ON 25 June 1811 the nineteen-year-old heir to an English baronetcy wrote to a young schoolmistress in Sussex: ‘I am not an aristocrat, or any crat at all but vehemently long for the time when man may dare to live in accordance with Nature & Reason, in consequence with Virtue.’1 The doctrine was pure Rousseau but the writer, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was to go much further than Rousseau in staking the claims of intellectuals and writers to guide humanity. Like Rousseau, Shelley believed that society was totally rotten and should be transformed, and that enlightened man, through his own unaided intellect, had the moral right and duty to reconstruct it from first principles. But he also argued that intellectuals, and especially poets-whom he saw as the leaders of the intellectual community-occupied a privileged position in this process. In fact, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’
Shelley set out this challenge, on behalf of his fellow intellectuals, in 1821 in his 10,000-word essay, A Defence of Poetry, which became the most influential statement of the social purpose of literature since Antiquity.2 Poetry, Shelley argued, is more than a display of verbal ingenuity, a mere amusement. It has the most serious aim of any kind of writing. It is prophecy, law and knowledge. Social progress can be achieved only if it is guided by an ethical sensibility. The churches ought to have supplied this but have manifestly failed. Science cannot supply it. Nor can rationalism alone produce moral purpose. When science and rationalism masquerade as ethics they produce moral disasters like the French Revolutionary Terror and the Napoleonic dictatorship. Only poetry can fill the moral vacuum and give to progress a truly creative force. Poetry ‘awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.’ ‘The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own.’ It fights egoism and material calculation. It encourages community spirit. ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.’ The achievement of poetry is to push forward the moral progress of civilization: in fact poetry, its hand-maiden imagination, and its natural environment liberty, form the tripod on which all civilization and ethics rest. Imaginative poetry is needed to reconstruct society completely: ‘We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life.’ Shelley, indeed, was not merely presenting the claims of the poet to rule: he was advancing, for the first time, a fundamental critique of the materialism which was to become the central characteristic of nineteenth-century society: ‘Poetry and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.’3
In his poetry Shelley certainly practised what he preached. He was a great poet-and his poetry can be understood and enjoyed at many levels. But at the deepest level, at the level Shelley himself intended, it is essentially moral and political. He is the most thoroughly politicized of English poets; all his major and many of his shorter poems have a call for social action of some kind, a public message. His longest, The Revolt of Islam (nearly 5000 lines), concerns oppression, uprising and freedom. A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, by which he means the spirit of good, embodying the freedom and equality of all human beings, celebrates its triumph over established evil. Prometheus Unbound tells of another successful revolution and the victory of the mythic figure who for Shelley (as for Marx and others) symbolizes the intellectual leading humanity to utopia on earth. The Cenci repeats the theme of revolt against tyranny, as does Swellfoot the Tyrant, an attack on George IV, and The Mask of Anarchy, an attack on his ministers. In ‘Ozymandias’, a mere sonnet, though a powerful one, he celebrates the nemesis of autocracy. In the lyrical ‘Lines from the Eugenean Hills’, he notes the cycles of tyranny which encompass the world and invites readers to join him in his righteous utopia.4 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is another plea to readers, to spread his political message, to ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe’ and so ‘quicken a new birth’, ‘scatter…my words among mankind!’ ‘To a Skylark’ is on similar lines, about the poet’s difficulty in getting his voice heard, and his message across. Shelley, in his lifetime, was disappointed at the meagre publicity given to his work and desperate that his political and moral doctrines should penetrate society. It is no accident that two of his most passionate poems are pleas that his words circulate widely and be heeded. As an artist, in short, Shelley was remarkably un-egocentric. Few poets have written less for their own personal satisfaction.
But what of Shelley as a man? Until quite recently, the general view was that assiduously propagated by his second wife and widow, Mary Shelley: that the poet was a singularly pure and innocent, unworldly spirit, without guile or vice, devoted to his art and his fellow men, though in no sense a politician; more a hugely intelligent and inordinately sensitive child. This view was reinforced by some contemporary descriptions of his physical appearance: slender, wan, fragile, retaining an adolescent bloom until well into his twenties. The cult of bohemian clothes Rousseau had inaugurated had persisted into the second and third generation of Romantic intellectuals. Byron sported not merely the Levantine or Oriental mode of dress when it suited him, but even in European clothes affected a certain looseness, dispensing with elaborate cravats, leaving his shirt-neck open, even leaving off his coat altogether and wearing shirt-sleeves. This aristocratic disdain for uncomfortable conventions was copied by more plebeian poets like Keats. Shelley also adopted the fashion, but added his own touch: a fondness for schoolboy jackets and caps, sometimes too small for him but peculiarly suited to the impression he wished to convey, of adolescent spontaneity and freshness, a little gawky but charming. The ladies in particular liked it, as they liked the unlaced and unbuttoned Byron. It helped to build up a powerful and persistent but mythic image of Shelley, which found almost marmoreal form in Matthew Arnold’s celebrated description of him as a ‘beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’. This occurs in Arnold’s essay on Byron, whose poetry he finds far more serious and weighty than Shelley’s, which has ‘the incurable fault’ of ‘insubstantiality’. On the other hand as a person Shelley was a ‘beautiful and enchanting spirit’ and ‘immeasurably Byron’s superior’.5 Hard to imagine a more perverse judgment, wrong on all points, suggesting that Arnold knew little of either man and cannot have read Shelley’s work with attention. Oddly enough, however, his judgment of Shelley’s character was not unlike Byron’s own. Shelley, Byron wrote, was ‘without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.’ Or again: ‘he is to my knowledge the least selfish and the mildest of men-a man who has made more sacrifices of his fortune and feelings for others than any I have ever heard of.’6 These comments were made when Shelley’s tragic end was fresh in Byron’s mind, and so in a spirit of nil nisi bunkum. Moreover, most of Byron’s knowledge of Shelley was based on what Shelley himself told him. All the same, Byron was a man of the world, a shrewd judge and a fierce castigator of humbug, and his testimony to the impression Shelley made on his more broad-minded bohemian contemporaries carries weight.
The truth, however, is fundamentally different and to anyone who reveres Shelley as a poet (as I do) it is deeply disturbing. It emerges from a variety of sources, one of the most important of which is Shelley’s own letters.7 It reveals Shelley as astonishingly single-minded in the pursuit of his ideals but ruthless and even brutal in disposing of anyone who got in the way. Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular. He burned with a fierce love but it was an abstract flame and the poor mortals who came near it were often scorched. He put ideas before people and his life is a testament to how heartless ideas can be.
Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, a large Georgian house near Horsham in Sussex. He was not, like so many leading intellectuals, an only child. But he occupied what is in many ways an even more corrupting position: the only son and heir to a considerable fortune and a title and the elder brother of four sisters, who were from two to nine years younger than him. It is difficult to convey now what this meant at the end of the eighteenth century: to his parents, still more to his siblings, he was the lord of creation.
The Shelleys were a junior branch of an ancient family and connections of the great local landowner, the Duke of Norfolk. Their money, which was considerable, was new and had been made by Shelley’s grandfather Sir Bysshe, the first baronet, who was born in Newark, New Jersey, a New World adventurer, rough, tough and energetic. Shelley clearly inherited from him his drive and ruthlessness. His father, Sir Timothy, who succeeded to the title in 1815, was by contrast a mild and inoffensive man, who for many years led a dutiful and blameless life as MP for Shoreham, gradually shifting from moderate Whiggism to middle-of-the-road Tory.8
Shelley had an idyllic childhood on the estate, surrounded by doting parents and adoring sisters. He early showed a passion for nature and natural science, experimenting with chemicals and fire-balloons, which remained a lifelong taste. In 1804, when he was twelve, he was sent to Eton, where he remained for six years. He must have worked hard because he acquired great fluency in Latin and Greek and an extensive knowledge of ancient literature which he retained all his days. He was always an avid and rapid reader of both serious material and fiction and, next to Coleridge, was the best-read poet of his time. He was also a schoolboy prodigy. In 1809 when he was sixteen, Dr James Lind, a former royal doctor who was also a part-time Eton master, amateur scientist and radical, introduced him to Political Justice by William Godwin, the key left-wing text of the day.9 Lind also had an interest in demonology and stimulated in Shelley a passion for the occult and mysterious: not just the Gothic fiction which was then fashionable and is ridiculed so brilliantly in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, but the real-life activities of the Illuminati and other secret revolutionary societies.
The Illuminati had been institutionalized in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt at the German University of Ingoldstadt, as guardians of the rationalist Enlightenment. Their aim was to illuminate the world until (as he argued) ‘Princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.’10 In a sense this became Shelley’s permanent aim but he absorbed the Illuminist material in conjunction with the aggressive propaganda put out by their enemies, especially the sensational Ultra tract by the Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobitism (London, 1797-98), which attacked not just the Illuminati but the Masons, Rosicrucians and Jews. Shelley was for many years fascinated by this repellent book, which he often recommended to friends (it was used by his second wife Mary when she was writing Frankenstein in 1818). It was mixed up in Shelley’s mind with a lot of Gothic novels which he also read, then and later.
Thus, from his teens, Shelley’s approach to politics was coloured both by a taste for secret societies and by the conspiracy theory of history preached by the Abbé and his kind. He never could shake it off, and it effectively prevented him from understanding British politics or the motives and policies of men like Liverpool and Castlereagh, whom he saw merely as embodied evil.11 Almost his earliest political act was to propose to the radical writer Leigh Hunt the formation of a secret society of ‘enlightened, unprejudiced members’ to resist ‘the coalition of the enemies of liberty’.12 Indeed some of Shelley’s acquaintances never saw his politics as anything more than a literary joke, a mere projection into real life of Gothic romance. Thomas Love Peacock, in his novel Nightmare Abbey (1818), satirized the secret-society mania and portrays Shelley as Scythrop, who ‘now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world. He built many castles in the air and peopled them with secret tribunals and bands of Illuminati, who were always the imaginary ingredients of his projected regeneration of the human species’. Shelley was partly to blame for this frivolous view of his utopianism. He not only, according to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, insisted on reading aloud ‘with rapturous enthusiasm’ a book called Horrid Mysteries to anyone who would listen, but he also wrote two Gothic novels of his own, Zastrozzi, published in his last term at Eton, and, during his first term at Oxford, St lrvyne or the Rosicrucian, rightly dismissed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning as ‘boarding-school idiocy’.13
Shelley was thus famous or notorious while he was still at school and was known as ‘the Eton Atheist’. It is important to note this, in view of his later accusations of intolerance against his family. His grandfather and his father, far from trying to curb his youthful writings, which included of course poetry, encouraged them and financed their publication. According to Shelley’s sister Helen, old Sir Bysshe paid for his schoolboy poems to be published. In September 1810, just before he went up to Oxford, Sir Bysshe again paid for 1500 copies to be printed of a volume of Shelley’s called Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire.14 When Shelley went up to Oxford in the autumn, his father Timothy took him to the leading bookseller, Slatter’s, and said: ‘My son here has a literary turn. He is already an author and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.’ Timothy, indeed, encouraged him in writing a prize poem on the Parthenon and sent him material.15 He obviously hoped to steer Shelley away from what he regarded as adolescent fireworks into serious literature. His financing of his son’s writing was on the explicit understanding that, while he might express his anti-religious views among his friends, he was not to publish them and so wreck his university career.
There is no doubt Shelley agreed to this, as a surviving letter shows.16 He then proceeded to break his word, in the most flagrant and comprehensive way. In March 1811, while a first-year undergraduate at University College, Oxford, he wrote an aggressive pamphlet on his religious views. His argument was neither new nor particularly outrageous-it derived directly from Locke and Hume. Since ideas, wrote Shelley, come from the senses, and ‘God’ cannot derive from sense-impressions, belief is not a voluntary act and unbelief cannot therefore be criminal. To this dull piece of sophistry he affixed the inflammatory title The Necessity of Atheism, printed it, put it in the Oxford bookshops and sent copies to all the bishops and the heads of the colleges. In short his behaviour was deliberately provocative and produced, from the University authorities, exactly the response which might have been expected: he was expelled. Timothy Shelley was dismayed, more particularly since he had received a letter from his son denying he would do any of these things. There was a painful meeting between the two in a London hotel, the father begging the son to give up his ideas, at least until he was older; the son insisting they were more precious to him than the peace of mind of his family, the father ‘scolding, crying, swearing, and then weeping again’, Shelley laughing aloud, ‘with a loud demoniacal burst of laughter’; he ‘slipped from his seat and fell on his back at full length on the floor’.17 There ensued negotiations by Shelley to get from his father a guaranteed allowance of £200 a year, followed by the bombshell (in August 1811) that he had married Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old schoolfellow of his sister Elizabeth.
Thereafter his relations with his family collapsed. Shelley tried to recruit first his mother, then his sisters to his side of the argument, but failed. In a letter to a friend he denounced his entire family as ‘a parcel of cold, selfish and calculating animals who seem to have no other aim or business on earth but to eat, drink and sleep’.18 His letters to various members of his family make extraordinary reading: at times artful and humbugging, in his attempts to extract money, at other times cruel, violent and threatening. His letters to his father escalate from hypocritical pleading to abuse, mixed with insufferable condescension. Thus, on 30 August 1811, he begs: ‘I know of no one to whom I can apply with greater certainty of success when in distress than you…you are kind to forgive youthful errors.’ By 12 October he is contemptuous: ‘The institutions of society have made you, tho liable to be misled by prejudice and passion like others, the Head of the Family, and I confess it is almost natural for minds not of the highest order to value even the errors whence they derive their importance.’ Three days later he accuses Timothy of ‘a cowardly, base, contemptible expedient of persecution…You have treated me ill, vilely. When I was expelled for atheism, you wished I had been killed in Spain. The desire of the consummation is very like the crime; perhaps it is well for me that the laws of England punish murder, & that cowardice shrinks from their animadversion. I shall take the first opportunity of seeing you-if you will not hear my name, I shall pronounce it. Think not I am an insect whom injuries destroy-had I money enough I could meet you in London and hollah in your ears Bysshe, Bysshe, Bysshe-aye, Bysshe till you’re deaf.’ This was unsigned.19
To his mother he was still more ferocious. His sister Elizabeth had become engaged to his friend Edward Fergus Graham. His mother approved of the match but Shelley did not. On 22 October he wrote to his mother accusing her of having an affair with Graham and arranging Elizabeth’s marriage to cover it up.20 There seems to have been no factual basis at all for this terrible letter. But he wrote to Elizabeth the same day telling her of the letter and demanding it be shown to his father. To other correspondents he refers to his mother’s ‘baseness’ and depravity’.21 As a result the family solicitor, William Whitton, was brought in and instructed to open and deal with all letters Shelley sent to the family. He was a kindly man, anxious to make peace between father and son, but ended by being totally alienated by Shelley’s arrogance. When he complained that Shelley’s letter to his mother was ‘not proper’ (a mild term in the circumstance), his own letter was returned, scrawled over: ‘William Whitton’s letter is conceived in terms which justify Mr P. Shelley’s returning it for his cool perusal. Mr S. commends Mr W. when he deals with gentlemen (which opportunity perhaps may not often occur) to refrain from opening private letters or impudence may draw down chastisement on contemptibility.’22
The family seems to have feared Shelley’s violence. ‘Had he stayed in Sussex,’ Timothy Shelley wrote to Whitton, ‘I would have sworn in Especial Constables around me. He frightened his mother and sisters exceedingly and now if they hear a dog bark they run up the stairs. He has nothing to say but the £200 a year.’ There was the further fear that Shelley, who was now leading a wandering, bohemian life, would induce one or more of his younger sisters to join him. In a letter dated 13 December 1811 he tried to induce the huntsman at Field Place to smuggle a letter to Helen (‘remember, Allen, that I shall not forget you’) and the letter itself-Helen was only twelve-is distinctly sinister, enough to chill the hearts of a father and mother.23 He was also anxious to get at his still younger sister Mary. Shelley was soon a member of Godwin’s circle, and associated with his emancipated daughter Mary, whose mother was the feminist leader Mary Wollstonecraft, and her still wilder half-sister, Claire Clairmont. Throughout his adult life Shelley persistently sought to surround himself with young women, living in common and shared by whatever men belonged to the circle-at any rate in theory. His sisters appeared to him natural candidates for such a ménage, particularly as he conceived it his moral duty to help them ‘escape’ from the odious materialism of the parental home. He had a plan to kidnap Elizabeth and Helen from their boarding school in Hackney: Mary and Claire were sent to case the joint.24 Fortunately nothing came of it. But Shelley would not have drawn the line at incest. He, like Byron, was fascinated by the subject. He did not go as far as Byron, who was in love with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh; but Laon and Cythna, hero and heroine of his long poem The Revolt of Islam, were brother and sister until the printers objected and forced Shelley to make changes, as were Selim and Zuleika in Byron’s The Bride of Abydos.25 Shelley, like Byron, always considered that he had a perpetual dispensation from the normal rules of sexual behaviour.
This made life difficult for the women he associated with. There is no evidence that any of them, with the possible exception of Claire Clairmont, liked the idea of sharing or had the smallest inclination to promiscuity in any form. To Shelley’s displeasure they all (like his own family) wanted a normal life. But the poet was incapable of leading one. He thrived on change, displacement, danger and excitement of all kinds. Instability, anxiety seem to have been necessary for his work. He could curl up with a book or a piece of paper anywhere and pour out his verses. He spent his life in furnished rooms or houses, moving about, often dunned by creditors, or the still centre of the anguished personal dramas which beat around him. But he continued to work and produce. His reading was prodigious. His output was considerable and most of it of high quality. But the mouvementé existence he found stimulating was disastrous for others, not least his young wife Harriet.
Harriet was a pretty, neat, highly conventional middle-class girl, the daughter of a successful merchant. She fell for the god-like poet, lost her head and eloped with him. Thereafter her life moved inexorably to disaster.26 For four years she shared Shelley’s insecure existence, moving to London, Edinburgh, York, Keswick, North Wales, Lynmouth, Wales again, Dublin, London and the Thames Valley. In some of these places Shelley engaged in unlawful political activities, attracting the attention of local magistrates and police, or even central government; in all he fell foul of tradesmen, who expected their bills to be paid. He also antagonized the neighbours, who were alarmed by his dangerous chemical experiments and affronted by what they saw as the disgusting improprieties of his ménage, which nearly always contained two or more young women. On two occasions, in the Lake District and in Wales, his house was attacked by the local community, and he was forced to decamp. He also fled before his creditors and police.
Harriet did her best to share his activities. She helped to distribute his illegal political leaflets. She was delighted when his first long poem, Queen Mab, was dedicated to her. She bore him a daughter, Eliza Ianthe. She conceived another child, his son Charles. But she lacked the capacity to fascinate him for ever. So did every other woman. Shelley’s love was deep, sincere, passionate, indeed everlasting-but it was always changing its object. In July 1814 he broke the news to Harriet that he had fallen in love with Godwin’s daughter Mary, and was off with her to the Continent (with Claire Clairmont tagging along). The news came to her as an appalling shock, a reaction which surprised, then affronted Shelley. He was one of those sublime egoists, with a strong moralizing bent, who assume that others have a duty not only to fit in with but to applaud his decisions, and when they fail to do so quickly display a sense of outrage.
Shelley’s letters to Harriet after he left her follow the same pattern as those to his father, condescension turning to self-righteous anger when she failed to see things his way. ‘It is no reproach to me,’ he wrote to her on 14 July 1814, ‘that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion.’ He had always behaved generously to her and remained her best friend. Next month he invited her to join himself, Mary and Claire in Troyes, ‘where you will at least find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will always be dear, by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this but me. All else are either unfeeling or selfish.’ A month later, finding this tactic did not work, he became more aggressive: ‘I deem myself far worthier and better than any of your nominal friends…my chief study has been to overwhelm you with benefits. Even now, when a violent and lasting passion for another leads me to prefer her society to yours, I am perpetually employed in devising how I can be permanently & truly useful to you…in return for this it is not well that I should be wounded with reproach & blame-so unexampled and singular an attachment demands a return far different.’ The next day he was at it again: ‘Consider how far you would desire your future life to be placed within the influence of my superintending mind, whether you still confide sufficiently in my tried and unalterable integrity to submit to the laws which any friendship would create between us.’27
These letters were written partly to extract money from Harriet (at this stage she still had some), partly to put pressure on her to conceal his whereabouts from creditors and enemies, partly to stop her from consulting lawyers. They are dotted with references to ‘my personal safety’ and ‘my safety and comfort’. Shelley was an exceptionally thin-skinned person who seems to have been totally insensitive to the feelings of others (a not uncommon combination). When he discovered that Harriet had finally taken legal advice about her rights, his anger exploded. ‘In this proceeding, if it be indeed true that your perversity has reached this excess, you destroy your own designs. The memory of our former kindness, the hope that you might still not be utterly lost to virtue & generosity, would influence me, even now, to concede far more than the law will allow. If after you receive this letter you persist in appealing to the law, it is obvious that I can no longer consider you but as an enemy, as one who…has acted the part of the basest and blackest treachery.’ He adds: ‘I was an idiot to expect greatness or generosity from you,’ and accuses her of ‘mean and despicable selfishness’ and of seeking ‘to injure an innocent man struggling with distress’.28 By now his self-deception was complete and he had convinced himself that, from start to finish, he had behaved impeccably and Harriet unforgivably. ‘I am deeply persuaded,’ he wrote to his friend Hogg, ‘that thus enabled I shall become a more constant friend, a more useful lover of mankind, [and] a more ardent asserter of truth and virtue.’29
It was one of Shelley’s many childish characteristics that he was capable of mingling the most hurtful abuse with requests for favours. Thus he followed the letter to his mother accusing her of adultery with another asking her to send onto him ‘myffollowing year. From 1815- Galvanic Machine & Solar Microscope’; his abuse of Harriet was interspersed with pleas not just for money but for clothes: ‘I am in want of stockings, hanks & Mrs Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works.’ He told her that, without money, ‘I must inevitably be starved to death…My dear Harriet, send quick supplies.’30 He did not inquire about her condition, though he knew she was pregnant by him. Then, abruptly, the letters ceased. Harriet wrote to a friend: ‘Mr Shelley has become profligate and sensual, owing entirely to Godwin’s Political Justice…Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire.’31
Shelley’s son, whom Harriet called Charles Bysshe, was born 30 November 1814. It is not clear whether the father ever saw him. Harriet’s elder sister Eliza, who remained devoted to her-and therefore came to be regarded by Shelley with bitter enmity-was determined that the children should not be brought up by Shelley’s bohemian women. He, unlike Rousseau, did not regard his children as ‘an inconvenience’ and fought hard to get them. But, inevitably, the legal battle went against him and they were made Wards of Chancery; thereafter he lost interest. Harriet’s life was wrecked. In September 1816 she left the children with her parents and took lodgings in Chelsea. Her last letter was written to her sister: ‘The remembrance of all your kindness, which I have so unworthily repaid has often made my heart ache. I know that you will forgive me, because it is not in your nature to be unkind or severe to any.’32 On 9 November she disappeared. On 10 December her body was discovered in the Serpentine, Hyde Park. The body was swollen and she was said to have been pregnant, but there is no convincing evidence of this.33 The reaction to the news by Shelley, who had long since circulated the falsehood that he and Harriet had separated by mutual agreement, was to abuse Harriet’s family and produce a tissue of lies: ‘It seems,’ he wrote to Mary, ‘that this poor woman-the most innocent of her abhorred & unnatural family-was driven from her father’s house, & descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself. There can be no question that the beastly viper her sister, unable to gain profit from her connection with me, has secured to herself the fortune of the old man-who is now dying-by the murder of this poor creature!…everyone does me full justice-bears testimony to the uprightness and liberality of my conduct to her.’34 He followed this, two days later, by a peculiarly heartless letter to the sister.35
Shelley’s hysterical lies may be partly explained by the fact that he was still unnerved by another suicide for which he was responsible. Fanny Imlay was Godwin’s stepdaughter by an earlier marriage of his second wife. She was four years older than Mary and described (by Harriet) as ‘very plain and very sensible’. Shelley made a play for her as early as December 1812, writing to her: ‘I am one of those formidable and long-clawed animals called a Man, and it is not until I have assured you that I am one of the most inoffensive of my species, that I live on vegetable food, & never bit since I was born, that I venture to intrude myself upon your attention.’36 She may have once featured in Shelley’s plan to set up a radical community of friends, with sexual sharing-himself, Mary, Claire, Hogg, Peacock and Claire’s brother Charles Clairmont. At all events Shelley dazzled her, and Godwin and his wife believed she had fallen tragically in love with him. Between 10-14 September 1814 Shelley was alone in London, Mary and Claire being in Bath, and Fanny visited him at his lodgings in the evening. The likelihood is that he seduced her there. He then went on to Bath. On 9 October the three of them got a very depressed letter from Fanny, postmarked Bristol. Shelley immediately set off to find her, but failed. She had, in fact, already left for Swansea and the next day took an overdose of opium there, in a room at the Mackworth Arms. Shelley never referred to her in his letters; but in 1815 there is a reference to her in a poem (‘Her voice did quiver as we parted’) which portrays himself (‘A youth with hoary hair and haggard eye’) sitting near her grave. But it was just an idea; he never visited her grave, which remained unmarked.37
There were other sacrifices on the altar of Shelley’s ideas. One was Elizabeth Hitchener, a young working-class Sussex woman, the daughter of a smuggler-turned-innkeeper, who by prodigies of effort and sacrifice had become a schoolmistress in Hurstpierpoint. She was known for her radical ideas and Shelley got into correspondence with her. In 1812 Shelley was in Dublin preaching liberty to the Irish, who were unresponsive. Left with a good deal of his subversive material on his hands, he had the bright idea of sending it to Miss Hitchener for distribution in Sussex. He packed it in a large wooden box but, characteristically, paid for it only as far as Holyhead, assuming it would be forwarded and Miss Hitchener would pay for it on arrival. But of course it was opened at the port of entry, the Home Office informed, and a watch set on the schoolmistress. This effectively destroyed her career. But she still had her honour. However, Shelley now invited her to join his little community and, much against the advice of her father and friends, she agreed. He also persuaded her to loan him £100, presumably her life savings.
At this stage he was loud in her praises: ‘though deriving her birth from a very humble source she contracted during youth a very deep and refined habit of thinking; her mind, naturally inquisitive and penetrating, overleapt the bounds of prejudice.’38 In letters to her he called her ‘my rock’ in his storm, ‘my better genius, the judge of my reasonings, the guide of my actions, the influencer of my usefulness’. She was ‘one of those beings who carry happiness, reform, liberty wherever they go’.39 She joined the Shelleys in Lynmouth, where it was reported, ‘She laughs and talks and writes all day,’ and distributed Shelley’s leaflets. But Harriet and her sister soon grew to dislike her. Shelley himself was not averse to a certain competitive tension among his women. But in this case he soon shared their disapproval. He seems to have seduced Miss Hitchener during long walks on the shore, but later felt revulsion. When Harriet and Eliza turned on her, he decided she must go. In any case he had by now made contact with the Godwin household, whose young ladies he found more exciting. So she was sent back to Sussex, to carry on the cause there, with promise of a salary of £2 a week. But she was treated there as a laughing-stock, the discarded mistress of a gent. Shelley wrote sneeringly to Hogg: ‘The Brown Demon, as I call our late tormentor and schoolmistress, must receive our stipend. I pay it with a heavy heart; but it must be so. She was deprived by our misjudging haste of a situation where she was going on smoothly; and now she says that her reputation is gone, her health ruined, her peace of mind destroyed by my barbarity: a complete victim of all the woes mental and bodily that heroine ever suffered!’ He then could not resist adding: ‘She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman.’ In fact she received only the first instalment of her wages, and her £100 loan was never repaid. Thus she retreated into the obscurity from which Shelley plucked her, a scorched victim of his flame.
A similar, even humbler, case was that of Dan Healey, a fifteen-year-old lad Shelley brought back from Ireland as a servant. We hear little of the Shelley servants, though there were usually three or four of them. In a letter to Godwin, Shelley defended his leisured existence on the grounds that ‘if I was employed at the loom or the plough, & my wife in culinary business and housewifery, we should in the present state of society quickly become very different beings, & I may add, less useful to our species.’40 So servants there had to be, whether or not Shelley could afford them. He usually employed locals at very low wages, but Dan was different because Shelley had found him useful in Dublin at sticking up unlawful posters. At Lynmouth, in the summer of 1812, he again used him to post his broadsheets on walls and barns. Dan was told that, if questioned by the authorities, he was to tell a story about ‘meeting two gentlemen on the road’. On 18 August he was arrested in Barnstaple, and told his story. This did him no good at all. He was convicted under the Act of 39 George III c79 and sentenced to fines totalling £200 or, in default, six months’ imprisonment. Instead of paying the fine, as everyone (including the authorities) expected, Shelley ran for it, borrowing 29 shillings from his cleaning woman and £3 from a neighbour for his getaway money.* So Dan went to gaol. On his release he returned to Shelley’s service but was sacked six months later, the formal reason being that his conduct had become ‘unprincipled’-he may have learned bad habits in gaol-the real one being that the Shelleys had to economize. He was owed £10 in wages, which were never paid.41 Thus another bruised victim receded into the darkness.
It must be argued on Shelley’s behalf that he was very young when all these things happened. In 1812 he was only twenty. He was twenty-two when he deserted Harriet and ran off with Mary. We often forget how young this generation of English poets were when they transformed the literature of the English-speaking world; how young indeed when they died-Keats twenty-five, Shelley twenty-nine, Byron thirty-six. When Byron, having fled England for good, first met Shelley on the shores of Lake Geneva on 10 May 1816, he was still only twenty-eight; Shelley was twenty-four; Mary and Claire a mere eighteen. Mary’s novel Frankenstein, which she wrote by the Lake during the long early summer nights was, you might say, the work of a schoolgirl. Yet if they were in a sense children, they were also adults rejecting the world’s values and presenting alternative systems of their own, rather like the students of the 1960s. They did not think of themselves as too young for responsibilities or demand the indulgence due to youth-quite the contrary. Shelley in particular insisted on the high seriousness of his mission to the world. Intellectually he matured very quickly. The immensely powerful poem Queen Mab, though still youthful in some ways, was written when Shelley was twenty and published the following year. From 1815-16 onwards, when he was moving towards his mid-twenties, his work was approaching its zenith. By this stage it showed not only remarkable breadth of reading but great profundity of thought. There is no doubt that Shelley had a strong mind, which was also subtle and sensitive. And, young as he was, he had accepted the duties of parentage.
Let us look now at his children. Altogether he had seven, by three different mothers. The first two, Ianthe and Charles, were born to Harriet and made wards of court. Shelley contested this move bitterly, losing it in part because the court was horrified by some of the views he had put forward in Queen Mab, and he saw the action as primarily an ideological attempt to get him to recant his revolutionary aims.42 After the decision went against him he continued to brood on the injustice and to hate Lord Chancellor Eldon, but he showed no further concern for the children. He was obliged by the court’s decision to pay £30 a quarter for the children, who were lodged with foster-parents. This was deducted at source from his allowance. He never made any use of such visiting rights as the court allowed him. He never wrote to them, though the elder, Ianthe, was nine at the time of his death. He did not inquire about their welfare, except formally, and the only letter we have to the foster-father, Thomas Hume, dated 17 February 1820, is essentially about his own wrongs and is a heartless document.43 There are no other references to these children in any other letters or diaries of his which survive. He seems to have exiled them from his mind, though they make a ghostly appearance in his autobiographical poem Epipsychidion (which dismisses Harriet as ‘the planet of that hour’):
Marked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother
By Mary he had four children, three of whom died, his son Percy Florence, born in 1819, alone surviving to carry on the line. Mary’s first child, a girl, died in early infancy. Their son William, aged four, caught gastro-enteritis in Rome; Shelley sat up with him for three consecutive nights, but the child died. Shelley’s exertions may have been prompted partly by guilt at his role in the death of his daughter Clara, who was still a baby, the previous year. In August 1818 Mary and the baby were in the comparative cool of the summer resort, Bagni di Lucca. Shelley, who was at Este in the hills above Venice, insisted that Mary and the baby join him immediately, a fearful five-day journey in the hottest season of the year. Shelley did not know that little Clara was unwell even before the journey began; but she was clearly ill on her arrival, and her condition did not improve. Nevertheless, three weeks later, and again entirely to suit his own convenience-he was intoxicated by his exchanges of radical views with Byron-he sent peremptory instructions to Mary to join him with the baby in Venice. Poor Clara, according to her mother, was ‘in a frightful state of weakness and fever’, and the journey lasted from 3.30 in the morning until five in the afternoon on a broiling day. By the time they reached Padua, Clara was obviously very ill; Shelley insisted they continue to Venice. On the journey, Clara developed ‘convulsive motions of the mouth and eyes’; she died an hour after Venice was reached.44 Shelley admitted that ‘this unexpected stroke’ (it was surely foreseeable) had reduced Mary ‘to a kind of despair’; it was an important stage in the deterioration of their relationship.
A further stage was reached that winter when an illegitimate child, a girl baptized Elena, was born to Shelley in Naples. He registered the child as his own and gave the mother’s name as Mary Godwin Shelley. But his wife was certainly not the mother: shortly afterwards, Shelley began to be blackmailed by a former servant, Paolo Foggi, who had married their children’s nurse, Elise, and the grounds for his threats were that Shelley had made a criminally false declaration by naming Mary as the mother. It is possible that Elise was the mother. But there are a number of powerful arguments against this. Elise herself had a different story. In 1820 she told Richard Hoppner, the British Consul in Venice, who had hitherto held a high opinion of Shelley despite his reputation, that the poet had deposited in the Naples Foundling Hospital a baby girl he had had by Claire Clairmont. Hoppner was disgusted by Shelley’s behaviour and when he confided in Byron the latter replied: ‘Of the facts however there can be little doubt-it is just like them.’45 He knew all about Shelley and Claire Clairmont. She was the mother of his own illegitimate daughter Allegra. She had set her cap at him in the spring of 1816 before he left England. Byron, who had some scruples about seducing a virgin, had slept with her only after she had told him she had already slept with Shelley.46 He had a very low opinion of Claire’s morals since she had not only, in effect, seduced him but offered to procure Mary Shelley for him too;47 that was one reason he would not allow her to bring up Allegra, though separating her from her mother proved fatal to the child. Byron was satisfied Allegra was his own and not Shelley’s since he was sure she was not having sex with Shelley at that time. But he evidently believed they had since resumed their intermittent affair, when Mary was away. Elena was the result. Various other explanations have been produced by Shelley apologists but the Claire-Shelley parentage is by far the most likely.48 Mary was devastated by the episode-she had never liked Claire and resented her continued presence in their household. If the baby remained with them Claire would become a permanent member of it, and possibly her affair with Shelley would be resumed. In response to Mary’s distress, Shelley decided to abandon the baby and, following the example of his hero Rousseau, made use of the orphanage. There, not surprisingly, the child died, aged eighteen months, in 1820. The next year, shrugging off the criticism of Hoppner and others, Shelley in a letter to Mary summed up the business in one hard-boiled and revealing sentence: ‘I speedily regained the indifference which the opinions of any thing or any body but our own consciousness amply merits.’49
Was Shelley, then, promiscuous? Certainly not in the same sense as Byron, who claimed, in September 1818, that in two and a half years he had spent over £2500 on Venetian women and slept with ‘at least two hundred of one sort or another-perhaps more’; and later listed twenty-four of his mistresses by name.50 On the other hand Byron in some ways had a finer sense of honour than Shelley; he was never sly or humbugging. To the sexual reformer and feminist J.H. Lawrence, Shelley wrote: ‘If there is any enormous and desolating crime, of which I should shudder to be accused, it is seduction.’51 This was his theory; but not his practice. In addition to the cases already mentioned, there was also a love affair with a well-born Italian woman, Emilia Viviani; he told Byron all about her but added: ‘Pray do not mention anything of what I told you, as the whole truth is not known and Mary might be very much annoyed by it.’52 What Shelley seems to have desired was a woman to provide his life with stability and comfort, and a license to pursue side-affairs; in return he would (at any rate in principle) allow his wife the same liberty. Such an arrangement, as we shall see, was to become a recurrent aim of leading male intellectuals. It never worked, certainly not in Shelley’s case. The liberty he took himself caused first Harriet, then Mary, anguish; and they simply did not want the reciprocal freedom.
Evidently Shelley often discussed these ideas with his radical friend Leigh Hunt. The painter and diarist Benjamin Robert Haydon records that he had heard Shelley ‘hold forth to Mrs Hunt & other women present…on the wickedness & absurdity of Chastity’. During the discussion, Hunt shocked Haydon by saying ‘he would not mind any young man, if he were agreeable, sleeping with his wife.’ Haydon added: ‘Shelley courageously adopted and acted on his own principles-Hunt defended them without having energy to practise them and was content with a smuggering fondle.’53 What the women thought is not recorded. When Shelley told Harriet she could sleep with his friend Hogg, she flatly refused. When he offered the same facility to Mary, she appeared to assent but finally decided she did not like the man.54 The surviving evidence shows that Shelley’s own experiments in free love were just as furtive and dishonest as those of most ordinary adulterers and involved him in the usual tangle of concealment and lies.
It was the same story with his money-dealings. They were immensely complicated and harrowing, and I can attempt only the barest summary here. In theory Shelley did not believe in private property at all, let alone inheritance and the primogeniture from which he benefited. In A Philosophical View of Reform, he set down his socialist principles: ‘Equality of possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.’55 But in the meantime it was necessary for privileged but enlightened men, like himself, to hang onto their inherited wealth in order to further the cause. This was to become a familiar, indeed almost universal, self-justification among wealthy radical intellectuals, and Shelley employed it to extract as much money from his family as he possibly could. Unfortunately for him, in his very first letter to his mentor Godwin, introducing himself, he proudly announced: ‘I am the son of a man of fortune in Sussex…. I am heir by entail to an estate of £6000 per annum.’56 This must have made Godwin prick up his ears. He was not only the leading radical philosopher but a financial muddler of genius and one of the most shameless financial scroungers who ever lived. Truly staggering amounts of money, from a variety of well-meaning friends, disappeared into his labyrinthine system of debts, leaving nothing to show. He seized upon the then young and innocent Shelley and never let go. He not only took Shelley’s family money but corrupted him thoroughly into all the seedy devices of an early nineteenth-century debtor: post-dated bonds, discounted paper and, not least, the notorious post-obit borrowings whereby young heirs to an entailed estate could raise heavily discounted sums, at enormous rates of interest, in anticipation of their father’s death. Shelley adopted all these ruinous procedures and a very large percentage of what he thus raised went straight into Godwin’s financial black hole.57
Not a penny was ever repaid, or seems to have done Godwin’s needy family the slightest good. At long last Shelley turned on the sponger. ‘I have given you,’ he wrote, ‘within a few years the amount of a considerable fortune, & have destituted myself for the purpose of realizing it of nearly four times the amount. Except for the good will which this transaction seems to have produced between you and me, this money, for any advantage that it ever conferred on you, might as well have been thrown into the sea.’ The loss of money was not the only harm Shelley suffered from his contact with Godwin. Harriet was quite right in thinking the great philosopher had coarsened and hardened her husband in a number of ways, especially in his attitude to money. She related that when Shelley, who had already deserted her for Mary, came to see her after the birth of her son William, ‘he said he was glad it was a boy, as it would make money cheaper.’58 By this he meant he could get a lower interest rate on a post-obit loan; it was not the remark of a twenty-two-year-old poet-idealist but of a shifty, chronic debtor.
Godwin was not the only bloodsucker in Shelley’s life. There was another perpetually cadging intellectual, Leigh Hunt. A quarter-century later, Thomas Babington Macaulay summed up Hunt to the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Napier, by saying that he had answered a letter of Hunt’s, ‘not without fear of becoming one of the numerous persons of whom he asks £20 whenever he wants it’.59 Eventually he was immortalized as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, Dickens confessing to a friend, ‘I suppose he is the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words…It is an absolute reproduction of the real man.’60 In Shelley’s time Hunt was only beginning his long career of borrowing, using Rousseau’s well-tried technique of persuading his victims that he was doing them a favour by taking advantage of their generosity. When Shelley died Hunt moved on to Byron, who eventually gave him his quittance in no uncertain terms; he considered Hunt had plundered Shelley. Alas, he did something worse, persuading Shelley that to men of advanced ideas like themselves, paying what you owed was not a moral necessity: to work for humanity was enough in itself.
Thus Shelley, the man of truth and virtue, became a lifelong absconder and cheat. He borrowed money everywhere and from all kinds of people, most of whom were never repaid. Whenever the Shelleys moved on, usually in some haste, they left behind little groups of once-trusting and now angry people. Young Dan Healey was not the only Irishman Shelley defrauded. He evidently borrowed a substantial sum from John Lawless, the republican editor who had befriended him in Dublin. He could not afford to lose the money and, after Shelley’s departure, wrote anxiously to Hogg inquiring his whereabouts. Shortly afterwards he was arrested for debt. Shelley not only made no attempt to get him out of jail by paying the money he owed, but abused him for complaining: ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote to a mutual friend in Dublin, Catherine Nugent, ‘that he has practised on you, as he did upon us.’61 Worse, in Lynmouth, Shelley signed bills using his name (‘the Honourable Mr Lawless’); this was forgery, then a capital offence.62
Another group of people Shelley defrauded were the Welsh, during his sojourn there. He arrived in 1812, leasing a farm and engaging servants (‘can you hire a trustworthy undermaidservant, as we shall require three in all’), but was soon arrested for debts of £60 to £70 in Caernarvon. John Williams, who sponsored his Welsh venture, and Dr William Roberts, a country doctor, stood bail for him, and the debt, plus costs, was paid by a London solicitor, John Bedwell. All three came to regret their generosity. More than thirty years later, in 1844, Dr Roberts was still trying to retrieve, from the Shelley estate, the £30 the poet owed him. Bedwell likewise demanded his money in vain, Shelley writing to Williams a year later: ‘I have received a very unpleasant and dictatorial letter from Mr Bedwell, which I have answered in an unbending spirit.’ Shelley liked to take a high tone. Williams’s brother Owen, a farmer, had lent Shelley £100; we find Shelley writing to Williams demanding that Owen produce a further £25, adding, ‘I shall know by your compliance with this request whether the absence of friends is a cooler for friendship or not.’ Shelley’s relations with Williams collapsed the following year in a welter of recriminations over the money the poet owed him. Neither Williams nor Owen was ever repaid anything. Yet Shelley was fierce and moralistic with anyone (Godwin and Hunt excepted) who owed him money. Another Welshman, John Evans, got two dunning notes, Shelley reminding him he was owed cash ‘which being a debt of honour ought to be of all others the most imperious, & to press the necessity of its immediate repayment, to lament also the apathy and backwardness of defaulters in such a case’.63
It was not clear what Shelley meant by debts of honour. He did not scruple to borrow from women, ranging from washerwomen and charladies, and his landlady in Lynmouth-she eventually got back £20 of the £30 he owed her, having wisely hung onto his books-to his Italian friend Emilia, from whom he got 220 crowns. He owed money to tradesmen of every kind. In April 1817, for instance, he and Hunt agreed to pay one Joseph Kirkman for a piano; it was duly delivered but four years later it was unpaid-for. Likewise Shelley got Charter, the famous Bond Street coachmaker, to make him a fine vehicle, costing £532.11.6, which he continued to use until his death. Charter eventually took the poet to court, but he was still trying to collect the money in the 1840s. A particular group Shelley exploited were the small printer-booksellers who published his poems on credit. This began with £20 borrowed from Slatter, the Oxford bookseller, lent when Shelley was sent down. Slatter evidently liked him and was anxious to save him from going to rapacious moneylenders; as a result Shelley involved him in an appallingly expensive mess. In 1831, Slatter’s brother, a plumber, wrote to Sir Timothy: ‘having suffered very much in consequence of an honest endeavour to save your son from going to Jews for the purpose of obtaining money at an enormous rate of interest…we have lost upwards of £1300.’ They were eventually arrested for debt, and never seem to have been paid. The Weybridge printer who published Alastor was still trying to get Shelley to pay for it four and a half years later; there is no evidence he was ever reimbursed. To a third bookseller Shelley wrote (December 1814): ‘If you would furnish me with books, I would grant you a post-obit bond in the proportion of £250 for every £100 worth of books provided.’ He told him his father’s and grandfather’s ages were sixty-three and eighty-five, when they were in fact sixty-one and eighty-three. A fourth bookseller-publisher, Thomas Hookham, not only printed Queen Mab on credit but advanced Shelley money. He too remained unpaid and, for the crime of sympathizing with Harriet, became an object of hatred, Shelley writing to Mary on 25 October 1814: ‘If you see Hookham, do not insult him openly. I have still hopes…I will make this remorseless villain loathe his own flesh-in good time. He shall be cut down in his season. His pride shall be trampled into atoms. I will wither up his selfish soul by piecemeal’64
What is the common denominator in all this-in Shelley’s sexual and financial misdemeanours, in his relations with father and mother, wives and children, friends, business associates and tradesmen? It is, surely, an inability to see any point of view other than his own; in short, lack of imagination. Now this is very curious, for imagination lies at the very heart of his theory of political regeneration. According to Shelley, imagination, or ‘Intellectual Beauty’, was required to transform the world; and it was because poets possessed this quality in the highest degree, because poetic imagination was the most valuable and creative of all human accomplishments, that he entitled them the world’s natural legislators, albeit unacknowledged. Yet here was he, a poet-and one of the greatest of poets-capable, perhaps, of imaginative sympathy with entire classes, downtrodden agricultural labourers, Luddites, Peterloo rioters, factory hands, people he had never set eyes on; capable of feeling for, in the abstract, the whole of suffering humanity, yet finding it manifestly impossible, not once but scores, hundreds of times, to penetrate imaginatively the minds and hearts of all those people with whom he had daily dealings. From booksellers to baronets, from maidservants to mistresses, he simply could not see that they were entitled to a viewpoint which differed from his own; and, confronted with their (to him) intransigence, he fell back on abuse. A letter he wrote to John Williams, on 21 March 1813, perfectly encapsulates Shelley’s imaginative limitations. It begins with a verbal assault on the unfortunate Bedwell; it continues with a savage attack on the still more unhappy Miss Hitchener (‘a woman of desperate views & dreadful passions but of cool & undeviating revenge…I laughed heartily at her day of tribulation’); it concludes with a pledge to humanity-‘I am ready to do anything for my country and my friends that will serve them’; and it signs off ‘& among the rest for you, whose affectionate friend I continue to remain’. This was the very Williams he was in the process of cheating and who would shortly become another embittered debtor.65
Shelley devoted his life to political progress, using the marvellous poetic gift bestowed on him, without ever becoming aware of this imaginative disqualification. Nor did he make it good by an attempt to discover the facts about the categories of mankind he wished to aid. He wrote his An Address to the Irish People before he even set foot in the country. When he got there he made no systematic effort to investigate conditions or find out what the Irish themselves actually wanted.66 Indeed he planned secretly to destroy their cherished religion. Shelley likewise remained profoundly ignorant of English politics and public opinion, of the desperate nature of the problems confronting the government in the post-Waterloo period, and of the sincerity of the efforts to solve them. He never tried to inform himself or to do justice to well-meaning and sensitive men like Castlereagh and Sir Robert Peel by precisely that kind of imaginative penetration he said was so essential. Instead, he abused them, in The Mask of Anarchy, just as he abused his creditors and discarded women in his letters.
Shelley clearly wanted a total political transformation of society, including the destruction of organized religion. But he was confused about how to get there. At times he preached non-violence, and there are those who see him as the first real evangelist of non-violent resistance, a progenitor of Gandhi.67 ‘Have nothing to do with force or violence,’ he wrote in his Irish Address; ‘Associations for the purposes of violence are entitled to the strongest disapprobation of the real reformist!…All secret associations are also bad.’ But Shelley sometimes sought to organize secret bodies and some of his poetry only makes sense as an incitement to direct action. The Mask of Anarchy itself is contradictory: one stanza, lines 340-44, supports non-violence. But the most famous stanza, ending ‘You are many, they are few,’ which is repeated (II. 151-54, 369-72) is a plea for insurrection.68 Byron, who was a rebel like Shelley but more a man of action than an intellectual-he did not believe in transforming society at all, merely in self-determination-was very sceptical of Shelley’s Utopia. In Shelley’s fine poem Julian and Maddalo, which records their long conversations in Venice, Maddalo [Byron] says of Shelley’s political programme, ‘I think you might make such a system refutation-tight/As far as words go,’ but in practice thought ‘such aspiring theories’ were ‘vain’.
The fact that in this poem, which dates from 1818-19, Shelley acknowledged Byron’s criticism marked a pause in his brash political fundamentalism. Shelley approached Byron with great modesty: ‘I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending…every word is stamped with immortality.’ For a time the power of Byron almost paralysed him: ‘the sun has extinguished the glowworm,’ as he put it. Certainly, getting to know Byron had a maturing effect on Shelley. But, unlike Byron, who began to see his role as the organizer of oppressed peoples-the Italians, then the Greeks-Shelley began to turn against direct action of any kind. It is very significant that, at the end of his life, he was becoming critical of Rousseau, whom he identified with the horrible excesses of the French Revolution. In his unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, Rousseau is presented as a Virgilian narrative figure, a prisoner of Purgatory because he made the mistake of believing the ideal could be realized in life, and was thus corrupted. But it is not at all clear that Shelley was thereby renouncing actual politics to concentrate on the pure idealism of the imagination.69
Certainly, in the months before his death there was no sign of any fundamental change in his character. Claire Clairmont, who lived to be over eighty and to become a sensible woman (the inspiration for Henry James’s magnetic story, The Aspern Papers), wrote sixty years after these events that ‘Harriet’s suicide had a beneficial effect on Shelley-he became much less confident in himself and not so wild as he had been before.’70 This may well be true though Claire, at that great distance in time, was telescoping events. Shelley did indeed become less violently self-centred, but the change was gradual and by no means complete at his death. In 1822 both he and Byron had built themselves boats, the Don Juan and the Bolivar, and Shelley in particular was obsessed with sailing. For this purpose he insisted on taking a house at Lerici on the Bay of Spezia for the summer. Mary, who was pregnant again, came to hate it, chiefly because it was so hot. The two were drifting apart; she was becoming disillusioned and tired of their unnatural life in exile. Moreover, there was a new menace. Shelley’s sailing companion was Edward Williams, a half-pay lieutenant of the East India Company. Shelley was showing increasing interest in Williams’s beautiful common-law wife, Jane. Jane was musical, played the guitar and sang well (like Claire), something Shelley liked. There were musical parties under the summer moon. Shelley wrote several poems to and about her. Was Mary to be displaced, just as she had once displaced Harriet?
On 16 June, as Mary had feared, she miscarried, and was again plunged into despair. Two days later Shelley wrote a letter which makes it clear their marriage was virtually at an end: ‘I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me…Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her necessitates this, perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.’ Shelley adds: ‘I like Jane more and more…She has a taste for music and an elegance of form and motions that compensate in some degree for the lack of literary refinement.’71 By the end of the month Mary was finding her position, the heat, the house, insupportable: ‘I wish,’ she wrote, ‘I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.’72
She got her manumission in tragic and unexpected manner. Shelley had always been fascinated by speed. In a twentieth-century incarnation he might have become devoted to fast cars or even aircraft. One of his poems, The Witch of Atlas, is a hymn to the joys of travelling through space. His boat the Don Juan was built for speed and Shelley had it modified to travel even faster. It was only twenty-four feet long but it had twin mainmasts and schooner rigging. He and Williams devised a new topsail rig which dramatically increased the area of canvas; to increase the speed still further, Byron’s naval architect, at Shelley’s request, created a re-rig and false stern and prow. She was now a very fast and dangerous boat and sailed ‘like a witch’.73 At the time of the disaster she could carry three spinnakers and a storm-sail and floated an extra three inches higher in the water. Shelley and Williams were returning in the refitted boat from Livorno to Lerici. They set off on the afternoon of 8 July 1822 in deteriorating weather, under full sail. The local Italian craft all scurried back into harbour when the storm broke at 6.30. The captain of one of them said he had sighted Shelley’s ship in immense waves, still fully-rigged; he invited them to come aboard his own or at least to shorten sail, ‘or you are lost’. But one of the two (supposedly Shelley) shouted ‘No,’ and was seen to stop his companion lowering the sails, seizing him by the arm, ‘as if in anger’. The Don Juan went down ten miles from shore, still under full sail; both were drowned.74
Keats had died in Rome of tuberculosis the year before; Byron was bled to death by his doctors two years later in Greece. So a brief, incandescent epoch in English literature came to an end. Mary took little Percy, the future baronet (Charles had died), back to England and began patiently to erect a mythical monument to Shelley’s memory. But the scars remained. She had seen the underside of the intellectual life and had felt the power of ideas to hurt. When a friend, watching Percy learning to read, remarked: ‘I am sure he will live to be an extraordinary man,’ Mary Shelley blazed up: ‘I hope to God,’ she said passionately, ‘he grows up to be an ordinary one.’