He sprang out first from a battered old leather suitcase, lined in Regency polka-dot. The suitcase belonged to Lord Byron’s friend Scrope Davies, and was unearthed from the cellars of a Pall Mall bank. The scholars were ravished by the manuscripts it contained – two completely unknown poems by Shelley, among much else – and I was called in to give a biographical opinion. But this was a case of pure sidetracking. What came to fascinate me was Scrope Davies’s own story, a perfect example of the Romantic past lying in wait, hidden in the shadows of greater reputations, and yet crying out to be told. I wrote it up for an American magazine, who then wondered if there was a whole book to be done about Romantic gamblers, ‘from Davies to Dostoyevsky, say?’. But this was too far, even for me.
Yet the possibility of lost manuscripts, or the urge to invent them, remained. What tempting gaps in the record could be filled, what ghosts could be summoned! I am sure one day biographers will attempt this, if only in homage to W. S. Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Shelley’s last days in Italy came back to me. There was a third person who drowned in his yacht in the Gulf of Spezia, the ‘English boatboy’ Charles Vivian.
Suppose Vivian had kept a diary which survived the wreck, and which turned up in another trunk in a bank in Livorno? So I actually wrote this diary, in a little green morocco notebook, a pure biographer’s fiction. Yet in the end it seemed to answer none of my questions, and I did not attempt to publish it. But finally, in the bi-centenary of Shelley’s birth, I turned again to radio and transformed my nagging speculations into a drama. ‘To The Tempest Given’ contains no forgery, and is accurately based on the varied accounts of the last three weeks of Shelley’s life at the Casa Magni in 1822. Every word that Shelley speaks has textual authority, only the voice of ‘Holmes’ sometimes has another hidden identity, that of the lost Charles Vivian.
SCROPE’S LAST THROW
SCROPE BERDMORE DAVIES, whose remarkable trunk caused considerable excitement in London literary circles this winter, was a university don and a society gambler – a combination of métiers that would have interested Dostoyevsky, and which certainly fascinated Lord Byron. His strange dragonfly career (1783–1852), in some ways typical of the wits and dandies of the English Regency, seems to have hung on the fall of a card at Watier’s Club, or the fall of a hoof at Newmarket; and it ended abruptly and tragically in his thirty-seventh year, with spectacular financial ruin leading not to suicide but to a long, dismal and penurious exile in the anonymous, small seaside hotels of northern France. Byron himself observed, helplessly, that ‘such a man’s destiny ought not to be in a dice-box’. But in a dice-box it always remained. The curious thing is that Scrope may have won on his last throw.
Up to now, astonishingly little has been known about Scrope considering he was one of Byron’s closest friends (‘one of the cleverest men I ever knew, in conversation’) and thus belongs to a period of literary history that has been more minutely excavated by scholars – English, American, Italian and German – than any other, including Shakespeare’s. No one has written his life; no one has collected his letters; no one possesses even a picture of him. The exhaustive Dictionary of National Biography honours him with no entry; and the author-authoritative Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand, grants him but one footnote, in which it is recorded that he was educated at Eton and had ‘an irresistible stammer’. Uncertain monument.
Yet Scrope was undoubtedly one of Byron’s most important confidants up to 1816. He was part of the inner circle, with Hobhouse the future politician and Kinnaird the banker, when Byron was at Cambridge; and is credited with, among other things, the discovery that Byron slept en papillote, that is to say, in paper curlers (‘Aha! Byron I have at last caught you acting the part of Sleeping Beauty’). It was Scrope who provided Byron with £4,000 (about £80,000 today) to finance his first journey to Greece and Turkey in 1809, upon which Byron’s early literary successes – Childe Harold I and II, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos – entirely depended. It was to Scrope that Byron turned on the deaths of his mother and his Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews, in one terrible week of August 1811; and it was to Scrope that he wrote from Calais: ‘Sincerely, you are among one of the few things in England that I leave with regret, and shall return to with pleasure.’
Scrope, with Hobhouse, was the only London friend invited to visit the Byron–Shelley circle in the famous summer in Switzerland of 1816; and it was to Scrope that Byron entrusted a fair copy of Childe Harold III to carry back to London for publication by Murray, together with secret presents of rock crystal for his beloved half-sister, Augusta Leigh. It was a commission that Scrope undertook, but did not entirely discharge, as we shall see. Finally, it was in nostalgic recollection of Scrope’s incurable wit and fecklessness that Byron perpetrated one of his most delightful bad puns which incidentally established for posterity the correct pro-nounciation of that bent, Dickensian name: ‘Tell me of Scrope – is he as full of “fierce embraces” as when I last saw him? – I wish he would marry and beget some Scrooples; it is a pity the dynasty should not be prolonged.’
Alas, the dynasty was never founded. Thirty-two years after his enforced exile in 1820, Scrope Davies died forgotten, intestate and scroopleless, in Paris in May 1852. He was remembered only by one garrulous memoir writer of the period, a certain Capt. Rees-Howell Gronow, who recalled in an uncharacteristically gentle passage of his Reminiscences:
Scrope Davies bore with perfect resignation the loss of the wealth he had once possessed; and though his annual income (provided by his faithful Cambridge college) was very limited, he made no complaints of poverty. He daily sat himself down on a bench in his garden of the Tuileries, where he received those whose acquaintance he desired, and then returned to his study, where he wrote notes upon the men of his day, which have unfortunately disappeared.
Those precious notes have yet to be rediscovered – though I learn that the librarians at King’s College are now hopefully ransacking the archives – but the forgotten trunk, never mentioned by Scrope himself, reappeared 124 years later in the private deposit vault of Barclay’s Bank. To understand how this extraordinary find occurred, it is necessary to recall the circumstances of Scrope’s ruin. First, consider the famous trunk itself.
It is actually rather small: a battered leather chest perhaps three feet wide and one foot deep, with a central lock and a faint smell of old riding boots. It is studded with brass rivets along the leading edges and around the joint of the lid; the studs elegantly follow the leather crescents where the corners are reinforced, and form a diamond pattern on the front. The lid opens low down, so the trunk seems to split apart like a drinks hamper or a pistol case – both pleasant associations for Scrope. Inside it is sportively lined in Regency polka-dot, and the lid is held by two silk stays. A decorative label, like an ex libris slip, is stuck to the back panel.
Everything that Scrope valued, and much that he did not, was hurled into the trunk during the space of one evening’s hectic packing in his Cambridge rooms in January 1820. The scene was later described by a historian of King’s College, W. H. Tucker:
He had possessed himself, as admitted and known in College, by slow – or other – degrees of some £20,000 at Newmarket; and as was most natural in betting men tried to double it, or more: in modern phrase, he rather plunged. On a certain evening he came into his rooms rather hurriedly, and with Mrs Hazel’s help began to pack up his personal effects. ‘What is it, Sir?’ she enquired. ‘Ruin! I’ve lost all I had, and as much more; and must leave tonight. Tomorrow will be too late.’
Scrope fled by the overnight coach to London, deposited the trunk at his bankers, Morland, Ransom & Co. of No. 1 Pall Mall East (where Byron also banked, and Kinnaird was senior partner), and departed into obscurity: some accounts say Calais, some say Ostend, some say Bruges. Thereafter, he never dared to return to England for fear of arrest, bankruptcy, public disgrace and inevitable imprisonment. In the end, he may have forgotten about the co
ntents of the trunk, or, a more tantalizing possibility, he simply could never risk reclaiming it. After Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824, and the scandalous success of Thomas Moore’s Life and Letters (1830), the temptation to reclaim it would have been agonizing. But the trunk was out of reach – though not out of play.
Time passed, as it does in England. Morland, Ransom & Co. merged with several other private banks to form Barclay’s. The building became Kinnaird House. But for 100 years, the old private deposit vault was undisturbed. In 1922 the trunk was restacked and relabelled, a little vaguely, S. Davies, but still it was not opened. Only in November 1976 did a literary-minded director of Barclay’s, Christopher Norman-Butler, finally alight once more upon the chest and guess at its potentialities. The present John Murray of Albermarle Street, the direct descendant of Byron’s original publisher, and Daniel Waley of the Department of Western Manuscripts of the British Library, were immediately called in; and two distant kinsmen of Scrope’s were approached in confidence. These were Martin R. Davies, a solicitor from Bristol, and Bevis Hillier, an art collector and critic, who happens also to be a regular contributor to the London Times. At a dinner party of Byron scholars at the Athenaeum Club on December 14, heady rumours buzzed across the smoked trout and white Burgundy, and Mr Murray had a peculiar glint in his eye. But it was not until 20 December that the story finally broke in an old-fashioned, front-page literary scoop in the London Times, brilliantly executed by Hillier, and copied next morning by the New York Times. Leading articles appeared throughout the English-speaking press, the television filmed Mr Norman-Butler handing over the trunk (now empty) to Lord Eccles of the British Library, and Lord Eccles handing the trunk back (still empty) to Mr Norman-Butler for another go, and the BBC World Service network carried the discovery as its premier item. Scrope was news!
What did the trunk contain? Martin Davies well described its chaotic interior, so redolent of poor Scrope’s last hectic hours in England, as ‘a sort of miniature Pompeii of the late Regency period’. The first impression was of scores and scores of unpaid bills and betting slips pinned on wire desk spikes; then an immaculate pair of white kid evening gloves; several embossed invitations from Lady Holland and the Duke of Wellington; letters and drawings from Scrope’s younger brother, Decimus, who guarded Napoleon on his last journey to St Helena (another exile); and a packet of love letters from Lady Frances Webster, a noted society beauty of the day, an early flame of Byron’s, and a later mistress of the Iron Duke’s. In one letter, a perfectly preserved and lustrous lock of her hair.
Then there were the dandy’s tailor’s bills – a pair of red lounging slippers, a pair of white tennis shoes, twelve guineas’ worth of shirts from C. H. Hemans, half-a-dozen Indian muslin handkerchiefs; traders’ advertisements for expensive wine and cheap brandy ‘Fine cognac at 9 shillings a gallon’); small account slips from Watier’s Club for dining and gambling; collections of after-dinner jokes and aphorisms, both in English and Latin, all carefully prepared, like Oscar Wilde’s, for ‘spontaneous’ repartee over the seltzer. More letters, in a jumble, from Thomas Moore, from Hobhouse, from Augusta Leigh. Then the legal documents, like a gathering tide, showing Scrope fighting at the Court of Common Pleas in 1818 for sums over £7,000; and the sinister shoal of tiny personal betting books, annotated with a minuteness that is already obsessional.
Finally, buried beneath this jackdaw heap, the sensational prizes: first, twenty unknown letters from Byron to Scrope written through the decade 1809–19, the seals torn open and the flakes of red wax still lying in the fresh folds. Second, a scarlet morocco-bound notebook containing Byron’s lost copy of Childe Harold III, which Scrope had evidently kept for himself instead of delivering to Murray in 1816, and marked with Scrope’s proud annotation: ‘This Ms was given by Lord Byron to Scrope Davies at Geneva, September 2nd 1816.’ (Fortunately, Shelley did deliver the fair copy Byron had given him that same summer.) Third – and perhaps most surprising of all – a pair of matching notebooks, bound in almost identical blue-and-orange marbled board, emanating from the Shelley circle. One contains a fair copy of Byron’s ‘Prisoner of Chillon’, beautifully written out in round, childish hand by Claire Clairmont – Mary Shelley’s stepsister, and Byron’s mistress of that summer, aged eighteen, desperately in love, and so anxious to prove her worth. The other contains fair copies of four Shelley poems of the Swiss period: two unknown sonnets (one fragmented, the other entitled ‘To Laughter’), the famous ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and the philosophical poem ‘Mont Blanc’ with Shelley’s annotation, ‘Scene – Pont Pellisier in the Vale of Joux’.
This fantastic hoard has stunned scholars and antiquarians, and full assessment will obviously take most of this year. What are the manuscripts worth (a single copy of Byron’s ‘Beppo’ was sold at Sotheby’s for £55,000 – about $94,000 – in 1976)? Where should they be kept? What new light do they throw on the Byron–Shelley circle in 1816? What do they tell us about the Regency dandies? The answers to such immediate questions will only be pieced together slowly. It is not even clear yet to whom the trunk actually belongs, but for the time being it has been put on loan to the British Library.
Some perspectives, and also some puzzles, are emerging. The copyright of the twenty new Byron letters lies in the control and keeping of John Murray, but extensive extracts are being published by the London Byron Society Journal this spring, when some judgement of their value will be possible. It is already evident that Scrope’s place in Byron’s emotional development, his role of model dandy and confidential rake, will be assured by them. Those letters written from Italy also contain strikingly bitter revelations of Byron’s attitude to English society and his own exile. Meditating in Venice on the rumours concerning his estranged wife and his half-sister that had originally driven him abroad, Byron remarks cuttingly, ‘If they were true I was unfit for England, if false England is unfit for me.’ He confides to Scrope in a mood of weary sarcasm:
You recollect that with the exception of a few friends (yourself among the foremost of those who staid by me) I was detested and blackened by all … nothing can ever atone to me for the atrocious caprice – the unsupported – almost unasserted – the kind of hinted persecution – and shrugging Conspiracy – of which I was attempted to be made the victim – if the tables were to be turned – if they were to decree me all the columns of the Morning Post – and all the tavern-signs of Wellington – I would not accept them.
The full text of letters such as these, when they finally appear, will obviously give a fascinating, if melancholy, picture of Byron’s home thoughts from abroad, and explain something of the mood in which he transformed himself into Don Juan, the greatest of all poetic dandies, the dandy adrift, the dandy who’s gone to the devil.
The ‘Childe Harold’ notebook, for all its value, perhaps tells us more about Scrope’s character than Byron’s poetry. Jerome McGann, of Johns Hopkins University, who is preparing an exhaustive new edition of the poetry for Oxford University Press, flew to London to examine the manuscript as it was being catalogued. He told me, as we stood among the debris of the trunk, drinking tea and reading Scrope’s wine lists, that his first impression was that the new readings of the poem would amount to little more than variorum footnotes, with minor alterations of adjectives and punctuation. The notebook does contain Byron’s amusing political footnotes, which were later suppressed. Scholars are however naturally cautious, and McGann’s final assessment will appear when his great opus, begun in 1970, finally surfaces.
Caution is justified. When the ‘Mont Blanc’ notebook was initially put on public display in mid-January, it was naturally assumed that all the poems were in Shelley’s own hand. But another eagle-eyed American scholar, Judith Chernaik, quickly spotted that this was not so. Timothy Burnet of the Manuscript Department swiftly brought out a pile of contemporary holographs by Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, and a somewhat bizarre but very English kind of conference was instantly convened over th
e glass display cases as the library was closing for the night, amidst a small posse of anxious, peak-capped attendants, indulgently checking their watches and the priceless manuscripts in benign alternation. The revised opinion now stands that the first three poems are in Mary’s hand, and the fourth, ‘Mont Blanc’, in Shelley’s.
This notebook remains the most puzzling of all. How on earth did Shelley’s poems come to be in Scrope’s trunk at all? Scrope and Shelley were not friends; nor would Byron have dreamed of sending Shelley’s notebook back to Murray with Scrope. Did Scrope somehow purloin it, and keep it like the ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Chillon’ notebooks? Or was there some genuine muddle-up with Claire’s copy, which looks so like it (both notebooks, incidentally, carry English watermarks for 1813)? It is intriguing.
One interesting possibility is that Mary copied out Shelley’s Swiss poems at Byron’s own request, as their summer together drew to a close, so that the notebook might form a kind of literary souvenir; and that Byron subsequently allowed it to fall into Scrope’s clutches. This speculation serves to draw attention to the best of the two new sonnets, ‘To Laughter’. Its subject – an attack on the cynical worldly humour, the sort that ‘mocks at truth and Innocency’, frequently indulged in by Byron’s friends – may have been of special interest, or relevance, to Scrope. Indeed, it may conceivably have been about him.
Scrope and Hobhouse arrived at Byron’s lakeside residence, the Villa Diodati, on August 26 1816, and their stay overlapped with Shelley’s by three days. We know from Mary’s Journal that Shelley spent at least two evenings in their company. The temperamental differences between Shelley and Scrope would have been very great – the earnest atheist meeting the roué – and it is not difficult to imagine Shelley’s sonnet as an ‘occasional’ piece dashed off after such an encounter. It certainly has the sense of a violent personal attack. Here it is, transcribed from the manuscript: