Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (5 page)

Marianne was less convinced of Lord Byron’s merits, related to her at length by Hunt and Bess in their letters. Reading descriptions of amusing evenings in Surrey Gaol with Byron did little to alleviate her loneliness in Brighton, and made her fearful that aristocratic admirers would distract Hunt from writing for
The Examiner
, on which her family’s livelihood depended. While Hunt and Byron were close in age there was considerable social disparity between them, which Marianne perceived to be a problem. As a result, she remained stoutly unimpressed by the Byron of popular myth: a brooding, melancholic figure based on the hero of his
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
.

Marianne’s suspicion of Byron derived not only from her concern about his influence over Hunt, but also from her growing anxiety about the events taking place in Surrey Gaol in her absence. Thornton’s health kept her in Brighton for longer than she intended, and she wrote increasingly worried letters to Bess, telling her to share the responsibility of looking after Hunt with her nephews and Kent cousins, and to think about returning to live with her parents. She also missed her husband badly.  She coped with the prolonged separation by penning a steady flow of letters meant for Hunt’s eyes only, in which she was quite explicit about how much she longed to be with him: ‘fancy where you would like to have me most, and you will know what I dreamt about, &c. &c. &c!!!’.
¹⁸
 Sometimes she sounded positively overcome with her own longing. She wanted, she told him, to ‘take you dearly into [my] arms when you go to bed, and, and, you know what I mean . . . I must not think about it, if I do I shall grow outrageous.’
¹⁹
Hunt responded in kind, imagining that his arms were wrapped around her. ‘I shall once more be clasped to one of the best hearts in the world, and have a bosom to rest upon, and a form to expatiate upon, that are all my own.’
²⁰

By the second year of Hunt’s sentence Thornton had recovered sufficiently for Marianne to reassert her position as her husband’s chief companion. She moved back into Hunt’s cell, accompanied by Thornton and John, and Bess was sent home.  Matrimonial relations were so well re-established that the Hunts’ third child, Mary, was born in Surrey Gaol with Hunt acting as midwife, ‘the hour having taken us by surprise’.
²¹
With Marianne and the children back in Hunt’s rooms, his living arrangements gained the utmost respectability. Byron, busy with his own concerns, visited Hunt less frequently as 1814 wore on, although he continued to send books and kind letters. Perhaps the flower-filled dungeon was less fascinating when it was a disapproving wife, rather than an admiring sister-in-law, who presided over the coffee pots.

I am boiling with indignation at the horrible injustice & tyranny of the sentence pronounced on Hunt & his brother, & it is on this subject that I write to you. Surely the seal of abjectness & slavery is indelibly stamped upon the character of England.

Thus wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley on 15 February 1813 to his friend and bookseller Thomas Hookham. ‘Surely’, his letter continued, ‘the public for whom Hunt has done so much will repay in part the great debt of obligation which they owe the champion of their liberties & virtues or are they dead, cold, stonehearted & insensible, brutalised by centuries of unremitting bondage . . . whilst hundreds of thousands are sent to the tyrants of Russia, he pines in a dungeon far from all that can make life to be desired.’ He concluded his protest with a practical suggestion: ‘I am rather poor at present but I have £20 which is not immediately wanted. – Pray begin a subscription for the Hunts, put my name for that sum, & when I hear that you have complied with my request I will send it you.’
²²

Percy Shelley was twenty years old when he wrote this letter. It captures his eloquence and his fervent hatred of tyranny and injustice, as well as his conviction that the champions of individual liberties deserved to be publicly celebrated. But it also captures the impulse to action which was one of Shelley’s essential features.  From his youth he combined a poetic sensibility with a belief in the power of political activism, and for a political liberal he had a surprisingly aristocratic conviction that his involvement in the Hunt brothers’ predicament would be welcome. His letter was also characteristic in that it combined the optimism of youth with the world-weary tone of a much older man. At twenty Shelley had in fact seen more of the world than many of his acquaintances and, like Hunt, he had suffered as a result of his writing.  However, he was still searching for a cause to which he could nail his colours, and behind the generosity of his offer to raise a subscription for the imprisoned
Examiner
owners lay a touch of envy at Hunt’s elevation to the role of publicly acknowledged political hero.

Shelley spent much of his first two decades trying to become just such a hero. Although barely out of adolescence at the time of Hunt’s imprisonment he was, in 1813, an ardent radical and anti-monarchist, bursting with ideas for the reformation of the world. Physically, he was rather odd, tall and slim to the point of limpness, with a high-pitched effete voice; but what he lacked in physical bulk he more than made up for in charismatic intensity. Among the earliest witnesses to this intensity were his school fellows at Eton, where he was sent by his landowning father when he was twelve. Initially he was bullied for his refusal to ‘fag’ for older boys, but the bullies soon discovered that, in spite of his feeble frame, Shelley was not a boy to succumb quietly to taunts. On the contrary, he could be terrifying when roused, and was quite capable of reciprocal acts of violence. He stabbed one tormentor’s hand with a fork, and others remembered him as an almost unearthly creature, with flashing eyes, wild hair, and deathly white cheeks. Eventually the extremity of his reactions won him grudging respect, and he left school in 1810 the acknowledged leader of his contemporaries. From Eton he proceeded to University College Oxford.  There, as at Eton, he developed a reputation for charismatic eccentricity, although this time he was not required to resort to violence to prove his worth. He was expelled from Oxford in 1811, when, on principle, he refused to admit to his authorship of a pamphlet (co-authored with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg) on
The Necessity of Atheism
.

A few weeks before his expulsion, Shelley wrote to introduce himself to Hunt, whose writing he greatly admired. It was a daring letter, written by an unknown undergraduate to an important political commentator some eight years his senior.  Shelley told Hunt of his vision for ‘a
meeting
of such enlightened unprejudiced members of the community, whose independent principles expose them to evils which might thus become alleviated’,
²³
and the pair met briefly at Shelley’s urging. But their relationship did not prosper: Hunt was too busy to pay much attention to the wild schemes of an impetuous young man with little experience of putting his ideas into practice, and Shelley rapidly became distracted by the consequences of his expulsion and was unable to pursue the friendship. Less than a month after first writing to Hunt Shelley found himself alone in London, exiled from Oxford and, eventually, from his family home in Sussex.

Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford represented a turning point in his life. His aristocratic childhood had not prepared him for outcast living. As far as his family was concerned it did not help that Shelley, like Hunt, considered himself to be a martyr to free speech, and that he combined the intransigence of youth with a deadly combination of idealism and aristocratic
hauteur
. But underneath the haughty persona he adopted during his dealings with his father – and, subsequently, with his father’s lawyer – was a hurt and lonely young man.

Over the next few years, Shelley made many attempts to replace the three institutions – his family, school and university – which had failed him. As he moved restlessly about the country he tried to gather friends about him, or to put himself in places where he believed he would find like-minded people. Like the imprisoned Hunt, he was groping towards an understanding of the political and philosophical significance of friendship. But his existence in the years following his expulsion from Oxford was rootless and restless, and was less conducive to the creation of a meeting of the enlightened than Hunt’s cocooned prison life. In the period of isolation which followed the breakdown of his relationship with his father he grew close to the family of John Westbrook, a merchant with two daughters, Eliza and Harriet. Harriet was a sweet-faced, slightly passive sixteen year old, very much under the thumb of her older sister. She responded to Shelley’s stories of ill-treatment at the hands of his family and the authorities in Oxford with unquestioning sympathy and quickly came to think of him as a heroic outcast, fully deserving of her love. Shelley delighted in her admiration and her kindness and in August 1811 they eloped to Edinburgh, where they were joined by Hogg, Shelley’s Oxford co-conspirator. From there Harriet and Shelley travelled to York, where they abandoned Hogg after he propositioned Harriet, and then to Keswick, where they met – and shocked – Coleridge’s middle-aged friend Robert Southey, and where Shelley embarked on a correspondence with the radical political philosopher William Godwin.

Godwin’s seminal contribution to English political thought, his
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
, first appeared in 1793, the year after Shelley’s birth. It was subsequently reprinted in revised editions throughout the 1790s. The significance of Godwin’s work for a generation of radicals and reformers was beyond measure.
Political Justice
presented a philosophical framework through which the events in revolutionary France could be perceived, and it also provided a millenarian vision for the future of society. Godwin argued that all institutions which sought to limit the power of the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge – such as government, systems of punishment, religion and marriage – were evils which needed to be eradicated in order to achieve a state of ‘perfectibility’. When Shelley learnt that Godwin was living in London with his family he was moved to write to him to ask for his friendship and to announce his allegiance to Godwin’s principles. In the spirit of upholding these principles, he proclaimed his intention to move to Ireland, where he planned to play a heroic role in the struggle for Irish independence.

From Ireland, where Shelley distributed campaigning pamphlets and failed to make much impact on the independence cause, the Shelleys moved to Nantgwyllt in Wales, and from Nantgwyllt to Lynmouth, on the North Devon coast.  From Lynmouth they moved back to Wales, and it was at their temporary home in the village of Tan-yr-allt that Shelley heard of Hunt’s imprisonment. It was also in Tan-yr-allt that he composed much of his first important poem,
Queen Mab
.
Queen Mab
was an angry, avowedly political work, and in it Shelley was able, for the first time, to demonstrate for himself the political potency of poetry. In nine cantos of verse and in extensive accompanying notes, he explored the revolutionary idealism of the past, attacked monarchy, marriage and religion, and proclaimed his vision of an idealised atheistic republic. The poem was indebted to Godwin, as well as to Rousseau and the French
philosophes
. It grew out of Shelley’s reading but was also influenced by his awakening perception of the rotten nature of contemporary society, manifested by the refusal of great institutions (Oxford) to permit independent thought; the sclerotic inability of the Irish to throw off the oppressive Anglo-Saxon yoke, and the poverty and hardship suffered by the Welsh villagers among whom the Shelleys lived. Like Godwin, Shelley fiercely objected to social, political and religious institutions which encouraged hypocrisy; and like Hunt he opposed all state attempts to limit individual freedom of thought and speech. As he moved around the country searching for companionship, Shelley refined and developed his philosophy, so that by the time of his twentieth birthday he was not just a Godwinian acolyte but a writer with well-developed ideas of his own.

Shelley finally met Godwin in the autumn of 1812, when he travelled to London with Harriet. There the young couple made several new friends, including Thomas Hookham, the bookseller who was privately printing
Queen Mab
, and an older poet, Thomas Love Peacock, who had already achieved some success. They were also introduced to Godwin’s family. Understanding the complicated familial relationships in the Godwin household would have required some concentration from Shelley and Harriet. In 1796 Godwin had embarked on a relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, and a key figure in the circle of revolutionary thinkers and writers gathered around the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Wollstonecraft already had an illegitimate daughter by an American merchant called Gilbert Imlay, whose desertion had caused her to attempt suicide by throwing herself off Putney Bridge. But Wollstonecraft found new happiness with Godwin. It was a transformative experience for both of them and, in 1797, the discovery that she was pregnant persuaded them to marry – despite Godwin’s strictures against marriage in
Political Justice
. Their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on 1 September 1797. But a little over a week later Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever, brought on by the manual extraction of the placenta and subsequent infection and haemorrhaging.