‡ By a judgment given on 27 March, neither the Westbrooks nor Shelley were to have custody; instead, they were each to submit nominees for the children’s guardianship, and to present plans for their future education which would be duly examined by a Master in Chancery. The children were, effectively, to be orphaned to protect them from being brought up by a father whose religious views were judged likely to damage them. It was almost unheard of at that time for a father not to be awarded custody, whatever his reputation. Shelley’s outrage and bitterness seem less excessive in this context. He did not, however, make any attempt to exercise the visiting rights which he was granted and he had shown no wish to be in touch with the children in the period between Charles’s birth in the autumn of 1814 and Harriet’s death two years later.
§ Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson)’s success is confirmed by the fact that she was offered £1,200, a huge sum for a book at that time, for her next work, Florence Macarthy, published in 1818.
¶ Shelley had been devastated by the news in March that he was to be denied custody of his children. The August verdict confirmed this and went further, refusing guardianship to Mr Longdill, the friendly lawyer who had been proposed by Shelley. His second choice, however, Dr Thomas Hume, was approved on 28 April 1818 and confirmed on 25 July.
|| Despite Mary’s anxious care for their possessions, a large quantity of letters were lost, destroyed, or possibly sold by their landlord in the years after they left Marlow.
** Alba was baptized at Byron’s request; the baptisms of William and Clara were undertaken to secure their legitimate status at a time when their parents were full of fears about the Lord Chancellor’s seemingly malevolent attitude to Shelley’s children.
PART III
Italy
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JOYS AND LOSSES
1818
On the beach of a northern sea
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once a wretch there lay to sleep,
Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones …
Shelley, ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’ (1818)
SITTING ALONE AT MARLOW IN EARLY FEBRUARY WHILE THEIR possessions were stowed away in packing cases, Mary read not only Scott’s Rob Roy but three of Byron’s most wildly romantic works, Lara, The Corsair and The Giaour. It was not easy to imagine their author as a doting father: Mary, who had spent most of the autumn of 1817 urging Shelley to persuade Byron to undertake the care of his baby daughter, must have suffered at least a few moments of unease. Crossing the gloomily impressive mountain pass which separated France from Switzerland at the end of March 1818, the travellers stopped at Chambéry, where Elise Duvillard’s family had come to meet them. Here, she found reassurance. Aimée, Elise’s little illegitimate daughter, seemed a happy, thriving child, quite unaffected by the fact that she was being brought up without a mother’s love.1 It had, in any event, occurred to none of their party that Claire would be separated entirely from her little girl. They imagined that Byron might wish to spend the summer with them at some pleasant villa of their choice. After that, they supposed, Claire would be offered an arrangement by which the newly named Allegra would spend time with both her parents, if not under the same roof. It was, Mary reassured herself, all for the best.
The alpine ascent began on 28 March, the day after their meeting with Elise’s family. Less pious than most travellers of the time, the Shelleys thanked Napoleon rather than God for the splendid road which took them over the top of Mont Cenis without mishap, despite the fact that the passes were thick with snow. Shelley, Claire noted, sang all the way up, while inviting them to see the snowy mountains as God’s own troop of ballet-dancers. The Jungfrau’s name and elegant line made it, he announced, the celestial equivalent to Mademoiselle Milanie, most charming of all the young dancers they had seen in London that winter.2
On 30 March, they left the domain of the King of Sardinia – crisply renamed ‘King of the Anchovies’ three years later in a best-selling guide to Italy by the fearlessly outspoken Lady Morgan – for that of the Emperor of Austria, ruler of Lombardy and Venetia. Italy, as Metternich commented in 1849, had become an empty title, a mere geographical expression. Following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, it had reverted to its old complexity, a patchwork of duchies, kingdoms and states, each of them tightly protected by border controls and each employing spies to maintain detailed notes on all foreign visitors and their political activities.
Having so far suffered only the minor irritation of a temporary confiscation of the works of Rousseau and Voltaire from Shelley’s collection of books at the French border, the travellers had no political axes to grind. Safely arrived at Milan, Mary sat down to write an ecstatic letter to the Hunts. Everything, in comparison to ‘wretched’ France, was perfect. Even the peasants’ carts were pulled by ‘the most beautiful oxen I ever saw’. The inns were excellent, the bread ‘the finest and whitest in the world’. Mary had, she admitted, been astonished by the way an opera audience at Turin had chattered from beginning to end of the performance; she was sadly disappointed by the drab bonnets and pelisses worn to the opera at La Scala, but then, the boxes were so elegant, the pit a bargain at eighteen pence a seat and the ballet of Othello ‘infinitely magnificent’, with dancing finer than they had ever seen in London. The children, ‘the chicks’, were all well, and Shelley’s health ‘infinitely improved’. ‘I like this town,’ she added; they were planning to spend the whole of the summer nearby, on Lake Como. She had not sounded so happy since the visit to Geneva.3
Anticipating Byron’s arrival to collect his daughter and renew their friendship, Shelley and Mary went off alone together to Lake Como to seek a house beautiful enough to tempt him into a long visit. The three days they spent there – for the first time since leaving England, free of nurses, and children, and Claire – left Mary with an impression of almost unearthly serenity Revisiting the lake more than twenty years later, she lost herself again in the beauty of the scenery and in a wistful certainty that this, if anywhere, was the spot to which Shelley’s spirit might have returned. Writing her third novel, The Last Man, in 1824–5, she remembered the house with which they fell in love, standing above the lake on a hillside thick with sweet-scented myrtle and tall cypresses.
Ten miles from Como … was a villa called the Pliniana … Two large halls, hung with splendid tapestry, and paved with marble, opened on each side of a court, of whose two other sides one overlooked the deep dark lake, and the other was bounded by a mountain, from whose stony side gushed, with roar and splash, the celebrated fountain … If some kind spirit had whispered forgetfulness to us, methinks we should have been happy here.4
There was a thunderstorm over the lake just before they left, reminding them of the nights of storytelling and scientific speculation with Byron at the Villa Diodati. The Pliniana would, they were sure, appeal as much to his imagination as to their own. After making inquiries about renting the villa, they returned to Milan, where Shelley wrote Byron a long friendly letter, urging him to come and spend part of the summer with them on the lake.
Shelley’s first Italian letter never reached Byron; this one brought a chilling response. It seemed that he had no intention of coming to stay and no great wish to see them. A messenger was being sent to collect Allegra. Claire must understand that all contact with her child would then come to an end. (Byron’s sudden proprietorial attitude to Allegra had been strengthened by learning that he had no chance of gaining custody of Ada, his only legitimate child.) On 22 April, the messenger, Mr Merriweather, an English shopkeeper working in Venice, arrived; panic-stricken, Claire announced that Allegra was ill and could not leave. Shelley, who had heard local talk of Byron’s disreputable life in Venice, now saw nothing ahead but sadness for everybody. It would, he told Claire, be far better if they ignored their friend’s commands and continued to look after the child as part of their own family.
This idea may have appealed to Clai
re; it horrified Mary. It was at this point that she intervened. Initially, they had agreed that Allegra should travel on to Venice with young Milly Shields; Mary now proposed to exchange Milly for Elise. Older (she was twenty-three), better-educated and more capable, Elise would be a reliable correspondent on the little girl’s welfare and a bulwark against whatever depravities Venice had to offer. Allegra would be safe with her.
Claire, to Mary’s relief, took the bait. On 26 April, the day before her birthday, she wrote Byron a heartbroken letter in a pathetic blotched scrawl, begging him to treat Allegra with all the affection of which she felt him to be capable, introducing him to Elise as ‘the most eligible person we could procure … a mother herself’, and begging for sympathy in the sacrifice she was about to make.
I love her with a passion that almost destroys my being she goes from me. My dear Lord Byron I most truly love my child. she never checked me – she loves me she stretches out her arms to me & cooes for joy when I take her … I assure you I have wept so much to night that now my eyes seem to drop hot & burning blood.5
On 28 April, Allegra, Elise and Mr Merriweather set off for Venice.
Perhaps it was as well that Byron had resisted their invitation; it transpired that the lovely Villa Pliniana was not, after all, available. With no fixed plans other than to visit the glorious cities – Florence, Rome, Naples – of which they had heard the most, the Shelleys, Claire and Milly Shields left Milan on 1 May and made a leisurely journey down to Pisa. A pretty university town flanking the Arno, it had recently fallen into economic decline. The population had dropped from a hundred thousand to a mere sixteen thousand; the cobbled streets were thick with grass. Mary dutifully clambered up the 224 steps of the leaning tower to look down on the Piazza dei Miracoli, but she could take no pleasure in a city which set chained gangs of prisoners to the task of street-cleaning. Weeding out the grass was not in itself taxing work; it was the chains and the inescapable analogy to slave labour which were disturbing. Similar scenes in Rome would gradually immunize Mary’s social conscience; newly arrived, she was overcome by disgust. Claire, however, took comfort from Elise’s letter reporting their safe arrival at Byron’s Venetian home. Allegra had been kindly received: ‘they dress her in little trousers trimmed with lace & treat her like a little princess‚’ Mary told the Hunts.6 Byron, moreover, had deigned to scribble a few lines at the bottom of Elise’s letter. Unhappy though she was, Claire was consoled by the thought that she might, after all, be allowed to see her daughter before too long.
Instead of waiting at Pisa to call on Lady Mountcashell, who as Mrs Mason now lived quietly on the edge of town with Mr Tighe and their two daughters, the travellers moved on to Livorno, an hour’s drive down the coast. It was ‘a stupid town’, Mary noted on 9 May, unimpressed by the cosmopolitan port’s broad streets and handsome piazzas. But they had not come here for culture. Armed with a letter from Godwin which skirted his daughter’s scandalous history to describe her as a respectable married lady on her travels, Mary was hoping to receive a call from the woman who had been on hand to help care for her in the first weeks of her life and who had known both her parents.
She was not disappointed. Maria Gisborne, the former Mrs Reveley, called at their inn soon after receiving Godwin’s letter and his daughter’s covering note: ‘she is reserved yet with easy manners,’ Mary recorded in approving tones. They spent much of the following day with her; walking out along the sea-wall in the evening, Mary met Mrs Gisborne again and coaxed her into ‘a long conversation about My Father and Mother’.
Shelley liked this quietly cultivated woman for being a democrat and an atheist; Mary admired the wide range of her accomplishments. A proficient linguist – she taught Shelley Spanish at a later date – and a sensitive and accomplished musician, Mrs Gisborne was also a skilled artist. Her greater attraction, in Mary’s eyes, was her connection to the past. Here was a woman who would have made an ideal stepmother; it was hard to look graciously on John Gisborne, the man for whom William Godwin had been displaced.
Large nosed, thin lipped and with an unfortunately adenoidal voice, Maria’s husband was slow to win the Shelleys’ affection, although Mary acknowledged that there might be more to him than she had supposed when he let her borrow and copy his own transcription of the thrillingly horrifying history of Beatrice Cenci, the young girl who murdered her incestuous father and was executed for the crime in 1599. Both Mary and Shelley preferred the company of Henry Reveley, the mild thirty-year-old son of Mrs Gisborne’s first marriage. One reason, of course, was that Henry belonged to the Eden of Mary’s earliest years: he could still remember playing with Fanny in the hayfields behind the Polygon. Another was that, in contrast to the somewhat stuffy society of the Gisbornes’ English friends – one, Mr Beilby, was pompously delighted to discover ‘an anachronism in the allusion to the tea-tables of Petersfield’ in Godwin’s Mandeville7 – Henry was a man of the future. Mr Gisborne’s career as a merchant had not flourished; Henry hoped to make the family rich by his schemes for a steam engine which, he believed, could be used to power a boat. It was not an impossible dream; steamships had been plying between Liverpool and Glasgow since 1815. Henry Reveley had noticed the difficulty and slowness of transporting cargo along the coast from Livorno to Genoa; he dreamed of powering a boat big enough to carry goods between Italy and France. It was three weeks before he could be persuaded to show his engine off to the visitors; Shelley, a believer in the transforming benefits of science, was entranced. Mary, noting that Mrs Gisborne was a devoted but overprotective mother, hoped that success would bring Henry a little necessary independence. Sadly, investment in this potentially lucrative venture turned out to be one of Shelley’s most expensive mistakes.
Shortly before their visit to inspect Henry Reveley’s engine, Shelley had found himself and his companions a more rural retreat. Two weeks later, on 10 June, they said their goodbyes to the Gisbornes, while begging them to visit their new home at Bagni di Lucca, a pretty little spa sixty miles to the north, closely wrapped in the wooded folds of a mountain landscape. Casa Bertini, the house which Shelley had rented for the summer of 1818, stood beside the oldest of the marble hot baths and the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s disused chapel at the top of a steep and twisting cobbled street. Cool shadowed rooms, filled, to Mary’s relief, with sturdy new furniture, opened behind on to a long rectangle of grass terminating in a dense hedge of laurels. The river Serchio, far below, was shut out of sight; visible from every window and filling the air with a scent rich as jasmine, were the sweet chestnut woods which climbed to the top of the surrounding hills.
For the first two weeks they had the place almost to themselves; towards the end of June, the lower part of the town became a throng of fashionable English, queuing up to make the acquaintance of the Bagni’s most illustrious visitor, Princess Pauline Bonaparte. Balls and elegant promenades became the order of the day; Shelley escorted Mary and Claire down to watch waltzes and quadrilles in the pretty old casino (the Italian equivalent of the English assembly room); to his disappointment, they grew shy and refused to take part. Mary, eager to practise her Italian, was scornful of the English colony’s refusal or inability to speak any language but their own; she did, however, sympathize with their dislike for being carted about in sedan chairs, Italian style. Bagni di Lucca had a large and splendid riding-stable and the Shelleys made good use of it. Mrs Gisborne, who had no doubt formed a fairly clear view of Mary’s affection for her stepsister, probably smiled when Mary informed her that poor Claire had taken a tumble from the saddle and hurt her knee, ‘so as to knock her up for some time’.8 When Shelley decided on an adventurous five-mile ride up into the Apennines, to the famously beautiful Prato Fiorito, Mary rode alongside him while Claire crossly nursed her leg at the villa. Claire, as the journals show, was singularly tactless in her assumption that, wherever Mary and Shelley went, she, like Mary’s unloved little lamb, must also go.
The household was easy to run. They had Milly Shie
lds to supervise the children, a woman to wash clothes and scrub floors and, in Paolo Foggi, a helpful factotum who was also willing to cook and, Mary ruefully became aware, to cheat them at every possible opportunity.* Shelley wrote in the garden or wandered up into the woods to read beside a clear pool in which, with nobody around to complain, he bathed naked; Mary divided her time between an intensive reading schedule (it included Horace, Gibbon, Virgil, Livy, the plays of Ben Jonson and a second reading of Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam) and long, delightful walks: ‘I like nothing so much as to be surrounded by the foliage of trees only peeping now and then through the leafy screen on the scene about me,’ she told Mrs Gisborne.9 Unlike her husband, who was overwhelmed with homesickness when he read Peacock’s accounts of evening strolls in the Marlow woods, Mary was wholly under the spell of her new surroundings.
Reports filtering through Peacock’s letters to Shelley confirmed that Frankenstein, if not universally admired and praised, was certainly being discussed. Cheered by Scott’s discerning review and encouraged by Shelley, Mary began casting about for a new subject. Her father, made fonder by absence, sent Shelley a friendly letter in which he outlined a project he thought perfect for his scholarly daughter, a collection of short histories of leaders of the Commonwealth established by Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I. Background reading, he thoughtfully added, would not be hard; only a few reference books would be needed.10 Godwin’s suggestion showed a shrewd appreciation of where Mary’s greatest skill lay; years later, some of her best work took the form of concise, well-informed biographical essays. Shelley, unfortunately, had other plans in mind. Twenty years later, Mary recalled that he had urged her to write a tragic drama; ‘he conceived that I had some dramatic talent, and he was always most earnest and energetic in his exhortations that I should cultivate any talent I possessed, to the utmost.’11 At the end of the summer, he was still pressing her to begin writing a play about Charles I; in 1821, he took over the project. Godwin, meanwhile, decided to write a History of the Commonwealth himself.
Mary Shelley Page 30