Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  For the rest, Shelley drew a picture of tranquillity. Though he feared that ‘a criminal information’ might arise from the Chancery case concerning the political and religious contents of Queen Mab, for the time being he was determined to extinguish rather than be extinguished by the anxiety.[1] He was content, he told Byron, with his garden, his books and the boat. At Marlow, the apple trees were in blossom.

  Marianne Hunt, Bessy and the children seem to have stayed on at Albion House for most of May and June, with Hunt himself paying flying visits whenever he could get away from the Examiner. The children were happy in each other’s company, and with the combined nursery forces of Bessy, Elise and Claire to look after them, they played for long sunny hours in the enclosed garden. William soon became attached to little Alba, and together they endured the rigours of Shelley’s cold-bath routine. Shelley would escape alone, or with Hunt and Peacock, for whole days on end in the boat.

  It was during May that he began the first autobiographical cantos of the long political poem which he intended to call Laon and Cythna, or, The Revolution in the Golden City. Much of it was actually written in the boat, or sitting on the leafy heights in Bisham Woods. Shelley used a series of thick, small sketching books, and wrote at tremendous scrawling speed in soft pencil, each page rarely containing more than two of the nine-lined Spenserian stanzas he had adopted for the work.4 His protagonists were to be a brother and a sister, who were also lovers, and who became leaders of a city insurrection and revolution apparently in the Far East, but actually modelled on the Paris Revolution. Some of the later passages were written more carefully, in pen, and suggest that Shelley also worked occasionally in the library at Albion House. It is notable that these sections contain the most dense and finely worked poetry, in a work that suffers overall from the diffusion of its loose philosophical narrative. There is no indication that Shelley, as he began the poem in May, had any clear outline of the shape and pattern of the plot. After a formal Spenserian allegory of an eagle fighting a serpent, in Canto I, the poem moves through several layers of autobiographical narrative about Shelley’s childhood, much of it extended into a semi-heroic disguise of epic and myth. After some 1,500 lines, it gradually begins to concentrate on recognizably contemporary public and political events in Canto IV. Altogether the poem was to last 4,818 lines, over eleven cantos, and to occupy Shelley until September. It was the longest work he ever wrote, and served the purpose of completely clearing the creative block which had hindered him since the spring of 1816. He was in fact trying to write that poem on the French Revolution, the ‘master theme of the epoch’, which he had originally recommended to Byron.

  When Shelley came home in the evenings, he spent much of his time reading and talking with Mary, and the household tended to retire early, before 10. When Hunt was down, or Hogg and Peacock came over, they had lively musical evenings and the conversation ranged freely. Mary recalled, ‘He was eloquent when philosophy or politics or taste were the subjects of conversation. He was playful; and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others — not in bitterness, but in sport.’5 When little William learned to walk, Shelley wrote characteristically to Hogg amid discussion of Homer and Apuleius: ‘My τετρaπoυς [quadruped] has been metamorphosed since you were here, into a featherless biped; he lives, & inhabits his father’s house but he has ceased to creep. He walks with great alacrity.’6

  At the end of May, Shelley and Mary spent a few days in London with Hunt, and delivered the manuscript of Frankenstein to Murray at 50 Albemarle Street. They went to see Don Giovanni at the Opera, and an exhibition of Turner landscapes, and dined once again with Hazlitt. They discussed the forthcoming trial of Wooler, editor of the Black Dwarf, which was to open on 5 June, and eagerly speculated on the popular disturbances which were coming to a head in the Midlands.[2]

  The Shelleys returned to Marlow, and through the length of June they and the Hunts mounted a series of idyllic picnicking expeditions with the children on the river and in Clifton Woods.

  Claire was absorbed by the new demands and fascinations of her baby, although she was sometimes moody and sullen in the old manner, and was depressed by the rarity of Byron’s letters, which were always addressed to Shelley and always excluded her. There is some evidence that both Hogg and Peacock made advances to Claire, but found her inaccessible. On good evenings though, she could be persuaded to sing, and it is thus that Shelley described her, with surprisingly overt passion, in a poem of this summer ‘To Constantia, Singing’.[3]

  Constantia, turn!

  In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,

  Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn

  Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;

  Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour, it is yet,

  And from thy touch like fire doth leap.

  Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet,

  Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!7

  Written across the manuscript of the last stanza, in the notebook which Shelley started keeping for occasional pieces at Albion House, is a fragment which he later incorporated into one of the speeches of his play of 1819, The Cenci. One cannot place any definite autobiographical significance on it, but it suggests that Claire’s music reminded him only too harshly that the cravings expressed in Alastor were still powerfully at work.

  To thirst and find no fill — to wail and wander

  With short unsteady steps — to pause and ponder —

  To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle

  Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle;

  To nurse the image of unfelt caresses

  Till dim imagination just possesses

  The half-created shadow, then all night

  Sick . . .8[4]

  Another occasional poem, ‘Marianne’s Dream’ was produced by Mrs Hunt’s labours in scraping down and restoring the plaster statues in the library. In Shelley’s vision, which is full of eruptive political symbols of earthquakes and floods and volcanic explosions, the statues come alive in a blazing city.

  At the end of June, after a brief visit to London again with Hunt, Shelley returned to Marlow feeling suddenly ill. For several days he had to break off from his writing of Laon and Cythna. He grew irritable. It was the chronic pain in his side, and spasmodic attacks, and in a letter to Byron, he seemed to feel that they were connected with the strains of the Chancery case and the general political situation in England. ‘I have lately had a relapse of my constitutional disease, and if the Chancellor should threaten to invade my domestic circle, I shall seek Italy; as a refuge at once from the stupid tyranny of these laws and my disorder.’ To Hunt, he wrote with more of the acid ‘spirit that mocked itself’, which Mary remembered: ‘Do not mention that I am unwell to your nephew; for the advocate of a new system of diet is held bound to be invulnerable by disease, in the same manner as the sectaries of a new system of religion are held to be more moral than other people, or as a reformed parliament must at least be assumed as the remedy of all political evils. No one will change the diet, adopt the religion, or reform parliament else.’9 Mary added a note at the bottom of the letter, ‘he always writes in this manner when ill’.

  But the long, lazy July days in the garden at Albion House and in the boat soon brought him back to health, and he returned eagerly to composition. Betty Kent remembered the way he would be seen drifting on the river, lying flat down in the bottom of the boat to read, ‘his face upwards to the sunshine’. Sometimes when he came back from Bisham Woods he brought the girls bunches of wild flowers, or appeared with trailers of green and white convolvulus draped round his straw sun hat.10 Thornton Hunt remembered walking alongside him on the river bank, as panting with exertion, he pulled a boat-load of visitors home against the current. Both Hunts, father and son, noticed how quickly he became known in the village, talking among the poor families, handing out money and giving simple medical advice. Mary wrote: ‘Marlow was in
habited . . . by a very poor population. The women are lacemakers, and lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they are very ill paid. The Poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates. The changes produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most heartrending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could. In the winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the poor cottages.’11

  Bursting out of Bisham Woods one day, Shelley ran across one of the little village girls called Polly Rose. She was brown-eyed, pretty and dressed virtually in rags. After a brief conference with Mary, and with Polly Rose’s mother, Polly was invited to visit Albion House as regularly as she wished, where Shelley promised to educate her. She played with the babies in the garden, and had long talks with Mary, and frequently slept at the house, being allowed to stay up until 10 o’clock. What Shelley actually taught her is not on record, but as an old lady she remembered best his mad horse-play. One game was sitting her on a polished wooden dining-table, and then tilting it up so she slid down shrieking with delight into his arms. Claire was also encouraged to join in these games, and sometimes she and Polly would perch on the long-suffering table, shouting and screeching in delight, while Shelley with prodigious energy and enthusiasm ‘ran it from one end of the room to the other’.12

  Polly Rose was also subjected to the terror treatment. She remembered the way Shelley used to come suddenly surging out of the woods, his hair stuck full of old man’s beard and other wild plants, ‘his long brown coat with curling lambs’ wool collar and cuffs’ flying behind him, his shirt pulled open and his gaze distracted. At that time, for a gentleman to be seen outdoors in public without a hat was unusual, and to be without stock or cravat of any kind was to be virtually déshbillé. Moreover Shelley was inclined to return from his rambles in a state of total self-absorption, which was equally weird and ungentlemanlike, ‘and he dashed along regardless of all he met or passed’.13

  At Albion House some of the games were liable to turn nasty, and Shelley concocted various tales of terror, including his oldest one of all, that what he was really trying to do in Bisham Woods was to raise the devil by necromantic efforts, ‘veryfying his aweful statement by a recital of the opprobrious names used in the evocation’.14 He also introduced Polly to gothic horrors, which reached a suitable climax in the Christmas of 1817. ‘On Christmas Eve Shelley related the ghostly tale of Bürger’s ballad of Leonore, a copy of which in Spencer’s translation with Lady Diana Beauclerc’s designs, he possessed, working up the horror to such a height of fearful interest that Polly “quite expected to see Wilhelm walk into the drawing room”.’15

  By the end of the year, Bisham Woods had been established by local repute as Mr Shelley’s peculiar woodland empire. When walking there once with Horace Smith, they came across two village ‘urchins’ who were stoning a squirrel from bough to bough in the elms overhead. Without even raising his voice he made them throw down their missiles and they ‘slunk away’.16

  Shelley’s status as eccentric squire of the district, enhanced perhaps by rumours of incest and illegitimate children, gave him a new though somewhat curious kind of dignity in the eyes of his friends. Hogg was inclined to write to Peacock, indirectly asking for news about ‘the Conchoid, Demogorgon & my other Marlow friends’, by which he meant Shelley and Mary and the Albion household. To Hunt, Shelley wrote: ‘It is the most comical thing in the world: You write accounts of your good behaviour to me as if I were some ancient and wrinkled, but rather good-natured grand-uncle. Now this is a new feeling for me. I have been accustomed to consider myself as the most imprudent and unaccountable of mankind.’17

  Peacock’s picture of the bustling madcap household of his novel Nightmare Abbey (1818) is drawn from his impressions of Albion House during this high summer, and for the sake of fiction he turned its gothic battlements into a mystic tower, ‘ruined and full of owls’, and imported not only Byron but also Coleridge into the household. Mary clearly recognized Shelley in the character of Scythrop with his mysterious mannerism, half comic and half grotesque, his secret and divided love-life, and his obsession with conspiratorial plans for revolutionary reform movements. This portrait-parody was a free, affectionate and nostalgic play of satire around Shelley during the period he was writing Laon and Cythna, and the political pamphlets.

  [Scythrop] now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world. He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovreignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves . . . . Scythrop proceded to meditate on the practicability of reviving a confederation of regenerators. To get a clear view of his own ideas, and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote and published a treatise, in which his meanings were carefully wrapped up in the monk’s hood of transcendental technology, but filled with hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of a rock.18

  The result, says Peacock, was not a detonation but merely a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request ‘for the balance’. Scythrop did not despair, but ‘foresaw that a great leader of human regeneration would be involved in fearful dilemmas, and determined, for the benefit of mankind in general, to adopt all possible precautions for the preservation of himself’. He smuggled a dumb carpenter into Nightmare Abbey to fit secret passages and sliding doors, and tutored the servants, ‘even the women’, to be absolutely silent. The Scythrop chapter closes with a memorable cameo. ‘In his evening meditations on the terrace, under the ivy of the ruined tower, the only sounds that came to his ear were the rustling of the wind in the ivy, the plaintive voices of the feathered choristers, the owls, the occasional striking of the Abbey clock, and the monotonous dash of the sea on its low and level shore. In the mean time, he drank Madeira, and laid deep schemes for a thorough repair of the crazy fabric of human nature.’19

  Shelley himself did not see the completed novel until June 1819, but then he wrote to Peacock and described his reactions with an unexpected gravity, for he took the essential subject of the satire seriously. ‘I am delighted with Nightmare Abbey. I think Scythrop a character admirably conceived and executed, & I know not how to praise sufficiently the lightness chastity & strength of the language of the whole . . . . I suppose the moral is contained in what Falstaff says “For Gods sake talk like a man of this world” and yet looking deeper into it, is not the misdirected enthusiasm of Scythrop what J[esus] C[hrist] calls the salt of the earth?’20 But he made no reference to Scythrop’s shuttlecock love between the raven-haired intellectual Stella, and the fair-haired musical Marionetta, a cunning amalgam of Shelley’s torn affections between Harriet, Mary and Claire.21 Mary, in her ‘Note on the Poems of 1817’, agreed that Peacock had ‘seized on some points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted Scythrop’; but she made it clear that Shelley was ‘not addicted to port or madeira’.

  While Shelley’s boating expeditions continued to take Claire, the Hunts and the children to Hampden, Virginia Water and Egham, Mary tended to remain behind. She was expecting another child, and liked to stay quietly at Albion House, making jellies for the children, and reading Brockden Brown’s horror novels. On 4 August they celebrated Shelley’s twenty-fifth birthday, and on the 30th, Mary’s twentieth.

  First Murray, and then Charles Ollier turned down Frankenstein, but at the end of the month Shelley’
s persistence as Mary’s agent was rewarded by a contract with Lackington, Allen and Co., and the novel was hurried off to the printers. Lackington’s was a good catch, for their circulating library and bookshop, with its splendid circular display tables and book galleries, was one of the most popular in London. Shelley insisted on a tight and highly commercial contract, writing to Lackington: ‘You should take the risk of printing and advertising etc. entirely on yourselves and, after full deduction being made from the profits of the work to cover these expenses, that the clear produce, both of the first edition and of every succeeding edition should be divided between you and the author.’22 Shelley was never able to insist on a similar contract for any of his own works.