Shelley: The Pursuit

  Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

  That things depart which never may return:

  Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,

  Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

  These common woes I feel. One loss is mine

  Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.

  Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine

  On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:

  Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

  Above the blind and battling multitude:

  In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

  Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —

  Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

  Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be,50

  The complete poem was first published in 1816. His conception of what Wordsworth’s ‘desertion’ involved, in personal and historical terms, was still immature. Six years later in Italy, he was to return to the theme with real understanding, in one of his most colourful and brilliant satirical pieces, Peter Bell the Third.[12]

  Hogg was now rapidly finding his feet at Nelson Square. Adaptable to his old friend’s interests, he soon helped to resuscitate the horror sessions in a slightly lighter and more sociable vein that was more to Mary’s taste. Three days before Christmas he spent the evening with great success. ‘Hogg comes. He describes an apparition of a lady, whom he had loved, appearing to him after her death; she came in the twilight summer night, and was hardly visible; she touched his cheek with her hands, and visited him many successive nights; he was always unaware of her approach, and passed many waking hours in expectation of it. Interesting conversation interrupted by Clara’s childish superstition. Hogg departs at 12.’ Mary remembered the story, and years later she wrote it up and published it with three others, collected from a later period of ‘horrors’, in the London Magazine for March 1824.

  On Boxing Day, a significant note appeared in the journal: Shelley referred to Mary as ‘sweet Maie’, one of several cosy nicknames, including ‘Pecksie’ and ‘the Dormouse’ (because she always seemed to be in bed), which Hogg had introduced into the household. An intimacy was now developing between her and Hogg, and this appropriately complemented the time which Shelley and Claire spent away together in town. In the last days of December, they went several times in the evenings to lectures given at one of the city institutes by a Mr Garnerin, ‘on electricity, the gasses, and the phantasmagoria’. On 30 December, Shelley and Claire did not return ‘till past 7, having been locked into Kensington Gardens; both very tired’. But Hogg came to cheer Mary up in the evening.51

  One week into the new year saw a sudden and wholly unexpected change in Shelley’s prospects. On 7 January 1815, while Shelley and Claire were out walking in search of new lodgings, Mary and Hogg found the death of Sir Bysshe Shelley announced in the papers. Almost immediately Hookham appeared on a social call, and to Mary’s wry amusement, ‘is very gracious’.

  When Shelley heard the news, he was wholly delighted. The death of old Bysshe meant nothing to him emotionally, but it promised to mean very much financially. He moved rapidly. A large apartment was taken at Hans Place, in the fashionable area of Chelsea and Kensington, and they moved there, with Hogg’s help, on the 10th. Shelley then left Mary in Hogg’s care, and took Claire with him to the formal reading of Sir Bysshe’s will at Field Place. He did not go to the funeral, but the trip took two days and they stopped the night at Kingston, returning for a late breakfast with Mary on Friday the 13th. Shelley related with glee how he had been forbidden to enter the house, so sat instead ostentatiously on the doorstep, where all the relatives and servants could see, reading a copy of Milton’s Comus with Mary’s name prominently written in the fly-sheet. Mary recorded the scene: ‘The will has been opened, and Shelley is referred to Whitton. His Father would not allow him to enter Field Place; he sits before the door and reads [my] “Comus”. Dr Blocksome comes out; tells him his father is very angry with him. Sees my name in Milton. Shelley Sidney comes out; says that it is a most extraordinary will. Shelley returns to Slinfold. Shelley and Clara set out, and reach Kingston that night. Shelley goes to Whitton, who tells him that he is to have the income of £100,000 after his father’s death if he will entail his estate.’52 The question of the entail was one which would eventually cause enormous difficulty and complication. Shelley had always said he wished to break up the estate from the time he left Oxford and quarrelled with Timothy; but for the moment his prospects looked glowing. A preliminary settlement was not to come into Shelley’s hands until three months later.

  The story of these early weeks of 1815 is obscured by one of the most strange and suggestive destructions of the manuscript record as it has come down to us. For the period of 7 January to 6 May 1815, no less than nine separate sections have been torn from the manuscript of Mary and Shelley’s shared journal. The deletions fall fairly evenly through January, February and April; but between 14 and 28 January, two weeks are missing; between 29 March and 6 April eight days are missing; and between 23 April and 4 May, another eleven days are missing. Apart from these three extended sections, it is notable that the suppressions tend to fall over weekends. Altogether, in the four-monthly period between January and May, no less than thirty days have been deleted.53

  It is also intriguing that other primary sources suddenly become very thin. In the same period, between January and May, there are only seven extant Shelley letters, all of which are brief notes, most of them to solicitors. Claire’s diary has not survived. Hogg’s second and last volume of his unfinished Life breaks off, perhaps significantly, in the middle of spring 1815. The only other informative source is a series of eleven love-notes written from Mary to Hogg between 1 January and 26 April, which show that Hogg had been fully accepted into the household as Shelley’s closest friend and Mary’s proposed lover.

  In January Hogg was a regular, usually daily, visitor, and from 10 March onwards, when the law vacation began, he lived continually with Mary, Shelley and Claire, and slept at the house.54 From this same date, Mary’s exasperation with Claire was openly expressed in the journal: ‘Friday 10th March. — Hogg’s holidays begin. Shelley, Hogg and Clara go to town. Hogg comes back soon. Talk and net. Hogg now remains with us. Put room to rights. 11th March. — Very unwell. Hogg goes to town. Talk about Clara’s going away; nothing settled; I fear it is hopeless. She will not go to Skinner Street; then our house is the only remaining place, I see plainly. What is to be done? Hogg returns. Talk, and Hogg reads the “Life of Goldoni” aloud. 12th March. — Talk a great deal. Not well, but better. Very quiet all the morning, and happy, for Clara does not get up till 4.’55

  Yet despite Mary’s irritation, Shelley continued to take Claire out with him during these months, to shop in the town, to negotiate with the solicitors and to disappear on long walks in Kensington Gardens and round the Serpentine. Had both Shelley and Mary mutually agreed to send her away, she would not have stayed. But Claire did stay, at least until the break-up of the London ménage in May.

  One can conclude from these circumstances that the destruction of the journal was intended to obliterate the best documented of Shelley’s attempts at setting up a radical community of friends, in which everything was shared in common. Around the central relationship between himself and Mary, he tried to encourage secondary intimacies between Mary and Hogg, and himself and Claire. While Hogg adopted a slightly chivalric role of confidant and lover towards Mary, Shelley in turn adopted the tutorial one of philosophic friend and lover towards Claire.

  Around their experimental household, there were satellite figures from Skinner Street: Fanny, and Claire’s brother Charles Clairmont — rather wild in the ‘Clairmont style’ as Mary noted. There was also Peacock, torn between his mistress Marianne St Croix and the unknown heiress who appeared briefly on his horizon, and equally troubled by summonses for debt. In January he went one worse than Shelley and landed
himself briefly in prison.56 Further off there were rumblings from Chapel Street, for Harriet had also heard of the death of Sir Bysshe, and was now pressing hard for a definite legal settlement from Shelley. Shelley was all the time anxiously awaiting the outcome of two decisive events: the birth of Mary’s child, due in April, and the distribution of the settlement of Sir Bysshe’s will.

  The emotional development of the ménage at Hans Place was effectively commanded by Mary. At the beginning of January, when only five months pregnant, yet almost permanently confined to bed, or at least the parlour, she was writing to Hogg: ‘You love me you say, — I think I could return it with the passion you deserve — but you are very good to me and tell me that you are quite happy with the affection which from the bottom of my heart I feel for you…you are so generous, so disinterested, that no one can help loving you. But, you know, Hogg, that we have known each other for so short a time, and I did not think about love, so that I think that that also will come in time & then we shall be happier, I do think, than the angels who sing for ever and ever, the lovers of Jane’s [Claire’s] world of perfection. There is a bright prospect before us, my dear friend — lovely — and — which renders it certain — wholly dependent on our own selves — for Shelley & myself I need promise nothing. . . .’57

  Mary wrote in the language of Shelley, and echoed his emphasis on the due delicacy and sensitivity required in sexual matters — ‘that also will come in time’. Shelley’s steady attempt to set up a pattern of secondary pairing appeared in two notes sent simultaneously to Hogg a few days later, the first from Mary. ‘Shelley and Jane [Claire] are both gone out & from the number & distance of the places that they are going to I do not expect them till very late. Perhaps you can come and console a solitary lady in the mean time — but I do not wish to make you a truant against your conscience. . . . With one kiss Good bye Affectionately yours Mary.’ Meanwhile Shelley had sent round a brief note: ‘My dear friend, Mary wished to speak with you alone, for which purpose I have gone out & removed [her deleted] Clare. If you should return before this evening & are at leisure I need not direct your steps. Affectionately yours, PBS.’58

  With her pregnancy, and the uncertainty of her position in relation to Shelley’s ‘deserted wife’, Mary was inclined to be cautious about full sexual intimacy with Hogg. On 7 January, the day when Sir Bysshe’s death was announced, Mary wrote to him. ‘My affection for you, although it is not now exactly as you would wish will I think daily become more so — then, what can you have to add to your happiness. I ask but for time, time which for other causes beside this — phisical [sic] causes — that must be given — Shelley will be subject to these also, & this, dear Hogg, will give time for that love to spring up which you deserve and will one day have.’59

  But Claire was given no part in the picture of happiness which Mary began to anticipate. Where Shelley seems to have been genuinely unjealous of Hogg’s part in his life, the possessive instinct was already working powerfully in Mary. She was content with a ménage à trois, but not à quatre. Shelley was to find this a permanent difficulty in his social arrangements and experiments. By the end of January Hogg had rechristened himself in the commune fashion, with the name of his sentimental hero.

  When you return to your lodgings this evening, dearest Alexy, I hope it will cheer your solitude to find this letter from me, that you may read & kiss before you go to sleep. My own Alexy, I know how much and how tenderly you love me, and I rejoice to think that I am capable of constituting your happiness. We look forward to joy & delight in the summer when the trees are green, when the suns brightly & joyfully [sic] when, dearest Hogg, I have my little baby, with what exquisite pleasure shall we pass the time. You are to teach me Italian, you know, & how many books we will read together, but our still greater happiness will be in Shelley — I who love him so tenderly & entirely, whose life hangs on the beam of his eye, and whose whole soul is entirely wrapped up in him — you who have so sincere a friendship for him to make him happy — no, we need not try to do that, for every thing we do will make him that without exertion, but to see him so — to see his love, his tenderness, — dear, dearest Alexy, these are joys that fill your heart almost to bursting and draw tears more delicious than the smiles of love from your eyes. When I think of all that we three in. . . .

  Here Mary broke off, and later finished the letter, adding briefly, ‘now Shelley and Clara are talking beside me, which is not a very good accompaniment when one is writing a letter to one one loves’.60

  By another sad irony, on the very same day that Mary was conjuring this vision of mutual bliss, Harriet wrote to Mrs Nugent a miserable and hopeless letter.

  I am sorry to tell you my poor little boy (Charles) has been very ill. . . .I am truly miserable my dear friend. I really see no termination to my sorrows. As to Mr Shelley I know nothing of him. He neither sends nor comes to see me. I am still at my father’s, which is very wretched. When I shall quit this house I know not. Everything goes against me. . . . At nineteen I could descend a willing victim to the tomb. How I wish those dear children had never been born. . . . Mr Shelley has much to answer for. He has been the cause of great misery to me and mine. I shall never live with him again. ’Tis impossible. I have been so deceived, so cruelly treated, that I can never forget it. . . . Is it wrong, do you think, to put an end to one’s sorrow? I often think of it, all is so gloomy and desolate.61

  Harriet remained alone, with her children, and this gloomy question.

  At Hans Place, the end of January and the beginning of February saw the start of the sole literary scheme of this period. Shelley had a series of what seemed to be highly unpromising talks with an Irish radical and editor called George Cannon, who planned to start up a monthly paper called The Theological Inquirer, or, Polemical Magazine. Cannon seems to have wanted both contributions and financial backing from Shelley. On the 29th they looked over Cannon’s papers, but concluded he was ‘a very foolish man’; and again, on 7 February, Cannon came and stayed the evening, a ‘vulgar brute’ as Shelley put it. Apparently his radicalism was too Irish for Shelley’s taste: ‘it is disgusting to hear such a beast speak of philosophy, &c. Let refinement and benevolence convey these ideas.’ In the end, however, Cannon performed an unexpected service for Shelley. Between March and July, his magazine published, with editorial comments under the name of ‘Erasmus Perkins’, nearly a third of the verse section of Queen Mab, and the whole of one of Shelley’s attacks on revealed religion, A Refutation of Deism.62 Shelley was still anxious to keep in circulation the political ideas set out in his early poem. The magazine announced, doubtless fictionally, that the poem had been discovered ‘during an excursion on the Continent’, and had been put into a correspondent’s hands by ‘the celebrated Kotzebue’, who ‘considered it too bold a production to issue from the British press’.

  On 8 February, perhaps to absorb their enlarged household more comfortably, Shelley took new apartments in Hans Place, at No. 41. Mary was irritable and unwell, the child in the womb beginning to give her some anxiety and discomfort. The journal for the 9th records: ‘Prate with Shelley all day. After dinner talk; put things away. Finish Gibbons Letters. . . . Shelley and Clara sleep, as usual. Hogg does not come till 10. Work and talk. Shelley writes letters. Go to bed. A mess . . . .’63 Here the manuscript is torn out, and recommences only four days later.

  On the 22nd Mary was suddenly and unexpectedly delivered of a child, the doctor arriving five minutes too late. It was a little girl, very tiny, and nearly two months premature. ‘Maie perfectly well’, noted Shelley; but the baby was not expected to live. Surprisingly though, it suckled properly, and began after five days to look strong. Shelley rather than Mary was exhausted by the strain. He was continually ‘unwell’, and his side gave him one of the first recorded spasms on the 26th after Fanny Godwin had kept him up talking until half past three in the morning. The next day he and Claire went out to get a cradle. It seemed as if the baby would live, and Mary had triumphed in
the permanent bond between her and Shelley.

  Shelley decided to leave Hans Place, and move to yet another apartment, this time nearer the river, in Pimlico. The place had become ‘horrid’, and the landlady was apparently determined to fleece them. No doubt she disapproved of illegitimate children. On 2 March, a mere ten days after the child’s birth, there was the bustle of moving to 13 Arabella Road. Mary and the baby went alone at 3 in the afternoon, but Shelley and Claire did not arrive until 6. Four days later Mary woke to find the child dead; it looked as if it had had convulsions and Mary was appalled. Her reaction tells a good deal about the disposition of Shelley’s household at this time. She wrote immediately to Hogg: ‘My dearest Hogg my baby is dead — will you come to me as soon as you can — I wish to see you. . . . Will you come — you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk — for I am no longer a mother now Mary.’64 Her journal entry makes no mention of Shelley. ‘Find my baby dead. Send for Hogg. Talk. A miserable day. In the evening read Fall of the Jesuits. Hogg sleeps here.’65 Four days later Hogg also moved into Arabella Road, and Mary began to press Shelley to make Claire leave. But ‘the prospect appears to me more dismal than ever; not the least hope. This is, indeed, hard to bear.’ Shelley did at least get Claire to advertise under the initials ‘AZ’ in the papers for a position, but there were no results. They read together, drank tea, played endless games of chess, and when the weather looked up they walked to the park or to the museums, or to the animals on show at the Exeter Change. Shelley noted a panther, a lynx, monkeys, a cassowary and tortoises, and a ‘very pretty antelope’. The antelope appeared six years later, in a superb glowing image: