Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Four days later, despite uncertain weather conditions, Shelley, Williams and their boy sailor set out for Lerici from Livorno, carrying fifty pounds which Shelley had borrowed from Byron. The conditions have been variously described, but it seems clear that the Don Juan sailed into one of the sudden summer squalls for which this part of the coast was notorious.¶ With no deck and sails which were difficult to bring down in a hurry, a sudden gust was all that was needed to swamp it. Reports came later that either one or two of the feluccas which regularly undertook the journey from Livorno to Genoa had seen the little boat struck by ‘baffling winds’;|| shouts to bring down the sails had been disregarded; at their next glance, the Don Juan had been engulfed.

  By 11 July, a Thursday, the three women at the Villa Magni were growing anxious; only continuing bad weather kept Jane from having herself rowed to Livorno the following day. Friday was the day on which the week’s post was delivered; it brought them a letter for Shelley from Hunt. Opening it, Mary saw that Hunt was asking for news of the travellers’ safe return, having heard that the boat had left Livorno in a storm. The date of departure, 8 July, was named. ‘I trembled all over,’ Mary wrote in the long and harrowing account of the tragedy she sent to Mrs Gisborne in August. ‘– Jane read it – “Then it is all over!” she said. “No my dear Jane,” I cried, “it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful …”’28

  Although still so weak that she had not been out of the villa for over a fortnight, Mary agreed with Jane that they must leave at once; Claire remained. The two women reached Pisa at midnight; they went straight to the Palazzo Lanfranchi. The Hunts were in bed and, much to her relief, Mary was shown up to Byron’s floor. Byron and Teresa could only confirm that the Don Juan had sailed on the previous Monday, in bad weather: ‘more they knew not.’ Horrified by Mary’s exhausted appearance (‘I looked more like a ghost than a woman – light seemed to emanate from my features,’ she reported them as having told her29), Teresa begged the travellers to stay and rest.

  They could not rest until they knew what had happened. Making the two-hour journey on to Livorno by carriage, they dozed at an inn until the first sign of light, when they went in search of Trelawny and Roberts. Captain Roberts was reassuring; he swore he had seen the Don Juan’s top-sails being lowered some ten miles out. (Neither Mary nor Jane questioned how, even with the aid of a telescope, he had managed this miracle of vision when everybody agreed that there had been a storm haze over the sea. The added top-sails were weighing heavily on Roberts’s conscience by this time.)

  By nine on the same morning, the two women were on their way back to Lerici under Trelawny’s escort. Mary, as the carriage rolled through the shallow water of the river Magra, had to struggle to hide her emotions from Jane: ‘I thought I should have gone into convulsions … looking down the river I saw the two great lights burning at the foce – A voice from within me seemed to cry aloud that is his grave.’ Five days later, on 18 July, Trelawny left to make further searches; Mary, astonishingly, was still hoping for good news: ‘I was very ill but as evening came on I said to Jane – “If anything had been found on the coast Trelawny would have returned to let us know. He has not returned so I hope.”’30

  The bad news had already come, although Mary did not know it. Claire, instructed by Trelawny to open his post in his absence, had read a letter in which Daniel Roberts said that two bodies, not yet formally identified, had been found. Acting as messenger was beyond her; she wrote a pathetic note to Leigh Hunt on 19 July, asking for advice and ending, helplessly: ‘I know not what further to add, except that their case is desperate in every respect, and Death would be the greatest kindness to us all.’

  Claire was saved by Trelawny’s return that evening. The corpses mentioned by Roberts had been those of Edward Ellerker Williams and Charles Vivian; Trelawny himself had been shown a third body. He was able to identify Shelley only by the copy of Keats’s poems which was still in the pocket of his jacket. By his own account, Trelawny did not need to say a word; Mary, however, remembered that he had been wonderfully graceful in breaking the news: ‘he launched forth into as it were an overflowing & eloquent praise of my divine Shelley – until I almost was happy that I was thus unhappy to be fed by the praise of him, and to dwell on the eulogy that his loss thus drew forth from his friend.’31 In this almost ecstatic state, she found the strength to write to her father. ‘I have some of his friends about me who worship him – they all agree that he was an elementary being and that death does not apply to him,’ she wrote and hurried to forestall the sympathy Godwin might from pity feel obliged to profess. ‘… I am not however so desolate as you might think. He is ever with me, encouraging me to become wise and good, that I may be worthy to join him.’32

  The following morning, the widows and Claire packed up their belongings and returned, with Trelawny accompanying them, to their former lodgings in Pisa. Tearfully, the arrangements for burial were discussed. Neither Mary nor Jane could contemplate leaving their husbands in the quicklime graves on the shore where the three bodies had been hastily buried to conform with the quarantine regulations. Jane wanted to take Edward’s remains to England; Mary wanted Shelley to lie near their little son William in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.

  This, in Mary’s experience, was their friend’s finest hour. At a time when she and Jane Williams were paralysed by their loss and by the horror of their situation, Trelawny took control. He ordered an iron rack on which to burn the bodies, gathered and laid the wood and thoughtfully produced frankincense to disguise the smell. Williams, identifiable only by a handkerchief and a boot, was dealt with on 15 August. The following day, Hunt and Byron drove down to the shore in a carriage to observe Shelley’s last rites, in the company of officials and a fascinated group of young fishermen. The corpse, now putrid and stained blue by the lime, was dug up and placed on the iron grid while Trelawny improvised a suitably pagan prayer. Everybody agreed that the ceremony was entirely appropriate for a poet who had already begun to seem to them like one of the spirits of his poems, a transcendent, not quite human power. It was all of a piece with Shelley’s transformation from bone to spirit that the flame ascending into a blue sky should have quivered with almost unearthly radiance. There were no chemists among the awed observers to tell Trelawny that quicklime, when heated to incandescence, produces a flame of exceptional luminosity.33

  This was the moment at which Trelawny converted himself into a keeper of the shrine, an earnest defender of the man he had known for less than six months but towards whom he now felt a veneration which would in time rival and threaten Mary’s own dedicated love. The fault was partly hers. How could Trelawny not feel that a special link had been forged between himself and her husband when she allowed him, after supervising the cremation, to arrange and even help to dig the final burial plot in Rome? Writing to her on 27 April 1823, Trelawny reported on the laurels and cypresses he had planted around the grave and on the fact that, beside it, he had dug another, on Shelley’s left ‘so that, when I die, there is only to lift up my coverlet and roll me into it’. Mary might, he told her, have a place on the other side, ‘if you like’.

  Nothing, to a romantic mind like Trelawny’s, could have carried more significance than his being charged with the care of Shelley’s remains. Placing himself beside his friend in the cemetery was an act of uncommon assertiveness. Mary, who had left all arrangements to him, was in no position to challenge it.

  *

  Godwin, while Mary Wollstonecraft was being buried, had sat in James Marshall’s rooms, concentrating all his thoughts on a letter of thanks to his friend Anthony Carlisle. Mary, while Hunt, Byron and Trelawny burnt the bodies on a scrubby, desolate stretch of shoreland, wrote the justly celebrated letter to Maria Gisborne from which come many of her words in this chapter. ‘They are now about this fearful office,’ she wrote on 15 August, the day on which Williams was cremated, ‘– and I live.’34 Staying away, she spared herself little. Trelawny’s horribly detailed ac
count of the fish-eaten body of Williams – ‘dreadfully mutilated – both legs separating on our attempting to move it – the hands & one foot had been entirely eaten – with all the flesh of the face’– was copied into her journal; she could not, it seems, bring herself to write out Trelawny’s description of the cremations.

  Mary’s torment had begun the moment she heard that Shelley’s body had been found; nothing now could be undone. Contrition was useless; she was left to scald herself with the memory of every angry word she had said, every time she had turned away, every time she had expressed cynicism or doubt. What use was there in telling herself that she had been driven by her need to protect their child? Percy thrived; Shelley, who had grown healthy enough that summer to surprise young Thornton Hunt with his fleshy cheeks and increased girth, was dead. For comfort, she was forced to turn to the poem he had written in the summer of 1821. ‘Adonais is not Keats’s it is his own elegy,’ she told Mrs Gisborne; reading it again, she drew some solace from the image of Shelley

  … made one with Nature: there is heard

  His voice in all her music, from the moan

  Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;

  He is a presence to be felt and known

  In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

  Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

  Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

  Which wields the world with never–wearied love,

  Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.35

  As his bones shrivelled to ashes on the shore, Mary’s relationship with Shelley was already being judged. No precious relic was brought back for her from the funeral pyre. This was the age in which, without photographs to be fondly framed and cherished, fragments of the dead were invested with the value of talismans. Byron’s choice, the skull, fell to pieces in the flames. Trelawny burned his hands in seizing a fragment of jawbone; Hunt took another. The heart, or the part of the remains which seemed most like a heart, had failed to burn, while exuding a viscous liquid.36 Trelawny snatched it out; Hunt requested and received this rather special relic of his friend. When Mary asked if she might have the heart herself, Hunt refused to surrender it. At some point shortly after this, Mary remembered them sitting together in a coach and quarrelling bitterly; it took a reproachful letter from Jane Williams to Hunt to compel a surrender. The heart was rediscovered after Mary Shelley’s death. Wrapped in silk between the pages of Adonais, it had lain inside her travelling-desk for almost thirty years.

  Mary followed her painful transcription of Trelawny’s report of the uncovering of one or both of the bodies – the account seems to run them together or to repeat itself – with a few disjointed entries in her journal. Among them are a couple which show how swiftly she was reaching towards the idea of a life that was about to be repossessed and transformed.

  He is a man which like sea weed, when in its element, unfolds itself & becomes a plant of rare beauty & grace, but taken from that it is a worthless & ugly weed, trodden under foot without remorse

  Yet that same sea weed, so that you raise it from the ground & tend on it dividing & nursing its delicate fil[?us] will preserve its beauty – I do not despair of him.37

  The task of defending and enhancing her husband’s reputation would be her great work for the future, her consolation for the remorse she now felt. No blame would be attached to Shelley for the unhappiness he had caused her, for the extent to which he had forced her to accommodate his wishes, for the readiness – although she was not fully aware of his betrayals – with which he had represented her to their friends as an unsympathetic partner. All blame, in Mary’s view, lay with herself; the exaltation of his nature and his work would be her act of reparation.

  Notes

  1. Anna Jameson, Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), p. 314.

  2. Henry James, ‘Italy Revisited’ (1877), Collected Travel Writings (Library of America edition, 1993), p. 399.

  3. MWS, Notes to the 1822 poems (PW).

  4. MWS–MG, 15.8.1822.

  5. MWS, ‘The Choice’, in MWSJ, p. 491. Thought to have been written at the beginning of 1823.

  6. Claire Tomalin, Shelley and His World (Penguin Books, 1992), p. 104. This remains the best short guide to Shelley.

  7. MWS–MG, 2.6.1822.

  8. Emily Sunstein, R&R, p. 217.

  9. EW, Journal, 15.5.1822 (Shelley’s Friends). This journal was with Williams when he drowned. Mary was the first to read and transcribe large tracts of it, with the intention of drawing on it for her planned life of Shelley.

  10. EW, Journal, 12.5.1822.

  11. MWS–MG, 2.6.1822.

  12. EW, Journal, 13.6.1822.

  13. Joseph A. Dane, ‘On the Instability of Vessels and Narratives: A Nautical Perspective on the Sinking of the Don Juan’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 47 (1998).

  14. EW, Journal, 14.5.1822, 28.5.1822.

  15. MWS–MG, 15.8.1822.

  16. PBS–JG (surviving only in JG’s transcript), 18.6.1822.

  17. See Appendix 3.

  18. MWSJ, 7.7.1822.

  19. MWS–MG, 15.8.1822.

  20. LH–PBS, 21.6.1822 (PBSL, 2, p. 439).

  21. PBS–LH, 24.6.1822.

  22. MWS–MG, 15.8.1822.

  23. EW–JW, 6.7.1822 (Shelley’s Friends), pp. 162–3.

  24. MWS–LH, c. 30.6.1822.

  25. PBS–MWS, 4.7.1822.

  26. Agnes M. Clarke, 13.7.1822 (Clarke Journal, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.).

  27. EW, Journal, 6.6.1822.

  28. MWS–MG, 15.8.1822.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid.

  31. MWS–MG, 27.8.1822.

  32. MWS–WG, [?]19.7.1822. These sentences were quoted by Godwin in a letter he sent to his friend John Taylor on 16 August 1822; they survive in an extract copy at Duke University, S.C. See also St Clair, G&S, p. 555. Unfortunately Mary’s letter was delayed; Godwin heard of Shelley’s death on 4 August from a third party. I conjecture the date of her writing from the evident effect of Trelawny’s revelation and the fact that no mention is made of plans for burial or cremation.

  33. The startling effects of incandescent lime were discovered shortly after this and put to dramatic use on stage. An experiment on the Thames on a moonless night showed that a man’s hand, lit up by lime, could be seen from a distance of ten miles. Trelawny was much struck by the brilliance of the flames which consumed the bodies of his friends.

  34. MWS–MG, 15.8.1822.

  35. PBS, Adonais, stanza xlii.

  36. The heart’s survival in intense heat is hard to explain, even if it had been in an advanced state of calcification. It is possible that the object snatched from the flames was the poet’s liver.

  37. MWSJ, p. 424. A later holograph draft of this account by Trelawny is in the British Library (Add. Mss 39168.S). Trelawny expanded and altered the account of the cremations in his later reminiscences.

  * Shelley told Trelawny that he had no immediate plans to use the prussic acid, but we should ask if he could possibly have said anything else.

  † Byron’s wish was frustrated by the Reverend John William Cunningham, the sanctimonious vicar of Harrow who also prevented a plaque from being installed, regarding it as likely to set a bad example to young Harrovians. Allegra’s coffin was buried outside the church, with no memorial.

  ‡ Emily Sunstein8 believes that Shelley showed his wife all Godwin’s letters that summer, at Mrs Mason’s urging; Mary’s letters suggest otherwise. Her letter to Mrs Gisborne of 2 June complains of Godwin’s writing ‘in so few words, and in such a manner’. Godwin wrote to his daughter on many occasions between March and July 1822. His letters were seldom short. All letters to Shelley went via the Mason household. Shelley may have been acting out of kindness in endeavouring to protect Mary from the news that her father was not yet offering Valperga. Godwin believed, probably correctly, that his own financial difficulties would lead to his being offered poor terms.

 
§ Shelley had acquired some basic medical knowledge from observation visits to the wards of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, during the months between his expulsion from Oxford and his elopement with Harriet.

  ¶ Another visitor to the region at the time, Agnes M. Clarke, noted in her journal that, preparing to sail from Lerici on 11 July 1822 on ‘a sea which was as clear & smooth as a looking glass’, it happened that a ‘providential delay’ preserved her from ‘a sudden hurricane wh. Must have been fatal if I had been out at sea. The captain of the felucca (a coastal craft) refused to go … I find these sudden hurricanes are very frequent at this season on this coast.’26 This is of particular interest, being so close to the date of the Don Juan’s going down.

  || When the Don Juan was located, Daniel Roberts, the builder, bought the raised shell and carried out an investigation of the wreck’s condition. ‘Trelawny tells me that in his, Roberts & every other sailor’s opinion she was run down,’ Mary wrote to Jane on 15 October 1822; ‘of course by that Fishing Boat – which confessed to have seen them.’ Trelawny and Roberts both welcomed an explanation which shifted the responsibility from the boat’s designer and builder. It is possible that the boat was considered fair prey. According to Williams’s journal, he and Shelley had already attracted adverse notice on 6 June when they drew pistols on a guard who attempted to prevent them landing on a military beach.27 Random voyages along a coast well manned by forts by two Englishmen known to have been involved in an alleged attack on a soldier at Pisa would certainly have been considered suspicious. The felucca crew could have deliberately rammed the boat, knowing that money had been taken in at Livorno, and that the incident was unlikely to be investigated too closely. It is also possible that the evidence of ramming dated only from the time when the boat was lifted and brought ashore. Damage of this kind might have occurred at this stage and gone unmentioned.