Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Only much later, in October 1816, did the Eclectic Review show the beginnings of some serious understanding. ‘The poem is adapted to show the dangerous, the fatal tendency of that morbid ascendancy of the imagination over the other faculties, which incapacitates the mind for bestowing an adequate attention on the real objects of this “work-day” life, and for discharging the relative and social duties . . . It cannot be denied that very considerable talent for descriptive poetry is displayed in several parts.’ Yet even here the reviewer concluded that Alastor was a ‘heartless fiction’, ‘wild and specious, untangible and incoherent as a dream’.39 But it seems unlikely that either Shelley or any of his immediate circle ever saw this review, and anyway it was really too late to affect the public sale of the book. Shelley was to write to Godwin in December 1816, ‘You will say that . . . I am morbidly sensitive to what I esteem the injustice of neglect — but I do not say that I am unjustly neglected, the oblivion which overtook my little attempt of Alastor I am ready to acknowledge was sufficiently merited in itself; but then it was not accorded in the correct proportion considering the success of the most contemptible drivellings.’40 Yet whatever explanation he protested, it was a bad blow, and one to be repeated over and over again in Italy, until he was almost dumb. The terrible bitterness against reviewers was finally put to work in Adonais, on the death of John Keats. The failure to reach a regular readership, even a small one, was to have the most important consequences for the direction in which Shelley’s work developed. Nor can it ever be forgotten as an underlying element in the friendship with Byron, the best-selling author of the age, which was to commence in the coming summer.

  One curious anomaly was the copy which Shelley suddenly sent to Southey at Keswick. He decided apparently on the spur of the moment, and posted it on 7 March 1816 from his lawyers, Messrs Longdill & Co, in Gray’s Inn. Remembering the opinions which Shelley had expressed to Miss Hitchener in 1812, and was again to give vent to in 1817, it seems strange that he should have treated Southey with such deference. But perhaps it is not so strange when one recalls his tactics with his father. The letter demonstrates how important Southey’s opinion still was to him, and the significance that Shelley had always attached to their early conversations. Shelley enclosed a copy of Alastor with his note: ‘I shall never forget the pleasure which I derived from your conversation, or the kindness with which I was received in your hospitable circle during the short period of my stay in Cumberland some years ago. The disappointment of some youthful hopes, and subsequent misfortunes of a heavier nature, are all that I can plead as my excuse for neglecting to write to you, as I had promised from Ireland . . . . Let it be sufficient that, regarding you with admiration as a poet, and with respect as a man, I send you, as an intimation of those sentiments, my first serious attempt to interest the best feelings of the human heart, believing that you have so much general charity as to forget, like me, how widely in moral and political opinions we disagree . . . . Very sincerely yours, Percy B Shelley.’41 He received no response; but Southey was alerted, and watched the press for any subsequent publications. His vigilance was to be rewarded in the following spring of 1817.

  The publication of Alastor coincided roughly with the birth of Shelley’s first surviving child by Mary, a little boy, on 24 January 1816. He was christened William, after his grandfather. Of all his children, this first grandson of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin was the one to whom Shelley was most obviously and most intensely attached. Beside William, his other children, whom he often treated with such careless unconcern, sometimes seem like mere domestic appendages. William is the only child who features in his poetry. The happy birth of this son, and the depressing failure of Alastor, also mark one of the main watersheds in Shelley’s creative output.

  For the next twelve months Shelley was to write virtually nothing except one poem of rather less than 150 lines, and a few scattered slight or fragmentary effusions. Of prose essays, pamphlets or speculations, he produced nothing at all. Mary noted that his normal practice of study-reading declined except for a few select classical authors like Aeschylus and Lucretius. Even his private correspondence thinned out, and except for four long descriptive letters to Peacock in the middle of the summer, his letters are concerned almost exclusively with matters of his own inheritance and complicated negotiations to settle Godwin’s apparently bottomless debts. The greatest part of his effort and energy was transferred into his family life, and turned to the minds and faculties of those around him. It is not coincidental that 1816 was a highly creative year for his immediate companions — Peacock completed Headlong Hall and commenced Melincourt; Mary embarked on the sensational novel that was to make her own literary career at a single stroke; and Lord Byron, after two years of relative inactivity, dabbling in Oriental Tales and marriage, at last took up and completed his Third Canto of Childe Harold and his celebrated bad poem ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’. There is a sense indeed in which the year 1816 almost lost Shelley altogether as a writer, and relegated him to the ranks of the comfortable, domesticated littérateurs, who encourage the glow of creativity in others and are then content to bask in it themselves. This did not happen, because the old core of disturbance was still active, as certain strange occurrences were to show; and events at the end of 1816 threw Shelley mercilessly back into the maelstrom. But it nearly happened.

  The idea of settling down to domesticity, which he had struggled against in the previous summer, and had now, with the birth of his son, tacitly accepted, was also in his own mind connected with an increasingly bitter feeling of social rejection. When he did want to settle down, he found he was unable to. This gradually became clear in the exhausting and acerbic correspondence with Godwin concerning debts which occupied a great deal of Shelley’s time in January, February and March of this year. The question of Shelley’s responsibility for Godwin’s finances was emotionally complicated in the extreme Godwin still persisted in an attitude of unrelenting condemnation of the elopement which had taken place nearly two years before; at the same time he was desperate enough to keep applying for Shelley’s financial aid. His position was further complicated by Mrs Godwin, who felt that her own daughter Claire had been seduced by Shelley with Mary’s tacit connivance. Mary, in turn, felt that Mrs Godwin was forcing her father to be harder towards them than he wished. Both the Godwins thought that not only Mary but also Claire and Fanny had fallen ruinously in love with Shelley. Four years later these attitudes were still basically unchanged, and a mutual friend of both parties, talking at Skinner Street in July 1820, noted in her diary: ‘[Godwin] then expatiated much on the tender maternal affection of Mrs G. for her daughter, and the bitter disappointment of all her hopes in the person to whom she looked for comfort and happiness in the decline of her life; he described her as being of the most irritable disposition possible, and therefore suffering the keenest anguish on account of this misfortune, of which M[ary] is the sole cause, as she pretends; she regards M[ary] as the greatest enemy she has in the world. Mr G[odwin] told me that the three girls were all equally in love with [blank].’42 There is no doubt from the context of these remarks that the blank stands for Shelley.

  On Shelley’s side, the straightforward desire to help a philosopher and political figure whom he still admired immensely had become layered over with secondary motives. He could no longer avoid the realization that Godwin was venal and opportunist where money was concerned. Yet paradoxically, the need to prove himself in Godwin’s eyes had increased, and he was prepared to try and buy his father-in-law’s approbation at almost any price. He felt the need to prove himself worthy of Godwin’s principles, to be more Godwinian than Godwin in his social conduct. Yet why this need drove him to such lengths is still not altogether clear. To an extent, Shelley must have felt that Godwin was his own father by adoption and the idea of a second failure, a second withdrawal of love filled him with terrible dismay. But perhaps stronger than this was the influence of both Mary and Claire. Mary especially felt
that Godwin ought to be helped, whatever his apparent attitude, for only thereby could he be saved from the clutches of Mrs Godwin. It was, significantly, Mary and not Shelley who became Godwin’s final court of appeal when he was writing for yet more money to them in Italy. The intensity of the bond between Mary and her father was something that Shelley only slowly realized. But it is this which finally explains the inordinate lengths that Shelley went to to satisfy Godwin’s financial requests, and the mixture of patience and fury with which he persisted.

  Shelley first began to negotiate seriously with Godwin on 7 January 1816. He explained the half-completed terms of the settlement of May 1815, and continued: ‘You say that you will receive no more than £1250 for the payment of those incumbrances from which you think I may be considered as specially bound to relieve you. I would not desire to persuade you to sell the approbation of your friends for the difference between this sum, & that which your necessities actually require . . . .’43

  This sum of £1,250 was of course in addition to the £1,000 which Shelley had procured for Godwin as a ‘debt’ the previous year. Shelley was in fact unable to provide such a large sum until either the settlement with his father to buy the reversion of old Sir Bysshe’s legacy was complete, or else the legal state of his own inheritance without entail was sufficiently clarified for him to raise post obit bonds upon it. This latter course required the strictest secrecy from Whitton and Sir Timothy, and there were even doubts in Shelley’s mind as to whether his own solicitor Longdill could be trusted. But Shelley’s grasp of these worldly difficulties was quite confident and steady.

  By the end of the month, the two other main figures in the negotiation, Hayward, Godwin’s solicitor, and William Bryant, a money-lender, were deeply involved, and Shelley was steadily applying pressure on Godwin to meet him. He carefully let the personal note creep back into the business letters, as the prelude to a rapprochement. ‘But I shall leave this subject henceforth, entirely to your own feelings. Probably my feelings on such an occasion would be no less distressing than your own . . . . Fanny & Mrs Godwin will probably be glad to hear that Mary has safely recovered from a very favourable confinement, & that her child is well.’44

  By mid-February, the solicitors had discovered that the sale of the reversion to Sir Timothy might actually break the terms of Sir Bysshe’s will as a whole, and disqualify both Sir Timothy and his son, so that a test case was now required in Chancery. Shelley was in difficulties once again over his own ‘domestic expenditure’ at Bishopsgate, and he came briefly to London to see if anything could be hastened. It seems that Claire, who was staying at Bishopsgate, accompanied him, and went to stay for several days at Skinner Street, perhaps as part of the plan to melt Godwin and assuage Mrs Godwin. Shelley wrote to Godwin in much more openly warm terms from Hogg’s rooms on 16 February. ‘I intended to have left Town at 2 o’clock tomorrow. I will not do so if you wish to see me. In that latter case send a letter by a porter to Mr Hoggs, 1 Garden Temple Court, making your own appointment. Yet I do not know that it is best for you to see me. On me it would inflict deep dejection. But I would not refuse anything which I can do, so that I may benefit a man whom in spite of his wrongs to me I respect & love. Besides, I shall certainly not delay to depart from the haunts of men.’45 But these hopes were ill-founded, Godwin refused bluntly to see Shelley, and moreover, Longdill gave him a most depressing analysis of his prospects in the Chancery case.

  One thing which did strike an anxious cord in Godwin’s heart was Shelley’s vague threat to depart from the haunts of men. Shelley had hinted before to Godwin that he might shortly die from a recurrence of supposed consumption, but Godwin had been used to these prognostications of doom ever since he first corresponded with Shelley in 1812, and they had little effect. But the threat simply to leave English society, and go into voluntary exile did terrify Godwin, for he realized that Shelley had already adopted this course twice previously. At worst Shelley might choose to leave England altogether, and Godwin would be left to fend for himself among the money-lenders and buyers. At the end of February, he detailed Thomas Turner, the husband of Shelley’s old friend of the Bracknell days, Cornelia Boinville, to act as a personal intermediary on his behalf. After the first of Turner’s visits on 20 February, Shelley had detected Godwin’s concern which indicated softening, and played upon it with considerable skill in a long letter of the following day. First, he sweepingly denied that he had any such intention. ‘I shall certainly not leave this country, or even remove to a greater distance from the neighbourhood of London, until the unfavourable aspect assumed by my affairs shall appear to be unalterable, or until all has been done by me which it is possible for me to do for the relief of yours.’

  But then, carefully moving in the opposite direction, he allowed Godwin to see further into his mind. For the first time Shelley explicitly stated the full implications of a lifelong exile. This was an important moment of realization in his own mind, and he approached it first of all as a personal and family matter, rather than a literary one. The moral which Godwin was intended to draw about his own ostracism of Shelley was unavoidable.

  ‘You are perhaps aware that one of the chief motives which strongly urges me either to desert my native country, dear to me from many considerations, or resort to its most distant and solitary regions, is the perpetual experience of neglect or enmity from almost everyone but those who are supported by my resources.’ This last was indeed a formidable realization, and contained a great deal of truth.

  ‘I shall cling, perhaps, during the infancy of my children to all the prepossessions attached to the country of my birth, hiding myself and Mary from that contempt which we so unjustly endure. I think, therefore, at present only of settling in Cumberland or Scotland. In the event the evils which will flow to my children from our desolate and solitary situation here point out an exile as the only resource to them against that injustice which we can easily despise.’46 Godwin had much food for thought.

  In the beginning of March, negotiations demanded Shelley’s presence in London so frequently that he took lodgings first at 13 and then at 32 Norfolk Street. Preliminaries for the Chancery case were already on hand, and Shelley had among other things to present in court his son by Harriet, little Charles, in order to have a legal guardian assigned. Harriet prevented him from doing this until an order of attachment was delivered by the Messenger of the Court and the child was apprehended.47 No immediate decision was forthcoming, and, even more frustrating, Godwin still refused to grant a personal interview. Without Mary’s calming influence, for she was still at Bishopsgate with William, Shelley’s patience finally gave way and he wrote to Godwin from Norfolk Street in a fury of reproach and scorn. The letter reminds one instantly of his notes to Sir Timothy of 1811. Whatever social arrangements were subsequently patched up, neither Shelley nor Godwin ever recrossed the emotional gulf opened up by this explosive letter. The explosion had, in effect, been delayed since the winter of 1814.

  In my judgement neither I, nor your daughter, nor her offspring ought to receive the treatment which we encounter on every side. It has perpetually appeared to me to have been your especial duty to see that, so far as mankind value your good opinion, we were dealt justly by, and that a young family, innocent and benevolent and united, should not be confounded with prostitutes and seducers. My astonishment, and I will confess when I have been treated with most harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation has been extreme, that, knowing as you do my nature, any considerations should have prevailed on you to be thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my ruined hopes, of all that your genius once taught me to expect from your virtue, when I found that for yourself, your family, and your creditors, you would submit to that communication with me which you once rejected and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or sufferings, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of forgiveness again to me, for my blood boils in my veins, and my gall rises against all that bears the human form, when I think o
f what I, their benefactor and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt from you and from all mankind.48

  But Shelley was still trapped in his own emotional contradictions. The following day, he sent Godwin a note, confirming that the financial negotiations were still continuing, and pitifully asking for understanding. ‘I must appear the reverse of what I really am, haughty & hard, if I am not to see myself & all that I love trampled upon and outraged.’49 Yet still Godwin did not relent, and several days later, when Shelley actually called at Skinner Street, he was refused admittance: not once, but three times.50 Gradually and painfully the resolution to see the Chancery case through, and leave Godwin to his fate was forming in Shelley’s mind.