Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  I have been informed that you have received £150 of the debt due from Shelley: all the money provided for the payment of Shelley’s debts is now exhausted; and that act of justice must be suspended till more money comes in which will be in November next: — the money has failed in consequence of Shelley’s stating his debts less than they are; & in order to justify this statement, he is actually guilty of abundant falsities: — in order to get rid of the £100, due to me for hire of furniture, he said, that he had resided at Tanyrallt only two months, & that the instant he had quitted it, I sold the furniture; did you ever hear of a more ungrateful fellow! — his attorney however promises that all his debts will be paid by the Father: — in November next.41

  Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, there is no evidence that the remainder of this debt was ever cleared either.[5]

  At Half Moon Street, one is aware of the presence of Hogg again in the little circle. While Shelley pursued business at the press, and his new intimacies with Peacock and the vegetarian and naturist John Frank Newton, Hogg was left to entertain Harriet. From certain of Hogg’s insinuations, one is tempted to wonder how far the situation at York in 1811 repeated itself, and how far Shelley, once again, was encouraging an intimacy between his best friend and his wife. The advanced state of Harriet’s pregnancy might appear to make this unlikely except for the curious fact that an exactly similar episode, of which we have slightly fuller record, was to occur during the pregnancy of Shelley’s second wife in 1815. Hogg paints a picture of himself dining and taking tea alone with Harriet, or of Harriet reading to him for long periods, until Shelley would come ‘tumbling up the stairs, with a mighty sound, treading upon his nose, as I accused him of doing, and throwing off his neckcloth, according to custom’. Then he would stand ‘staring around for some moments, as wondering why he had been in such a hurry’.42 On one occasion he recounts how he was sitting alone with Harriet after dinner when a Quaker physician ‘Dr S.’ arrived to examine Harriet and the condition of her pregnancy. Hogg rose to go, but, according to his narration, Harriet made a great show of forcing him to stay: ‘ “You need not go away! Dr S. does not desire it, I am sure. He rather wishes you to stay!” ’ Hogg implies that he found the position ‘delicate and distressing’. Although in the event the Quaker physician, in a volte face typical of Hogg’s humorous narrative, did nothing except sit down next to Harriet and gaze intently at her for ten minutes murmuring ‘softly and inarticulately’.43

  The development of a somewhat awkward relationship, awkward for Harriet, rather than for Shelley, is indicated by one of Shelley’s notes, simply dated ‘Cook’s Hotel, Wednesday Morn’. ‘My Dearest Friend, I have felt myself extremely hurt by Harriet’s conduct towards you. She writes in this. I only desire that she were as anxious to confer on you all possible happiness as I am. She tells you that she invites you this evening. It will be better than our lonesome and melancholy interviews.’44 The first sentence was suppressed by Hogg when he published it in his own biography; the last sentence seems to suggest that Hogg had been moping to Shelley about Harriet. Shelley added a P.S. ‘I am sure that Harriet will be as kind as ever. I could see when I spoke to her (if my eye were not blinded by love) that it was an error not of the feelings but of reason. I entreat you to come this evening.’ That ‘error of reason’ recalls of course the long passionate exchange on sexual sharing which had passed between Keswick and York in 1811. But for the moment, these considerations were dissolved by the birth of Harriet and Shelley’s first child, Eliza Ianthe, on 23 June 1813. She was christened at St George’s, Hanover Square: her names were drawn from both sides: Eliza after Miss Westbrook, and Ianthe after the dream heroine of Queen Mab. The services of Dr S. were apparently satisfactory, despite, or perhaps because of, his murmuring, and within a few hours Shelley noted she was ‘rapidly recovering’. He was now a father; but at once it was a father with worries. He had begun to understand through Medwin how his financial prospects were endangered, and he was assailed, as he told Medwin on the 28th, by ‘a most unpleasant feeling of embarrassment and uncertainty’.45

  For the first time Shelley felt the thick cloak of domestic responsibility begin to settle about his shoulders. He stayed up so late talking to Medwin that his meetings with Hogg were frequently missed or forgotten. But the Newtons distracted him, and Shelley soon found himself being whisked off to late-night parties at the Vauxhall.46

  Shelley’s feelings towards his first child are not easy to establish. Hogg says that the little blue-eyed, fair-haired baby did not ‘appear to afford him any gratification, or to create an interest’.47 Peacock on the other hand says Shelley was extremely fond of it, and ‘would walk up and down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a monotonous melody of his own making’.48 Yet even Peacock admits that the child was always a source of worry and disagreement between Shelley and Harriet. The child had brought them family responsibility without bringing them back into the security of the family inheritance. At a more personal level, Shelley wished the child to be brought up along ‘naturist’ lines, as he had observed in the Newton household where, among other things, the children were encouraged to run around the house naked.[6] Particularly, Shelley wished Harriet to breast-feed the child and look after it herself, but instead, as Peacock observed, ‘the child had a wet-nurse whom he did not like, and was much looked after by his wife’s sister, whom he intensely disliked’. It was the arrival of Ianthe which first brought the latent antagonism between Shelley and Eliza clearly into the open. Eliza had all the faults of an over-managing mother-in-law.

  By the end of July, it was clear that Shelley’s inheritance was to be obstructed, and the settlement was put into Chancery — by Timothy’s solicitors — a move that promised virtually indefinite delay. It was now imperative for Shelley to reduce his expenditure; the debts he owed to the Tremadoc creditors and Charters were already beyond hope of immediate repayment. As a temporary measure, the Newtons suggested that he could take his family to stay with another member of their set who owned a large country house in Bracknell, Berkshire. By the 27th they were installed at High Elms, the property of Mrs Boinville, a handsome and prosperous widow, the elder sister of Mrs Newton. Peacock, who had just returned from a summer holiday in North Wales (when he made his investigations at Tan-yr-allt), joined Shelley at Bracknell, and together they planned an autumn trip to the North as a method of escaping Shelley’s immediate creditors and reducing his expenditure. Healy had to be discharged from service, but as his conduct had become ‘so unprincipled’ in London Harriet was glad to dismiss him. On Dan’s side, it seems that he was owed ten pounds’ wages, but these too fell victim to the new economizing. Servants were never to have a smooth run in Shelley’s unorthodox households; their attitudes fluctuated between sublime dedication and vilest recriminations.

  Harriet wrote miserably to Mrs Nugent of the loss of ‘the immense property of his sires’, and the Chancery manoeuvre, which she felt was a concerted plan by Timothy, the Duke of Norfolk and the family solicitors to keep it out of Shelley’s hands. This was probably near the mark. ‘We are now in a house 30 miles from London, merely for convenience. How long we remain is uncertain, as I fear our necessities will oblige us to remove to a greater distance. Our friends the Newtons are trying to do everything in their power to serve us; but our doom is decided. . . . To have all our plans set aside in this manner is a miserable thing. Not that I regret the loss, but for the sake of those I intended to benefit.’49 Shelley was soothed by the new household, where he found himself among sympathetic spirits. Mrs Boinville was the wife of a French revolutionary emigré, a friend of Lafayette’s, who had recently been killed during retreat from Moscow in February 1813. She was a young-looking woman for her age, but her hair was absolutely white. Shelley called her teasingly, ‘Maimuna’, partly to imply the maternal relationship, and partly romantically, to recall the lady of Southey’s ‘Thalaba’, with grey hair and ‘a damsel’s face’. They discussed vegetarian
ism, atheism, naturism and French politics in the slightly rarefied intellectual air of Madame Boinville’s salon. Shelley was also charmed by Mademoiselle Boinville, who at 18 was bilingual, intelligent and very pretty. Her name was Cornelia.

  Harriet was less relaxed. She found ideas that she had been taught by Shelley to treat with reverence now chattered over by armchair radicals in an effete society she did not respect. She found an unexpected ally in Peacock, whose dry, rather donnish humour and respect for solid scholarship had little patience with the Bracknell set. Peacock, who was 28 in October, unmarried and introverted, hid under bland good manners an acidly observant eye for everything that went on around him. He had unhappily broken off a love-affair in North Wales, and now turned with pleasure and relief to the task of cheering and amusing Shelley’s young wife. They made a private joke of the Bracknell people, which later became for Peacock one of the inspirations for his first comic novel. ‘At Bracknell,’ he recalled, ‘Shelley was surrounded by a numerous society, all in a great measure of his own opinions in relation to religion, and politics, and the larger portion of them in relation to vegetable diet . . . each [had] nevertheless some predominant crotchet of his or her own, which left a number of open questions for earnest and not always temperate discussion. I was sometime irreverent enough to laugh at the fervour with which opinions utterly unconducive to any practical result were battled for as matters of the highest importance to the well-being of mankind; Harriet Shelley was always ready to laugh with me, and we thereby both lost caste with some of the more hotheaded of the party.’50 Peacock, whose evidence becomes increasingly important in the next four years of Shelley’s life, never took Shelley absolutely seriously, though he admired him in many ways and found him a fruitful source of ideas for his own work. He regarded Shelley as an extraordinary human being, rather than as an extraordinary writer; unlike Hogg he had little awe — either genuine or false — for the ‘Divine Poet’. He was fascinated by the ‘crotchety’ side of Shelley’s personality, yet he was frequently inclined to overlook its deeper driving forces and motives. Like Shelley, he loved a mysterious occurrence more than a prosaic one, and their sense of the macabre was mutual — a great source of amusement and private understanding in later years.

  During this Bracknell period of late summer 1813, Shelley found himself entering on one of the most uncertain and upsetting periods of his life. All his immediate goals were dissipated; the inheritance with which he had planned so much philanthropy had slipped from his grasp; his wife and child were slowly changing from a source of peace and hope into one of anxiety and dissatisfaction; his political interests were being swamped and diverted by the endless talk of the Boinville set. It is from this unsettled period that one of Hogg’s most extraordinary tales of Shelley emanates. According to Hogg, Shelley believed he had caught elephantiasis during a coach journey, and was perpetually worrying over it and examining himself. As Hogg tells the story, Shelley is made to seem merely an amusing and childlike eccentric, going through the strange routine of examining others’ skin to compare with his own. But if the story has any basis in fact, and Peacock’s evidence supports it, it seems that Shelley was deliberately acting up to the artificialities of the society in which he had marooned himself and Harriet. The madness is that of a pet eccentric, a drawing-room poet indulging himself, a charade.

  His imagination was so much disturbed, that he was perpetually examining his own skin, and feeling and looking at that of others. One evening, during the access of his fancied disorder, when many young ladies were standing up for a country dance, he caused wonderful consternation amongst these charming creatures by walking slowly along the row of girls and curiously surveying them, placing his eyes close to their necks and bosoms, and feeling their breasts and bare arms, in order to ascertain whether any of the fair ones had taken the horrible disease. He proceeded with so much gravity and seriousness, and his looks were so woebegone, that they did not resist, or resent, the extraordinary liberties, but looked terrified and as if they were about to undergo some severe surgical operation at his hands.51

  Hogg seems to want to imply also, that Shelley was inexorably breaking loose from sexual loyalty to Harriet. Once more the undercurrent of fear, used as a catalyst in his relations with the opposite sex, makes itself felt in Shelley’s behaviour.

  As September wore on, Harriet found that she and Shelley were having ‘many arguments concerning the respect that all men pay to property’.52 They seemed to agree, but it was a sore subject. Debtors had now begun to inquire after Shelley in London, and there was talk of his arrest. Shelley was bitterly resigned to his father’s withholding of the inheritance, and was already thinking of alternative ways of raising funds. Harriet still clung to every sign of goodwill from Field Place, writing pathetically to Mrs Nugent: ‘The post has just brought me a letter from Mr Shelley’s sister, who says her father is doing all in his power to prevent his being arrested. I think even his family pride must long to give way on the present occasion. . . . Mrs Shelley tells her son everything she hears.’53 Yet in reality, there was neither help nor even sympathy forthcoming from Field Place. It was becoming imperative to leave the Home Counties for the time being. Harriet, anxious for the security of her child, suggested that they might try once more to lease the lovely farm at Nantgwillt, but the plan was ephemeral without ready capital to secure the stock. Harriet continued to dream of a home at Nantgwillt for many months, and it became her ideal setting for a family life with Shelley. Shelley on the other hand was increasingly unsettled and unsatisfied, and sometimes he was finding it easier to talk to Cornelia Boinville than his wife. Their new friend Peacock found himself steadily drawn into a mediating role.

  At the end of September, Shelley decided that they must attempt to establish their own residence for the winter. Apparently through Hogg, he contacted a money-lender in London, called Starling, and began negotiations for a large loan. The coach built by Charters was packed up with belongings, while Shelley convinced Harriet that the child — still only three months old — would be safe to travel, and persuaded Peacock to accompany them. On Saturday, 2 October, he clinched a ruinous post obit loan for £500 payable on Sir Bysshe Shelley’s death at the rate of 300 per cent, which amounted to £2,000.[7] On Monday 4 October, the coach which was laden down with Shelley, Harriet and the baby, Eliza and Peacock and all their books and luggage, trundled slowly out of Bracknell and headed for Cumberland and the Lake District. At Warwick, Shelley posted back a note to Hogg informing him of their destination, the post obit loan and stressing the need for secrecy. ‘I wish you to consider all communications made to you on this subject as secret. I may confide to you surmises probably rash, & possibly ill-founded. To your secrecy and friendship I shall commit them.’54 There was also the more humdrum business of Peacock’s ‘small trunk’ of books, which required forwarding, as Shelley had off-loaded it at the last moment in deference to his coach springs. The same fate, presumably, had also overtaken little Ianthe’s wet nurse.

  Shelley drove the coach quite hard, and they reached Low Wood Inn, Ambleside, within the week. Ianthe remained healthy, and Harriet seeing the mountains, was once more dreaming of ‘our dear Nantgwillt’.55 Shelley contacted the Calverts at Keswick, and began to ask around for a house for the winter. To his surprise, none was forthcoming. Memories of the winter of 1811 probably lingered on about Shelley locally, and Shelley and Harriet in turn soon decided that ‘such a set of human beings’ occupied the Lakes that they would move on. North Wales held no attractions, so they set out on the road to Scotland and within sixteen days of leaving London found themselves in Edinburgh. Shelley took lodgings for them all at 36 Frederick Street, planning to remain for the winter. Peacock’s books arrived, and Shelley was encouraged to embark on a solid course of study, now mixing ancient with modern: notably Homer’s Odyssey and Laplace’s Système du Monde.56 The coach went in to John Dumbreck, Coach-maker, for service which it badly needed since Shelley had managed to break eight m
ain plates, four steel springs, and smash two of the lamps so they had to be completely replaced. The bill came to £8 11s. which Mr Dumbreck was still trying to collect ten years later.57 Meanwhile Shelley translated two of Plutarch’s essays on vegetarianism, and busied himself, to Peacock’s bemused fascination, with preparing one of his most peculiar and crotchety productions, a pamphlet On the Vegetable System of Diet. In its thin, high-flown rhetoric, and its subordination of political and philosophical questions to those of speculative ‘dietetics’ one catches something of the tone and quality of the talk among the Newton — Boinville set:

  With [what] arguments shall philosophy assail superstition, so long as terrifying phantoms crowd round the couch of its pale and prostrate victim, refuting with the indisputable evidence of sense the metaphysical scepticism of reason, while politician’s dreams and reveries of indiscribable horror testify? How shall we inspire the miserable man with kindness and humanity whose social feelings are jaundiced by a torture that lurks within his vitals. . . .58

  For the time being, Shelley seemed to be content to argue that political injustice and oppression was the consequence of indigestion. Like the elephantiasis episode, it showed how he had been thrown off course since Tan-yr-allt, and turned in a restless, absurd circle of self-doubt and uncertainty which he had not experienced since the post-Oxford days in Poland Street. Parts of the essay also suggest the beginning of a constant worry about his own health (as again in the elephantiasis episode), which showed its symptoms in a combination of mental anxiety and physical discomfort in the region of the stomach and abdomen, perhaps accompanied by his first minor spasms.[8] ‘Groundless terrors, vertigo, and delirium are frequently consequent upon a disease of the digestive organs; tremors and spasmodic affections, remote both in their nature and position from disorders of the stomach, are yet in many cases to be traced to its derangement . . . .’59 Nevertheless he was not too caught up in his own concerns to let a novel by Hogg, The Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, just published, go by unremarked; he wrote warmly to Hogg, praising the ‘extraordinary and animated tale’ and a hero ‘so natural and energetic as Alexy’.60 ‘Believe me,’ he concluded, ‘to be ever sincerely attached to you.’