Shelley: The Pursuit (40 page)

The men themselves were not wholly inarticulate, and there is evidence of the formation of embryo unions at Tremadoc, and attempts to bargain
en masse
, with the use of strikes and walkouts. Little of this story has been preserved in documents, for like so much other early labour history of the period it was overlooked or suppressed by the educated as a peripheral movement of malcontents. One document at least, preserved on the Caernarvonshire county records, and tentatively dated May 1812 or 1813, indicates quite clearly what was going on. The note is from an unnamed local overseer, to John Williams, who was on business in London at the time.

Today about 3 clock in the afternoon all of the Towyn men Rise and Leave off the Work. My men Come Back intent to do the same. I have grate trouble to Persuade them to stop at Work and this is the very speech that I have from them. ‘We are all Willing to work but we cannot work without meat and we Cannot get meat without money’ — you know the terms very well. But however them did promise to stop at Work untill I have an answer to this Letter. For God sake trie to come home. It is a great pitty that all [?] are same as we is with this Great Concern at this time of the year. Indeed I am longing more for see you than I never did for my father.
⁷

In such a dispute between owner and labourers, there can be no doubt with which side Shelley aligned himself. Harriet was to summarize their feelings about Leeson, that from his character and ‘from many acts of his’ they found him ‘malignant and cruel to the greatest degree’. Shelley, with his natural bias against this kind of aristocrat, refused to have any social relations with Leeson, and the occupant of Morpha Lodge was never allowed to cross the threshold of Tan-yr-allt.
⁸
In such a small circle of local gentry, such a refusal was a most signal insult. Leeson, for his part, quickly came to suspect Shelley’s financial probity, and distrusted his influence among the labourers in Tremadoc. Later, he was to discover, through Williams, the story of Shelley’s propagandizing and pamphleteering in Dublin. His reaction to this was, not unnaturally, extremely hostile. Ultimately he came to regard Shelley as little better than a financial adventurer, a professional agitator and an unprincipled subversive. He acted accordingly.

The situation at Tremadoc quickly came to resemble the previous situations at Keswick and Lynmouth. The difference was that Shelley was no longer a visitor, but an important and active member of the community, whose very occupation in connection with the fund took him legitimately to all areas of the district. It is difficult to know how far Shelley really involved himself with the working people of Tremadoc. One commentator
⁹
imagines him riding from door to door; while another wonders, ‘Did he dispense anti-militarism, anti-capitalism, egalitarianism, republicanism, perhaps atheism, with his five pound notes?’
¹⁰
His interest in Luddism generally, and the particular fate of persecuted Luddites during that hard winter of 1812, shows at least that he could not have been indifferent to the ‘violent rioting’ in the Leyn Peninsula, a mere two hours ride away, during these weeks. (Two men were subsequently executed for their part in these disturbances, in 1813.) His own letters show that he was sufficiently intimate with the local people to know about individual cases of hardships and illness, and already on 11 December he was writing to Dr William Roberts in Caernarvon asking him to make Tan-yr-allt ‘your headquarters’ since Shelley had ‘a patient or two’ in the neighbourhood.
¹¹
This reminds one of his activities with the poor in Dublin, which always had a very decided political slant to them. Shelley made a habit of walking out at night — and talking to the labourers who used the time to cultivate their little garden patches by moonlight — an occupation at that time and that season which vividly suggests their hardship, and the inevitable subject of Shelley’s conversations with them. In a note appended to one of the passages of
Queen Mab
, which Shelley was writing all this time, he observed pointedly: ‘It has come under the author’s experience that some of the workmen on an embankment in North Wales, who, in consequence of the inability of the proprietor to pay them, seldom received their wages, have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile ground by moonlight.’
¹²
He argued further in the note that manual labour was constantly exploited: ‘The labour requisite to support a family is far lighter than is generally supposed. The peasantry work, not only for themselves, but for the aristocracy, the army, and the manufacturers.’
¹³

It was soon apparent that Shelley was resented strongly in those sections of the community influenced by men like Leeson and Evans, and that he in turn was angry and critical about much that met his eyes locally. From the start he felt that he was likely to be hounded and persecuted. ‘The society in Wales is very stupid,’ he wrote to Hogg, shortly before Christmas, ‘they are all aristocrats and saints: but that, I tell you, I do not mind in the least; the unpleasant part of the business is, that they hunt people to death, who are not likewise.’
¹⁴
Although Williams remained friendly to Shelley, and was helping him with such things as his winter coal stock, Madocks himself does not seem to have been at Tremadoc to exert a moderating influence among the various parties. The business was to get very unpleasant indeed by the next spring.

While Shelley worked for the Embankment he was also turning his spare hours into an intensive period of study, under Godwin’s general direction. The broad field was to be history, what Shelley sardonically called that ‘record of crimes and miseries’.
¹⁵
Godwin argued that it depended on the selection of events one chose to make — ‘it is our own fault, therefore, if we do not select and dwell upon the best’. Godwin inspired Shelley with an ambitious and active approach to his self-education which ever after informed Shelley’s raging and voracious appetite for books. He especially encouraged him to ignore secondary and minor work as a substitute for the grand originals. ‘A true student’, Godwin told him, ‘is a man seated in a chair, and surrounded with a sort of intrenchment and breastwork of books. It is for boarding-school misses to read one book at one time.’ Did Shelley smile at that, thinking of Miss Hitchener? ‘Particularly when I am sifting out facts, either of science or history, I must place myself in the situation of a man making a book, rather than reading books. When I have studied the Grecian history in Homer, in Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, together with those of the moderns that are most capable, or most elaborate, in unfolding or appreciating the materials the ancients have left us, I shall then begin to know what Greece was. I need not, of course, mention how superior is the information and representation of contemporaries to those who come afterwards . . . .’
¹⁶
Godwin firmly put Shakespeare and Milton ‘at the head of our poetry’, and Bacon and Milton ‘at the head of our prose’. These preferences were also passed on to Shelley, though as yet he read Greek only in translation. Of Shelley’s own taste, Godwin noted: ‘
You
have what appears to me a false taste in poetry. You love a perpetual sparkle and glittering, such as are to be found in Darwin, and Southey, and Scott and Campbell.’
¹⁷

The immediate result of Godwin’s advice and strictures was a series of enormous book-lists which went out to Hookham, and, spreading the load and also the debt, to Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, the bookseller and contributor to the
Yellow Dwarf
. Besides the works of the Greek and English classics which Godwin had recommended, Shelley was organizing his own intellectual odyssey. He ordered Aeschylus and Euripides, Sappho, Confucius, Plato, Kant and Spinoza, and various English historians including Gibbon, whose sour elegance, surprisingly, attracted him throughout his life. Next came Moore’s
Hindu Pantheon
and Southey on Brazil, which interested Shelley as a revolutionary centre. There were also selected semi-scientific works, Erasmus Darwin’s
Zoonomia
and
The Temple of Nature
; Lord Monboddo on
The Origin and Process of Language
; the French encyclopaedists; Trotter on
The Nervous Temperament
and on
Drunkenness
.
¹⁸
Shelley made various astronomical inquiries: ‘You would very much oblige me if you would collect all possible documents on the Precession of the Equinoxes; as also anything that may throw light upon the question whether or no the position of the Earth on its poles is not yearly becoming less oblique?’
¹⁹
Shelley digested this vast load rather unevenly, as might be expected. Nevertheless, the intensive period of research bore fruit in the quite extraordinarily ranging ‘Notes’ which he attached to
Queen Mab
, which were to run from classical authors on atheism to essays on vegetarianism and speculations on the astronomical layout of the universe.

Despite the difficulties which Embankment affairs involved Shelley in, the composition of
Queen Mab
went on steadily. By the end of January 1813, Shelley was writing to Hookham that
Queen Mab
would be finished by March in ten cantos, and that the collection of short poems would also be ready. ‘The notes to QM will be long & philosophical. I shall take the opportunity which I judge to be a safe one of propagating my principles, which I decline to do syllogistically in a poem. A poem very didactic is I think very stupid.’
²⁰

Of the short poems he remarked: ‘Some of the later ones have the merit of conveying a meaning in every word, and these all are faithful pictures of my feelings at the time of writing them, but they are in great measure abrupt & obscure. All breathing hatred to government & religion, but I think not too openly for publication. — One fault they are indisputably exempt from, that of being a volume of
fashionable literature
.’
²¹

Shelley was in an extremely didactic mood, inflamed no doubt by the visible contrast between the living conditions of the ‘aristocracts and saints’, and the labourers of Tremadoc who were now in the hardest part of winter, and always on the edge of starvation. It was a ‘Russian’ cold.
²²
The persistent story, unsupported by any documentary evidence, that Shelley went out and shot a farmer’s sheep caught in a bramble, may have its origin in one of Shelley’s more
desperate attempts to help the labourers with food. Most of his own supplies, including food and coal, were only obtained on credit from the local shopkeepers — a fact that was to make him vulnerable to better-heeled opponents. In these spartan conditions, Shelley’s fanaticism was daily inflamed.

To Hogg, he was beginning to posture again in his old manner of melodramatic self-projection. Writing of his adherence to ‘republicanism’ he delivered a superior flourish: ‘It certainly is far removed from pothouse democracy, & knows with what smile to hear the servile applause of an inconstant mob. — but though its cheek could feel without a blush the hand of insult strike, its soul would shrink neither from the scaffold nor the stake, nor from those deeds and habits which are obnoxious to slaves in Power.’
²³
Through this, suitably generalized for Hogg’s consumption, one can make out the lineaments of the struggle at Tremadoc.

Harriet, speaking for them all, voiced a more general disenchantment in one of her missives to Mrs Nugent, which reflected in a feminine way much of the righteous fury with which Shelley himself judged the deleterious human effect of the Embankment on the very people it was designed to benefit. ‘All the good I wrote of Mr Madocks I now recant. I find I have been dreadfully deceived respecting that man.’ Gazing down from the south windows of Tan-yr-allt, she wrote: ‘The sea, which used to dash against the most beautiful grand rocks… was, to please his stupid vanity and to celebrate his name, turned from its course, and now we have for a fine bold sea, which there used to be, nothing but a sandy marsh uncultivated and ugly to the view.’ She added scornfully that the Embankment ‘viewed from the height looks as if a puff of wind from the mountains would send it to oblivion like its founder’s name.’ She deliberately took a remote and careless attitude to the very event which Williams, Leeson, Ellis-Nanney and the others most feared. Though the household at Tan-yr-allt was proud to consider itself ‘the means of saving the bank from utter destruction’, it was increasingly restless about the motives of the owners.
²⁴
Shelley’s passage in the affairs of Tremadoc grew less and less harmonious, and by early February he was saying that he had been ‘teazed to death for the last fortnight’.
²⁵

Yet despite it all, Shelley still seems to have been remarkably happy at Tan-yr-allt. Harriet was now visibly pregnant, the baby was due in June, and the house seemed to him ‘extensive and tasty enough for the villa of an Italian prince.’
²⁶
In the evenings, ‘when I come home to Harriet I am the happiest of the happy’.
²⁷
He does not seem to have even considered leaving. Hogg was already invited to come to stay as early as possible in March, and to remain as long as he could. Hookham and his family had also been invited, for Shelley felt the young publisher was an important man to draw into his radical circle, and on 15 February Shelley was writing to convince him that August was much too late to arrive,
why not June?
²⁸
The only unexpected absentee from these spring plans was Godwin, who had once again fallen temporarily out of favour. Harriet summarized: ‘He wanted Mr Shelley to join the Wig [
sic
] party, and do just as they pleased, which made me very angry, as we know what men the Wigs are now.’ Both the Sussex Whigs, and the Duke of Norfolk himself had turned down support for Madocks’s Embankment,
²⁹
and of course Madocks himself was in disgrace. ‘[Godwin] is grown old and unimpassioned, therefore is not in the least calculated for such enthusiasts as we are. He has suffered a great deal for his principles, but that ought to make him more staunch in them, at least it would me.’ In keeping with the spirit of the times, Harriet closed her letter to Mrs Nugent — ‘Adieu, dearest friend to liberty and truth.’
³⁰