Certainly, by mid-May, there was trouble afoot. Paolo Foggi had turned up. A letter from Mary to Mrs Gisborne, written on 18 June, told her that they had been forced to go to lawyers in Livorno because of ‘an infamous conspiracy against us’ and that Paolo had played a part in it. ‘That same Paolo is a most superlative rascal,’ she added: ‘I hope we have done with him.’ No evidence has been found of the nature of the conspiracy, but it seems likely that it related to Elena Adelaide. Foggi may not have known everything, but he knew enough to cause trouble and to ask for money; after his abrupt eviction from Livorno, Shelley, Mary and Claire took refuge from gossip in the absent Gisbornes’ villa, Casa Ricci, on the outskirts of the town. ‘Nay here we are we have taken possession’ – Mary informed their friends with a touch of embarrassment at having moved into their home without invitation or warning. ‘What do you say?’37
Two weeks later, Mrs Gisborne heard from Shelley that his mysterious little charge would be coming to live with them as soon as she recovered from a mild fever. Fortunately, perhaps, Mary was never put to this final test of her loyalty. The baby died in Naples on 10 June.
*
‘Babe unwell – We are unhappy & discontented,’ Mary noted a week later, on 17 June. She laid the blame for Percy’s illness on her own milk, affected by the troubles Paolo had brought to their door. Shelley, enraged by yet another demand for money from his father-in-law, preferred to blame Godwin. On 7 August, he told Godwin that he had received Mary’s permission to intercept any letters which might contain upsetting news. The tone is slightly uncomfortable; how freely, one wonders, had Mary given away the right to read her own mail? Had Shelley simply made a decision and decided to act upon it, without asking his wife? He was capable of such high-handed behaviour and Mary later expressed concern and puzzlement at the paucity of letters from her father.
The situation with Paolo Foggi, worries over Allegra and the continuing anxiety about her father all played their part in disturbing her. But the prime cause was in the house.
Among a series of terse entries in her journal, Mary had noted 8 June to be ‘A better day than most days’ for the reason that Claire went off on a trip. On 25 June, she wrote that she had been ‘too much oppressed & too languid to do anything’. Her letters recorded savage squabbles among the servants in unusual, almost obsessive detail as she watched their quarrels reflect her own. ‘Heigh ho the Clare & the Ma[ie] / Find something to fight about every day,’ noted Claire on 4 July. Shelley, writing to Mrs Gisborne on 20 July as they prepared to move to a new summer house, enlisted her sympathy for Claire (‘Poor thing! She is an excellent girl …’), while regretting that Mary had not the wisdom of a woman of forty-five, or even of her husband ‘as misfortune has made me. She would then live on very good terms with Clare.’38 Still unable to accept that it was high time for Claire to leave, he tried to sweeten Mary’s mood and encourage her into good spirits: ‘What Mary is when she a little smiles / I cannot even tell or call to mind, / It is a miracle so new, so rare,’ he wrote in a graceful adaptation from Dante’s Vita Nuova.
Mrs Mason had formed her own view of this uneasy triangle when the Shelleys were living in Pisa. Drawn to Claire, for whom she became the kind of mother-figure that Mrs Gisborne had already made herself to Mary, she found her own solution to their problem. In July, Claire was invited to visit Casa Silva by herself for a few days. She went there again on 21 August and, on Vaccà’s advice, was lodged at Livorno to see if bathing would benefit a swollen thyroid gland which he had diagnosed as tubercular – and which she had airily dismissed, announcing that if she was scrofulous (tubercular), then he was ridiculous. Mrs Mason took advantage of Claire’s absence to make arrangements for her to live as a paying guest in the Florentine home of Dr Antonio Boiti, physician to the amiable and enlightened Grand-Duke Ferdinand III of Lorena. Through Boiti and his German wife, Claire could acquire a new language while teaching English to their children; with German and French, she could become a governess and start a new life, independent of Shelley and her stepsister.
Neither Claire nor Shelley were happy about this arrangement, but the need for a change was recognized. By the end of the summer, Mary could dare to hope that she was free of her stepsister. After five years of a shared life, it was an agreeable prospect.
Notes
1. MWS–MH, 29.6.1819.
2. CC–Byron, 16.3.1820.
3. Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield, in Shelley’s Guitar (Bodleian exhibition guide, 1992), p. 118, gives a detailed account of this poem’s appearance. Being a pencil draft with some ink insertions, it is extremely faint; the last line was only recovered (by Judith Chernaik) and printed in 1972.
4. Byron, amused by the caricature of himself as Mr Cypress in Nightmare Abbey, sent Peacock a gold locket as acknowledgment.
5. MWS–MH, 28.8.1819 and to LH, 24.9.1819.
6. WG–?, 1.12.1820 (Abinger, Dep. c. 607/6 [partial transcript in MWS’s hand]).
7. MWS–Amelia Curran, 18.9.1819.
8. WG–MWS, 9.9.1819 (Abinger, Dep. c. 524). It looks as though the light cancellation, a single pen line, was done by Godwin at the time of writing but left, as if he wished his thoughts to be read.
9. Matilda (first published 1959; ed. Pamela Clemit, Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 2, ix, p. 48.
10. Ibid., x, p. 56.
11. Ibid., x, p. 55.
12. Mrs Gisborne’s journal, 8.8.1820 (Shelley’s Friends).
13. Matilda, xii, p. 67.
14. No attempt was made to publish either Matilda or its draft version, The Fields of Fancy, until over a hundred years after Mary’s death.
15. PBS, The Mask [Masque] of Anarchy, 1819; 1832.
16. MWS (PW). Here, Mary argued that Shelley was calling on the many to unite passively to establish their rights. This seems rather a tame interpretation.
17. Charles had published an account of the insurrection in the Morning Chronicle, 13.2.1819, and signed it with his own initials. His mother, impressed by Charles’s fluent style and political commitment, tried hard to get him a job on The Times through Crabb Robinson who was a friend of the proprietor, John Walter.
18. MWS–LH, 24.9.1819.
19. Marion Kingston Stocking gives a detailed account of the family in CC, 2, p. 134.
20. MWS–MG, 9.11.1819.
21. MWS–MG, 13.11.1819.
22. Sophia Stacey, in Helen Rossetti Angeli’s transcription of her diary in Shelley and His Friends in Italy (1911), pp. 97 and 104.
23. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (1888), 3 vols., 1, pp. 402–5 and 407–8.
24. MWS–MH, 24.3.1820.
25. Ibid.
26. CCJ, 8.2.1820.
27. PBS–MG, 11.3.1820, in David Mackenzie Stocking and Marion Kingston Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, XXXI (1980), pp. 1–9.
28. Mrs Mason (Lady Mountcashell)–MWS, [8].10.1819 (Abinger, Dep. c. 517/2).
29. Ibid., 15.1.1820.
30. MWS–MH, 24.3.1820.
31. MWS–WG, 14.3.1820. The only surviving sentence from this letter is included in MWSL, 1.
32. WG–MWS, 30.3.1820 (Godwin, 2, p. 271).
33. Hoppner MSS (Murray).
34. MWS–MG, 8.5.1820.
35. CC–Byron, 1 and 4.5.1820. The letter of 4 May survives only in draft form (CC, 2). Byron may have remained unaware that he was being slandered by a servant of the Shelleys.
36. CC–Byron, 15[?18].5.1819.
37. MWS–MG and John Gisborne (hereafter JG), 18.6.1820.
38. PBS–MG, 19.7.1820.
* John was one of Hunt’s small sons.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN ABSENTIA CLARIAE
1820
Rain till one o’clock – at sunset
the arch of cloud over the west
clears away – a few black islands
float in the serene – the moon
rises – the clouds spot th
e sky –
but the depth of heaven is clear –
The nights are uncommonly warm
‘My thoughts arise & fade in solitude
The verse that wd invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day
How beautiful they were – how firm they stood
Frekling the starry sky like woven pearl!’
Write – S reads Hyperion aloud – Greek1
Mary Shelley, Journal, 18 October 1820
A MILD CLIMATE, A CALM LIFE AND NO MEDICINE HAD BEEN ANDREA Vaccà’s sensible prescription for Shelley’s mysterious illness; with this advice in mind, Shelley, Mary and – until her departure for Livorno and Florence – Claire, moved at the beginning of August 1820 to a village four miles east of Pisa. Their house was most ‘agreable’, Mary reported to Amelia Curran on 17 August, ‘& with delightful scenery within a walk’. Percy was thriving, ‘a great comfort’, and the gentle climate was doing wonders for Shelley’s health, ‘which is to him a rare & substantial enjoyment’.
Small and sweetly sleepy, Bagni di San Giuliano lay beside an artificial canal linking the Serchio to the Arno. Above it, reared the mountain wall separating Pisa from its ancient enemies in the many-towered and stoutly barricaded city of Lucca. The Shelleys’ new home, Casa Prini, stood in a broad crescent looking towards the spa casino and up to the steep wooded slopes of Monte di San Giuliano. Behind the house, a narrow garden led down to the canal on which, as soon as he had found a boat for sale, Shelley often rowed into the centre of Pisa or towards the neighbouring village of Pugnano. Less fashionable than Bagni di Lucca, San Giuliano had kept its village atmosphere; on one occasion when Mrs Mason was visiting them, Shelley’s attempt to read out his latest poem, ‘Ode to Liberty’, was drowned by the snuffles and honks of a herd of pigs being sold under their windows.
Sitting in the garden at night under a sky thick with stars, they listened to prettier sounds, the soft whooping of owls, the leisurely slap of water as a boat slid past in the shadows. In the mornings, before the heat began to build, they walked along the canal’s rough banks or up the winding mountain paths to peer into the mysterious little caves and grottoes in which, the superstitious locals said, fairies and witches lived.
Claire’s long-awaited departure was the chief source of Mary’s new contentment. On 17 August, she had confessed to Miss Curran that her stepsister’s departure still seemed ‘impossible’. On 31 August, however, Claire was dispatched to Livorno for a month, staying at the Gisbornes’ empty house; her return on 1 October was sourly marked in Mary’s journal with a drawing of the sun, a sign which reappeared on 20 October as Shelley escorted a sullen Claire to her new home in Florence with the Boiti family.*
Soothed by her new surroundings, Mary took time off from studying Greek to write a children’s story for Laurette Mason. The fair copy, intended for publication, has not survived, but Laurette was made a present of the original manuscript. Affection or forgetfulness preserved it in her family papers, from which Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot was recovered and published for the first time in 1998.2
To a little girl who could scarcely remember England (Laurette was only five when her parents moved to Italy), Mary’s simple story of a fishing village in the West Country was as full of wonder as a fairy tale; to modern readers, its interest lies in the element of the story which describes the loss to loving parents of a child. Mary cannot have intended her young reader to brood on the harsh laws which separated Laurette’s mother from the children of her marriage to Lord Mountcashell; it is more likely that she was thinking of her own losses, and of those close to her; of the three children they had buried, the son and daughter Shelley had been forced to renounce, the little girl who was now living at Ravenna with Byron and his young mistress. Relieved though Mary had been to see Allegra go, she shared Claire’s concern for her life with a father who appeared to treat the child, at best, as casually as the tribe of animals he took with him on his travels.
It was distressing and frustrating for Mary to see how, despite some kindly attentions from the reviewers for Blackwood’s Magazine, literary acknowledgment continued to elude Shelley, much of whose poetry remained unpublished. Only bad luck, she felt, had kept The Cenci from being accepted for performance in London; to her, the play had marked a step towards the more popular work which would bring him a wider audience. ‘It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame,’ she explained in 1839; ‘but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery of his own powers, and greater happiness in his own mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours.’3 It was a reasonable assumption; most writers thrive on having their work published. Mary was, however, mistaken in thinking that she had any control over Shelley’s creativity. When, back from a stiff day’s climb up to the dizzy peak of Monte San Pellegrino on 12 August, Shelley promptly responded with one of his most fanciful and unearthly poems, she was dismayed. And she said so.
Richard Holmes has suggested that it was Shelley’s introduction of the witch’s beautiful bisexual angel child, Hermaphroditus, which Mary found so discomforting. Mary was no prude; she was probably telling the simple truth when she wrote, in 1839, that she had been afraid of Shelley’s ‘discarding human interest and passion, to revel in the fantastic ideas that his imagination suggested’. Beautiful though the images were, Mary could not imagine them suiting ‘the popular taste’: ‘Even now,’ she defiantly added, ‘I believe that I was in the right.’4
Criticizing poets is a dangerous business. Having told Shelley what she thought, Mary was punished for her candour. The six tart stanzas which preface The Witch of Atlas accuse her of being ‘critic-bitten’ and for being ready to dismiss a poem just because its verses ‘tell no story, false or true!’ Shelley’s tone was playful; his message was as pointed as a knife. Here was a complete and cutting reversal of the tender homage he had offered in happier times, at the opening of The Revolt of Islam.
To thy fair feet a winged Vision came,
Whose date should have been longer than a day,
And o’er thy head did beat its wings for fame,
And in thy sight its fading plumes display;
The watery bow burned in the evening flame,
But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his way –
And that is dead. – O let me not believe
That anything of mine is fit to live!5
The punishment for her presumption was taken a step further as Mary was requested to copy out the poem – and the introductory verses – for her husband on 14 August. ‘Do,’ she wrote tersely two days later: ‘Finished.’ The hurt was still apparent in 1824 when, publishing the poem for the first time, she omitted the six stanzas aimed at her. She did, however, print them in the 1839 edition of Shelley’s works.
Mary was perplexed and a little hurt to learn, and at secondhand, that the Gisbornes had returned from England in early September without getting in touch. September came and went without any contact. Were they angry with the Shelleys for having borrowed the Casa Ricci without permission earlier in the summer? Had some new morsel of scandal reached them? Mary had often in the past scolded Maria affectionately for being a lazy correspondent, but this silence was too long. Taking matters into her own hands, on 16 October she made a surprise day trip to see them at Livorno. Mrs Gisborne seemed discomforted by her sudden appearance at Casa Ricci. She was not welcoming; all she would say was that she had sent a ‘foolish’ letter to San Giuliano which Mary would find when she reached home.
The distress which this letter caused suggests that it contained details relating to the Gisbornes’ summer in London, where they had been staying with Mr Gisborne’s sister Emma and her husband, the musician and composer Muzio Clementi. Mary had begged her friend to keep a daily journal of her visit, especially since she knew that the Gisbornes would be calling at Skinner Street. Maria kept the journal as requested but it was, by the end of her visit, embarrassingly clear that she
would never be able to show it to Mary; the content was far too damaging. Now published, the journal makes it plain why the Gisbornes had been keeping Shelley and Mary at a distance since their return from England.
On 4 July, a month after the Gisbornes’ first call at Skinner Street, Godwin had described Shelley to them as immoral, and ‘a lover of falsehood’. Five days later, he told them that Fanny, Claire and Mary had been equally in love with Shelley; he was even ready to say that Fanny had ‘put an end to her existence owing to the preference given to her youngest sister’. Mrs Godwin, he added, blamed Mary entirely for the loss of Claire and looked on his daughter as ‘the greatest enemy she [Mrs Godwin] has in the world’. On 3 August, the shocked Gisbornes were visited by their old friend, John Fenwick, Eliza’s spendthrift husband. Fenwick had been given the awkward job of explaining that Mrs Godwin had issued an ultimatum; they could either stop praising Mary or stop seeing her stepmother. No paragon himself, Mr Fenwick also provided them with ‘a very bad character’ of Shelley. At their final meeting on 28 August, the Gisbornes were treated by Godwin to an extensive account of his financial dealings with Shelley; in case they missed the point, they were presented with a written list of the sums Godwin still believed himself to be owed. The Gisbornes did, however, manage to remove one of the old man’s convictions: ‘In the first conversation I had with Mr G[odwin] – about C[laire],’ Mrs Gisborne wrote, ‘he was still incredulous as to the real author of her misfortune.’6 Much of Godwin’s unappeasable scorn for Shelley derived from the belief that he was Allegra’s father and that Mary had been expected to raise the child as her own; here, at least, Mrs Gisborne was able to soften his view.
Mary Shelley Page 36