Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  And rivets with sensation’s softest tie

  The kindred sympathies of human souls,

  Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:

  Those delicate and timid impulses

  In Nature’s primal modesty arose,

  And with undoubted confidence disclosed

  The growing longings of its dawning love,

  Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,

  That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,

  Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost. . . .

  Woman and man, in confidence and love,

  Equal and free and pure together trod

  The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more

  Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim’s feet . . . .’18

  The handling of the free love theme is characteristic of much of the strength and weakness of the whole work. The prose notes are constantly more powerful and effective than the long-drawn Miltonic or Southeyan rhetoric of the verse. Ideas are diffused by abstraction and repetition. The reader, however much he sympathizes with Shelley’s position, cannot be unaware of immaturity and inconsistency of thought, and a tendency to approach real human problems in a spirit of scornful, bookish brilliance. Shelley’s attitude to love is marred by two obvious blank spots. The first is his blindness to the intrinsic value of constancy in human relations, so that loving has the chance to develop from a static ‘sweet sensation’ into a cumulative process of discovery and exploration. We notice that Henry’s love is ‘speechless’. An earlier moralist and lover, Richard Steele, had observed, ‘to love her is a liberal education’. Shelley, less experienced, believed that ‘affection’ could simply ‘decay’ — presumably he imagined a painless, balanced and simultaneous process on both sides. His second blindness was to the way in which children made a fundamental alteration to the direction and responsibilities of a love relationship. Shelley was to remain faithful to his free love principles throughout his life, but he was to pay dearly — and make others pay dearly — for his personal blindness in both these respects.

  Queen Mab was, however, to have a life quite independent of its author’s. In the twenty-five years from its first printing, this was undoubtedly the most widely read, the most notorious, and the most influential of all Shelley’s works. It was not read by ‘the sons and daughters of aristocrats’, nor was it read for its poetic qualities; it was read by middle-class and working-class radicals in cheap pirate editions. The poem was advertised, extracted and discussed in the radical papers such as Richard Carlile’s Champion and Republican; and established itself as a basic text in the self-taught working-class culture from which the early trade union movement of the 1820s, and the Chartism of the thirties and forties was to spring. The Owenite interest in Shelley is well known, and Thomas Cooper, the ‘Chartist Rhymer’ placed Shelley in the pantheon of republican and visionary poets alongside Milton and Byron.[1] Bernard Shaw was told by an old Chartist that ‘Queen Mab was known as the Chartists’ Bible’ — an evangelical role for which it was well-suited.19

  Apart from these hints, it is difficult to show exactly how important Shelley’s poem became in circles that have left little written historical record, despite the brilliant pioneering work of E. P. Thompson. But the complicated and largely underground printing history of Queen Mab gives some indication. Of the original 250 copies Shelley distributed about seventy in England, Ireland and America. When the radical booksellers bought up the remainder in spring 1821, Richard Carlile says there were 180 left.20 The publisher Clark brought these out of the genteel selling market, and under his own imprint (which he simply pasted over the title page) he found he was able to sell them off among the radical working-class readership of the Republican within a few months. When he was prosecuted by the Vice Society, he desisted and Carlile then set up and printed a new edition towards the end of 1821; Trelawny found one copy in a Geneva bookshop and took it over the Alps to Shelley. (Shelley’s reaction belongs to another part of the story.) This sold so well, and was so satisfactorily threatened by the same Vice Society that Carlile was bringing out his second edition in boards at the ‘reduced price’ of 7s. 6d. in February 1822. By December 1822 there were no less than four entirely separate editions of Queen Mab on sale, and Carlile was cautioning readers against other ‘imperfect editions’, and advertising his own which now had the ‘Notes’ ‘all translated’. This was a great advance. Carlile’s advocacy was straightforward:

  Queen Mab is a philosophical poem in nine cantos, and is remarkably strong in its exposure and denunciation of Kingcraft and Priestcraft. Lord Byron calls it a poem of great strength and wonderful powers of imagination; and, with his Lordship, we differ from some of the Author’s metaphysical opinions. However it is upon the principle of free discussion and giving currency to every thing that is valuable, that the present publisher has taken up the publication. . . . In addition to the Poem itself, there are Notes by the Author, of equal bulk, equal beauties, and equal merit. Every thing that is mischievous to society is painted in this work in the highest colours.21

  Carlile, though suggesting reservations regarding Shelley’s outright attitudes to atheism, marriage and vegetarianism, cheerfully went ahead with the dangerous business of combating the Vice Society in the courts; he had been to jail before, and it held no terrors. Altogether Carlile published four separate editions in the twenties. Other important editions in this decade were Brook’s reprint of 1829 from an original 1813 copy, and the mysterious ‘New York’ edition of 1821 under the imprint of William Baldwin.22[2] In the thirties, the first definitive American edition appeared, published by Wright and Owen, New York 1831, with translated ‘Notes’. The following year, 1832 — the year of Reform — saw the appearance of perhaps the most important underground edition of all, under the imprints of Mrs Carlile and Sons (Mr Carlile being in jail). This was a cheap, pocket-size version, intended for serious study, with the ‘Notes’ appended directly to the verse as footnotes or prose commentary, and the long quotations from French, Greek and Latin fully translated. This was the classic Chartist’s copy, taken over in 1833 by the Owenites, and reprinted constantly by the great radical publishers of the 1840s, Heatherington and Watson.23 The number is not certain, but between 1821 and 1845 it has been reckoned ‘fourteen or more’ separate editions were published. At the same time, it has been calculated that between 1823 and 1841, the working-class and radical periodicals such as those edited and published by Carlile and Heatherington carried ‘140 items’ on Shelley, most of which were excerpts from or discussions of Queen Mab.24 Besides reaching American radicals, it is known that the poem was influential in liberal and revolutionary circles on the Continent, and the young Frederick Engels began a translation before the 1848 upheavals.25 All this is bitterly ironic in the light of Shelley’s own laments in Italy about his failure to reach an audience; and the subsequent attempts by the Shelley dynasty and the established publisher Moxon, to keep the official collections of Shelley’s poetry clean and respectable. In the end Heatherington took a test case for blasphemous libel against Moxon in 1841 to establish the principle that Queen Mab could be printed in full and remain beyond the reach of the law. The case was lost, but as no sentence was forthcoming from the Bench, the principle was won.

  Queen Mab’s reputation was of course quite otherwise in the established press. A middle-of-the-road periodical, the Investigator of 1822, summed up the feelings of ‘unmingled horror and disgust’ at that ‘most execrable publication’ to which Byron’s Cain was ‘a homily’.26 A long pamphlet of the previous year, entitled an Answer to Queen Mab significantly addressed the first of its two parts to ‘The Anti-Matrimonial Thesis’ and the second to ‘The Supposed Atheism’. The political and commercial critique had less power to shock, for it was only really taken seriously by the radicals.27 The exception to these reactions were Hunt’s Examiner and a rather mysterious periodical entitled the Theological Enquirer which carried excerpts amounting to one-third of the whole poem
in eight numbers between March and July 1815, together with favourable discussion and correspondence. The paper then disappeared without trace. The enigma of this astute, mushroom publication, edited by an Irish radical under the unlikely name of Erasmus Perkins was not solved until 1955.28 This forms a later part of the story, together with Shelley’s curious love-hate relationship with his own creation.29 In June 1822, eight days before they died together, Shelley’s intimate friend Edward Williams was given a pirate copy of the poem and sat under the boat sails in the ‘excessive heat’ reading it. His note in his journal reads: ‘Read some of S’s Queen Mab — an astonishing work. The enthusiasm of his spirit breaks out in some admirable passages in the poetry and the notes are subtle and elegant as he could now write.’30 Queen Mab followed Shelley to the end, almost it seemed, with a will and spirit of its own. What had happened was that in his first major work, he had captured something of the spirit of the coming age, and it had sailed on beyond him.

  Yet from a literary point of view, there is perhaps only one passage in all the nine cantos that presages the best of the poetry to come. It is not one of the diffuse visions of future Utopian light, but one of the visions of darkness. In it, Shelley manages to find a poetic image powerful enough to reflect his own arguments and indignation concerning the state of the majority of men he had seen in the society around him. The image is of primitive man in his pre-social state, abandoned on the face of a hostile and freezing globe, in a region where neither sunlight or intelligence has penetrated. It is terminated with a scowling, ironic twist which only Shelley could have conceived. As so often with Shelley, it was an image that once seized he never let go, but returned to it, altering and enriching, as a painter might work on a canvas, or a teacher on a child. The final transformation was to appear six years later, in Act II Scene IV of Prometheus Unbound. In Queen Mab it stands in its crudest, angular form, full of the awkward transitions and bald insistencies which everywhere flaw the poem. Yet the power to fuse passionate abstract argument with large visionary scenes and mythic projections of deep social or psychological significance is already present in this passage. This is the power that made Shelley a great poet. Here we see it struggling to dominate the material of its conception:

  ‘Man, where the gloom of the long polar night

  Lowers o’er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

  Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost

  Basks in the moonlight’s ineffectual glow,

  Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;

  His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,

  Insensible to courage, truth, or love,

  His stunted stature and imbecile frame,

  Marked him for some abortion of the earth,

  Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,

  Whose habits and enjoyments were his own:

  His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,

  Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,

  Apprised him ever of the joyless length

  Which his short being’s wretchedness had reached;

  His death a pang which famine, cold and toil

  Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark

  Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:

  All was inflicted here that Earth’s revenge

  Could wreak on the infringers of her law;

  One curse alone was spared — the name of God . . . 31

  That summer in London, largely spent in hotels, was for Shelley a season of births and prospects. Besides Queen Mab there was Harriet’s baby. This was due towards the end of June, and with Shelley’s twenty-first only a month later, there were hopes of turning it into a time of reconciliation with Field Place. But Shelley’s feelings in this respect were not quite the same as Harriet’s, and for the first time one is aware of a definite difference of opinion between them. At the end of May, Harriet was writing with half-disguised excitement: ‘Mr Shelley’s family are very eager to be reconciled with him, and I should not in the least wonder if my next letter was not sent from his Paternal roof, as we expect to be there in a week or two.’32 Timothy had come up to town, and Tom Medwin, perhaps with promptings from his father, urged Shelley to get in touch with him once more. Possibly it was Medwin too who alerted the Duke of Norfolk to the timely possibility of a reconciliation between father and son. The duke paid a visit to Cook’s Hotel, and left an invitation to a meeting the following morning. Shelley did not go, later explaining that ‘illness prevented him’. This was not a good omen. Yet Harriet still dreamt of giving birth to her first-born under her father-in-law’s roof, and Eliza and her own father encouraged her sensible aspirations. When Shelley had actually been persuaded to write to Timothy on the 18th, Harriet felt she could afford to view Field Place with a certain condescension. ‘[Timothy Shelley] has not yet answered the letter; but we expect it daily. Their conduct is most surprising, after treating us like dogs they wish for our Society.’33

  Shelley’s letter might well have misled her into this false confidence, opening as gracefully as it did. ‘My Dear Father, I once more presume to address you, to state to you my Sincere desire of being consider’d worthy of a Restoration to the intercourse with yourself and my Family which I have forfeited by my Follies.’34 But for both father and son these were the opening moves of a chess game which had been played out to stalemate long since. Timothy replied with equal grace, inquiring if Shelley was prepared to state publicly the renunciation of his said ‘Follies’. Shelley, whose follies were at that very moment attaining permanent form on Hookham’s printing press, answered that indeed he was not. We do not have his letter, but Timothy’s reply to it makes it quite clear that neither side was the least interested in compromise. ‘As you now avow there is no change in [your opinions], I must decline all further Communication, or any Personal Interview, until that shall be Effected, and I desire you will consider this my final answer to anything you may have to offer.’35 Despite all Harriet’s hopes, the exchange had lasted a mere eight days. It was, after all, a formality. On 28 May Shelley sent off a courtesy note to the Duke of Norfolk, in which he revealed his willingness to man the old barricades of two years previously. ‘My Lord Duke . . . I was prepared to make my father every reasonable concession, but I am not so degraded and miserable a slave as publicly to disavow an opinion which I believe to be true. Every man of common sense must plainly see that a sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up is as unfortunate a test of intellectual uprightness as can possibly be devised.’36 It was difficult to contradict.

  What could the duke, or Medwin or even Harriet urge against this? When Shelley chose to defend his ‘intellectual uprightness’ no pressure could force him out. Wisely, Harriet chose to adopt an attitude of brisk defiance towards Field Place, yet her disappointment is eloquent. ‘Mr Shelley has broken off the negotiation, and will have no more to say to his son because that son will not write to the people of Oxford, and declare his return to Christianity. Did you ever hear of such an old dotard? It seems that so long as he lives, Bysshe must never hope to see or hear anything of his family. This is certainly an unpleasant circumstance, particularly as his mother wishes to see him, and has great affection for him.’37 But it was to be more unpleasant than either Shelley or Harriet supposed, for at this date, and certainly well on into July, Shelley had no notion that such a breach could endanger the financial side of the inheritance. The complete transformation of their expectations in this respect was to put severe pressure on a point that was now revealed as a weak one in their relationship. To this, Harriet was to bring all the claims of a young mother without house or security, and the emotional support of Eliza and her father Mr Westbrook. Surely some reasonable formula could be patched up with Timothy, and at least a small degree of financial independence secured? Yet what Harriet attempted to alter was a cardinal stubbornness in Shelley’s character, and an emotional decision about his family the roots of which stretched back well beyond his ma
rriage.

  But for the time being, Shelley looked confidently on his economic prospects. The expensive rooms at Cook’s were continued, while lodgings in Half Moon Street, a hundred yards down Piccadilly were taken, probably as an extra for Harriet’s confinement. Shelley decided that some regular form of transport was now in order, and he went to the fashionable coach-maker Thomas Charters of New Bond Street and ordered the construction of a carriage. This was a solid vehicle which was to take him to the continent in 1816. The bill for construction and servicing was expected to amount to several hundred pounds, which Shelley confidently hoped to pay in the autumn. In the event, nothing was paid at all, and in the following year Charters became one of Shelley’s most pressing creditors. Still nothing was paid, but in November 1815 Shelley was threatened with imminent arrest and finally signed a bill of exchange ‘which committed him to the payment of £532 11s. 6d. four years from that date’.38 [3] In 1844, twenty-two years after his death, Shelley’s executor Peacock received an application from Thomas Charters for the payment of a bill of exchange to the value of ‘£532 11s. 6d.’. This saga can be taken as exemplary of the history of many lesser bills and obligations which Shelley contracted throughout his life. Shelley’s conduct in this respect, which has only gradually been revealed by extensive investigations of secondary documents[4] must be set against his much better publicized acts of flagrant generosity. Overall one has the impression that he owed rather more than he gave away.

  Shelley’s confidence at this time also extended to the Tan-yr-allt bills, and he had several meetings with ‘Williams the Welchman’ who was down in London taking instructions from Madocks at the end of June.39 But Shelley’s Welsh creditors were to fare no better. By May a list of Shelley’s unpaid bills had been drawn up, of which the amount owed to Williams and Nanney alone amounted to £350.40 Apparently Shelley then signed a bond which made him liable for £700 in default of payment after an agreed date. By June 1815, part of these debts had been paid, but Nanney was writing to Williams in exasperation about the rest: