Percy was always the anxious theme of Mary’s letters. How, when he remained so shy and awkward, was he ever to meet anybody? She had ached for a loving daughter after the loss of her own; Percy’s wife, if only she could be found, would be her compensation.
Percy, conspicuously failing to find an appropriate bride, remained wedded to boats. In May 1842, Mary was obliged to resign herself to a month at the yachting haven of Cowes, on the Isle of Wight; in June, they spent a pleasant week at nearby Exbury. Rented by a Squire Brett from friends of Gee Paul, Exbury became a favourite visiting place for Mary, a glimpse into the world in which, had the Shelleys shown more kindness, she might have been allowed to lead a happy life. Here, she could sit out on the lawn and look across the Solent, take afternoon drives into the local villages or exclaim with her fellow guests at the courage of the Queen in driving out with her husband just after a botched attack on her life. Victoria was, Mary thought admiringly, ‘a brave little thing’.10
Mary’s sleepy, happy weeks at Exbury and her words of admiration for the Queen mark the distance she had travelled since the impetuous days of her life with Shelley. Victoria was presiding over the biggest colonial and industrial power in the world at a time of singularly ugly social divisions. Shelley, it seems fair to guess, would have matched the outrage of Dickens in Hard Times at England’s embrace of a chilly utilitarianism which afforded the poor little but the option of voluntary transportation or death of disease or exhaustion. Mary, worn down by years of poverty and social ostracism, was ready to compromise. She would always exert herself in the cause of Italy’s freedom from Austrian domination; the social injustices at home which were now being exposed and challenged in the novels of Dickens rated no more than occasional asides in the long letters she conscientiously wrote to Claire, to Elizabeth Berry, to Jane Hogg.
Reform on a large scale was something which Mary was ready to leave to others. Her own chosen contribution to society was, while on a more modest scale, often absurdly generous. Now, as she drew up her plans for a leisurely fourteen-month tour of Europe with her son, she proposed to cover all the travelling expenses of a clever but poor young man called Alexander Knox who had spent much of the summer in her company and who she felt would benefit from such an experience.
It may have been Robert Leslie Ellis, the brilliant young mathematician who once again joined the tourists at a later stage, who guessed that Mary would be enchanted by Knox. Mary’s letters show that Percy had only a slight acquaintance with him when they planned the trip. Knox had suffered a breakdown at university in 1841.11 Ill health, a fondness for writing poetry and lack of money only added to his charms for Mary; ‘he is completely incapable of exertion from the tendency to complaint of the heart,’ she wrote to Claire from Exbury, adding that Knox’s company would be ‘a great good for Percy, & for me too’.12 Knox was socially graceful, able to fit in anywhere. Secretly, she hoped that some of his easy manners would rub off on her dear but depressingly uncouth son.
A few days spent in London before their June departure gave Mary the chance to catch up with Jane Hogg’s flurried life. Still a beauty and bored of old ‘Dah’ – Hogg and she had been ‘Mamma’ and ‘Dah’ to each other since the deaths of their parents – Jane had been conducting an indiscreet flirtation with her handsome nephew. Her frantic efforts to hide the fact that her daughter Dina was about to become an unmarried mother seemed, in the circumstances, rather hypocritical, but the father, Leigh Hunt’s son, Henry, was not Jane’s idea of a suitable husband, being both poor and sexually promiscuous. Her own miserable early marriage had been a harsh education: a bad husband, in Jane’s view, was worse than none. Mary, listening to her angry outpourings on the subject of ungrateful daughters, agreed that a short visit to Claire in Paris might be the answer when Dina’s baby was born.
The arrangement was eerily close to that made for Isabel Robinson in 1827 at the time when Isabel had disclosed Jane’s treachery. Kinder and more discreet, Mary kept Jane’s family scandals to herself. Revenge had never interested her.
*
Jane Hogg’s dramas followed Mary abroad as Claire sent transfixing reports of a household seething with resentment, of Jane’s love-affair with her nephew having provoked Jefferson Hogg to paroxysms of jealousy, and of an increasingly savage relationship between mother and daughter.
The second tour was not proving to be the rest-cure Mary had hoped for. The heat, when they reached Dresden, was unbearable. ‘O the heat – the heat! It is overwhelming – I never felt any thing like it before,’ she wailed to Claire on 16 August. Everything seemed unsatisfactory. Knox’s expenses were draining her funds, although she was sure that the play he was writing would bring rewards one day. The people all seemed ugly, ill-dressed and dirty. Henry Hugo Pearson, a tall, strange-looking friend of Knox’s who had already set several of Shelley’s poems to music (Vincent Novello published them), had joined their party and pleased her by offering to harmonize one of her own romantic songs, ‘O listen while I sing to thee’.‡ Pearson was, however, annoyingly reluctant to introduce them to the interesting people he claimed to know. As a result, Mary found herself surrounded by bores.
Once settled into comfortable lodgings on the Grand Canal in Venice, they had the benefit of Laura Galloni’s large circle of friends. Claire, who heard little but grumbles from Dresden, Prague and Salzburg, was told instead of leisurely morning promenades in St Mark’s, of meals with Monckton Milnes who told her that Trelawny had grown dirty and morose, chopping wood all day on Putney common while his mistress cared for their child. Percy was taking lessons on the trumpet, Mary reported; as for herself, she was having her work cut out with two young invalids to care for – Pearson also had a heart complaint – and both, in their different ways, such tricky characters. Pearson had a quick, explosive temper and no understanding of money; Knox was ‘proud & sensitive to a fault’. Clever though they both were, their highly strung natures gave her reason to congratulate herself on her son’s calm stolidity. Occasionally, Mary felt a twinge of guilt at the knowledge of how much of his money had gone on caring for ‘poor dear Knox’. Still, the cause was a good one; she had faith in Knox’s brilliance and she remained confident that his company would benefit her son.13
Writing up her journey later for publication, Mary played heavily on the melancholy associations evoked by Venice; the letters suggest that her sadness had been short-lived. There had been so much to do, so many people to meet. Company, as she had known when she urged Knox to join them, was always her best defence against grief. Exhausting though it was looking after three young men, two of whom were often extremely demanding, she was never alone.
Settled in Florence for the opening of 1843, at lodgings near the Ponte Vecchio, Mary lapsed into gloom again. Everything had gone wrong. Pearson, resentful of her preference for Knox, had gone off in a temper. Percy had also taken against Knox and was refusing to socialize. Gee Paul had written a silly, skittish letter inquiring about her plans to marry Knox. There was a kind of condescension in Laura Galloni’s manner which made it hard to believe that her friendship was sincere.
Mary’s own ill health and a depression may well have contributed to the bad feeling which led Pearson to abandon the party. Her letters sound wretched. Laura’s nieces and nephews were dismissed as plebeians; the weather was dreadful; their funds were always low. She was cut to the quick when the new Lord Holland, a prominent figure in Florence’s social world, refused to be friendly. Her only moment of satisfaction was a brief encounter with Mrs Hoppner which enabled her, just for once, to be vengeful enough to turn her back.
She had searched for Clara’s burial place on the Lido in Venice; in Rome, staying on the airy Via Sistina in rooms next to those where Amelia Curran had once lived, she made a pilgrimage to the Protestant cemetery. It was the first time Mary had seen where Shelley’s ashes were buried, lying in the shadow of Trelawny’s row of young cypresses. But William’s grave, to her great distress, was impossible to locate. Li
ke Clara, he was erased, as if he had never existed. There was peculiar pain for a mother in this discovery.
Mary had always loved Rome. Even the appearance of a comet, judged by the Romans to be a warning of evil to come, did not alarm her. Percy, now that Knox had moved out to different lodgings, seemed happy again. In retrospect, she decided that Mrs Mason’s daughters meant well enough and suffered only from a lack of exercise. Walking would do wonders for their spirits, announced Mary, whose vigorous explorations had reduced her to bandaging up her aching feet with corn-plasters. Percy flatly refused to be dragged around any more galleries, but his place had been taken by Alexis Rio, a French art critic whose work she had read a decade earlier and whom she had met at one of Rogers’s social breakfasts. Rio was her chosen escort and interpreter of art, while his wife, ‘a dear good unaffected privitive [sic] Xtian (a pious Catholic)’, became Mary’s favourite sightseeing companion as she revisited the massive excavated sites. ‘I enjoy myself extremely,’ she told Claire on 15 April 1843, while continuing to regret Percy’s lack of interest in Roman culture. There was no cause for sorrow in the news that Aunt Everina Wollstonecraft, rotting angrily away in a house which she refused to have cleaned, had finally surrendered to a stroke. Dutifully regretful to her fellow niece, Elizabeth Berry, Mary was more candid with Claire, tartly commenting that the wretched old woman had died of ‘natural decay aided by her determination to do nothing she was told’.14 She did not dispute Everina’s right to be buried near her sister Mary in the increasingly derelict graveyard at St Pancras.
Memories had tormented Mary less than she anticipated on the journey but when, at the beginning of May, they travelled south again to Sorrento, the view of the bay drew her thoughts back to the last month at Lerici and the horror of the final days there. Percy, desperate to see a remarkable flying machine which was on display in London and a little tired of his mother’s attempts to enrich his mind, was ready for England and even for another visit to his stiff relations at Field Place. Mary, uninvited, began making plans for an end-of-summer holiday with Knox. Perhaps, with the opening of a new railroad, they could travel to the Loire valley, or the Rhine, or to one of the French seaside towns or … She was still lost in plans when Knox’s aunt, on whom he was financially dependent and with whom Mary had stored her furniture while she was on her travels, unexpectedly died.
Poor Knox! Mary wrote to Jane Hogg, not aware of how unsuitably enamoured of the young man she sounded, or of the conclusions her friends were beginning to draw. What was he to do now, with no money and no certain future? It seemed so unfair that young Julian Robinson had married a rich clergyman’s daughter while Percy – ‘never was anyone so kind & considerate & good’ – and Knox remained unattached and ‘poor as rats’.15 There was nothing to be done: home they must go. ‘Oh to leave a Paradise –’ she wailed to Claire, ‘at this moment of loveliness to travel scant of money I know not whither.’16 Being abroad and penniless had been a thrilling challenge when she was sixteen; at forty-five, the prospect held no charm.
Ever since the previous autumn of 1842, Mary had been urging Claire to join their party; it was unfortunate that she decided to take up this invitation just before Mary had to alter her own plans. Conscious of the disappointment Claire must be feeling, she resolved to make amends by spending August in Paris with her stepsister. The decision, although kindly made, would have unfortunate consequences.
Notes
1. MWS, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844), 1, Letter VIII, in Selected Works, 8, ed. Jeanne Moskal (Pickering & Chatto, 1996), p. 124.
2. CC–MWS, 30.10.1840.
3. MWSJ, 18.8.1840.
4. MWS–Harriet de Boinville, March–May 1841.
5. MWS–CC, 1.10.1842, quoting from a lost letter written to her by Claire at an unspecified but evidently fairly recent date.
6. Additional details about Alexander Berry, an outstandingly successful self-made man, are given by Betty T. Bennett in MWSL, 3, p. 20. The Berry–Shelley correspondence is in the State Library of New South Wales, in the Alexander Hay Collection.
7. MWS–Elizabeth Berry, 14.1.1842.
8. MWS–CC, 9.5.1842, reporting Percy’s description.
9. Ibid.
10. MWS–CC, 2.6.1842.
11. The details come from Cornelia Crosse, Red-Letter Days of my Life (Bentley, 1842), vol. 2, p. 150. In later life, Mrs Crosse recalled, Knox still retained ‘a joyous out-of-school boy look in his face’. Her book also provides descriptions of Leslie Ellis, whose discoveries in the field of botanic science are claimed here to have anticipated the work of Charles Darwin.
12. MWS–CC, 2.6.1842.
13. MWS–CC, 1–2.10.1842.
14. MWS–CC, 23.3.1843.
15. MWS–JWH, 9.71843.
16. MWS–CC, 19.7.1843.
* Charles Manners-Sutton had been created Baron Bottesford and Viscount Canterbury in March 1835, to enable him to enter the House of Lords after losing the re-election to his post as Speaker of the House of Commons through, it was commonly agreed, some rather underhand political manoeuvring by the Whigs. ‘Nothing can be so shabby as the conduct of the Whigs – to have elected him when they wanted him – to oppose him when it is policy – this is factious in the extreme,’ Mary had noted in her journal on 13 February 1834.
† Elizabeth Wollstonecraft, Mary’s first cousin, had gone to Australia in 1819 as the wife of her brother Edward’s business partner, Alexander Berry. The friendship begun between the cousins in the 1830s through a shared obligation to care for Everina, their only surviving aunt, was maintained by Alexander Berry and Mary after his wife’s death in 1845.6
‡ The song is dated as having been composed on 12 March 1838, which limits the possibility of giving it an autobiographical reading since Ida Beauclerk was still alive and Mary had no other man – or woman – in her life at that time, or none she chose to acknowledge.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ENTER, THE ITALIANS
1843–1844
‘Poor Gatteschi … He is mad to join the insurgents in Bologna – and I do not wonder – It is more manly & natural to desire to be in arms & in danger than to be dragging out the miserable life he leads at Paris. I gather from what he says joined to what you tell me that he thinks that he cannot leave Paris with honour while in debt – Poor fellow – for how much better a lot he was made … my plan is to make a volume & make a £100 if possible by it for him … ’
Mary Shelley to Claire Clairmont, 20 September 1843
PARIS IN THE 1840S WAS A POLYGLOT CITY TO WHICH, ALONG with several of the Russian families Claire had known in Moscow, came the Italians whose country was still largely occupied by Austrian troops and controlled from Vienna. Most of these Italians were supporters of Giuseppe Mazzini. Exiled as a dangerous manipulator of anti-conservative feelings, Mazzini had succeeded in giving coherence where there had been only confusion, and in accelerating the process of rebellion. Some sixty thousand patriots had joined his ‘Young Italy’ movement by 1833, calling for liberation from the foreign rulers and the formation of an independent republic. In 1837, Mazzini had moved to London, where he was perceived as a romantic hero. His connection to the secretive world of the carbonari, from which Young Italy had recruited its hard core of troops, enhanced his Byronic image. Any mention of spies and plots was sure to lead to Mazzini’s name; an Italian abroad had only to keep a couple of canaries and look mysterious to be identified as one of Mazzini’s conspirators.
Neither Mary nor Claire were impervious to the romance of secret societies; in 1814 both of them had eagerly devoured stories of Adam Weishaupt and the society of the Illuminati. Mary’s months in Italy made her unusually responsive to the impoverished Italian exiles who talked of rescuing their country from its foreign overlords. The de Boinville family may have provided the initial introductions (Harriet de Boinville’s widowed daughter Cornelia would later form a relationship with one of the Ruflini family who were Mazzini’s closest Italia
n friends). However the connection occurred, Mary was introduced during her month in Paris to a group who had close affiliations with the Young Italy movement. Among them were a married couple from Corsica by the name of Guitera, Carlo Romano, a Count Martini and an unusually handsome would-be-writer employed by him. This was Ferdinando Gatteschi.
Mary, with her weakness for clever, unfortunate young men, had seldom met one whose need seemed so poignant as Gatteschi’s. Admiring, chivalrous and respectful, he spoke with passion of the Italian cause, of his literary ambitions, of his own wretchedness – and of his need for money. Hints of an aristocratic past did no harm to his cause, especially as Shelley’s patrician status had recently been enhanced by the revelation of links between him and Sir Philip Sidney.* Borrowing 200 francs from Claire, Mary insisted that the money must go to their new friend. ‘I am very anxious to hear whether you sent to that poor Unfortunate Gatteschi –’ she wrote as soon as she reached London; ‘pray let me know – I will pay you faithfully that & all else of money … as soon as I can.’1
Before leaving Paris towards the end of August 1843, she had promised Gatteschi that she would find him a publisher in England. By 27 September, Mary was ready to tell Edward Moxon that she was writing up an account of her travels. Work was proceeding fast but she wanted money, she admitted, not for herself, but ‘for a purpose most urgent & desirable’. A month later, she offered to sell him the copyright of two books, relating the travels of 1840 and of 1842–3. By January 1844, she had the first book ready to go to press.
Mary Shelley Page 69
