wrote a letter to William Godwin, expressing his admiration. “It is now . . . more than two years since first I saw your inestimable book on ‘Political Justice,’” Shelley wrote. “It opened to my mind fresh & more extensive view; it materially influenced my character, and I rose from its perusal a wiser and a better man.” These words, which would warm the heart of any writer, came with an appeal for Godwin to adopt Shelley as his pupil and devoted follower. Godwin, living in near obscurity, was flattered, even though Shelley tactlessly added that he had not written earlier because he thought Godwin was dead. The two men began a correspondence that would be life-changing for both.
In a rash moment, Shelley also offered to help Godwin financially. Godwin would henceforth hold Shelley to his promise even when Shelley himself was in need of funds. Shelley could obtain loans because it was expected that some day he would come into a considerable inheritance, and lenders would advance funds on the agreement that he would repay them afterward. But these financial instruments, known as obit loans, came at huge rates of interest, and Shelley had trouble servicing his debt. At the time, delinquent debtors were not only subject to losing their possessions, but they could also be thrown in jail. Shelley’s kind offer would turn out to be a thorn in the relationship between the two men.
Later in the year Shelley and Harriet came to London and met the Godwins at home for dinner. Harriet noted on the visit that Godwin looked like Socrates, Fanny Imlay was plain but sensible, and the portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft was lovely. Through Godwin, Shelley met John Newton, a vegetarian and health fanatic. Shelley was already a vegetarian, but henceforth he adopted a lifestyle based on Newton’s philosophy that what was “natural” was good. Hogg had earlier complained about his friend’s eating habits: he ignored mealtimes, eating only when he was hungry, and according to Hogg, the poet lived on bread, raisins, nuts, tea, and honey. Later in 1812, Shelley would publish another tract, titled A Vindication of Natural Diet, in which he confidently stated, “There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.”
Percy and Harriet seemed overjoyed by the birth of their first child, a daughter, in June 1813. They named her Ianthe, after the heroine of Queen Mab. Unfortunately, the deterioration in their marriage began with that event. Shelley was distraught when Harriet refused to breastfeed the child, a topic about which he was passionate. One of Shelley’s fantasies was that he could change sex at will, and he went so far as to try to breastfeed the infant himself. When that failed, Peacock recalled, the couple hired “a wet-nurse whom he [Percy] did not like, and [the child] was much looked after by his wife’s sister, whom he intensely disliked. I have often thought that if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if this sister had not lived with them, the link of their married love would not have been so readily broken.”
At the end of July, Shelley, his wife, and their daughter moved into the home of John Newton’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Jean Baptiste Chastel de Boinville, who lived about thirty miles outside London. Her French husband had died during Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Also part of the household were Mrs. de Boinville’s eighteen-year-old daughter Cornelia and her husband, a lawyer who was another devotee of Godwin’s. Percy began taking Italian lessons from Cornelia, and a short-lived romance blossomed. Some months later, Shelley wrote Hogg about his experience:
The contemplation of female excellence is the favorite food of my imagination. . . . I had been unaccustomed to the mildness the intelligence the delicacy of a cultivated female. The presence of Mrs. Boinville & her daughter afforded a strange contrast to my former friendless & deplorable condition. . . . I saw the full extent of the calamity which my rash & heartless union with Harriet . . . had produced.
Nonetheless, in March of 1814, Shelley agreed to go through a second marriage ceremony with Harriet. The event may have come at the insistence of Harriet’s family, because they feared that her age at the time of the first wedding might make the union technically illegal and thus threaten the legitimacy of their child, along with her right to inherit the Shelley fortune. Harriet conceived another baby, but the relationship had lost its zest for Percy. He blamed many of their problems on Harriet’s sister Eliza, who doted on Ianthe. But in his mind Harriet was to blame too. She had given up their former practice of reading books aloud to each other, and it seemed to Percy that her efforts to improve her intellectual talents were slackening. Nor was she as devoted a disciple of his social ideas as she had been. She
lley wrote that it was only “duty” that was keeping the marriage together, and in a letter to Hogg, he identified himself with the poet John Milton, whose words he echoed: “a dead & living body had been linked together in loathsome & horrible communion.”
The couple separated in March 1814, with Harriet and Eliza taking Ianthe to the west country of England. By the time Harriet and Percy’s son, Charles, was born in November of 1814, the separation was permanent. Shelley had met someone else: Mary Godwin.
The relationship with Harriet set a pattern for Percy’s later loves. He combined sexual ambiguity with a sense of omnisexuality. For him there were no limits. “I go on till I am stopped,” he later told a friend, “and I am never stopped.” He was not faithful in his first marriage, and he would not be in his second either.
Mary had originally met Percy on November 11, 1812, when he, his wife, and Eliza were visiting Godwin; the encounter seemed to make little impression on any of those present. By the time they met again, on May 5, 1814, her father and Shelley had become good friends, and indeed Godwin was by now financially dependent on the young poet. Since her return from Scotland, Mary had heard only good things about Shelley. On his part, now that his separation from Harriet had taken place, Shelley saw Mary with new eyes. He was immediately attracted to her because of her beauty, intellect, name, and personality. “The originality & loveliness of Mary’s character was apparent to me from her very motions & tones of voice. . . . Her smile, how persuasive it was & how pathetic!” he wrote. Mary had a high, smooth brow, dazzling fair skin, light brown hair, and large hazel eyes. She was then sixteen, the same age as Harriet had been at the time she and Shelley had wed.
Shelley recognized in Mary the “woman-symbol of intellectual beauty” that he sought. Yet he was torn between his feelings and loyalties. Thomas Love Peacock saw him frequently at this time and noted the poet’s agony. Peacock called his state of mind “suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.” He remembered Shelley as being in a mad state, his hair and clothes disordered and his eyes bloodshot as he clutched his bottle of laudanum for security. But Mary’s allure won out over Shelley’s doubts.
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