Shelley: The Pursuit (33 page)

They left Cwm Elan about 20 June, planning to break their journey at the market town of Chepstow, in Monmouthshire, on the river Wye. At the last moment there was a panic concerning Miss Hitchener. It is not quite clear what this was, but it seems as if Shelley finally got to hear definite news of the Post Office investigation. On 18 June he dashed a quick note to her, more urgent than anything before. ‘Something on which we cannot calculate has happened. Means utterly unknown to us, have been practised upon you. — Friendship & justice command that we should do all that can be done.’
³⁵
He promised that once at Chepstow, Eliza would stay with the baggage, and he and Harriet would hurry by coach ‘across the country to
you
’. Meanwhile Miss Hitchener was to try and borrow money for the return journey with them from a Mr Howel at Hurstpierpoint. Shelley treated it as a break for liberty. ‘Affairs have now arrived at a crisis, I perceive by your letter the necessity of our journey, it is playing a momentous game, it demands coolness & resolution — such coolness as contempt for our adversaries has given Harriet and me. Calm yourself collect yourself my dearest friend. . . .’ As for ‘Mr & Mrs Pilfold & Co’, ‘even now I can sometimes not help smiling tho the smile is a bitter one, when the train of their conspiracies comes across me.’ The liberation date was fixed as Thursday, 25 June; perhaps not that very day, but positively that week, Shelley promised. ‘Prepare yourself to leave a scene rendered hateful by impotent malice,’ he crowed.
³⁶

But in the event, and despite all his protestations, he never went to Hurstpierpoint at all. Arriving at Chepstow about 24 June, the little party — Shelley, Harriet, Eliza and Dan their Irish servant — went to look over a house that Godwin had heard of from a friend. But they found the house ‘not half built’, as Harriet said, ‘and by no means large enough for our family’, by which she meant all those whom Shelley intended to invite to join them. Moreover the country around Chepstow was dismal after Cwm Elan. They wrote the owner, a certain Mr Eton, a refusal, and posted it via Skinner Street. After anxiously checking their remaining money, they turned westwards and headed along the north Somerset and Devon coast with the vague target of Ilfracombe. It is not known what excuse was sent to Miss Hitchener for this failure of the promised liberation party.

About 28 June they left the main coastal road and began to descend a precipitous track through the cliffs, engulfed in rich flowering foliage, with a little river curling and rushing in the gorges below them. After nearly an hour’s dusty descent, for the track wound down for about two miles, a beautiful vista of glittering blue sea, rocky foreshore and beached fishing boats, enclosed in a tiny shingle bay, suddenly opened in front of the eyes of the tired travellers. They had arrived at Lynmouth. It was natural Shelley country.

Among the cluster of little stone and whitewash houses, with their low thatch roofs and deeply recessed windows and doorways, peering out to sea under shaded brows, they found a single cottage unoccupied. It stood a little way back from the beach on rising ground where the trackway met the two branches of the Lyn river, crossed and ran down parallel to the sea. The cottage was roughly built, but sprawled into a pleasant series of adjoining rooms which provided Shelley once more with the chance to bring his friends together. ‘The poverty and humbleness of the apartments is compensated for by their
number
, & we can invite our friends with a consciousness that there is
enclosed
space wherein they may sleep.’
³⁷
Around them the cliffs were covered in a wild profusion of plants and bushes, with trees shimmering through various shades of green and mauve, and dotted by vivid clumps of pink and purple rhododendrons. The sun slid round the rim of the steeply wooded cove, which faced north, never far from the over-arching treetops. As its angle flattened towards mid-afternoon the village was filled with a curious blue-green haze. The stone shoulders of the cliffs hunched tightly and defensively around the village and the cottage windows gazed out on the sharply restricted band of open sea to the north.

Harriet was radiant with surprise and delight; it was as beautiful as Nantgwillt and it had ‘a fine bold sea’ as well. She wrote joyfully to Mrs Nugent: ‘We have taken the only cottage there was, which is most beautifully situated, commanding a fine view of the sea, with mountains at the side and behind us. Vegetation is more luxuriant here than in any part of England. We have roses and myrtles creeping up the sides of the house, which is thatched at the top. It is such a little place that it seems more like a fairy scene than anything in reality. All the houses are built in the cottage style, and I suppose there are not more than 30 in all.’
³⁸
The post came in twice a week from Barnstaple, some eighteen miles away to the south-west. The trackway was so steep no carriage would venture down it, but a horse could be ridden up with care. Getting Shelley’s heavy trunks of books and pamphlets down the hill was a memorable business which required local labour. It was an event that aroused a certain amount of speculation in the village, and caused sufficient remark for it to appear in a government report that reached Lord Sidmouth’s desk two and a half months later. ‘Mr Shelley had with him large chests, which were so heavy scarcely three men could lift them,
which were supposed to contain papers.’
³⁹
Shelley also made his mark on the bi-weekly postal system, supplying it with more letters than the rest of the village put together, usually more than a dozen at a time and on one occasion, as Sidmouth was informed, ‘so many as sixteen letters by the same post’. It was generally felt that Shelley must be, for all his youthful looks, a ‘somebody’, and as like as not a somebody up to no good. He was watched at Lynmouth from the start.

Both Shelley and Harriet were too busy to notice. Harriet arranged their books and papers, wrote letters to Mrs Nugent, and fussed around trying to find something for Dan to do. Shelley was now in the middle of writing his pamphlet on the Eaton case. He was organizing his philosophic reading more carefully again, and had embarked on a translation of d’Holbach’s
Système de la Nature
, the implications of which he was eager to discuss with Godwin. He arranged for liberal and radical papers to be sent over weekly from Barnstaple, including Cobbett’s
Political Register
and Hunt’s
Examiner
, and he was searching about for a London bookseller.
[5]
It was probably Godwin who put Shelley on to Thomas Hookham and Sons, of 15 Old Bond Street.
⁴⁰

Shelley was again anxious to get his commune together. Miss Hitchener at last set out from Sussex about 14 July, and Shelley wrote a long eulogy on her self-made republican and Deist virtues in a letter to Godwin. This was by way of an introduction, for Miss Hitchener spent the stop-over night in London, not at the Westbrooks’ but at Skinner Street. ‘She is a woman with whom her excellent qualities made me acquainted — tho deriving her birth from a very humble source she contracted during youth a very deep & refined habit of thinking; her mind naturally inquisitive and penetrating overleaped the bounds of prejudice — she formed for herself an unbeaten path of life.’
⁴¹
One cannot help being struck by the difference between this apparently cool Godwinian assessment of Miss Hitchener’s ‘worthy’ virtues, and the passionate outpourings which Shelley had lavished upon her so often in correspondence, calling her nothing less than ‘the rock’ in all his storm.

Shelley attempted to get one of Godwin’s own household to come down to Devon with Miss Hitchener. ‘Why may not Fanny
[3]
come to Lynmouth with Miss Hitchener . . . and return with us all to London in the autumn?’ Godwin was not happy with this suggestion, explaining that he did not really
know
Shelley, he had not ‘seen his face’, and that such a move might be premature. Yet Shelley already had a feminine following at Skinner Street, as was clear from
Godwin’s observation about Shelley’s letter from Chepstow: ‘the moment when what I may now call the well-known hand was seen, all the females were on the tiptoe to know’.
⁴²
In the event, Miss Hitchener left at long last on the Barnstaple coach alone on 15 July to join her fate to the Shelleys.

One can imagine the interest aroused in Lynmouth as a third female, travelling unescorted, arrived to join young Mr Shelley’s party at Hooper’s Lodging, as his cottage was known locally. She was joyfully received, a tall, thin figure with her rather pocked and ravaged complexion, very talkative and anxious to please. She obviously worshipped Shelley. The villagers never discovered quite what the set-up was, but it was concluded that she was some kind of ‘female servant’ and ‘supposed a foreigner’.
⁴³
This was reported to Lord Sidmouth too, though his Sussex sources had probably already informed him that Miss Hitchener had left to stay with ‘her connection’ in the West Country.

Once Miss Hitchener had arrived, Shelley began active local propaganda work for the first time since he had left Dublin. There was another change which was also indicative of businesslike activity: Portia’s name was changed to ‘Bessie’. After Miss Hitchener had been with them for a fortnight, Harriet wrote one of her exact and amusing descriptions to Mrs Nugent in Dublin. She was kindly about her, though slightly mocking her earnestness. It was not altogether easy to have another woman in Shelley’s life. ‘Our friend Miss Hitchener is come to us,’ Harriet wrote on 4 August. ‘She is very busy writing for the good of mankind. She is dark in complexion, with a great quantity of long black hair. She talks a great deal. If you like great talkers she will suit you. She is taller than me or my sister, and as thin as it is possible to be. I hope you will see her one day. . . . Miss Hitchener had read your letter and loves you in good earnest. Her own expression. I know you would love her did you know her. Her age is 30. She looks like as if she was only 24 and her spirits are excellent. She laughs and talks and writes all day.’ Miss Hitchener also brought doubtful news of Godwin. ‘She has seen the Godwins, and thinks Godwin different to what he seems, he lives so much from his family, only seeing them at stated hours. We do not like that, and he thinks himself such a very great
man
. He would not let one of his own children come to
us
just because he had not seen our faces. Just as if writing to a person in which we express all our thoughts, was not a sufficient knowledge of them. I knew our friend, whom we call Bessy, just as well when we corresponded as I do now.’
⁴⁴
However, that opinion was to change shortly too.

Lynmouth, so cut off from all communications, might not be thought the ideal centre for distributing propaganda. But there was one ever-ready mode of transport and dispersion waiting their command, as Shelley suddenly realized: the sea, and the wind that blew over it. The result was that in the early mornings and late evenings, Shelley and the supposed foreigner could be seen picking their
way along the rocks and shingle with arms and pockets full of bottles. Carefully waiting for the right turn of the tide, and the right shift of the wind so it blew from the west into Avonmouth, or south-west across to Wales, they lobbed far out to sea a fleet of bobbing vessels, ‘vessels of heavenly medicine’ as Shelley called them in a sonnet, ‘On Launching some bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel’. The medicine consisted of the
Declaration of Rights
and the broadsheet ballad ‘The Devil’s Walk’.

Another of Shelley’s methods, which had in its elaborateness a curious element of game-playing, was to build a miniature boat. Again, Lord Sidmouth was to receive a detailed description of one of these, picked up off-shore by a local fisherman. The little box was ‘carefully covered over with bladder, and well-rosined and waxed to keep out the water, and, in order to attract attention at sea, there was a little upright stick fastened to it at each end, and a little sail fastened to them, as well as some lead at the bottom to keep it upright’.
⁴⁵
The contents of seditious paper was duly reported. A third method was more prosaic. Their Irish servant, simple blundering Dan Healy, was loaded up with broadsheets and sent off into the surrounding byways to post them up on the wall and barn doors when no one was about. Shelley gave him a cover story, about meeting two travelling gentlemen on the road, if he happened to be stopped and questioned.

The last method can only be called perfectly Shelleyan. Harriet and Bessie and he would spend hours by the windows of their cottage cutting out sections of silk, and sewing and gluing them with cowgum. The result was a fire balloon, a globe of silk which was inflated by the operation of a spirit-soaked wick suspended under the open neck. These are tricky machines to fly, as they tend to ignite, but Shelley managed to get many radiant balloons to lift copies of the
Declaration of Rights
and sail through the evening sky north-eastwards across the Bristol Channel, until their tiny spark was lost in the dusk. He recorded this in one of the best of his early poems, ‘To a Balloon, laden with Knowledge’:

Bright ball of flame that thro the gloom of even

Silently takest thine ethereal way

And with surpassing glory dimmst each ray