Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Both Shelley and Harriet were too busy to notice. Harriet arranged their books and papers, wrote letters to Mrs Nugent, and fussed around trying to find something for Dan to do. Shelley was now in the middle of writing his pamphlet on the Eaton case. He was organizing his philosophic reading more carefully again, and had embarked on a translation of d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature, the implications of which he was eager to discuss with Godwin. He arranged for liberal and radical papers to be sent over weekly from Barnstaple, including Cobbett’s Political Register and Hunt’s Examiner, and he was searching about for a London bookseller.[5] It was probably Godwin who put Shelley on to Thomas Hookham and Sons, of 15 Old Bond Street.40

  Shelley was again anxious to get his commune together. Miss Hitchener at last set out from Sussex about 14 July, and Shelley wrote a long eulogy on her self-made republican and Deist virtues in a letter to Godwin. This was by way of an introduction, for Miss Hitchener spent the stop-over night in London, not at the Westbrooks’ but at Skinner Street. ‘She is a woman with whom her excellent qualities made me acquainted — tho deriving her birth from a very humble source she contracted during youth a very deep & refined habit of thinking; her mind naturally inquisitive and penetrating overleaped the bounds of prejudice — she formed for herself an unbeaten path of life.’41 One cannot help being struck by the difference between this apparently cool Godwinian assessment of Miss Hitchener’s ‘worthy’ virtues, and the passionate outpourings which Shelley had lavished upon her so often in correspondence, calling her nothing less than ‘the rock’ in all his storm.

  Shelley attempted to get one of Godwin’s own household to come down to Devon with Miss Hitchener. ‘Why may not Fanny[3] come to Lynmouth with Miss Hitchener . . . and return with us all to London in the autumn?’ Godwin was not happy with this suggestion, explaining that he did not really know Shelley, he had not ‘seen his face’, and that such a move might be premature. Yet Shelley already had a feminine following at Skinner Street, as was clear from Godwin’s observation about Shelley’s letter from Chepstow: ‘the moment when what I may now call the well-known hand was seen, all the females were on the tiptoe to know’.42 In the event, Miss Hitchener left at long last on the Barnstaple coach alone on 15 July to join her fate to the Shelleys.

  One can imagine the interest aroused in Lynmouth as a third female, travelling unescorted, arrived to join young Mr Shelley’s party at Hooper’s Lodging, as his cottage was known locally. She was joyfully received, a tall, thin figure with her rather pocked and ravaged complexion, very talkative and anxious to please. She obviously worshipped Shelley. The villagers never discovered quite what the set-up was, but it was concluded that she was some kind of ‘female servant’ and ‘supposed a foreigner’.43 This was reported to Lord Sidmouth too, though his Sussex sources had probably already informed him that Miss Hitchener had left to stay with ‘her connection’ in the West Country.

  Once Miss Hitchener had arrived, Shelley began active local propaganda work for the first time since he had left Dublin. There was another change which was also indicative of businesslike activity: Portia’s name was changed to ‘Bessie’. After Miss Hitchener had been with them for a fortnight, Harriet wrote one of her exact and amusing descriptions to Mrs Nugent in Dublin. She was kindly about her, though slightly mocking her earnestness. It was not altogether easy to have another woman in Shelley’s life. ‘Our friend Miss Hitchener is come to us,’ Harriet wrote on 4 August. ‘She is very busy writing for the good of mankind. She is dark in complexion, with a great quantity of long black hair. She talks a great deal. If you like great talkers she will suit you. She is taller than me or my sister, and as thin as it is possible to be. I hope you will see her one day. . . . Miss Hitchener had read your letter and loves you in good earnest. Her own expression. I know you would love her did you know her. Her age is 30. She looks like as if she was only 24 and her spirits are excellent. She laughs and talks and writes all day.’ Miss Hitchener also brought doubtful news of Godwin. ‘She has seen the Godwins, and thinks Godwin different to what he seems, he lives so much from his family, only seeing them at stated hours. We do not like that, and he thinks himself such a very great man. He would not let one of his own children come to us just because he had not seen our faces. Just as if writing to a person in which we express all our thoughts, was not a sufficient knowledge of them. I knew our friend, whom we call Bessy, just as well when we corresponded as I do now.’44 However, that opinion was to change shortly too.

  Lynmouth, so cut off from all communications, might not be thought the ideal centre for distributing propaganda. But there was one ever-ready mode of transport and dispersion waiting their command, as Shelley suddenly realized: the sea, and the wind that blew over it. The result was that in the early mornings and late evenings, Shelley and the supposed foreigner could be seen picking their way along the rocks and shingle with arms and pockets full of bottles. Carefully waiting for the right turn of the tide, and the right shift of the wind so it blew from the west into Avonmouth, or south-west across to Wales, they lobbed far out to sea a fleet of bobbing vessels, ‘vessels of heavenly medicine’ as Shelley called them in a sonnet, ‘On Launching some bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel’. The medicine consisted of the Declaration of Rights and the broadsheet ballad ‘The Devil’s Walk’.

  Another of Shelley’s methods, which had in its elaborateness a curious element of game-playing, was to build a miniature boat. Again, Lord Sidmouth was to receive a detailed description of one of these, picked up off-shore by a local fisherman. The little box was ‘carefully covered over with bladder, and well-rosined and waxed to keep out the water, and, in order to attract attention at sea, there was a little upright stick fastened to it at each end, and a little sail fastened to them, as well as some lead at the bottom to keep it upright’.45 The contents of seditious paper was duly reported. A third method was more prosaic. Their Irish servant, simple blundering Dan Healy, was loaded up with broadsheets and sent off into the surrounding byways to post them up on the wall and barn doors when no one was about. Shelley gave him a cover story, about meeting two travelling gentlemen on the road, if he happened to be stopped and questioned.

  The last method can only be called perfectly Shelleyan. Harriet and Bessie and he would spend hours by the windows of their cottage cutting out sections of silk, and sewing and gluing them with cowgum. The result was a fire balloon, a globe of silk which was inflated by the operation of a spirit-soaked wick suspended under the open neck. These are tricky machines to fly, as they tend to ignite, but Shelley managed to get many radiant balloons to lift copies of the Declaration of Rights and sail through the evening sky north-eastwards across the Bristol Channel, until their tiny spark was lost in the dusk. He recorded this in one of the best of his early poems, ‘To a Balloon, laden with Knowledge’:

  Bright ball of flame that thro the gloom of even

  Silently takest thine ethereal way

  And with surpassing glory dimmst each ray

  Twinkling amid the dark blue depths of Heaven;

  Unlike the Fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou

  Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,

  Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow

  A watch light by the patriots lonely tomb,

  A ray of courage to the opprest and poor,

  A spark, tho’ gleaming on the hovel’s hearth,

  Which thro’ the tyrant’s guilded domes shall roar,

  A beacon in the darkness of the earth,

  A sun which o’er the renovated scene

  Shall dart like Truth where Falsehood yet has been.46

  One remembers how he berated one of his friends at Eton as apyros, a man who has no love for fire. In this poem, every image is shot through by the presence of flame, and the fire-balloon itself becomes a metaphor of the life of the revolutionary or philanthropist, whose body is burnt away and destroyed, but whose message survives and kindles those around. The poem weakens an
d falls off towards the end, until the distinctive image of fire in darkness succumbs to the almost meaninglessly general ‘renovation of the scene’ by Truth replacing Falsehood. This was a very apt reflection of Shelley’s own limitations in understanding the philosophy of political change, at this point in his life.

  The 1st of August was Harriet’s seventeenth birthday, and the 4th was Shelley’s twentieth. They let off balloons to celebrate. Afterwards this became one of Shelley’s customs, and he was continuing it four years later in Switzerland.

  Living all together at Lynmouth, Shelley again began to think about the communal life, and how it was best organized for his own little circle. All the time while he campaigned for egalitarian principles, he kept a regular servant in Dan. It is not known if Dan ate at table with the rest of the household, but it is certain that Shelley liked to employ local servants to cook and housekeep wherever he went. The wages for such services were tiny. The plan to run the farm at Nantgwillt had been part of a general idea that manual labour and a certain degree of self-sufficiency should be a necessary feature of communal living. Carried through into action, this would have been a truly revolutionary scheme, reminiscent of the Southey — Coleridge Pantisocratic plan formed at Cambridge and Bristol during the 1790s, and a premonition of the breakaway groups from the Owenite factory townships in the 1820.[6]

  But at Lynmouth, writing to Godwin, Shelley stated his views differently, and showed a surprising willingness to reflect the current morality and class stratification of his own day. It is, however, important to remember that he was trying to get Godwin’s daughter down to stay with them, and that Shelley consistently put on a more conservative and respectful front for the master’s benefit than he did in real life. ‘I do not mean’, Shelley wrote to Godwin, ‘that a splendid mansion, or an equipage is in any degree essential to life, — but that, if I was employed at the loom or the plough, & my wife in culinary business and housewifery we should in the present state of society quickly become very different beings, & I may add, less useful to our species. Nor consistently with invincible ideas of delicacy, can two persons of opposite sexes unconnected by certain ties sleep in the same apartment. Probably, in a regenerated state of society agriculture & manufacture would be compatible with the most powerful intellect and polished manners; — probably delicacy as it relates to sexual distinction would disappear. Yet now, a ploughboy can with difficulty acquire refinement of intellect, & promiscuous sexual intercourse under the present system of thinking would inevitably lead to consequences the most injurious to the happiness of mankind.’47

  These arguments reflect the assumptions of Shelley’s social background. It was certainly true that a ploughboy in 1812 would be extraordinarily lucky to achieve any degree of education, even literacy. Although even here, there were distinguished exceptions in the working-men’s movement, which threw up writers of the calibre of Samuel Bamford, William Lovett and Richard Carlile.[7] But Shelley’s argument that if he, the educated man, the man of intellectual refinement, were put to the plough, he ‘would quickly become a very different being’, suggests a very deep sense of class differentiation, so deep as to be almost a biological differentiation. He seemed to believe that the mere act of manual labour destroyed a man’s mental capacity for thought and the intellectual life. Again, on the sexual issue, the slightly embarrassed consideration of the physical details of undressing and sleeping in the same room, which lies behind Shelley’s idea of invincible delicacy, is another deeply ingrained idea of his own class stratum, dependent on the simple fact of spacious living.

  William Cobbett, the editor and journalist who proudly proclaimed his ploughboy origins, featured in the discussions which were going on at the cottage about his paper the Weekly Register and his attitudes as a political popularist. Both Shelley and Harriet were furious that Cobbett had attacked Sir Francis Burdett in his recent stand over the building of barracks in disturbed areas. Harriet thought that ‘Cobbett merely changes his sentiments as occasion requires’, and that his political manners were abusive and contradictory.48 Both were anti-Cobbett because of his popularist appeal and style, precisely that bridgehead to the ‘poor and opprest’ that Shelley had failed to establish in his Dublin pamphlet. Shelley enlisted Cobbett’s name rather sneeringly in a general attack on the irrelevancy of classical education, suggesting that men like Cobbett were really beyond all hope of refinement. ‘I have as great a contempt for Cobbett as you have’, he wrote to Godwin, ‘but it is because he is a dastard & a time server; he has no humanity, no refinement, but were he a classical scholar would he have more?’49 As Shelley began to understand the political process more broadly and with more insight, so his admiration for Cobbett steadily increased. He eventually came to regard him as a ‘mischievous’ and delightful bull-baiter of authority, and almost exactly seven years after Lynmouth, he was writing ‘Cobbett still more & more delights me, with all my horror of the sanguinary commonplaces of his creed. His design to overthrow Bank notes by forgery is very comic.’50

  At Lynmouth in July, Shelley embarked on a concentrated period of reading and study. He began a debate with Godwin over the materialist philosophy and the principles behind Political Justice. They discussed Helvetius and Berkeley, and Shelley once more found himself at issue with Godwin. They had agreed on the ‘omnipotence of education’ and were united in antagonism towards the ‘system of self-love’, which they understood to be the operating principle behind contemporary society. But in more purely philosophical regions, Shelley disagreed with Godwin that ‘the loftiest disinterestedness is incompatible with the strictest materialism’. Shelley at this stage regarded himself as a strict ‘necessitarian’, with a rigidly mechanical view of the moral universe, whereas Godwin tended towards a more flexible philosophy. Shelley held his ground without compunction. ‘If I err in what I say, or if I differ from you (though in this point I think I do not) Reason stands arbiter between us. Reason (if I may be permitted to personify it) is as much your superior, as you are mine.’51

  Shelley took issue with Godwin over the content of education, and argued that Godwin’s ideas were too literary and fettered by undue respect for a classical education and sophisticated linguistic training. ‘You say that words will neither debauch our understandings, nor distort our moral feelings. — You say that the time of youth could not be better employed than in the acquisition of classical learning. But words are the very things that so eminently contribute to the growth and establishment of prejudice: the learning of words before the mind is capable of attaching correspondent ideas to them, is like possessing machinery with the use of which we are so unacquainted as to be in danger of misusing it.’ Shelley here hit upon a powerful critique not only of literary education in general, but of eighteenth-century literature in particular; his argument is not unrelated to the advocacy by both Wordsworth and Coleridge of the ‘plain style’ in their essays and prefaces.

  Shelley was at this moment most concerned with education, and he therefore concluded his argument with a suggestion for an adolescent syllabus: ‘I should think that natural philosophy,[8] medicine, astronomy, & above all History would be sufficient employments for immaturity, employments which would completely fill up the era of tutelage, & render unnecessary all expedients for losing time well, by gaining it safely.’52 The subjects which Shelley chose as the basis for a true education show he was once again turning over in his mind the background for his long poem which he had projected at Keswick. The ‘Notes to Queen Mab’, which he finally put down in definite form in London the following year, are based on exactly these categories. Shelley was ‘re-educating’ himself with all these disciplines at Lynmouth. A book order to Hookham dated 29 July included a collection of Medical Extracts, Sir Humphry Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women and David Hartley’s study of ‘mental association’, an early psychological thesis, Observations on Man.53

  At Lynmouth Shelley also read for the first time J.H. Lawren
ce’s four-volume romance, The Empire of the Nairs; or The Rights of Women. It was based on a study of the matriarchal caste of the Nairs in Malabar, and was one of the most influential of feminist tracts.[14] Shelley at once wrote enthusiastically to Lawrence that his book had ‘succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines. I then retained no doubts as to the evils of marriage, — Mrs Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that; but I had been dull enough not to perceive the greatest argument against it, until developed in the “Nairs”, viz. prostitution both legal and illegal.’54 The fundamental exemplum of Lawrence’s book was that a healthy and happy community could only be formed by the abolition of a sexually monogamous morality. This chimed with the kind of theories Shelley had been developing ever since Oxford; yet he was acutely aware of the dangers of practising such a theory in the present society. For this reason he defended his own marriage as he had done previously to Miss Hitchener, remarking cheerfully that ‘Love seems inclined to stay in the prison’.

  Yet his further comments on seduction, with their curiously over-sensitive shudder of recoil, reflect much less on Harriet than on his relationship with Miss Hitchener, and the accusations which had been levelled from Sussex: ‘. . . Seduction, which term could have no meaning in a rational society, has now a most tremendous one; the fictitious merit attached to chastity has made that a forerunner of the most terrible of ruins, which, in Malabar, would be a pledge of honour and homage. If there is any enormous and desolating crime, of which I should shudder to be accused, it is seduction.’55 For all his shuddering however, one notes that, quite firmly, chastity was a ‘fictitious merit’.