Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Behind Shelley’s idea of the ‘quiet revolution’, the revolution from within, rising silently through society like a yeast from an ever-extending chain of linked associations, lay the unmistakable form of Illuminism. At a time when the Corresponding Societies and early Union clubs had been suppressed, and even William Godwin could not conceive of anything in the middle ground between fireside discussion and mob violence, Shelley secretly turned to the Masonic conception of revolutionary brotherhood as a viable form of reform organization. He was attracted especially by its occultism, its tight communal solidarity, and ‘seeding’ of subversive political ideas. He never wrote of Illuminism to Godwin, who would have been appalled, but to Miss Hitchener in this same letter he recommended the authoritative book on the subject, by the Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, a translation in four volumes, 1797–8. ‘To you who know how to distinguish truth, I recommend it.’21[7] This letter marked the high point of Shelley’s political hopes in Ireland.

  But from March onwards, Shelley knew the tide was turning inexorably against his whole mission. He gradually became disillusioned by the lessons of the Fishamble Street meeting, although it had brought him into contact with the liberal editor and publicist John Lawless.[8] Moreover, he was shaken by Godwin’s first reactions to his campaign which were just beginning to reach him. For the first time too, he seemed suddenly to become aware of just how bad the conditions were in Dublin itself. On 8 March he wrote bitterly to Godwin, as if his eyes had been opened for the first time:

  I had no conception of the depth of human misery until now. — The poor of Dublin are assuredly the meanest and most miserable of all. In their narrow streets thousands seem huddled together — one mass of animated filth! . . . These were the persons to whom in my fancy I had addressed myself; how quickly were my views on this subject changed! . . . I do not think that my book can in the slightest degree tend to violence . . . . A remedy must somewhere have a beginning.22

  By 10 March, the impressions of physical suffering and degradation had become almost overwhelming. Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener were now steadily emptied of political theory which was replaced by detailed descriptions of human squalor, poverty and individual injustice. He explained that he was writing to Sir Francis Burdett to help prosecute the case of a man called Redfern, an expatriate Irishman who had been ‘torn from his wife and family in Lisbon’ and pressed into the army. On one occasion Shelley had found a little boy, ‘starving with his mother, in a hiding place of unutterable filth and misery’ and had rescued him and was ‘about to teach him to read’ when they were seized by constables. The boy ‘has been snatched on a charge of false and villainous effrontery to a magistrate of Hell, who gave him the choice of the tender or military service. He preferred neither yet was compelled to be a soldier.’ It was the poor Cumberland woman’s story all over again.

  Everywhere Shelley met the horrors of poverty and cruelty on the streets, and whenever he intervened, the result only increased his anger and despair. ‘A widow woman with three infants were taken up by two constables. — I remonstrated, I pleaded. — I was everything that my powers could make me. The landlady was overcome. The constable relented, and when I asked him if he had a heart, he said “to be sure he had as well as another man, but — that he was called out to business of this nature sometimes twenty times in a night”. The woman’s crime was stealing a penny loaf. — She is however drunken, & nothing that I or anyone can do can save her from ultimate ruin and starvation.’23 He was also disenchanted with the Irish reformers whom he had originally been so eager to contact: ‘I have daily numbers of people calling on me; none will do. The Spirit of Bigotry is high.’

  At the very moment when he realized just how radical a reform was required to reach these poor miseries on the street, he found his own idealistic schemes were faltering. ‘The Association proceeds slowly, and I fear will not be established. Prejudices are so violent in contradiction to my principles that more hate me as a freethinker, than love me as a votary of Freedom . . . . I have at least made a stir here, and set some men’s minds afloat. I may succeed, but I fear I shall not in the main object of Associations.’ Walking round the streets he had entered so eagerly, he felt disgusted and angry. ‘I am sick of this city & long to be with you and peace,’ he told Miss Hitchener. ‘The rich grind the poor into abjectness and then complain that they are abject. — They goad them to famine and hang them if they steal a loaf . . . . My own dearest friend in the midst of these horrors thou art our star of peace.’24 He vented some of his frustration by writing a violent letter to the ‘Editor of the panegyrizing paper’, the Dublin Weekly Messenger, which had carried an article describing his mission in glowing terms, on 7 March.[9]

  Few of Shelley’s contacts in Dublin had turned out well. His introduction to Curran did not mature, and though he dined with him twice, Curran refused to talk politics and only angered Shelley with his ribald humour. Godwin told Shelley that his pamphlet had probably ‘frightened him’. John Lawless, the editor, sensing that Shelley had money to spend, promised him ‘a share in the management of a paper’, and as March drew on, interested him in the publication of his Compendium of the History of Ireland which he was planning. Shelley undertook to raise some money for this venture, and it was some time before he learnt to distrust ‘Honest Jack’. Lawless turned out to be the author of the ‘panegerizing’ article.

  The best friend that the Shelleys made in Dublin was Catherine Nugent, a spinster of solid artisan background and strong republican sympathies. During the United Irishmen’s rebellion she had regularly visited the political prisoners awaiting trial or execution in Dublin jail. She now supported herself by doing needlework at a furrier’s, and had met Shelley through reading one of his pamphlets. Catherine Nugent was a great practical help and support to them all during the difficult month of March, and by the 10th they had moved from Sackville Street to take new rooms at 17 Grafton Street, since Mrs Nugent lived at No. 101.

  When Shelley, with his usual attentiveness to new female company, inquired if Mrs Nugent was married, he received the conclusive reply that ‘her country was her only love’.25 Harriet found her ‘an agreeable, sensible woman’, and formed a close friendship with her that lasted over several years.[10] She corresponded freely with Mrs Nugent until her death, and did not hesitate to write frankly or even jokingly of Shelley. Harriet never quite liked to do this when writing to Miss Hitchener, the Sister of his Soul. Shelley had recently taken up vegetarianism, almost an act of defiance, at this time, and Harriet joined the ‘Pythagorean’ system. On 15 March she wrote, ‘Mrs Shelley’s comps. to Mrs Nugent, and expects the pleasure of her company to dinner, 5 o’clock, as a murdered chicken has been prepared for her repast.’26 Three days later Mrs Nugent was again visiting, and sat in their room ‘talking to Percy about Virtue’, as Harriet put it for Miss Hitchener’s benefit.

  During these mid-March days Shelley’s political optimism continued to wane. ‘As to an Association my hopes grow daily fainter on the subject, as my perceptions of its necessity increase.’27 He still looked forward to the ‘command of a paper, with Mr Lawless’, though even Lawless had made it clear that he regarded Shelley’s ultimate hopes as ‘visionary’. A new note of despondency crept in with the rumour that Habeas Corpus was about to be suspended, and there were possibilities of surprise arrests. Harriet had been ‘very much alarmed at the intelligence’ of this, though she hoped it was ill-founded: ‘if it is not where we shall be is not known, as from Percy’s having made himself so busy in the cause of this poor Country, he has raised himself many enemies who would take advantage of such a time & instantly execute their vengeance upon him’. To anger and disgust, fear had now been added; Shelley’s period of education in practical politics was continuing rapidly towards its end.

  On 18 March, almost exactly five weeks after Shelley’s arrival, a letter of grand remonstrance arrived from Godwin. He had read with mounting horror an extract from
Shelley’s second pamphlet, Proposals for an Association in the Weekly Messenger. The Advertisement had read: ‘I propose an Association for the following purposes: first, of debating the propriety of whatever measures may be agitated; and, secondly, for carrying, by united and individual exertion, such measures into effect when determined on. That it should be an Association diffusing knowledge and virtue throughout the poorer classes of society in Ireland . . . .’ To these activist proposals, Godwin demanded:

  Can anything be plainer than this? Do you not here exhort persons, who you say ‘are of scarcely greater elevation in the scale of intellectual being than the oyster: thousands huddled together, one mass of animated filth’ to take the redress of grievances into their own hands. . . . Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood! If your associations take effect to any extensive degree, tremendous consequences will follow, and hundreds, by their calamities and premature fate, will expiate your error. And then what will it avail you to say, ‘I warned them against this; when I put the seed into the ground, I laid my solemn injunctions upon it, that it should not germinate?’28

  From this time forth Shelley was never absolutely frank in his letters to Godwin about his most extreme political views. In the Proposals Shelley had specifically derided the Godwinian approach to reform. Speaking of liberty, Shelley had written: ‘It will not be kept alive by each citizen sitting quietly by his own fireside and saying that things are going on well, because the rain does not beat on him, because he has books and leisure to read them, because he has money and is at liberty to accumulate luxuries to himself.’29 And again: ‘I think that individuals acting singly with whatever energy can never effect so much as a society.’

  Yet Shelley had seen enough of Dublin, and he was contemplating departure. Godwin’s letter, though he did not agree with, it, was the final stroke. ‘I have withdrawn from circulation the publications wherein I erred & am preparing to quit Dublin,’ he wrote repentantly to Godwin from Grafton Street. ‘The part of the City called the Liberty exhibits a spectacle of squalidness and misery such as might reasonably excite impatience in a cooler temperament than mine. But I submit. I shall address myself no more to the illiterate, I will look to events in which it will be impossible that I can share, and make myself the cause of an effect which will take place ages after I shall have mouldered into dust.’30 Reading this passage, Godwin later remarked that his disciple was going ‘from one extreme to the other’. This was true, for Shelley wanted to convince Godwin that he had acquiesced in his reasoning, while in fact he found Godwin’s remonstrance merely gave him a convenient way out of a position he had already decided to abandon.

  He did not give up the argument over associations though: they were ill-timed, but not dangerous. ‘My mind is by no means settled on the subject.’ He also omitted to tell Godwin about the newspaper and publishing scheme with Lawless, or the fact that he was already printing a new radical document, a Declaration of Rights which was soon to see very active service in Devon. ‘Fear no more for any violence or hurtful measures in which I may be instrumental in Dublin,’ he told Godwin soothingly, ‘I acquiesce in your decisions. I am neither haughty reserved or unpersuadable.’31

  Shelley now began a strategic retreat from Dublin. He sent instructions and explanations through Harriet to Miss Hitchener at Hurstpierpoint the same day. ‘Dispense the Declarations. Percy says the farmers are very fond of having something posted on their walls. Percy has sent you all his Pamphlets with the Declaration of Rights, which you will disperse to advantage. . . . All thoughts of an Association are given up as impracticable. We shall leave this noisy town on the 7th of April, unless the Habeas Corpus Act should be suspended, and then we shall be obliged to leave here as soon as possible.’ On the 20th Shelley hurried off a note to Medwin, his faithful financial standby, asking him to arrange a loan of £250 over eighteen months for Lawless’s book. ‘As you will see by the Lewes paper, I am in the midst of overwhelming engagements.’32 Miss Hitchener had been keeping the local Sussex press well primed with cuttings from the Dublin papers with a view to softening up the ground for Shelley’s next campaign, and his activities sounded more impressive in England than they really were in Dublin.

  For the Irish mission was a defeat. When Shelley did return to England it was not to carry the fight into any of the disturbed urban centres of the North or West — Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester or Carlisle. He sought rural seclusion to recoup his energies and meditate on what he had experienced. But if it was a defeat, it was also an invaluable lesson. The confrontation with the physical facts of poverty, disease and brute ignorance was an experience which never left Shelley, and they were to fill his best writing with images of macabre force. The issue of violent change was brought forward as a central question in his political thinking. The idea of the ‘association’, and of political change fertilized by tight-knit communities of advanced thought, was one that never left him, and he continued to experiment with it in his own pattern of living for the next ten years. Looking back at the whole thing two weeks later, he summed it up without prevarication or bravado. ‘The Habeas Corpus has not been suspended, nor probably will they do it. We left Dublin because I had done all that I could do, if its effects were beneficial they were not greatly so, I am dissatisfied with my success, but not with the attempt.’33

  The Shelleys finally departed from Dublin on Saturday, 4 April. They had sent ahead a large deal box containing the pamphlets, the broadsheets, the Declaration and a printed version of poor Redfern’s letter from the Portuguese army, the whole thing directed to Miss Hitchener as material for the development of the Lewes Association. They tried to persuade Mrs Nugent to join their little errant commune, but she looked up from her needlework and said simply ‘she had never been out of her country, and [had] no wish to leave it’.34 They did take with them the Irish servant who had first been employed in giving out pamphlets: his name was Dan Healy and Shelley had forgiven him for announcing that his master had peculiar political views since he was only ‘15 years of age’.35 Dan was now a dedicated member of the cause, and their only Irish convert. They left Dublin harbour tacking out to sea in a heavy headwind.

  [1] John Philpot Curran (1750–1817), lawyer and one-time radical whose appointment as Master of the Rolls (1806) signified the end of active social dissent. His itinerant daughter Aemelia later painted the famous flat-faced sentimental portrait of Shelley in Rome in 1819. See Chapter 20.

  [2] Like many untested revolutionaries, Shelley believed for a time that the two things were necessarily consequent upon one another. Though his beliefs changed, the eruptive symbol of the volcano remained, and he eventually drew an ink sketch of it in an Italian Notebook of 1821: Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 9, p. 336.

  [3]Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751–1834), an erstwhile member of the Society of United Irishmen, pamphleteer and propagandist.

  [4] The sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Faustus Socinus (nephew of Laelius Socinus), a figure calculated to appeal to Shelley. Socinus travelled from Siena to Cracow attacking fundamental Christian dogma such as the Divinity of Christ, the Trinity and Original Sin. He was a personality of hectic charm and welcome enlightenment in European university circles.

  [5] Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759–97), Author, radical feminist, educationalist, traveller. One of the most remarkable intellectual figures in the background of Shelley’s career. Here it is sufficient to note that she was a tutor in Ireland with the Mountcashell family (see Chapter 24); lived with the American Imlay in Paris during the Terror; published The Rights of Women in 1792; travelled alone through Scandinavia; and married William Godwin a few months before her death in 1797. Their love-child, also Mary, was aged 14 at the time of Shelley’s Irish trip.

  [6]The latter was achieved in 1829; the former has proved a rather more difficult objective.

  [7]Shelley’s autographed and annotated copy of Vol. 2 of Barruel is in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Its condition suggests that it was a consta
nt source of reference.

  [8]John Lawless (1773–1837), a stagey radical, who cultivated the use of his quizzing glass and his nickname ‘Honest Jack’. He published A Compendium of the History of Ireland in 1814, a republican view of the English colonization.

  [9]For once Shelley’s political instinct was sound: the editor of the Weekly Messenger was William Conway, a supposed liberal, who secretly corresponded with Lord Sidmouth at the Home Office on radical activities in Ireland. See MacCarthy, Shelley’s Early Life: From Original Sources, pp. 305–7.

  [10]Harriet’s letters to Mrs Nugent thus become one of our main sources of information concerning Shelley’s domestic affairs during the years 1811–14. Sadly, Harriet never saw Mrs Nugent again after this first acquaintance.

  6. A Radical Commune

  The crossing took them thirty-six hours of extremely rough sailing, during which time they had nothing to eat. They arrived off Holyhead at 2 a.m. on Monday, 6 April, and were put ashore on the beach nearly a mile from the inn. The sailors led the way with storm lanterns across the rocks and shingle in the pouring rain. Harriet survived the best, for she had curled up in a dry corner of the boat and slept placidly for almost the entire voyage. Both Shelley and Eliza were almost too weak and exhausted to cover the ground, but when at last they reached the inn Shelley surprised Harriet by ordering a large meal including meat. ‘You will think this very extraordinary,’ she wrote to Catherine Nugent.1

  Once recovered, they set off to find a new home and base for their activities. Shelley had long been planning to get Miss Hitchener to join them in Wales, and if possible to get Godwin and his family to come as well. But it was not easy to find the kind of place that would suit them; Shelley wanted considerably more than a cottage, but at the same time he could afford almost nothing in ready cash. Some kind of arrangement would have to be made to get a lease on security, or on borrowed capital. This meant finding a sympathetic landlord. They travelled rapidly southwards through Caernarvonshire and Merionethshire — ‘every Inn we stopped at was the subject of new hopes, and new disappointments’.2