Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  On Shelley’s return to Montalègre, at the beginning of August, it was soon clear that the summer with Byron was coming to an end. From London the tentacles of his financial affairs were at last closing around him again, and a letter from his solicitor Longdill received on the 2nd convinced him that he would have to return. A cheque for twenty-five pounds was sent off to Peacock to help tidy up bills at Bishopsgate, for the sale of the furniture had realized little. Charles Clairmont had also written from Bordeaux begging Shelley to support his studies, and Shelley contributed ten pounds. But the deciding factor was Claire.

  Claire was now three or four months pregnant, and it was obvious that the moment had come to settle the arrangements about the child with Byron. Perhaps he would agree to set up a regular ménage with her? She hoped so, desperately; but Shelley was doubtful, already knowing Byron far better than she did. He had never loved her; and now even physical love had become irritating, and Claire’s very presence at the Diodati seemed intolerable. With a good deal of sense, and much kindness, Shelley undertook to negotiate with Byron on Claire’s behalf. Mary was kept out of the discussions and she noted in her journal for 2 August: ‘In the evening Lord Byron and [Shelley] go out in the boat, and after their return, Shelley and Claire go up to Diodati; I do not, for Lord Byron did not seem to wish it.’50 Shelley finally managed to arrange an unhappy, but not altogether unsatisfactory compromise. Byron would recognize the child when it was born, and would bring it up himself in Europe; but meanwhile Claire would treat the pregnancy discreetly, and go to England for the birth. Byron refused to have Claire in his household, but he agreed to allow her to visit the child regularly under the designation of an aunt, once it had been settled under the paternal roof. Exact dates and places remained vague, but there was talk of summer 1817 in Italy.

  What gave force to this agreement was Shelley’s determined and courageous offer to look after Claire during the period of her pregnancy and childbirth, and support her as one of his own household. This was an offer which he put forward, fully realizing from his past experience the difficulties with Mary, the Godwins and other outsiders he would encounter. He must also have considered the inevitable rumours of ‘incest’ which would attach to himself. He did not blanch at these in the least, and for once acted both from principle and from experience. It was an act of great personal generosity, and imagination, far more distinctive than many of his philanthropic declarations and wild disbursements of his father’s money. It was also a frank recognition of personal responsibility for Claire. Claire never forgot this. One of the first fruits was that Shelley had now no choice but to leave Switzerland.

  Mary says nothing in her journal of her reaction to these events. On 4 August she gave Shelley a telescope which she had bought in Geneva for his 24th birthday, and they celebrated by going out in the boat to launch a fire balloon from the lake. But there was too much wind, and they had to try from the shore. From the lawn in front of Montalègre, the silken balloon inflated, rose unsteadily, caught the wind and burst instantly into flame and was consumed.

  The little community was inexorably breaking up. But the arrival of M. G. Lewis on the 18th, with a colourful train of Jamaican servants, whom he treated with genial kindness, temporarily lifted the Byronic gloom at the Diodati, and they all went up in the evening to discuss ghosts again. Shelley, who was now constantly discussing with Mary the plotting of Frankenstein, carefully questioned Lewis about ‘the mysteries of his trade’. In the journal he entered a long note on four stories, ‘all grim’, which Lewis told, and Mary years later wrote one of these for her article ‘On Ghosts’ for the London Magazine of March 1824. Shelley was curious to find that personally speaking, Lewis was a sceptic with regard to ghosts, and that Byron sided with him in the argument. ‘We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron nor Monk G. Lewis seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without also believing in God. I do not think that all the persons who profess to discredit these visitations really discredit them, or if they do, in daylight, are not admonished by the approach of loneliness and midnight to think more respectably of the world of shadows.’ Shelley took Byron and Lewis out in the boat, during the next few days, and among the subjects discussed was Goethe’s Faust. Shelley continued to escort Claire to the Diodati where she was being allowed to fair copy Childe Harold. But Byron still refused absolutely to see her alone. Yet he frequently came down from the Diodati, to talk with Shelley at Montalègre, partly to escape Polidori who was constantly getting drunk or involving himself in affrays in Geneva; and partly because he regretted Shelley’s departure. One Saturday evening, they sat on the wall overlooking the little harbour, talking quietly till the light faded and they parted for dinner. More and more rumours were now circulating back to them from Geneva, and five years later, writing to an Italian friend of Byron’s, Shelley recalled:

  The natives of Geneva and the English people who were living there did not hesitate to affirm that we were leading the life of the most unbridled libertinism. They said that we had found a pact to outrage all that is regarded as most sacred in human society. Allow me, Madam, to spare you the details. I will only tell you that atheism, incest, and many other things — sometimes ridiculous and sometimes terrible — were imputed to us. The English papers did not delay to spread the scandal, and the people believed it . . . . The inhabitants on the banks of the lake opposite Lord Byron’s house used telescopes to spy on his movements. One English lady fainted with horror (or pretended to!) on seeing him enter a drawing room . . . . You cannot, Madam, conceive the excessive violence with which a certain class of the English detest those whose conduct and opinions are not precisely modelled on their own. The systems of those ideas forms a superstition, which constantly demands and constantly finds fresh victims. Strong as theological hatred may be, it always yields to social hatred.51

  Shelley did not, however, choose to recall the hotel registers.

  The arrival of Byron’s old friends from London on 26 August, John Cam Hobhouse and Scrope Daves, effectively marked the changing of the guard. Shelley now felt he was de trop, and packing and coaching arrangements began. Byron and Polidori came down for farewells, and the two poets took a last sail on the lake in their boat which was thenceforward handed over to the Diodati. A copy of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ had arrived from London, and Shelley gave it a quiet memorial reading to Mary before going to bed. By the 28th they were packed up, and left on the 9 o’clock coach from Geneva the following morning. The fair copy of Childe Harold was locked in Shelley’s portmanteau for personal delivery to Murray’s at Albemarle Street. The Swiss nursemaid, Elise, came with them to look after little William. They glanced back regretfully at the shining lake, as they rose into the Jura, and gazed thoughtfully at the rocks, and the pines and meadows that had been under snow at the time of their arrival long ago in the spring.

  The departure was hardest for Claire. There is a brief undated note of hers to Byron, probably written in the last few days of August. It tells everything about that brief liaison. ‘I would have come to you tonight if I thought I could be any use to you. If you want me or anything of, or belonging to me I am sure Shelley would come and fetch me if you ask him. I am afraid to come dearest for fear of meeting anyone. Can you pretext the copying? Tell me anytime I shall come & I will because you will have then made your arrangements. Every thing is so awkward. We go soon. Dearest pray come and see us pray do.’52 But Byron had not come.

  Yet as the coach rolled slowly through Dijon and Fontainebleau towards Le Havre, Shelley was already looking and planning ahead. The friendship with Byron, though it had brought him responsibilities and had banked up much of his creative impulse, had also given him a matured and confident sense of new purpose. He felt alive again to the wider pattern of events in England, and at the back of his mind a long-buried theme for his writing was beginning to stir. One of the last books he had read at Montalègre was the Histoire de la Révolutio
n, by Rabault.53 Dispatching a brief letter to Byron, he expressed the idea obliquely, as something for Byron rather than for himself. ‘We passed, not through Paris, but by a shorter route through Versailles, and Fontainebleau, and stayed to visit those famous Palaces, which, as I will hereafter tell you, are well worth visiting as monuments of human power; grand, yet somewhat faded; the latter is the scene of some of the most interesting events of what may be called the master theme of the epoch in which we live — the French Revolution.’54

  At Le Havre, they embarked for Portsmouth, as Shelley knew that arrival in London with Claire would only complicate matters unnecessarily. They docked on 8 September, and Shelley watched anxiously while the customs officer leafed through the MS of Childe Harold, apparently looking for lace concealed between the pages. He drove into Somerset, and quickly established Mary and Claire in a house at No. 5 Abbey Churchyard, a discreet corner of Bath, and within three days was himself in his old London lodgings at 26 Marchmont Street. He had much business. There was Murray to deal with; and Peacock’s negotiations for a house at Windsor; and the old, endless wrangle with Godwin over money he could not supply, and loans he could not convincingly underwrite. While he stayed in London between the 10th and 14th, Fanny Godwin came to visit him in the evenings, partly as Godwin’s messenger, and partly on her own account. Then he went to Peacock’s at Marlow, and Mary joined him, but no house was immediately available, so they determined to winter in Bath.[7]

  From there, at the end of the month, Shelley wrote to Byron, apprising him of their plans, the 2,000 guineas Murray had agreed on for ‘the Childe’, and their hopes for all meeting again in the spring. The picture was cosy and domestic: ‘We are all now at Bath, well and content. Claire is writing to you at this instant. Mary is reading over the fire; our cat and kitten are sleeping under the sofa; and little Willy is just gone to sleep. We are looking out for a house in some lone place; and one chief pleasure which we shall expect then, will be a visit from you.’55 But as autumn darkened into winter, the little household was shaken and transformed by a series of disastrous blows, and they were drawn back, one more time, into the whirlpool of London. The summer was long over.

  [1] Byron did raise the question of paternity with Shelley, but only briefly, and he soon dismissed it as certainly his child. But writing to his friend Douglas Kinnaird, he implied that Shelley did not deny previous sexual relations with Claire: ‘. . . Is the brat mine? I have reason to think so, for I know as much as one can know such a thing — that she had not lived with S[helley] during the time of our acquaintance — and that she had a good deal of that same with me.’

  [2] Coleridge himself was somewhat concerned at the witch’s revelation of the ghastly deformity of her breasts, and in later editions changed the penultimate line to, ‘A sight to dream of, not to tell!’

  [3] A close connection with Shelley’s earlier description of such states, in the writings of 1815, is manifest here.

  [4] Mary’s solitariness during this night, if accurately recalled, suggests that it occurred when Shelley was already away on the lake with Byron; however this may have been a literary device, as was the imagined landscape — it was the Jura that were ‘beyond’ the lake; the Alps lay behind Montalègre, to the south.

  [5] Shelley kept a small sketch book with him in which he pencilled rough drawings of the lake and drafts of his diary-letter to Peacock, (Bodleian MS Shelley Adds. e. 16.) On p. 37, perhaps after his return to Montalègre, he wrote cross-wise in ink:

  My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,

  The verse that would invest them melts away

  Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:

  How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,

  Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!

  [6] Here, too, Coleridge had been before him, and had come back with his ‘Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni’. But for Coleridge the almighty God was safely in residence ‘On thy bald aweful head, O sovran Blanc!’

  [7] On 24 September 1816, Shelley delivered his will to the solicitor Longdill. It gives an interesting indication of his sense of attachments and responsibilities at this time. The residue of his estate was left directly to Mary Godwin. Harriet Shelley was to receive a sum of £6,000, and her children Ianthe and Charles £5,000 each. Claire Clairmont was to receive a sum of £6,000, together with an invested annuity of a further £6,000 which Shelley perhaps intended to make the care and upbringing of the forthcoming child independent of Byron if Claire so chose. Peacock was to receive £500, and an invested annuity of £2,000. Hogg and Lord Byron were each left gifts of £2,000. Byron and Peacock were appointed the trustees. The comparative provisions made for Claire and for Harriet are especially suggestive of Shelley’s feelings; as is also the complete absence of William Godwin’s name from the document.

  14. The Suicides: London 1816

  On the 9 October 1816, an extremely depressed note from Fanny Godwin arrived at Abbey Churchyard. To their surprise the Shelleys saw it carried a Bristol postmark. Both Claire and Mary were familiar with Fanny’s profound depressions, and Shelley was immediately dispatched to Bristol to seek out the girl. He returned at 2 a.m. without news. That night, in a small upper room in the Mackworth Arms, Swansea, Fanny committed suicide by overdosing herself with opium. Her pathetic suicide note explained nothing, and the Godwins were left to conclude that she had killed herself because of unrequited love for Shelley. There were in fact several other possible motives, including the recent discovery of her own illegitimacy, but her agonizing and loveless suspension between the Godwin and Shelley households was clearly the root circumstance. Godwin himself reacted by imposing a complete silence on the matter both at Skinner Street and on the Shelleys at Bath. Someone tore off the name from the suicide note, and Fanny’s identity never reached the local papers. Godwin forbade the Shelleys to go to Swansea or claim the body, and he himself was so discreet as to turn back his own journey at Bristol. No one went to see Fanny buried, and relatives were at first told that she had gone to Ireland; and later that she had died from a severe cold. Charles, her half-brother, was still not informed of her death by the following summer.

  Neither Shelley’s nor Mary’s correspondence contain the least overt reference to Fanny’s death at this time, which demonstrates among other things how secretive they could be about personal matters if they so chose. Claire wrote to Byron that Shelley’s health was upset by Fanny’s death (she did not herself mention suicide), and it has normally been assumed that Shelley was distraught. But there is no other evidence for this in Mary’s journal, or elsewhere. Shelley continued to read Don Quixote out loud, and began to keep records of the amount he ate, in grams. Mary took drawing lessons, and began to study chemistry with Shelley, reading Sir Humphry Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Claire was moved to a nearby address at 12 New Bond Street, for her approaching confinement, probably with Elise in attendance. It seems that only months later, when Shelley looked back at the grim pattern of that autumn and winter, did he accept the full implications of Fanny’s death. Several poems he wrote in the following year seem to grope towards realization and acceptance. There is the famous, ‘Her voice did quiver as we parted’, but also the following lyric in which he himself is pictured and placed:

  They die — the dead return not — Misery

  Sits near an open grave and calls them over,

  A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye —

  They are the names of kindred, friend and lover,

  Which he so feebly calls — they all are gone —

  Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone,

  This most familiar scene, my pain —

  These tombs — alone remain.1

  But of course, in reality, Shelley did not sit over Fanny’s poor anonymous grave.

  The rest of October and November passed in an ominous calm. The retired domesticity of Shelley’s life at Bath was almost unbroken. He moved between Mary at Abbey Churchyard a
nd Claire at New Bond Street, writing letters from both addresses. Claire was now expecting her child within six or eight weeks and his presence was her main comfort. They all walked up to the Royal Crescent to view the solar eclipse, but it was cloudy, and Mary amused herself watching the many disconsolate people with burnt glass.2 Shelley put forward a few tentative literary feelers, writing to a Monsieur Pascoud in Geneva concerning a French translation of Political Justice he had undertaken, and sending a fair copy of his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ to Hunt at the Examiner’s offices in London. For the time being there was no response from either quarter. He noted that Murray was rapidly preparing to bring out Childe Harold, though he himself had been ousted from the job of proof-reading by the critic Gifford. This minor professional snub, which Shelley passed off as best he could, was caused by Byron pretending to take him further into his confidence about the poem at the Diodati than he actually had. Shelley diverted his spleen by attacking the Edinburgh Review’s criticism of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. There was some genuine comfort for the author of Alastor in the fact that this volume, which also contained ‘Kubla Khan’, was so superciliously dismissed by a liberal review: ‘. . . there is literally not one couplet in the volume before us which would be reckoned poetry, or even sense, were it found in the corner of a newspaper, or upon the window of an inn.’3 Lord Byron and he could sympathize equally in the callous treatment of Coleridge.