Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The enduring value of Mary’s notes is in the context they give to the poems. Biographers and critics remain gratefully dependent on her vivid and accurate descriptions of the places in which they had lived, her glimpses of Shelley dreaming under the trees at Marlow, scribbling in a boat, working in his hot little room at the top of an Italian villa, wandering through the fields. ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening,’ she wrote in her Note on the Poems of 1820, ‘while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle-hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.’ This was her approach, descriptive, evocative, and carefully non-specific. She gave little of Shelley’s private life away.

  Bitterness crept in only at the end. Concluding with ‘The Dirge’, the poem she had written as a lament for Shelley’s death, Mary expressed dissatisfaction with her own achievement. Ill health and sadness had spread ‘their sinister influence’ over her notes, she wrote. Touchingly, she apologized ‘for not having executed in the manner I desire the history I engaged to give of Shelley’s writings’; honourably, she confessed that her recollections had been of ‘deep and unforgotten joys and sorrows’. She did not pretend, as she might have done, that her memories were of undiluted happiness.1

  Queen Mab, of which she had no original copy (her own had been left at Marlow), presented the greatest problems and stirred up the most controversy. Writing in December 1838, to Hogg, to Leigh Hunt, to Moore, to anybody she could think of who might have been supplied with an original text, Mary sought their advice as to what she should do. Richard Monckton Milnes wanted an unexpurgated text but none of the copious notes to the poem in which Shelley had been most outspoken; Moxon, anxious to protect himself, thought that the most atheistical passages of the poem should be excluded; Hogg appeared to agree with the publisher. Mary, while personally opposed to atheism and eerily convinced that Shelley ‘now’ felt as she did, still shrank from the idea of publishing a mutilated text. Prudence won: the cutting of tricky passages of Queen Mab and a few less significant omissions were Mary’s concession to Moxon. Hunt’s offer to write part of the Preface with her was firmly rejected. ‘The edition will be mine –’ she told him on 14 December, ‘& though I feel my incompetencey – yet trying to make it as good as I can, I must hope [for] the best.’

  Mary could hardly have supposed that her approach would win favour with everybody; the reviews were appreciative of Shelley and critical of his widow. The Examiner (3 February 1839) felt that she had no understanding of her husband’s work; the Spectator (26 January 1839) spoke for many in regretting that Queen Mab had been published in a truncated form.* The Athenaeum (27 April 1839) told its readers that Mrs Shelley’s selective editing and excessively concise notes were unlikely to satisfy any true admirer of Shelley’s work.

  This was hard to bear. It was harder still that the very friends from whom she had sought advice now weighed in with their protests. Trelawny sent his presentation copy back to Moxon with a roar at the omissions: ‘How very much he must enjoy the opportunity thus afforded him of doing a rude & insolent act,’ Mary bitterly noted in her journal on 12 February 1839 and added that the omissions were ‘almost worthwhile … if only to give him this pleasure’. Hogg was angry that she had left out Queen Mab’s dedicatory verses to Harriet and disinclined to believe Mary’s assurances that Shelley himself had governed Mary’s decision. Shelley had, she recorded in her journal, expressed ‘great pleasure’ when an earlier edition of the poem had omitted these lines to Harriet: ‘this recollection caused me to do the same – It was to do him honour.’2 They were all, it seemed, against her; Hogg, Peacock, Trelawny, Hunt. Responding to Hogg’s reproaches, Mary thanked him for his ‘insinuations’ and added that the ‘poison’ of Jane’s gossip in the past should have prepared her for this second dose, as big a one as he could mix, ‘for which I am proportionately obliged to you’.3

  Indignant and hurt though she was, the accusations went home. The second one-volume edition of 1839 restored the dedication to Harriet, added two political poems and restored the omitted verses of Queen Mab. Mary had the gloomy satisfaction of seeing Moxon’s apprehensions come true. He was prosecuted for blasphemous libel in 1841 – it was the last such case held in England – although sentence was never passed and the book remained in circulation.

  *

  ‘I almost think that my present occupation will end in a fit of illness … I am torn to pieces by Memory,’ Mary wrote in wretched spirits on 12 February 1839. By the time she had settled in her new home at Putney, she was in a state of deep melancholy and exhaustion. ‘Illness did ensue – what an illness – driving me to the verge of insanity,’ she scribbled in her journal in March. Fortunately, Julia Robinson, always a favourite of Mary’s, was able to come downriver from her family’s new home on Kew Green to care for her and help to put the house in order. By April, Mary was back at her desk.

  The new home on which Moxon’s payments had enabled her to take a year’s lease was Layton House, hideous on the outside but comfortable and easily habitable, just west of Putney High Street. Percy, recovering from another short-lived romance, one on which Mary had bestowed her blessing in February, liked it for being only a short stroll above the river, since boats now took precedence over the flute as his great obsession; Mary enjoyed living near her friends the Stanhopes, who occupied two handsome houses built on the site of old Putney Palace. The Thames, by the late 1830s, had become the sulphurous, overcrowded, sinister highway of traffic memorably depicted by Dickens in his later novels. Turning her back on it, Mary looked up at a hillside dotted with charming Palladian villas standing on small, pretty estates. London was a leisurely river journey away; as fond of walking as ever, Mary took long strolls across Barnes Common and through Richmond Park as the spring days lengthened into summer and as she felt her spirits beginning to lift. Her strolls did not, however, take her to Augusta Goring, or into the extreme Radical circles which gathered in the houses owned by the prosperous Temple Leader, where Trelawny ranted away with the best of them.

  Perhaps Mary was more relieved than she admitted that her son’s romance with Gertrude – her second name is not known – was over. In her journal, she wrote of Percy, now in his third year at Trinity, as a blessing to his mother. Mary Ellen Peacock was once again nudged into taking an interest, with suggestions that she might like to visit when Percy was at home or to join him and his young college friends on a boating trip. Old Henry Crabb Robinson, who had become a devoted admirer of the work of both Mary and Shelley, took a dim view of the boy. Percy was ‘a loutish-looking youth’, he noted after meeting him and his mother on an evening out, ‘quite unworthy in his external appearance [of] his distinguished literary ancestors … His moral character is highly spoken of. Of his abilities,’ he added ominously, ‘nothing is said.’4 Mary, too, fell silent when it came to Percy’s academic achievements. In 1838, she had asked Monckton Milnes to look into the matter of getting him some private coaching.

  The Robinson family were Mary’s most regular visitors as she worked diligently on, preparing Shelley’s essays and letters for her final volumes. Taught by her painful experiences over Queen Mab, she was determined to censor as little as possible. This did not mean that she was ready to publish everything. ‘You see I have scratched out a few lines [of Shelley’s Essay on the Devil and Devils] which might be too shocking,’ she wrote to Leigh Hunt on 6 October 1839, ‘and yet I hate to mutilate. Consider the fate of the book only … so many of the religious particularly like Shelley.’ In the end, she did not wait for Hunt’s advice but decided to defer publication; Shelley’s reputation was too precious, too hard-won to be exposed to such a risk. With his translation of the Symposium she was ready to be bolder. Hunt was scolded for preferring the bland word ‘friendship’ to ‘love’. The substitution, she rightly told him, simply caused confusion about the genders; besides, she wanted to keep ‘as many of Shelley’s own words as possible’.5 Publishin
g the letters, however, she was selective. Leigh Hunt was urged to dig up the originals of six letters he had included in his 1828 publication, Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, so that she could fill up his omissions: ‘why not – we wish to shew him not ourselves – & each word of his is him.’6 This was nobly said, but when it came to publishing Shelley’s letters to her father, Mary lost her nerve. Only one, a harmless epistle which gave none of the background away, was sent to Moxon.

  Her Preface to Shelley’s prose works, published in December 1839, provided a second opportunity for exaltation, and she took it. Shelley’s only defect, she wrote, had been to die too young; granting him a faith he had never possessed, she envisaged him risen to a new ‘sphere of being, better adapted to his inexpressible tenderness, his generous sympathies, and his richly gifted mind’; here those he had loved would one day join him. Heartfelt though this may have been, it was also an unabashed attempt at sanctification.

  The critics, once again, liked the works better than the editing. ‘The Examiner was really good – very – the Athenaeum creditable,’ Mary wrote to Moxon on 19 December. In fact, neither of these reviewers had praised Mary’s work, and the Spectator, with which she was less pleased, had regretted that her own taste appeared to lean towards ‘the weakest and most defective parts of his [Shelley’s] mind’ (14 December 1839). The editor, Mary tartly exclaimed to Moxon, must be ‘both a goose and a coxcomb’.†

  Leigh Hunt had become a staunch ally in the editorial process, even though Mary did not always agree with his views. Their friendship had faded after Hunt’s move to Chelsea; now, while he offered encouragement and suggestions, sometimes rather more than Mary wished for, she deluged him with enthusiastic and encouraging notes about his play, A Legend of Florence, due to open in February 1840. Hunt, despite his long career as a theatre reviewer, had never been lucky with his dramas and A Legend had already been turned down elsewhere before shrewd Madame Vestris took it for Covent Garden; he was very nervous. ‘My fair friends are full of resolution that it shall succeed – and I know that it will,’ Mary reassured him a week before the opening.8 Three weeks later, she had seen it, read it and was planning to go again. ‘Adieu dear successful Dramatic-Poet,’ she signed off a letter which informed him that his work was full of ‘all the loveliest things of this (when you write about it) lovely world’.9‡ Percy, a young man of few words, added his own congratulations to Mary’s next note: ‘Percy says: “Make great thanks to Hunt for his play I like it very much.”’11

  A less agreeable correspondence with Hunt took place just before the Christmas of 1839, when he sent her a letter from a would-be biographer of Shelley. George Henry Lewes was only twenty-two and his wife Agnes had not yet embarked – with Lewes’s approval – on her fruitful partnership with Hunt’s eldest son. Perhaps Mary was unaware that Lewes’s biography was already partly written and that it had been advertised in four successive editions of the National Magazine and Monthly Critic in 1838. Perhaps word had reached her that he was a man of raffish reputation and with progressive views. She brusquely turned down his request for an interview; Hunt was asked to tell the young man that she would not permit a biography.¶ If anybody was to do it, she would, she wrote, but ‘the reasons that prevent me & will prevent me are so tragical – that I could never bring myself to converse on them to my nearest friend – & to a stranger it is quite out of the question.’

  It was in this letter to Hunt that Mary was most revealing about the emotional torture she had suffered while working her way through Shelley’s poems and letters, some of them for the first time:

  Time may flow on – but it only adds to the keenness & vividness with which I view the past – adds, how much: for when tragedies & most bitter dramas were in the course of acting I did not feel their meaning & their consequences as poignantly as I now do – I cannot write or speak of Shelley to any purpose according to my views without taking a seal from a fountain, that I cannot bring myself yet to let flow.13

  There were too many things that only she knew, only she could say; even thinking about them plunged her into despair. Mary’s reluctance to make revelations did not spring simply from a wish to protect Shelley’s reputation, but from knowing how miserable she felt whenever she was forced to remember the past. She did not understand her depressions; she knew that certain things caused them and that those things were better left alone. Nothing, in her experience, affected her more than to confront the chilly, white-faced ghost of herself as she was after the deaths of Clara and William; to see herself through Shelley’s own unhappy eyes. She was guilty enough, God knew; why must she acknowledge it to strangers, be judged again when none had ever judged her more harshly than she did herself?

  *

  If the past could still cause her piercing unhappiness as she read of Shelley’s feelings during the bleak months in Naples when he had, perhaps, attempted to adopt a child to compensate for her losses, the present offered hope, and even love. The few poems which Mary wrote in 1838–9 were all on the theme of the healing power of love. On 27 November 1839, she expanded on this theme in her journal:

  Another hope – Can I have another hope? A friendship secure helpful – enduring – a union with a generous heart – & yet a suffering one whom I may comfort & bless – if it be so I am happy indeed … I can indeed confide in A’s inalterable gentleness & affection … but will not events place us asunder – & prevent me from being a comfort to him – he from being the prop on which I may lean – We shall see – If I can impart any permanent pleasure to his now blighted existence, & revivify it through the force of sincere & disinterested attachment – I shall be happy.

  Mary’s allusions to ‘A’ and ‘his now blighted existence’ and to a love she hopes to ‘revivify’ make it clear that she was thinking of Aubrey Beauclerk.

  Mary had stayed on affectionate terms with all the Beauclerk family; it must have been only a question of time before she would meet Aubrey again as a widower with four young children, who had now abandoned his political career to look after his estates in Sussex and Ireland. It seems strange that she should so easily have forgiven a man who had already let her down, but unhappiness was always a magnet for Mary’s sympathy. While comforting Beauclerk, she was also caring for another friend. Colonel Jeremiah Ratcliffe, a cultivated and entertaining man with a fine singing voice and high hopes of being made chief Equerry to the newly married Prince Albert, may originally have met Mary through Augusta Goring, who knew him at least as early as 1837. In early March 1840, Ratcliffe was involved – he had seconded the challenger – in a duel between his friend Captain Léon, an illegitimate son of Napoleon, and Léon’s cousin, the future Napoleon III. The duel on Wimbledon Common was stopped by the police (duelling was then, as now, technically unlawful, although no statute forbade it) but the story was taken up in the papers and Ratcliffe was widely condemned for his involvement. On 12 March, the Gazette de France reported that Ratcliffe had been confined on grounds of insanity.

  Mary had been closely involved in these events. The non-duel took place on 3 March. On 5 March, she noted cryptically: ‘Ratcliffe taken ill.’ Five days later, she confided to Jane Hogg that she had been ‘engaged & absorbed by the distress of a friend (no one you know) you know it is my Star to have unfortunate friends.’ There was, however, little she could do for poor Ratcliffe after he had been placed in a private asylum, except to defend him to her friends. Thomas Moore had, by 7 April, received a letter from Mary which has not survived but in which she had evidently done her best to present his behaviour in a favourable light. ‘Your account of him interested us all very much,’ Moore wrote back.

  Mary had, as she frankly admitted to Moxon, felt little inclination to write professionally since completing the Shelley editions; the task, although rewarding, had exhausted her. She had moved into temporary lodgings at Richmond in the spring of 1840 after the termination of her year’s lease on Layton House at Putney. Confronting the long summer vacation of 1840 and hearing that Pe
rcy was planning to spend it in Europe with a couple of fellow undergraduates, she decided that the change and a little adventure would do her good. It was, besides, unthinkable that her son should go abroad without her; Mary found it impossible to imagine that a strapping nineteen-year-old would be able to take care of himself on such a trip. Percy, no youthful rebel, was agreeable to the plan. They determined to sail for France on 13 June.

  Sitting on a Brighton balcony a fortnight before their departure, Mary fell under the spell of a moonlit evening and allowed herself to dream of love. ‘Amore redivivus’ was the heading she chose for her long journal entry of 1 June. Dwelling on the renewing power of love, she thought of Aubrey Beauclerk, and of her good fortune in having a cheerful, affectionate son, who considered it delightful that his mother should accompany him instead of sitting sadly alone at Richmond. ‘If I could restore health – administer balm to the wounded heart and banish care from those I love –’ she wrote, ‘I were in myself happy, while I am loved – and Percy continues the blessing that he is.

  Still who on such a night must not feel the weight of sorrow lessened – For myself I repose in gentle & grateful reverie – & hope for others – & am content for myself. Years have – how much! cooled the ardent & swift spirit that at such hours bore me freely along. My health impaired by a thousand mental sufferings has cast chains on my soul – Yet though I no longer soar, – I repose – though I no longer deem all things attainable – I enjoy what is – & while I feel that I have, whatever I have lost of youth & hope – acquired the enduring affection of a noble heart – & Percy shews such excellent disposition I feel that I am much the gainer in life.