Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  March too saw another event which was decisive in Shelley’s departure from England. Claire, after shuttling between London and Bishopsgate, took advantage of Shelley’s residence in London to make the first moves in a little project of her own. This was the invasion, storm and capture of Byron. It says much for Claire, still only just 18, that where many others, more powerful and more beautiful, had failed, she — at least temporarily — succeeded.

  Lord Byron was at this time aged 28. His life had been disordered and made directionless by a desperately unhappy marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815. The legal separation proceedings were now drawing to a close in a storm of bills and claims after months of separations and rapprochements. The basis of the settlement was agreed on 17 March.51 His emotional tangle was further complicated by an intimate relationship with his half-sister Augusta, in an advanced state of pregnancy, who had just removed from his house at 13 Piccadilly Terrace to lie in at her rooms at St James’s Palace. The friendship had caused Byron endless public acrimony. He wished above all to leave England before he should be caught in further scandals, legal complications or even in the clutches of the bailiffs. He planned his escape for April. His old friends Scrope Daves and John Cam Hobhouse were making preparations for a secret departure, and Byron’s faithful valet Fletcher was discreetly preparing trunks at No. 13. The city firm of Baxter’s were engaged to construct a new Napoleonic carriage for his travels, for which he paid £500. Byron hoped that escape to the Continent in the spring might also restart the creative mechanism which had faltered in 1813, after the completion of two cantos of Childe Harold. The delights of marriage and the glitter of social and literary celebrity both seemed to him intolerably faded. He desperately needed the break.

  At that moment, in March, his life seemed to be suspended between two distinct theatres of action, and, without indicating his intention to depart, he was in the mood to write to James Hogg in Scotland: ‘And so you want to come to London? It’s a damned place to be sure, but the only one in the world (at least the English world) for fun; though I have seen parts of the globe that I like better, still upon the whole it is the completest either to help one in feeling oneself — alive — or forgetting that one is so.’52 By luck, by ill-luck or by instinct, it was in this fatalistic mood that Claire and Byron’s paths crossed; and their lives irretrievably tangled.

  Claire first came to Byron’s attention, very mildly, with a series of pseudonymous notes addressed to him in his capacity as a member of the Drury Lane Theatre Committee. After achieving a first interview, which was rather more prosaic than she would have desired, she followed up her advantageous opening with a spirited correspondence. Claire filled her billets doux with discussions of new poetry, her own fiction, and advanced ideas on social institutions, including, scornfully, marriage: ‘I can never resist the temptation of throwing a pebble at it as I pass by.’53 Of the story she sent him, probably ‘The Idiot’ of 1814, she noted progressively that ‘the story might appear to be a highly moral warning to young people about irregular opinions’, but nevertheless ‘atheists might see and understand my meaning’. Shelley’s teaching and influence were being put to good use.

  How far Shelley was actively engaged in Claire’s campaign can only be judged from minor details. But it is important in the light of Shelley’s subsequent behaviour towards Claire. During the six weeks she was conducting her siege of Byron, Claire was staying at least part of the time with Shelley in Norfolk Street. In March alone she received notes of hand from him providing her with no less than forty-one pounds. Moreover, Shelley, though he had not yet met Byron, featured actively in Claire’s correspondence. She explained to Byron about the events of 1814; about Mary and Godwin; and about the underground publication of Queen Mab. Byron was prepared to be impressed, and Claire wrote in reply: ‘Shelley is now turned three and twenty, and interested as I am in all he does, it is with the greatest pleasure I receive your approbation.’54 The news was passed on to Shelley, and later Claire sent Byron a copy of Alastor as well.

  Claire next asked Shelley for a summation of her own character, and Shelley provided an apt one. She passed this on to Byron verbatim; she implies that Shelley did not know to what use she was putting the description, but if so, it is curiously appropriate to the situation. ‘My Sweet Child,’ Shelley said, adopting his best tones of guide and mentor, ‘there are two Clares — one of them I should call irritable if it were not for the nervous disorder, the effects of which you still retain: the nervous Clare is reserved and melancholy and more sarcastic than violent; the good Clare is gentle yet cheerful; and to me the most engaging of human creatures; one thing I will say for you that you are easily managed by the person you love as the reed is by the wind; it is your weak side.’55

  Charmed by Claire’s quickness, her warmth, her lightness of touch, and her apparently totally free attitude to sexual relations, Byron saw her with increasing frequency, usually in the evenings in his private rooms at the theatre. On one evening, when he could not be there, Byron offered her his box, but she refused as much as she wanted to go, because Shelley disliked the theatre and ‘declares he could not endure it’. At other soirées Claire probably sang to Byron, as she knew her voice was her greatest asset, and he wrote one of his most famous lyrics at this time, dating the manuscript 28 March 1816. It has traditionally been taken as addressed to Claire.

  There be none of Beauty’s daughters

  With a magic like thee;

  And like music on the waters

  Is thy sweet voice to me;

  When, as if its sound were causing

  The charmed Ocean’s pausing,

  The waves lie still and gleaming,

  And the lulled winds seem dreaming . . . .

  It was a long time since Shelley had written such a love poem.

  [1] This, and other prose fragments of the period, come from a loose collection of Shelley’s fools-cap notes in the Bodleian MS. Shelley Adds. c. 4. Folder 21–23. They were never formally edited or titled by Shelley. Mrs Shelley later grouped them, including a fragment on Shelley’s recurrent dreams, under two headings: ‘Speculations on Metaphysics’ and ‘Speculations of Morals’. Since they are clearly held together by the central theme of the study of mental change and development — both generally in society, and specifically in Shelley’s own life — it is more appropriate to title them with his own phrase: ‘On the Science of Mind’.

  [2]David Hartley (1705–57), educated at Cambridge, doctor and medical writer, philosopher. His major work, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749) is perhaps the first work of English psychology. He advanced a curious theory of physical vibrations (probably due for revival), as well as his famous theory of individual morality depending upon the ‘association of ideas’. He was influential among many later writers, including Wordsworth, Coleridge and J.S. Mill. Shelley first read Hartley’s Observations at Lynmouth in the summer of 1812.

  [3]Shelley finally accepted the sexual significance of this dream three years later, in his preface to a translation of the Symposium (1818).

  [4]William Drummond (1770?–1828), essayist and amateur geologist. Academical Questions, Vol. 1, was published in 1805; the projected Vol. II never appeared. Drummond studied the work of Descartes, Newton, Locke and Hume, and glanced critically at the contributions of Spinoza and Kant. His exposition of ideas was fluent and gentlemanly, with a strong, English flavour of scepticism. But he was eccentric enough for his times to write approvingly of Plato and Lucretius, and this particularly attracted Shelley. Drummond was in Italy during this decade, and finally met Shelley in Rome. He was making a study, appropriately enough, of volcanoes.

  [5]The dating of both the essays ‘On Love’ and ‘On Life’ is not absolutely certain. Shelley used and re-used the notebooks in which they appear both in England and in Italy. For example the Notebook Bodleian MS Shelley Adds. e. II contains both ‘On Love’ (pp. 1–9) and a draft preface to Prometheus Unbound (pp. 56
–61) though they are certainly not contemporary. In the end, style, tone and sophistication of argument are important factors in assigning them to the summer of 1815, while the similarity of the material to that discussed in the ‘Preface to Alastor’ can be regarded as decisive.

  [6] It comes from a Choric Epode, in which Hippolytus’s fate is bemoaned, lines 1144ff:

  [7] Claire Clairmont’s literary judgement is surprisingly good. ‘Alastor is a most evident proof of improvement; but I think his merit lies in translation — the sonnets from the Greek of Moschus and from Dante are the best . . . .’ Claire to Lord Byron, spring 1816, Murray MSS.

  13. The Byron Summer: Switzerland 1816

  April 1816 promised to be a decisive month in more ways than one. The test case over the Shelley inheritance was finally to go into Chancery; Byron’s separation papers were due; Mary came up to London with the child and Shelley moved to new and more spacious lodgings at 26 Marchmont Street; Godwin’s financial fate hung in the balance. Shelley, like Byron, was waiting only for a legal decision before breaking away from London completely. Claire, for her part, realized that her own freedom of action depended very largely on Shelley’s financial independence; especially when she discovered that Byron would never agree to take her with him as his travelling mistress to Geneva. She therefore planned hopefully to seduce Byron before he left, but the timing was tricky. ‘I steal a moment to write to you to know whether you go tomorrow,’ she wrote in mid-April. ‘It is not through selfishness that I pray something may prevent your departure. But tomorrow Shelley’s chancery suit will be decided & so much of my fate depends on the decision; beside tomorrow will inform me whether I should be able to offer you that which it has long been the passionate wish of my heart to offer you.’1

  In the event, Byron’s separation papers did not come through until the 21st, and Shelley’s chancery decision was not given until the 23rd. This was the day on which Byron fled from 13 Piccadilly Terrace with his valet Fletcher and his new amanuensis Dr William Polidori, and made headlong for Dover with the bailiffs expected hourly on his trail. But by this time Claire was already Byron’s mistress. According to one of her notes, she had arranged a first romantic night with Byron at a discreet inn ten miles outside London, probably on Thursday, 18 April. She had waited for a reply in Hamilton Place, and it had been in the affirmative.2 Later Mary had been taken to meet Byron formally in the green room at Drury Lane, though Claire had emphasized to Byron that the nature of their connection should not be hinted at. Mary indeed does not seem to have realized fully what was afoot until quite late in the summer, as remarks in her Geneva journal indicate.

  Shelley on the other hand must have been au fait from the start. When Byron, after the first flush of physical delight, began to remark more critically on Claire’s ‘fiendish temper’, she countered with her recommendation from Shelley, which seemed to implicate his judgement in the affair. ‘I know Shelley is too fond of me not to be indulgent, yet I think it an honourable testament to that part of my character you have accused that the man whom I have loved & for whom I have suffered much should report this of me. Some time hence you will say the same about my temper . . . . Now pray answer me kindly & do not put any little sarcastic speeches in it . . . .’3

  The ease with which Shelley fell in with Claire’s plans to follow Byron to Geneva even suggests that he may have been using Claire as an introduction to Byron. The engineering of Mary’s visit to Drury Lane was designed to make the whole scheme seem more natural and innocent. The different degrees to which Claire took Mary and Shelley into her confidence in this respect is a good indication of her instinctive assessment of their real attitudes and sympathies.

  On the 23rd, Shelley was in court to hear a surprise decision given against any rearrangement of the estates by Sir Timothy, and consequently against the intended sale of Shelley’s reversion. Sir Timothy’s solicitor, Whitton, also in court, noticed the great disappointment on Shelley’s face with ill-disguised satisfaction.4 But Sir Timothy behaved with perhaps unexpected generosity on hearing of the decision, which went equally against his own plans for his other children, and against Shelley’s plans. Doubtless the dependency of Harriet and her two children had some bearing on his action. He informed Shelley that the £1,000 annuity would continue as agreed, despite the fact that the business basis for it had collapsed, now the reversion could not be sold. Furthermore he would pay off more of Shelley’s bills.

  Shelley presented the situation in its gloomiest light in a letter to Godwin: ‘Chancery has decided that I and my father may not touch the estates . . . . All this reduces me very nearly to the situation I described to you in March, so far as relates to your share in the question. I shall receive nothing from my father except in the way of charity. Post Obit considerations are very doubtful, & annuity transactions are confined within an obvious & very narrow limit. My father is to advance me, a sum to meet as I have alleged engagements contracted during the dependence of the late negotiation. This sum is extremely small, & is swallowed up, almost, in such of my debts & the liquidation of such securities as I have been compelled to state in order to obtain the money at all. A few hundred pounds will remain; you shall have £300 from this source in the course of the summer.’5 Shelley had hoped to obtain at least another £600 by this disengenuous method,6 though in the event, largely through Longdill’s sense of legal propriety, this was reduced to less than half such a sum. Godwin never saw any of it, let alone the hoped-for £1,250. Most depressing of all, he saw his worst fears confirmed, despite Shelley’s promises, when he noted that the letter, dated 3 May, was addressed from Dover. Shelley was abroad again.

  His choice of Geneva, indeed his choice to go across the Channel at all, rather than northwards into Cumberland or Scotland as he had previously intended, was very largely decided by Claire’s wishes. Shelley departed — like Byron ten days previously — with speed and silence, taking the two girls and little William. Godwin was not forewarned. The financial negotiators Bryant and Hayward were given a cover story that Shelley was to be in the country for a week. Even Hogg, with whom Shelley dined on the eve of their departure, was not enlightened until a note arrived asking him to forward an explanatory letter to Longdill. Hogg had been led to expect that he was going to live with them again in communal fashion as in the previous spring, and Shelley felt considerably embarrassed on the point. He explained obliquely: ‘Seal, & dispatch for me the enclosed letter to Longdill. It will give you that information which mauvaise honte or awkwardness, or anything which you please except a want of regard made me conceal last night. In fact I had determined on the plan; & felt pained that the commencement of it, fell at a time when it was impossible that you should be partaker in it.’7 There is no evidence that Harriet was in any way informed of Shelley’s plans or whereabouts, and this final act of disregard was to have grim consequences.

  Characteristically, Peacock in his ‘Memoir’ preferred to make no reference at all to either the Godwin debt, or Claire’s affair. Instead he gave a long circumstantial and totally irrelevant account of Shelley having left England because of a hallucination that Williams of Tremadoc had come to Bishopsgate to warn him of a plot by Sir Timothy and Captain Pilfold to imprison him. There is in fact a rather more mundane basis for this story in the circumstances of Shelley’s debts two years later in 1818 at Great Marlow. Peacock’s delightfully eccentric anecdote seems to be a mixture of polite subterfuge and the genuine confusion of aging memory.

  When he wrote from Dover to Godwin, Shelley did not explain that Claire was with them, and he implied that he and Mary had been driven into exile ‘perhaps forever’. Perhaps he might return alone, for a few days, on strictly business affairs, but ‘to see no friend, to do no office of friendship, to engage in nothing which can soothe the sentiments of regret almost like remorse . . .’. He appealed once more to Godwin’s better feelings: ‘But I have been too indignant, I have been unjust to you. — forgive me. — Burn those letters which contain the
records of my violence, & believe that however what you erroneously call fame & honour separate us, I shall always feel towards you as the most affectionate of friends.’8 Godwin did not write to Shelley for a month, and then it was only to receive no reply for a further four weeks. Shelley had dismissed him.

  They caught the packet out of Dover on the afternoon of 3 May, Shelley just managing to seal and dispatch his letter to Godwin before the ropes were cast off. Travelling at a leisurely rate, they arrived in Paris on the 8th. Here they were held up by passport difficulties, since regulations had been tightened because of an escaped political prisoner. From their rooms in the rue Richelieu, Claire wrote amusingly to Byron that she had persuaded the ‘whole tribe of Otaheite philosophers’ to come with her — a laughing reference to the sunny pleasure-loving islanders of Tahiti. She also assured him that she had ten times rather be his male friend than his mistress. The letter was sealed in red wax with the impression of the Judgement of Paris — Shelley’s signet.

  They were all glad, for their individual reasons, to be on the Continent again. Shelley was immensely relieved to escape the pressures of London, which had been making him physically ill with consumptive symptoms once more. He was also looking forward to the meeting with Byron which Claire promised. Much of Mary’s attention was taken up by the child, but she recalled the happy times of 1814, though noting shrewdly that the French population seemed more hangdog and oppressed since the restitution of the Bourbon dynasty of tyrants: ‘the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself’.9 Her phrase was taken from Shelley, the first significant political observation he had made for more than a year.