Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley became extraordinarily dependent on Elizabeth Hitchener’s support during these early days at Keswick, writing, ‘I am immersed in a labyrinth of doubt. My friend, I need your advice your reason, my own seems almost withered. Will you come here in your Christmas holydays.’23 He was almost surprised to find himself immersed in the green, tranquil depths of the Lake District, in sole command of a grateful and adoring Harriet, and a strangely good-humoured Eliza. He walked out alone over the cold and beautiful upland pastures, gazing down on the ruffled waters and brooding on mutability. He felt his friendship with Hogg was one more example of an intimate emotional relationship that had failed him. Paradoxically he came to believe that it was Hogg who had deserted him, and not he who had allowed himself to be spirited away from Hogg at York. He wrote plaintively: ‘I know how much I owe to you . . . but it is not my fault, indeed it is not.’24

  Transformed into mythical pattern, the desertion of his first friend was to appear in the opening cantos of the long poem The Revolt of Islam of 1817. At the time it left him little that was illuminating about his own nature. There was the clear statement on free love: ‘I attach little value to the monopoly of exclusive cohabitation. You know that I have frequently spoken slightingly of it.’25 But even this was overshadowed by the ambiguity of his feelings towards his new wife. As he wrote to Hogg about his sexual relations with Harriet: ‘suppose not that I would have envyed you what I too might share, what I should not much care utterly to resign (you see I am explicit as you were)’.26 There was still too little that seemed settled or explicit in his own mind. Without Hogg his marriage began to take on a different complexion; while with Eliza the old problem of Harriet’s dependence threatened to return. Yet it was no good looking back: the letters to his old friend tailed off in mid-November, and the correspondence gradually ceased as the passion burnt itself out with nothing left to feed on. The silence that came between them was to last for almost a year.

  At Keswick they had taken a small house, Chesnut Cottage, about two miles outside Keswick on the Penrith road. They were now in the region of the Lake poets, and Shelley expected as his immediate neighbours Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and de Quincey. It was, perhaps, one of the greatest strokes of ill-luck that in all his time at Chesnut Cottage he was only to meet Southey. Coleridge was away lecturing in London that winter, and Wordsworth remained deep in hibernation at Grasmere.[3] Wordsworth does not seem to have been aware that Shelley was ever in his vicinity, and in all probability would not have relished the idea very much. But Coleridge was to recall the missed opportunity long afterwards with a mixture of wistful regret and gentle patronizing complacency. ‘Poor Shelley,’ he confided to John Frere in 1830, ‘it is a pity I think that I never met him. I could have done him good. He went to Keswick on purpose to see me. . . . Southey had no understanding for a toleration of such principles as Shelley’s. I should have laughed at his Atheism. I could have sympathized with him, and shown him that I did so, and he would have felt that I did so. I could have shown him that I had been in the same state myself, and I could have guided him through it. I have often bitterly regretted in my heart that I never did meet with Shelley.’27 In this interview, not published until 1917, Coleridge added an acute general comment on Shelley’s predicament as he had seen it unfolding. ‘Shelley was a man of great power as a poet,’ he told Frere, ‘and could he only have had some notion of order, could you only have given him some plane whereon to stand, and look down upon his mind, he would have succeeded.’ The strange thing was that Shelley himself soon wrote about his difficulties in a very similar way. De Quincey, who was burrowed into Grasmere at Dove Cottage, missed Shelley and commented impishly on his own library, which, ‘being rich in the wickedest of German speculations, would naturally have been more to Shelley’s taste than the Spanish library of Southey’.28 It was, then, Southey alone that Shelley chanced to meet during his four months’ stay in the Lake District.

  In the meantime, the Shelleyan routine reestablished itself at Chesnut Cottage. The house was divided with another family, but the Shelleys were allowed to use the little garden, or as Harriet naïvely explained to some visitors, ‘the people let us run about in it, whenever Percy and I are tired of sitting in the house’.29 The post came in daily at Keswick at 7 o’clock in the morning, and went out again at 9, and on urgent occasions Shelley would be waiting for letters — especially from Hogg — and dash off his replies in time to go by return. This in itself may account sometimes for their breathless wildness. Shelley walked about the lakes and peaks, often alone, and his reflections on the deserted and magnificent scenery were soon flooding out to Miss Hitchener. A small sum of money came from old Westbrook, perhaps in response to a request from Eliza, but Shelley was soon on the verge of penury again despite the fact that his rent only came to thirty shillings a week. By 30 November he was writing to Medwin, who had been severely taxed by Timothy for helping with Harriet’s marriage settlement, to inquire about the possibilities of raising some money by loan with his inheritance as security. It is interesting that Shelley did not yet stoop to entertaining the idea of getting work himself.

  Despite being ‘so poor as to be actually in danger of every day being deprived of the necessaries of life’,30 Shelley was able to gird himself and his ladies up to visit the Duke of Norfolk at Greystoke at his lordship’s invitation in the first week of December. The weekend was extended to one of more than seven days. The meeting did not help solve family difficulties as the duke had hoped, but it gave Shelley an introduction to the Lake District notables. Unexpectedly Shelley enjoyed himself, showing off the pretty and very presentable Harriet, and arguing everyone into corners. The duke, who remembered his own radical days when he had proposed the notorious toast to ‘our Sovereign, the People’ was by all accounts friendly and tolerant of his fiery young guest, and Shelley recovered much of the resilience and self-confidence which the break with Hogg had weakened. ‘I held the arguments which I do everywhere.’31

  On his return to Chesnut Cottage, about 9 December, he wrote to Miss Hitchener that he was ‘fatigued by aristocratical insipidity’, but that was only to reassure her that he was still of the egalitarian faith. More indicative was the short, low-toned and refreshingly simple note he sent to Hogg, the epilogue to the agonized series, and its dismissal. Here at last he put all the vaporous emotions, tortuous moral distinctions and defensive Godwinian theories firmly aside, and admitted it had been a straight fight. A fight which by the nature of things Hogg had lost. ‘If I were free,’ he told Hogg gently but firmly, ‘I were yours — tho’ I don’t think you sinless, I think you capable of great things, and in truth as well as in the stores of such a mind as yours can I conceive no pleasure equal to the participation. But I am Harriet’s. I am devoted to her happiness; this is entrusted to me, nor will I resign it. Would you desire me to desert her and live with you?’32 There could be only one answer to this. For the time being, T. J. Hogg, his first great friend, dropped out of his life.

  As Shelley recovered, the radical mission which he had first clearly perceived at York reasserted itself, and now more comprehensively than before. In the letters to Miss Hitchener, the image of ‘sister of his soul’ was subtly replaced by a more politicized one in which he saw the mirror of his own aspirations: ‘I consider you one of those beings who carry happiness, reform, liberty wherever they go — to me you are as my better genius, the judge of my reasonings, the guide of my actions, the influencer of my usefulness. Great responsibility is the consequence of high powers.’33

  His genius for disturbance began to make itself felt at Keswick. There was talk of strange lights and noises in the cottage, and rumours of the devilish consequences of Shelley’s atheism soon went abroad. ‘Strange prejudices have these country people!’ remarked Shelley innocently, as he set out to project the sinister reputation for alchemy that he had marketed at Oxford. The occult influences of childhood were growing up with him. Shelley’s landlord finally came knocking at the
door to protest. ‘Mr Dare entered our cottage and said he had something to say to me. “Why Sir,” said he, “I am not satisfied with you. I wish you to leave my house.” — “Why Sir?” “Because the country talks very strangely of your proceedings. — Odd things have been seen at night near your dwelling. I am very ill satisfied with this — Sir I don’t like to talk of it. I wish you to provide for yourself elsewhere.’” Shelley succeeded in quieting Mr Dare’s fears with ‘much difficulty’, but realized that he was not welcome as a permanent tenant, and would eventually have to move. His explanation for the strange night-time proceedings was disarmingly simple. He had been discussing physics with Harriet and Eliza and demonstrating the nature of the atmosphere: ‘to illustrate my theory I made some experiments on hydrogen gas, one of its constituent parts. — This was in the garden, and the vivid flame was seen at some distance.’34 He concluded his account to Miss Hitchener with a rather more mocking gleam, ‘I wish to stay at Keswick . . . to see Southey. You may imagine then that I was very humble to Mr Dare, I should think he was tolerable afraid of the Devil.’35

  Shelley now began to think of taking a house in Sussex again, but not near any ‘populous manufacturing dissipated town’ or near any barracks. In travelling between Edinburgh, York and Keswick he had already gained new experience of the poverty and exploitation which existed in the great cities of the North and Midlands, and had observed the ubiquity of soldiers wherever social conditions were worst.

  At this time the occupation army stationed at trouble spots in England exceeded in number the whole of Wellington’s force fighting on the Spanish peninsula.36 The war itself was increasingly unpopular, and the country was in the throes of a severe economic crisis, brought on partly by the Continental blockade, and partly by the internal disruption of trade and the soaring of wartime prices. Harvests were bad, and the cost of basic foods rose sharply. Petitions for minimum wages were drawn up by thousands of weavers in Scotland, Manchester and Bolton.37 Discontent boiled over in local disturbances, food riots and outbreaks of frame-breaking, especially in Lancashire. All this came together in the phenomenon of Luddism, which shook the country in the spring and summer of 1812. The symptoms were not merely temporary economic ones: they arose from deep-seated social grievances, the appalling lack of proper housing, savage working hours and factory conditions, and the complete absence of educational or medical facilities among the manufacturing populations. Class antagonisms were sharpened by the indiscriminate use of troops to ‘keep the peace’ for the local employers and property-owners.

  These extreme economic conditions were helping to give birth to a quite new kind of radicalism, not the old radicalism of the Foxite Whigs and men like the Duke of Norfolk, but a working-class radicalism, concerned fundamentally with economic and social grievances rather than party political ones, and without as yet any kind of parliamentary representation. In the country as a whole, and especially in the parts of it through which Shelley had been travelling as an outcast from his family and from his class of southern Whig aristocrats, a new political awareness was growing. Class identities were solidified as they came into opposition and finally into open and violent conflict with the forces of local justice and property ownership, and ultimately with the forces of government.[4]

  In the December of 1811, a steady politicizing of Shelley’s views was going on at Keswick, reflecting the developments in the nation at large. To begin with he was concerned primarily with the settling of his own little community in such a remote and beautiful region. ‘Oh! how you will delight in this scenery. The mountains are now capped with snow. The lake as I see it hence is glassy and calm. Snow vapours tinted by the loveliest refractions pass far below the summit of these gigantic rocks. The scene even in winer is inexpressibly lovely. The clouds assume shapes which seem peculiar to these regions; what will it be in summer, what when you are here. Oh! give me a little cottage in that scene, let all live in peaceful little houses, let temples and palaces rot with their perishing masters.’38 Yet even in this pastoral Rousseauesque dream, the note of political discontent crept in. Shelley was planning a poem, a long one, which would be ‘by anticipation a picture of the manners simplicity and delights of a perfect state of society: tho still earthly’.39 He realized, half laughingly, that at such a time, even so poetical a plan might be regarded as subversive. ‘What think you of my undertaking. Shall I not get into Prison. Harriet is sadly afraid that his Majesty will provide me a lodging in consideration of the zeal which I evince for the bettering of his subjects.’40

  The works of Godwin now began to fill more and more of Shelley’s vision of the struggle for reform and the ideal society. He listed to Miss Hitchener what he considered were Godwin’s most valuable contributions in the following order of importance: The Enquirer, St Leon, Political Justice and Caleb Williams. It was characteristic of Shelley’s temperament that as his thinking became politically active he should immediately be attracted to the work of an extreme anarchist idealist, who had once been trained for the Presbyterian ministry at Hoxton Academy, and always retained the passionate puritan logic of the dedicated religious missionary. Shelley’s championship of atheism was now almost lackadaisical: ‘I annihilate God; you destroy the Devil and then we make a Heaven entirely to our own mind — It must be owned that we are tolerably independent . . . .’ But it began to take its place in a wider pattern of intellectual rejection and social criticism, that grew in self-confidence and anger.

  On Christmas Day 1811, Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener, now the perfect sounding-board for his ideas, what was really a classic statement of the new emergent radicalism. Coming from Shelley, at this early stage, it inevitably lacked any definite objectives in reform terms; yet the depth, the fury and the social disillusionment of the criticism is unmistakably cast in the language of the Luddite period.

  I have been led into reasonings which make me hate more and more the existing establishment of every kind. I gasp when I think of plate & balls & tables & kings. — I have beheld scenes of misery. — The manufacturers are reduced to starvation. My friend, the military are gone to Nottingham — Curses light on them for their motives if they destroy one of its famine wasted inhabitants. — But if I were a friend to the destroyed myself about to perish, I fancy that I could bless them for saving my friend the bitter mockery of a trial. — Southey thinks that a revolution is inevitable; this is one of his reasons for supporting things as they are. — But let us not belie our principles. — They may feed & may riot & may sin to the last moment. — The groans of the wretched may pass unheeded till the latest moment of this infamous revelry, till the storm burst upon them and the oppressed take furious vengeance on the oppressors.41

  Shelley now saw a lifetime’s task opening up before him. The awareness that he showed in this Christmas Day letter of 1811, though as yet naïve and to some extent melodramatic, was to lie behind his work and thinking for the rest of his career. One must also remember its formulation: ‘I have been led into reasonings which make me hate . . . .’ This hate remained steadily behind the main thrust and energy of much of his most powerful and characteristic work.

  At this point in Keswick, he thought of the methods for circulating ideas which he had learnt from Lind at Eton, and practised at Oxford. He began to consider propaganda and more active forms of political intervention. At once he planned to put out a small collection of poems which would celebrate the cause of liberty. ‘The minor Poems I mentioned you will see soon. They are about to be sent to the Printers. — I think it wrong to publish anything anonymously. I shall annexe my name, and a preface in which I shall lay open my intentions as the poems are not wholly useless. “I sing, and liberty may love the song.” Can you assist my grave labours. Harriet complains that I hurt my health, and fancies that I shall get into prison.’42 The accent on prison was partly to impress on Miss Hitchener the seriousness of his intentions, but also to show that he anticipated taking issue with the established authorities of society. The determinatio
n to publish under his own name also showed he had changed and learnt from the Oxford days. Shelley was not able to find a publisher in England, and eventually took the collection to Ireland instead, where the manuscript was left with R. and J. Stockdale of Abbey Street, Dublin.[5]

  The idea of visiting Ireland was first vaguely mentioned on 10 December, but it was not until January that it began to form in Shelley’s mind. It seemed the obvious place to get his propaganda poems printed, and to make his first venture into political activism.

  Yet it was the meeting and talks with the poet Robert Southey at Greta Hall which supplied the decisive political catalyst. It has usually been thought that the relationship between Southey and Shelley was wholly antagonistic: the young idealist revolutionary set against the middle-aged, soured and hypocritical Tory. Southey remarked in a letter to his friend Grosvenor Bedford that ‘It had surprised him [Shelley] a good deal to meet for the first time in his life with a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is, that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven.’43 This was written on 4 January 1812, at an early stage of their acquaintance. It has sometimes been taken that Southey began by patronizing Shelley; or that, alternatively, as in Hogg’s ridiculous story, Shelley began by offending Southey and falling asleep in the middle of Southey’s talk.44 Yet Shelley, on the contrary, makes it quite clear that at this time he was deeply fascinated and influenced by Southey; they disagreed on many points, but this was precisely the attraction.