Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  The Shelleys and Hogg spent the whole of September in Edinburgh. Hogg has many droll anecdotes, a few of which can be gingerly interpreted. Shelley had taken handsome lodgings on the ground floor of a house in George Street, and the moment Hogg arrived Shelley insisted that his friend must immediately have a bed in the same house. ‘ “We have met at last once more!” Shelley exclaimed, “and we will never part again! You must have a bed in the house!” It was deemed necessary, indispensable . . . the landlord was summoned, he came instantly; a bed in the house; the necessity was so urgent that they did not give him time to speak.’63

  All three walked joyfully about Edinburgh, Shelley collecting regular letters from the post office in ‘prodigious number’, and doting on large supplies of comb honey that they found in the shops. A special treat was to visit the dour Edinburgh kirks to hear the sermons, which caused Shelley an exquisite mixture of amusement and outrage. On one memorable and embarrassing occasion Shelley and Hogg attended a Presbyterian catechism class, in which the catechist got more and more angry as his pupils failed to answer the questions correctly. After interrogating them on the identity of Adam, and receiving no satisfactory reply, he went on to sterner stuff. ‘The indignation of the Catechist waxing hot, in a still louder and very angry tone he broke forth with: “Wha’s the Deel?” This was too much; Shelley burst into a shrieking laugh, and rushed wildly out of doors. I slowly followed him, thinking seriously of Elders, Presbyters, and Kirk Synods. However, nothing came of it; we were not cast into prison.’64 From this tale one may gather that both Shelley and Hogg were indulging in a priest-baiting game partly for their own amusement, partly out of genuine ideological outrage and partly no doubt for the benefit of the beautiful, simple and easily impressionable Harriet. On another occasion Shelley was reprimanded in the streets for giving vent to his piercing, fiendish laughter on the Sabbath.65

  Shelley was now studying furiously once more, as he had done at Oxford. Hogg recalls how he managed to discover a source of free books in Edinburgh — either at the excellent circulating library, or possibly through the young lawyer whom he had met on the coach. Shelley was continually going out to get new ones. He read French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and discovered Buffon, one of whose treatises he began to translate in the evenings. Harriet fitted very well into this routine, and for her part took up a French romance which she translated and copied out with characteristic style, ‘without blot or blemish, upon the smoothest, whitest, finest paper, in a small, neat, flowing and legible feminine hand’.66 When not employed in this, Harriet used to read aloud to Hogg and Shelley, ‘remarkably well, very correctly, and with a clear, distinct, agreeable voice, and often emphatically’. She would keep this up for hours, well into the night, and Hogg implies that he appreciated this exercise rather more than Shelley who was inclined to grow drowsy and drop off to sleep on the hearthrug.

  Shelley, immersed in the scientific speculations of Buffon, was particularly fascinated by the stars seen so clearly in the northern summer latitude, and the three of them would walk the night streets gazing upwards, talking of constellations, modern astronomy and Greek mythologies of the zodiac. For several nights the sky was marked by a startling comet.

  Edinburgh itself gradually palled on Shelley and he was soon to refer to their being ‘chained to the filth and commerce’ of the Scottish capital.67 The chain that bound them was money, or rather, it was lack of money. Financial difficulties began to occupy an important part in Shelley’s plans, and he was never really to be free of them for the rest of his life. At the time of his elopement with Harriet, Shelley was living on the £200 annuity from his father. His journey to Edinburgh, and much of his stay there, seems to have been subsidized by money from Captain Pilfold, who generously stuck by his wayward nephew at this time. Hogg also had lent his friend several small sums.

  The day after his marriage at Edinburgh, Shelley attempted to secure the quarterly fifty pounds due to him from Timothy on 1 September. Realizing that once the news of his marriage reached Field Place his allowance would probably be cut, he hurried off an innocent filial appeal, explaining that he had (somehow, on his way to Ireland) been detained at Edinburgh ‘in consequence of having incurred a slight debt’, and anxiously awaited his allowance which could be sent through Graham in London. With the brisk calculation he had already decided upon in Wales, Shelley masked all reference to Harriet and wrote in a style of anxious and trusting respect: ‘My dear Father — I know of no one to whom I can apply with greater certainty of success when in distress than you. I must own that I am not so frugal as could be wished, but I know you are kind enough to enclose me a Dft for £50.’68 It is extraordinary, considering what had already taken place between him and his father, that Shelley did not realize — if nothing else — the transparent untruth of this address would alert his father. In the event, Timothy quickly had news of the elopement, stopped the allowance, and wrote an angry and distraught letter to Hogg’s father at Durham: ‘God knows what can be the end of all this disobedience.’69

  As the days and then weeks passed and no money reached him, Shelley’s letters to Field Place escalated from a tone of frigid politeness, through heavy sarcasm, into paeans of insult and accusation. More than anything, it was Timothy’s refusal to make a response of any kind, the operative effect of his original threat to ‘withdraw himself’, which enraged and goaded Shelley. It is easy to sympathize with Shelley in this, for he was in an awkward and entirely unknown situation, for the first time responsible for someone besides himself; quite bereft of reliable resources, and yet apparently writing to a brick wall.

  Two weeks after his unsuccessful attempt to secure the £50, Shelley again wrote to Timothy in a vein of ceremonious and ostentatious reasonableness: ‘Proceeding on the idea suggested, the vague information above alluded to that you were displeased with me, permit me with the utmost humility to deprecate any anger on your part, perhaps also I may succeed in pointing out its inutility, & inadequacy to the happiness of any one whom it may concern.’70 Ten days later, on 27 August, he was writing with greater urgency and more open sarcasm: ‘Father, are you a Christian?. . . do not rather these hypocritical assumptions of the Christian character lower you in real virtue beneath the libertine atheist, for a real one would practise what you preach, & quietly put in practice that forgiveness . . . .’71

  By 12 October, having moved with Harriet and Hogg back to York, his letters show that he had now given up any immediate hope of financial support from Timothy, but was more than ever determined to press home his case, and make his reproaches sting. ‘Obedience is in my opinion a word which should have no existence — you regard it as necessary. — Yes, you can command it. The institutions of society have made you, tho’ liable to be misled by passion and prejudice like others, the Head of the family; and I confess it is most natural for minds not of the highest order to value even the errors whence they derive their importance.’72 In this letter one can hear for perhaps the first time the ring of what can be called a truly Shelleyan note: that mixture of intense anger, glowing libertarian principle, and the bitter reproachfulness of the abandoned and the outcast.

  A day later, Shelley was writing to his grandfather Sir Bysshe in a similar vein, though with more hope and therefore with more dignity. ‘Language is given us to express ideas — he who fetters it is a BIGOT and a TYRANT, from these have my misfortune arisen. — I expect from your liberality and justice no unfavourable construction of what fools in power would denominate insolence. This is not the spirit in which I write. I write in the spirit of truth and candor. If you will send me some money to help me and my wife (and I know you are not ungenerous) I will add to my respect for a grandfather my love for a preserver.’73 Sir Bysshe did not respond any more than Timothy, for it seems that he too regarded a mésalliance as something unspeakable, and Shelley’s high tone to be a mockery.

  The battery of letters to his father had not quite been discharged. The final letter, like the whole se
ries, has something deeply characteristic of Shelley’s primary range of emotional reactions, which were to reappear in other more complicated, more diverse and more sophisticated situations. It is an outcry, against which there can be no turning away, but equally no real answer. It is not finally an accusation, a blow, or even a threat: it is a kind of self-consecration — it is a curse. Shelley wrote to Timothy on 15 October from York:

  You have treated me ill, vilely. When I was expelled for atheism you wished I had been killed in Spain. The desire of its consummation is very like the crime, perhaps it is well for me that the laws of England punish murder, & that cowardice shrinks from their animadversion. I shall take the first opportunity of seeing you — if you will not hear my name, I will pronounce it. Think not I am an insect whom injuries destroy — had I money enough I would meet you in London, & hollow in your ears Bysshe, Bysshe, Bysshe, — aye Bysshe till you’re deaf.74

  The curse was significantly his own name: significantly, for it betrays the fact that he regarded himself at some level as his father’s own blunder, his own damnation. At this extremity, fears, suspicions and guilts took on the solidity of facts for Shelley. Thus the story that Timothy had wanted his son to be conscripted to fight in the Peninsular War and be killed in action, which has no evidence or even likelihood behind it, now becomes one of Shelley’s permanent grievances against him. The idea that Timothy was pursuing him — tragic, for the reverse was so obviously true — also became a recurrent obsession. Peacock, who did not get to know Shelley until a year later, refers particularly to this as an ingrained apprehension, himself knowing that it was totally unfounded.

  After this cathartic letter Shelley let silence fall between them, wrote through the solicitor Whitton, and adopted an altogether more oblique, calculating and offhand style. The gulf was now irrevocable between father and son at an emotional level; and a particular pattern of response between Shelley and the outside world of established society had been forged, if not for ever, then at least for many years to come. Shelley had his nineteenth birthday on 4 August 1811.

  The move to York, which lies in the background of this correspondence, took place in the first days of October. Their resources were now very low, and arriving one evening in the autumn rain, they hunted miserably about for cheap lodgings which they found in the house of two ‘weird sisters’ as Hogg called them, retired dressmakers. On the journey Shelley had been dispirited and distracted, and once, at Berwick, Hogg had found him missing from his seat when the coach was about to start. ‘He was standing on the Walls in a drizzling rain, gazing mournfully at the wild and dreary sea, with looks not less wild and dreary.’75

  [1]Literally, ‘the lack of self-love’. Shelley was much concerned by the possibility, or impossibility, of disinterested love at this time. Somewhat obscure evidence, revealed much later in his Italian writing, suggests that these weeks in Poland Street, Soho, witnessed his first sexual experiences. See Chapter 26.

  [2]Both Hogg and Peacock suffered from this eccentricity for years of their acquaintance with Shelley; Hogg’s accounts include the launching of large-denomination banknotes on the Serpentine. In 1814 Shelley graduated to fire-boats launched on Hampstead ponds.

  [3]No record of the ‘dream journal’ survives, but there are several fragments of prose, probably dating from 1815, in which dreams and related psychological phenomena of memory symbolism are discussed: Bod. MS Shelley adds. c. 4, Folder 22–23. See Chapter 12.

  [4]Erasmus Darwin, 1731–1802, one of the archetypes of Shelley’s much admired eccentric scholars. Darwin was a free-thinker, physician, botanist and poet; a man of strong Quakerish principles, and much admired where he practised in Lichfield and Derby. He married twice (and thereby became the grandfather of both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, the geneticist). Shelley read his long poem The Botanic Garden (1792), and probably glanced at his prose work Zoonomia (1796) in which an early theory of evolution was propounded. Darwin’s fusion of Science, philosophy and poetry was to prove an inspiration to Shelley. See Chapter 9.

  4. Harriet Westbrook

  The early days at York were bad for Shelley and he needed considerable personal courage to face them. He had taken the decisive step away from his family, especially from his sisters and his father; away from the financial and social stability of the class he had been brought up in; and away from the structure of beliefs, and especially the unquestioned assumptions of privilege, which that class had deeply in its bones. He was already paying a heavy emotional price for all this, and he was probably aware that there was more to follow. Years later, Leigh Hunt used to enumerate with admiration all the worldly goods that Shelley had renounced: the family fortune, the respectability, the seat in Parliament. But Hunt tended perhaps to over-emphasize the material deprivation which at this moment in York in October 1811 was so clearly secondary to the emotional and psychological one. For a young man, material difficulties are the easiest. Yet Shelley’s final reaction to all this was one that had already become characteristic. He fought back.

  The first sign of this was his reopening of the correspondence with Elizabeth Hitchener. Writing on 8 October from ‘Miss Dancer’s, Coney Street, York’, he apprised her of the fact that he, the convinced atheist and anti-matrimonialist, was now married. He defended his action vigorously, on the grounds that in the present state of society both the reputation of the woman and the ‘political rights’ of both would otherwise suffer; yet he confirmed his opposition to the principle of marriage. ‘How useless,’ he wrote, with one of his earliest sparks of pragmatism, ‘to attempt by singular examples to renovate the face of society’; arguing that the proper weapons were ‘reasoning’ and the struggle for a ‘comprehensive change’. Nevertheless, he continued, it was still necessary to ignore the prejudices of society wherever practical and his married status gave him a new power to do this. He therefore issued for the first time a remarkable invitation to Miss Hitchener. ‘Will you write to me?. . . Nay more — will you be my friend, may I be your’s — the shadow of worldly impropriety is effaced by my situation; our strictest intercourse would excite none of those disgusting remarks with which females of the present day think right to load the friendships of the opposite sexes. Nothing would be transgressed by your even living with us — could you not pay me a visit. My dear friend Hogg that noble being is with me, & will be always, but my wife will abstract from our intercourse the shadow of impropriety.’1 Here for the first time Shelley was groping towards his idea of the community of like-spirits, the radical commune of reformers who could live together on an equal basis and attempt that ‘comprehensive change’ of society which the ideal of ‘perfectibility’ constantly held out. Also, on a more personal level, one sees his increasing discomfort in the narrow confines of the closed married relationship: Hogg will ‘always’ be with them, and others like Miss Hitchener will soon follow.

  Shelley need not have worried about the Sussex schoolmistress. She reacted with kindness, and positively overwhelming enthusiasm. She thought there was ‘no equivocation’ in Shelley’s action and as to the marriage, that was certainly ‘due to Mrs Shelley’ in the circumstances. ‘May your life ever protect her, to say how sincerely I wish you both every happiness does not convey half my feeling for it.’ She had however certain instinctive social misgivings concerning Shelley’s invitation, and gently diverted it into a more ethereal kind of sympathy. ‘With the greatest and sincerest pleasure should I accept your invitation if in my power, but situated as I am it is not possible, tho’ at some future period I anticipate accepting it. . . . I long to be introduced to your Harriet will she ever permit me to call her so, she shall have a Sister’s affection, for are you not the Brother of my soul; see! I have profited by your instructions, & levelled you with as much, (nay perhaps more) facility than you can wish.’2

  This warming reply reached Shelley the day after he had delivered his final epistolatory blast of ‘Bysshe, Bysshe, Bysshe’ into his father’s ear. It is perhaps by the reaction a
way from his family that one can account for the extreme outburst of tender and passionate feelings with which he at once replied to Miss Hitchener. One may also perhaps detect a hint of dissatisfaction, if not actual disillusionment, with the intimate relationship that he should normally have been developing with his young and beautiful girl-bride, Harriet. There is a certain physical distaste, a Hamlet-like sneer at the fleshly fact that indicates this. ‘You who can contemn the world’s prejudices, whose views are mine,’ he carolled to Miss Hitchener, ‘I will dare to say I love, nor do I risk the possibility of that degrading and contemptible interpretation of this sacred word, nor do I risk the supposition that the lump or organized matter which enshrines thy soul excites the love which that soul alone dare claim. Henceforth I will be yours, yours with truth sincerity & unreserve.’3

  The first fruit of this ‘unreserve’ was a wild declaration of a plan to use his inheritance for the foundation of some kind of egalitarian community, which should feature Hogg and Miss Hitchener — and presumably Harriet, though it is remarkable that in his enthusiasm he forgets to mention her. ‘I still desire money, and I desire it because I think I know the use of it. It commands labour, it gives leisure, & to give leisure to those who will employ it in the forwarding of truth is the noblest present an individual can make to the whole. . . . Justice demands that it shd be shared between my [real — deleted] sisters? Does it or does it not? Mankind are as much my brethren & sisters as they, all ought to share — this cannot be, it must be confined. But thou art the sister of my soul — he is its brother — surely these have a right.’ The reference to justice here is implicitly Godwinian ‘political’ justice, which always insists that property is not rightfully owned by he who possesses it in law, but only by he whose need or personal worth can make best use of it in the ordinary course of events. The little detail of Shelley’s deletion of ‘real’ sisters shows how clearly he was substituting his own chosen ‘philosophical family’ for the family of flesh and blood at Field Place, who had betrayed him. Hogg and himself, Shelley explained, already considered ‘our property as common’, and they were eagerly anticipating the moment when Miss Hitchener would do the same. He signed off rapturously, ‘Sister of my soul adieu. With I hope eternal love your — Percy Shelley.’ The usual ‘Bysshe’ was dropped presumably as a gesture of democratic good faith; for Bysshe, after all, had become a weapon to beat the aristocracy with their own misdeeds.