Meanwhile (1810) he had passed from Eton to University College, Oxford. He avoided there, except for an exploratory night or two,47 the sexual riot that seemed to most undergraduates a necessary course to manhood. He listened now and then to lectures by the dons, who kept only a step ahead of him in Latin and Greek; soon he was composing Latin poetry, and he never forgot Aeschylus. His quarters were disordered with scattered books and manuscripts, and the abracadabra of amateur science; in one experiment he nearly blew up his room. He trusted to science to remake the world and man. He did not care for history, having taken the word of Voltaire and Gibbon that it was mainly the record of the crimes and follies of mankind; nevertheless he read these two skeptics fondly. He thought that he had found an answer to the riddle of the universe in Lucretius and the philosophes: it was a choreography of atoms following necessary laws. Then he discovered Spinoza, and interpreted him as a monistic dualist who saw matter and mind as two aspects of one divine substance—a something like mind in all matter, and a something like matter clothing all mind.
He read passionately. His classmate Hogg described him as “having a book in hand at all hours; reading … at table, in bed, and especially during a walk … not only at Oxford … in High Street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of London…. I never beheld eyes that devoured the pages more voraciously.”48 Eating seemed to him a waste of time, if unaccompanied by reading; and the simplest food was best, if only as least distracting from the digestion of ideas. He was not yet a vegetarian, but bread in one pocket and raisins in another seemed to him a well-balanced meal. However, he had a sweet tooth, savored honey on gingerbread, and liked to adorn his drinking water with wine.49
He is represented to us, in his Oxford days, as a tall, slender, stooping bundle of nerves, theories, and arguments; careless of his dress and hair; shirt collarless and open at the throat; face almost femininely fair; eyes brilliant but restless; manners awkward but courteous. He had a poet’s organism, sensitive at every nerve end, warm with unchecked feelings, receptive to a chaos of ideas, but allergic to history. He had a poet’s moral code, naturally stressing individual liberty and suspicious of social restraints. Wonderful, Hogg reported, were the nights in Shelley’s room, when they read poetry and philosophy to each other, demolished laws and creeds, exchanged certainties till 2 A.M., and agreed on one point above all others—that there was no God.
On that subject the young rebels concocted a collaboration which they entitled The Necessity of Atheism. That term was then proscribed in polite society; gentlemen skeptics called themselves deists, and spoke respectfully of God as an unknowable spirit, inherent in nature as its life and mind. Shelley himself would later come to this view; but, in brave and uncalculating youth, the authors preferred to call themselves atheists as a challenge to a taboo and a call to attention. The argument of the essay was that neither our senses nor reason nor history reveal a God. The senses reveal only matter in motion according to law. Reason rejects the idea of a creator evoking the universe out of nothing. History offers no example of divine action, nor of a divine person appearing on the earth. The authors did not sign their names, but, on the title page, ascribed it to, “Through deficiency of proof, An Atheist.”
The Oxford University and City Herald for February 9, 1811, contained an advertisement for the pamphlet. It appeared on February 13, and Shelley at once placed copies of it in the window or on the counter of an Oxford bookstore. The Reverend John Walker, fellow of New College, saw the display, and called upon the bookseller to destroy all copies of it in his possession; this was done. Meanwhile Shelley had sent copies to many bishops, and to several university dignitaries.50 One of these brought the pamphlet to the master and fellows of University College. These summoned Shelley to appear before them on March 25. He came, was shown the pamphlet, and was asked was he the author. He refused to answer, and made an appeal for freedom of thought and the press. He was told to leave Oxford by the next morning. Hearing of this, Hogg confessed himself co-author, and asked for equal punishment; it was granted. That afternoon a college bulletin announced that Shelley and Hogg were being expelled “for contumacy in refusing to answer certain questions put to them.” Privately the master sent word to Shelley that if it should prove difficult for him to leave at such short notice, a request for a few days’ delay would be granted. The message was ignored. On March 26 Shelley and Hogg proudly left on the top of the coach for London.
VI. ELOPEMENT I: SHELLEY, 1811–12
They took rooms at 15 Poland Street. Shelley’s father, in town for a session of Parliament, came to them there, and appealed to them to renounce their views. Finding Shelley unmoved, he bade him dismiss Hogg as an evil influence, return to the family home, and stay there “under such gentleman as I shall appoint, and attend to his instructions and directions.” Shelley refused. The father departed in anger and despair. He recognized Shelley’s abilities, and had looked forward to his taking an honorable place in Parliament. Hogg left for York to study law. Soon Shelley’s funds ran out. His sisters, then studying at Mrs. Fenning’s School in the Clapham district of London, sent him their pocket money. In May his father relented, and agreed to allow him £200 a year.
Among his sisters’ fellow students at Clapham was sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the prosperous owner of a tavern in Grosvenor Square. When she met Percy she was awed by his pedigree, his fluency of language, the range of his studies, the fascinating deviltry of his views. She soon agreed that God was dead and that laws were unnecessary nuisances. She read with fond tremors the rebel texts he lent her, and the translated classics revealing a wonderful civilization that had never heard of Christ. She invited him to her home. “I spend most of my time at Miss Westbrook’s,” Shelley wrote to Hogg in May, 1811. “She is reading Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique.”51 When her schoolmates discovered that her strange friend was an atheist they boycotted her as already smelling of hell. When she was caught with a letter from him she was expelled.
Early in August Shelley reported to Hogg: “Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by endeavoring to compel her to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was the answer, at the same time that I essayed to modify Mr. Westbrook in vain! And in consequence of my advice she has thrown herself on my protection.”52 Later he recalled the result: “She became evidently attached to me, and feared that I should not return her attachment…. It was impossible to avoid being much affected; I promised to unite my fate with hers.”53 Apparently he proposed a free-love union; she refused; he proposed marriage; she agreed. Her father refused consent. On August 25 the couple eloped, took the coach to Edinburgh, and there were married by the rites of the Scottish Church (August 28, 1811). Her father yielded to the fait accompli, and settled upon her an annuity of two hundred pounds. Her older sister Eliza came to live with her in York and (Shelley confessing himself a poor hand at practical matters) took charge of the new family’s funds. “Eliza,” he reported, “keeps our common stock of money, for safety, in some hole or corner of her dress,” and “gives it out as we want it.”54 Shelley was not quite happy at Eliza’s mastery, but took comfort in Harriet’s docility. “My wife,” he later wrote to Godwin, “is the partner of my thoughts and feelings.”55
Harriet and Eliza, with Hogg nearby, stayed in York while Shelley went to London to soften his father. Mr. Shelley had stopped his allowance on hearing of the elopement; now he renewed it, but forbade his son ever to enter the family home. Returning to York, Shelley found that his dear friend Hogg had attempted to seduce Harriet. She said nothing of this to her husband, but Hogg confessed, was forgiven, and departed. In November the trio left for Keswick, where Shelley became acquainted with Southey. “Here,” wrote Southey (January 4, 1812), “is a man who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794…. I told him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven.”56 Shelley found Southey amiable and generous, and read the older man’s p
oetry with pleasure. A few days later he wrote: “I do not think as highly of Southey as I did. It is to be confessed that to see him in his family … he appears in a most amiable light…. How he is corrupted by the world, contaminated by custom; it rends my heart when I think what he might have been.”57
He found some balm in reading Godwin’s Political Justice. When he learned that this once famous philosopher was now living in poverty and obscurity, he wrote to him a letter of worship:
I had enrolled your name in the list of the honorable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so. You still live, and, I firmly believe, are planning the welfare of human kind. I have just but entered on the scene of human operations, yet my feelings and my reasonings correspond with what yours were …. I am young; I am ardent in the cause of philosophy and truth…. When I come to London I shall seek for you. I am convinced I could represent myself to you in such terms as not to be thought unworthy of your friendship ….
Adieu. I shall earnestly await your answer.58
Godwin’s reply is lost; but we may judge its tenor from his letter of March, 1812: “As far as I can yet penetrate into your character, I conceive it to exhibit an extraordinary assemblage of lovely qualities, not without considerable defects. The defects do and always have arisen chiefly from this source—that you are still very young, and that in certain essential respects you do not sufficiently perceive that you are so.” He advised Shelley not to publish every ebullition, and, if he published anything, not to put his name to it. “The life of a man who does this [publishes and signs] will be a series of retractions.”59
Shelley had already practiced restraint by keeping in manuscript, or in some privately printed copies, his first important composition—Queen Mab. “It was written by me at the age of eighteen—I dare say in a sufficiently intemperate spirit—but … was not intended for publication.”60 In 1810 he was still aflame with the French philosophes; he prefaced the poem with Voltaire’s angry motto Écrasez l’infâme!, and he borrowed many ideas from Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791).
As the poem begins, the maiden Ianthe is asleep. In a dream the Fairy Queen Mab comes down to her from the sky, takes her up to the stars, and asks her to contemplate, from that perspective, the past, present, and future of the earth. A succession of empires passes before her—Egypt, Palmyra, Judea, Greece, Rome … Leaping to the present, the Queen pictures a king (obviously the Prince Regent) who is “a slave even to the basest appetites”;61 she wonders that not one of the wretches who famish while he feasts “raises an arm to dash him from the throne”; and she adds a now famous verdict:
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches.62
The Queen also dislikes commerce and Adam Smith: “the harmony and happiness of man yields to the wealth of nations”; “all things are sold, even love.”63 She pictures the burning of an atheist; this frightens Ianthe; the Queen comforts her by assuring her, “There is no God.”64 Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, enters, and berates the God of Genesis for punishing billions of men, women, and children through thousands of years for one woman’s unintelligible sin.65 (Byron may have found suggestions here for his Cain; Shelley had sent him a privately printed copy.) Finally the Queen pictures a rosy future: love unbound by law, prisons empty and needless, prostitution gone, death without pain. Then she bids Ianthe return to the earth, preach the gospel of universal love, and have undiscourageable faith in its victory. Ianthe awakes. —It is a powerful poem, despite its juvenile thought and sometimes bombastic style; in any case a remarkable product for a lad of eighteen years. When, without the poet’s consent, Queen Mab was published in 1821, the radicals of England welcomed it as their plaint and dream. Within twenty years fourteen editions were issued by piratical firms.66
After a stay (February-March, 1812) in Ireland, where, with heroic impartiality, he worked for both Catholic and proletarian causes, Shelley and Harriet passed into Wales. Oppressed by the poverty there, they went to London to raise funds for Welsh charities. He took this opportunity to pay his respects to Godwin, who was so pleased with him that the two families frequently played host to each other. After short return visits to Ireland and Wales, the younger couple settled in London. There, March 24, 1814, to insure the legitimacy of any son and heir they might have, Shelley and Harriet were remarried, now by a Church of England rite. Some time before, on her birthday, he had addressed to her a poetic renewal of his vows:
Harriet! let death all mortal ties dissolve;
But ours shall not be mortal! …
Virtue and Love! unbending Fortitude,
Freedom, Devotedness, and Purity!
That life my spirit consecrates to you.67
VII. ELOPEMENT II: SHELLEY, 1812–16
Through all his wanderings Shelley seems never to have thought of earning his own living. Perhaps he shared Wordsworth’s view that a dedicated poet should be excused from labors or concerns that might stifle the poetry in his blood. He saw no contradiction between his propaganda for equal rights under a republic and his efforts to get his share of the wealth that his grandfather bequeathed to his father. He added to the paternal annuity by selling “post-obits” to moneylenders; so, in 1813, he pledged two thousand pounds of his expected inheritance in exchange for six hundred in hand.
Perhaps the moneylenders were encouraged by his frail physique and recurrent illnesses. A constant pain in his left side (his second wife would report) “wound up his nerves to a pitch of sensibility that rendered his views of life different from those of a man in the enjoyment of healthy sensations. Perfectly gentle and forbearing in manner, he suffered a good deal of irritability, or rather excitement, and his fortitude to bear was almost always on a stretch.”68
He thought he might ease his pains by a vegetarian diet. He was confirmed in this hope by experiments described in John Newton’s Return to Nature, or Defence of a Vegetable Regimen (1811). By 1812 he and Harriet were confirmed vegetarians. By 1813 he was so enthusiastic about what she called “the Pythagorean system”69 that he interpolated in his notes to Queen Mab an appeal to all and sundry:
By all that is sacred in our hope for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system! … There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of a vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness.70
In Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) he traced man’s evil impulses, and most wars, to a meat diet, and pleaded for a return from commerce and industry to agriculture:
On a natural system of diet we should require no spices from India, no wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira …. The spirit of the nation, that should take the lead in this great reform, would insensibly become agricultural; commerce, with all its vices, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners.71
A strange concatenation of circumstances led from his vegetarianism to the breakup of his first marriage. Through his admiration for John Newton he met Newton’s sister-in-law, Mrs. John Boynton, a vegetarian, a republican, charming despite her white hair, and capable of educated conversation in two languages. In June, 1813, Harriet had given birth to a pretty daughter, whom Shelley named Ianthe; that summer he moved with them, and sister Eliza, to Bracknell, a pleasant place thirty miles from London. Shortly thereafter Mrs. Boynton took a house there, and gathered about her a circle of French émigrés and English radicals whose views on government and diet pleased Shelley. More and more frequently he left Harriet and Ianthe with Eliza, and went off to enjoy the company of Mrs. Boynton, her friends, and her married daughter.
Several shadows had fallen across his relations with his wife. He se
ems to have felt a certain retardation in her intellectual growth: she was increasingly absorbed in her child, and careless about politics, and yet she had developed a liking for gay comforts and fine clothes; partly for her sake he had bought an expensive carriage. At this critical juncture in his affairs (May 26, 1813) he received notice from his father that unless he retracted his atheism and apologized to the master of his college at Oxford, he would disinherit him and end all financial aid. In expectation of a substantial bequest on his coming of age (August 4, 1813), Shelley had contracted debts that mortgaged his future. Harriet and Eliza panicked, and obviously wondered whether Paris was not worth a Mass. Shelley refused to recant, and continued to frequent the soirees of Mrs. Boynton. Godwin sent word that he was facing arrest by his creditors, and implied that he would welcome aid. In June, 1814, Harriet moved with her child to Bath, apparently in the expectation that her husband would soon join her there. Shelley went to London, took a room in Fleet Street, tried to raise money for Godwin, and almost daily dined at the philosopher’s home in Skinner Street. There he met Mary Godwin.
She was the child in whose birth, seventeen years back, the gifted but unfortunate vindicator of the rights of woman had lost her life. Mary’s fresh youth, her alert mind, her pale and thoughtful face, her unconcealed admiration for Shelley, were too much for the poet, who was still a lad of twenty-one. Again pity mingled with desire. He had often heard of Mary Wollstonecraft and her remarkable book; here was her daughter who, unhappy under a stern stepmother, went often to sit alone beside her mother’s grave. Here—Shelley felt—with her double heritage of sensitivity and intellect, was a finer mind and spirit than Harriet. Within a week he was in the throes of a passion such as he seems never to have experienced before. On July 6 he asked Godwin for the hand of his daughter. The astonished philosopher denounced his acolyte as “licentious,” forbade him the house, and put Mary under the custody of her stepmother.72