Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Working on the basis of equality, armed with their own library, farming their own farm, encircled even with their own pupils, they thus hoped to make Nantgwillt a truly radical centre dedicated to ‘plans, ideas communicated ameliorated & passed through the fire of unbiased discussions’, and to no less than the ‘immediate energizing of these reforms which the thoughtless and the everyday beings cannot conceive of as practicable or useful’.21 For the first time since his elopement, Shelley saw immediately within his grasp the possibility of setting up a living community of like spirits.

  But it was not to be. The first hint of trouble to come appeared in a letter from Miss Hitchener at the end of April. People in Sussex were talking; there were rumours going about concerning her and Shelley. Captain Pilfold, their own mentor, was looking doubtful and she herself was worried. At first Shelley reacted scornfully, dismissing her worries with an indignant flourish. ‘Oh my dearest friend do not think of not living with us. What! because a few paltry village gossips repeat some silliness of their own invention till they believe it shall those resolves be shaken which ought to survive the shock of elements and crush of worlds? What is there in the Capt.’s disapproval? he has been an uncle to me, I owe him gratitude for his kindness — but am I prescribed to take his word. I have examined this affair on every side, & withdraw not an iota of my former convictions.’22

  Further letters reached Nantgwillt, and it emerged that Portia’s father was throwing his weight against the plan too. On 30 April Shelley wrote to him. Shelley must have realized how delicate was the situation. There was the relationship between father and unmarried daughter; the class division between the son of a baronet and a smuggler turned publican; and the ever-present problem of sexual scandal. Yet he wrote to Thomas Hitchener of Friar’s Oak without a vestige of tact: ‘Sir — I am your daughters friend, of whom you may have heard her speak. . . . Sir, my moral character is unimpeached & unimpeachable. I hate not calumny so much as I despise it. What the world thinks of my actions ever has, & I trust ever will be a matter of the completest indifference. Your daughter shares this sentiment with me, & we both are resolved to refer our actions to one tribunal only, that which Nature has implanted in us.’ This was a disastrous lapse and can only have confirmed Mr Hitchener’s worst fears. It was a lapse typical of Shelley, typical of his blind self-assertion and sudden explosions of high mindedness. The letter went on to assure Mr Hitchener that Mrs Shelley was equally determined that Elizabeth should ‘share the prosperity or adversity of her lot with us’. He concluded with a remark that was probably well-intentioned, but somehow came out in the context as a patronizing sneer. ‘I understand that there is woven in the composition of your character a jealous watchfulness over the encroachments of those who happen to be borne to more wealth and name than yourself. — You are perhaps right. It need not be exerted now. I have no taste for displaying genealogies, nor do I wish to seem more important than I am.’23

  The following evening Shelley sat up late, with Harriet once more tossing feverishly in her bed, ‘so languid that she can scarcely speak’, and wrote passionately to Miss Hitchener. He told her about his letter-writing to her father and also to Captain Pilfold. ‘I can think with no patience,’ he wrote, his anger growing once more, ‘my toleration to the hateful race of vipers that crawl upon this earth is almost exhausted when I find they have stung thee.’ Then, growing calmer again with the act of writing, he advised her more sensibly: ‘Your father and the Capt. are near you, we are far; & yet my friend when you hear their arguments, persuasions, & threats, I think you sometimes turn your mind towards us, & ask, “What would Percy’s little circle think of this; what would they say?” Adieu. You will hear from me soon at greater length as I have much to say, & much to answer. Yours indissolubly PBS.’24

  By the end of May, Harriet was convalescing, and the fever had gone. Shelley was immensely relieved at this, and more confident at the outcome of events. Quoting Macbeth he told Miss Hitchener — ‘but screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail’. Yet the rumours going around Hurstpierpoint continued to grow. As Shelley put it, acidly: ‘That you are to be my Mistress! that you refused it whilst I was single, but that my marriage takes away all objections that before stood in the way of this singular passion. — They certainly seem to have acquired a taste for fabricating the most whimsical and impossible crimes.’25

  Shelley explained the opposition to his plans not in terms of moral bigotry or Mrs Pilfold’s ‘extemporaneous effusions’, but in specifically political terms. He believed that what he had excited was, ultimately, the force of political reactionism, and he put it as such to Miss Hitchener. ‘Now my friend are we or are we not to sacrifice an attachment in which far more than you & I are immediately implicated, in which far more than these dear beings are remotely concerned; and to sacrifice to what? — To the world. — To the swinish multitude, to the undiscriminate million such as burnt the House of Priestly, such as murdered Fitzgerald,[2] such as erect Barracks in Marylebone, such as began, & such as continue this libertycide war, such wretches as dragged Redfern to slavery — or (equal in unprincipled cowardice) the slaves who permit such things . . . .’26

  From what is now known of the Home Office and Post Office investigation at the end of April, it seems that Shelley was more right than he realized. It seems highly likely that the inquiry instigated in Sussex by the Postmaster-General, and the decision to set a watch on Elizabeth Hitchener, was the real source of the ‘rumours’ which began to circulate at this time. The order to discover if there was any connection between her and Shelley can only have meant that their correspondence was being intercepted and opened, and that inquiries were being made locally about Miss Hitchener’s day-to-day activities. In small rural communities such as those at Hurstpierpoint and Cuckfield, it is unlikely that news of this had not crept around the social grapevine.

  Shelley now tried to convince Captain Pilfold that what he was planning need not upset established morality. But Pilfold, who was still considering Shelley’s financial affairs, remained uneasy. ‘The Capt. told me that the reports were as you stated them to be,’ Shelley informed Miss Hitchener in rather a more grave tone. ‘He professed to disbelieve the Mistress-business, but asserted that I certainly was very much attached to you. I certainly should feel quite as inclined to deny my own existence as to deny this latter charge . . . .’ Immediately following this news of Captain Pilfold’s objections, Shelley sent a caution to Miss Hitchener which suggests that the Captain had made some reference to rumours of government investigation. ‘Tell me in your next how your political affairs get on. Who are your agents? What have you done? Take care of letting any of the Declarations get into the hands of priests or aristocrats. Adieu.’27 But of course it was too late.

  Shelley had now effectively alienated what little support he had in Sussex. Mr Hitchener wrote a stiff refusal to allow his daughter to go to Wales, which Shelley answered with furious and fruitless rhetoric, expending his question marks on the unresponsive air. ‘How are you entitled to do this? who made you her governor? Did you receive this refusal from her to communicate to me? . . . Your ideas of Propriety (or to express myself clearer, of morals) are all founded on considerations of profit.’ Perhaps Shelley thought the best policy now was to force an angry separation between father and daughter, since it would at least help to make up Miss Hitchener’s mind for her.

  But much more important than Mr Hitchener’s disapproval was Captain Pilfold’s. It struck at the root of Shelley’s plans. Medwin and Captain Pilfold met on 23 May to discuss the lease of Nantgwillt. Despite the £1,000 of to stock be purchased, Captain Pilfold might still have been disposed to help his nephew if he had been convinced that the Nantgwillt scheme was a sound one. But instead he saw all manner of social and political disgrace threatening. The following day Medwin wrote to inform Shelley that ‘Captain Pilfold and myself are under the Necessity of Declining any further Concern in the Transaction’.28 The draft lease was r
eturned to James Davies, the owner’s solicitors in Kingston, by the next post. In effect this meant the end of Shelley’s Welsh plan. The chance for setting up the Nantgwillt community had been lost.

  On Saturday, 6 June, Mr Hooper forced them to quit the lovely farmhouse, and a disconsolate baggage train crossed over the valley and put up rather shame-facedly at Thomas Grove’s house of Cwm Elan. They found Mrs Grove to be pleasant, ‘tho too formal to be agreeable’ on this occasion; and Mr Grove seemed to act rather distantly. Altogether, as Harriet put it, ‘you may guess how we pass our time’.29 For a moment their plans were chaotic. Shelley’s first reaction was to throw everything up and talk of going to Italy until he came of age in 1814, for until then ‘the same difficulty will attend us wherever we go’. Italy might also be beneficial to Shelley’s health which had come to worry them both as other plans went astray. He had recently been writing to Godwin that ‘until my marriage my life had been a series of illness, as it was of a nervous, or spasmodic nature, it in a degree incapacitated me for study . . .’30[4] The Italian plan depended on securing passports during a time of war, and Shelley realized that these might be difficult to obtain. In the meantime they might go to the seaside, in Cardiganshire perhaps, or further south, in Devon.

  Miss Hitchener wrote to suggest that they might all go and settle in Sussex, perhaps even at her own house in Hurstpierpoint? This might be cheap, but there were obvious strategic objections. ‘Might not our central situation with relation to all our well-meaning enemies expose us, & our views continually to their aggressions, which contemptible as they might be with respect to our own peace of mind, would assume an entirely different aspect with regard to our usefullness?’ — by which he meant political usefullness.31 There was also the possibility that Timothy might be so angry at their residence in Sussex that he would withdraw the vital quarterly allowance of fifty pounds.

  The last few letters from Cwm Elan were full of calculations about the expense of travelling in various directions. A journey to Sussex would cost them thirty pounds, but to Ilfracombe in Devon only eight pounds, and this was finally decisive. ‘With the difference of these two sums, a house is procurable at Ilfracombe or near it which shall be the sanctuary of happiness.’ It was decided that Miss Hitchener must take a coach to London as soon as she could arrange her affairs. She could stop the night at Mr Westbrook’s in Chapel Street, who was still regarded as a neutral party, and the next morning he could see her safely on to the Barnstaple coach. No doubt the well-meaning enemies would attempt to prevent her departure, but ‘there is no necessity either to conceal or make public your departure. I recommend not secrecy, but calm firmness.’32 It was sad to be leaving their Welsh valley, and despite her fevers Harriet said she was ‘tied Leg and Wing’ to ‘this enchanting place’. For years afterwards she dreamed of returning.

  Shelley still managed to look ahead for possible directions in which he could be useful — a word he used a lot during this period. He noticed an article in Hunt’s Examiner33 about radical publisher Daniel Eaton who had recently been tried and sentenced for publishing the third part of Tom Paine’s attack on revealed religion in The Age of Reason, in a cheap mass-circulation edition. The Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough had sentenced Eaton to the relatively hard punishment of eighteen months imprisonment, with the unpleasant and rather medieval addition of two hours’ in the public pillory each month. Shelley saw the opportunity for a third public pamphlet and began to draft a defence of the free press.

  Meanwhile he took care to reaffirm his loyalty to Godwin, partly eclipsed since Dublin. He was responding to the need for a fatherly and authoritative figure which he still felt in moments of crisis, though he did not admit it to himself. The declaration of loyalty stemmed from quite genuine feelings of respect on his part, although it did not have quite so much doctrinal agreement behind it as Godwin might have wished. On 11 June he wrote from Cwm Elan: ‘I will no longer delay returning my grateful & cordial acknowledgements for your inestimable letter of March 31st. That it is most affectionate & kind I deeply feel & thankfully confess. I can return no other answer than that I will become all that you believe & wish me to be.’ He was anxious now to make amends. ‘I will endeavour to subdue the impatience of my nature so incompatible with true benevolence. I know that genuine Philanthropy does not permit its votaries to relax even when hope appears to languish, or to indulge bitterness of feeling against the worst the most mistaken of men. — To these faults in a considerable degree I plead guilty, at all events I have now a stimulus adequate to excite me to the conquest of them.’34 It was a warm and touching letter. In the intellectual presence of one he felt he could trust, Shelley’s sense of personal inadequacies was revealing. He was rarely able to admit his own impatience and his own bitterness of feeling; more usually he was ‘unimpeached and unimpeachable’.

  They left Cwm Elan about 20 June, planning to break their journey at the market town of Chepstow, in Monmouthshire, on the river Wye. At the last moment there was a panic concerning Miss Hitchener. It is not quite clear what this was, but it seems as if Shelley finally got to hear definite news of the Post Office investigation. On 18 June he dashed a quick note to her, more urgent than anything before. ‘Something on which we cannot calculate has happened. Means utterly unknown to us, have been practised upon you. — Friendship & justice command that we should do all that can be done.’35 He promised that once at Chepstow, Eliza would stay with the baggage, and he and Harriet would hurry by coach ‘across the country to you’. Meanwhile Miss Hitchener was to try and borrow money for the return journey with them from a Mr Howel at Hurstpierpoint. Shelley treated it as a break for liberty. ‘Affairs have now arrived at a crisis, I perceive by your letter the necessity of our journey, it is playing a momentous game, it demands coolness & resolution — such coolness as contempt for our adversaries has given Harriet and me. Calm yourself collect yourself my dearest friend. . . .’ As for ‘Mr & Mrs Pilfold & Co’, ‘even now I can sometimes not help smiling tho the smile is a bitter one, when the train of their conspiracies comes across me.’ The liberation date was fixed as Thursday, 25 June; perhaps not that very day, but positively that week, Shelley promised. ‘Prepare yourself to leave a scene rendered hateful by impotent malice,’ he crowed.36

  But in the event, and despite all his protestations, he never went to Hurstpierpoint at all. Arriving at Chepstow about 24 June, the little party — Shelley, Harriet, Eliza and Dan their Irish servant — went to look over a house that Godwin had heard of from a friend. But they found the house ‘not half built’, as Harriet said, ‘and by no means large enough for our family’, by which she meant all those whom Shelley intended to invite to join them. Moreover the country around Chepstow was dismal after Cwm Elan. They wrote the owner, a certain Mr Eton, a refusal, and posted it via Skinner Street. After anxiously checking their remaining money, they turned westwards and headed along the north Somerset and Devon coast with the vague target of Ilfracombe. It is not known what excuse was sent to Miss Hitchener for this failure of the promised liberation party.

  About 28 June they left the main coastal road and began to descend a precipitous track through the cliffs, engulfed in rich flowering foliage, with a little river curling and rushing in the gorges below them. After nearly an hour’s dusty descent, for the track wound down for about two miles, a beautiful vista of glittering blue sea, rocky foreshore and beached fishing boats, enclosed in a tiny shingle bay, suddenly opened in front of the eyes of the tired travellers. They had arrived at Lynmouth. It was natural Shelley country.

  Among the cluster of little stone and whitewash houses, with their low thatch roofs and deeply recessed windows and doorways, peering out to sea under shaded brows, they found a single cottage unoccupied. It stood a little way back from the beach on rising ground where the trackway met the two branches of the Lyn river, crossed and ran down parallel to the sea. The cottage was roughly built, but sprawled into a pleasant series of adjoining rooms which provided Shelley onc
e more with the chance to bring his friends together. ‘The poverty and humbleness of the apartments is compensated for by their number, & we can invite our friends with a consciousness that there is enclosed space wherein they may sleep.’37 Around them the cliffs were covered in a wild profusion of plants and bushes, with trees shimmering through various shades of green and mauve, and dotted by vivid clumps of pink and purple rhododendrons. The sun slid round the rim of the steeply wooded cove, which faced north, never far from the over-arching treetops. As its angle flattened towards mid-afternoon the village was filled with a curious blue-green haze. The stone shoulders of the cliffs hunched tightly and defensively around the village and the cottage windows gazed out on the sharply restricted band of open sea to the north.

  Harriet was radiant with surprise and delight; it was as beautiful as Nantgwillt and it had ‘a fine bold sea’ as well. She wrote joyfully to Mrs Nugent: ‘We have taken the only cottage there was, which is most beautifully situated, commanding a fine view of the sea, with mountains at the side and behind us. Vegetation is more luxuriant here than in any part of England. We have roses and myrtles creeping up the sides of the house, which is thatched at the top. It is such a little place that it seems more like a fairy scene than anything in reality. All the houses are built in the cottage style, and I suppose there are not more than 30 in all.’38 The post came in twice a week from Barnstaple, some eighteen miles away to the south-west. The trackway was so steep no carriage would venture down it, but a horse could be ridden up with care. Getting Shelley’s heavy trunks of books and pamphlets down the hill was a memorable business which required local labour. It was an event that aroused a certain amount of speculation in the village, and caused sufficient remark for it to appear in a government report that reached Lord Sidmouth’s desk two and a half months later. ‘Mr Shelley had with him large chests, which were so heavy scarcely three men could lift them, which were supposed to contain papers.’39 Shelley also made his mark on the bi-weekly postal system, supplying it with more letters than the rest of the village put together, usually more than a dozen at a time and on one occasion, as Sidmouth was informed, ‘so many as sixteen letters by the same post’. It was generally felt that Shelley must be, for all his youthful looks, a ‘somebody’, and as like as not a somebody up to no good. He was watched at Lynmouth from the start.