Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  With Hunt’s family however, Shelley was indulged as a great favourite. Hunt’s wife, Marianne, looked on Mary and Shelley simply as a misunderstood and persecuted couple, and she was delighted with the way Shelley played with the children. Hunt’s eldest son, Thornton, then 11, afterwards remembered how he frequently went boating and walking on the Heath with Shelley. His father’s new strange friend filled him with a mixture of fascination and fear. He remembered one of his alarming physical spasms ‘when he suddenly threw up his book and hands, and fell back, the chair sliding steeply from under him, and he poured forth shrieks, loud and continuous, stamping his feet madly on the ground’.

  Contrasting him with his own father, Thornton recalled: ‘Shelley entered more unreservedly into the sports and even the thoughts of the children. I had probably awakened interest in him, not only because I was my father’s eldest child, but still more, because I had already begun to read with great avidity, and with an especial sense of imaginative wonders and horrors . . . . I can remember well one day when we were both for some long time engaged in gambols, broken off by my terror at his screwing up his long and curling hair into a horn, and approaching me with rampant paws and frightful gestures as some imaginative monster . . . . Shelley often called me for a long ramble on the heath, or into regions which I then thought far distant; and I went with him rather than with my father, because he walked faster, and talked with me while he walked . . . and when I was “done up”, he carried me home in his arms, on his shoulder, or pickback. Our communion was not always concord; as I have intimated, he took a pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter . . . . I am well aware that he had suffered severely, and that he continued to be haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him like an Orestes. He frequently talked on such subjects . . . .’28 Young Hunt’s memories are remarkable, and have the candid, unflinching penetration of a child’s glance. Thornton was, incidentally, one of those who was always convinced of the reality of the attack at Tan-yr-allt. Perhaps more than any of the adult Hampstead friends, Shelley allowed him into the dark side of his mind.

  But for Shelley, the games, the sociable dinners, the late-night arguments, the comfortable breakfasts with Hunt joking and punning genially in his flowered dressing-gown, all served as stimulating distractions. A sense of purpose was hardening secretly inside him. Both the Chancery case, and the reform meetings which had been sweeping the country had crystallized within him a new determination to express himself politically. The creative and the political impulse worked, as before, together.

  In February, Lord Liverpool’s administration had again announced a national state of alarm, as it had done in 1812. Government secret committees, commissioned to examine agitational and insurrectional movements and the levelling propaganda of the Spenceans, reported to both Houses of Parliament in the middle of the month. On 3 March Habeas Corpus was suspended, and on the 29th the Seditious Meetings Act was passed.29 On 30 January the deputies of the Hampden Clubs had held a special conference in London, and a contest for command of the reform movement was fought out between Francis Place, William Hone the editor of Reformist’s Register, and Cobbett. The fundamental principle at issue was whether it was best to press at once for full manhood suffrage, by working-class agitation throughout the nation, or whether to try and increase merely the middle-class representation. Francis Place advocated the second course, arguing that they might then carry the final stage of reform through from the floor of the Commons itself. Shelley was deeply involved with these issues. When Shelley and Mary moved from Hampstead to stay with Peacock at Marlow, she wrote to Hunt that the house was ‘very political as well as poetical’, and somewhat nervously asked his advice on a scheme which Shelley and Peacock were planning to start a local protest movement based on a refusal, as householders, to pay their rates and taxes.30

  Nothing can better capture the popular political feeling of this early spring of 1817 than the reports which Cobbett’s Weekly Political Pamphlet and the Black Dwarf carried of the execution of a sailor called Cashman who had been convicted as a result of the Spa Fields Riot of December 1816. The execution itself acted as the trigger for a large and spontaneous demonstration, in which Cashman gallantly played the jocular democratic hero to the very last. ‘As the Sherriffs advanced, the mob expressed the strongest feelings of indignation; groans and hisses burst from all quarters, and attempts were made to rush forward . . . . Cashman . . . seemed to enter into the spirit of the spectators, and joined in their exclamations with a terrific shout . . .“Hurra, my hearties in the cause! success! cheer up!” ’ He brushed away two Anglican clergymen, and the execution hood, with derision, stepped on to the trap with the noose around his neck and bellowed amiably at the crowd. ‘ “Now you buggers, give me three cheers when I trip”; and, after telling the executioner to “let go the jib-boom”, Cashman “was cheering at the instant the fatal board fell from beneath his feet”.’ The crowd fell silent, and the constables shifted uneasily at the barricades. Then with growing force they cried ‘Murder’ and ‘Shame’, and would not disperse for several hours.31

  It was in this month also that Samuel Bamford was arrested near Manchester and brought south for a trial and imprisonment that led to his personal examination by Sidmouth and other members of the Cabinet, of which he has left a brilliant and celebrated description.32

  In mid-February, Shelley suddenly began to work on a political pamphlet, his first since 1812. He showed the draft to Hunt’s friend Ollier, who agreed to print and publish it at Shelley’s expense. Shelley took the manuscript with him to Marlow, where he revised it, in discussion with Peacock. Its final title was A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom, and it was signed with the vatic pseudonym, ‘The Hermit of Marlow’. The pamphlet itself is short and to the point, and deliberately reasonable and moderate. Shelley suggested that a Crown and Anchor Meeting should be assembled of all the Friends of Liberty, whatever their particular bias, in order to set up what was in effect a national plebiscite. Funds and representatives should be organized to ask every ‘adult individual of Great Britain’ one simple question: whether or not they were in favour of the proposal that the House of Commons ‘should originate such measure of reform as would render its members the actual representatives of the nation’. This single question should be canvassed, without any further details or particulars. ‘It is trivial to discuss what species of reform shall have place when it remains a question whether there will be any reform or no.’ But if the answer was a majority ‘yes’, then all pressures could be brought to bear on Parliament to put through some immediate measure of reform, as this would then indisputably be the ‘will of the nation’.

  Beyond this simple target, towards which Shelley himself made a characteristic offer of £100 to set up an action fund, the meeting should disclaim ‘revolutionary and disorganizing schemes’, and declare its object to be ‘purely constitutional’. Indeed he stated that for his part, he did not believe that it was the right time to press matters further than instituting annual Parliaments, and a limited middle-class extension of the electoral base. He had, it seemed, no wish to be counted, in this contest at least, a democrat or demagogue. ‘With respect to universal suffrage, I confess I consider its adoption in the present unprepared state of public knowledge and feeling a measure fraught with peril. I think that none but those who register their names as paying a certain small sum in direct taxes ought, at present, to send members to Parliament. The consequences of the immediate extension of the elective franchise to every male adult would be to place power in the hands of men who have been rendered brutal and torpid and ferocious by ages of slavery. It is to suppose that the qualities belonging to a demagogue are such as are sufficient to endow a legislator.’33

  It would appear from
this that Shelley was quite deliberately setting out to align himself with the liberals of Hunt’s Examiner, rather than with the real radicals of the Political Register and the Black Dwarf. But in private, Shelley’s views were much further left than he admitted in this pamphlet. His scheme with Peacock to withhold payment of taxes — a highly unusual piece of direct action at that time — demonstrates this well; as also his tendency to side in political argument with the republican Hazlitt; and much of his private writings. This split between public and private attitudes gives some indication of the intense difficulty with which men like Shelley entertained the idea of a real English democracy.

  But there was hidden in the Hermit’s pamphlet a single logical trick which made the radical democratic point well enough. For, ideologically speaking, Shelley’s proposal in fact assumed already what it pretended to question. Once the reader found himself agreeing that the whole of the ‘individual adult’ population of Great Britain had a right to be consulted on the reform issue — that is, on a fundamental political issue — then the principle of universal adult franchise was already in practice established.

  Five hundred copies of the pamphlet were advertised by Ollier (together with Keats’s first volume of poems), and began to appear in the first fortnight of March. Shelley pressed Ollier to advertise unsparingly, and drew up for him a mailing list which shows clearly that he was addressing himself to the very centre of the controversy. Among those who received his pamphlet were Cobbett, Major Cartwright, Francis Burdett, Place, Brougham and Robert Owen. Bundles of copies were also sent to Hunt at the Examiner, and the Hampden Clubs of London and Birmingham. In April Shelley had some direct negotiations with Hone, probably about reprinting this or another of Shelley’s political works, but as far as is known nothing came of it directly. But this is perhaps how Shelley’s name came into the circle of working-class radical publishers, and how Richard Carlile himself approached Shelley in the summer about publishing Queen Mab.34 A copy eventually reached the Quarterly, and was later scathingly reviewed in a collection of anonymous and semi-seditious pamphlets by Robert Southey.

  The publication of the pamphlet brought Shelley no personal reactions outside the circle at Marlow and Hampstead, but from now on he felt himself back inside the reform movement and he followed the process of public meetings, political trials of editors, publishers and working leaders, with close attention. As he settled into the spring at Marlow, he turned the whole question of radical political and social change over in his mind and began to read further studies of the French Revolution. More and more he came to believe that the way in which he and his contemporaries interpreted the French Revolution would decide the way in which they would fight for or oppose the present struggle for democratic reform.

  [1] At the present time two manuscripts of this letter are extant, one in the British Museum (Ashley 5021), and the other in the Bodleian (Bod. MS Shelley c. 1, F135-138): both have doubtful postmarks or signatures. For a lively discussion, see Robert M. Smith, The Shelley Legend, New York, 1945, with a gentlemanly reply by the distinguished trio of Shelley scholars N.I. White, K. N. Cameron and F. L. Jones. The overall point is exemplary of Shelley sources: where events reveal Shelley in an unpleasant light, the original texts and commentaries have attracted suppressions, distortions and questions of doubtful authenticity, originating from Victorian apologists.

  [2] Shelley had some cause for this caveat: there is no proof that he had even seen Ianthe since spring 1814, two and a half years before.

  [3] Like Elizabeth Hitchener presumably.

  [4] ‘[Shelley] went to Charles Richards, the printer in St Martin’s Lane . . . about the printing of a little volume of Keats’ first poems . . . the printer told me that he had never had so strange a visitor. He was gaunt, and had peculiar starts and gestures and a way of fixing his eyes and his whole attitude for a good while, like the abstracted apathy of a musing madman.’ The opinion of Mr John Dix in his Pen and Ink Sketches of Poets, Preachers and Politicians (1846).

  15. The Garden Days: Marlow 1817

  By the end of February 1817, Shelley had at last secured a twenty-one-year lease on Albion House, and after several delays, on 18 March Shelley and Mary took possession of their new home. Claire had come up from Bath, bringing with her Elise, little William and her own beloved Alba. Albion House was the most determined effort at a permanent residence that Shelley ever made in England. It was a rather long, low, two-storey building roughly finished in a kind of white pebble-dash, with tiny attic windows peering over the top of a mock gothic balustrade. The slightly quaint impression was enhanced by the curious shape of the window frames, which were also mock gothic, each one rising to a pair of gnomish points. The front door, which gave directly on to the street, was fenced round and embowered by a lattice-work porch and balustrade over which wisteria and wild ivies climbed in profusion. The rooms were large inside, though they tended to be slightly dark and damp. The pride of the house was an enormous library which gave on to the back garden, and Shelley immediately began stocking it with books from Ollier and furnishing it in the approved Hunt fashion with full-size statues of Venus and Apollo. The garden itself at the back was very fine, about an acre in size, partly enclosed by a high, mellow red-brick wall, and already set out with neat lawns and dominated by a floating, dark green cedar tree. Its peripheries were somewhat darkened by firs and cypresses, closely planted. At the bottom of the lawn was a mound, where they sometimes sat in the evenings to see the view over the meadows, and behind this a vegetable garden where ornamental plants were inclined to appear idiosyncratically among the cabbages. At the end of the garden, the ground fell away down a steep chalk bank into a hidden lane. There are several records of Shelley hiding from uninvited visitors in this lane; of his leading his ladies up the chalk bank after walks; and using it as a slide to shoot past the enraptured Hunt children ‘in a cloud of chalk dust’.1 One of the first books Shelley ordered was Mawe’s Gardening Calendar, and his newly engaged gardener, Harry, was put to work sowing the Alpine seeds they had brought back from Switzerland. Mary also hired a cook and a housemaid.

  Albion House stood on the main London coaching route to Henley, about 200 yards to the west of the centre of Marlow and the solid three-storey brick establishment where Peacock lived with his mother. Across the road, and about three minutes over a hayfield, was the Thames, Marlow steps and the weir. Shelley kept a small skiff permanently moored here throughout the spring and summer for his water expeditions. Southwards from the Thames, across about a mile of shining water-meadows rose the steep green escarpment of Bisham Woods, loosely timbered with beech, birch and fir trees. Here Shelley loved to walk, turning secluded spots into open-air studies, or indulging in horse-play with Peacock and Hogg and the Hunt children, slithering down more dust slides and carving Greek hieroglyphics and revolutionary slogans on the trees. They even set up an altar to Pan, which Hogg and Peacock were solemnly to visit long after Shelley had gone abroad.

  Mary was anxious to play the hostess from the start, and in March she invited the Hunts: ‘I am now writing in the Library of our house in which we are to sleep tonight for the first time — It is very comfortable and expectant of its promised guests. The statues are arrived and everything is getting on. Come then, dear, good creatures, and let us enjoy with you the beauty of the Marlow sun and the pleasant walks that will give you all health spirits & industry.’ Hogg and Peacock, however, were a reminder of former things, and Mary was not unduly enthusiastic about Shelley’s old friends from the unsettled days. ‘Hogg is at present a visitor of Peacock. I do not like him and I think he is more disagreeable than ever. I would not have him come every week to disturb our peace by his illhumour and noise for all the world. Both of the menagerie were very much scandalised by the praise & sonnet of Keats and mean I believe to petition against the publication of any more.’2 Mary omitted to mention that Shelley’s opinion of Keats was correspondingly low; or that at Hampstead, with his own Queen Mab and Alastor be
hind him, he had solemnly advised Keats to avoid publishing young.

  The first proper guest was Godwin, who came in the early days of April. The weather had turned cold, and the whole visit was something of a strain, but Shelley manfully organized boating trips to Medmenham Abbey, Henley and Maidenhead, and talked with his father-in-law about the progress of his new novel Mandeville and the old issues of ‘perfectibility’. Claire had deposited Alba with Marianne Hunt and her sister Bessy Kent at Hampstead, and came down to Marlow immaculate again under her maiden name. A few hours after Godwin’s departure, the whole Hunt family arrived, bringing besides their own children, a little ‘cousin’ of theirs whom Aunt Claire had kindly agreed to take care of for the summer. Thus with Shelley’s careful management Alba was slipped easily into the Marlow household. With the arrival of the Hunts, the weather seemed to improve, regular expeditions took to the water or disappeared for the day into Bisham Woods. Shelley set himself on a concentrated course of Spenser’s poetry and Lacretelle’s Short History of the French Revolution, with the idea for a big political poem steadily forming in his mind. Mary meanwhile began to revise and fair copy her Frankenstein which had been thrown aside during the crises of the winter.

  Shelley took much trouble to fit Claire smoothly into the household. He wrote twice to Ollier to secure her ‘a print done from a drawing by Harlowe of Lord Byron’, specifying carefully how it should be framed. At the end of April he negotiated a loan of seventy-five pounds to buy a first-class concert piano from Vincent Novello upon which Hunt and others might accompany her singing. This piano, needless to say, was still not paid for in 1821.

  He wrote to Byron a cheerful but somewhat wry description of Claire and her little baby at Marlow. ‘[Alba] is very beautiful, and though her frame is of a somewhat delicate texture, enjoys excellent health. Her eyes are the most intelligent I ever saw in so young an infant. Her hair is black, her eyes deeply blue, and her mouth exquisitely shaped. She passes here for the child of a friend in London, sent into the country for her health, while Claire has reassumed her maiden character. Indeed all these precautions have now become more necessary than before on account of our renewed intimacy with Godwin, which has taken place in consequence of my marriage with Mary, a change (if it be a change) which had principally her feelings in respect to Godwin for its object. I need not inform you that this is simply with us a measure of convenience, and that our opinions as to the importance of this pretended sanction, and all the prejudices connected with it, remain the same.’ Shelley went on to discuss in general terms Alba’s future. He assumed without question that Byron would honour his obligations to the child herself, but tacitly admitted that Byron might well feel less obliged towards the mother. He and Mary would, of course, he said, give ‘all our care’ to the child in Byron’s absence. Shelley did not add that Mary regarded Claire as one of the main burdens of her life: ‘absentia Clariae’ still being one of the preconditions of her happiness. All in all, he felt it best that Byron should try to come back to England to settle the matter himself. In the event Byron was to be fully occupied in Venice.3