Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Nobody could accuse the Major of lacking perseverance. A few months later, a credulous London bookseller, William White, was visited by a pretty lady calling herself Mrs Byron. She had, she tearfully said, been compelled by circumstances to make occasional sales from literary letters collected by her late father. Like the Major, for whom she was of course acting, Mrs Byron preferred to sell one or two letters at a time; they fetched more money when presented in isolation. White bought all he was offered and, in good faith, passed on the news to Mrs Shelley that he had some interesting correspondence for sale. But Mary had been duped for long enough. Writing his own account in 1852, White was still smarting at the memory of her answer, given ‘in so angry and coarse a tone as to leave no doubt that she thought my only motive was to extort money’.24 Most probably‚ she recognized the White letters as being ones of which she had already purchased copies.25

  Given this response, it is surprising to find Mary, acting through a third party, as the purchaser of five Shelley letters and the manuscript of a poem from a sale held in December 1848. Among these was a letter – it is not clear at what point, if at all, she recognized it for a copy – which Shelley had written to her on 11 January 1817. Mary would have been easily able to identify it and recognize its significance from the extract printed in the catalogue. This was the letter in which Shelley had eagerly reported Godwin’s news of ‘evidence’ of Harriet’s infidelity in the period leading up to the 1814 elopement. Mary, for whatever reason, had been desperately anxious to acquire it. The purchase price was six guineas. Having obtained her prize, she put it carefully away with the rest of her hoard.

  *

  The Gatteschi affair had left Mary feeling emotionally drained and deeply indebted to Claire for her support and for her restraint. (Claire had, after all, warned her against both Gatteschi and Guitera almost from the beginning.) Anxious to express gratitude, Mary could not repress the habit of disapproval. Claire’s efforts to find her just the right French cloak and bonnet were met with a regret that she had chosen bright colours, not an appropriate black; she was scolded for maintaining her friendship with scandalous, dangerous Lady Sussex Lennox; she was told not to bring her odious French maid when she next came to Putney. When Claire complained about the lack of income from her opera box, she was reminded that Mary was too poor even to give a dinner party, that she kept no horse and paid no visits in town: only Knox’s agreeable company kept her from a life of complete solitude at Putney.26

  Claire had never expressed any great enthusiasm for Alexander Knox; she certainly did not expect to be invited to contribute to his support. This, on 1 December, just two months after the Gatteschi letters had been recovered and destroyed, was what Mary invited her to do. Knox had, while living in Paris that autumn, recklessly purchased a luxurious flat which he could not afford to maintain. (Had a part of Mary’s £250, intended for the cost of recovering letters, gone towards its purchase?) Mary could only ‘darkly guess’ why he might have bought it; Claire was invited to arrange its sale. A week later, Mary had a better idea. Claire’s own modest home cost her 800 francs a year; why should she not pay an extra 200 and rent Knox’s rooms? They were, she added encouragingly, in a better and more sociable part of the city: ‘I cannot help feeling that you would be a gainer.’

  We should not, perhaps, blame Claire for assuming that she was being exploited again. The next letter, dated 11 December, informed her that Mary had just given Knox the considerable sum of £100. She did not feel good about it: ‘my poor poor Percy wd he had no Mother to rob him in this wicked manner,’ she scrawled inside the envelope, and added a black wish: ‘a thousand times wd I were dead.’ She wrote again the following day, in similar vein: ‘I can do no more – & he – what can become of him –’ A deletion of two separate three-line entries in the last paragraph was followed by the usual request that the letter be burnt.

  Claire put the letter away. A week later, on 17 December, she sent Knox a curious coded message in an otherwise insouciant letter to Mary. ‘Tell Knox,’ she wrote, ‘that Annie Farrer says Mr Howard sees little of his young wife but is always at his Club playing cards. This is Annie’s version of the result of the beautiful Miss McTavishe’s marriage – it will amuse him and he knows how much credit to give to Annie’s versions.’ As a response to Mary’s distraught requests and outbursts of contrition, this verged on the bizarre. Had Knox been having an affair with the beautiful Miss McTavishe? Did Claire know precisely why he had been so recklessly extravagant, and wish to punish him with news of the sequel? It seems a plausible explanation.

  Mary had often complained of Claire’s genius for stinging her conscience. This gift was well employed in the following months. Planning her arrival in England, Claire wrote bravely of the pleasure it would give her to live near them, ‘particularly as I have not long to live’. She had, she went on, spent the winter making her dear nephew a hearthrug of every colour except black, ‘an emblem of his fate, past, present and future’. Whatever Claire might think in private of Mary and of her relationship with Knox, her faith in her nephew’s remarkable abilities remained undimmed: ‘now if he goes into Parliament and if he falls in love,’ she wrote, ‘and to boot is as he is, a musician and a metaphysician and a good boater, in a little time he will be a universe of a man comprehending all things.’27

  Notes

  1. TJH–MWS, 16.12.1844 (Abinger, Dep. b. 211/3(b)).

  2. Gentleman’s Magazine, XXII, August 1844, p. 206.

  3. MWS–CC, 7.12.1844.

  4. MWS–CC, 23.12.1844.

  5. MWS–Rose Stewart, 1.5.1844; MWS–CC, 27.10.1844.

  6. MWS–Richard Monckton Milnes, 11.11.1844.

  7. See S.C. Djabri, A. Hughes and J. Knight, The Shelleys of Field Place, op. cit., P. 143.

  8. MWS–CC, 11.12.1845.

  9. MWS–Alexander Berry, 29.3.1847.

  10. MWS–CC, 14.10.1845.

  11. MWS–CC, paraphrased from her letters of 10–14 September 1845.

  12. MWS–CC, 8.1.1845.

  13. Wilhelm Clairmont–CC, 17.8.1849. Trelawny’s wife, formerly Augusta Goring, is a possible source for the hostility sensed by Claire; Mary had been free in expressing to Trelawny her dislike of Claire, and Claire herself alluded to Augusta in these conversations with her brother. For Charles’s view of the Robinsons, see Ch.C–CC, 14.7.1849 (CC, 2).

  14. MWS–CC, 15.9.1845.

  15. MWS–Andrew Alexander Knox, 16–24.9.1845.

  16. Le Constitutionel and Le National, 11.10.1845. Sunstein notes that no reference to either Gatteschi or Guitera survive in the records of the Préfecture in Paris (R&R, p. 454, n. 11).

  17. CCJ, p. 220, n. 56.

  18. MWS–CC, 22–23.10.1845.

  19. MWS–CC, 8.10.1845.

  20. MWS–Louisa Kenney, 22.10.1845 (date conjectured by Betty T. Bennett, but evidently before 1846).

  21. MWS–Thomas Hookham, 11.3.1846.

  22. MWS–Thomas Hookham, 12.9.1846.

  23. Athenaeum, 18.3.1848.

  24. William White, The Calumnies of the ‘Athenaeum’ Journal Exposed (privately printed, 1852). A full and fascinating account of the Major’s career is given by Theodore G. Ehrsam in Major Byron: The Incredible Career of a Literary Forger (John Murray, 1951). See also Richard D. Altick, The Scholar Adventurers (Macmillan, New York, 1960).

  25. Some of White’s collection was bought for Mary’s son and daughter-in-law at auction on 12 May 1851. Subsequently discovered to be forgeries, these letters were nevertheless retained in the Shelley collection. Exposed as an impostor, the Major fled the country. In 1867, he visited the Marquise de Boissy (the former Teresa Guiccioli) and again announced himself as Byron’s son. He later sent her the bills for his hotel. Two monthly numbers of The Inedited Works of Lord Byron were published in New York in 1849–50; from then on the Major’s life became increasingly Walter Mittyish. He was, on various occasions, introduced as an aristocratic exile, a British naval officer, a journalist and a mining prospector. H
is wife, meanwhile, worked as a housekeeper. The date of his death is uncertain. Altick, op. cit., pp. 164–5, n. 22, gives further details. Additional information is supplied by T.J. Brown in ‘Some Shelley Forgeries by Major Byron’ (Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, June 1963).

  26. MWS–CC, 20–22.11.1845.

  27. CC–MWS, 19.1.1846.

  * Made shortly after Sir Timothy Shelley’s death, this was Mary’s last journal entry, and extracts a passage from Edmund Burke’s letter to his son, dated 4 February 1773.

  † Shelley left no official will that ever came to light. His executors were obliged to proceed according to the informal bequests left among his papers, so far as they could be accommodated under the strict laws of inheritance that governed the entailed estate.

  ‡ The nature of this ‘disgusting’ letter remains unclear, although her wish ‘to relieve Mr Holcroft from all onus on the subject’ suggests that he may have been professionally connected as a lawyer to Hookham or Byron, or even both.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  ANXIOUS TIMES

  1845–1848

  ‘It is terrible to write such words half in jest – but these are awful times.’

  Mary Shelley to Alexander Berry, 28–30 March 1848

  ‘WHAT YEARS I HAVE SPENT! –’ MARY SIGHED TO CLAIRE AT THE end of 1845; ‘the years in Somerset Street alone in London – the years at Harrow – quite alone – Well it is over now – & with years comes liking for quiet – All I ask is to be free from care …’1 Cares stuck like burrs. Relief at the news that Knox had found regular and reasonably well-paid employment writing on politics for the Morning Chronicle was swept away in preparing for Claire’s arrival, wondering what unpleasant use Major Byron might be planning for the letters she had failed to obtain, and struggling to furnish a new London home.

  The house was Percy’s choice. A handsome, brand-new building in Chester Square, on the south side of Belgravia, it had been bought with some of the proceeds from the sale of Castle Goring. Percy, backed by Alexander Knox and Gee Paul, was delighted by it; Mary‚ longing for country air and a pretty cottage on part of the Shelley estate, was less enthusiastic. It was ‘a pretty & cheerful’ house‚ she told Claire on 11 December‚ shortly after the purchase had been made. A month later, worn down by the business of finding servants, buying furniture from the sales and worrying about the cost of upkeep‚ she was ready to declare that ‘I hate [it] with all my heart.’ Her only comfort was that it would be convenient for Percy‚ if he succeeded in the Horsham election and went into Parliament.

  A minor but hurtful source of distress at this time was a gratuitous attack on Shelley’s poetry by Edward Bulwer‚ a man Mary had always looked on as a friendly supporter‚ someone who shared Monckton Milnes’s enthusiasm for promoting her husband’s work. But Bulwer introduced his new translation of Schiller’s poems with an attack on ‘young poets [who] vie with each other who can write the most affectedly’; Shelley was singled out as a bad influence, an example of writers who use showy and fantastic language to disguise their ideas from the reader‚ ‘if‚ indeed, any general idea is to be found buried amid the gaudy verbiage’.2 Bulwer had mistaken the spirit of the times if he thought this would win him friends, Mary wrote indignantly to Edward Moxon; he ‘casts an indelible stain on his own name, as long as it survives’.3 Bulwer was not‚ in fact, alone in making this point. Reviewing Tennyson, a poet of the younger generation, in 1842, Hunt had criticized his language as excessively flowery and sensual‚ and warned him to steer away from the influence of Keats and Shelley‚ Tennyson’s schoolboy idol.4

  Mary’s annoyance is understandable, however. She had seen little adverse criticism of her husband in the last few years. Her edition of the Poetical Works had been steadily reprinted throughout the 1840s and her notes, however scornfully received at the time, had exercised the influence she had intended. Shelley was a poet ‘whose genius and virtue were a crown of glory to the world – whose love had been the source of happiness‚ peace and good’, she had written.5 In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett had written quiveringly of a life sacrificed to the quest of Beauty, while George Gilfillan’s account of Shelley in his celebrated series of literary portraits that year eulogized his prophetic power and his selfless benevolence.6 (Reviewing Gilfillan’s portraits in 1845, Thomas de Quincey, excusing Shelley’s anti-Christian views, had added his own memorable image of the poet as ‘an angel touched by lunacy’.) It was small wonder, after such tributes, that Mary grew indignant at any criticism of a Shelley who had almost become her own creation.

  Still unaware of any specific cause for her increasingly severe bouts of ill health‚ Mary was near to collapse by the time the house in Chester Square was ready for occupation. The geologist and physician Gideon Mantell, a man who had known and liked her for several years, was just leaving his own house in Chester Square on the evening of 12 March 1846 when he received an urgent request to visit a patient at No. 24.7 The alarm must have been considerable: John Ayrton Paris‚ President of the Royal College of Physicians, was also called in. The diagnosis they made was ‘neuralgia of the heart’ and the best cure they could suggest was a quiet convalescence. Percy‚ naturally‚ thought that nothing would help his mother’s recovery so well as a holiday at Cowes, where he could spend his spare time yachting. ‘I returned no better,’ Mary told Leigh Hunt sadly in June, although she was anxious to let him know that Percy had been ‘unspeakably attentive to & careful of me’. The doctors could do nothing for her. Still ‘a complete invalid’, she planned to spend the rest of a scorchingly oppressive summer away from London.8

  It was not a good time for her to hear from Thomas Medwin that he had completed and was preparing to publish a full-length life of Shelley. Medwin was staying with his brother Pilfold at Horsham when he approached Mary in May 1846; it may have been Pilfold, a lawyer, who pointed him towards the Record Office and the Chancery papers of 1817–18, in which mention was made of Shelley’s atheism as a reason for withholding his paternal rights of custody. Mary was horrified. She herself had written all that needed to be said, she wrote back hastily: ‘I vindicated the memory of my Shelley and spoke of him as he was – an angel among his fellow mortals – lifted far above this world – a celestial spirit given and taken away …’ An account of the kind Medwin might wish to give, ‘the account of the Chancery Suit above all’, would undermine all that she had achieved. Forbearance was what would serve Shelley’s memory best now, she pleaded, ‘forbearance – and reserve’.9

  Medwin’s answer confirmed her worst fears about the book he claimed to have finished. Scorning Gilfillan and De Quincey for ‘their accursed Cant – their cold false conventionalities – their abominable Claptrap’, he accused Mary of cowardice in not having published the ‘History of Christianity’ which Shelley had allowed him to read. Her objections came too late; his book, he untruthfully boasted, would be published in six weeks, ‘at latest’.10 Hearing no more, Medwin invited Mary to buy his manuscript and the guarantee of his future silence. The Chancery proceedings would be an ‘indispensible’ part of the book, he threatened, as would other unidentified passages ‘whose discussion you would not approve of’. He named £250 as the payment a publisher had offered and warned her to act quickly, as ‘we are going to press immediately’.11

  This was blackmail, and was seen as such; it took Mary a year to discover that Medwin’s manuscript had already been turned down by several publishers; Colburn had rejected it on the very day of Medwin’s threatening demand. Even without this information, she was sceptical of his claims. Sending the letter on to Jane Hogg on 30 May‚ she ridiculed the idea that anybody would have offered such a sum: ‘had he said £100 there had been a semblance of truth.’ She had not bothered to answer his last letter, she added; ‘nor of course shall I this’. But her experiences with Gatteschi and Major Byron had taught her caution; Hogg was requested to examine all of Medwin’s correspondence with a lawyer’s eye before returning it to her safekeeping.12 She had another y
ear to wait‚ anxiously, before learning what Medwin might choose to say about the delicate subject of the Chancery case.

  Going abroad provided an escape from worry. Mary had fallen in love with Baden-Baden on her travels with Percy and few spas had such a reputation for curing nervous complaints. In July, as the temperature in London drove everybody away who could afford the luxury of escape‚ she set off for the German spa, then at its zenith as one of the most fashionable in Europe. Kind, cheerful Mrs Hare and her sister Miss Paul were there to keep her company as she dutifully sipped the waters, walked out for her daily bath and sighed at the relentless heat. (John Leech’s cartoons for Punch in the summer of 1846 showed London cabbies stripped down to hats and underwear; holidaying on the Rhine, Charles Dickens was feeling ready to melt.) Roulette in the stifling candle-lit rooms of the casino was less tempting than cool evening carriage drives out to the great ruins of Caracalla’s baths, reminding her of Rome, or slow walks along the bank of the river Oos. The doctors were being most kind and helpful, she told Claire; it still took only one extended stroll to prostrate her.

  There was no point in feigning grief at the news that old Lady Shelley had died of gastroenteritis at Elcott, her new home in Berkshire, in August. Courteous visits had been paid to Elcott, the last of them only a few months ago, but it had been hard to maintain an affectionate manner, especially after Lady Shelley’s ungenerous behaviour over Field Place; writing to the recently widowed Alexander Berry in Australia, Mary commented without sentiment that her mother-in-law’s death was a benefit to Percy. (Lady Shelley’s annual allowance had already cost him a thousand pounds.) She was far more distressed by Claire’s passionate objections to being evicted from her roost in Chester Square at the end of the summer.