Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  On a topical issue Shelley attacked the Prince Regent’s lavishly extravagant fête at Carlton House on 19 June, which included a 200-foot banqueting table along the length of which ran an artificial stream encased in banks of silver and pumped from intricately ornamented silver fountains at one end. ‘What think you of the bubbling brooks, & mossy banks at Carlton House?’ he exclaimed to Miss Hitchener, grimly enumerating the ludicrous magnificence and ‘disgusting splendours’. ‘Here are a people advanced in intellectual improvement, willfully rushing to a Revolution, the natural death of all great commercial Empires, which must plunge them in the barbarism from which they are slowly rising.’40 Misuse of wealth in this way always outraged Shelley, for not only did it inflame his natural puritanism, but it shocked his sense of the justice of fair distribution and the self-evident claims for a reasonable economic equity.

  But he did not risk telling Miss Hitchener later that he had carried out a rapid propaganda expedition against the Regent’s festivities. He had dashed off a satire of some fifty lines, had it printed locally as a pamphlet, and on his way through London to Wales, stopped off at the Groves, to spend several hours tossing copies into the windows of carriages driving up to Carlton House. This was to be his first exercise in active political campaigning, half prank and half serious propaganda. His pupil Miss Hitchener was not apprised of it, nor did Shelley’s promise to visit her in London on the first stage of his journey actually materialize. He afterwards explained that he had been prevented by several nights of sleeplessness and days of pressing business, which ended by giving him ‘a short but violent nervous illness’ on his arrival in Wales.41 All this, though perhaps conveniently exaggerated, suggests that he had been living at Field Place under considerable nervous stress.

  The plan to go to Wales had been worked out with his cousins the Groves at the end of June. It came as both an escape and a relief, for he wished to take stock of his position on neutral ground. Shelley left Field Place for London, and then travelled to Thomas Grove’s remote house at the top of the valley of Cwm Elan, near Rhayader, in the county of Radnorshire. He arrived about 9 July, immediately sending off a note to Hogg.

  Thomas Grove, Harriet Grove’s eldest brother, was aged 27, and a gentleman farmer with an estate of 10,000 acres. His house lay some four miles south-west of Rhayader, and not far from the tiny country village of Elan. The Elan valley which surrounds it is a formation of bleak and rocky hills, covered in mauve heather and flowering gorse with the pink sandy Radnorshire stone peering through. In fine weather it is very beautiful and dramatic, especially the curving view from the road leading back into Rhayader; but the geography of the area is essentially closed and gloomy. The population in 1811 was extremely sparse, consisting largely of the semi-wild breed of mountain sheep, with their long thin muzzles, narrow close-set eyes and vivid splashes of marker dye maintained by the seasonal visits of the reddleman. The kind of enclosure offered by this landscape, with its steeply sheltered sides, the wall of rock or hillside at its back, and the single dramatically channelled vista through the open end of the valley seems to have exercised a quite extraordinary and hitherto unremarked attraction for Shelley. As his travels took him further afield and eventually on to the Continent, this curiously symbolic geographical setting became the recurrent and dominant motif of the many different houses in which he chose to stay. The airy remoteness, the cradling protection, and the single dramatic view recur like some kind of subliminal theme. His houses were, for choice, like the encastellated strongholds of chivalric romance, each one an ultimate retreat in which he seemed to be waiting, back to the wall, for the inevitable pursuer who will appear at first a great way off, but inexorably advancing through the only route that is not barred. Once again, this is a central image in the mature poetry.

  To Hogg, Shelley wrote with unusually bluff brevity that the scenery was ‘divine, but all very stale flat and unprofitable — indeed this place is a very great bore’.42 But to Miss Hitchener, who had already channelled off a good deal of the enthusiastic froth previously reserved for his college friend, Shelley was rather more thoughtfully forthcoming: ‘Rocks piled on to each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, & valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment — but why do they enchant, why is it more affecting than a plain, it cannot be innate, is it acquired?’ Already he seems to have felt some response in himself to this kind of landscape, some particular reflection of his own mind. He went on, meditatively: ‘Thus does knowledge lose all pleasure which involuntarily arises, by attempting to arrest the fleeting Phantom as it passes — vain almost like the chemist’s aether it evaporates under our observation; it flies from all but the slaves of passion and sickly sensibility who will not analyse a feeling.’43

  This contempt for ‘sickly sensibility’ was new and growing in Shelley. He attempted to replace it by a more objective concern with facts around him, especially the social facts of oppression and hardship. He had told Miss Hitchener that he was going to travel around ‘on foot’ to view the manner and conditions of the peasantry. He produced an immediate report on an incident concerning a Welsh beggar whom he had heard asking for bread at Grove’s kitchen door while he was dressing by his window in the morning. He hurried downstairs, caught the old man, and ‘gave him something’ which was received with due grace. Then, thinking no doubt of Wordsworth’s philosophic vagrants, he tried to get the beggar to talk. ‘I followed him a mile asking a thousand questions; at length I quitted him finding by this remarkable observation that perseverance was useless. “I see by your dress that you are a rich man — they have injured me and mine a million times. You appear to be well intentioned but I have no security of it while you live in such a house as that, or wear such clothes as those. It would be charity to quit me.” ’44 Shelley learnt one of his first genuine political lessons from the unexpectedly abrupt and prosaic denouement of this romantic encounter.

  Cwm Elan was not all social study. It was mostly boredom and indecision and self-doubt. ‘I am what the sailors call banyaning. I do not see a soul. All is gloomy and desolate. I amuse myself however with reading Darwin,[4] climbing rocks and exploring this scenery.’45 Various plans were fermenting in Shelley’s mind. The Westbrooks were on holiday at Aberystwyth, only thirty miles away to the west, and part of Shelley’s undeclared reason for coming to Wales was to arrange a visit to Harriet and Eliza.46 To Edward Graham he wrote that he was still planning surgical studies, in emulation of John Grove, but was hindered by being ‘as poor as a rat’.47 To Hogg, he wrote drily that if he knew anything about love then he knew he was not in love with Harriet; he planned, on the other hand, to come to see Hogg at York as soon as his strengthened finances might allow, and added that it would be necessary to come under a false name to avoid irritating his father ‘needlessly’. He found the deception easily justified in his newly adopted tone of brisk objectivity: ‘we must live if we intend to live, that is we must eat drink & sleep, & money is the necessary procurer of these things’.48 He was scathing about Timothy’s unfortunate discovery of Hogg’s visit to Field Place in June. ‘I regard the whole as a finesse to which I had supposed the Honourable Member’s headpiece unequal.’49

  As he steeled himself to fling back into the centre of action and events, Shelley’s thoughts turned increasingly to politics, and it was of these that he wrote to Miss Hitchener rather than disclosing his ambitions for Harriet. His discussions were now rapidly moving from the notion of atheism to the idea of equality in society:

  You are willing to dismiss for the present the subject of Religion. As to its influence in individuals we will — but it is so intimately connected with politics, & augments in so vivid a degree the evils resulting from the system before us, that I will make a few remarks on it.50

  Shelley was now determined to view religion in the wider context of the English society of 1811, and indeed within the context of the whole history of social oppression. His mind ran ove
r the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Gordon Riots. His conclusion was a crude building-block version of Rousseau, that a naturally egalitarian society had been continually corrupted by the hereditary power-pyramids of Religion, Monarchy and Aristocracy.

  It is this empire of terror which is established by Religion, Monarchy is its prototype, Aristocracy may be regarded as symbolising its very essence. They are mixed — one can now be scarce distinguished from the other, & equality in politics like perfection in morality appears now far removed from even the visionary anticipations of what is called the wildest theorist. I then am wilder than the wildest.51

  In other letters he looked at the idea of equality more closely, and tried to answer the objection that his views on a just society were ‘visionary’: ‘Why is it visionary, have you tried?’ If Locke’s argument that there are no ‘innate ideas’ is correct, it proved to him that all mankind started out equal before nature, ‘intellect varies but in the impressions with which casualty or intention has marked it’.52 At any rate, he felt, whatever the objections to complete equality as an attainable political situation, any advance in this direction would be an improvement. ‘What can be worse than the present aristocratical system? there are in England ten millions only 500,000 of whom live in a state of ease; the rest earn their livelihood with toil and care.’

  As yet Shelley’s grasp of the problem was primitive, not to say naïve. He had no real experience of how the majority lived; he had suffered no real economic deprivation; he had no realization of the problems of educating ignorance and bigotry at the lowest level; and, like most of his contemporaries, he had no idea that industrialization and urbanization were far more at the roots of an unjust society than a lazy, pleasure-loving aristocracy, or a fat quiescent clergy. The Welsh beggar had been right to take his alms and distrust his intentions.

  It was not politics, but the romantic interest of Harriet’s situation which finally brought Shelley out of Radnorshire. A rapid correspondence moved between Cwm Elan and Aberystwyth, though the post was maddeningly irregular, ‘like the waves in Hell were to Tantalus’.53 Scenting the wind, Eliza, through Harriet, had sent him a novel extolling the virtues of matrimony, by Amelia Opie.54 It was entitled suggestively Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter.

  Walking alone through the rocks and waterfalls of Wales, Shelley felt ready to embark on some new form of life, to grapple with it: ‘. . . a thousand shadowy trees form the principal features of the scenery, I am not wholly uninfluenced by its magic in my lonely walks, but I long for a thunder storm.’55 Thus he wrote at the end of July.

  By the end of August the thunderstorm had occurred; he was in Edinburgh and married. Events had moved quickly. In late July Shelley had received letters from Harriet in London saying that her father had ‘persecuted her in the most horrible way’, and was forcing her to go back to school. He wrote back and urged resistance. Harriet became so upset that she now wrote to him, talking of suicide, and threw herself on Shelley’s ‘protection’. On Monday, 5 August, Shelley dashed to London by coach, but on arrival he could not persuade Harriet to take any decisive action. He put up at Charles Grove’s in Lincoln’s Inn for the weekend, anxious and perplexed. News that John Grove was proposing to his sister Elizabeth further disturbed him and he made a whirlwind visit to Field Place the following Thursday, 15 August. His note apprising Hogg of the disaster, and reassuring him that Elizabeth would not accept Grove went off the same day to York.

  Meanwhile Harriet hung fire for a further ten days of intimate negotiations, undecided ‘not with respect to me but herself’ — as Shelley put it.56 But finally on the morning of Sunday, 25 August, Shelley and Harriet, abetted by Charles Grove, slipped away from Chapel Street in a Hackney carriage, and spent the day hiding in coffee houses near Cannon Street. The two elopers caught the night mail from the Green Dragon Inn, Gracechurch Street, bound for Edinburgh via York. Shelley had in his pocket ten pounds borrowed from Hogg, and twenty-five pounds from Tom Medwin’s father, the estate lawyer at Horsham. Behind him he left a diversionary note for his father, saying without explanation that he was making a sudden trip to Ireland via Holyhead, and asking for his ‘clothes papers gun &c’ to be forwarded to Charles Grove’s in London. The coup was complete. As with most of the crucial events of Shelley’s biography, his own version of the facts gradually became distorted. Two months later Shelley was writing to Elizabeth Hitchener, to explain that the whole thing had really occurred because of Harriet. Harriet had fallen in love with him, rather than vice versa; she had been made so ill and miserable by persecution that she had become suicidal and he had been forced, first to ‘promise to unite’ his fate with hers, and finally to contradict his whole anti-matrimonial position so far as to propose marriage. The protection of the woman was finally, he felt, an overwhelming argument in the case.57 His role thus became that of the rational Godwinian, who had unwittingly been caught up in Harriet’s circumstances, but had responded coolly and disinterestedly in a point-by-point fight for her freedom. Certainly Shelley came to believe this about himself.

  The actual facts, as far as we can recover them, do not suggest this is the truth. The evidence seems to show that Shelley far more than Harriet was the instigator of events, and it was he who pressed them to their final conclusion, even though this was not exactly what he had intended. In his last letter to Hogg from Cwm Elan, it is clear that he was already passionately involved with Harriet and determined to carry her off, though on the basis of free love if he could manage it. ‘We shall have £200 a year, when we find it run short we must live I suppose on love. Gratitude and admiration all demand that I should love her forever. We shall see you at York. I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism by which I am now almost convinced. I can get lodgings at York I suppose. . . . Your enclosure of £10 has arrived. I am now indebted to you £30.’58 This letter clearly shows that Shelley intended to carry off Harriet even before he left Wales. He went to London with the immediate intention of liberating her from Chapel Street and taking her to York to meet Hogg and get lodgings. Afterwards they might then argue about ‘matrimonialism’. When Shelley arrived in London and put his case, however, it did not work. Harriet refused. Far from abandoning herself to him and his ‘protection’, for more than two weeks she refused to leave Chapel Street at all.

  Shelley’s note of about 14 August, some seven days after he had arrived in London, shows him perplexed and depressed in the middle of this unexpected predicament. ‘My arguments have been yours,’ he wrote to Hogg, ‘they have been urged by the force of the gratitude which their occasion excited — but I yet remain in London, I remain embarrassed & melancholy.’ Characteristically in this moment of reverse, he turned back to his old fondness for Hogg, continuing in the same note: ‘Your noble and exalted friendship, the prosecution of your happiness, can alone engross my impassioned interest.’ Reverting to the struggle to capture Harriet, he concluded: ‘I never was so fit for calm argument as now. This I fear more resembles exerted action than inspired passion.’59

  The ‘arguments’ which Shelley keeps referring to here are the arguments for marriage as against free love. What seems to have happened, therefore, is that Harriet refused to leave on a free-love basis, and that Shelley had to talk himself into a proposal of marriage and her into an acceptance. To do this Shelley had to alter his plans radically. Discussions with Charles Grove, the only friend who was fully Shelley’s confidant at this point, revealed that such an elopement would have to be solemnized in Scotland in order to avoid lengthy qualifications and parental approvals. This necessitated abandoning the York plan, and obtaining further travelling money — which Shelley did under some pretext from Mr Medwin when he visited Sussex. In all this it is again clear that Shelley was the instigator. Although one may also feel that it was the elder and more ‘refined’ Eliza Westbrook who was shrewdly bargaining marriage into the Sussex aristocracy for the consummation of Shelley’s youthful passion. This was Hogg’s opinion, and also the
explanation given by Shelley’s counsel during the trial for custody of the children, six years later.60 If such was the case, by her own lights, Eliza did very well.

  As the negotiations drew to a conclusion in the last week of August, Shelley seems to have had a slight sense of getting rather more than he had bargained for. There is a story that may be taken as a slight indication of Shelley’s mood at the actual moment of his elopement. The anecdote goes that as he and Charles waited for Harriet at a prearranged coffee house in Mount Street, the two young men breakfasted on oysters and then Shelley stood in the doorway distractedly skimming the empty shells across the street, repeating over and over to Charles with an ironic sigh: ‘Grove, this is a Shelley business!’61 Besides the mournful pun, he probably intended a reference to his grandfather’s marital exploits. It also seems from this account that Harriet was late.

  Shelley and Harriet travelled non-stop, leaving a note for Hogg, requesting further money, as they went through York at midnight on Monday. They reached Edinburgh on the morning of Wednesday, 28 August 1811, and immediately took out a marriage licence, having been advised on the exact procedure by a Scottish lawyer they met on the coach. Shelley described himself in the marriage book as ‘Farmer, of Sussex’.62 They moved from the coaching inn to lodgings, and Hogg came up from York to join them, probably during the following weekend. It must have been some time before Hogg arrived that the wedding night incident occurred which Peacock later described, when Shelley drew his pistols on a party of well-wishers and threatened to shoot them if they crossed the threshold.

  Altogether it is unlikely that Shelley was alone with Harriet for much more than seven days, three of which were spent in non-stop coach travel. It was a strange honeymoon à trois and showed from the outset Shelley’s disinclination to live entirely in the company of one woman for more than a few hours at a time. It was only gradually that Shelley came to accept this about himself, and ask what it was that caused it. Harriet, at this time, it must be remembered, was only just 16 years old, and still really a schoolgirl.