This marked, more really than the expulsion from Oxford, Shelley’s first significant step in the process of self-exile which came to dominate much of his life. Perhaps characteristically, the gesture had at its core a gratuitous violence; for such a renunciation was of course legally quite empty until Shelley had attained the age of 21. Still, it accorded with his egalitarian principles, and besides those he had little else left.
[1]Hogg first contributed a long article to the New Monthly Magazine in 1832 entitled ‘Reminiscences of Shelley at Oxford’; later he was allowed access to Shelley papers kept at Field Place and wrote the first two volumes of The Life of Shelley covering the poet’s career until 1814. It was published in 1858, after which permission to use the Shelley papers was withdrawn. Hogg’s presentation of Shelley is brilliantly anecdotal, but consistently humorous and facetious, with a great deal of his own autobiography intermixed. He altered the text of Shelley’s letters, to soften their radicalism, and characteristically ‘Atheist’ is always printed as ‘Deist’, and ‘atheistical’ as ‘philosophical’. Pronouns were also changed to disguise his emotional involvement in Shelley’s life. Hogg has been harshly viewed by later scholars, but his own life was crippled partially by his connection with Shelley: disaster at Oxford, disinheritance and failure to achieve high distinction at the Bar. He wrote sadly: ‘It is difficult to view [Shelley] with the mind which I then bore — with a young mind; to lay aside the seriousness of old age; for twenty years of assiduous study have induced, if not in the body, at least within, something of premature old age.’
[2]It is one of the instructive ironies of literary history that it was precisely this image which William Hazlitt used to attack the irresponsibility of Shelley’s wild radicalism in a celebrated essay ten years later, ‘On Paradox and Commonplace’: ‘It would seem that [Mr Shelley] wanted not so much to convince or inform, as to shock the public by the tenor of his productions, but I suspect he is more intent upon startling himself with his electrical experiments in morals and philosophy; and though they may scorch other people, they are to him harmless amusements, the coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that play around the head, but do not reach the heart! Still I could wish he would put a stop to the incessant, alarming whirl of his Voltaic battery.’
[3]Shelley wrote to Graham at the end of November 1810: ‘The part of the Epithalamium which you mention [i.e. from the end of Satan’s triumph] is the production of a friend’s mistress . . . [it] will make it sell like wildfire.’ Mrs Nicholson had regrettably attempted to assassinate King George III in 1786; she was subsequently committed to a Bedlam. King George escaped both fates. Shelley posed as her nephew, anxious to publish a ‘more copious collection of my unfortunate Aunt’s Poems’, if the first had any success.
[4]Of the poem itself we know nothing, but what appears to be a later version occurs in the Esdaile MS Notebook, a collection of works written between 1810 and 1814; it is his first short piece of recognizable poetic qualities, though obviously influenced by Wordsworth.
[5]The Examiner had carried an article against military flogging entitled ‘One Thousand Lashes’; Henry Brougham brilliantly defended the case under the jaundiced eye of Lord Ellenborough who never usually missed a chance to put a publisher in the stocks.
[6]For the most lively contemporary account of the Illuminist movement, see John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe. London, 1798. Shelley’s treasured edition of the Abbé Barruel’s polemic study was the exhaustive Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. the Hon. Robert Clifford, 4 vols, London, 1798.
3. Wales and Limbo: 1811
Shelley now found himself existing in a kind of limbo. He kept on his sitting-room at Poland Street, but it was lonely without Hogg, and he was running out of money. He complained of solitude and made a virtue of having nothing but an ill-kept overcoat to wear. He read, wrote letters and retired to bed at 8 to make the days pass. Until he decided to stay with relatives in Wales at the beginning of July, his life was to be unsettled and shapeless. The correspondence with Hogg continued, and Shelley kept up his contacts with the Medwins, John Grove and Edward Graham in London. But in Sussex both Timothy and Sir Bysshe sealed themselves away from him.
At the end of April, Shelley crossed paths with his father, who had come up to Town to consult with Whitton, and they bumped into each other in Grove’s corridor: ‘I met my father in the passage, and politely enquired after his health, he looked as black as a thunder cloud & said “Your most humble Servant!” I made a low bow & wishing him a very good morning passed on. He is very irate about my proposals. I cannot resign anything till I am 21, I cannot do anything, therefore I have 3 more years to consider the matter you mentioned.’1
A possible ally appeared in the form of Captain Pilfold, one of Shelley’s uncles on his mother’s side. Pilfold was a retired naval officer, a veteran of Trafalgar, crusty and good-humoured by all accounts, and he felt Timothy had acted precipitately towards his eldest son. He was prepared to sympathize with Shelley and help him. Pilfold had a house at Cuckfield near Horsham, and it was from this welcome base that Shelley eventually renewed his siege of Timothy on Friday, 10 May. Timothy had announced that he would not have Shelley back at Field Place, except on his own terms. Shelley nevertheless threatened to come, at which Timothy retaliated with — ‘Oh then I shall take his sister away, before he comes.’2 The position was now curiously reversed, with Timothy at bay, and Shelley barking at his heels. We learn from a letter to Hogg that the Shelley family had rallied round Timothy during the crisis rather than his son: Elizabeth, for example, refused to have ‘an Atheist correspond with her. She talks of Duty to her Father.’3
Shelley was still writing fiercely to Hogg of the ‘cold Prejudice and selfish fear’ of which religion was the child, and appealed to Hogg for his constant support: ‘. . . I appeal to your own heart to your own feelings. At that tribunal I feel that I am secure, I once could tolerate Christ — he then merely injured me — he merely deprived me of all that I cared for, touching myself, on Earth — but now he has done more and I cannot forgive.’ The strange, mythical transformation of his feelings into theological terms continued, half suggesting a kind of mental breakdown. For the rest, he was confused, demoralized, vainly attempting to get a grip of his situation. ‘I don’t know where I am, where I will be. — Future present past is all a mist, it seems as if I had begun existence anew under auspices so unfavourable. — Yet no, that is stupid.’4
Harriet Grove’s elder brother John, then aged 26 and training in London as a surgeon, attempted to intervene on his young cousin’s behalf, ‘flattering like a courtier’, and at one visit Timothy agreed to supply Shelley with £200 per annum ‘and leave [him] to misery’. But on return to Field Place he cancelled the offer.5 Shelley was not without family allies, as this shows, and by 29 April his immediate financial worries were being dealt with, probably by Pilfold or Grove, and he felt sure enough to offer aid to Hogg who was at York.6 His passion against Timothy was not abated though it matured on reflection as the days went by. He sent off to Hogg a ‘mad effusion’, in which his father plays the role of a hunting lion or tiger or blood-sucking monster, and Shelley himself becomes the pursued llama, the fleeting hind, sinking in ‘a trance of despair’. The poem was later adapted for the Esdaile Notebook and entitled ‘Dares the Lama’. Its final lines generalize Shelley’s picture of himself heroically matched against the pursuing horror of religion, unrepentent to the bitter end:
For in vain from the grasp of Religion I flee
The most tenderly loved of my soul
Are slaves to its hated control
It pursues me, it blasts me! oh where shall I fly
What remains but to curse it, to curse it & die.7
The ‘tenderly loved’ are Elizabeth Shelley, and perhaps Harriet Grove.
In prose, however, Shelley’s feelings were rather less meek and he developed a practical strategy. He was certain t
hat he had complete hereditary power over the estate which would fall to him legally at 21, and he felt confident of forcing Timothy to terms: ‘The estate is entirely entailed on me, totally out of the power of the enemy, he is yet angry beyond measure; pacification is remote; but I will be at peace vi et armis; I will enter his domains preserving a quaker-like carelessness of opposition, I shall manage a l’Amerique & seat myself quietly in his mansion turning a deaf ear to any declamatory objections.’8 Meekness, in personal relations, now seemed to him a decidedly religious kind of fault, so that he could write of a certain Revd Faber, whom he had offended with his atheism: ‘Poor fool! His Christian mildness, his consistent forgiveness of injuries amuses me; he is le vrai esprit de Christianisme, which Helvetius talks of . . .’9 Of all Shelley’s London supporters, Captain Pilfold alone, ‘a very hearty fellow’, seemed sufficiently fierce. Shelley delightedly told Hogg that he had ‘illuminated’ Pilfold on religious matters in return for his noble aid, and the Captain had responded well. ‘A physician named Dr J — dined with us last night, who is a redhot saint; the captain attacked him, warm from “The Necessity”, and the doctor went away very much shocked.’10 It looked like his first proselytizing success; but it was not a permanent one.
Another ideological landmark during this unsettled interim period was Shelley’s first visit to the editor of the Examiner, Leigh Hunt, to whom he had written from Oxford in March. Hunt invited him to a Sunday breakfast at Hampstead.
Shelley’s impression of the Hunts, given for Hogg’s benefit, characteristically lacked all human or physical elements. He judged them as a pair of potentially interesting theories, but rather less enlightened than himself. ‘Hunt is a man of cultivated mind, & certainly exalted notions; — I do not entirely despair of rescuing him out of this damnable heresy from Reason — Mrs Hunt is a most sensible woman, she is by no means a Xtian, & rather atheistically given; — It is a curious fact that they were married when they were both Wesleyan Methodists & subsequently converted each other.’11 There was, probably, a certain ironic bravado intended in all this, though one is reminded of Merle’s comments concerning religious monomania. Hunt in his turn remembered Shelley as an intense, self-conscious, elegant but rather immature figure: ‘a youth, not come to his full growth, very gentlemanly, earnestly gazing at every object that interested him, and quoting the Greek dramatists’.12 Greek quotation appeared as part of the running debate he was having about the role of individual virtue within the process of political reform. Was Antigone immoral, he wondered. ‘Did she wrong when she acted in direct in noble violation of the laws of a prejudiced society?’ Hardly, he concluded, since ‘political affairs are quite distinct from morality’.13
At this date his idea of the enlightened and the virtuous still contained the strong Methodistical element of the ‘elect’, the spiritually chosen. He remained far from William Godwin’s idea of a public and political standard of virtue, upon which general reform might be based. ‘What constitutes real virtue, motive or consequence? surely the former. . . . I have left the proof to Aristotle — shall we take Godwin’s criterion, expediency — oh surely not. Any very satisfactory general reform is I fear impracticable, human nature taken in the mass . . . .’14 The most immediate consequence of this highly selective and meritocratic form of moral dogma, was, it appeared, that for ‘men of honour’ marriage was detestable, and ‘antimatrimonialism’ was to be recommended. A friendship with Hunt did not develop at this time.
In Poland Street, in that rather dark back sitting-room, Shelley was becoming aware of his own solitary identity, divorced for the first time from the society of Field Place or Oxford, and cut off from the impassioned discussions with Elizabeth or Harriet Grove or Hogg. This kind of solitude, not merely a physical one but also a social and spiritual one, was his first taste of an experience that was to become terribly familiar. Now there were only the four walls with the vine trellis wallpaper, and the maid coming up with the meals, or going down with the post. After two weeks it began to press upon him with real horror and he wrote about it to Hogg.
Solitude is most horrible; in despite of the αφιλαυτια[1] which perhaps vanity has a great share in, but certainly not with my own good will I cannot endure the horror the evil which comes to self in solitude . . . what strange being I am, how inconsistent, in spite of all my boasted hatred of self — this moment thinking I could so far overcome Nature’s law as to exist in complete seclusion; the next shrinking from a moment of solitude, starting from my own company as it were that of a fiend, seeking anything rather than a continued communion with self — Unravel this mystery — but no. I tell you to find the clue which even the bewildered explorer of the cavern cannot reach. . . .15
At this unguarded moment, Shelley here touched on one of the great themes and images of his later poetry, and one of the great difficulties of his personal life. He was both fascinated and terrified by the workings of his own mind viewed in solitude. Though his work almost never became realistically autobiographical in the sense of Wordsworth’s Prelude, or studiously self-analytic in the mode of Coleridge’s poems, nevertheless the secret workings of his own personality and the half-hidden movements of his mind at a subconscious level, were for him an ever-deepening source of imagery, and poetic myth-making. The accent was always on fear, on mystery and on hidden terror.
Passages from his letters written at Poland Street strikingly predict much later work: his second long poem was to be called ‘Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude’; the image of the pursuing fiend which had already appeared during Shelley’s school period, was to become a central motif in many individual works; while the notion of the mind as an unexplored cave, a bewildering labyrinth through which the explorer must risk his search for a personal identity, was to fill his poems, his notebook and his prose speculations. For him, ‘inquiry’ came to mean in essence travelling, movement outwards or inwards, rather than analysis, the accumulation of different categories at a single stable point. The image of the journey, especially the subterranean journey, constantly recurs in this respect.
In his battle with solitude, Shelley tried to divert himself with his cousin Medwin’s company on brisk walks, especially around the Serpentine and through Regent’s Park. It was always a relief to revert to childhood games, and Medwin found Shelley mixing intense discussion of dreams with energetic bouts of ducks-and-drakes, the number of bounds called out loud ‘with the utmost glee’. Then there were silent moments of paper-boat-building followed by anxious launching rituals.[2] In the discussion of dreams, it transpired that Shelley had been keeping a dream journal. Perhaps this accounted for his early evenings.
At this time Shelley was ever in a dreamy state, and he told me he was in the habit of noting down his dreams. The first day he said, they amounted to a page, the next to two, the third to several, till at last they constituted the greater part of his existence. . . . One morning he told me he was satisfied of the existence of two sorts of dreams, the Phrenic and the Psychic; and that he had witnessed a singular phenomenon, proving that the mind and soul were separate and different entities — that it had more than once happened to him to have a dream, which the mind was pleasantly and actively developing; in the midst of which, it was broken off by a dream within a dream — a dream of the soul, to which the mind was not privy; but that from the effect it produced — the start of horror with which he waked — must have been terrific.16
These were already familiar concerns. The sense of a doubleness in the mind, the psychic dreams ever ready to invade the phrenic one, just as the self is waited on by its own ‘fiend’; and more explicit even, the realization that the psychic dream — the dream within the dream — is something uncontrollable, alien, fearful and horrifying. They remained permanent interests with Shelley in his lifelong exploration of psychic and parapsychic phenomena, conducted with the ever-present mixture of fascination and revulsion.
Medwin says that the habit of ‘systematizing of dreams’ revived Shelley’s so
mnambulism and he used to wander about at night in a trance. On one occasion he even got so far as to leave Poland Street altogether. Medwin says he was crossing Leicester Square at 5 in the morning when his attention was caught by a group of urchins gathered round a hunched shape under one of the railings; the shape turned out to be Shelley, fully dressed and curled up fast asleep. Medwin woke him up, and found that Shelley was as surprised as he at the discovery.17 The story might sound unlikely, except that it is matched by several recorded incidents of a similar type at various stages of Shelley’s life.[3]
One of the side-effects of Shelley’s loneliness was that from mid-April he began to rely on the company of the Westbrook sisters. Shelley had first met the youngest, Harriet, through his own sisters Elizabeth and Hellen, at their school at Clapham. The Westbrooks were the daughters of a retired merchant and coffeehouse proprietor, John Westbrook, colloquially known by some contemporaries as ‘Jew’ Westbrook. Mr Westbrook’s establishment had been the Mount Street Coffee House in Grosvenor Square, respectable and very prosperous. On his death, he left an estate of £60,000.18 Westbrook was, in effect, achieving that most difficult piece of English social navigation: moving from the lower middle class to the upper middle class. In the process his wife seems to have been reduced to an almost invisible nonentity, and his daughters split by a kind of cultural lag: the elder, Eliza (who was 29) being sharply self-educated and consciously refined; while the younger, Harriet, (then 16) was an almost perfectly natural middle-class creation, very neat in her dress and manners and writing, and exceedingly pretty. She was also immature for her age, and had come to rely upon her elder sister, both emotionally and morally, as a second and much more influential mother. Hogg always tended to ridicule the social pretensions of the Westbrooks, but he had his own reasons for this. Medwin refers to Harriet admiringly as ‘a handsome blonde’, but remarks that it was, socially, an ill-judged friendship. Eliza was taller, sallow, with long jet-black hair which she spent much time in combing.19