Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Harriet apparently[2] replied to this letter, attempting to ‘vindicate’ herself as Shelley put it, the same day; yet he wrote again on the 27th, in much the same tone. ‘You have applied to an attorney the consequence is obvious — you are plainly lost to me, lost to the principles which are the guide and hope of my life.’ As to her remarks about Mary, and her ‘appeal to the vilest superstitions’, he considered it ‘an insult that you address such Cant to me’. His own sense of moral superiority remained unshaken, and, if anything, further enhanced. ‘If you feel yet any ambition to be ranked among the wise and good, write to me. I am hardly anxious however to hear from you, as I despair of any generosity or virtue on your part. . . . PB Shelley.’8 Shelley was preparing to move to St Pancras that afternoon at 5 o’clock, but deliberately omitted to give Harriet the new address, advising her instead to communicate through Hookham. In retrospect this really marked the decisive collapse of the relationship. There was a break of some six days in the correspondence, and thereafter Shelley’s letters, though never again so bitter, remained frigidly aloof. Yet Harriet still had hopes.

  The new lodgings were on two floors at No. 5 Church Terrace, St Pancras, beyond what is now the Euston Road, a shabby-genteel district bordered by open fields, to which Godwin himself was to retire much later in old age. Peacock began to call regularly, and he helped Shelley with the early stages of his negotiations with a money-lender called Ballechy, while discussing his own amatory complications in the shape of an enthusiastic heiress, and his old friend Marianne St Croix. Shelley accepted Peacock’s new position as an intermediary, and was now glad of his friendship in a London that had suddenly become hostile. He reacted curiously to the break with Harriet, and plunged into a volatile mood of mischievous scheming. Shelley and the two girls and Peacock walked over Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill, launched fleet after fleet of paper fireboats, read aloud from Political Justice, set off fireworks in the fields, discussed a renewed Irish expedition and concocted an extraordinary plan to kidnap his two younger sisters, Hellen and Elizabeth, from their boarding school at Mrs Hugford’s in Hackney. Jane and Mary were even sent to the school anonymously to reconnoitre.9

  On 3 October, Shelley wrote a long retrospective letter to Harriet. Although he told her that he would have liked to have ‘superintended’ the progress of her mind, and have assisted her in ‘cultivating an elevated philosophy’, he was now broadly dismissive. ‘I am united to another; you are no longer my wife. Perhaps I have done you injury, but surely most innocently & unintentionally in having commenced any connection with you. — That injury whatever be its amount was not to be avoided. If ever in any degree there was sympathy in our feelings & opinions wherefore deprive ourselves in future of the satisfaction which may result, by this contemptible cavil — these unworthy bickerings. Unless a sincere confidence be accorded by you to my undesigning truth, our intercourse for the present must be discontinued.’ He cancelled an arrangement for them to meet the following afternoon, apparently to settle mutual debts, since he had heard rumours of bailiffs.

  Harriet had perhaps counted on one last appeal: the forthcoming birth of their second child. But underneath the signature, ‘Affectionately yours, PB Shelley’, she read a coldly courteous P.S. ‘I do not apprehend the slightest danger from your approaching labour: I think you may safely repose confidence in [Dr] Sim’s skill. Your last labour was painful, but auspicious. I understand that cases of difficulty after that are very rare.’ He closed by asking her to send on to Hookham ‘stockings, hanks & Mrs Wollstonecraft’s posthumous works’.10

  Two days later it was the same thing: he hoped she would find another lover, ‘capable of being to you as the brother of your soul’, meanwhile he remained her true friend, and ‘enough your friend to make the employment of a lawyer quite unnecessary’. He still refused to see her, refused to meet a lawyer or to give his address. He felt he could be rational about Ianthe too. ‘I know that by the law of nature she is yours, & not mine — that your feelings towards her depend on physical sympathy, whilst mine are the result of habit & self-persuasion.’ Now at last Harriet began to see how hopeless it was.11

  Shelley’s letters to Harriet over this period had totally lacked understanding or sympathy towards his wife’s feelings. Her own point of view was merely ‘superstition’, and her own need for support and advice merely weakness and treachery. Compared with his letters to Hogg of 1811, or his letters to Miss Hitchener of 1812, they were chill, high-minded and emotionally empty. It is difficult to believe that anyone could really have taken seriously those beneficent plans for Harriet’s future life and welfare. The Westbrooks and Amory certainly did not. Did Mary? Did Peacock?

  In striking contrast, when writing to Hogg in Norton on 3 and 4 October, Shelley revealed his feelings freely, and surveyed the whole pattern of his life as it had shifted in the last year from Harriet to Mary Godwin. He wrote that Harriet had diverted the true and natural course of his career and task in life. There is no talk of beneficence. ‘You will rejoice that after struggles and privations which almost withered me to idiotism…I am restored to energy and enterprise, that I have become again what I once promised to become. . . . I suddenly perceived that the entire devotion with which I had resigned all prospects of utility or happiness to the single purpose of cultivating Harriet was a gross & despicable superstition.’ By contrast, his union with Mary had given him an overwhelming sense of both intellectual and sexual liberation and fulfilment, amounting to a revelation. ‘How wonderfully I am changed! Not a dis-embodied spirit can have undergone a stranger revolution! I never knew until now that contentment was anything but a word denoting an unmeaning abstraction. I never before felt the integrity of my nature, its various dependencies, & learned to consider myself as a whole accurately united rather than an assemblage of inconsistent and discordant portions.’ Most important of all, the liberation that his love for Mary had brought freed him to continue with his life’s work. ‘I am deeply persuaded that thus ennobled, I shall become a more true and constant friend, a more useful lover of mankind, a more ardent asserter of truth and virtue — above all, more consistent, more intelligible more true.’

  The nature and intensity of his passion for Mary were well expressed in the way he recalled his first impressions of her at Skinner Street, though remembering that Hogg had never seen the girl whom Shelley was now presenting as his lover, it had a curious physical disembodiment. ‘The originality & loveliness of Mary’s character was apparent to me from her very motions and tones of voice. The irresistible wildness and sublimity of her feelings shewed itself in her gestures and her looks. — Her smile, how persuasive it was, and how pathetic! She is gentle, to be convinced and tender; yet not incapable of ardent indignation and hatred. . . . I speedily conceived an ardent passion to possess this inestimable treasure.[3] In my own mind this feeling assumed a variety of shapes. I disguised from myself the true nature of affection. I endeavoured also to conceal it from Mary: but without success. . . . No expressions can convey the remotest conception of the manner in which she dispelled my delusions.’

  Shelley was himself beginning to be aware of the self-reflecting nature of his feelings, adding to Hogg with a sudden flash of recognition: ‘I speak thus of Mary now — & so intimately are our natures now united, that I feel whilst I describe her excellencies as if I were an egoist expatiating on his own perfections.’ The extraordinary delusive, subjective, nature of sexual feelings, and the complications of self-projection which can so easily dominate passionate relationships between a man and a woman, became the subject of several of Shelley’s prose speculations, and the long poem Alastor the following year.

  Writing to Hogg he omitted much that was still painful and difficult, and mentioned nothing about his expected children by both Harriet and Mary, or his ostracism by Godwin and the Boinville set. Yet he was anxious for Hogg’s tacit approval, and asked if ‘any degree of our ancient affection is yet cherished by you for a being apparently so inconsistent
and indisciplinable as me’. He ended his letter with a partially veiled appeal. ‘My dear friend I entreat you to write to me soon. Even in this pure & celestial felicity I am not contented until I hear from you.’12 Hogg replied to this letter on 17 October, and first met Shelley again in London some three weeks later on 7 November.

  Shelley’s felicity was now indeed very far from that pure and celestial state he wished to suggest. Apart from the pressures and anxieties caused by his wife and his creditors, there was increasing tension within the ménage à trois at Church Terrace. The state of affairs between himself and Jane was reaching a critical stage. On the night of October 7, there took place an extremely bizarre incident, with ingredients of mystery, sexuality and terror which made it almost a paradigm of Shelley’s relationships with young women. It is particularly interesting, because it is relatively well documented, with a full account both by Shelley himself in the journal, and by Jane in her diary.

  On the 5th the threesome had gone to Hampstead Ponds to sail fireboats, and in the evening Shelley had excited the two girls with a melodramatic reading of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, and Wordsworth’s macabre tale ‘The Mad Mother’. Mary went to bed early, as she tended to do at this time, and Shelley and Jane sat up ‘till one over the fire’ talking, while Shelley wrote to Harriet. This entry Jane later tried to delete from her diary.13

  The next day, the 6th, Peacock came to breakfast and Shelley went off to negotiate with Ballechy, and came back feeling ‘very unwell’.14 Peacock had stayed at Church Terrace ‘wearying us all morning’, according to Jane. They dined at 6, Shelley read a canto of Queen Mab and some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s love letters out loud to them, and they all retired to bed early.

  On the morning of the 7th, Shelley, Mary and Peacock walked over the fields towards Hampstead, while Jane, for some reason, ‘refuses to walk’, as Shelley wrote in the journal. Actually, we know from Jane’s diary that she slipped out after they had gone and walked by herself ‘in the Squares’. The friction between Mary and Jane was now tacitly recognized. Shelley’s entry continues, with faintly disquieting touches. ‘We traverse the fields towards Hampstead. Under an expansive oak lies a dead calf. (Contemplate subject for a poem.) The sunset is beautiful. Return at 9. Peacock departs. Mary goes to bed at half-past 8; Shelley sits up with Jane. Talk of oppression and reform, of cutting squares of skin from the soldiers’ backs. Jane states her conception of a subterranean community of women.[4] Talk of Hogg, Harriet, Miss Hitchener &c.’ The last part of this indicates the degree of confidentiality now reached between Shelley and Jane.

  Jane’s own entry makes this even clearer, and also sounds the first note of sinister implications. ‘Mary goes to bed — Shelley & myself sit over the fire — we talk of making an Association of Philosophical people — of Eliza and Helen — of Hogg and Harriet — at one the conversation turned upon those unaccountable & mysterious feelings about supernatural things that we are sometimes subject to — Shelley looks beyond all passing strange — ’

  To understand what happened next it is necessary to recall Shelley’s skilled manipulation of feminine sensitivities ever since the legends of the Great Snake among his sisters at Field Place. It is also necessary to observe very carefully the small, probably unconscious clues in his gestures and questions, which show that Shelley subtly diverted the potentially sexual elements of the fireside intimacy into the path of horror. Jane, as he had previously discovered in France, was peculiarly susceptible to this diversion. Shelley’s journal continues, referring to himself in the third person. ‘At 1 o’clock Shelley observes that it is the witching time of night; he inquires soon after if it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears; in half an hour the question is repeated in a different form; at 2 they retire awe-struck and hardly daring to breathe. Shelley says to Jane “Good night”; his hand is leaning on the table; he is conscious of an expression in his countenance which he cannot repress. Jane hesitates. “Good night” again. She still hesitates. “Did you ever read the tragedy of Orra?” said Shelley. “Yes — How horrible you look — take your eyes off.” “Good night” again, and Jane ran to her room.’15

  What Shelley’s entry explicitly fails to mention at this point is the extreme pitch of nervousness to which he had now succeeded in bringing Jane. Her own entry makes this painfully clear, and also makes the deeply disturbing effect of the facial expression which Shelley ‘could not repress’ quite definite. Jane wrote: ‘Shelley looks beyond all passing strange — a look of impressive deep & melancholy awe — I cannot describe it I well know how I felt it — I ran upstairs to bed — I placed the candle on the drawers & stood looking at a pillow that lay in the very middle of the Bed — I turned my head round to the window & then back again to the Bed — the pillow was no longer there — it had been removed to the chair[5] — I stood thinking for two moments — how did this come? Was it possible that I had deluded myself so far as to place it there myself & then forget the action? This was not likely — Every passed at it were in a moment[6] — I ran downstairs — Shelley heard me & came out of his room — He gives the most horrible description of my countenance — I did not feel the way he thinks I did — We sat up all night — I was ill.’16

  Towards the end of this entry, it is Jane who is omitting details, and we have to turn back to Shelley’s journal to gain a fuller picture. It is helpful to see the passage at length, to understand quite clearly how Shelley managed to aggravate rather than calm Jane. It is notable that almost every action which he performed, ostensibly in order to soothe her, has the actual result of further increasing her terror. Just how far Shelley consciously realized what he was doing is difficult to decide; there is an element of game-playing in his account. One presumes that the ghastly description of Jane’s face, a portrait far more macabre than anything to be found in Zastrozzi, is the same description which he gave to Jane at the time. This surely was a calculated piece of witch-raising, and Jane herself says that she ‘did not feel in the way he thinks I did’. This is what Shelley wrote in the journal which he shared with Mary.

  Shelley, unable to sleep, kissed Mary and prepared to sit beside her & read until morning, when rapid footsteps descended the stairs. Jane was there; her countenance was distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay — it beamed with a whiteness that seemed almost like light; her lips and cheeks were of one deadly hue; the skin of her face and forehead was drawn into unnumerable wrinkles — the lineaments of terror that could not be contained;[7] her hair came prominent and erect; her eyes were wide and staring, drawn almost from the sockets by the convulsion of the muscles; the eyelids were forced in, and the eyeballs, without any relief, seemed as if they had been newly inserted, in ghastly sport, in the sockets of a lifeless head. This frightful spectacle endured but for a few moments — it was displaced by terror and confusion, violent, indeed, and full of dismay, but human. She asked me (Shelley) if I had touched her pillow (her tone was that of dreadful alarm). I said, ‘No, no! if you come into the room I will tell you’[8] I informed her of Mary’s pregnancy; this seemed to check her violence.[9] She told me that a pillow placed upon her bed had been removed, in the moment that she turned her eyes away to a chair at some distance, and evidently by no human power. She was positive as to the fact of her self-possession and calmness. Her manner convinced me that she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries. . . . I repeated one of my own poems. Our conversation, though intentionally directed to other topics, irresistibly recurred to these. Our candles burned low, we feared they would not last until daylight. Just as dawn was struggling with moonlight, Jane remarked in me that unutterable expression which had affected her with so much horror before; she described it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness and conscious power over her. I covered my face with my hands, and spoke to her in the most studied gentleness. It was ineffectual; her horror and agony increased even to the most drea
dful convulsions. She shrieked and writhed on the floor. I ran to Mary; I communicated in a few words the state of Jane. I brought her to Mary. The convulsions gradually ceased, and she slept. At daybreak we examined her apartment and found her pillow on the chair.17

  One can tell from various cryptic entries later in the journal and Jane’s diary that these ritual horror sessions were regular features of the menage at Church Terrace throughout October. Mary never took part in them, but neither did she interfere; she seems to have taken the attitude that this was something to be worked out strictly between Shelley and Jane, and retained a certain ironic detachment. Ten days later, on the 18th, for example, she noted ‘I go to bed soon, but Shelley and Jane sit up, and, for a wonder do not frighten themselves.’18 Jane’s diary for this day has a deleted entry, ‘Mary goes to bed — Talk with Shelley over the fire until two — Hogg — his letter — friendship — Dante — Tasso & various other subjects.’19 Peacock was told on a walk to the ‘Withered Tree’ at Hampstead, and apparently laughed at them. Nevertheless they had another session that same night, when Jane’s diary reads: ‘Mary [deleted for We] goes to bed at eight — sit up with Shelley over the fire — get rather in a horrid mood — go to bed at eleven thinking of ghosts cannot sleep all night.’20 Shelley directed her reading to Zastrozzi, the Abbé Barruel and Queen Mab.