Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Percy Bysshe Shelley found himself in a new and hostile world. For the first time he was conscious of his own appearance, and his own physical limitations. At Syon House he was remembered as a tall, thin, awkward boy, somehow both large and slight. He had a long face, with the marked Shelley nose and brow, and a ruddy, freckled country-child complexion. His eyes were large, blue, staring. His hair was longer than most of the London boys wore it, and curled and tangled round his face in natural profusion.13 His hands and features were fine, with that characteristic girlish delicacy of bone structure belonging to English upper-class children. In the tribal universe of a lower-middle-class preparatory school, with its brute system of physical loyalties and rigid conformism, Shelley was almost completely without recourse. Medwin, who obeyed the schoolboy code, and did not interfere — ‘we all had to pass through this ordeal’ — recalled the early days and weeks. ‘All tormented him with questionings. There was no end to their mockery, when they found that he was ignorant of pegtop or marbles, or leap-frog, or hopscotch, much more of fives or cricket. One wanted him to spar, another to run a race with him. He was a tyro in both these accomplishments, and the only welcome of the Neophyte was a general shout of derision.’14 When he was alone, Medwin observed Shelley crying quietly.

  In the schoolroom, Shelley watched Dr Greenlaw construe Homer and take snuff and make jokes about farting like ‘the winds in the Cave of Aeolus’.15 He was a small, red-faced man, with a sharp Scottish accent, and a gift for extracting schoolboy humour out of Greek and Latin texts, calling them facetiae. He carried his spectacles perched, with faintly mocking intent, on the top of his eyebrows, except when he grew angry, and lowered them with silent menace onto his broad rubicund nose with its snuff-taking nostrils. His clouts were aimed over the side of the head, and could knock a schoolboy from his desk.16 Shelley found time to sketch the trees of Field Place in his exercise books, and gaze out of the schoolroom window to watch the swallows gathering for their autumnal migration.17 His Sussex childhood seemed very far away. Only two things offered themselves as possible resources to be drawn on: one was his imaginary world of monsters and demons and apparitions. The other was an unexpected discovery — he found he had inherited something of his grandfather’s character, and had a violent and absolutely ungovernable temper once he grew angry.

  ‘Poor Shelley,’ exclaimed Medwin of the bullying, ‘he was always the martyr.’ Yet Shelley was frequently a fighter as well, and was soon renowned for his paroxysms of fury. Tom Medwin preferred to give only a hint of this in his Life, for he wanted to present an angelic childhood: ‘he was naturally calm, but when he heard or read of some flagrant act of injustice, oppression or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of horror and indignation were visible in his countenance’. But other pupils remembered Shelley’s temper with more distinctness. ‘The least circumstance that thwarted him produced the most violent paroxysms of rage; and when irritated by other boys, which they, knowing his infirmity, frequently did by way of teasing him, he would take up anything, or even any little boy near him, to throw at his tormentors.’18 Another recalled that when he had been flogged, he would roll on the floor, not from pain, but overcome with frustration and indignity. When he hit out, it was frequently without control, ‘like a girl in Boys’ clothes’, lashing out with open hands. All his life, Shelley was to detest violence and the various forms of ‘tyranny’ which it produced. Yet the exceptional violence in his own character, the viciousness with which he reacted to opposition, was something he found difficult to accept about himself. Much later, his passionate belief in a philosophy of freedom was to be weakened and contradicted by problems of political violence and active resistance which he found it hard to resolve.

  The shock of the school experience also darkened and distorted the monsters and romantic demons of Field Place. Isolated and at bay, his mind became increasingly unsettled, and while his days were full of persecutions, his nights now seemed no less tormented. The occurrences recorded half-jocularly by Tom Medwin and others have a counterpart in many a boy’s childhood. But with Shelley they were different, for they hung on beyond boyhood; they hung on all his life.

  He was subject to strange, and sometimes frightful dreams, and was haunted by apparitions that bore all the semblance of reality. We did not sleep in the same dormitory, but I shall never forget one moonlight night seeing Shelley walk into my room. He was in a state of somnambulism. His eyes were open, and he advanced with slow steps to the window, which, it being the height of summer, was open. I got out of bed, seized him with my arm, and waked him — I was not then aware of the danger of suddenly rousing the sleep walker. He was excessively agitated, and after leading him back with some difficulty to his couch, I sat by him for some time, a witness to severe erethism of his nerves, which the sudden shock produced.19

  The visions and sleepwalking recorded by Mary Shelley in the last weeks of Shelley’s life — he was then aged 29 — correspond to these earliest ones. Medwin’s mention of ‘erethism of the nerves’ — abnormal excitement of them — is also the first record of the mysterious complaint, part constitutional and part psychosomatic, which becomes a permanent feature of Shelley’s life from the age of 20.

  Shelley’s experiences at Syon House Academy might not in themselves have been important if they had not been so strongly reinforced by the events and experiences of later life. But looking back, it seemed to him that the first ten years of his life at Field Place had been a magic circle of freedom and love, a pre-Lapsarian Paradise, and the entry into school, which was the first part of his entry into the outside world, was like the Fall. As a man, he was very rarely to refer to Field Place explicitly in his writing, for the sense of betrayal was overwhelmingly strong and bitter. But in a notebook of 1816, there is a fragment which he wrote in Switzerland at the age of 24:

  Dear Home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,

  The least of which wronged Memory ever makes

  Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.20

  At the very end of his life, in a mood of more distant reminiscence, he scrawled in one of his Italian notebooks a rough string of visionary verses that recall this first decade in terms of the garden world of a lost Eden:

  A schoolboy lay near a pond in a copse

  Blackberries just were out of bloom

  And the golden bloom of the sunny broom . . .

  The pine cones they fell like thunder drops

  When the lazy noon breathed so hard in its trance

  That it wakened the sleeping fir-tree tops.

  Under a branch all leafless & bare

  He was watching the motes in their mimic dance

  Rolling like worlds through the dewy air

  And he closed his eyes at last to see

  The network of darkness woven inside

  Till the fire-tailed stars of the night of his brain

  Like birds round a pond did flutter & glide

  And then he would open them wide again.21

  These first ten years of Shelley’s life had been extremely sheltered. Yet they were also the last years of the eighteenth century, and a time of exceptional disturbance in the affairs of men, ‘the times that try men’s souls’. Events that had occurred far beyond the narrow circle of his knowledge were henceforth to effect the whole tenor of his career.

  Shelley had been born in 1792. It was the year in which Tom Paine published his Rights of Man, and the year in which the French Revolutionary forces declared war on Europe. It was the beginning of a decade of unprecedented upheaval which affected most of Europe and had repercussions not only in politics but also in literature and science. England, which was to stand firm against the French Revolutionary pressures from without, was shaken and transformed by the forces of change acting within. The nineties in England saw the first meetings of the Radical London Corresponding Society, and the formation of the early tenuous network of Working Men’s Associations across the major industrial cities of the north. It saw an unp
recedented increase in the national production of cotton and metal goods with a corresponding shift of the population into the manufacturing centres and the undermining of the old rural patterns of life which were so accurately studied and lamented by William Cobbett in his travel essays and polemic journalism.

  The nineties saw the circulation of the revolutionary political works of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine and Home Tooke, beside a flood of subversive pamphleteering. From the Continent, a wave of new ideas arrived in popular translations of Condorcet, d’Holbach, Voltaire, Volney and Laplace, together with reports of transactions in the Revolutionary Conventions. The transformation of the solid, eighteenth-century English sensibility, with its Johnsonian cast of insular common sense, was marked most strikingly and simply by the transformation in subject matter which now attracted English writers and artists. Robert Southey, a future poet-laureate, wrote a verse play about the agrarian leader Wat Tyler, and his friend Coleridge composed a powerful drama The Fall of Robespierre. William Blake produced his first prophetic books, The French Revolution and America: A Prophesy. William Wordsworth, who had himself witnessed some of the early stages of the revolution in Paris, turned to stories of poverty, low rural life, insanity and the supernatural in the most representative book of the period, Lyrical Ballads. The first genuinely popular reading market developed in response to the glut of lurid gothic tales and romances published in cheap editions, tales of horror by M. G. Lewis — who soon earned the sobriquet ‘Monk’, after his best-selling title — and novels of pursuit and haunting by Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, Joanna Baillie, and even by the philosopher Godwin in his book Caleb Williams, a story of obsessional pursuit, pointedly subtitled, Things as They Are.

  In painting, the macabre work of Henry Fuseli, himself a frequenter of the Godwin circle, and the demoniac vision of Blake, characteristically achieved through a brilliant series of technical innovations in printing method, quickly dominated the visual frontiers. The old order of Joshua Reynolds faltered and gave way, and the young Turner first exhibited his oils in the Royal Academy.

  In science, the first experimental work on electricity, gases and combustion was beginning to yield striking and hitherto unexpected results. In Manchester, John Dalton was preparing his theories on the absorption of gases; in Clifton, the young superintendent of the Pneumatic Institution, Humphry Davy, was completing his early researches into nitrous oxide, voltaic batteries and the elements of chemical composition. The first sociological study of major importance was published by Thomas Malthus in 1798, An Essay on Population.

  The decade saw revolutionary activities as diverse as the idealism of Bristol Pantisocracy, illicit leveller associations like the Spencean Society, and the LCS working movement for popular education and democratic rights which led to the Treason Trials of Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall. The newspapers and the taverns throughout the land were full of talk of French informers and bloodthirsty Jacobins who wished to destroy the whole fabric of society, and the cartoonists drew huge guillotines dripping with gore and grotesque figures with mad eyes and red caps of liberty. For the first time in English history, an institution at Whitehall called the Home Office began to develop a nationwide network of surveillance, and throughout the nineties there was a steady extension of judicial controls and civilian spy systems among the ordinary people. Directed first by William Pitt, and later by his successor to the premiership Lord Liverpool, there was an increasingly rigid imposition of political and religious censorship in the courts: the two great instruments of the Lord Chancellor in this respect being the twin laws of Seditious and Blasphemous Libel.

  It was, finally, a decade of war: at first only a distant war, fought largely at sea; but later a war that came to every man’s doorstep in the form of conscription, high prices, food shortages bordering on famine, garrisoned soldiery, social unrest among the manufacturing classes, and a proliferation of agents from the Customs, Excise, Post Office and Home Office. Above all it came in the ceaseless, swelling, uncontrollable agitation — to a degree never before known in this island — of new ideas: a great wind of restless, contradictory, ill-defined ideas, but ideas none the less that blew open new doors and windows in men’s minds and changed their lives for ever. War had always accelerated both social and economic trends in England, and this war was to last for the best part of eighteen years.

  Shelley was born into an age of upheaval. Yet it might be assumed that Horsham, Sussex, still slumbering in its traditional eighteenth-century pattern of seasonal labour, sheep markets, village festivals, and still dominated by squire and parson, was in reality very little affected by these distant commotions and rumblings among politicians, intellectuals and city-dwellers. But the social crust was no longer as solid as it seemed. This particularly applied to the family that occupied the squire’s house at Field Place, with its long drive, its plantations of oaks and cedars, its pond and eccentric ‘American Garden’ of redwoods and semi-tropical plants. In that part of southern England, ‘Shelley’ was indeed an ancient name in the county aristocracy, and the original family of the Shelley-Michelgroves had an impeccable pedigree and a baronetage bestowed by James I. But Shelley’s own family did not derive directly from this respected stock: his was a junior and inferior branch, descended by a long trellis of younger brothers and obscure marriages, and settling uneasily at the beginning of the eighteenth century on Fen Place, near Worth in Sussex.22 Here John Shelley, Shelley’s great-great-grandfather lived, and from here Shelley’s direct ancestry can be traced through the restless, indigent and rather murky history of two opportunist younger sons. It was to be an important factor in Shelley’s later life that at the time of his birth, the family at Field Place was socially arriviste. Its subsequently vaunted blood-connection with the literary Shelley-Sidneys of Penshurst Place was as tenuous as the most liberal laws of cousinage will allow.

  Shelley’s great-grandfather, Timothy Shelley, the third of five sons, was forced to emigrate to America to make his living in the reign of George I. There it appears that he became a merchant, married a New York miller’s widow, lost his money and turned into a quack doctor.23 During this period Bysshe Shelley, the second son and Shelley’s grandfather, was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1731. Some years later, Timothy’s fortune was saved by the death of one elder brother and the insanity of another, and he was able to bring his colonial family back to England, including his son Bysshe.

  Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s grandfather, was a determined and individualistic man whose initiative and disregard for social proprieties was not squirearchical, but wholly of the New World. He was a tall, striking figure, with the long Shelley nose, cold eyes and a thin, purposeful lip. His drive and nonconformity brought him worldly success, together with the unpopularity of those descendants who benefited from him. In 1752 he instigated a family tradition by eloping with a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of a wealthy clergyman, and marrying her in Mayfair. The girl died nine years later, and Bysshe inherited the estates. In 1769 he repeated the process, with even greater success, this time eloping with a daughter of the aristocratic Sidney Perry family who owned estates in Sussex, Kent and Gloucester. This brought him social cachet rather than money. Bysshe inherited Field Place and the Fen Place estates in 1790, became a baronet in 1806, and died in 1815 leaving a fortune of £200,000. He spent much of his time in building a new ancestral home in the shape of Castle Goring by the sea in Sussex, but at the end of his life he preferred to live in his small cottage near the Horsham tavern, a crotchety eccentric feared by his children both legitimate and otherwise. £12,816 in loose banknotes was found dispersed among his furniture and books in the Horsham cottage at his death.24

  Shelley’s father, Timothy — named after the American ‘apothecary’ — was born of Bysshe’s first marriage to Miss Mary Catherine Michell, the clergyman’s daughter, in 1753. In him, Bysshe’s wildness and self-assertion were temporarily subdued. As befitted the son of a self-made man, he quietly conformed to the ne
w social surroundings and awaited the descent of the baronetcy from the father who always despised him. He attended University College, Oxford, and presented it with silver candlesticks; he then made the Grand Tour and entered Lincoln’s Inn. He became mildly interested in politics, and attached himself to Norfolk’s wing of the Foxite Whigs. But he was always in spirit an easy-going place-man, and a conformist. He did what was expected of him. Norfolk was fighting a local county battle against his Tory rival Lady Irwin, and bought up the Horsham electorate. He managed to get Timothy nominated as Member for the town for the 1790–2 parliamentary session. But finally Lady Irwin succeeded in a petition against the election, and Timothy was deprived of his seat, having to be re-elected for New Shoreham, another of the Duke’s extensive political properties.

  Meanwhile, Timothy had married Elizabeth Pilfold of nearby Warnham in October 1791. He installed his new bride in Field Place, as old Bysshe was busy building at Goring. Their first child, a son christened Percy Bysshe, was born ten months later on 4 August 1792. Timothy was aged 40, and his new wife aged 29.

  Perhaps the most remarkable single fact of Shelley’s childhood is that while both parents comfortably outlived him, neither left a single word of reminiscence about his early boyhood.[1] We know nothing directly of his relationship with his mother during his first fifteen years, and Shelley rarely mentioned her in later life. From a few stray remarks in letters from Oxford, and from passing references by his cousin Tom Medwin and his undergraduate friend T. J. Hogg, we can gather that the feelings between mother and son were exceptionally close and warm up to the time that Shelley went to school. After this Shelley seems to have found his mother increasingly distant and unresponsive, and there are indications that he felt deeply rejected. Shelley’s sense of betrayal was finally to erupt in an extraordinary accusation of adultery which he made at the age of 19. But apart from this, his feelings were shrouded in mystery.