The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  Even in these pleasant vacation spots, Shelley could not stay put for long. He went off to London to consult with doctors about his illnesses, which now included a serious abdominal complaint. He told Mary that while he was away he would look for a house where the two of them could live. That left Mary stranded in Clifton, a town near the seaport of Bristol, alone and pregnant (not to mention unmarried, though Shelley introduced her as “Mrs. Shelley” to avoid controversy). Mary constantly feared that he might be with Claire, for Lynmouth was not too far away.

  Mary wrote Shelley a letter that shows how disturbed she was at this time; the tone veers between desperation and cuteness. “We ought not to be absent any longer indeed we ought not—I am not happy at it,” she began,

  when I retire to my room no sweet Love—after dinner no Shelley. . . .

  Pray is Clary with you? for I have enquired several times . . . but seriously it would not in the least surprise me if you have written to her from London & let her know that you are there without me. . . .

  Tomorrow is the 28th of July [the anniversary of their elopement]— dearest ought we not to have been together on that day—indeed we ought my love. . . . Your Pecksie is a good girl & is quite well now again—except a headach[e] when she waits so a[n]xiously for her loves letters—dearest best Shelley pray come to me.

  Mary knew that Shelley had abandoned Harriet even though she was his legal wife. She had only faith that her erratic lover would not repeat the scene with her. Nevertheless, Shelley did return to Mary by the end of the week. He had good news: Dr. William Lawrence, the eminent surgeon, had assured him that he need not worry. Shelley did not have consumption, nor was he on the edge of death.

  That out of the way, it was time to move again. In August, Shelley found a place for the two of them to live near Windsor, west of London. It was a two-story house of red brick with a garden for Mary. There the summer and fall passed quite peacefully. It was the longest time in their relationship that they lived as a couple, with no additional members of the household. Thomas Peacock, who lived close by, was a regular visitor, and at the end of August he and Mary’s stepbrother, Charles Clairmont, joined the lovers for a trip along the Thames. Shelley, as always entranced by water, proposed they row a boat up the river to its source. While the men rowed, Mary enjoyed the lovely scenery along the winding banks.

  When the group reached Oxford, they disembarked so Shelley could show them his former rooms and the Bodleian Library. As Charles wrote to Claire in a letter about the trip, they saw “the very rooms where the two most noted infidels, Shelley and Hogg . . . pored, with the incessant . . . application of an alchemyst, over the artificial and natural boundaries of human knowledge.”

  The trip was a productive one for Shelley; the relief from anxiety over bill collectors, ill health, and quarrels between Mary and Claire prompted a surge of poetic works. Charles reported to Claire, “We have all felt the good effects of this jaunt; but in Shelley the change is quite remarkable; he has now the ruddy healthy complexion of the Autumn upon his countenance, & he is twice as fat as he used to be.” Perhaps the real reason for Shelley’s newly robust appearance was that Peacock had persuaded him to give up his vegetarian diet and eat some pork chops.

  Mary gave birth to a son on January 24, 1816, finally able to give her father the gift she herself was supposed to have been. She named the child William, hoping that would soften her father’s heart and persuade him to resume their relationship. Shelley wrote sarcastically to Godwin that it would make Fanny and Mrs. Godwin happy to know that Mary had given birth to a son and that both mother and child were healthy. Despite this, Godwin was not reconciled with his daughter, though for that day he noted in his journal, “William, nepos, born.”

  Mary’s son proved to be healthy, and at long last she had a home where she did not have to share Shelley with anyone else. Such happiness could not last—and it didn’t. Shelley funded a scheme that had sent Charles Clairmont and Claire off to Ireland to start a business. That did not pan out, and early in 1816, Claire had returned to London, where she finally was able to move back into the Skinner Street residence of the Godwins. Shelley’s legal battles over his will and the settlement with Harriet frequently took him to London as well. Mary fretted that he and Claire would resume their relationship, and Mary knew by this time that she did not want to share Shelley any more than she had wanted to share her father’s love.

  Claire, however, was about to make a literary catch of her own. She had written a letter to a man whose very presence, it was said, could make respectable women faint. It was Claire’s ambition not just to meet Lord Byron, but to become his lover.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN EUROPE

  She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

  Thus mellow’d to that tender light

  Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

  —“She Walks in Beauty,” Lord Byron, 1815

  WHEN LORD BYRON WROTE these famous lines, his inspiration was the sight of his lovely female cousin at a party in London, but he might as well have been describing himself. Byron was a legend in his own time, renowned as much for his physical beauty as for his poetry. He personified the Romantic movement, turning his own life and obsessions into art, just as his life became a topic of rumor and gossip throughout Europe and America. Byron became famous just as mass-market publications and mass-produced copperplate images were starting to appear. Through them, he became the first international celebrity.

  At all times and places, beauty has been an asset, and Byron made the most of his striking features. Few who met him escaped his spell. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, described him in 1816, when Byron was twenty-eight: “so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw—his eyes the open portals of the sun.” The French author Stendhal, who saw him in Milan later that same year, remembered, “I was struck with Lord Byron’s eyes. . . . I never in my life saw any thing more beautiful or more expressive. Even now, when I think of the expression which a great painter should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent head.” Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin met Byron five years later and wrote: “His . . . lips and chin had that curved and definite outline which distinguishes Grecian beauty. His forehead was high, and his temples broad; and he had a paleness in his complexion, almost to wanness. . . . [His eyes] were of a greyish brown, but of a peculiar clearness, and when animated possessed a fire which seemed to look through and penetrate the thoughts of others.” Caroline Lamb, who lost her dignity, reputation, and finally her sanity over Byron, summed up his allure for women: “That beautiful pale face is my fate.”

  Byron worked hard to maintain his looks. He adopted a special way of walking on his toes to increase his height (5'8") and to conceal the limp that resulted from a congenital birth defect. Careful to preserve his teeth, he used a special powder to brush them and had it sent to him whenever he left England. He wore gloves, even when indoors, to preserve the white skin of his notably small and shapely hands; he habitually wrote after midnight and slept through the morning to avoid exposure to sunlight. He was very proud of his soft chestnut hair. Scrope Davies, a close friend, once entered Byron’s bedroom to catch him fast asleep wearing hair curl papers. Davies awoke him with the cry: “Sleeping Beauty!” Byron exploded into rage and Davies explained that he thought his hair curled naturally. “Yes, naturally every night,” replied the poet; “but do not, my dear Scrope, let the cat out of the bag, for I am as vain of my curls as a girl of sixteen.”

  Byron continually exercised and dieted, and may even have been anorexic. He followed a lifelong regimen that alternated between binge eating and crash diets, for when he let himself go, he gained weight quickly. He measured his waist and wrists each morning and if he was not satisfied he would immediately take Epsom salts and a variety of patent medicines
intended to purge him—the diet pills of the day. Along with his weight, his energy cycles varied from manic highs to moods of depression and paranoia. When he was in one of his lethargic periods he became “bloated and sallow,” his knuckles “lost in fat.” Reaching a manic period, he would become obsessed with his weight, eating nothing but vinegar, water, and a bit of rice. At a dinner party when he exasperated the hostess by refusing to eat the prepared meal, he was asked what he did eat and he replied: “Nothing but hard biscuits and soda water.” Byron’s weight obsession continued throughout his life. Not long before he died, he explained to a doctor in Greece: “I especially dread, in this world, two things, to which I have reason to believe I am equally predisposed—growing fat and growing mad; and it would be difficult for me to decide, were I forced to make a choice, which of these conditions I would choose in preference.”

  The one flaw in his physical perfection was his deformed foot. As a child he suffered agonies caused by devices intended to straighten it. (Some have described it as a club foot, but Byron’s bootmaker claimed that the defect was that one foot was an inch and a half larger than the other and his ankles were very weak, which caused the foot to turn out too much.) Byron wore a very close-fitting, thin boot that he laced tightly for support. The calf of one leg was also weaker than the other, so he always wore long pants even when swimming. Thomas Medwin once mused that it might have been “a cloven foot.”

  Indeed, the defective foot affected Byron’s gait only slightly, but because so much concern had been shown over it when he was young, its greatest effect was on Byron’s sense of himself. He regarded it as the mark of Cain, one of his favorite Biblical characters and the subject of one of his great poems. He felt deeply ashamed of what he considered to be his lameness. Seated or standing, he always made an effort to conceal the flaw. At parties, he looked for a place to stand where he could hide the base of his leg behind a curtain or tablecloth. In his full-length portraits, the foot is always in shadows. When his lifelong friend John Cam Hobhouse was visiting him in Italy, Byron abruptly accused him of looking at his foot. Hobhouse replied: “My dear Byron, nobody thinks of or looks at anything but your head.”

  The “deformity” was one reason Byron saw himself as an outsider, and why he pushed himself so hard. Byron drove himself to excel in such sports as swimming, boxing, riding, and shooting—and of course lovemaking. He expressed the link between his lameness and his greatness in a poem:

  Deformity is daring.

  It is its essence to o’ertake mankind

  By heart and soul, and make itself the equal —

  Ay, the superior of the rest.

  The poet he claimed to admire most was Alexander Pope, a hunchback.

  Byron noted that he had developed sexually at a young age: “My passions were developed very early—so early—that few would believe me—if I were to state the period—and the facts which accompanied it,” he once told a friend. Byron thought that these early sexual experiences had deprived him of an ordinary childhood, pushing him into premature aging. Later in life, he linked this precocious sexuality with his tendency to melancholy and depression.

  Those childhood sexual experiences were both platonic and physical. When Byron was about seven and living in Aberdeen with his mother, he felt an intense love for his equally young cousin Mary Duff. “I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness. . . . How the deuce did all this occur so early?” he wrote in his journal in 1813. “I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever really been attached since.” Later when he heard of Mary’s marriage to another, it “was like a thunder-stroke—it nearly choked me.”

  As to physical experience, Byron had been aroused as a young boy by a maid named May Gray. He told a friend she “used to come to bed with him and play tricks with his person.” This behavior continued for two years until his mother found out and Gray was sacked. The experience warped Byron’s feelings about women, often causing him to see them as nothing but sex objects. He later described his attitude: “Now my beau ideal would be a woman with talent enough to be able to understand and value mine, but not sufficient to be able to shine herself. All men with pretensions desire this, though few, if any, have courage to avow it.”

  Byron knew that he was a bisexual although there was no such word then (Coleridge coined it in the year of Byron’s death), and the penalty for homosexual behavior was harsh. Indeed, convictions for sodomy could be punished with a death sentence. Though youthful experimentation with other boys was acceptable, adult homosexuality was not. Sodomy—defined as anal penetration and emission—was difficult to prove, but “assault with attempt to commit sodomy” was easier. Those convicted were exposed in the public pillory, where some were stoned to death by gawking crowds or pelted with mud and excrement. The new level of intolerance had led some homosexuals to flee England. One such was William Beckford, author of the Gothic novel Vathek, a favorite book of Byron’s. The strong homophobia of the times made Byron’s mixed feelings about his attraction to boys understandable.

  The hero of Byron’s poems was often an aristocrat haunted by sins of the past. That image came not only from his own life but from the tales of his ancestors on both sides. Their wild background, of which Byron was proud, dated back to the Norman Conquest. The Byruns, as the family name was spelled then, claimed they had come over with William the Conqueror in 1066 and their name is listed in the Domesday Book. Newstead Abbey, Byron’s home in Nottinghamshire, came to the family during Tudor times after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and distributed their lands among those faithful to him.

  The poet’s grandfather John Byron, nicknamed “Foulweather Jack” for his ability to attract storms, was a vice admiral in the Royal Navy. After being shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia, he survived by eating his dog, including the skin and paws. Later he was put in charge of an exploring expedition, but luck was still not with him, for he managed to circumnavigate the globe without finding a single new island. During the American Revolution, his bad luck caused a storm to blow up during a naval battle against French ships in the West Indies. His assignment ended in utter failure and he was relieved of his command.

  Like his son and grandson, Foulweather Jack was a rake. His escapades with a chambermaid found their way into the scandal sheets of the time. When he died, the noble title and the estate passed to the poet’s great-uncle William, known as the “Wicked Lord.” William married an heiress and ran through her fortune; supposedly he was in the habit of throwing her into a lake on the estate when she displeased him. He murdered his cousin and neighbor William Chaworth; the event was so notorious that those who wanted to attend his trial had to purchase tickets. William was found guilty of manslaughter but set free. He spent much of his later years in isolation with his trained crickets, who reportedly left the crannies of the walls of Newstead Abbey on his command. At his death, the estate showed the signs of long neglect: its once-famous oaks had been cut down and the manor house was a wreck.

  The poet’s father —“Mad Jack,” he was called—was also notorious. As a young Captain of the Guards, he had carried on a love affair with the married Marchioness of Carmarthen. They ran off together and wed after her husband divorced her. She died soon after, giving birth to a daughter named Augusta, who would become notorious as Byron’s half sister—and lover. Mad Jack didn’t have time to grieve for long, for with his wife’s death, her (and his) annual income of four thousand pounds ended as well. He headed for Bath, the marriage-market of the day, looking for an heiress. Mad Jack’s son would note that he was “a very handsome man, which goes a great way.” To pay for his gambling debts, Jack was said to have charged wealthy women for his sexual services.

  At Bath, Catherine Gordon, though she was fat, loud, and gawky, attracted his attention—as well she should have, for she was sole heiress to a large fortune. The Gor
dons held the estate of Gight in northern Scotland near Aberdeen. This noble family traced their lineage back to James I, king of Scotland from 1406 to 1437. The Gordons had produced a succession of Scottish lairds known for their violence and cunning until the last two generations, whose members suffered from melancholia. Catherine’s father and grandfather had both committed suicide by drowning themselves. Jack had no trouble getting Catherine to fall in love with him, and they were married a few months later, in 1785. Nor did Jack have much difficulty running through her fortune, for he led an extravagant life and gambling was one of his many pleasures. With no parents to safeguard her, Catherine soon lost her castle, her wealth, and then her husband too.

  All that Mad Jack left her was a son, born George Gordon Byron on January 22, 1788. He was born with a caul, a membrane over his head, which is often regarded as a positive omen. As part of the old superstition, the caul was kept for good luck, and later was sold to John Hanson, the family lawyer, who gave it to his brother, a captain in the Royal Navy. If it held any luck, Captain Hanson did not benefit, for his ship sank, leaving only one survivor (not Hanson).

  Nor did the caul seem to presage good fortune for the infant, for young George’s deformed foot indicated, at least to his father, that he would never walk. Byron later blamed the deformity on the fact that his mother had kept her corset tightly laced during her pregnancy. Though that couldn’t have been the source of the problem, it did affect his feelings toward her. Meanwhile Mad Jack went to France, where he took up with his half-sister Fanny in an incestuous relationship that Jack’s son would later imitate. Incest seemed truly to be a family affair for the Byrons.