Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  On 1 July Shelley, Williams, Captain Roberts and the boat boy Charles Vivian sailed for Livorno, covering the distance of fifty miles in seven hours. They docked at half past nine in the evening, and spent the night sleeping on deck on cushions thrown down from the Bolivar. The next morning the quarantine officers cleared them to come ashore. Byron, the Gambas, Hunt and his family were all at Livorno, and there was an emotional reunion between Hunt and Shelley. Hunt recalled how Shelley rushed forward to embrace him, repeating over and over with delight ‘how inexpressibly glad’ he was to see him. Shelley was in the highest spirits, and when some joke was made, he leaned against a doorway for support, laughing wildly till the tears came into his eyes.

  The next day, leaving Williams at the harbour to buy provisions, Shelley and the Hunts and Byron made their way to Pisa. The Pisa plan for the Liberal, which was after all the real reason for their being together, did not now look promising. The Gambas were about to be permanently exiled from Tuscany, and Byron had declared that he would abandon both the Lanfranchi, and his new summer residence at Monte Nero to follow them. Trelawny was already scheming to get the Bolivar by land to the Lake of Geneva. Hunt was sixty crowns in debt, and his wife Marianne was dangerously ill: at Pisa Vaccà told Hunt she would probably die. Byron was appalled and irritated by the sight of Hunt’s numerous offspring, and groaned inwardly and outwardly at the responsibility he had taken on at the ground floor of his palace. On top of all this, a private letter from Mary to Hunt which Shelley delivered announced that it would be ‘madness’ for the Hunts to come to Lerici: ‘I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.’51 ‘Everybody is in despair,’ Shelley wrote, ‘& everything in confusion.’52

  Shelley made great efforts during the next five days to mediate between all the parties, and succeeded to some degree. He pointed out to Hunt that the offer Byron had made of assigning the copyright of his ‘Vision of Judgement’ for the first number of the Liberal would almost certainly guarantee the journal’s success. This offer he firmly secured from Byron ‘in spite of delicacy’. When it appeared in the autumn, the Liberal did in fact carry Byron’s poem.

  Shelley’s presence at Pisa, looking sun-burnt and healthy, gradually had the effect of cheering everyone, and both Byron and Hunt were anxious that he should stay. But Williams was still waiting at Livorno with the Don Juan, and he was impatient to return to Jane at Lerici: the wind blew constantly northwards for Spezia. ‘What can I do,’ he wrote in a note to Jane. ‘Poor Shelley desires that I should return to you, but I know secretly wishes me not to leave him in the lurch.’53 Besides, there was Mary still waiting on her sofa in the terrace windows, worrying about Percy Florence. Shelley wrote to her from Pisa: ‘How are you my best Mary? Write especially how is your health & how your spirits are, & whether you are not more reconciled to staying at Lerici at least during the summer. . . . Ever dearest Mary, Yours affectionately S. — PS. I have found the translation of the Symposium.’54 He also sent a brief love-note to Jane. ‘I fear you are solitary & melancholy at Villa Magni. . . . How soon those hours past, & how slowly they return to pass so soon again, & perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately so happily! . . .’55 He looked in to greet the Masons at Casa Silva before leaving Pisa on 7 July.

  At Livorno, he was greeted by Williams and Trelawny. The heat was overpowering, and the weather began to look unsettled, and they were all anxious to be off. Trelawny intended to sail the Bolivar to Lerici alongside them, but at the last moment he was held up by port clearance papers. Shelley and Williams decided to go on without waiting longer. Shelley jumped down on to the deck of the Don Juan; he was wearing a double-breasted reefer jacket, white nankeen sailors’ trousers and black leather boots. The ship cast off. Together with their boat boy, Charles Vivian, they drew out of the harbour at just after two in the afternoon of 8 July 1822 and hoisted full sail to make with all speed to Lerici. Trelawny waved goodbye and watched them with a spy-glass as they headed out to sea. Then he went down to his cabin to sleep. Captain Roberts, anxious about the low clouds gathering on the horizon to the west, took a large telescope and asked permission to climb the lighthouse, where he watched the sails of the Don Juan until they disappeared into a thickening haze. The storm came up rapidly from the south-west and broke at about half past six. The local Italian feluccas, wary of such summer squalls, ran for the safety of Livorno harbour, and one of the Italian captains reported having sighted the Don Juan in heavy seas.

  The poet laureate of Pisa, Count John Taaffe, long afterwards recounted the captain’s story:’. . . seeing that they could not long contend with such tremendous waves, [he] bore down upon them and offered to take them on board. A shrill voice, which is supposed to have been Shelley’s, was distinctly heard to say “No”. . . . The waves were running mountains high — a tremendous surf dashed over the boat which to his astonishment was still crowded with sail. “If you will not come on board for God’s sake reef your sails or you are lost,” cried a sailor through the speaking trumpet. One of the gentlemen (Williams it is believed) was seen to make an effort to lower the sails — his companion seized him by the arm as if in anger.’56 The Don Juan went down into the Gulf of Spezia, some ten miles west of Viareggio, under full sail.

  * The final unfinished words of Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’ in Bod. MS Shelley Adds. c. 4, Folder 5, are on a foolscap sheet (p. 53) which has been roughly folded in two. They read:

  Then, what is Life? I said…the cripple cast

  His eye upon the car of beams which now had rolled

  Onward, as if that look must be the last

  And answered… ‘Happy those for whom the fold

  Of

  The back of the sheet is covered with sail sketches. The whole manuscript has been finely and exhaustively examined by G. M. Matthews, ‘The Triumph of Life: A New Text’, Studia Neophilologica, XXXII (1960) and Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’ (1965). Reiman in his Appendix D concludes that the poem was probably begun ‘late in May 1822’ and returned to, after the Bolivar’s departure, ‘late in June’.

  30. Coda

  The bodies of Shelley, Edward Williams, and Charles Vivian were eventually washed up along the beach between Massa and Viareggio ten days after the storm. The exposed flesh of Shelley’s arms and face had been entirely eaten away, but he was identifiable by the nankeen trousers, the white silk socks beneath the boots and Hunt’s copy of Keats’s poems doubled back in the jacket pocket. To comply with the complicated quarantine laws, Trelawny had the body temporarily buried in the sand with quick lime, and dug up again on 15 August to be placed in a portable iron furnace that had been constructed to his specification at Livorno, and burnt on the beach in the presence of Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, some Tuscan militia and a few local fishermen. Much later Shelley’s ashes were buried in a tomb, also designed by Trelawny, in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, after having remained for several months in a mahogany chest in the British Consul’s wine-cellar.

  In England, the news of Shelley’s death was first published by the Examiner on 4 August, and on the following evening by the Courier whose article began: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no.’ Obituaries and polemic commentaries followed in many reviews and papers during the next three months.

  In Tuscany, the shock of Shelley’s death served temporarily to draw the old Pisan Circle together again. Mary, Claire and Jane Williams returned together to Pisa; Trelawny and Leigh Hunt placed themselves at Mary’s disposal; and Byron took on financial responsibility for the whole party and determined to go through with the plan for the Liberal. In that summer of 1822, Mary was aged 25; Claire 24; Trelawny 29; Byron 34; and Hunt 37. It was a young and immensely gifted group of individuals, but the influences which held them together were now far weaker than the forces that drove them apart, and nothing productive was to be achieved in each other’s company. As Trelawny recalled, ‘we degenerated
apace’.

  The first to depart, not surprisingly, was Claire, who returned almost immediately to Florence, and in September travelled alone to Vienna to stay with her brother Charles, a journey she had long contemplated. With both Allegra and Shelley dead there was nothing to keep her in Italy. In 1823 she accepted a post as a governess with a wealthy family in Moscow, and remained in Russia for several years. After a silence of twelve months, she had gradually resumed her correspondence with Mary and with Trelawny, and her letters were still as lively as ever; but she was frequently lonely, and she never married.

  In the autumn of 1822, the remaining Pisan Circle moved in Byron’s shadow to Genoa, and took separate houses outside the gates at Albaro. Here Jane Williams left for England, with her two children, and arrived in London in November with an introduction from Mary to Hogg. True to his form of old, Hogg was soon attracted by Shelley’s latest love-object, and within a year a liaison was blossoming. Jane eventually lived with Hogg as his common law wife, and bore him a daughter who was christened Prudentia. In 1832, Hogg published his first article on Shelley at Oxford in the New Monthly Magazine; and many years later, with Jane’s help issued the first two volumes of his biography in 1858. Hogg failed to attain either of his ambitions, a Judgeship or the Chair of Civil Law at the newly founded University of London; instead he became a regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and was finally one of the Municipal Corporation Commissioners and Revising Barrister for Northumberland. He died in 1862 at the age of 72.

  In October 1822, the first number of the Liberal containing Shelley’s translations from ‘Faust’ and Byron’s ‘Vision of Judgement’ was published in London, only to be received by a storm of protest. It folded quietly the following year after only four issues, the final collapse of Shelley’s original Pisan plan. In July of 1823, after growing acrimony largely over financial matters, the remainder of the old Pisan party broke up. Byron and Trelawny sailed for Greece in the Bolivar, Mary set out for England, the Hunts were left to struggle on for two years in Florence and Teresa Guiccioli was abandoned in Genoa.

  In Greece Byron spent several harsh and disillusioning months training a private army and attempting to instil some sense of brotherhood among the mixed assortment of European freedom-fighters in their motley uniforms, only to die miserably at Missolonghi of marsh fever on 19 April 1824. His valet Fletcher was still with him. Trelawny shifted for himself as a private adventurer and freebooter, joining forces with the Greek chieftain and brigand Odysseus; later he continued his escapades in Europe and America, and swum the Niagara just above the Falls. Finally he returned as a raffish member of London society, dining out on reminiscences, and publishing the autobiographic The Adventures of a Younger Son in 1830, and the biographical Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron in 1858, both of which are semi-fictionalized accounts. In middle age he eloped with Lady Augusta Goring, and after a divorce scandal, married for the third time, and settled in Monmouthshire.

  When Mary returned to London in 1823 with her precious child Percy Florence, she renewed her friendship with Jane Williams and the Gisbornes, and settled in Kentish Town near her father William Godwin. A dramatized version of Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein was playing at the English Opera House, and her role as a minor literary celebrity began, which soothed her though it did not bring financial security. She continued an endless series of negotiations with Field Place, aided somewhat coldly by Peacock, and in 1824 obtained a £100 annuity to support herself and Percy. On the publication of five hundred copies of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, Sir Timothy instantly threatened to remove the vital annuity, until the remaining 191 unsold copies were destroyed. A similar threat was made on the publication of The Last Man in 1826; but gradually Mary’s situation improved, she took rooms in Regent’s Park and sent Percy to Harrow, and later to Trinity College, Cambridge — an education modelled on. Byron’s — where to her delight his career was smooth and undistinguished. Various drawing-room affections with a number of fashionable young poets and actors, including Washington Irving, came to nothing, and she turned down an offer of marriage from Trelawny. Gradually old friends fell away: both John and Maria Gisborne died in 1835, and in April of the following year her father died at the age of 80, the end of what Mary now clearly realized as an ‘excessive and romantic attachment’. She was still obsessed by Shelley’s papers, and trapped by memories both idealized and remorseful, her life attained a curious stillness, interrupted only by sea-bathing at Sandgate, increasingly acid correspondence with Claire, Trelawny and Jane, and occasional expeditions to the Continent with Percy’s undergraduate friends. In 1839, on the publication of the first edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works by Moxon, Mary was bitterly attacked by Trelawny, Hogg and Peacock for her editorial omissions and suppressions.

  In 1844 old Sir Timothy finally died, and the baronetcy descended upon Percy Florence, who inherited Field Place, and married Jane St John, a narrow, kindly, capable woman with literary tastes, in 1848. Tactfully Lady Jane Shelley assumed the handling and collecting of the Shelley papers from Mary, and had built a special room of remembrance at the new Shelley home of Boscombe Manor which was treated almost like a shrine, complete with life-size monument of the poet, lockets of fading hair, glass cases of letters and blue opaque pots containing fragments of bone. The meditative stillness of Mary’s life now changed imperceptibly into a physical paralysis, and she died quietly in 1851 attended by her beloved Sir Percy.

  During this time Peacock had risen to eminence in India House and between 1836 and 1856 was the Chief Examiner of Correspondence, a position he held directly above the young utilitarian and feminist John Stuart Mill. Peacock published his ‘Memoirs’ of Shelley in Fraser’s Magazine shortly after his retirement, and while intelligently criticizing Hogg’s biography and stoutly defending the honour of Harriet Shelley against the worshippers of Boscombe Manor, he unconsciously attributed to Shelley an aura of comic mystique drawn from his own fiction. It was not coincidental that 1861 saw the crown of his own literary career in the last and most mellow of his ‘crotchet’ novels, entitled Gryll Grange. Five years later he died at the age of 81.

  Leigh Hunt, who had also attacked Hogg’s biography, was already dead. After returning to his beloved Highgate in 1825, he had issued his Italian apologia Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828) and continued producing a mass of genial literary journalism including Stories From the Italian Poets (1846). He moved south to Cheyne Row, befriended Thomas Carlyle, and published perhaps his best work, a three-volume Autobiography in 1850. He died nine years later at Putney, aged 74.

  The traces of the old Italian circle were now almost entirely dissolved. Trelawny had broken with his wife, and gone to cultivate fig trees at Worthing, where as an old man he sat to Sir John Millais as the ancient sea dog in The North West Passage, his final gesture of romance. He was to die in 1881. There remained only Claire Clairmont, who had returned to Europe in 1828, and shuttled between Vienna, London and Italy for many years, still labouring as a governess, and still writing her sprightly correspondence, which became faintly malicious in old age. Claire’s main hope of real independence had been the generous legacy of £12,000 which Shelley had intended for her many years previously; but somehow inevitably, when it eventually reached her in 1844, much of it was squandered in a series of madcap investments. At long last she returned in genteel poverty to the beautiful Italian city of her original exile, Florence, and lived peacefully there for many years attended by her niece Pauline, finally dying in 1879.

  A young Harvard University graduate, Edward Silsbee, had come to Florence shortly before Claire’s death in search of Shelley’s supposed love-letters. He tried ineffectually to charm them from the dark-eyed old lady by parading his youthful zeal and enthusiastic knowledge of Shelley. His performance inspired Henry James’s cutting story The Aspern Papers (1888), which is the final damnation of all biographers. Silsbee did however retrieve Claire’s faircopy book, with its tr
anscription of the poem ‘To Constantia Singing’ — ‘Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget’.

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  For kind permission to consult and quote from copyright materials I am very happy to thank: the Keeper of Western Mss, the Bodleian Library; John Murray of Albemarle Street; the Caernarvonshire Record Office; Lord Abinger; and the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

  For further copyright permissions, my thanks and acknowledgements to: Harvard University Press; Oxford University Press; University of Oklahoma Press; University of New Mexico Press; Duke University Press; University of Illinois Press; the Bodley Head; and Victor Gollancz.

  For permission to make reference to and quotation from copyright documents I am pleased to thank The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc. of New York.

  For reproductions of pictures and manuscripts my thanks are due to: the Bodleian Library; the British Museum; the National Portrait Gallery; the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome; the Museo Borghese, Rome; the Uffizi Gallery, Florence; Nottingham Public Libraries; Mrs Imogen Dennis and St Pancras Public Libraries; Editions Jaeger, Geneva; the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; and the Frankfurter Goethemuseum.

  My special thanks to the artist David Farris; and the photographer Adrian Holmes, now of Rylands Visual Facilities Ltd.

  For technical help of one kind or another I am extremely grateful to: Bryn R. Parry, of Swyddfa Archifau Caernarfon; the archivist of the University of North Wales, Bangor; the staff of the Old Bodleian Library, Oxford; the staff of the British Museum, and Carol Andrews of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities; the staff of the London Library; the staff of the Rising Sun, Lynmouth; Richard Ormond, Assistant Keeper, the National Portrait Gallery; Signora Vera Cacciatore, the Keats-Shelley Museum, Rome; Susan Bartlett, Florence and Orinda, California; and Signor Giulio Martinelli, La Fondiaria Assicuriazioni, Bagni di Lucca.