Robinson’s benign impressions were shared by two admirers of Shelley who approached Mary in the autumn of 1823. Bryan Waller Procter, a handsome invalid of thirty-six, was a poet and recently successful dramatist who wrote under the name ‘Barry Cornwall’; Thomas Lovell Beddoes was the twenty-one-year-old son of the celebrated Dr Beddoes in whose Pneumatic Institute, long before, young Humphry Davy had introduced Coleridge to the delights of laughing gas. The published author of a play and a collection of poems, Thomas had a lurid imagination; his love of graveyard subjects reminded Mary of Shelley when they had first met.
Mary’s visitors had a literary proposal to put to her. She, they knew, had been talking to Leigh Hunt’s brother John about a scheme to publish Shelley’s poetry, despite Sir Timothy’s injunction. Hunt, although ready to act as the publisher, was in financial difficulties and facing a lawsuit. They would, Procter told Mary, be honoured if she would allow them, together with his brother Nicholas and an attorney, Thomas Kelsall, to underwrite the costs. Shelley’s name must be raised above the coarse derision of such magazines as the Literary Gazette and the Eclectic Review; most importantly, readers must see for themselves that his work was not all obscure or didactic, as the critics regularly implied. Mary could not have been more warm in her agreement. Collecting and transcribing Shelley’s often almost illegible manuscripts had been her main occupation in the year following his death. Encouraged by Procter and Beddoes, she went back to her task.
Crabb Robinson described Procter as ‘a man whom everybody loves’.19 Mary was initially more reserved in her enthusiasm; she had heard both Byron and Shelley speak derisively of Procter’s work. ‘He is evidently vain, yet not pretending,’ she wrote hesitantly to Leigh Hunt, ‘and his ill health is for me an interesting circumstance; since I have been so accustomed to Poets whose frame has been shattered by the mind … Yet after all, except the Dramatic Scenes I do not like Procter’s style.’20 His head was, however, uncommonly handsome. He had a beautiful voice and a soft, sympathetic manner. Marianne Hunt had warned her that he was promised to Adeline Skepper, stepdaughter of her father’s friend Basil Montagu, but Procter himself made no mention of being engaged.
Procter’s visits to Mary’s lodgings near Coram’s Fields were rare, but they were long. ‘I know some clever men in whose conversation I delight,’ she owned to her journal on 18 January 1824, ‘but this is rare like angels visits.’ Even a few angelic visits had set her to dreaming of what it might be like to live with a man ‘whose opinions I shd respect, whose qualities I should admire & whose person I should love’. Guilt-filled, she brushed the thought aside; her child was all she needed for company, or should be: ‘you are clever, good, affectionate and beautiful – why does not your form fill my sense – your existence suffice for my content[?]’ But she continued to be attracted to Procter; on 3 September 1824, she wrote of ‘a Poet – who sought me first – Whose voice laden with sentiment, paused as Shelley’s – & who read with the same deep feeling as he … who once or twice listened to my sad plaints & bent his dark blue eyes upon me …’
She had not seen Procter for four months when she wrote this; his marriage to Miss Skepper took place in October 1824. Perhaps he was finding his relationship with Mary a little too intense when he suddenly decided to stop visiting her: ‘So much for my powers of attraction,’ Mary noted.21 There were no more meetings after his marriage; young wives seldom wanted a woman with Mrs Shelley’s reputation in their homes. Everybody who had any contact with Godwin’s circle knew that Shelley’s first wife Harriet had been pregnant when Mary ran away with him; who was to say that she had changed her ways, or lost her passion for poets?
*
Mary had two suggestions to put to Leigh Hunt on 9–11 September 1823 in the letter which mentioned Procter’s first call. One was that, if he cared about keeping the Examiner and its two affiliated papers afloat, he must stop borrowing so heavily from his brother John, who owned the larger share of the business and bore all the costs; the second was that he should write a preface to the edition of Shelley’s poems which she was preparing. Hunt had, as she knew, already drafted an article on Shelley; such a professional journalist could easily supply the brief introduction she required.
Hunt, for reasons which have never been clear, was unwilling to oblige her. The Examiner continued to praise Shelley whenever an excuse arose, notably for his recently published translations from Faust. Hunt may have suggested or have written these anonymous tributes, but, besieged by reminders of an approaching deadline for his preface, he remained silent or made excuses. Posthumous Poems, which included those inspired by Claire, Emilia Viviani, Sophia Stacey and Jane Williams, their identities discreetly masked by asterisks and initials, was published in an edition of five hundred in June 1824. Mary wrote the Preface herself. Opening it with a mild rebuke to Hunt, she offered an ardent defence of Shelley’s name. Praising him as a fearless crusader for ‘the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind’, she gave this as ‘the chief reason why he, like other illustrious reformers, was pursued by hatred and calumny’.
This was stirring stuff, but the collection showed little of Shelley’s reforming passion: poems such as ‘To the Lord Chancellor’ and The Masque of Anarchy were neither included nor mentioned. The chief aim of the Preface was to defuse the image of Shelley the atheist, the troublemaker, the rebel. Mary’s new Shelley was an altogether softer creature, ‘the wise, the brave, the gentle … a bright vision’, gone but ‘not, I fondly hope, for ever: his unearthly and elevated nature is a pledge of the continuation of his being, although in an altered form.’ In phrases such as these and with a collection which put the lyrical firmly above the political, Mary began the long, difficult task of transforming a poet known chiefly for a notorious private life and for his atheism into a sexless spirit, a saintlike celebrant of nature who had ascended from the beach at Viareggio as if to heaven in a quivering shaft of flame. Very possibly, she believed what she wrote; very certainly, she wanted others to believe it.
A few did. The Hunts’ Examiner – naturally – praised her candour and looked forward both to her biography and the publication of her husband’s prose. Hazlitt, in the influential Edinburgh Review, described the Preface, to Mary’s annoyance, as ‘imperfect but touching’; the Literary Gazette’s sceptical critic thought her praises ‘too hyperbolic to be the effusion of genuine sorrow’.22 But the book sold well; at least one poem, ‘Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples’, was, from then until the middle of the century, constantly reprinted in verse collections and copied into albums. Three hundred copies of Posthumous Poems had been sold when Sir Timothy, furious that his wishes had been disregarded, ordered the remainder of the edition to be withdrawn only two months after publication. Mary was warned that his payments would cease if she made further attempts to publicize Shelley’s work. Such bullying behaviour only increased her determination but she took care, after this threat, to move behind the scenes.
It was unfortunate that, just as a few bold reviewers were starting to suggest that Shelley ought to be classed with Wordsworth and Byron, Thomas Medwin decided to publish his Conversations of Lord Byron and to include some personal details of Shelley’s life. His book was published in November 1824; only a few references to Shelley’s life were needed for the old stories to begin circulating again. In August, when Posthumous Poems was newly out, Knight’s Quarterly had been ready to proclaim Shelley a great poet; by December, the critic of the Universal Review had read Medwin’s work and was ready to dismiss him again as a ‘miserable’ one.
*
When Mary had first arrived back in England in the autumn of 1823, friendless and uncertain of her future, she had excited the interest of a gentle, eager playwright whose name she had heard mentioned a good deal by the Kenneys at Versailles. This was John Howard Payne, whose bad luck it is to be remembered only as the author of a sentimental song, ‘Home, Sweet Home’, and as the man Mary Shelley could never bring herself to love as
much as he did her.
A spare, shy, chestnut-haired man with Shelley’s large eyes and high forehead, Payne had made his name in America when, in order to rescue his widowed father from bankruptcy, he abandoned his education to become a celebrated boy-actor. Arriving in Europe in 1813, he moved between Paris and London, often for the purpose of avoiding creditors. Mary’s father had known him since 1817,23 but neither Godwin nor any of Payne’s affectionate circle of friends could cure his unlucky habit of falling into debt.** His plays, including Brutus (1818) and two or three historical romps which he wrote with the anonymous assistance of his fellow expatriate Washington Irving, were not respected by the critics, but they were hugely successful with the public. ‘Home, Sweet Home’ was the song on everybody’s lips when Mary arrived back in England; it was the hit of Payne’s latest triumph, Clari, or The Maid of Milan. He had as usual made nothing from it; the profits had gone to Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, who composed the music.
Payne was already a great friend of Mary’s half-brother when she first met him over a dinner at Godwin’s home in the autumn of 1823. For the last three years, she was told, he had been supplying her father with free theatre passes. This, as Payne was quick to learn, was a sure way to earn smiles from a young woman who loved the theatre herself and preferred, if she could, to sit in good seats. She seemed to like him; on 4 December, he was invited to join Mary and her family to see her old favourite, The Winter’s Tale. Soon, he would pluck up the courage to express his feelings, to hail her as ‘a being so beyond all others, that, even though her qualities are certainly “images” of what is promised in “heaven above” I can kneel down & worship them without dreading the visitation upon idolatry’.25 Mary was not yet ready for such adulation.
Pitifully short of friends in this hard and alien city, Mary may have been more grateful for Payne’s timid friendship than she cared to show. Mrs Gisborne, however, was there and always comforting. ‘She is my delight, her gentleness toleration & understanding, & not the least of her attractions, her affection for me, render her dear to me,’ Mary wrote.26 Hogg, to whom she confided this, had been prompt to pay her a visit, but his interest, as she could readily see, was to talk about her friend Jane Williams. Peacock, although a kind and conscientious executor, was too wrapped up in his new family, his job and his novels for more than the basic courtesies of friendship. Medwin found time for a quick dinner on a visit to London.
Godwin did his best. He had produced John Howard Payne. He invited Mary’s old friend Isabella Booth to bring her little daughter for a visit on 3 September, a few days after Mary had first arrived from Paris. This, however, was not the happy occasion he had anticipated. Isabella, her energy and strong intelligence ground down by an overbearing husband and a continual shortage of money, had suffered a serious nervous breakdown; she was on her way to convalesce in Scotland with her father. ‘Be kind to me Mary,’ she wrote entreatingly on 1 November, but the old friendship could not be revived. ‘The great affection she displays for me endears her to me & the memory of early days –’ Mary wrote to Hunt a few days after their meeting, ‘Else all is so changed for me that I should hardly feel pleasure in cultivating her society.’27 Loyalty guaranteed that she would do what she could to help her unhappy friend; but all chances of intimacy had ended in the spring of 1818, when Isabella surrendered to her husband’s wishes and refused to accompany Mary and Shelley to Italy.
What Mary wanted was not the friendships which kept her close to the Godwin household but a new life, away from it. She loved her father. She did not want to share everything with him, or to share in all his worries, day after day. ‘My father’s situation his cares and debts prevent my enjoying his society,’ she wrote guiltily in her journal on 18 January ‘of the second year after 1822’. She ached for new friends, but how was she to find them?
The man who did most to answer the needs of the two young widows†† was Leigh Hunt. Shortly before Mary left Italy, he had written a warm letter recommending her to his musical friend Vincent Novello. Both Mary and Jane Williams, he explained, were badly in need of kindness; Mary would be a charming guest, so long as she was kept away from the subject of Shelley. Start her on that, Hunt warned, and she would become anguished and self-conscious, talking in the high-flown phrases of a novelist. Put her in a room with good music, however; and she would be as rapt and quiet as a Quaker.28
Novello and his large family had, for reasons of economy, recently moved out of London to a house on Shacklewell Green, lying between Hackney and Islington. Shacklewell today is a sorry huddle of unlovable streets at the foot of Hackney Downs and it was not much more charming then. Mary detested the area, ‘that dreary flat – scented by brick kilns and adorned by carcases of houses’.29 She saw nothing to admire in the Novellos’ china and glass-crammed parlours, or in the dull little garden leading down to a damp arbour. The pleasure, for her, for Jane and for music-loving William, who often acted as their escort, was in the cheerful company.
Reading the accounts of Shacklewell evenings which Mary sent to the Hunts in Italy takes us into the chaotic, exuberant world of one of Dickens’s theatrical families. Children tumbled everywhere. Charles Cowden Clarke (his father had been Keats’s gentle schoolmaster) stood in one corner, crying ‘charming’ and ‘beautiful’, his face, ‘like a bird’s skull’, glowing with feeling as he listened to a Novello family concert. In another corner was Keats’s friend Edward Holmes, ‘Werter the II – passionately fond of music & playing well’. Arthur Gliddon’s pretty young wife was there, squabbling with her ‘Caro Sposo’ about the best way to boil a goose and bewailing the absence of the Hunts. Mrs Novello, known as the ‘Wilful Woman’ for her firm rule of a chaotic household, was pregnant for the eleventh time but smiling, ‘ever smiling’, while her beaming husband and his handsome brother Francesco led the evening’s music, commencing with sacred songs from Mrs Blaine Hunt (nobody dreamed of referring to the fact that her brother-in-law had just been arrested as an accomplice in a grisly murder) and ending with Handel and Mozart, whose works Vincent Novello championed and helped to popularize. Sitting at a little distance, for Charles detested music, were the Lambs, Mary’s square pale face wreathed in contentment, her brother’s veiled in pipesmoke.30
This was a house in which Mary felt welcome and at her ease. She could joke with Mrs Novello about Godwin (‘the O.G.’ or ‘old gentleman’) and promise her ‘twenty kisses such as woman may give to woman on your dear cheek’.31 Safe in the knowledge that she was causing no jealousy, she could flirt with balding, plump little Vincent and call him ‘Vincenzo’. ‘Mr Novello is my prediletto,’ she told Hunt. ‘I like him better & better each time I see him … his kindness towards me & his playing have quite won my heart.’32
Novello had, since the age of sixteen, been the organist at the fashionable Portuguese chapel in South Street, Mayfair. Mary often went there to hear him play. He had converted her to instrumental music, she told Hunt, but he had also opened her ears to Haydn, whose oratorio, The Creation, would be revealed as ‘the language of the immortals’ in a moving scene set in the Alps towards the end of The Last Man.33
In later life, Mary, one of the Novello daughters, married Charles Cowden Clarke. Together, they published their recollections of a musical household. ‘Very, very fair both ladies were,’ Mrs Cowden Clarke wrote of the two young widows, but her more candid sister Clara remembered that the Novello children had not liked Jane Williams and dreaded invitations to visit her. (She did not say why.) For Mrs Shelley, however, the Novello daughters had nothing but admiration. Mary Cowden Clarke, still treasuring her gifts of an autographed copy of Frankenstein and an Italian necklace of coral beads, spent a whole page describing the graceful angle of Mary’s golden-haired head, her small, beautifully tapering fingers and the way her face flowered into life when she was speaking. Mary Shelley, she concluded, ‘was the central figure of attraction to my young-girl sight; and I looked upon her with ceaseless admiration – for her personal graces, as w
ell as for her literary distinction.’34
At ease among the Novellos and their friends, Mary described herself as playing ‘the giddy schoolgirl’; she drank toasts, chattered in Italian and charmed everybody. It took an evening with Coleridge, in January 1824, to remind her of other, more glorious days: ‘his beautiful descriptions, metaphysical talk & subtle distinctions reminded me of Shelley’s conversation such was the intercourse I once dayly enjoyed,’ she wrote in her journal the following day.35 The Novellos would have been fine company, had she not been used to something finer still. ‘I will go into the country & philosophize,’ she added to her journal entry, and her thoughts drifted to Jane Williams, who was planning to move out of the smoke to the village of Kentish Town. With Jane, she would not feel the need for other companions, for they would share the company of the beloved dead. ‘I love Jane more than any human being,’ she wrote on the same meditative January evening: ‘but I am pressed upon by the knowledge that she but slightly returns this affection.’ Mary was not yet aware that Jane and Hogg had formed an intimate, possibly sexual relationship; she only knew that Jane seemed increasingly reluctant to spend time discussing their shared past.
Pining in the dark, damp English winter, Mary put on too much weight while she brooded over the quality of work she was being forced to write for money, and over Jane’s lack of affection. She went to the theatre. She took long, vigorous walks: ‘Ye Gods – how I walk,’ she wrote to Marianne Hunt in March. She toured exhibitions, saw the Elgin marbles again, looked at prints, and climbed the muddy steps of the stagecoach to trundle out to Shacklewell for another musical evening.
Mary Shelley Page 49