Shelley: The Pursuit (59 page)

With much regret, Shelley decided to sell his solar microscope, and took Jane for support. ‘We go to Harris the optician — he won’t have our microscope — I go to Peacock to fetch him and the microscope — He talks to Shelley a little while in Holborn — Shelley & I go to Davison’s in Skinner Street. We are sent away for half an hour — Walk up and down Chatham Place though we are both so tired we can hardly stand — I am so hungry for I had nothing since breakfast & it is now six o’clock — Return to Davison’s get 5 Pounds — for our microscope — In my absence Peacock has gone all the way to Pancras we were not at home — he sees the waiter at St James’ Hotel there — much frightened and returns home.’
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A few days later, Shelley, after much hesitation, sold his pistols to Davison as well. There really was no one to turn to.

The two girls stuck together, despite several misunderstandings and reproachful scenes. Shelley failed to arrive at meeting places on time or at all; Jane got
left behind when Shelley and Mary were trying to find a hotel room for the day. It was perhaps hardest on Jane, who had the least support, and inevitably tended to feel on the outside of the intimacy between Shelley and Mary. ‘He says he is unhappy,’ she exploded once in her diary, ‘God in heaven what has he to be unhappy about! Go to Bed at ten.’ One of his brief Sunday visits she summed up: ‘Shelley writes many letters. Dine at four. Mary & Shelley & I sleep all evening — Shelley goes at ten — Very philosophical way of spending the day — To sleep & talk — why this is merely vegetating.’
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On 9 November Mary noted with a certain satisfaction in the journal, ‘Jane gloomy; she is very sullen with Shelley. Well, never mind, my love — we are happy.’ Perhaps Jane’s mood was partly explained by a meeting Shelley had just had with Hogg who was returned to London. ‘Hogg had been with him the evening before & asked him after his
two Wives
. He joked all the time and talked of the pleasures of Hunting.’
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In the circumstances it must have seemed a cruel jest.

But even between Shelley and Mary the strain sometimes showed. His passionate letters were all very well, but Mary found he was often maddeningly vague about what actual progress had been made in negotiations. ‘You don’t say a word in your letter — you naughty love to ease one of my anxieties, not a word of Lambert of Harriet of Mrs Stewart of money or anything — but all the reasonings which you used to persuade Mr Peacock love was a good thing. Now you know I did not want converting. . . .’
³⁷
Yet sometimes, when Shelley had to contemplate the long week ahead without her, his notes broke into a kind of spontaneous lyricism. Under their poignancy, they contained a characteristic psychological penetration into the way his desire fluctuated in its objects.

‘Mary love — we must be united. I will not part from you again after Saturday night. We must devise some scheme. I must return. Your thoughts alone can waken mine to energy. My mind without yours is dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down. It seems as if you alone could shield me from impurity and vice. If I were absent from you long I should shudder with horror at myself. My understanding becomes undisciplined without you.’
³⁸

Ever after, he considered the moon to be Mary’s emblem. Six years later in Italy, looking back at the way the whole relationship had developed, he wrote with infinitely sad understanding in the classical austerity of his matured style:

She led me to a cave in that wild place

And sate beside me, with her downward face

Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon

Waxing and waning o’er Endymion.

And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb,

And all my being became bright or dim

As the Moon’s image in a summer sea,

According as she smiled or frowned on me;

And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead. . . .
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The period of limbo was finally broken on 8 November by the securing of a loan, with the co-operation of Ballechy and Hookham and Peacock, for a sum somewhere in the region of £500. It is not known to what extortionate rate of interest Shelley was forced to agree. The following morning, Jane and Mary packed up their few books and belongings in a hired coach, picked Shelley up from Peacock’s, and drove southwards across the city shaking off the dust of St Pancras. Their new lodgings were more select, in the residential area off the Blackfriars Road, at No. 2 Nelson Square. Mary had arranged these, having first tried Pimlico and Sloane Street.

Soon after their arrival, Shelley was out in the city planning a further loan with Hookham. For almost unbelievably, Godwin had sent word through a third party that further financial aid was acceptable, since Shelley had achieved such striking success with Ballechy. That Godwin had the cold audacity to claim money at this juncture, and even more that Shelley was prepared to recognize the claim, gives some indication of the perverse influence that the philosopher still exercised over his erstwhile pupil. The Godwins also made one more attempt to extract Jane, when they heard that since moving she was in a sullen mood with Shelley. In Shelley’s absence a note arrived, brought by Fanny Godwin. Apparently, ‘the reason she comes is to ask Jane to Skinner Street to see Mrs Godwin, who they say is dying’.
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Mary did not oppose this obvious overture, and Fanny was sent back to pick up some suitable clothes for Jane to wear. She returned to Nelson Square and with Mary’s blessing, the two went off together. When Shelley, too late, came back, ‘he disapproves’. But Mary was rather pleased. ‘In the evening talk with my love about a great many things. We receive a letter from Jane saying she is very happy, and she does not know when she will return.’ This happened on the 13th; two days of silent suspense followed, during which Shelley noted ‘disgusting dreams’ in the journal. On the 15th, Shelley recorded: ‘Jane calls; converse with her. She goes back to Skinner Street; tells Papa that she will not return; comes back to Nelson Square with Shelley.’ Mary had been ill in bed and was unable to contribute much to the decision.

It turned out that Godwin had proposed to Jane a scheme that she should go and stay with his friends, the Taylors of Norwich, as a kind of governess. Jane had shown no enthusiasm for such a post, so Godwin suggested merely that she go to stay as a paying guest with some family outside London, where she could find her own feet. But Shelley had liberated his young protegée too well. Jane
had agreed to go, but only on two conditions: ‘That she should in all situations openly proclaim and earnestly support, a total contempt for the laws and institutions of society, and that no restraint should be imposed upon her correspondence and intercourse with those from whom she was separated.’ That at any rate was how the Godwins remembered her outrageous response when the scheme had been abandoned, and Shelley had reclaimed Jane. Mrs Godwin was genuinely distraught for her daughter, and regarded Shelley as a madman and an immoralist. Among other things, Jane told her that she could not leave Shelley since he was fearful of walking alone in the streets in case a revengeful enemy called Leeson should ambush him with a knife.
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It was the sort of macabre joke only she and Shelley could fully appreciate.

Jane had resoundingly established her independence of Skinner Street and her parents, and she began to experiment with a new name, in a manner that resembled Miss Hitchener’s less fortunate changes of nomenclature. Various forms were tried: Clare, Clara, Claire, and these gradually entered their journal. Finally she settled on the firm and musically satisfying Claire Clairmont, and as such she is known to history. It is precisely at this point that Jane’s, or rather Claire’s diary would become of maximum interest. But the remaining pages of the notebook which Shelley had originally given her in France are torn away from 9 November 1814 onwards, and there is nothing left for the rest of the year. It is not known what hand destroyed this vital and fascinating record of her relationship with Shelley, but such wholesale annihilation is unlikely to have been her own. No further manuscript of Claire’s diary is known to exist, until that beginning on 1 January 1818.
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With the move to Nelson Square, the worst of Shelley’s financial tribulations were over. Yet there was still no definite source of a permanent income in sight. He was unable to set up proper house with Mary and Claire; he could not leave the network of lawyers and money-lenders so painfully built up in London; he could afford no journey, nor could he find in the countryside the tranquillity and concentration to embark on any solid piece of composition. There was no gleam of a reconciliation with Godwin, although his old philosophical master continued to make pressing inquiries about a loan through Thomas Turner, Cornelia Boinville’s husband. This was an intolerable situation which was eventually to goad Shelley to open fury, though not before he had surrendered further payments. Reconciliation with Field Place was more than ever unthinkable. Political action in any sphere was impossible, even a brotherly kidnapping, with his hands so tied. In the immediate future lay the birth of his second child by Harriet, and only slightly more distantly, in the spring, Mary’s child. He was hemmed in on all sides by personal responsibilities. It was ironic that the result of all his efforts to liberate himself and those around him from the trammels of
morality and society seemed so far to be an almost total entrapment in the complications of his own daily existence.

It seemed certain now that Shelley, Mary and Claire would have to winter in London, and little remained to do, with Shelley visiting the money-lenders daily, except to cultivate books and friends. Mary seems to have been almost constantly unwell in November and December, and since Shelley liked to take Claire with him on his city visits, the reappearance of Hogg on the horizon promised to fill a social gap in their little community. Hogg first visited Nelson Square on 14 November. He had changed a good deal, Shelley found. Many of his liberal political sympathies had dropped away, and his shyness had been replaced by a jovial ironic mask behind which Hogg posed as a worldly-wise raconteur. ‘Perhaps he may still be my friend’, Shelley wrote in the journal, ‘in spite of the radical differences of sympathy between us; he was pleased with Mary; this was the test by which I had previously determined to judge his character. We converse on many interesting subjects, and Mary’s illness disappears for a time.’
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Hogg called again on the 16th, the 20th, 24th and 29th, and gradually assimilated himself to the household. At first Mary was inclined to be glacial, and only took pleasure in engaging and beating him in chess-like games of intellectual argument. ‘Get into an argument about virtue, in which Hogg makes a sad bungle — quite muddled on the point, I perceive.’ Several days later, when Shelley was out, Hogg called in the evening and ‘we have an argument upon the Love of Wisdom, and Free Will, and Necessity; he quite wrong, but quite puzzled; his arguments are very weak’. Slowly Hogg realized that he would do better by omitting to run the Wollstonecraft intellectual gauntlet. On 1 December when he called, they talked about ‘heaps of things, but do not argue tonight’; and three days later, Shelley was gratified to read Mary’s entry in the journal, which observed: ‘Walk about dusk a few times round the Square. Hogg comes in the evening. I like him better tonight than before, but still fear he is an
enfant perdu
.’ Provided Mary thought of Hogg as an
enfant
, whether
perdu
or not, all would be well. Soon he was calling regularly every few evenings, being ‘sincere’, and amusing them all with droll recollections of their early life together, like the ‘funny account of Shelley’s Father, particularly of his vision and the matrimonial morning’. This was very apt stuff.
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Hogg had brought with him a copy of his novel,
Prince Alexy Haimatoff
, and Shelley thought it would be suitable to sit down and write a critique. This was one of the very few pieces of composition he produced between their return from the Continent in September and the following spring. It was subsequently published in the
Critical Review
of December 1814. Shelley singled out for attention Hogg’s daring description of the advice given by young Prince Alexy’s
tutor on matters of sexual morality. He attacked vigorously what he regarded as a debased version of ‘free love’, and the argument was partly
ad hominem
:

But we cannot regard his commendation to his pupil to indulge in promiscuous concubinage without horror and detestation. The author appears to deem the loveless intercourse of brutal appetite a venial offense against delicacy and virtue! He asserts that a transient connection with a cultivated female may contribute to form the heart without essentially vitiating the sensibilities. It is our duty to protest against so pernicious and disgusting an opinion. No man can rise pure from the poisonous embraces of a prostitute, or sinless from the desolated hopes of a confiding heart. Whatever may be the claims of chastity, whatever the advantages of simple and pure affection, these ties, these benefits are of equal obligation to either sex. Domestic relations depend for their integrity upon a complete reciprocity of duties.
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