Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  It was soon apparent that Shelley was resented strongly in those sections of the community influenced by men like Leeson and Evans, and that he in turn was angry and critical about much that met his eyes locally. From the start he felt that he was likely to be hounded and persecuted. ‘The society in Wales is very stupid,’ he wrote to Hogg, shortly before Christmas, ‘they are all aristocrats and saints: but that, I tell you, I do not mind in the least; the unpleasant part of the business is, that they hunt people to death, who are not likewise.’14 Although Williams remained friendly to Shelley, and was helping him with such things as his winter coal stock, Madocks himself does not seem to have been at Tremadoc to exert a moderating influence among the various parties. The business was to get very unpleasant indeed by the next spring.

  While Shelley worked for the Embankment he was also turning his spare hours into an intensive period of study, under Godwin’s general direction. The broad field was to be history, what Shelley sardonically called that ‘record of crimes and miseries’.15 Godwin argued that it depended on the selection of events one chose to make — ‘it is our own fault, therefore, if we do not select and dwell upon the best’. Godwin inspired Shelley with an ambitious and active approach to his self-education which ever after informed Shelley’s raging and voracious appetite for books. He especially encouraged him to ignore secondary and minor work as a substitute for the grand originals. ‘A true student’, Godwin told him, ‘is a man seated in a chair, and surrounded with a sort of intrenchment and breastwork of books. It is for boarding-school misses to read one book at one time.’ Did Shelley smile at that, thinking of Miss Hitchener? ‘Particularly when I am sifting out facts, either of science or history, I must place myself in the situation of a man making a book, rather than reading books. When I have studied the Grecian history in Homer, in Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, together with those of the moderns that are most capable, or most elaborate, in unfolding or appreciating the materials the ancients have left us, I shall then begin to know what Greece was. I need not, of course, mention how superior is the information and representation of contemporaries to those who come afterwards . . . .’16 Godwin firmly put Shakespeare and Milton ‘at the head of our poetry’, and Bacon and Milton ‘at the head of our prose’. These preferences were also passed on to Shelley, though as yet he read Greek only in translation. Of Shelley’s own taste, Godwin noted: ‘You have what appears to me a false taste in poetry. You love a perpetual sparkle and glittering, such as are to be found in Darwin, and Southey, and Scott and Campbell.’17

  The immediate result of Godwin’s advice and strictures was a series of enormous book-lists which went out to Hookham, and, spreading the load and also the debt, to Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, the bookseller and contributor to the Yellow Dwarf. Besides the works of the Greek and English classics which Godwin had recommended, Shelley was organizing his own intellectual odyssey. He ordered Aeschylus and Euripides, Sappho, Confucius, Plato, Kant and Spinoza, and various English historians including Gibbon, whose sour elegance, surprisingly, attracted him throughout his life. Next came Moore’s Hindu Pantheon and Southey on Brazil, which interested Shelley as a revolutionary centre. There were also selected semi-scientific works, Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature; Lord Monboddo on The Origin and Process of Language; the French encyclopaedists; Trotter on The Nervous Temperament and on Drunkenness.18 Shelley made various astronomical inquiries: ‘You would very much oblige me if you would collect all possible documents on the Precession of the Equinoxes; as also anything that may throw light upon the question whether or no the position of the Earth on its poles is not yearly becoming less oblique?’19 Shelley digested this vast load rather unevenly, as might be expected. Nevertheless, the intensive period of research bore fruit in the quite extraordinarily ranging ‘Notes’ which he attached to Queen Mab, which were to run from classical authors on atheism to essays on vegetarianism and speculations on the astronomical layout of the universe.

  Despite the difficulties which Embankment affairs involved Shelley in, the composition of Queen Mab went on steadily. By the end of January 1813, Shelley was writing to Hookham that Queen Mab would be finished by March in ten cantos, and that the collection of short poems would also be ready. ‘The notes to QM will be long & philosophical. I shall take the opportunity which I judge to be a safe one of propagating my principles, which I decline to do syllogistically in a poem. A poem very didactic is I think very stupid.’20

  Of the short poems he remarked: ‘Some of the later ones have the merit of conveying a meaning in every word, and these all are faithful pictures of my feelings at the time of writing them, but they are in great measure abrupt & obscure. All breathing hatred to government & religion, but I think not too openly for publication. — One fault they are indisputably exempt from, that of being a volume of fashionable literature.’21

  Shelley was in an extremely didactic mood, inflamed no doubt by the visible contrast between the living conditions of the ‘aristocracts and saints’, and the labourers of Tremadoc who were now in the hardest part of winter, and always on the edge of starvation. It was a ‘Russian’ cold.22 The persistent story, unsupported by any documentary evidence, that Shelley went out and shot a farmer’s sheep caught in a bramble, may have its origin in one of Shelley’s more desperate attempts to help the labourers with food. Most of his own supplies, including food and coal, were only obtained on credit from the local shopkeepers — a fact that was to make him vulnerable to better-heeled opponents. In these spartan conditions, Shelley’s fanaticism was daily inflamed.

  To Hogg, he was beginning to posture again in his old manner of melodramatic self-projection. Writing of his adherence to ‘republicanism’ he delivered a superior flourish: ‘It certainly is far removed from pothouse democracy, & knows with what smile to hear the servile applause of an inconstant mob. — but though its cheek could feel without a blush the hand of insult strike, its soul would shrink neither from the scaffold nor the stake, nor from those deeds and habits which are obnoxious to slaves in Power.’23 Through this, suitably generalized for Hogg’s consumption, one can make out the lineaments of the struggle at Tremadoc.

  Harriet, speaking for them all, voiced a more general disenchantment in one of her missives to Mrs Nugent, which reflected in a feminine way much of the righteous fury with which Shelley himself judged the deleterious human effect of the Embankment on the very people it was designed to benefit. ‘All the good I wrote of Mr Madocks I now recant. I find I have been dreadfully deceived respecting that man.’ Gazing down from the south windows of Tan-yr-allt, she wrote: ‘The sea, which used to dash against the most beautiful grand rocks… was, to please his stupid vanity and to celebrate his name, turned from its course, and now we have for a fine bold sea, which there used to be, nothing but a sandy marsh uncultivated and ugly to the view.’ She added scornfully that the Embankment ‘viewed from the height looks as if a puff of wind from the mountains would send it to oblivion like its founder’s name.’ She deliberately took a remote and careless attitude to the very event which Williams, Leeson, Ellis-Nanney and the others most feared. Though the household at Tan-yr-allt was proud to consider itself ‘the means of saving the bank from utter destruction’, it was increasingly restless about the motives of the owners.24 Shelley’s passage in the affairs of Tremadoc grew less and less harmonious, and by early February he was saying that he had been ‘teazed to death for the last fortnight’.25

  Yet despite it all, Shelley still seems to have been remarkably happy at Tan-yr-allt. Harriet was now visibly pregnant, the baby was due in June, and the house seemed to him ‘extensive and tasty enough for the villa of an Italian prince.’26 In the evenings, ‘when I come home to Harriet I am the happiest of the happy’.27 He does not seem to have even considered leaving. Hogg was already invited to come to stay as early as possible in March, and to remain as long as he could. Hookham and his family had also been invited, for Shelley felt the young publisher was an i
mportant man to draw into his radical circle, and on 15 February Shelley was writing to convince him that August was much too late to arrive, why not June?28 The only unexpected absentee from these spring plans was Godwin, who had once again fallen temporarily out of favour. Harriet summarized: ‘He wanted Mr Shelley to join the Wig [sic] party, and do just as they pleased, which made me very angry, as we know what men the Wigs are now.’ Both the Sussex Whigs, and the Duke of Norfolk himself had turned down support for Madocks’s Embankment,29 and of course Madocks himself was in disgrace. ‘[Godwin] is grown old and unimpassioned, therefore is not in the least calculated for such enthusiasts as we are. He has suffered a great deal for his principles, but that ought to make him more staunch in them, at least it would me.’ In keeping with the spirit of the times, Harriet closed her letter to Mrs Nugent — ‘Adieu, dearest friend to liberty and truth.’30

  But around his own fireside, all was well. Shelley had even grown quite complacent about his family at Field Place, and his inheritance. ‘I do not see that it is in the interest of my Father to come to terms during my nonage, perhaps even not after. — Do you know I cannot prevail upon myself to care much about it. — Harriet is very happy as we are, & I am very happy.’ The regularity of retired country life seemed to suit him, and he mocked Hogg gently for his unhealthy existence. ‘I continue vegetable. Harriet means to be slightly animal until the arrival of spring. — My health is much improved by it, tho partly perhaps by my removal from your nerve racking & spirit quelling metropolis.’31 He was teaching Harriet Horace, and made Hogg promise to bring with him a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for her; in the meantime she had a ‘bold scheme’ of writing Hogg a Latin letter.32 But before their schemes for self-improvement, and for uniting the little circle, could come to fruition, circumstances once again overwhelmed them.

  February was a time of increasing tension at Tremadoc, for it was the month of the high spring tides. The previous year, the first winter of the completed Embankment, the disastrous breach had occurred on 14 February. Another breach this year would probably have been fatal for Madocks, who was already deeply in debt, and he would have been forced to declare himself bankrupt and abandon his whole North Wales scheme. It was absolutely essential that the workmen manned the Embankment, and kept up running repairs, with complete dedication and loyalty. Any form of labour unrest was anathema. John Williams, Leeson and the Ellis-Nanneys were all in a state of intense nervous expectation, as was the whole community. Matters were so tense that Mr Ellis-Nanney, on hearing vague rumours that part of the Embankment was improperly finished, had his wife write to Williams. Williams’s reply still exists,33 repeatedly reassuring them that nothing possible had been left undone: ‘God Forbid that he should have any such an idea,’ as Williams put it.

  But it was just at this time that Shelley, excited by other events elsewhere in England made a most inopportune display of his violent radical sympathies, which were greeted, in the circumstances, with more than usual outrage and horror. At the end of January, the newspapers carried reports of the execution of fourteen frame-workers, who were convicted at York for Luddite activities. Among the local gentry, such news was naturally greeted with deep satisfaction; and at Tremadoc especially there was appreciation of stern punishment meted out to mutinous labourers. But Shelley, on the contrary, was furious. No doubt he aired his views publicly at Tremadoc, and he soon decided to go further than this. On 31 January Harriet wrote to Hookham, with Shelley’s direction: ‘I see by the Papers that those poor men who were executed at York have left a great many children. Do you think a subscription would be attended to for their relief? If you think it would, pray put down our names and advertise it in the Papers. Put down my Sister’s name, Mr Shelley’s and mine for two guineas each; if this meets with your approbation we will enclose the sum.’34 Although this was not a direct expression of solidarity with the Luddite cause, it made Shelley’s sympathies only too clear.

  On top of this, Shelley now began to distribute his Irish pamphlets to those he regarded as ‘likely’. We do not know how far this dangerous process went, except in one vital instance. Copies were given to John Williams, whom Shelley persisted in regarding as friendly to all his ideas. From Williams, at least one pamphlet got into the hands of Leeson. We know this from the one letter surviving of an exchange between Shelley and Leeson. Leeson wrote: ‘I beg to tell you that [the pamphlet] was not given to me by Mr Ashstone, nor taken by him from John Williams’s house, — but was handed to me by John Williams with a remark that it contained matter dangerous to the State, and that you had been in the practise of haranguing 500 people at a time when in Ireland. So much for your friend.’35 The fact that such inflammatory material reached Leeson, particularly with his own personal interest in Ireland and the Tremadoc labour-force, may have produced the decisive polarization of feeling within the neighbourhood. It seems clear that Leeson, presumably after serious consultation with other important figures in the district like Evans and the aforesaid Mr Ashstone, must have come to the conclusion that Shelley should be forced out of the district as rapidly as possible. There is no definite evidence for such a consultation, but subsequent events strongly substantiate it. Whether Williams himself knew anything of this, it is difficult to say; but in his position as Madocks’s manager, it is easy to see how he might have had to play a double part. His essential loyalty was always to the Embankment, and not to any clique or individual. Equally, it is easy to see the motives of the Leeson faction, who disliked Shelley both in his person and in his principles, distrusted his financial promises, and feared his influence on the embryo labour movement in the village. Leeson’s first move was strictly correct. He sent Shelley’s pamphlet ‘up to Government’, together with the circumstances of the case.36 It was the Barnstaple situation all over again.

  Shelley had not learnt caution, however. As always, sensing opposition, he plunged forward. On 15 February he discovered another radical cause to champion. He had been following throughout the winter the case of the Hunt brothers, John and Leigh, who had been prosecuted for libel as the result of an attack on the character of the Prince Regent in the Examiner for 22 March. The case had been defended by Brougham, and Shelley had already voiced a trenchant opinion on the liberal side to Hogg: ‘[Brougham] was compelled to hesitate when truth was rising to his lips; he could utter that which he did utter only by circumlocution and irony. — The Solicitor General’s speech appeared to me the consummation of all shameless insolence. & the address of Ld. Ellenborough, so barefaced a piece of timeservingness, that I’m sure his heart must have laughed at his lips as he pronounced it.’37 Now he learnt that the Hunts had each been imprisoned for two years, fined £500 and ordered to supply £750 securities for good conduct over the next five years. Once again he felt required to commit himself in the most public way possible. The letter he wrote to Hookham, with its high, lashing, unshakeably righteous tone, gives us as clear an indication as anything of his mood in the last ten days at Tan-yr-allt. The violent uncompromising manner was the same, both in his letters to London and his dealings at Tremadoc; he was at bay, and he knew it.

  My dear Sir, I am boiling with indignation at the horrible injustice and tyranny of the sentence pronounced on Hunt and his brother, & it is on this subject that I write to you. Surely the seal of abjectness and slavery is indelibly stamped upon the character of England. — Altho I do not retract in the slightest degree my wish for a subscription for the widows and children of those poor men hung at York yet this £1000 which the Hunts are sentenced to pay is an affair of more consequence. — Hunt is a brave, a good, & an enlightened man. — Surely the public for whom Hunt has done so much will repay in part the great debt of obligation which they owe the champion of their liberties & virtues or are they dead, cold, stonehearted & insensible, brutalized by centuries of unremitting bondage? . . . Well. — I am rather poor at present but I have £20 which is not immediately wanted. — Pray begin a subscription for the Hunts, put my name for that sum,
& when I hear that you have complied with my request I will send it to you. — Now if there are any difficulties in the way of this scheme of ours, for the love of liberty and virtue overcome them.38