Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  An antelope,

  In the suspended impulse of its lightness,

  Were less aethereally light. . . .66

  Godwin glimpsed them by chance near the cages, and later remarked to Charles Clairmont that ‘Shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked’.67 Meanwhile Mary had nightmares about her dead baby, and dreamt that it was still alive. For the first time she felt what was never quite to leave her, the shadow of Harriet. Harriet, after all, had borne Shelley a son. Shelley sailed paper boats with Claire on the Serpentine.

  On 10 April Shelley passed the morning with Harriet, who was in ‘a surprisingly good humour’, discussing legal arrangements. Throughout the month, Shelley’s new solicitors P. W. Longdill were busy organizing his claims and debts to be presented to Sir Timothy for discharge. On the 21st and 22nd, Shelley again saw Harriet about presenting his little son Charles in court as part of the legal formalities; but this time, as Mary noted, ‘he was much teased with Harriet’. Eventually it was agreed that Shelley’s and Sir Timothy’s solicitors, Longdill and Whitton, should complete the arrangements between them. Shelley made no attempt to get custody of the children.

  Instead he decided to take Mary away for a brief spring holiday in Berkshire, as the completion of legal matters was now nearly in sight. Claire was left to look after the apartment. They departed on 24 April, to stay at the Windmill Inn at Salt Hill near Windsor, a part of the country which, despite its proximity to Eton, held considerable attractions for Shelley. They took a room overlooking a neat little garden planted with cypresses and enclosed by white palings. Hogg, whose law term had started again, could not come with them, though Mary made several coquettish attempts to get him out of London, saying that when his ‘letters arrived Shelley’s distitch was truly applicable — ’

  ‘On her hind paws the Dormouse stood

  In a wild & mingled mood

  Of Maieishness & Pecksietude.’68

  On the 25th Shelley returned to London to consult with Longdill, and probably spent the night at Arabella Road with Claire. He came back with the news that Harriet’s attorney said she ‘meant (if he did not make a handsome settlement on her) to prosecute him for Atheism’.69 This was a threat which was later renewed, but its source was the Westbrooks rather than Harriet herself. Hogg did not come down despite further solicitations from ‘A Runaway Dormouse’, but Mary and Shelley returned to London on 27 April, and took new lodgings at 26 Marchmont Street, in Bloomsbury. Shelley sent on ahead the last note which refers to the intimacy between Mary and Hogg, strongly suggesting that it had reached a sexual stage and that Mary, at least briefly, had been shared. ‘I shall be very happy to see you again, & to give you your share of our common treasure of which you have been cheated for several days. The Maie knows how highly you prize this exquisite possession, & takes occasion to quiz you in saying that it is necessary for me to absent from London, from your sensibility to its value.’70

  One result of this short holiday was that Shelley and Mary came back agreed to send Claire away to stay with friends. As the last few days passed by before the settlement, they walked about London in the May sunshine, Mary still with Hogg, who was now more severely known as ‘Jefferson’, and Shelley, to Mary’s chagrin, still with Claire. After the failure of a plan to send Claire to an acquaintance of Godwin’s, a certain Mrs Knapp, it was decided that she should go right away from London to stay by the sea, and Lynmouth was eventually decided upon. Possibly Shelley wrote to the lodgings he had stayed at in 1812; at any rate Claire was determined to go by herself, to prove her independence. On 12 May, the day before her departure, Mary noted with undisguised irritability, ‘Shelley and the lady walk out. After tea, talk; write Greek characters. Shelley and his friend have a last conversation.’ On the Saturday morning, Shelley went alone to see Claire on to the coach. He did not come back for a long time, and in the middle of the afternoon the awful suspicion that he might have gone off with Claire crossed Mary’s mind. Suddenly ‘very anxious’, she hurried out to meet him, but was unable to find him and returned in the rain. Finally Shelley reappeared at half past six, very tired, and went to sleep immediately after dinner. ‘The business is finished,’ wrote Mary. She closed her journal on that day, adding as an epigraph, ‘I begin a new Journal with our regeneration.’ Just above, Shelley scrawled in with a whimsical touch of the macabre, a witch’s recipe: ‘9 drops of human blood, 7 grains of gunpowder, ½ oz. of putrified brain, 13 mashed grave worms.’ But below this Mary added, ‘The Maie and her Elfin Knight’ — which was Shelley.

  The day of their regeneration also saw the conclusion of the lengthy financial negotiations between Shelley’s solicitors and Sir Timothy’s. Things had been much complicated by two factors. First the collection and assessment of Shelley’s bills and post obit bonds, which ran to several thousand pounds. Second, the disagreement between Sir Timothy and Shelley over the eventual fate of the two parts of the Shelley estate, which were by now of very considerable value. A final decision over these estates could not be taken, by the terms of Sir Bysshe’s will, for twelve months, but in the meantime Longdill pushed successfully — applying pressure on both father and son — for a temporary agreement.

  Exactly a year and a day after the announcement of his grandfather’s death, Shelley wrote the following letter to Godwin which set out the crux of the business. ‘My grandfather had left me the option of receiving a life estate in some very large sum (I think £140,000) on condition that I would prolong the entail so as to possess only a life estate in my original patrimony.[13] These conditions I never intended to accept, although Longdill considered them very favourable to me, & urged me by all means to grasp at the offer. It was my father’s interest and wish that I should refuse the conditions, because my younger brother [John], would then inherit in default of my compliance with them, this life estate. Longdill & Whitton therefore, made an agreement that I should resign my rights to this property, & that my father in exchange for this concession should give me the full price for my reversion. In compliance with the terms of this agreement I signed a deed importing that I disclaimed my grandfather’s property.’71 The consequence of this agreement, if it went smoothly into effect in spring 1816, would have been to guarantee Shelley an annuity from Sir Timothy, the power to encumber the estate freely, and the eventual inheritance of the Shelley estates proper on the death of Sir Timothy.[14] The estates proper were valued at an income of £8,000 per annum. Shelley, with the connivance of Longdill, achieved these terms, largely by hiding from his father the fact that he had never intended to accept the bribe of his grandfather’s legacy, and therefore forcing Sir Timothy — who was most anxious to obtain the legacy for his other son — to agree to more immediately generous terms than he might otherwise have done. Timothy also agreed to give Shelley an immediate annuity, and pay off his debts.

  A typical piece of Shelley’s sharp practice appeared in the listing of these debts. Sir Timothy’s solicitor, Whitton, eventually agreed to honour £2,900-worth of unpaid bills and loans; but, of this, £1,200 was actually intended by Shelley to be used as another massive payment to Godwin, though listed as a debt. Moreover Shelley had promised Godwin only £1,000 and intended to pick up the remaining £200 for his own pocket. This, again, only became clear a year later, when Godwin complained about the loan, and Shelley wrote on 23 January 1816, with unblushing frankness: ‘My meaning was, that you should receive no more than that £1000 until the second settlement with my father which was then expected in November (1815); & I considered your giving in your debt at 1200 as an accommodation to me, enabling me to procure as it did 200 which I should not otherwise have received.’72 Another curiosity about the listing of Shelley’s debts was the number of items which were not finally dealt with.[15]

  The immediate result of the settlement put a small but significant sum of money in Shelley’s control but postponed the final arrangement of the estates until spring 1816. Shelley collected a lump sum of £4,500[16] and was granted an ann
ual income in the shape of an annuity of £1,000 to be paid until his death, or Sir Timothy’s. For the first time in his life, he was made reasonably independent, though the ability to wield money with any power, by encumbering the estate or raising normal post obit loans was also postponed until the following year. On 15 May he wrote to Whitton directing that, from his annuity, £200 should be paid in quarterly sums to Harriet, for her upkeep. This does not seem very large, as no separate provision was made for the feeding, clothing or education of his two children Ianthe and Charles, or for finding Harriet her own house or lodgings. Nevertheless it was one-fifth of his income. Harriet also received a cash present of £200, largely to pay off bills incurred over the winter. Mary was given a draft on his new bankers, Messrs Brookes & Co. of Chancery Lane, for £300 cashable on request. The one mystery is Claire, who was staying on her own in Lynmouth. Charles Clairmont, who had been asking Shelley for a £100 travelling allowance, was probably given money with which he was also to look after his younger sister. Of this there is no record, but later in the summer Charles and Claire went together to Ireland.

  Meanwhile Shelley did what he had been longing to do for many months, and escaped into the country. He took Mary on a leisurely tour of the West Country, and by the end of June had settled at comfortable lodgings in Torquay. At last they had escaped London. But Shelley had not escaped himself.

  [1] Omitted in Public Records Office transcript, where Shelley’s letters to Harriet were discovered by Leslie Hotson in 1930.

  [2] All Harriet’s side of this correspondence is lost, and one must allow for bitter or short-sighted remarks which Harriet herself must have made.

  [3] It is important for the interpretation of later events to note Shelley’s use of the phrase ‘possess the treasure’ in a sexual context.

  [4] To divert the radicalism of this reference to a feminist community, probably drawn from the female province of ‘Cocklecu’ in Ludwig Holbert’s A Journey to the World Underground (1742), Lady Shelley altered it to the charming ‘Sublime community of women’ in Shelley and Mary, 1882.

  [5] The possible significance of this sprightly pillow is variable. It has been ingeniously suggested that lying there in the middle of the bed it was for Jane a symbol or substitute for Shelley. In another direction one can observe that Jane was of the ideal age and temperament for those mischief-making phenomena usually referred to as ‘poltergeists’. Students of the works of M. R. James will know that bed-linen in propria persona, so to speak, provides the classic form of supernatural apparition. See Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (1908), a tale with sexual undertones not inappropriate to the present case, and especially his comments on the expressions of linen.

  [6] I gloss this broken but eloquent sentence as meaning something like, ‘Every [minute] passed [looking] at it were [gone] in a moment’, even though ungrammatical. The sensation of uncontrollably accelerating or decelerating time flow is a primary ingredient of nightmare terror.

  [7] Five years later in Italy, Shelley was to write of another female face in a not dissimilar state:

  Its horror and its beauty are divine.

  Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

  Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,

  Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

  The agonies of anguish and of death.

  See ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci’, Poetical Works, p. 582.

  [8] That is, back into the little parlour. If Shelley had chosen of course, he could have gone up to Jane’s room to reassure her that nothing was really amiss. But he did not.

  [9] Again, there is a slight suggestion of sexual diversion here, suggesting that Mary’s pregnancy must somehow isolate Shelley from further attachment to Jane.

  [10] The aesthetics and psychology of nineteenth-century Terror literature have not received much serious study. Interesting texts to begin with are Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 2 vols, 1756; Freud’s short essay ‘The Uncanny’, in Collected Papers, Vol. IV, 1919; and Eino Railo’s little-known work, The Haunted Castle: Studies in Romanticism, London, 1927. The only modern critic who seems genuinely aware of the problem specifically in Shelley’s poetry is James Reiger, in The Mutiny Within, 1967, a wayward and masterly book full of curious resonance.

  [11] Shelleyan Greek, roughly translated as ‘The immaterial image of your body’. For the importance of these ‘immaterial images’ in love-making, see the exposition of ‘idols’ in Lucretius’s chapter on Love, Book IV, De Rerum Nature, a lifelong favourite of Shelley’s.

  [12] To gain a deeply felt, though deeply republican view of Wordsworth’s difficulties, one has to turn once again to William Hazlitt, in his essay in The Spirit of the Age, 1824.

  [13] Both old Sir Bysshe, and Sir Timothy, were ambitious to pass on intact a large landed estate, and the method of entail was the traditional legal means of preventing it from being broken up by a fractious elder son. It is necessary to distinguish between (a) the life estate in the large capital sum from Sir Bysshe’s residual personal estate, which was used essentially as a bribe; and (b) the actual landed ‘patrimony’ which Shelley would inalienably inherit provided he did not entail it and outlived his father.

  [14] But in thus purchasing freedom in the future use of his unentailed inheritance of approximately £80,000, Shelley was paying a high price for himself and his heirs. He threw away approximately another £70,000 of Sir Bysshe’s residual personal estate. Thus, if he had agreed to his grandfather’s plan, in all the life interest on an estate of some £150,000 (yielding £14,000 per annum) would have been his and his heirs’ after Sir Timothy’s death. But this did not fit in with his idea of responsible estate management; nor, incidentally, did it leave him free to borrow cash on the estate in the meantime.

  [15] Later, in the 1817 Chancery case, Shelley claimed that his true debts should have been valued in May 1815 at £5,000. At any rate, major creditors not fully settled included Williams and Ellis-Nanney at Tremadoc; Charters the coach-maker; and Nash, with whom Shelley had made the post obit bond for £3,000 before eloping in July 1814. Sir Timothy in fact offered to pay off Nash, but at a lower rate than the exorbitant one blithely agreed by his son, which was £8,000. Nash refused an offer of £4,500, there was a court case in 1816 and Shelley lost.

  [16] It is notable that the £4,500 cash ‘gift’ is the same figure as that offered to Nash: Sir Timothy no doubt intended Shelley to deal with the debt from this fund. That Nash ruthlessly stuck to his original bond was perhaps more exasperating for father than for son, since Shelley rapidly converted the money for other uses. A final judgement in favour of Nash was made in May 1818, but since this was the time that Shelley left England there is no definite evidence that the debt was honoured by him. Eventually though, the Shelley estate would have been legally constrained to pay: the family disagreements of the aristocracy were the best class of business.

  12. Up the River: Bishopsgate 1815

  During the summer months of June and July 1815, Shelley’s whereabouts in England is largely unknown. But what has survived suggests that he was in a state of great uncertainty about his immediate future. This was complicated by the first serious bout of his chronic abdominal illness, together with consumptive symptoms, which led him in July or August to put himself under the care of Sir William Lawrence, the eminent London consultant surgeon and medical author who wrote one of the early essays on modern evolutionary theory. It is not until the very end of August that he sent a calm, but strangely soulful letter to Hogg, announcing that he had finally taken a house near Peacock in Bishops-gate, and was living there quietly reading and writing with Mary. During the intervening months he had undergone a decisive change, one of the effects of which was the recommencement of his creative output. Another expression of this change was his decision to set up house properly with Mary, and to start a second family.

  This decision was not easily made. From T
orquay, on 22 June, he had written to John Williams in North Wales inquiring if there was ‘any remote or solitary situation of a house to let for a time, with the prospect of purchase when my affairs will permit’. On the 24th he received the first quarterly payment of his £1,000 annuity. With funds actually in hand, he changed his mind about going to Wales and sealing himself off alone with Mary. On the 30th he sent a brief note to Williams saying he had altered his plans and was leaving Torquay early the following day ‘for Windsor in whose neighbourhood a friend has seen & highly recommended a furnished house’.1 This was a result of correspondence with Peacock, who was already living in a house at Marlow on the Thames. But Mary was only told that he was going house hunting, and he left her behind in rooms at Clifton. More than three weeks later she was still writing miserably and now rather desperately to him, asking when he would find a house, and when she would see him again. She was particularly upset by the fact that they were to be apart on 28 July, the anniversary of their elopement. She could see only small hope of seeing him on his birthday on 4 August — and then only if she forced matters, and jumped into a London coach herself, which he obviously did not want. Her letter is eloquent of her distress, and shows in places that she had real fears of losing him:

  We ought not to be absent any longer — indeed we ought not — I am not happy at it — when I retire to my room no sweet Love — after dinner no Shelley — though I have heaps of things very particular to say — in fine either you must come back or I must come to you directly — You will say shall we neglect taking a house — a dear home? No my love I would not for worlds give up that. . . . Dearest, I know how it will be — we shall both of us be put off day after day with the hopes of the success of the next days search for I am frightened to think how long — do you not see it in this light my own love.