Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Shelley’s account fits neatly with Mary’s statement to Marianne Hunt on 12 March, that Elise had been ‘quite spoiled’ by her stay in Venice and had gone to live in Florence after marrying their ‘rogue of an Italian servant’ at Naples and turning Catholic. Two years later, Mary’s story had changed. In the letter of 1821 in which, writing at Shelley’s request, she defended him from ‘the foulest calumnies’ (a charge made to the Hoppners by Elise that Claire had given birth to his child at Naples), Mary referred to ‘an accident’ which had led her to discover ‘a connexion’ between Elise and Paolo in Naples. A doctor had diagnosed ‘danger of a miscarriage’ and since ‘I wd not turn the girl on the world without in some degree binding her to this man – we had them married at Sir W[illiam] A’Courts.’11 (Sir William was British ambassador to the court of Naples.) So, we can choose between two versions of Elise’s marriage; she undertook it against the Shelleys’ advice (Shelley’s account to Peacock), or she was dismissed after being forced by them to marry, because she was or had recently been pregnant (Mary’s account to Mrs Hoppner).

  The charge against which Mary was here defending herself had come to the Hoppners directly from Elise, or so they said. Claire, Elise had told them, was already pregnant when she came to Venice to see Allegra in the summer of 1818. She had taken medicines to cause an abortion; Shelley continued to supply these to her at Este and Rome, but with no success. Their child had eventually been born at the lodgings on the Chiaia in Naples. Shelley had bribed the doctor into silence and had taken the baby to a foundling hospital. Mary, according to Elise’s extraordinary story, had known nothing, neither that Claire was pregnant, nor that a child had been born.12

  This ugly tale seems to have reached the Hoppners during the summer of 1820 when Elise was once again living in Venice. The Hoppners were at this time irritated by the fact that Claire had been using them as a means of getting her messages through to Byron: ‘Why indeed we have been selected by Clara [Claire] as the means of communicating with you I know not,’ Hoppner wrote to Byron in May 1820. It must have been after this date that Elise told them her tale, for on 21 June Hoppner wrote again to Byron, sending love to Allegra and adding a gossipy hint: ‘I am heartily glad, though I dare not tell you why, that you have not sent her to her mother.’ Byron, replying on 20 July from Ravenna, where he was living with Teresa Guiccioli, his young mistress, made no allusion to this. On 6 September, Hoppner tried again to arouse his curiosity: ‘I hope for his [Shelley’s] sake that Clara and his atheism have driven him out of his wits, as I am loath to believe him so thoroughly depraved as I must consider him if he has not this justification.’ This forced Byron to ask what it was they knew against Shelley; Hoppner’s next letter, of 16 September, passed on Elise’s story, one which he had evidently been hoping for an invitation to relate.13

  Visiting Byron at Ravenna the following summer, Shelley was shown Hoppner’s letter. His immediate reaction was to write and ask Mary to tell Mrs Hoppner whatever she herself believed to be the true facts. Mary was requested to send her letter to him, so that he could show it to Byron before they sent it on to the Hoppners. Mary did this. Her account was found, with its seal broken, among Byron’s papers after his death. Quite possibly, Shelley gave it to him to forward to the Hoppners and Byron, after reading it, simply forgot. Equally possibly, Byron decided that a vindication of Claire might arouse the Hoppners’ sympathy for her and enable her once again to use them as message-carriers.

  ‘Claire had no child‚’ Mary wrote in this long and fluent letter, in which the handwriting never faltered, although she expressed horror and pain at the charges she was being asked to meet: ‘Claire had no child the rest must be false.’ But there had been a child, if not Claire’s, and Mary already knew enough about it in April 1819 for Shelley to tell Mr and Mrs Gisborne that his wife was writing to explain why ‘a combination of circumstances’ would oblige them to return to Naples for six months at the end of May. This letter from Mary has not survived. It is the one which might have told us most about her own part in the plot.

  Was Mary lying in her letter to Mrs Hoppner? Could Elena Adelaide have been Shelley and Claire’s child? Baptized on the same day that her birth was registered, 27 February, she was alleged by Shelley to be precisely two months old. If Elena Adelaide was born on 27 December, the date on which Mary noted that Claire had been ‘unwell’, she could have been conceived on the journey to Italy. Claire had been unwell throughout the summer, but can we imagine that she managed to hide her pregnancy for all those months and that she was able to make an arduous journey up Mount Vesuvius a few days before secretly giving birth, and in rooms to which Mary assured Mrs Hoppner that she herself had access at all times? How secret can a birth without anaesthetic be? The one ringingly confident statement in Mary’s letter to Mrs Hoppner was that denial: ‘Claire had no child.’ I think we should believe her.

  A second and intriguing possibility is that Elise’s story to the Hoppners derived from her own history, not Claire’s. Mary’s account of Elise’s pregnancy never named Paolo as the father of her child. She told Mrs Hoppner that the two servants had only formed their ‘connexion’ at Rome in late October, just before they set out for Naples. This would certainly rule out the possibility that Elena Adelaide was their child, but not that Elise might have become pregnant by Shelley in the spring of 1818.* Perhaps, after bribing Paolo to marry Elise and leave their household in January 1819, Shelley decided to adopt his own daughter and register her as his legitimate child. Elise and Paolo certainly knew about something out of the ordinary which took place at Naples, enough for Shelley to lament to the Gisbornes on 7[?] July 1820 that ‘Paolo has been taking advantage of my situation in Naples in December 1818.’ Paolo, in 1820, was threatening to charge him ‘with the most horrible crimes’.

  It is, of course, possible that Paolo had decided to make trouble by conflating the rumour – of which Elise would surely have been aware – that Allegra was Shelley’s child, not Byron’s, with the adoption of a baby in Naples. It is certain that Paolo was attempting blackmail in the summer of 1820 and that he said enough to damage the Shelleys’ both at Pisa and at Livorno. What he said is not known. But why should Elise, living apart from her husband by that time, have decided to carry gossip to the Hoppners? It is a point which has been overlooked by biographers: Elise had nothing to gain by slandering Shelley and Claire; she told the Hoppners only of a baby’s being taken away from the lodgings on the Riviera di Chiaia. There is a slight but noticeable assonance between the name Elise (pronounced ‘Eleessa’) and Elena (pronounced ‘Elaina’).

  Let us suppose, then, that the mysterious Elena Adelaide was Elise’s baby by Shelley, that she was removed from the lodgings after her birth and that Mary then put up a fierce resistance to Shelley’s scheme to register, baptize and adopt her as their own child. Did Mary compel him to leave the baby behind at Naples? This might connect to a brief visit paid by Elise to the Shelleys in the autumn of 1819, when they were staying in Florence. She could have been calling from courtesy; she could have been anxious to know about the child – her child’s – welfare. A second child, alluded to in Elise’s friendly letter to Mary of 17 July 1821, was probably Paolo’s: ‘j’ai fait une jolie petite fille … tre gaie …’14

  The mystery baby died at Naples in June 1820. This was the month in which the Hoppners sent their first hint to Byron of a strange tale given to them by Elise. The young nurse’s bitterness becomes wholly understandable if she had just heard of the death of a child she was forced to relinquish. She could hardly tell the Hoppners the truth; their own letters to Byron make it clear that the couple had a low opinion of Claire, regarding her as a bad mother and of loose morals. By transferring her own story to Claire, Elise had the release of unlocking her unhappy secret and inflicting hurt on Shelley. Later, told by both Mary and Claire of the damage she had done, Elise denied having ever said anything. Mary, sending her own letter of denial to Mrs Hoppner via Shelley, referred to Elise with
unusual bitterness as ‘this miserable girl’. Claire, who may never have known how much her own name had been slandered, remained on excellent terms with Elise, visiting and being visited by her when they were both living in Florence in 1820–1.

  There is a third possibility. Writing up his Conversations of Lord Byron in 1824, Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin has Byron alluding to a lady who had fallen in love with Shelley after reading his poetry. Perhaps Byron, who was fond of ‘bamming’, the practice of spinning stories to credulous listeners, did tell Medwin some such tale for the fun of it, but Medwin cited Shelley himself as a second source.15 Publishing his life of Shelley in 1847, Medwin claimed that he had been told of a beautiful and aristocratic lady who was so overwhelmed by the poet’s high ideals and his belief in ‘unfettered union between the sexes’ that she decided, after meeting him in London, to abandon husband, family and friends to follow him throughout the world. Medwin’s proverbial inaccuracy placed the start of her pursuit in 1814; Shelley apparently told him that she had been spying on him across the lake when he was at Geneva in 1816. In 1818, so the story went, she followed him again; she had managed to stay in the same hotel between Rome and Naples. She had arrived in Naples on the same day; ‘and at Naples – she died.’16 This, Medwin decided, explained the unhappy tone of the poetry Shelley wrote that winter.

  Interest in Medwin’s story as a possible solution has obscured the fact that he never mentioned a baby. The editor of Claire’s letters, summarizing the available evidence regarding the mysterious Neapolitan adoption, speculates on the use of the name Adelaide. This was a name which belonged neither to the Shelley nor the Godwin family trees. Could the mother have been Adelaide Constance Campbell, whose mother, Lady Charlotte Campbell, married her chaplain, Edward Bury, while they were all travelling in Italy in 1818?† Should we try to link her to the ‘AB’ of unidentified gender to whom Shelley instructed his London publisher to make two payments, of ten and twenty pounds, earlier in the year? But then Shelley also made a passing observation to Peacock on the thoughtful, heart-searching eyes of German ladies; should we start looking for a German Adelaide, or brood on the fact that ‘Adelaide’ means ‘of noble birth’? Can anything be construed from the fact that two popular operas performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1818 had the names Elena and Adelaide in their titles? We can, once we start to look, see potential mothers springing up everywhere; none offers more than the thin coincidence of a shared name.‡

  The least complicated answer of all strikes me as the most convincing. Shelley’s letters to the Gisbornes consistently referred to the baby as his ‘Neapolitan charge’, as if the baby was of Neapolitan birth. It is possible that he knew the mother; it does not follow that he was the father. Shelley had, as we have already seen, a strong interest in adopting little girls; he could naively have assumed that Mary’s anguish at losing Clara would be assuaged by the gift of a substitute.

  History has lost sight of how commonly children were abandoned and adopted in Italy at that time. Polidori, visiting Pisa, had been shown the ‘turning box of an establishment unknown in this country [England] … A miserable mother, hidden by her long veil, is often seen at midnight, to approach with a trembling hand, to stand a long time kissing and weeping over her infant, near this grate; a footstep is heard; she puts it into the box, turns it round; a bell rings the knell of separation, and she parts, perchance for ever, from her child.’18 The novelist and travel-writer Marianna Starke, visiting Naples shortly before the Shelleys, was astonished to learn that her servants had recently adopted a foundling, although they had a family of their own: ‘afterward, when we mentioned the circumstances to our Neapolitan friends, they informed us that such instances of charity were by no means rare among the common people.’19 The Shelleys read Starke’s book; this passage could even have alerted Shelley to how simple a process adoption was. His experiences with the Court of Chancery would have made him particularly anxious to legalize the process by a registration and baptism.

  The absence of letters and the brevity of Mary’s diary entries, when put together, suggest that she knew more than she ever acknowledged. Her own refusal to take charge of this substitute child, whatever its relation to her husband, may explain her note of ‘a most tremendous fuss’ on the day of their departure from Naples, as Shelley rushed to make alternative arrangements for the baby’s care. They made their peace with each other at lovely, wild Gaeta, where they spent a whole day strolling in woods and along the empty shore.20 Here, Mary’s fourth child was conceived. Five days later, the Shelleys and Claire were back in Rome.

  *

  They lodged at the Palazzo Verospi on the Corso, which was one of the smartest addresses in Rome. Shelley, despite his republican views, remained patrician in his habits: this was the street on which his father would have stayed, had he ever ventured so far as Italy. Perhaps Shelley was preparing Mary for her role as a baronet’s wife; they had already begun to anticipate Sir Timothy’s death. ‘Il buon tempo verrà,’ Shelley’s new ring announced; Mary wanted to find him one with his family crest engraved as a seal.

  Sir Timothy would have been impressed by the decorum of their Roman life. Mary and Claire took drawing lessons; Claire worked on her singing. They received calls from Lord Guilford, the son of George III’s prime minister, and from Sir William Drummond, an authority on the excavation work being done at Herculaneum and Pompeii. They were presented to the Pope, a seemingly gentle old man who nevertheless left Mary feeling ‘dreadfully tired’. Lord Guilford introduced them to the ancient and formidably erudite Marianna Dionigi, their near neighbour on the Corso. Attending the signora’s evening conversaziones and relishing the chance to exercise their Italian, they felt most superior to the tongue-tied English guests who, as Claire maliciously noted, ‘after having crossed their legs & said nothing the whole Evening, rose all up at once, made their bows & filed off’.21

  Mary was more enthusiastic. ‘How you would like to be here!’ she wrote to Marianne Hunt on 12 March: ‘… my letter would never be at an end if I were to try [to] tell a millionth part of the delights of Rome – it has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank & now I begin to live – In the churches you hear the music of heaven & the singing of Angels –’ A few weeks later, her secret hopes were confirmed; she was pregnant again. It seemed a happy coincidence that they should just have met Dr John Bell, a celebrated Scottish doctor who knew her father and who now became part of their own small circle of friends. Writing to Mrs Gisborne, Mary told her that Bell’s intended visit to Naples would be ‘one reason’ for their own return there. She was not yet prepared to disclose another, but she had already told Leigh Hunt that ‘circumstances will keep us a long time’ at Naples.22 It seems that Shelley had persuaded her to reconcile herself to the adoption.

  The Hunts and Maria Gisborne were thankful for signs that Mary had recovered from the loss of her daughter and was enjoying life in a city ‘stuffed with the loveliest statues in the world’. There were still dark moments. It took only one cold day to drag Shelley’s health down, Mary told Hunt; for herself, ‘evil thoughts will hang about me – but this is only now and then –’23

  She had several causes for despondency. The unresolved situation in Naples was worrying; Mrs Hoppner had sent them a cruelly tactless letter, hinting that Allegra was pale and pining and that Claire was a thoughtless mother not to take responsibility for her.24 In England, Godwin was confronted by heavy demands for years of unpaid rent at Skinner Street, rent which he had happily assumed he was under no legal obligation to pay, having no single direct landlord. No letters between him and the Shelleys have survived from this period, but it would be surprising to discover that he had not communicated his distress to Mary.

  The Emperor of Austria visited Rome for the Holy Week celebrations at the beginning of April. Mary’s republican blood boiled at the sight of his officers pushing the meek crowds away with drawn swords. Enraged by the Roman people’s inability
to live up to the spirit of their glorious past, she wrote a short story in which she imagined the feelings of a Roman senator returning to the present. She called it ‘Valerius, the Reanimated Roman’, but her scientific interest in his return from death was minimal. What interested her was Valerius’s response to the sight of his great city in ruins, the Forum become the Campo Vaccino, the Colosseum’s arches broken and thick with weeds; at the Pantheon, she pictured his distress at finding the shrine of the old gods converted into a Roman Catholic church.

  We can see hints of Mary’s father in Valerius’s ‘placid and commanding’ face. A direct allusion to Isabella Booth seems to be made when Valerius meets Lady Harley, a young woman of Scottish birth whose name is Isabell and whose husband, far older than herself, relishes the role of being her tutor. But ‘Valerius’ is also an affectionate record of Mary’s own responses to her surroundings. She began her story at Naples; moving to Rome, she described all her favourite haunts, the Colosseum, Mount Palatine, the walks along the Tiber. ‘This is of all others the place I delight most in Rome to visit,’ she wrote after climbing with Valerius to the banks above the great ruined arches of Caracalla’s Baths. This was where Mary herself often came to sketch and read, while Shelley, sitting nearby, worked on the last act of Prometheus Unbound. This, she wrote in her tale, is a place which ‘joins the beauty and fragrance of Nature to the sublimest idea of human power; and when so united, they have an interest and feeling that sinks deep into my heart.’25

  They had been in Rome for six weeks when Claire and Mary, driving through the Borghese Gardens, caught sight of a familiar face. Amelia Curran had been living in Rome for over two years; both she and her brother William, now in Paris, had remained on friendly terms with the Godwins. Still unmarried, although she was considerably older than Mary and Shelley, Amelia lived in a house filled with visiting artists, many of them Irish, in the Via Sistina at the top of the Spanish Steps. The narrow Corso in the midst of the city, she warned her friends, was no place for a small and delicate child as the dreaded season of malaria approached; convinced, the Shelleys hastily took new rooms in the house next to hers. The air on the Trinità dei Monti was, so everybody told them, the best in Rome; the views, stretching across the city, were magnificent.