Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  — The thoughts of my past life

  Rise like the ghosts of an unquiet dream

  Blackening the cheerful morn.

  Much of the ‘feverish dream’ of these weeks was used the following year for Shelley’s study of unrealized sexual desire in Alastor.

  One other quotation from Dante in the notebook, referred not to Cornelia, but to Harriet: the inscription over the Gate into Hell, ‘Lasciate ogni Speranza, voi che intrate [sic]’. We know this, because five months later, looking back at this period of ‘two months at Mrs Boinville’s without my wife’, Shelley described his feelings to Hogg as follows:

  I saw the full extent of the calamity which my rash & heartless union with Harriet: an union over whose entrance might justly be inscribed

  Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate!

  had produced. I felt as if a dead & living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion. It was no longer possible to practise self-deception: I believed that one revolting duty yet remained, to continue to deceive my wife.77

  This appalling feeling of physical revulsion, so strong that he felt that the act of love had become like an act of necrophilia, had its roots as far back as the earliest letters to Miss Hitchener from York in 1811. Shelley had at last managed to do the thing that all his life he found most difficult: to face up to one of the deep and often unpalatable truths of his own feelings and temperament. But this he achieved only in retrospect: in October 1814, and not in April or May.

  What was revulsion on one side, became painfully vivid longing and projection on the other. One has the impression that the air round Shelley was heavy with what can only be described as sexual static. Cornelia was merely a temporary conductor for this super-charged atmosphere. Shelley’s description of the sensations which surrounded and overwhelmed him are finely, and even touchingly caught in an incident he related to Hogg. It is important to understand that Shelley makes it quite clear that this happened before he went to Skinner Street in June, and therefore before he had met Mary Godwin:

  I wandered in the fields alone. The season was most beautiful. The evenings were so serene & mild — I never had before felt so intensely the subduing voluptuousness of the impulses of spring. Manifestations of my approaching change tinged my waking thoughts, & afforded inexhaustible subject for the visions of my sleep. I recollect that one day I undertook to walk from Bracknell to my father’s (40 miles). A train of visionary events arranged themselves in my imagination until ideas almost acquired the intensity of sensations. Already I had met the female who was destined to be mine, already had she replied to my exulting recognition, already were the difficulties surmounted that opposed an entire union. I had even proceeded so far as to compose a letter to Harriet on the subject of my passion for another. Thus was my walk beguiled, at the conclusion of which I was hardly sensible of fatigue.78

  Hogg records that a friend saw him at Field Place on this occasion, when he was welcomed clandestinely by his mother; he leant on a grand piano in the drawing-room and with one hand playing over and over again a little melody which was said to have been a favourite of Harriet Grove’s.79

  Shelley was drawn from Bracknell and the dream by the humdrum reality of money. His Welsh creditors had been pressing him in May, as two brief notes to John Williams show.80 With creditors on one hand, and Godwin on the other, and both getting restless, it was time to realize the post obit bond with the Nash brothers. On 5 May he dined with Godwin, where fleetingly he may have glimpsed Mary. On the 6th he wrote to Nash’s solicitor to guarantee that ‘there has been no portion of the Shelley Estate sold under the Settlement of 1791’.[12] He also had to declare the previous post obit acquired from Starling in October 1813. On the 14th he was again in London, and writing to Williams, asking him to appoint an official representative for the Tremadoc creditors in London. He stayed at his room in Old Bond Street with Hookham.81

  By the beginning of June, Shelley’s negotiations kept him more frequently in London than in Bracknell. A desultory correspondence with Harriet at Bath was still continuing, for the plan to lease Nantgwillt had once again been resurrected; and apparently for her peace of mind Shelley went through the motions of acquiring the lease stock. On 12 June he wrote to the solicitor Davies in Kingston, Herefordshire, to request his acceptance as the prospective tenant.82 There is no other evidence that Shelley seriously intended to take Nantgwillt, but it may have remained a vague possibility in his mind. What it does show is that Harriet still dreamt of going there, and considered the separation from Shelley as only temporary. It is impossible to say how far Shelley was deliberately deceiving Harriet at this stage; it is most likely that he regarded the Nantgwillt plan as a convenient way of preventing her from worrying too much, or from worrying him too much. For his mind, indeed his whole being, was elsewhere.

  It was June 1814 when Mary Godwin entered his life, and Shelley’s world shifted on its axis. With the experiences of the previous five months, and with the state of mind which he had described to Hogg, it is not surprising that the sudden recognition of friendship between himself and the intensely intellectual daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft took him by storm. Mary was three months short of 17, and strikingly pretty. Like Harriet, Mary had an extremely attractive and characteristic aureole of hair, which seemed to draw Shelley as if it were the emanation of her own spirit burning above the broad pale forehead. Jane Clairmont later described it, as though it were a kind of spiritual presence: ‘Mary’s hair is light brown, of sunny and burnished brightness like the autumnal foliage when played upon by the rays of the setting sun; / it sets in round her face and falls upon her shoulders in gauzy wavings and is so fine it looks as if the wind had tangled it together into a golden network . . . it was so fine one feared / to disturb the beauty. . . .’83 Jane, her half-sister and adoring shadow, was a few months younger. From the start, the friendship grew on a triangular basis.

  When Shelley came to talk and dine with Godwin at Skinner Street, with the topic rarely shifting from the post obit negotiations, it seemed natural that Godwin’s two girls should help to entertain him and cheer his spirits in the interludes. Shelley had also offered to teach Jane Italian, and Mary was a kind of chaperone. Neither Mr nor Mrs Godwin suspected the power of the alchemy that was brewing. Shelley and the two girls enjoyed long afternoon walks around London in the radiant June weather, and their favourite rendezvous was Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave in Old St Pancras Church Yard. Mary, Jane and Shelley sat on the grave and talked for hours. We do not know what they talked of: could it have been other than the rights of women, free love, atheism, political and social tyranny, the community of radical spirits? How far Shelley, sensing the abnormally close relationship between Mary and her father, felt that he had discovered another paternal tyranny that required liberation, we cannot tell either, though it is hinted at in one of his letters. He presented a copy of Queen Mab to her with a facetious joke on the fly leaf, but she wrote secretly in it: ‘I am thine, exclusively thine. I have pledged myself to thee and sacred is the gift.’

  By mid-June, Shelley had taken rooms ‘at an Inn in Fleet Street’, and from 19 to 29 June he dined at Skinner Street every day. During these very few days, the friendship had exploded into mutual passion.

  There can be no doubt that Shelley was entirely swept off his feet by the sudden vision of the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft: physical passion, brotherly affinity, spiritual identity burst upon him like a thunderclap. After the grinding months of Edinburgh and Bracknell, after the naggings of unsatisfactory fatherhood and the tramels of the disappointed inheritance, it was as if he could start his youth all over again, a dazzling second chance. Mary offered fresh, 16-year-old sexuality combined in the most extraordinary way with the precocious intellectual flair of her Godwinian upbringing. She was both naïve and knowing, both flesh and spirit, burning with a youth and intelligence which blazed out all the more hypnotically against the gloomy, hopeless, complicated collapse
of Shelley’s married relationship with Harriet. With only momentary hesitations and misgivings, he fled from the shadow into the sun. Love was free, and to promise for ever to love the same woman was absurd.

  An agonized, self-dramatizing little poem written ‘To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’ in mid-June, and clandestinely slipped across the book counter at Skinner Street, openly displayed the alternative chances of life that Harriet and Mary seemed to offer him —

  To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage

  Which preys upon itself alone;

  To curse the life which is the cage

  Of fettered grief that dares not groan,

  Hiding from many a careless eye

  The scornèd load of agony. . . .

  To spend years thus, and be rewarded,

  As thou, sweet love, requited me

  When none were near — Oh! I did wake

  From torture for that moment’s sake.

  Upon my heart thy accents sweet

  Of peace and pity fell like dew

  On flowers half dead; — thy lips did meet

  Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw

  Their soft persuasion on my brain,

  Charming away its dream of pain.84

  For Mary the passion seems to have been equally sudden and overwhelming, though of a different order. She had already heard much of Shelley’s daring exploits from her sisters Fanny and Jane, especially Jane, and he was the kind of figure her whole education had brought her up to admire: a poet, an intellectual, a radical and an activist. But to find his attention turned so fiercely upon her within the very first days of their meeting, to find him so passionate and yet so bitter, so tender and yet so frightening, was an experience that pierced her to the very heart. The childhood security of the Godwin household, dominated by the heavy emotional demands of her father and yet made comfortless by the jealousy of her stepmother, was broken open for her by his restless, pursuing presence and the quick, unmistakable sound of his footsteps darting up the stairs at the back of the shop and the sudden low call — Mary! He spoke to her with a directness and intensity which was so new to her, and yet she instantly recognized it as love. With a singlemindedness that later proved wholly characteristic, Mary soon found the irresistible moment at her mother’s graveside in Old St Pancras Churchyard, and then simply and explicitly declared her own love for Shelley, offered him both body and soul, and then, almost calmly, awaited the consequences.[13] It was Sunday, 26 June, and they walked back arm in arm. Beside them, a little puzzled and a little envious, walked Jane who had been waiting patiently on a distant tombstone.

  Mary entered in her copy of Queen Mab: ‘This book is sacred to me and as no other creature shall ever look into it, I may write what I please. Yet what shall I write? That I love the author beyond all power of expression and that I am parted from him. Dearest and only love, by that love we have promised to each other although I may not be yours I can never be another’s.’86 It sounded almost like a challenge.

  The following day, 27 June, Shelley revealed their love to Godwin. To his surprise, the philosopher was appalled. Godwin was now in an unenviable position. The loan from Nash, which he had been assiduously helping Shelley to negotiate, was very nearly completed; and yet all prudence bid him shut his house to a married man who had openly declared his designs on his daughter. After agonized thought, he decided to try and temporize. He described in a letter to an old friend how Shelley had ‘had the madness to disclose his plans to me, and to ask my consent. I expostulated with him with all the energy of which I was master, and with so much effect that for the moment he promised to give up his licentious love, and return to virtue.’87 He asked Shelley to visit Skinner Street less often, and the regular dining stopped after 29 June; however Shelley continued to call and take occasional meals until 7 July. On the previous day, the transactions for a loan of £2,593 10s. od. were completed with Nash, of which half was to be made over direct to Godwin. Godwin later said that it was only on this evening, 6 July, that Shelley declared himself, when the loan had already been finalized, but this was not so. The actual money did not reach Godwin until thirteen days later, on 19 July.88 From 8 July, it seems that Shelley was no longer welcome at Skinner Street except for formal meetings with Godwin. Meanwhile, he had stopped writing to Harriet altogether for a week, and Hookham received an anxious inquiry from Bath. Godwin began to compose a ten-page letter to Shelley, which took him two days to write.89

  There is no reliable account of the next fraught ten days of Shelley’s life. Mrs Godwin recalled awful scenes at Skinner Street, with Shelley bursting in furious and hysterical, and on one occasion threatening to commit suicide by poisoning himself with an overdose of laudanum in their front room.[14] The bottle had to be wrested from him by Mary. Godwin’s diary records serious ‘Talks’ held first with Mary, and then with Jane. Peacock remembered Shelley in the grip of ‘a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable passion’, torn between loyalty to Harriet and love for Mary. ‘His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said: “I never part from this.”’90 He also implies that Shelley considered suicide.

  As a result of Hookham’s news, Shelley summoned Harriet from Bath, and she arrived in London about 13 July. Harriet, in her own person, was now Godwin’s last hope of avoiding either tragedy or scandal, and there is evidence that he tried to bring all available forces to control the situation. He had private consultations with Harriet, took Shelley out on a coach drive, and even summoned Mrs Boinville from Bracknell for her advice and support. But Shelley, at his first meeting, had effectively stunned Harriet, by withholding nothing and insisting that he loved Mary with passion while he had only ever felt a brotherly attachment to her. Yet he insisted that he was remaining loyal to Harriet. His explanation was devastatingly simple:

  I repeat (& believe me, for I am sincere) that my attachment to you is unimpaired: I conceive that it has acquired even a deeper & more lasting character, that it is now less exposed than ever to the fluctuations of phantasy or caprice. Our connection was not one of passion & impulse. Friendship was its basis, & on this basis it has enlarged & strengthened. It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all sufficing passion . . . may you find a lover as passionate and faithful, as I shall ever be a friend affectionate & sincere!91

  If this struck coldly into Harriet’s heart, the more so because it was basically true, with what an icy chill she recognized the ghost of her former self in Shelley’s description of Mary: ‘I wish you could see Mary; to the most indifferent eyes she would be interesting only from her sufferings, & the tyranny which is exercised upon her. I murmur not if you feel incapable of compassion & love for the object & sharer of my passion.’ Shelley later discovered that, probably on Godwin’s advice, Harriet wrote to Mary about him in a letter which recommended that Mary should write to Shelley asking her lover to ‘calm’ himself and ‘subdue’ his passion for her.92 It does not seem likely that Mary wrote such a letter. Harriet, who saw the Chapel Street history repeating itself at Skinner Street, at once suspected the denouement. As far as one can gather, she took shelter in the idea that this was a passing infatuation, and that Shelley would eventually be drawn back by the ties of loyalty to his legal wife, and above all by the ties of affection for his children: for Harriet had told Shelley that she was pregnant again. She was consoled by Peacock.

  Having received his share of the post obit on the 19th, Godwin was more than ever determined to crush Shelley’s fatal and inconvenient passion. Both Mary and Jane were confined to the house, and Godwin wrote long letters to Harriet on the 22nd, and Shelley on the 25th. But it was all in vain. When he rose early on the morning of 28 July, he found a letter leaning on his mantelpiece. Shelley had gone one better than his great-grandfather: on his second elopement he had taken two girls.

  [1] It is also interesting to note Cooper’s admiring reference to another of Shelley’s political poems, The Revolt of Isla
m (1817). See his Purgatory of Suicides, written in Stafford jail, 1845, Canto II, stanza 7. Chapter 15.

  [2]These should not be confused with Benbow’s pirate edition of 1826, which was a book that Robert Browning later picked up on a London bookstall, thus changing his whole life, and precipitating Pauline (1833). This was entitled Miscellaneous Poems, and did not contain Queen Mab, which in the circumstances was a pity for Browning. See Frederick A. Pottle, Shelley and Browning, 1965; and Ref. 22.

  [3] By November 1816 this sum had somehow risen to £1,000 in respect to further borrowings which Shelley apparently secured from Charters. There is no evidence that at any time did Shelley repay this extra sum. See Ingpen, Shelley in England, p. 638.

  [4] The honours for this patient and not altogether edifying research must go to Roger Ingpen, op. cit. For Shelley’s own estimate of his debts by 1822, see pp. 710–11.

  [5] One cannot altogether dismiss the possibility that the exasperation of Ellis-Nanney and others in the district had some effect on the way in which the history of the Tan-yr-allt affair in February 1813 was eventually transmitted to posterity.