Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  2. CC’s retrospective journal entry for 8.4.1818.

  3. MWS–LH and MH, 6.4.1818.

  4. MWS, The Last Man (1826), 3, p. 266. The villa is here envisaged as it might have become had Shelley and Mary been rich enough to restore it; when they visited Lake Como in 1818, the villa was in a state of great dilapidation.

  5. CC–Byron, 27[26?].4.1818. (The original is in the Murray archive, in a box entitled – though not by Byron! – ‘Letters from the Ladies’.)

  6. MWS–MH and LH, 13.5.1818.

  7. MG–MWS, 21.6.1818, in Shelley’s Friends, p. 52.

  8. MWS–MG, 17.8.1818.

  9. MWS–MG, 15.6.1818. Paolo Foggi may have been taken on in Livorno; Mary writes as if Mrs Gisborne already knew of his existence.

  10. WG–PBS, 8.6.1818 (S&M, 2).

  11. MWS, Note on ‘The Cenci’ (PW).

  12. Richard Holmes, Shelley in Love (Anvil Press, 1980), p. 98.

  13. Ibid., p. 106.

  14. PBS, ‘One Love’, Shelley and His Circle, 6, pp. 633–5 (also Bodleian, Ms Shelley adds. e. 11, pp. 1–9). Titled ‘One Love’ by PBS, it is better known as ‘On Love’. Mary transcribed it in 1829 for a sentimental Christmas annual, The Keepsake, to which she became a regular contributor.

  15. Thomas Moore, Byron, p. 389. The ‘informant’ here, although not named, was almost certainly Teresa Guiccioli or possibly Mrs Hoppner herself. Mary would not have wished to denigrate a girl she had herself sent to care for Allegra.

  16. Elise’s letters for this period have not been preserved. Claire’s letter to Byron was written on 15 or 18 May 1818. In the 1870s, she repeated this accusation in a letter to Trelawny (CC, 2).

  17. CC–Augustus Silsbee (Silsbee Papers, box 7, file 2).

  18. MWS–MG, 17.8.1818.

  19. PBS–MWS, 18.8.1818.

  20. PBS–MWS, 23.8.1818.

  21. Mary, writing in 1839, was probably drawing on Shelley’s own description of Este as ‘an extensive Gothic castle, now the habitation of owls and bats’ (PBS–TLP, 8.10.1818).

  22. MWS, ‘Petrarch’, Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal, 1 (1835).

  23. MWS, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), Letter VI (1842).

  24. WG–MWS, 27.10.1818 (Abinger, Dep. c. 524).

  25. Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge University Press, 1986), discuss this possibility. Had Shelley been infected, neither he nor Mary would have imagined that the disease could be a danger to her.

  26. Rambles, Letter VI.

  * Paolo Foggi was probably hired in Livorno, since Mary, writing to Mrs Gisborne on 15 June 1818, refers to him simply as ‘Paolo’, adding that he has been ‘exceedingly useful’.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A MYSTERIOUS HISTORY

  1818–1819

  ‘Naples is, I can easily conceive, to most people, a delightful residence … Yet we have been most dreadfully teized, and that has, in some degree, taken away from our gusto for this place …’

  Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 22 January 1819

  BYRON WAS NOT SURPRISED BY THE APPARENT CALMNESS WITH which Mary had faced her loss. Mary, so Claire had written to him early in 1818 from her lodgings in Bath, faced all troubles with the serenity of a ship sailing ‘under a gentle & favourable wind’. (This suits well with Mrs Godwin’s comment in 1814 that Mary, at sixteen, showed the steadiness of a woman of forty.) Claire, with endearing candour, went on to admit her envy to Byron. Oh, to have written Mary’s novel! –

  yet all yields when I consider that she is a woman & will prove in time an ornament to us & an argument in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong & cultivated intellect.1

  Byron shared Claire’s admiration of Frankenstein, and of its author. Clever women intrigued him: one, Lady Melbourne, had been his confidante and mentor; another, for a while, had been his wife. He respected Mary’s cool head enough to seek her advice, even at a time when she was mourning the loss of her baby daughter, on whether he should publish his memoirs. (Mary, according to her own recollections, saw nothing in them that was not publishable.2)

  As a mother, however, Byron thought Mary as much of a reckless fool as her husband. Of course, he had no idea of the circumstances which had led to Clara’s death, or of Shelley’s responsibility for dragging his wife and a sick baby across Italy to protect Claire and himself from scandal. Not all brigands on the road to Rome were murderers; not all foreign travellers were robbed; not all children died of malaria or dysentery. Nevertheless, the number of such incidents was disturbingly high and Byron thought his friends were tempting fate by setting off on a vagabond trip to the dangerous South with their remaining child, a pretty and delicate-looking little boy. He did not regret having removed Allegra from their charge.

  Armed with the guidebooks written by the Reverend Chetwode Eustace, a Roman Catholic clergyman who had travelled extensively in Italy in 1801 and with whose conservative views they became increasingly impatient, Shelley kept his companions to a rigorous schedule of sightseeing as they travelled towards Rome along the Via Emilia. At Ferrara, they admired the paintings of Guido Reni (‘the divine Guido’), visited the great library, saw the very chair in which the adored author of Orlando Furioso used to sit (in those times everybody who loved literature knew the plot and characters of Ariosto’s epic, even if they hadn’t read it) and the cell in which Tasso had been imprisoned. Goethe, who questioned everything, had mistrusted the cell’s authenticity; Shelley took away a sliver from its wooden door as a keepsake for Peacock. At Bologna, Mary’s eyes suddenly glazed; a glimpse of her misery coloured Shelley’s description to his friend in England of a madonna’s face, ‘heavy … as if the spirit of a love almost insupportable from its intensity were brooding upon and weighing down the soul …’3 They looked respectfully at triumphal arches, fell in love with Spoleto and struggled to find new ways to describe the celebrated cascade at Terni. It was, Mary thought, as beautiful as a painting – no, more so! ‘The thunder – the abyss – the Spray – the graceful dash of water lost in the mist below – it put me in mind of Sapho leaping from a rock and her form vanishing as in the shape of a swan in the distance.’4 Reaching Rome on 21 November, the Shelleys, together with Claire, Paolo Foggi and the two nurses, settled into ‘a comfortable hotel’, a relief after the weeks of staying at cold and often filthy inns. (One had been so bare of hospitality that Mary spent the night in her travelling dress and cloak.)

  Rome, in the autumn of 1818, was in the throes of a massive excavation programme. Wandering over the tracts of open fields which reached even into the middle of the city, the visitors sometimes stumbled and hurriedly drew back as they found themselves peering down a hole in the ground at the crown of a Roman arch. Although they did not, like a startled Goethe, find the Sistine Chapel’s altar being used as a picnic area, they grew rapidly accustomed to Rome’s casual approach to its imperial past. Wandering through a maze of grassy lanes towards the Forum and scrambling over heaps of earth and rubble, they watched cattle grazing among the columns. Cabbages and artichokes sprouted in dishevelled gardens on the Palatine Hill; ladies in splendid, high-plaited headdresses squabbled over the price of fish among the ruins behind the Portico of Octavia. Pilgrims up from the South slumped in the sunlight with their eyes shut; a pious few knelt as a line of grimly hooded monks swept past. With competent ferocity, artists staked out the Colosseum with their easels; Mary, aching for Mrs Gisborne’s skill as she trained her view-finder on appropriate subjects, sat among them while William, trotting at liberty, amused himself among the marble torsoes strewn about the ground, looking to his eyes like casually dismembered dolls.

  ‘S. begins his tale of the Coliseum,’ Mary noted on 25 November. Shelley never completed his conversational fragment in which, talking to a young stranger, an old man seems to hint at their own loss when he says ‘with a deep and suffering voice, “that men have buried their children’”.5 F
urther indications of the Shelleys’ low spirits emerge from his account to Peacock of a visit one bright autumnal day to the Protestant cemetery on the outskirts of Rome. It was impossible not to think of Harriet, Fanny and their own two baby daughters, all gone to unrecorded graves, as they wandered among the monuments and tablets. The sky deepened to the dusty mauve of the Campagna plain; the dead seemed almost enviable, lying in such a quiet place. ‘Such is the human mind,’ Shelley mused, ‘& so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion.’6

  The last part of their journey south through Italy was across notoriously dangerous territory. The Appian Way stretched west from Rome over the desolate malaria-haunted Pontine marshes before turning south on the coast at Terracina and dropping down through lonely hills to Naples. Shelley travelled on ahead with a terrified priest and a nervous merchant; a man was knifed to death almost at his feet in Capua. The experience was not unusual; the French poet and diplomat Alphonse Lamartine, travelling on the same route a few years earlier, passed a half-burned carriage with corpses lolling on the steps;7 Marianna Starke, an intrepid travel-writer on whose accounts the Shelleys often relied, had been informed that this was the most dangerous road in Europe. Lady Blessington and Lady Morgan both undertook it with extreme nervousness; Shelley left Mary, Claire and the two nannies to brave it with only the untrustworthy Paolo Foggi for a guide.

  ‘Cross the Pomptine Marshes‚’ Mary noted on 29 November. ‘There are no houses or villages to be seen in the whole extent if you except 3 miserable post houses – the people you me[e]t have all a savage appearance – they appear to gain their livelihood by sporting or robbing when they dare – We meet many soldiers as patroles both on foot & on horseback.’ She was, for once, quite glad to see them.

  Anna Jameson, visiting the little coastal settlement of Terracina a few years later, gasped at ‘beauty beyond what I ever beheld or imagined … an enchanted land, “a land of Faery”’.8 Like Mary and Claire, she peered up the mountain above Terracina to glimpse the pillars of a vast temple to Jupiter and above it, a ruined fortress. Away to the north, rising from a perpetual wreath of mist, lay an island, in fact a promontory, which was said to have been the home of the enchantress, Circe; a very suitable place for such a sorceress to live, in the travellers’ view. The sea air raised their spirits. Travelling on down to Gaeta and with the dreaded Pass of Fondi behind them, Mary and Claire thrilled to the – inaccurate – news that their inn stood on the grounds of Cicero’s villa, and that his murdered body had been buried nearby. ‘A poet could not have a more sacred burying place [than] in an olive grove on the shore of a beautiful bay,’ Mary wrote in her journal. The next day, jolting through a landscape of hills that reared and curved like the waves of a frozen sea, they finally saw the distant smoke of Vesuvius spouting from the volcano’s broken cone. Below it, the towers and palace roofs of Naples spread down the hillsides to the bay like a scene from The Arabian Nights. This was the landscape for which everything in Italy was mere preparation. Homer had been in Mary’s mind as she stared across the sea to the headland of Montecircello; Naples, for romantic scholars, was the territory of Virgil, birthplace of Latin literature.

  Shelley, left to his own devices and enjoying the benefit of the favourable exchange rates, had taken lodgings for them all at No. 250 Riviera di Chiaia. The most expensive street of villas in all Europe, the Chiaia justified its prices with a view which stretched from Vesuvius to the orange groves of Posilippo, of a bay flecked, by day, with as many white sails as a cloud of butterflies, and by night, with the pine torches of the fishermen. The gardens separating the villas from the sea were the favourite haunt for visitors; open to all, they were beset by the tireless sketchers who found it impossible not to paint one more charming child, costumed flowerseller or beribboned entertainer. Staying on the Chiaia, Lamartine exclaimed, was like living in the Garden of Eden.

  Writing fifteen months later to a young relation of Shelley’s who was then visiting Naples, Mary was full of nostalgia for its charms. ‘I never found my spirits so good since I entered upon care as at Naples, looking out upon its delightful Bay,’ she told Sophia Stacey ‘The sky, the shore, all its forms and the sensations it inspires, appear formed and modulated by the Spirit of Good alone unalloyed by any evil. Its temperature and fertility would, if men were free from evil, render it a faery habitation of delight – but as a Neapolitan said of it, “E’ un Paradiso abitato dai diavoli.”’9

  And what, Miss Stacey must have wondered, was causing Mrs Shelley to harp so on the evil aspect of a city which she seemed to have loved? And, if she thought Naples so beautiful, why did her letter go on to compare it so unfavourably to Rome?

  The answer lies in one of the most mysterious and baffling episodes in Mary’s life, the story of Shelley’s Neapolitan ‘charge’. The charge was a little girl who was given the name of Elena Adelaide Shelley and who, left in the care of unknown persons at Naples when the Shelleys returned to Rome, died there in the summer of 1820. Who Elena Adelaide was is a mystery that has never been solved. She may have been a foundling, adopted by Shelley to comfort his wife for Clara’s loss. She may have been his child by Claire, or by Elise Duvillard. She may have been Elise’s child by Byron. She may, as Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin first hinted in a book about Byron which he published in 1824, have been the daughter of a mysterious Englishwoman who had an affair with Shelley in London shortly before he left England, and who followed him to Naples. All that is known for certain is that she was not the daughter of Mary Shelley and that Mary, called on in 1821 by Shelley to answer a tale spread by their former employees, that Claire had given birth to his child while they were at Naples, passionately denied it. Mary was probably telling the truth, but that does not help us to guess how much of the story she knew, or whose the child was.

  *

  On 27 February 1819, the day before they left Naples for Rome, Shelley went to the local registry for the Chiaia district and presented a baby, untruthfully stated to have been born to himself and Mary precisely two months earlier, on 27 December, at 250 Riviera di Chiaia. The midwife was named; the two witnesses were a young local hairdresser and a cheesemonger, neither of whom are likely to have known anything of Shelley’s private life. The baby was registered under the name Elena Adelaide Shelley.

  Claire kept no diary at Naples; Mary’s was brief. Shelley, although elaborately descriptive in his accounts to Peacock of their inspection of all the local sites, including the inevitable pilgrimage to the rim of the volcano, provided scant personal detail. Vignettes which litter the pages of contemporary travel journals, of the gambling which took place everywhere, even in the theatres, of back streets filled with ‘idol’ shops, of lazzaroni whose miraculous ability to do nothing at all with cheerful ease baffled and enraged all English visitors, of the pretty girls dancing tarantellas under trellised arbours; all these are strikingly absent from the Shelleys’ accounts. We hear that Shelley became so ill on their journey up Vesuvius that they had to turn back, and that Claire’s hysterical behaviour on the same expedition almost caused their guides to abandon her on the road. We know that Mary and Shelley read Winckelmann, extoller of stainless purity, on the art of ancient Greece and that Mary, still unsure of her next subject, was valiantly wading through a French edition of Sismondi’s gigantic History of the Medieval Italian Republics. We know that on 27 December, the day on which Elena Adelaide was alleged by Shelley to have been born, Claire was sufficiently ill for Mary to make a note of the fact. We know that Shelley himself was confined to the house by illness for much of February, but that he grew well enough to make a long and difficult journey down to the temple at Paestum towards the end of the month. This illness was the explanation Mary later offered for the melancholy poems which Shelley wrote while they were at Naples. She was, at the time, unaware of their existence.

  Mary was as terse with her correspondents as with her journal after their arrival at Naples in early December. Mrs Gisborne learnt only of their safe arriv
al and, nearly two months later, that they had been ‘dreadfully teized’, a word which then carried more meaning than the sense of slight vexation it conveys today. The teasing may have related to the behaviour of Paolo Foggi, whom they had recently dismissed. Mary, writing to Mrs Gisborne on 22 January, mentioned Paolo’s dishonesty: ‘he has made, I fancy, £100 – by us. lately he has cheated us through thick and thin.’10 Shelley, writing to Peacock the following day, confirmed that Paolo had left them and added that Elise Duvillard had married him ‘very much against our advice’.