PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792–1822
Born in Sussex in 1792 and drowned in Italy thirty years later, the poet Shelley had a short but eventful life marked by numerous affairs and controversies, An atheist, a vegetarian, a political radical and an advocate of free love, he offended rather a lot of people in his lifetime, and many of his writings disappeared from view during the more morally repressed Victorian era.
He had been sent to Eton where he was bullied mercilessly (he would not accept ‘fagging’, he didn’t like sport, and he had a rather high-pitched voice). On going up to Oxford he managed to get chucked out in only a year, for publishing a pamphlet expounding atheism. The authorities were horrified, as was his father, who urged him to give up his radical ideas and his ‘somewhat progressive’ views on love and promiscuity. Percy rebelled, and eloped to Scotland to marry a 16-year-old girl called Harriett who had a crush on him. She had been regularly threatening suicide, and insisted that her elder sister (aged 28) move in with them. That must have been awkward for Percy, who disliked the sister intensely, but it became the first of numerous ‘threesomes’ in his life.
Percy quickly became rather more interested in an English teacher called Elizabeth Hitchener whose ideas inspired him to write his first epic poem – Queen Mab – about a utopian society. The Shelleys had a child, Elizabeth Ianthe, but by the time Harriett got pregnant again her husband had fallen for the charms of a well-educated and ferociously intelligent girl called Mary. The object of his new passion was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous feminist author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Mary Wollstonecraft had died giving birth to her daughter, leaving the young Mary to be brought up by her father William Godwin, author of a radical work called Political Justice. He was much respected by Percy, but if he thought that Godwin would be thrilled when Percy decided to elope to Europe with Mary, as he did in 1814, he was much mistaken, especially as the pair took with them Godwin’s step-daughter Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (known as Claire). Mary and Claire were step-sisters, both aged 16 at the time. Together the trio toured France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland before running out of money and returning to England. By then, Mary was pregnant. Harriett was also expecting, and she gave birth first, to Percy’s son Charles, in November 1814. Mary produced a daughter three months later, but the infant died after a few weeks. Mary quickly fell pregnant again and had another child in 1816, which they called William. Harriett meanwhile had decided to get a legal separation, and to rub salt in the wound applied for sole custody of her children on the basis that Percy was an unfit parent.
Percy’s grandfather had died in 1815, leaving him a legacy of £1,000, and this enabled Percy to set off once more for Europe with Mary, again with Claire in tow. Claire was in love with George Byron and she introduced him to their group, and they all spent the summer in Switzerland. They returned to the depressing news that Mary’s halfsister Fanny had committed suicide. A few weeks later, Percy’s wife Harriett chose a similar fate, drowning herself in the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park. This left Percy and Mary free to marry, which they did in 1817. The court however refused to allow Percy custody of his children – his views on free love horrified the authorities and it was decided that the children were better off with foster parents.
Percy and Mary settled in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, and became friends with the poets John Keats and Leigh Hunt. Shelley’s attempt at publishing a work entitled Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City about incestuous love proved too much for his publishers, although it did re-appear in a modified form a year later. In 1818 the Shelley’s decamped for Italy, moving around from city to city, but were beset with problems as first their son William and then their daughter Clara Everina succumbed to illness and died. In December 1818 the birth of a girl called Elena Adelaide Shelley was registered in Naples, with the mother given, not as Mary, but as a ‘Marina Padurin.’ Some observers speculated that the actual mother was Claire Clairmont, or possibly the family nursemaid. The child died just over a year later. By then Mary had given birth to a son Percy Florence Shelley (later, Sir Percy). The parents had moved from Naples to Florence and Pisa and then on 8 July 1822, less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley and a couple of friends decided to sail across the Gulf of Spezia. While returning from Livorno in his sailing boat, the ‘Don Juan’, a storm overtook the craft and all on board were drowned, although stories persisted that Shelley had either been bumped off because of his political views, or as a result of a botched robbery at sea. His body washed ashore and was cremated on the beach, in order to comply with quarantine regulations. Mary did not attend the funeral. The Courier reported: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is God or no.’
LORD BYRON, 1788–1824
A brilliant poet, but a man whose love affairs scandalised the Regency period, George Gordon Noel Byron had to endure a club foot, a father who deserted him, a mother who was mentally unstable, and a nurse who sexually abused him when he was 9 years old. It was small wonder that he turned out to be so unconventional. He became Sixth Baron Byron when he was 10, and was sent away to Harrow, where as a young teenager he dabbled in sexual encounters with both genders. In 1805 he went up to Trinity College, where he found time to attend wild parties, pursue a variety of sexual conquests, and to indulge his love of gambling, boxing and horse racing. In 1811 he took his seat in the House of Lords, and embarked on a passionate affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb. It was she who dubbed him ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. Byron became an overnight sensation with the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Thereafter he turned his attentions to Jane Harley, Countess of Oxford, before moving on to an alleged affair with a girl called Augusta, who was his own half-sister and who had married the previous year. In the spring of 1814, Augusta gave birth to a daughter who was christened Elizabeth Medora Leigh. It was widely rumoured that Byron was the father. He then rebounded into a marriage with Anne Isabella Milbanke. The wedding, in January 1815, was followed by the birth of a child called Augusta Ada. The marriage barely lasted the year before his wife left him, taking their daughter with her. Apparently she could not cope with her husband’s debts, his heavy drinking, his bisexuality – and the allegations of his incestuous relationship with Augusta.
In 1816 Byron left for Switzerland where he met up with Shelley – and Claire Clairmont, who gave birth to his daughter, Allegra, in 1817. When his friends returned to England, Byron stayed in Europe and travelled to Italy, writing Don Juan and generally enjoying himself with a bevy of female beauties along the way. At one stage he fell in love with an Italian countess, a married woman by the name of Teresa Guiccioli. She was, at 19, eleven years younger than him. They had met just three days after her wedding to the Count, and they immediately fell in love, prompting Byron to settle in Ravenna between 1819 and 1821 while they conducted their very public affair.
In 1823 he decided to throw in his lot with Greek freedom fighters, who wanted to liberate Greece and overthrow the Ottoman Empire. Byron poured money into equipping the Greek navy, taking command of a group of fighters, and generally being heroic. However, he caught an infection, and died of his illness (probably sepsis) in 1824, aged just 36. His embalmed body was brought back to England, but was denied a burial at Westminster Abbey – as would have been customary for a man of his standing and fame. Apparently the powers-that-be at Westminster felt that his immoral behaviour made him an unfit candidate for burial in their Abbey. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people came to view his body when it lay in state for two days in London, before being taken away to be interred in the family vault near Newstead Abbey in Nottingham. He may have been considered a great hero in Greece, but it was 145 years before even a plaque with his name on was put up in Poets’ Corner – and then only after a campaign which lasted over sixty years. In the nineteenth century, society was simply not prepared to accept By
ron as a national hero. Others had their peccadilloes and were forgiven, but in the case of Lord Byron he was considered to be just too depraved, too immoral, and not in any way repentant. Had he been born fifty years earlier, the world might have turned a blind eye, but by the 1820s the British public was moving away from accepting the notoriously profligate behaviour of the aristocracy towards the more moral, more repressed, and less flamboyant world of the Victorians.
The pendulum was about to swing: sex continued, scandal continued and satire continued, but the openness of the Georgians was replaced by Victorian hypocrisy and censure.
Glossary
A Selection of Sexual Terms
(G) indicates that the explanation is from the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose.
Madams
Abbess (or Lady Abbess); Bawd; Buttock broker (Cant); Covent Garden abbess; Gap-stopper; Go between; Mother/ Mother of the maids.
Pimps
Cock pimp; Panderer; She-napper; Squire of the placket.
Prostitutes
Academician; Bat; Biter; Bunter; Buttock; Crack; Covent Garden nun; Cyprian Corps; Dasher; Demi Rep; Doxy; Drab; Dress Lodger; Drury Lane vestal; Convenient (Cant); Fashionable impures; Flash mollisher; Flower seller; Harlot; Hedge whore; Hoydon; Impure; Laced mutton; Lady of easy virtue; Ladies of the First Quality; Mab; Madam Ran (Cant); Merry arse Christian; Mob; Moll; Nymph; One of us/one of my cousins; Spell; Thaiis; Quean; Pintle-merchant; Piper’s wife; Public ledger; Punk; Receiver-General; Squirrel; Star gazer; Strumpet; Tail; Three penny upright; Trumpery; Unfortunate women; Woman of the town; Woman of pleasure.
Nine descriptions of women with loose morals:
1. Demanders for Glimmer or Fire
2. Bawdy Baskets
3. Morts
4. Autem Morts
5. Walking Morts
6. Doxies
7. Delles
8. Kinching Morts
9. Kinching Coes
Bullies
Bully back; Flash man.
The customers
Corinthians ; Flogging cully; Keeping cully; Mutton monger; Top diver.
Premises
Bagnio; Buttocking shop; Cab; Cavaulting School; Corinth; Flash Panney; House of Civil reception; Nanny house; Nugging house; Nunnery; Pushing school; Punch-house; Seraglio; School of Venus; Smuggling Ken; Snoozing Ken; Vaulting school.
Homosexuality
Back Gammon player; a He-strumpet; an Indorser; Madge culls; a Miss Molly; Windward passage; Queer cull.
Sexual organs – male
Blind boy/blind visitor; Hair splitter; Nutmegs; Roger; Pego; Plug tail; Silent flute; Sugar stick; Tallywags (or Tarrywags); Thomas/Man Thomas; Tools; Twiddle-diddles; Whirligiggs; Yard.
Sexual organs – female
Cock alley; Cock Lane; Crinkum Crankum; Cunny; Dumb glutton; Fruitful vine; Hat/Old hat; Madge; Money; Muff; Notch; Pitcher; Quim; Water-mill.
The sex act
Blanket Hornpipe; Clicket; to grind; Moll Peatly’s Gig; Mutton; Nub; to Occupy; to roger; to bull; Strapping: (Cant); to swive; Two-handed put.
Terms associated with venereal disease
Covent Garden ague; Clap; Crinkums; Dropping member; Drury Lane ague; Dumb watch; Fire ship; Flap dragon; French disease; French gout; Frenchified; Flapdragon; Job’s dock; Notch; to nap; Nimgimmer; Peppered; Pissing pins and needles; Pox; Sauce; Scalder; Shanker; Spanish gout; Tetbury portion; Venus’s curse.
Miscellaneous
Apple dumplin shop: A woman’s bosom (G)
Bubble: A cheated person or dupe
Burning shame: A lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick (G)
Buttock-ball: A dance attended by prostitutes (G)
Cantharides: Aphrodisiac
Dutchess: A woman enjoyed with her pattens on, or by a man-in boots, is said to be made a dutchess (G)
Electuaries and Eringoes: Aphrodisiacs
Flyer: To take a flyer; to enjoy a woman with her clothes on, or without going to bed (G)
Fustilugs: A dirty slattern. (G)
Pucker water: Water impregnated with alum, or other astringents, used by old experienced traders to counterfeit virginity (G)
Socket money: A whore’s fee, or hire; also money paid or a treat, by a married man caught in an intrigue (G)
Short-heeled wench: A girl apt to fall on her back (G)
Van-neck: Miss or Mrs Van-Neck; a woman with large breasts; a bushel bubby (G)
Whore’s curse: A piece of gold coin, value 5s 3d, frequently given to women of the town by such as professed always to give gold, and who before the introduction of those pieces always gave half a guinea. (G)
Whore’s kitling, or Whore’s son: A bastard (G)
Whore-monger: A man that keeps more than one mistress. A country gentleman, who kept a female friend, being reproved by the parson of the parish, and styled a whore-monger asked the parson whether he had a cheese in his house; and being answered in the affirmative, ‘Pray,’ says he, ‘does that one cheese make you a cheese-monger?’ (G)
Wife in water colours: A mistress, or concubine (G)
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Accreditation for images used in this book:
My sincere thanks to all the museums, libraries, and galleries who have allowed the reproduction of images throughout this book and in particular to René Levaque for his generosity.
Cover image and page ii: Love in her eyes sits playing. Mezzotint by J.R. Smith, after Matthew William Peters. © British Museum
Image 1 A Bagnigge Wells Scene, or no resisting Temptation published by Carington Bowles, 1776. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. lwlpr00112
Image 2 Retail Traders not affected by the Shop Tax from 1787. Library of Congress PC3-1787
Image 3 A St Giles’s Beauty published by Carington Bowles in 1784. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. lwlpr05402
In Bed with the Georgians Page 23