The next morning they were up before first light, and left the capital still in darkness. They breakfasted at Dartford, and by nightfall came down the long Dover hill from Canterbury, with Claire pointing out to the children all the lights below then, the castle and the sea, ‘almost like a fair city’. It was the largest household Shelley had ever taken abroad, consisting of eight people: Mary and Claire, little William, the babies Clara and Allegra, their faithful Swiss nurse Elise and Milly Shields, a servant girl from Marlow. This time they were not pursued, and put up comfortably at York House, intending to sail the next day. In the morning, Claire and the maids walked with the children on the beach, and Allegra had her first experience of sea bathing.103
While waiting for the captain of their packet to decide if they could manage the stiff north-easterly, Shelley suddenly remembered that he had not left his bankers, Brookes, full instructions concerning unpaid bills. He hurried off a note, specifying four applicants only, and ‘no other bills to be honoured’. Peacock was put down first, for thirty pounds. Towards the printing of The Revolt of Islam, Shelley also stipulated thirty pounds for Charles Ollier. Godwin got a handshake of £150. Finally, ‘Mr Madocks (for accounts at Marlow). £117’.104 The last thing Shelley wrote in England concerned bills, not poetry.
They embarked. The sea was very rough and they left Dover on the wings of a March storm. Claire watched waves ‘mountains high’, but the sail over to Calais took just two hours and forty minutes, and was the quickest crossing Shelley had ever had. The babies were ill, but behaved beautifully, and slept below deck with the servants. Shelley, Mary and Claire leaned on the deck rail. Next to them, a military gentleman’s wife became so frightened she began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer out loud. Each time she was sick, she ordered her servant to continue repeating it for her.105 Shelley looked away towards France: it seemed to him that spring was hastening to meet them from the south.106
[1] In The Cenci, Shelley adapted the fragment to the speech of Orsino in which he explicitly describes the overwhelming force of his physical lust for Beatrice, in the last soliloquy of Act II, Scene II, 1. 132:
Her bright form kneels beside me at the altar
And follows me to the resort of men,
And fills my slumber with tumultuous dreams,
So when I wake my blood seems liquid fire;
. . . and thus unprofitably
I clasp the phantom of unfelt delights
Till weak imagination half possesses
The self-created shadow.
[2] On 22 November 1817, Shelley sent a copy of Queen Mab to a certain Mr Waller, writing in the flyleaf: ‘It is the Author’s boast . . . that after 6 years of added experience and reflection, the doctrines of equality and liberty and disinterestedness, and entire unbelief in religion of any sort to which this Poem is devoted have gained rather than lost that beauty and that grandeur which first determined him to devote his life to the investigation and inculcation of them. — PBS.’ Bod. MS Shelley Adds. c. 4, F303.
[3]E. P. Thompson’s summary is definitive. ‘We may see the Pentridge rising as one of the first attempts in history to mount a wholly proletarian insurrection, without any middle-class support. The objectives of this revolutionary movement cannot perhaps be better characterized than in the words of the Belper Street song — “The Levelution is begun”. . . . And yet the longer-term influence of the Oliver affair was to strengthen the constitutionalist, as opposed to the revolutionary, wing of the reform movement . . . . For three years the crucial political contests centered upon the defence of civil liberties, and the rights of the Press, where the middle class was itself most sensitive . . . . the failure of Pentridge emphasized the extreme danger of conspiracy. Only the shock of Peterloo (August 1819)
threw a part of the movement back into revolutionary courses; and the Cato Street Conspiracy (February 1820) served to reinforce the lesson of Oliver and Pentridge. From 1817 until Chartist times, the central working-class tradition was that which exploited every means of agitation and protest short of active insurrectionary preparation.’ The Making of the English Working Class, 1968 pp. 733–5.
[4] The ‘fac-simile reprint’ was published by Thomas Rodd, who stated that ‘The author printed only twenty copies of this Address’. There is no way of checking this, but certainly the strong political views Shelley expressed in this pamphlet, as with the Philosophical View of Reform, were generally unavailable to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death. See T. J. Wise, A Shelley Library, 1924.
[5]A typical alteration came at the climax of the death-speech of one of Laon’s supporters in Canto XII, stanza 30. Shelley had originally written:
‘For me the world is grown too void and cold,
Since hope pursues immortal destiny
With steps thus slow — therefore shall ye behold
How Atheists and Republicans can die;
Tell to your children this!’ Then suddenly
He sheathed a dagger in his heart and fell . . . .
But, bending to Ollier’s wishes, the fourth line was finally reduced to the inoffensive and unremarkable
How those who love, yet fear not, dare to die.
[6] These became a favourite symbol of Shelley’s and in his later Italian notebooks he made frequent sketches of them, often resembling sycamore seeds with a round central pod and a single or double fibrous wing extension. See, for example, Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 6, p. 97 rev.
[7] In Shelley’s manuscript notebook (Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 10), this whole passage of Canto IX from stanzas 19 to 26 is written very carefully in ink and much corrected; while the surrounding body of the canto is written in his usual racing pencil scrawl, as Trelawny later said, for all the world like a marsh overgrown with bulrushes and blotted with wild ducks.
[8] One curious and unexpected influence was on the German Expressionist writers of a century later, who wrote in the climate of social upheaval and desperation of the years 1917-22. The Revolt of Islam is particularly reflected in the Expressionist revolutionary Ich-dramas written by Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser, where epic scenarios are combined with political and utopian imagery and intense mythological projections of the individual self. Like Shelley they relied on violent and luridly distorted images, combined with highly abstract rhetoric; but like Shelley too they found it impossible to integrate fully heroic myth and political reality. The Expressionist novelist B. Traven, author of The Death Ship (1926), proclaimed his main influences as Max Steiner and Shelley.75
[9] John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), critic, editor and biographer. An almost exact contemporary of Shelley’s, he revived Blackwood’s Magazine with John Wilson, with whom much of his review work has been confused, and later edited the Quarterly Review from 1825 to 1853. Though he was to prove Shelley’s most intelligent reviewer, his sympathies were unreliable and he was partly responsible for the notorious attack on Keats’s Endymion in 1818. His great Life of Scott (1837-8) is remembered for its brilliant inaccuracies.
[10] He had good reason for this fear. 1817 saw twenty-six prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel, among which were the trials of William Hone, Tom Wooler and Richard Carlile. Queen Mab was peculiarly open to the kind of disguised political prosecution which the government mounted during this period. Shelley realized that further involvement with the courts on civil charges might well bring with it a criminal ‘information’ with the threat of crippling fines and perhaps even imprisonment. In 1821 Queen Mab was indeed successfully prosecuted and its publisher heavily fined. See Chapter 27.
[11] The night of 9 June 1817 saw disturbances in Derbyshire which became known as the Pentridge Revolution. Shelley later wrote his most brilliant political pamphlet in defence of the men involved in this most successful of Lord Sidmouth’s political exercises with agents provocateurs.
[12]In the Silsbee-Harvard MS Notebook, Claire’s copy of the poem contains an indicative notation in pencil which she later added: ‘written at Marlow 1817 —
wd. not let Mary see it — sent it to Oxford Gazette or some Oxford or county paper without his name’. The version printed by the Oxford University and City Herald in its issue of 31 January 1818 was first recovered and republished by Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, Case Western Reserve University Press 1972, pp. 195-7. It contains a number of minor textual variants and is signed ‘Pleyel’. Pleyel is the rationalist and lover of Clara Wieland in Charles Brockden Brown’s romance, Wieland.
Illustrations: Section II
15. Mary Shelley, sketch by an unknown artist, about 1814
16. Claire Clairmont in 1819 by Aemilia Curran
17. Byron in 1818 by James Holmes
18. Château Chillon and Lac Leman from an early nineteenth-century engraving
19. Leigh Hunt by Samuel Lawrence
20. John Keats by C. A. Brown
21. William Hazlitt by William Bewick
22. Ramasses II (photograph by Adrian Holmes)
23. Garden at Casa Bertini, Bagni di Lucca where Shelley translated Plato’s Symposium
24. Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni
25. ‘Massacre at St Peter’s’. cartoon by F. Fogg, 1819
26. Venus Anodyomene, Florence
16. The Platonist: Bagni di Lucca 1818
As Mary noted in her new journal, they were now at Calais for the third time in their lives. Shelley did not wish to linger in France, where he had learnt to expect dirty inns, unreliable coaches and ‘the nasal and abbreviated cacophony of the French’.1 Instead he decided to make with all possible speed for the Alps. Having decided after all to purchase a carriage at Calais on Friday, 13 March 1818, they mounted their baggage and set out to travel towards the Swiss border through Artois and Burgundy, deliberately circumventing Paris. The first leg of the journey was made largely by moonlight, and they had to tip the guards heavily at St Omer in order to enter the city walls so late at night. A woman shrieked from across the moat, demanding who the invaders were.2 From St Omer, they passed through Rheims, Châlons-sur-Marne and Dijon, finally reaching Lyons at nearly midnight on the following Saturday, 21 March, where they had their first rest. Shelley wrote of their rapid progress to Hunt and Byron, and negotiated with a voiturier to drive them over the Alps to Milan.
Throughout the journey Shelley ignored French books, and concentrated on reading Schlegel’s essays on Shakespeare and the theatre, turning over in his mind the idea for a poetic drama. The weather was hot, and the sky over the Midi a radiant blue, and Shelley’s spirits rose steadily. On the evening before their departure from Lyons they sat discussing the Revolutionary times in the city with the voiturier who had witnessed action; and then went out to see the moon rise over the distant Alps and glitter in the water where the Saône flows into the Rhône.3 The next day they drove into the foothills, and crossed the frontier at Les Echelles. Shelley’s books had to be submitted to the Sardinian censor, ‘a Priest who admits nothing of Rousseau, Voltaire etc. in the province’. ‘All such books’, he noted acidly, ‘are burned.’4 As an Englishman on his travels, however, the eccentricities of Shelley’s library were eventually allowed to pass by.
The delay was eclipsed by the fantastic rockscapes and cliffs of the mountain pass outside Les Echelles, which reminded Shelley of a famous mise en scène in Aeschylus: ‘The rocks which cannot be less than 1000 feet in perpendicular height, sometimes overhang the road on each side, and almost shut out the sky. The scene is like that described in the “Prometheus” of Aeschylus; vast rifts and caverns in granite precipices; wintry mountains, with ice and snow above; the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns; and walls of toppling rocks, only to be scaled, as he describes, by the winged chariot of the Ocean Nymphs.’5 This image, and other ones from the previous Alpine expedition in summer 1816, now began to coalesce in Shelley’s mind around the subject of the Titan Prometheus, chained and welded to his rocky precipice. It was a mythic image which went back to the earliest of Shelley’s childhood romances, and now suddenly it found its appropriate physical setting. Mary’s outcast monster and her modern Prometheus had also been conceived in the mountains. But for the moment, surrounded by the bustle and irritation and delights of travel, the Aeschylean image lay dormant in Shelley’s imagination.
At Chambéry their carriage was again halted, half-way across the bridge, the French soldiers at one end, and Piedmontese at the other. Passports and books were pored over by customs men who maddened Shelley with their officiousness. For over an hour they refused to allow the carriage to move either backwards or forwards, and all the time it rained steadily. Finally a Swiss canon who had met Sir Timothy Shelley at the Duke of Norfolk’s, passed through the customs post, and with more charity than honesty assured the officials of Percy Shelley’s respectability and good connections. The carriage was allowed through, with its crates of heresy undisturbed. The rest of the day was spent at Chambéry, where the parents of their Swiss maid Elise had arranged to meet their daughter.
Elise was to play an important part in Shelley’s life in Italy during the next years, and something of her background is now known. Elise’s mother had married twice. The family life had been a disturbed one, and in her early twenties Elise had had an illegitimate child. Her mother and her stepfather had agreed to look after it, when Elise went off to make a new life with the Shelleys in 1816. This fact perhaps accounts for her willingness to leave Switzerland in the first place, and also why Shelley himself regarded her as a highly suitable nurse for both Mary’s and Claire’s children. She understood such extra-matrimonial matters. Her own little girl, whose age is uncertain, was called Aimée, and the stepfather’s name was Romieux. But Elise’s maiden name is unknown.6 Claire liked Elise, and described her as ‘a very superior Swiss woman of about thirty, a mother herself’.7 Elise was not, as has often been conjectured, an innocent working-class maidservant in her teens. She was a woman of some education, with sexual experience, and was in fact the oldest member of Shelley’s party by four or five years. The parallel with Elizabeth Hitchener is obvious, and her possible importance in the triangular relationship between Mary, Claire and Shelley thus becomes partially evident. There is no record of Elise’s personal appearance, or of her attractions, and nothing that Shelley wrote at this time seems to imply more than his complete trust in her. She was almost one of the family.
After Chambéry, which they left on Saturday, 28 March, the carriage ploughed through the snow over Mount Cenis and along the Napoleonic route across the Pont du Diable. Shelley was in high spirits, and sang all the way according to Claire, his voice echoing off the cascades of frozen ice, the snow cliffs and the precipices. His songs were improvised snatches of atheistical verse, about gods being ‘hung on every tree’, and he joked gleefully about the Promethean possibilities of the landscape, and the world of mythic monsters, asserting ‘that the Mountains are God’s Corps de Ballet of which the Jungfrau is Mademoiselle Milanie’.8 They came down into the sunlit meadows and primroses of Susa the next day, and reached Turin and went to the opera on 1 April. Finally, on the 4th, they reached their first objective in Italy, Milan, with its splendid theatre, its opera house and its cathedral bristling with white pinnacles and statuary. Their first monument in Italy was a symbolic one: ‘a ruined arch of magnificent proportions in the Greek taste standing in a kind of road of green lawn overgrown with violets and primroses’. Shelley was delighted to be shown round it by a blonde Italian girl, as he stressed to Peacock, who seemed to him like Fuseli’s Eve.9 Perhaps he had re-entered the Paradise.
Settling themselves at a small apartment in the Locande Reale, they embarked on a whirl of operatic and balletic evenings in Milan. Shelley wrote to England to inform his friends of their safe arrival, and general health and high spirits. He was planning, he told Peacock, a tragedy on the subject of Tasso’s madness, which he intended to take the whole summer writing, once they got settled in a house: ‘I thirst to be settled that I may begin.’ During the day Claire wrote long notes on the power of the Italian ba
llet, which swept both her and Shelley off their feet. ‘It is full of mad and intoxicating joy, which nevertheless is accompanied by voluptuousness.’ They saw an adaptation of Othello, and Maria Pallerini, dancing Desdemona, was described by Claire in terms that reflect upon Shelley’s poetry: ‘Her walk is more like the sweepings of the wind than the steps of a mortal, and her attitudes are pictures.’10 It was something of this combination of liquid line and sculptural frieze that Shelley was trying to achieve in his writing. Italy at first acquaintance seemed to awake so many correspondences and resonances in Shelley’s mind that it came like a revelation; he barely had time to ask after ‘Cobbett and politics’, or the proofs for his own forthcoming volume, to be entitled Rosalind and Helen. Even the papist cathedral offered itself to him in the most vivid and sympathetic way. ‘It is built of white marble & cut into pinnacles of immense height & the utmost delicacy of workmanship, & loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groups of dazzling spires relieved by the serene depth of this Italian Heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seem gathered among those sculptured shapes is beyond anything I had imagined architecture capable of producing.’ Inside, the sombre luxury of the stained glass, the ‘massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures & the silver lamps that burn forever’ seemed to him like a ‘gorgeous sepulchre’. Curiously none of this repelled him, and there was one particular spot in the aisles behind the high altar where the light was ‘dim and yellow under the storied window’, which he visited regularly in the afternoons to read Dante whom he had selected for his guide into Italian literature. He was reading the Purgatorio.11