Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Next appeared an intensification of the ‘ghostly’ talk, the grim gothic fantasies, with which he partly amused and partly frightened Harriet. At their most extreme, the fantasies came near to hallucinations, but this was rare, and Shelley knew when they had occurred, and distinguished them from reality. The outlet for his own tension, found in the tendency to terrorize his feminine companions, has been noted from his earliest childhood. The themes of ghosts and hauntings were endemic to his poetry, providing a powerful source of private imagery, which reflected his alienation from the society around him. Moreover, the imaginative investigation of these abnormal states in himself and in others, conducted almost in the spirit of the psychologist, had a permanent fascination for him, and later informed many of his prose speculations. The ‘antique castle’ and its ‘ghosts’ with which he taunted and discomforted Harriet at Keswick was a fairly mild example of what Shelley was capable of doing in this respect.

  The actual attack on Shelley that Sunday evening brought all this to a climax. The anger and dislike of the community finally manifested itself in a real assault. Shelley, always brave in the moment of physical crisis, was subsequently overcome by extreme ‘nerves’. By this one can understand that he probably had attacks of hysteria; at its most extreme this could involve a screaming fit and complete prostration, and he would have to be put to bed and nursed.[11] It was doubtless to help Harriet to cope with all this that the Calverts extended their timely invitation. After this Shelley would be weak, listless, unable to work, and have a tendency to sleepwalk at night and be plagued by bad dreams.

  As he recovered, Shelley began to dramatize what had actually occurred; Harriet’s anger seems to have been partly caused by the realization that she had been unduly frightened by Shelley’s accounts. Gradually, as he completely regained his normal state, the dramatized accounts would attain a more overtly gothic twist, making them both more grim and more humorously exaggerated. Thus the experience was brought more easily under control. Another, and more obvious defence mechanism was the way in which Shelley moved out of the district as soon as possible after the climactic incident. The definite decision that they were leaving for Dublin was given in Shelley’s first letter to Miss Hitchener after the attack, on 26 January.

  Just before they had left Keswick, there was a slight excitement about Harriet being pregnant. But it turned out to be a false alarm. Both were disappointed, Shelley saying that it was ‘a piece of good fortune I could not expect’.82 Children definitely fitted into Shelley’s idea of the commune. ‘I hope to have a large family of children,’ he confided to Miss Hitchener. ‘It will bind you and me close & Harriet.’ It was perhaps a slightly curious way of explaining his enthusiasm. Harriet was more immediately practical, but slightly wistful about it. ‘Now I can bear the Journey better than if I were you know what, which I do not expect will be the case for some time, years perhaps — but now adieu to that subject.’83 There is no further hint why Harriet did not expect to be pregnant for ‘years perhaps’, though writing from Dublin in February, Shelley again mentions the possibility of a ‘little stranger’.84 From the very beginning there is evidence in the Hitchener correspondence, that Shelley’s sexual life with Harriet was not satisfying. Subsequent remarks made by Shelley confirm this. Harriet always remained silent. Nevertheless Shelley found her deeply attractive, and made a motif of her radiant glance and gorgeous hair. At Keswick he wrote her a little clumsy two stanza poem which is full of gratitude and reassurance. The second stanza is:

  O Ever while this frail brain has life

  Will it thrill to thy love-beaming gaze,

  And whilst thine eyes with affection gleam

  It will worship the spirit within.

  And when death comes

  To quench their fire

  A sorrowful rapture their dimness will shed

  As I bind me tight

  With thine auburn hair

  And die, as I lived, with thee.85

  Harriet came out well from the crisis at Keswick. It was the first time in her life that she had been called upon to act with some independence. Instead of being organized by Shelley, she had had to organize him; to arrange the move to the Calverts, to judge the seriousness of Shelley’s symptoms and the general situation, to correspond with Shelley’s intellectual partner Miss Hitchener. She did all this effectively, and Shelley found a new appreciation for her. From this time on her letters and postscripts became a central part of Shelley’s story.

  Harriet was not as politically radical as Shelley, but she had her own strong sympathies which she could express with boldness and simplicity. ‘I cannot wait till Summer,’ she wrote to Miss Hitchener, ‘you must come to us in Ireland. I am Irish, I claim kindred with them; I have done with the English, I have witnessed too much of John Bull and I am ashamed of him.’86 Often in her talk and her actions she unconsciously mimicked her husband, using his phrases and gestures and references. But she was distinguished from him by her thoroughly feminine sense of proportion, and a very quick sense of the ridiculous. She even managed to tease Shelley in her own quiet way, which must have been very good for him; but she was too young and too inexperienced to stand up to him completely. She was easily overruled or overawed by him, and often refers, rather pathetically, to her own youth and ignorance in comparison with someone like Miss Hitchener.

  On 29 January, Shelley’s mood was fluctuating between expectancy and gloom. ‘I hope to be compelled to have recourse to laudanum no more; my health is reestablished and I am strong in hope and nerve; your hopes must go with me. I must have no horrible forebodings. Everybody is not killed that goes to Dublin — perhaps many are now on the road for the very same purpose as that which we propose.’87 Harriet also noted that the reports from Ireland were bad, but still she hoped ‘Percy will escape all prosecutions’.88 Leaving the neighbourhood, in which they had made both known and unknown enemies, was clearly a relief to them all. They loaded several stout trunks with books and belongings; Shelley carried pistols and laudanum; and the manuscripts of the pamphlet, the broadsheet, and the collection of poems — the sacred words of liberty — were stowed safely away in their baggage.

  On 3 February, as the little party waited for their boat in the unsettled weather and rain at Whitehaven, they drew together all their physical and emotional resources, and concentrated, as Shelley said, on the greater object, ‘the welfare of general man’.89 The new contact opened with Godwin was a great inspiration at this time. As they embarked, Shelley fired off one last letter to Miss Hitchener. The packet was to leave at 12 midnight, stopping at the Isle of Man on the way. They were glad to leave Whitehaven, ‘a miserable manufacturing seaport Town’, where the Inn was horrible. The sea looked rough and there was talk of a storm. Shelley’s thoughts dwelt briefly on the lost comforts of the Calverts’ house and especially Mrs Calvert’s kindness. But their spirits were excellent, their purpose determined, and Shelley struck a note of valiant confidence. ‘To give you an idea of the perfect fearlessness with which Harriet and Eliza accompany my attempt, they think of no inconveniences but those of a wet night and sea-sickness, which in fact we find to be the only real ones. — Assassination either by private or public enemies appears to me to be the phantoms of a mind whose affectionate friendship has outrun the real state of the case.’90 He closed the note with an unexpected little sally. ‘Pray what are you to be called when you come to us for Eliza’s name is Eliza and Miss Hitchener is too long too broad and too deep. Adieu. Your P.B. Shelley.’91

  The crossing was very rough. It took nearly thirty hours, and they were swept far up into the North of Ireland. They were all exhausted on arrival. But no one was sick; and there were no assassinations. Their mission had begun.

  [1] After acting faithfully as Shelley’s literary agent in London during 1810 and spring 1811, Graham had fallen from favour. Like John Grove, he had apparently made an offer for Elizabeth Shelley’s hand, and Shelley was overwhelmed by feelings of betrayal. Stories of adultery be
tween Graham and Mrs Timothy Shelley — which Shelley had dismissed as a joke in May (Letters, 1, No. 71, p. 85) — were now resurrected as hard facts, and Shelley wrote bitterly to his mother: ‘I suspect your motives for so violently so persecutingly desiring to unite my sister Elizabeth to the music master Graham, I suspect that it was intended to shield yourself . . . .’ Mrs Shelley, like Timothy, was now also seen as a sexual hypocrite and family tyrant; and Graham’s role was that of a mere pawn in the emotional drama. There is no independent evidence of adultery, nor did Elizabeth marry the unfortunate music-master. The episode throws light on the intensity of Shelley’s feelings both for his mother and his sister, and the frailty of his early friendships.

  [2]This interpretation is strongly supported by comparable events and liaisons in spring 1813, and again in spring 1815. See Chapters 9 and 11.

  [3]Both poets were in the middle of a bitter quarrel, which seems to have been started by a misunderstanding of certain remarks that Wordsworth made to Coleridge’s host in London Basil Montagu, about Coleridge being ‘a rotten drunkard’ and ‘an absolute nuisance in his family’. See Mary Moorman, Wordsworth: A Biography, 1965, 11, pp. 199–201.

  [4]E. P. Thompson has written: ‘It is true that Napoleon’s Continental System and the retaliatory Orders in Council [of Lord Liverpool’s administration] had so disrupted the market for British textiles that the industries of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands were stagnant. Both war and successive bad harvests had contributed to the raising of the price of provisions to “famine” heights. But this will not do as an explanation of Luddism; it may help to explain its occasion, but not its character.’ The Making of the English Working Class, 1968, p. 593.

  [5]It went through varied vicissitudes but it was never finally printed in Shelley’s lifetime though some of the poems appeared in the Esdaile MS Notebook. See Chapter 3, Ref. 7.

  [6]Shelley had been introduced to Southey by William Calvert, whom he had met at Greystoke. Calvert, whose brother had befriended Wordsworth, had instantly struck both Shelley and Harriet with his earnest, sympathetic gaze, so that they remarked upon it in their letters. Calvert seemed to know all about the Held Place and Oxford background; he helped the Shelleys with practical details like getting the rent on Chesnut Cottage reduced to a guinea a week, and supplying linen. Shelley, incidentally, wrote to Medwin that the rent was 30 shillings.

  [7]It is remarkable to compare the impressions of William Hazlitt, who saw both men in their youth, and described them in similar language and tone. Of Southey he wrote ‘Mr Southey, as we formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. . . . It was the dawn of Liberty that still tinged his cheek, a smile between hope and sadness that still played upon his quivering lip. . . . He was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world.’ (From The Spirit of the Age, 1824.) Compare this with p. 362.

  [8]It had first been published in The Morning Post, 6 September 1799.

  [9]The original of this poem was probably the one Shelley tried to sell at Oxford for Peter Finnerty’s benefit; its subject of the social injustice of warfare would have been particularly suitable. The poem is worth reading in full.

  [10] Dowden’s ‘summary’ of this report, which has been consistently given in previous biographies, altered the whole emphasis of the news article, and by suppressing circumstantial details, contrived to make the whole incident inherently unlikely. (Dowden, I, p. 227.) Like many other writers, Dowden found Shelley’s ‘hallucinations’ very convenient. See also Ref. 76.

  [11] Later, when Shelley was on the Continent, we have several detailed records of such hysterical attacks; they are also connected with the early somnambulism which Medwin noted.

  ≠5. Irish Revolutionaries: 1812

  The Shelleys finally reached Dublin, after a laborious coach-journey southwards, late on the ‘night of 12 February 1812, and put up at the first available hotel. The next day Shelley took first-floor rooms at No. 7 Sackville Street, with a wrought-iron balcony suspended elegantly over the busy thoroughfare. The house was owned by a prosperous woollen draper, and Sackville Street was in the thriving commercial quarter, with the city centre just a few minutes’ walk away. Shelley posted a five-line note to Miss Hitchener to say that they had all arrived safely, but forgot to include their new address; Harriet slipped it in as a postscript with the injunction, ‘write soon’. In the evening the three of them stood on their balcony and gazed round at the bustling city which, over the next six weeks, was to provide Shelley with the most intensive period of practical political education that he experienced in his life.

  The following morning, St Valentine’s Day, Shelley made his opening moves. He took the introductory letter that Godwin had sent him at Keswick, and left it at the house of the Irish barrister and Master of the Rolls, John Philpot Curran, on St Stephen’s Green.[1] On his way back, at Winetavern Street he found a printer, Isaac Eton, who was prepared to set up the manuscript of his first Irish pamphlet, An Address to the Irish People. Eton promised delivery of 1,500 copies within the week. During the afternoon Shelley picked up a newspaper, probably an American one, as these were available in Dublin, and read with ecstatic delight an article on the republican revolution that had broken out in Mexico at the end of 1810, led first by the liberal priest Miguel Hidalgo, and, after his execution, by José Morelos. He rushed back to Sackville Street to tell Harriet and Eliza, and in the enthusiasm of the moment they felt as if the forces of freedom were breaking out simultaneously all over the globe. Shelley sat down and wrote:

  Earth’s remotest bounds shall start

  Every despot’s bloated cheek,

  Pallid as his bloodless heart

  Frenzy, woe, and dread shall speak . . .

  The poem, ‘To the Republicans of North America’, as he wrote it that day in five stanzas, celebrated his American ‘brothers’ and called on the great Ecuadorian volcano Cotopaxi to blast out the news of freedom across the mountain-tops of the whole American continent:

  Cotopaxi! bid the sound

  Through thy sister mountains ring,

  Till each valley smile around

  At the blissful welcoming!

  This was the first time that he used one of his favourite images, the erupting volcano which symbolizes the egalitarian revolution in society and the revolution of love in the human heart.[2] The idea of worldwide revolution constantly recurred to Shelley in moments of optimism throughout his life, and he eventually incorporated it in his theory of the evolution of Liberty through human history. Worldwide revolution was also one of the secret articles of the Illuminists.

  In this poem Shelley also touched on the problem that was to haunt him with increasing perplexity during his time in Dublin, the question of violent revolution. Could bloodshed ever be justified in the cause of freedom? Using the renowned image of the Liberty Tree, which had been on the lips of both Thomas Jefferson and Barère in the National Convention,1 Shelley wrote confidently:

  Blood may fertilize the tree

  Of new bursting Liberty

  Let the guiltiness then be

  On the slaves that ruin wreak

  On the unnatural tyrant-brood

  Slow to peace and swift to blood.2

  Writing to Miss Hitchener that evening, and uncertain ‘whether our letters be inspected or not’, he adopted a less fiery tone and promised her that his conduct in Dublin would be marked by ‘openness and sincerity’, and that his writings should ‘breathe the spirit of peace, toleration, and patience’. When he copied out the poem for her, he omitted the blood-fertilizing stanza, which in his notebook is the penultimate one. But he could not suppress his enthusiasm which was so great that he had actually persuaded Eliza to agree to edit a selection of Tom Paine’s works that they might print in Dublin to help educate the working classes, though just at that moment Eliza was ‘making a
red cloak which will be finished before dinner’. He was full of printing schemes, and was trying to get hold of the works of Benjamin Flower, the radical propagandist and agitator who had edited the Cambridge Intelligencer during the French Revolution, and later founded the Political Register which was eventually taken over by William Cobbett. His own pamphlets, wrote Shelley, would contain ‘downright proposals for instituting associations for bettering the condition of human kind. I even I, weak young poor as I am will attempt to organize them. The society of peace and love! . . . This is a crisis for the attempt.’3

  Four days later the first sheets came off Eton’s press; they were almost illegibly printed on bad paper, and the whole pamphlet ran to the absurd length of thirty pages. Shelley was delighted nevertheless, and sent off proofs to Miss Hitchener. The style, he assured her, ‘is adapted to the lowest comprehension that can read’.4 By the 24th, the Address was published, and he sent a copy to her, with a rapturous letter: ‘let us mingle our identities inseparably, and burst upon tyrants with the accumulated impetuosity of our acquirements and resolutions. I am eager, firm, convinced.’ Godwin too was immediately sent a copy, with the promise of a second pamphlet already in the press: ‘a crisis like this’, Shelley repeated enthusiastically to Godwin, ‘ought not to be permitted to pass unoccupied or unimproved’.5

  The Address now had to be distributed, and the vigour with which Shelley undertook this is one of the most impressive features of his whole stay. Scores of copies were mailed to prominent liberals like Curran and Hamilton Rowan.[3] No less than sixty copies were sent out to public houses in the centre and surrounds of the city — an apt method in Dublin, which he had learnt from Paine’s experiences. He hired a servant especially to distribute copies, with instructions when to give them away and when to sell them, depending on the look of the potential customer. Shelley himself took copies into the streets, throwing them into passing carriages and open windows, pushing them into the hands of beggars, drunkards and street ladies. Harriet sometimes went with him, delighting in Shelley’s passionate eagerness, and yet laughing at him too: ‘We throw them out of [the] window and give them to men that we pass in the streets; for myself I am ready to die of laughter when it is done and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman’s hood of a cloak. She knew nothing of it and we passed her. I could hardly get on my muscles were so irritated.’6 In the evenings Shelley stood on the balcony at Sackville Street watching for a passer-by who looked ‘likely’, and then tossing down a pamphlet.