Ianthe Esdaile did come; it was her first and last visit. She came and, according to Lady Shelley, wept after being shown a selection of letters and memorabilia. Peacock, keeping his distance, published his objections in an article for Fraser’s Magazine that June; Hogg, uncrushed, continued writing. Loftily, he ignored the Shelleys’ request that they should be allowed to inspect and censor as they wished. In the summer of 1859, he was taught a cruel and public lesson. Lady Shelley, respectfully assisted by a young man from the British Museum, a twenty-four-year-old Shelley enthusiast called Richard Garnett, presented her own version of the past.
The Shelley Memorials opened with a ferocious indictment of Hogg’s incomplete biography. The editor, while taking the opportunity to warn her readers against forged letters and to sound a good deal more expert in this area than she in fact was, addressed herself first to the ‘fantastic caricature, going forth to the public with my apparent sanction’ to which readers of Hogg’s first volumes had been subjected. It was this, Lady Shelley explained, which had compelled her to ‘clear away the mist’ of inaccuracy, and to give ‘a truthful statement of long-distorted facts’.15 A legal letter to Hogg meanwhile coolly informed him that Sir Percy would take him to court if he attempted to publish without consent any correspondence of his father’s or mother’s.16
Without permission, Hogg’s hands were tied. All he could do was to copy Jane’s affectionate note of the previous year to anybody who might wish to support him. Writing to Monckton Milnes, he added that Lady Shelley should be forgiven, ‘on the grounds of insanity’, her family being ‘low’ and ‘somewhat crazy’.17 Hogg had always been his own worst enemy and vindictiveness undid him now. His friends did not rally. The remaining two volumes were still unpublished when he died three years later. The manuscript does not appear to have survived.
It is impossible not to sympathize with poor Ianthe Esdaile at this time. Hogg, in a sniggering allusion to her mother’s ‘rosy’ complexion, had hinted that Harriet had a drink problem. (Hogg’s view of Harriet’s intemperance, shared by Lady Shelley, seems to have been based on the fact that her father had owned a tavern as well as a coffeehouse which served liquor.) The Shelley Memorials, by a dexterous chapter-break, managed to kill Harriet off and leave Shelley grieving over ‘the self-sought grave of the companion of his early youth’ before allowing Mary to appear in the guise of his comforter. It was admitted that they had not immediately married; the blame was laid on Godwin’s teaching rather than on the embarrassing truth, that Shelley already had a living wife.
The Esdailes, hating publicity, kept their heads down. Shelley’s two surviving sisters, so far as is known, said never a word. Peacock, with whom Sir Percy was convinced Harriet had slept during her marriage to Shelley, sprang again to her defence. In January 1860, he published another article in Fraser’s Magazine, in which he bluntly related the sequence of dates so skilfully disarranged in the Memorials. He rejected Lady Shelley’s statement that the separation had been by mutual consent. Harriet was described with great cordiality; Shelley’s passion for Mary, and that alone, had in Peacock’s view separated him from a cheerful and affectionate wife.18 This was war and Lady Shelley took up the cudgels with relish. Richard Garnett was employed to write a public response. Only discretion, he announced in June 1860, had so far prevented the Shelleys from publishing documents which would demolish Mr Peacock’s ‘allegations’.19 Two years later – why did he wait so long? – Peacock defiantly published further pertinent dates, and extracts from the Chancery suit, in Fraser’s Magazine. This time, in March 1862, he included Shelley’s damaging statement to Eliza Westbrook that Mary’s ‘union’ with himself had been ‘the cause of her Sister’s Ruin’.
Spiritualism, imported from America in the 1850s, was a great comfort to Lady Shelley at such times. Mary sent a message from the beyond that Peacock would soon be gone. (He died in 1866.) Having deleted an inconvenient mention of enduring guilt about Harriet from Mary’s journals, Jane prepared a letter about her parents-in-law for the Esdailes to study: ‘not the slightest feeling of remorse had ever touched either of these most sensitive natures on Harriet’s account,’ she unblushingly informed them. Hogg’s references to Harriet’s ‘habits of intemperance’ and her growing indifference to her husband were brought forward.20 The obliging Garnett was recruited to help prepare a further volume of defensively edited materials. This became the infamous Relics of Shelley of 1862. Peacock had been quite wrong to suggest that Mary had helped destroy a happy marriage, Garnett wrote; to prove it, he quoted a letter in which Shelley, before meeting Mary, described his wife in terms of ‘disgust and horror’.21 A treacherous blank concealed the fact that Shelley had been describing, not Harriet, but her sister Eliza.
Lady Shelley was not the only woman who was busily rewriting the past and talking to spirits. The widowed Marquise de Boissy, formerly Teresa Guiccioli, moved to a house near Florence shortly after Claire Clairmont took up residence there in 1859. Claire, keeping up with old friends through Jane Hogg, satisfied herself with an occasional shaft aimed at Lady Shelley’s domination of a weak husband; Teresa, informed by chatty apparitions that de Boissy and Byron had now become the best of friends, decided that the great love-affair of her life had been no more than a tender friendship. Busily writing her recollections, Teresa destroyed or rewrote any letters that interfered with her own version, scribbled furious annotations all over Moore’s biography of Byron and, wherever she found the word ‘love’ applied to herself, altered it to ‘devotion’.22 Tempting though it is to berate Jane Shelley, she was acting in the spirit of the times. Reverence, in the Victorian biographer’s mind, was paramount. Truth was less important than defending the dead from scandal.
A refuge to Claire, Italy was to Percy and Jane a country for pilgrimages. In 1863, they made a tour of hallowed sites. At Rome, they were pleased to find Shelley’s grave being tended and smothered in violets by a future poet laureate, young Alfred Austin; at Lerici, the locals were quick to tell them just what they wished to hear. A fisherman announced that Shelley had been as beautiful as Christ, a pleasing confirmation of the Shelley represented by Weekes’s sculpture. He allowed them to copy a drawing of Mary which he had found in the deserted villa.|| Jane, hoping for a visitation, spent a cold and disappointing night in Shelley’s bedroom.
Frankenstein, or rather, the Creature, had by now settled into the role of all-purpose bogeyman in English politics. During the Crimean War, he was brutish Russia; in 1866, he was the working-class man; in 1843 and again in 1869, he provided a useful image for rebellious Ireland. As the Creature became increasingly savage and unsympathetic, portraits of his creator became equally distorted. Eliza Rennie, describing Mary in 1860, remembered a genteel ex-governess with a beautiful voice whose dearest wish had been to conceal her professional career and whose life had been unfairly haunted by ‘calumnies’. (These were presumably the stories of Mary’s supposedly scandalous summer as part of the ‘league of incest’ at Geneva in 1816, although Rennie may also have been alluding to gossip spread by Jane Hogg.23) Thornton Hunt, relying on anecdotes told by his late father, described a clever, handsome slattern, a careless mother with a sharp, querulous temper. The fact that he believed Mary, not Mrs Novello, was known as ‘the Wilful Woman’, gives a hint of the casual nature with which he threw his piece together. But Thornton was among many who had been shocked by Lady Shelley’s readiness to believe the worst of Harriet. She had been entirely innocent when the marriage ended, he wrote; he did Harriet no favour, however, by offering ‘evidence’ that she had come near to prostitution in her last years. Shelley’s own increasingly pristine image was not helped by Hunt’s hints of ‘rude trials’ to his constitution during his brief spell at Oxford, never discussed in public but revealed, Thornton believed, in some discreet allusions to classical authors made in Mrs Shelley’s novels.24 No reader could doubt that Hunt was referring to a sexual infection. This was not what Lady Shelley had anticipated when she invited him t
o champion the cause.
Among the readers of Hunt’s account was William Michael Rossetti, who had his own connection to the Shelleys. His father had known both Godwin and Mary; his uncle, John Polidori, had flirted hopefully with Mary in Geneva during the summer of 1816. The first British editor of Whitman’s poetry, Rossetti had not yet become a reverent acolyte himself. That period lay far ahead, after the deaths of his more famous brother and sister. As a left-wing bachelor moving in Bohemian circles in the 1860s, Rossetti saw no reason why the flaws in a great poet should be concealed. He was shocked when Richard Garnett coolly informed him that the lengthy preface to his new edition of Shelley’s poems was not satisfactory, either to Garnett himself or to ‘the family’. Rossetti held his ground, despite a long friendship with Garnett. All he was prepared to do, after hearing that it would distress Ianthe, was to delete the ‘fact’ that her mother had, in her last years, taken up with a ‘Very humble’ man and that Shelley, at least, believed she turned to prostitution.25
The Shelleys did their best to divert this tiresome lover of truth by letting it be known that he would never have their approval or be invited to view the Sanctum. Swinburne, another admirer, urged Rossetti to stick to his guns: ‘Do root things up,’ he wrote, ‘for I am sure the closer we get to facts the greater and purer he [Shelley] will come out.’26 A month later, on 29 June 1869, Rossetti had a long, enthralling conversation with Trelawny who, having broken with his wife Augusta and the mistress who replaced her, was back in London and living close to his mother’s old Brompton home.
Claire Clairmont had, by a fluke of timing, just written to Trelawny after a gap of decades, to ask if she was mentioned in Teresa Guiccioli’s memoirs. She was surprised and touched to receive back a long and affectionate letter in which, while reassuring her about Teresa’s book – it was a shallow, harmless work, Trelawny comforted her, containing no reference to herself27 – he urged her to write down all she could remember. Claire was ready to oblige him.
This was the point at which Mary Shelley’s reputation, lovingly protected by her daughter-in-law, came under fire. Rossetti, who shared most of the information that came his way with Richard Garnett, was the beneficiary of the combined energies of two mischievous old storytellers with time on their hands. Reports from Garnett that there had been a great burning of documents relating to Harriet at Boscombe in 1870 strengthened Rossetti’s sense of the importance of gathering evidence from another, less partial quarter. Dazzled by Trelawny’s gifts, a relic (Trelawny had a suspiciously large number of these ready for visitors) of the poet’s charred remains, a sofa on which Shelley had slept at Pisa,** Rossetti failed to smell out the prejudice in the reports he was being given.
Trelawny’s old affection for Mary Shelley had soured long before her death. Now, persuaded by his own narratives that he alone had been Shelley’s cherished friend, he became her most censorious judge. ‘Mary Shelley’s jealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley –’ he wrote to Claire on 3 April 1870; ‘indeed she was not a suitable companion for the poet – his first wife Harriett must have been more suitable – Mary was the most conventionable slave I ever met – she even affected the pious dodge, such was her yearning for society – she was devoid of imagination and Poetry …’ And so on. Claire, while unwilling to condemn Mary on religious grounds (she had herself become an ardent Catholic) was ready to comply in other respects. Warmed by Trelawny’s affection for his ‘dear old friend’, as he now fondly addressed her, she deluged him with recollections, presenting herself as the innocent victim of circumstances. Mrs Godwin’s letters of 1814 to Lady Mountcashell were taken out and copied, with many emendations and careless rewritings, causing even the gullible Rossetti to wonder why the name ‘Claire’ appeared with such regularity in letters written by a mother who had always firmly addressed her daughter as Jane.
Claire’s references to Mary were garrulous and sometimes inaccurate. They were not vindictive. Her main concern was to clear her own name of scandal and to find a buyer for her collection of Shelley letters in order to raise money for Pauline, the niece who now lived with her in Florence, and for Pauline’s illegitimate daughter, who also shared her home. (Trelawny’s offer of £50 was rejected as insufficient.) One wonders, however, if Claire would have written with quite such readiness had she known that Trelawny was planning a further volume of reminiscences.
To Rossetti, pleased to find that Trelawny shared his own eagerness for the truth, the project seemed an admirable one, a complement to the edition of Shelley letters which he prepared between 1872 and 1879. And then, Trelawny was so generous with his introductions. In 1871, Rossetti met Jane Hogg, deaf but still handsome in a wig of brown curls; in 1873, he went to see Claire in Florence and came away impressed by this small white-haired lady, her bright-eyed stare belying her age.28 Claire, fortunately for him, had not yet read his Memoir. In 1875, listing to Trelawny the mistakes Rossetti had made, she innocently sealed his view of Mary as a religious fanatic by telling him that they had both received a most correct upbringing, including weekly visits to church followed by questions on the sermon.29
The Shelleys, knowing nothing of all this, had begun with the deaths of Hogg and Peacock to feel that the reputations of Percy and Mary were secure. An agreeable ex-cleric, C. Kegan Paul, had been enlisted by them to write a life of William Godwin. The result, published in 1876 after careful examination by Sir Percy, contained nothing scandalous. Ianthe’s death that year reduced the likelihood of any further trouble from the Esdailes on the score of Harriet. Percy and Jane were free, for a short time, to enjoy monitoring the progress of the theatre they had begun building as an enhancement to their new London home, Shelley House, on the Chelsea Embankment. (Oscar Wilde mischievously named his own home nearby ‘Keats House’ in competition.) And then, in 1878, Trelawny brought back to life his twenty-year-old book, rewritten and retitled as Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author.
Shelley was glorified. The victim of Trelawny’s vivid, vitriol-dipped pen was Mary. The book’s appendix stripped her naked of dignity, of virtue, of intelligence and, above all, of the right to be admired as Shelley’s wife. She was a hypocrite, Trelawny wrote. She was cold. She was obsessed with society. She understood nothing of her husband’s nature or his work. Frankenstein was the work of Shelley’s brain, not hers; widowed, she had sunk back to her ‘natural littleness’. Shelley’s marriage to her was described as ‘the utmost malice of fortune’, endured with saintly resignation by a man who had never recovered from the loss of his first wife. Trelawny, in this vigorous reconstruction of the past, had been Shelley’s chosen companion and confidant. Even the story of Shelley’s heart was turned around. Mary, disgusted by such a relic, had given it to Hunt, according to Trelawny, who conveniently forgot that he himself had given it to Hunt on the beach and that Jane Williams had been forced to beg it back for the widow.
Garnett, summoned to the defence again, only succeeded in rousing the old man’s love of battle. Trelawny had, besides, his own reputation to defend. His name had, by dint of his own efforts, become linked to those of Shelley and Byron in the public imagination. His response to Garnett, published by the Athenaeum in August 1878, was malevolent enough to provoke Jane Shelley into asking whether, at his bidding, she might give herself the pleasure of taking his portrait and lock of hair out of the Sanctum.30 Trelawny’s answer, if he sent one, has not survived. Curiously, Amelia Curran’s portraits of Mary and Claire were still proudly displayed on his wall.
Sir Percy, now almost sixty and happiest with his boats, his theatricals and his dogs, had had his fill of shrine-guarding, having long since made up his mind that Harriet Westbrook’s low background and weak nature explained his father’s defection to a finer woman. A gentle character, Percy lavished affection on young relations (‘Shelley-boy’, his cousin John’s second son, was a favourite) and his own adopted daughter, Bessy Florence, a motherless niece of Jane’s. His unpublished diary shows him experimenting with photography, joining
the local bicycle club, skating on Sunday mornings (but only after attending church) and gravely timing himself with a pedometer as he strolled out to a London lunch at the Beefsteak or the Garrick. In London, his literary background made him a figure of interest; he dined out with actors, painters and poets who asked him once because he was Shelley’s son and again, because he was such a cheerful, easygoing guest. If he was, as Trelawny once told Rossetti, a ‘degenerate’, he was a most discreet one. At Boscombe, he loyally supported local activities and was pleased by the number of neighbours ready to come and applaud his plays. Unaware of the bizarre link resulting from his mother’s friendship with raffish Isabel Douglas, he made friends with her illegitimate daughter, Adeline Drummond Wolff, who was now living with her husband at the neighbouring country estate. A brief but more intense friendship formed when Robert Louis Stevenson settled at ‘Skerryvore’ in Bournemouth before frail health and a restless spirit took him to the drier heat of Samoa.
Stevenson, who dedicated one of his finest novels, The Master of Ballantrae, to the Shelleys, affectionately evoked all that was best about Percy in a letter written to Jane shortly after her husband’s death. It was his innocent eccentricity and pleasure in fantasy that most charmed Stevenson. ‘Do you remember coming once to call on us, you two together,’ he wrote to Jane, ‘on a day of a high wind? and how, as you drove on, he made a romance that you were driving through a forest, and would come presently to an old ruined abbey …’31 Being Stevenson, he couldn’t resist spinning out the tale, but the story was clearly of Percy’s own making. As Stevenson noted, there was ‘a deal of his father’ hidden behind the bluff exterior, the pink cheeks and beaky nose of the country squire.
Mary Shelley Page 78
