Shelley: The Pursuit

  John Williams, now equally determined that Shelley live at Tan-yr-allt and organize the fund, asked Madocks to intercede with Girdlestone. Shelley explained, with doubtful veracity, that there was a ‘deed in doctors’ commons’ stating that he should come into a large property automatically on attaining his majority. This changed Girdlestone’s tune, and by 28 September he was temporizing and trying to trace the deed.[5] Madocks, having heard of Shelley through Williams and perhaps Burdett, was now keen for him to join the project. Williams and Shelley decided that he must at once go to London, to press his case with Madocks, to clinch the lease and to settle the Caernarvon debt. The whole party took the coach road south again.

  The Shelleys put up at Lewis’s Hotel, St James’ Street, and remained in London for some five-and-a-half weeks, between 4 October and 13 November. On that first evening, a longed-for meeting took place, and the Shelleys dined at Godwin’s in Skinner Street. It was a great success. The Godwins were pleased and intrigued by Shelley, and enchanted with Harriet. Godwin himself was immediately confirmed in the role of mentor. He approved of Tremadoc as a much safer and more solid project than Irish campaigning; but he advised Shelley to set his finances in order, especially if he wanted to contribute to the fund himself. There is some evidence that Godwin was instrumental in having Shelley consult the lawyer John Bedwell to advise him on his affairs and negotiate a loan of cash. Shelley applied to the Vicar of Warnham for his birth certificate, so that a loan until his majority could be formally drawn up. At the same time Shelley wrote to Field Place for his galvanic generator and solar microscope, so he could set up a proper study at Tan-yr-allt.4

  Godwin explained at some length to Shelley his own hopes for the bookshop which Mrs Godwin was running. It was intended to supply liberal and rational textbooks and encyclopaedias for children’s education. The great problem, as Godwin said, was an acute lack of capital financing to put the business on a solid footing. Even Harriet understood that ‘they are sometimes very much pressed for enough ready money. They require such an immense capital . . . .’5 It had already occurred to Godwin that his young disciple might eventually be of great use to him in this department. Godwin borrowed on principle, for he believed his work had a right to financing and was valuable to the community, justifying his belief with the egalitarian arguments of Political Justice. Shelley, in his turn, forced his acts of generosity upon others, strangely like Godwin in his disregard for practical consequences, and insisted on the virtue of the generous acc in itself. This was, perhaps, another kind of blindness. Ironically, both men subscribed to the doctrine stated in Book III of Political Justice that ‘morality as has been frequently observed, consists entirely in an estimate of consequences’.6 The one thing that neither Shelley nor Godwin ever managed to do with any consistency was to estimate consequences.

  The Shelleys, for their part, were jubilant with their conquest. Godwin at this time was aged 56, small, balding, well rounded, and comfortable looking, but with narrow piercing eyes, sometimes encircled with fine round gold spectacles, looking steadily out from a deep brow. The peak of his career had been reached nearly twenty years previously, with the publication of Political Justice and his novel of pursuit, Caleb Williams, in 1793–4. His daring defence of Home Tooke at the Pittite treason trials long afterwards endeared him to the radical cause. Another minor peak of creative and intellectual output still awaited him, for between 1817 and 1820, in the midst of personal and financial crises, he published Mandeville and his excellent polemic, Answer to Malthus. At the moment the prophet had become, as Harriet noted, ‘quite a family man’. Though somewhat brooding and imperious with his own children, and frequently strained in the company of his second wife, Mrs Clairmont, Godwin was yet a charming and hospitable host. He enjoyed the way his own slow and oracular manner was complemented by the rapid volleys and ascending monologues of Shelley’s conversation. Again, Harriet’s immediate reaction was indicative: ‘We have seen the Godwins. Need I tell you that we love them all? . . . His manners are so soft and pleasing that I defy even an enemy to be displeased with him. We have the pleasure of seeing him daily, and upon his account we determine to settle near London . . . . G. is very much taken up with Percy. He seems to delight so much in his society. He has given up everything for the sake of our society. It gives me so much pleasure to sit and look at him. Have you ever seen a bust of Socrates, for his head is very much like that?’7 It must have given Godwin great pleasure to have Harriet sitting looking at him, and thinking how like Socrates he was.

  Hazlitt, whose little biographical essay is by far the most vivid and just contemporary portrait of Godwin in old age, observed the same gentleness as Harriet, though with more acidity. ‘In private, the author of Political Justice, at one time reminded those who knew him of the Metaphysician engrafted on the Dissenting Minister. There was a dictatorial, captious, quibbling pettiness of manner. He lost this with the first blush and awkwardness of popularity, which surprised him in the retirement of his study; and he has since, with the wear and tear of society, from being too pragmatical, become somewhat too careless. He is, at present, as easy as an old glove. Perhaps there is a little attention to effect in this, and he wishes to appear a foil to himself.’8 The remark on Godwin’s clerical dissenting background is shrewd; Godwin had been educated at the seminary at Hoxton, and as a young man was a fervent disciple of the Sandemanian, John Glas.[6] The missionary touch of the dissenting minister never entirely left Godwin’s cast of mind and personality. Equally his philosophical work always has the piercing single-mindedness of the inspired campaigning journalist, writing for a small circulation newspaper. Hazlitt wrote his essay in 1824; but at the time the Shelleys first met Godwin he was just entering his old glove period.

  The menage at Skinner Street was somewhat complicated by Godwin’s two marriages. The first had been in 1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft, after her desertion by the American Imlay and her return from Scandinavia. The relationship had been intensely happy and tragically brief; Mary was dead a few months later after giving birth to Godwin’s first child, named after her mother. Godwin also found himself responsible for Mary Wollstonecraft’s earlier child by Imlay, another girl, named Fanny. His daughter Mary and his stepdaughter Fanny were in 1812 aged 15 and 19 respectively. Mary was in Scotland, staying with relatives for most of Shelley’s visit, but Fanny was at home, ‘very plain, but very sensible’, observed Harriet. She quickly made friends with Shelley, though strangely she seems to have been rather in awe of Harriet, almost jealous, thinking her rather a ‘fine lady’. She was shy, slightly bullied by her father’s second wife, and full of her own inferiority; Shelley’s interest dazzled her, he talked to her, teased her, explained things to her, and gave her glimpses of the poet and iconoclast. Shelley spoke freely of himself, and his ‘dreadful sardonic grins’.9 It was the sort of relationship in which he was at his most gentle, most frank and most winning. The results were to be tragic.

  Godwin remarried in 1803. His second wife was a widow with a powerful and determined personality, and it was a practical rather than a romantic match. Mrs Clairmont, now Mrs Godwin, ran the bookshop and wore green-tinted spectacles like Robespierre. She brought with her two children, Charles and Jane, now aged 18 and 15. A son was born to her and Godwin in 1805: William was the baby and darling of the family, and much time was spent on his education, including the construction of a miniature pulpit from which he could deliver lectures especially written by the older children.10

  Skinner Street thus contained five children: Fanny and Mary, from Godwin’s first marriage, and Charles, Jane and William, from the second. All of them were encouraged to eschew fashionable things and society; instead from an early age the Godwins took them out to dinner and theatre with their own adult friends, and taught them to be hosts to the stream of distinguished visitors: Holcroft, the playwright, and his daughter Fanny; Curran and his daughter Aemelia; Coleridge; Hazlitt; the Lambs and later Wordsworth. Characteristically all three girls we
nt regularly to Coleridge’s lectures in the winter of 1811.11

  Godwin’s most intense emotional relationship was not with Mrs Clairmont, but with his own daughter by the first marriage. The young Mary was darkly handsome, cool and precocious for her age, well read and painstakingly educated in the radical tradition by her father. Much of the affection which had been aroused in Godwin originally by the headstrong, mercurial Mary Wollstonecraft had been insensibly transferred to the daughter after her death. Mary returned this love with great warmth, luxuriating in the pride her father took in her. In many ways the relationship became too close during Mary’s adolescence, and in later life it was to give her a strangely chilly detachment, as if something had been drawn out of her by her father. Later still, after Godwin’s death, she reacted, and became flirtatious and capricious in a genteel slightly old-maidish way, which often embarrassed both her admirers and herself. But Mary was also fiercely intelligent, with a curiously masculine, penetrating and abstract quality to her thought, inherited from her mother, and this enabled her to be aware of her own emotional difficulties.

  Mary was not spoilt as a child, however; Godwin was far too conscientious a father, treating her stringently, and deliberately sending her away for lengthy periods to stay with his friends, the Baxters, in Scotland. The other children looked up to Mary, depended on her and confided in her. This was especially true of the younger girl Jane, and the older girl Fanny: both Mary’s stepsisters. Mrs Clairmont, on the other hand, distrusted her and her influence.

  At the time of Shelley’s first visit of 1812, Mary was away with the Baxters. Harriet merely learnt that Mary was ‘another daughter in Scotland’, and that she looked very much like her mother. Shelley and Harriet gazed at the picture of Mary Wollstonecraft which dominated Godwin’s study. ‘She is very much like her mother, whose picture hangs up in his study. She must have been a most lovely woman. Her countenance speaks her a woman who would dare to think and act for herself.’12

  Mrs Godwin the second has largely been preserved in the venom of Charles Lamb’s pen. In 1803, he had written: ‘The Professor [Godwin] is COURTING. The lady is a Widow with green spectacles and one child, and the Professor is grown quite juvenile.’13 Later, summing up her disagreeableness, her inquisitiveness, her gossiping and her managing manners, he coined the ultimate formula: ‘That damn’d infernal bitch Mrs Godwin.’ None the less it required considerable character to stand up to the boundless egoism of the philosopher and the relentless conditions of his financial affairs — a fact which Shelley only gradually came to appreciate for himself. Harriet’s first impression was strong: ‘The many trials that Mrs Godwin has had to encounter makes me very much inclined to believe her a woman of great fortitude and unyielding temper of mind. There is a very great sweetness marked in her countenance. In many instances she has shown herself a woman of very great magnanimity and independence of character.’14 By the following summer, however, Harriet found her so disagreeable that she preferred not to visit Skinner Street. Shelley succeeded in evading her odium for slightly longer.

  By the end of October the two families had become close friends, and they walked, talked and dined together. Skinner Street became Shelley’s centre of gravity in London for two years. Apart from advising him how to organize his finances, Godwin was urging Shelley to adopt a thorough and systematic programme of reading and study: Shelley’s correspondence and book-lists from Tan-yr-allt show the immediate fruits of this. The subjects discussed, which Godwin noted in his diary, were: ‘matter and spirit, atheism, utility and truth, the clergy, Church Government, and the characteristics of German thought and literature’.15

  One casualty of the new friendship was almost certainly Miss Hitchener, whose role as soul-mate and spiritual advisor was rapidly superseded by the influence of the greater prophet. There had already been considerable domestic friction between her and Harriet in the stress of the flight from Lynmouth, and one may suspect again, as in the case of Hogg, the steady subterranean influence of Eliza Westbrook, mining away at her sister’s rivals. The inevitable consequences did not immediately come to a head, for Shelley was preoccupied with many different affairs. He was working on the Embankment fund, and appears to have tried his local influence in Sussex, though without much success. Possibly this was the last plan he and the doomed Miss Hitchener co-operated on, and he may have tried to re-install her conveniently as his agent in Hurstpierpoint.

  Shelley reported back to John Williams at Tremadoc: ‘I see no hope of effecting on my part any grand or decisive scheme until the expiration of my minority. In Sussex I meet with no encouragement, they are a parcel of cold selfish & calculating animals who seem to have no other aim or business on earth but to eat drink and sleep.’ However he assured Williams that there was no slackening on his own behalf. ‘My fervid hopes, my ardent desires, my unremitting personal exertions (so far as my health will allow) are all engaged in that cause which I will desert but with my life.’16 The parenthesis about his health suggests that during the days at Beaumaris and Caernarvon he had been under considerable strain, and he was falling back on ill health as an escape clause in the way he had done at Keswick. In London, however, he was ‘much better’,17 and the discussions with William Madocks were clearly accounted satisfactory on both sides, though no personal record of an interview has survived.

  Another notable meeting, or rather reunion, which Shelley fitted into these busy weeks, was with his old friend Hogg. That Shelley should seek Hogg out in unknown chambers, as he did, shows the degree to which his relationship with Harriet had matured. Shelley was now confident enough to wish tentatively to draw Hogg back into his circle; but Hogg too had changed, for the discipline and the drudgery of the legal circuit had burnt off much of his undergraduate radicalism, and left him in rather bitter humour. His description of their reunion, though brief and clearly coloured up, is one of the finest and most suggestive passages in his biography. He had not seen or heard of Shelley for almost exactly a year. ‘I had returned from the country at the end of October 1812, and had resumed the duties of a pleader: I was sitting in my quiet lodgings with my tea and a book before me; it was one evening at the beginning of November, probably about ten o’clock. I was roused by a violent knocking at the street door, as if the watchman was giving the alarm of fire; some one ran furiously upstairs, the door flew open, and Bysshe rushed into the middle of the room. . . . Bysshe looked, as he always looked, wild, intellectual, unearthly; like a spirit that had just descended from the sky; like a demon risen at that moment out of the ground. How had he found me out?’

  The answer was that Shelley had gone to Hogg’s offices at the Middle Temple. Hogg’s superior was unwilling at first to give Shelley his friend’s address, because he did not like the look of him, and Shelley was in one of his flashing, peremptory moods. Finally, as was later explained to Hogg, ‘My clerk thought, that in a frequented part of London there could not be much danger, so I permitted him, though rather unwillingly, to write down your lodgings, and at last I gave it him. . . . I hope he did not do you any harm.’ Shelley’s reaction to this caution was scornful: ‘Like all lawyers, he is a narrow-minded fool! How can you bear the society of such a wretch? The old fellow looked at me, as if he thought I was going to cut his throat; the clerk was rather better, but he is an ass!’18

  With that he launched into his own affairs, ‘a thousand at least of them at a time’, says Hogg, ‘without order, and with his natural vehemence and volubility’. Shelley stayed late, making a great noise, and finally Hogg, for fear of disturbing the people of the house, led him by the arm down into the street, where he continued talking. They arranged to meet again the next day, and Hogg, Shelley, Harriet and Eliza dined at 6 together near St James’s Palace. Harriet shook hands and talked of Irish revolutions; Eliza smiled ‘faintly upon me in silence’; and Shelley was late. When he came thundering upstairs he would talk of nothing but Welsh waterfalls and a new plan for them all to live together again in London. Hogg implies
this was in his manner of ‘habitual mystery’, but in fact Shelley had reasons for keeping quiet on all subjects with political implications. He told Hogg about the Tremadoc scheme in the very vaguest terms,19 but he said nothing of the Lynmouth affair, and — what was even more remarkable — he told Hogg nothing about his friendship with Godwin. Thirty years later when Hogg came to complete this part of Shelley’s life, he was still unaware that Shelley and Godwin had ever met during that autumn. Nothing of course was mentioned about Queen Mab. A spring meeting was enthusiastically agreed on, and in the meantime, correspondence was reopened.

  The preparation of material for his pamphlet on Eaton, and for ‘Queen Mab’, had brought Shelley a new circle of friends grouped around the bookseller Thomas Hookham of New Bond Street. Unlike Hogg, they were fully apprised of Shelley’s active radicalism. The most important of these was Thomas Love Peacock, then aged 27, who had already published two long poems with Hookham, Palmyra (1806) and The Genius of the Thames (1810). Peacock had been born at Weymouth, of a merchant family, and moved to London with his mother at the age of 16, where he was privately educated. He was made independent by a small annuity. His stringent scholarly humour, his prickly attitude to contemporary politics, and his immense range of reading in Italian and Greek, made him one of the most promising of the younger authors on Hookham’s list. Shelley was amused to hear the stories of Peacock’s own experiences in Merionethshire, where he had stayed as a kind of literary hermit the previous year, walking the mountains with a pack, reading classical authors, writing verses and staying first at a cottage near Maentwrog, and then at local inns. The seven years between them gave Peacock the authority of experience, as well as the proven ability to remain intellectually and socially self-sufficient. Shelley very much admired this and was impressed by his poetry. The friendship remained slightly formal at this time, with Shelley sending ‘best Compts to Mr Peacock’ via Hookham. Later he wrote directly from Wales to tell Peacock with sly amusement how he had spoken to one Welsh lady, ‘in many respects a woman of considerable merits’, who recalled Peacock with a frisson of disapproval. ‘ “Ah!” said she, “there Mr Peacock lived in a cottage near Tanybwlch, associating with no one, & hiding his head like a murderer, but” she added altering her voice to a tone of appropriate gravity, “he was worse than that, he was an Atheist.” I exclaimed much against the intolerance of her remark, without producing the slightest effect. She knows very well that I am an infidel and a democrat but perhaps she does not do me justice.’20 The mischievous solemnity with which Shelley narrated this little incident, with its wry conclusion about his own atheism, suggests some of the strength Peacock’s friendship would eventually give him: the ability to mock his own enthusiasms, and to laugh gently at his own eccentricities. This gift was to be more important as a personal influence than a literary one. Shelley, in his turn, gave Peacock the inspiration to transform his taste for mocking personal and intellectual foibles, into a complete new literary sub-genre — the crotchet novel — with its brilliant manipulation of dialogue and polemic debate.[7]