Chatterton wrote:
From my boyish days I was propelled of a sentiment . . . that I was born to promote the diffusion of knowledge. It were absurd to prove to you how much the increase of happiness depends on the progress of myth, and truth on the invention of the adoption of a philosophical knowledge. I have long had this object in view. But what an immense field of science must a man travel . . . It were useless, as well as ostentatious to describe my exertions & especially as their effect in knowledge seems disproportionally small . . . It was only by the faint glimmer of my midnight lamp, in solitude and science, that I could recover my mind from my agitation in which the scenes of the day had thrown it; and that my worn imagination permitted a virtuous and rational state of society inflicted in some measure my own exertions.
There are no indications that Godwin replied to this letter—though he eagerly replied to the one from Shelley.
Shelley’s enthusiasm for life’s more unorthodox subjects had always been contagious, going so far as to engulf those that surrounded him. In some respects, these enthusiasms caused him to be expelled from Oxford University not long before he came to know William Godwin.
Most of what is known of the six months Shelley spent at Oxford comes from Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a young man he met and befriended soon after he arrived. Though Hogg is believed to have been bright in his own right, and in later life became a lawyer, he is best known for his association with Percy Shelley. He tried to make the most of that friendship, particularly with his book Shelley at Oxford, in which he anointed himself the expert on Shelley’s schoolboy days.
The book stresses many of the characteristics most people associate with Shelley, especially the beautiful physical traits that seem to elevate the poet from the mere mortal to the angelic.
The initial meeting occurred one evening during the school’s scheduled meal. As Hogg sat at his assigned table, he realized he had been joined by a young freshman who was so tall and gawky he gave off an aura of fragility. He wore expensive clothes, though he seemed not to mind them, and there was a gentility about him, though “his gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent.” His long hair crowned a face that was pale, small, and delicate like a girl’s. He ran his hands through his hair regularly yet unconsciously. Hogg was captivated and could not help but stare at the young man who had entered his life.
During their initial conversation, Hogg learned that Shelley had a peculiar fascination with science and chemistry, most especially electricity. “What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands of him who knew how to wield it, in what manner to direct its omnipotent energies, and we may command an indefinite quality of the fluid,” Shelley cried out to a stunned Hogg.
Shelley also spoke about the powers of thunder and lightning, and of the possibilities for man should he be able to “guide it.” Shelley was enthralled by overpowering nature: “How many secrets of nature would such stupendous force unlock,” he said.
He invited Hogg to continue this one-sided conversation in his rooms, not only so that he could expand on his scientific ideas, but also so he could show off one of his most prized possessions: a galvanic battery.
At Eton a few years earlier, he had refused to take part in sports and the same studies as his peers. Instead spent his time on “strange studies,” inundating those who would hear him with stories of “fairy land, and apparitions, and spirits, and haunted grounds.” He launched fire balloons toward the sky and barricaded himself in his room reading texts on chemistry and demonology. His room often smelled of “strange and fiery liquids” that he kept bubbling on the tables. He also started to experiment on himself with a small galvanic battery he had purchased before entering the institution. These experiments occurred in the middle of the night, while the rest of his classmates slept. Though Shelley left behind few notes about these experiments, his tutor, a Mr. Bethell, who had once been subjected to the effects of the battery, kept an account of what happened.
As Edward Dowden, who researched and wrote a detailed book about Shelley and his scientific pursuits, and T. J. Hogg reported, while on a nightly round Mr. Bethell heard peculiar noises coming from behind Shelley’s locked doors. Curious, he became convinced that Shelley was engaging in “nefarious scientific pursuits,” which of course he intended to put a halt to. He marched into the room, where Shelley was engulfed in a leaping “blue-flame.” Stunned, Bethell asked what he was doing, and Shelley replied, “I am raising the devil.”
On hearing this, the tutor approached the galvanic battery and placed his hands above it. He received a nasty electrical discharge that sent him flying across the room. What little bond existed between tutor and pupil was seriously frayed that night.
Although Giovanni Aldini had previously performed the most comprehensive galvanic experiment on a human corpse in London, the introduction of galvanic electricity to an English audience had occurred earlier, by the so-called medico-electrician Tiberius Cavallo. It was Cavallo who had brought the work of Galvani to the forefront in England, in 1793, when he read two extended and detailed letters he had received from none other than Alessandro Volta, who was detailing Galvani’s experiments on frogs. Cavallo also read those letters at the Royal Society, making them available to scientists in the not-so-distant future.
Since the late 1770s, Cavallo had been dabbling with electricity on a medicinal level, even constructing those instruments he needed for his purposes. This had made him one of the most sought-after and famous natural philosophers in all of London. Aside from his own abilities as an inventor and medical therapist, he was also an excellent letter writer, a trait that led him to begin and keep up friendships and professional correspondences with a wide variety of people across Europe and beyond, people who kept him abreast of the latest inventions and innovations in the fields. One person he corresponded with was Dr. James Lind of Windsor, who would later become one of Percy Shelley’s mentors at Eton.
Lind was interested in using galvanic electricity on diseased bodies. Through his many letters, he was kind enough to provide Cavallo with stories and anecdotes about his experiments, the ins and outs of how he used the galvanic battery on his patients. He also let Cavallo know about the results from experiments being conducted by other scientists across Europe; Cavallo did the same, providing Lind with information he received and discovered.
These interchanges between Cavallo and his friends gave him what he needed to complete a major work, A Complete Treatise on Electricity, in Theory and Practice, with Original Experiments. It was remarkable on many levels, not only because it explained animal electricity at length, but also because it detailed, in sometimes graphic prose, the experiments some doctors were performing not on dead bodies, but on themselves. Of particular interest was Dr. Munro, who, on one occasion, “applied a blunt probe of zinc to the Sephum Norium, and repeatedly touched it with a crown-piece of silver applied to the tongue, and thereby produced the appearance of a firefly, [and] several drops of blood fell from the nostrils.”
But throughout the years Cavallo’s most noteworthy and prolific letter writer continued to be James Lind. In a letter written on August 2, 1792, Cavallo piped, “P.S. Have you made any dead frogs jump up like living ones?”
After a fulfilling life, notably as the physician to King George III, Lind settled into a cottage in Windsor with his wife. In Windsor, Lind developed a reputation for “tricks, conundrums, and queer things.” Madame D’Arblay, a Windsor resident, suggested that neighbors were afraid of him, of “his trying experiments with their constitution . . . they thought him a better conjurer than physician.” His laboratory was a cornucopia of galvanic batteries, metal probes, surgical instruments, dead frogs, scalpels, bubbling vials, gases, and poisons, a chaotic environment that strangely enough would be duplicated by a pupil in his rooms at Oxford University.
When T. J. Hogg met Percy Shelley, he was perhaps hoping for a friendship that would blunt the loneliness that had settled over him once he had entered Oxford. True, h
e had always wanted to attend “that land of promise.” But a certain measure of melancholy had seized him when he arrived. He desperately needed company; Shelley quickly provided that. As such, he decided to visit the “young chemist’s” rooms, where he discovered a strange odor emanating from the various gases bubbling forth in the vials resting on the table.
The rooms had been cleaned before the new occupants arrived, but Shelley’s resembled a disastrous laboratory. Everything was in disarray, from personal belongings to “philosophical instruments,” as “if the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to re-create the primeval chaos . . . An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic through, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter.” Shelley quickly walked back and forth about the room, and Hogg learned that a combination of ether and some other powerful fluid had spilled out of the vials and onto the floor, igniting and leaving dark smudges on the carpet.
Shelley pointed a finger toward the electrical apparatus on the table, wishing to show his new friend how the machinery worked. Ever so eager to please, Hogg began to fiddle with the equipment, at which point he began to “work the machine until it was filled with fluid,” while Shelley turned “the handle very rapidly, so that the fierce, crackling sparks flew forth.” This process became so intense, Shelley’s “long wild locks bristled and stood on end.”
Hogg recalled that Shelley was jumping back and forth across the room, from idea to idea. The process became so wild, Hogg came to believe that Shelley would “set the college on fire, or that he would blind, maim, or kill himself by the explosion of combustibles.” Hogg mused that poison would likely be the end of Shelley. He mixed and combined it in an erratic manner without regarding what dishes, cups, and bowls he was using or bothering to find out if the combinations were even plausible. When offered something to eat or drink Hogg habitually examined the cup or dish to make sure nothing unusual was in it; if he didn’t see anything peculiar, he pressed his nose to it in an effort to smell it, though even then he could not be sure.
Hogg and Shelley talked well into the night, the discussion turning from the mysteries of lightning and thunder to the details of the electrical kites Shelley had constructed while a young boy at home. He also told Hogg of the love he had possessed for the macabre, which still fascinated him, and the tales of the spirit world he so loved: ghosts, goblins, and water nymphs.
Shelley’s fascination with the land of the dead would plague him throughout his entire life. In a letter written to Hogg, undated but placed by experts to June 27, 1811, Shelley wrote, “I have been thinking of Death and Heaven for days. Where is the latter? Shall we set off? Is there a future life? Whom should we injure by departing? Should we not benefit some?”
From his childhood days, Shelley suffered from debilitating waking dreams which further enhanced the notion of an existing otherworldly life. They occurred so frequently he often took laudanum to quell them. But instead of helping, this potion caused him to have persistent and raging hallucinations.
Laudanum, or tinctura thebaica, is a derivative of opium, and it became so fashionable during Shelley’s time, the Victorians were notorious for chugging it down in large quantities to relieve anything that ailed them, from gout, to the stress of migraines, to hair loss, even administering it to teething children to ease the pains in their gums. In the latter cases, some of the wet nurses were found to be a little zealous with their ministrations, so much so that some children in their care died of opium poisoning. Laudanum was even sold under such attractive names as Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup and Godfrey’s Cordial. It did not seem dangerous, merely a step removed from the soothing calmness achieved by milk and honey.
Many of the alchemists, including Paracelsus, dabbled with opium. When Paracelsus was conducting experiments dealing specifically with Papaver somniferum, the plant from which the opium was derived, he discovered that opium’s soporific abilities were a great relief to suffering patients. He continued to investigate the drug’s properties and was so astounded with the results, he derived the name laudanum from the Latin word laudare, “to praise.” Unfortunately, Paracelsus did not realize that opium, in all of its forms, was also addictive, causing a whole score of problems for its users.
Percy Shelley, who was “highly sensitive to pain, easily excited, and subject to paroxysms of passions,” was one of the many addicted to laudanum. And unfortunately, it did nothing to prevent his waking dreams. His sleep was so disturbed, he often sleepwalked in the middle of the night, his hair wild and disheveled, his face as pale as one of those ghosts he often spoke of. He and his cousin Thomas Medwin lived in the same dormitory, and one night Shelley arose and dragged himself into Medwin’s room. Open-eyed but asleep, Shelley walked toward an open window. Medwin jumped from his bed and took Shelley by the arm.
“He was excessively agitated,” Medwin later recalled, “and after leading him back with some difficulty to his couch, I sat by him for some time, a witness to the severe crethism of his nerves which the sudden shock produced.”
Despite the negative effects the drug could cause, Shelley still hoped that laudanum would eventually give him a reprieve from his sleepless nights and feverish nightmares, which were often bothersome but could turn dangerous. But it would not be very long before he met someone, a kindred spirit, who would understand perfectly. In fact, according to literary history, it was during one of her own waking dreams that the young Mary Godwin first saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”
In the summer of 1814, a meeting between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin took place. Soon after Shelley had sent William Godwin the letter that started their friendship, Shelley began calling on the Godwins at their Skinner Street home. It is possible that Shelley and Mary Godwin met in 1812, when she returned from a period of time abroad. But if so, neither one ever mentioned it.
The situation in the Godwins’ household had become not only unhappy but also downright intolerable, thanks in part to the new Mrs. Godwin’s attitude toward her stepdaughter. As such, William Godwin removed the source of those disagreements: Mary. The reason given was that Mary’s health had become so poor the only way to improve her constitution was a trip abroad, but that was a cover-up for the real story.
Mary was sent to Dundee, a small harbor city in Scotland. Prior to the trip, William Godwin had written to William Thomas Baxter, a man he had met only once before. Baxter’s daughter, Margaret, was also married to one of Godwin’s friends, David Booth, further cementing their connection. The Baxters agreed to take in Mary Godwin for a short visit so that she could recuperate from an ailment William Godwin had only described in the briefest details. Mary departed on June 7, 1812, on the Osnaburg. While she was staying with the Baxters, she struck up a close friendship with the two youngest daughters in the family, Christina and Isabel, becoming especially close to Isabel. At the time of her visit, Dundee was well known for several prestigious industries, such as the manufacturing of jute and fabric. More than anything, Dundee was renowned for its whaling industry and the history associated with it.
Dundee reeked of boiling whale blubber and had a population of between thirty and forty thousand inhabitants at the time of Mary’s visit. Most of them were involved in some way or another in the whaling industry, whether as mariners on the many vessels that left the city’s small enclosed harbor for the arctic seas, or on land, where the “whaling boiling yards” were located.
Each whaling company had one of these yards, where the whale oil and blubber were eventually transformed into the products needed. Even the women were employed in the field, “to clean the whale bone of its flesh and other impurities.”All of this bustling and brisk business in whale products created an awful smell. As late as 1825, an article that appeared in the Dundee Advertiser mentioned the “most disagreeable suspicious sort of smell [that] has accosted the olfactory nerves of the
inhabitants of this town.” Still, the town relied on the whaling business, and the smell was part of it.
Mary Godwin must have been aware of the smell, but more important, she must have heard the many tales that abounded in Dundee. Most of them were associated with the frigid arctic seas, with the mariners and the vessels lost in the watery abyss, with those men who never returned. One such tale was that of Captain Adamson, who manned the ship Advice. He had been captured during the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 and brought onto a Dutch vessel, which then sank. Captain Adamson was lost for several days in the vastness of the arctic waters, alone with his thoughts and fears, before he was found anew and returned to safety. Such tales of bravery and despair would no doubt have reminded Mary of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In it, the mariner had also been lost at sea for a time, lost companions, feared the outcome, but was eventually found, and later told his story again and again to those who would hear of it.
But in 1814, when Percy Shelley returned for a visit to Skinner Street, Mary was there, having just come back from another trip to Scotland. Shelley’s eyes must have settled on her and for the first time he must have seen the young woman she had become. Edward Dowden described Mary at that age as “a girl in her seventeenth year, with shapely golden head, a face very pale and pure, great forehead, earnest hazel eyes, and an expression at once of sensibility and firmness about her delicately curved lips.”
Aside from fancying her physical features, Shelley found something far more important and appealing: Mary was the daughter of William Godwin, the illustrious mentor whose work Shelley idolized, and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the first feminist, whose work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had had such an impact. And Shelley came to believe that Mary had her parents’ intellectual gifts, although there was no indication of this yet.
The Lady and Her Monsters Page 9