Shelley: The Pursuit (68 page)

The idea of settling down to domesticity, which he had struggled against in the previous summer, and had now, with the birth of his son, tacitly accepted, was also in his own mind connected with an increasingly bitter feeling of social rejection. When he did want to settle down, he found he was unable to. This gradually became clear in the exhausting and acerbic correspondence with Godwin concerning debts which occupied a great deal of Shelley’s time in January, February and March of this year. The question of Shelley’s responsibility for Godwin’s finances was emotionally complicated in the extreme Godwin still persisted in an attitude of unrelenting condemnation of the elopement which had taken place nearly two years before; at the same time he was desperate
enough to keep applying for Shelley’s financial aid. His position was further complicated by Mrs Godwin, who felt that her own daughter Claire had been seduced by Shelley with Mary’s tacit connivance. Mary, in turn, felt that Mrs Godwin was forcing her father to be harder towards them than he wished. Both the Godwins thought that not only Mary but also Claire and Fanny had fallen ruinously in love with Shelley. Four years later these attitudes were still basically unchanged, and a mutual friend of both parties, talking at Skinner Street in July 1820, noted in her diary: ‘[Godwin] then expatiated much on the tender maternal affection of Mrs G. for her daughter, and the bitter disappointment of all her hopes in the person to whom she looked for comfort and happiness in the decline of her life; he described her as being of the most irritable disposition possible, and therefore suffering the keenest anguish on account of this misfortune, of which M[ary] is the sole cause, as she pretends; she regards M[ary] as the greatest enemy she has in the world. Mr G[odwin] told me that the three girls were all equally in love with [
blank
].’
⁴²
There is no doubt from the context of these remarks that the blank stands for Shelley.

On Shelley’s side, the straightforward desire to help a philosopher and political figure whom he still admired immensely had become layered over with secondary motives. He could no longer avoid the realization that Godwin was venal and opportunist where money was concerned. Yet paradoxically, the need to prove himself in Godwin’s eyes had increased, and he was prepared to try and buy his father-in-law’s approbation at almost any price. He felt the need to prove himself worthy of Godwin’s principles, to be more Godwinian than Godwin in his social conduct. Yet why this need drove him to such lengths is still not altogether clear. To an extent, Shelley must have felt that Godwin was his own father by adoption and the idea of a second failure, a second withdrawal of love filled him with terrible dismay. But perhaps stronger than this was the influence of both Mary and Claire. Mary especially felt that Godwin ought to be helped, whatever his apparent attitude, for only thereby could he be saved from the clutches of Mrs Godwin. It was, significantly, Mary and not Shelley who became Godwin’s final court of appeal when he was writing for yet more money to them in Italy. The intensity of the bond between Mary and her father was something that Shelley only slowly realized. But it is this which finally explains the inordinate lengths that Shelley went to to satisfy Godwin’s financial requests, and the mixture of patience and fury with which he persisted.

Shelley first began to negotiate seriously with Godwin on 7 January 1816. He explained the half-completed terms of the settlement of May 1815, and continued: ‘You say that you will receive no more than £1250 for the payment of those incumbrances from which you think I may be considered as
specially
bound to relieve you. I would not desire to persuade you to sell the approbation
of your friends for the difference between this sum, & that which your necessities actually require . . . .’
⁴³

This sum of £1,250 was of course in addition to the £1,000 which Shelley had procured for Godwin as a ‘debt’ the previous year. Shelley was in fact unable to provide such a large sum until either the settlement with his father to buy the reversion of old Sir Bysshe’s legacy was complete, or else the legal state of his own inheritance without entail was sufficiently clarified for him to raise
post obit
bonds upon it. This latter course required the strictest secrecy from Whitton and Sir Timothy, and there were even doubts in Shelley’s mind as to whether his own solicitor Longdill could be trusted. But Shelley’s grasp of these worldly difficulties was quite confident and steady.

By the end of the month, the two other main figures in the negotiation, Hayward, Godwin’s solicitor, and William Bryant, a money-lender, were deeply involved, and Shelley was steadily applying pressure on Godwin to meet him. He carefully let the personal note creep back into the business letters, as the prelude to a
rapprochement
. ‘But I shall leave this subject henceforth, entirely to your own feelings. Probably my feelings on such an occasion would be no less distressing than your own . . . . Fanny & Mrs Godwin will probably be glad to hear that Mary has safely recovered from a very favourable confinement, & that her child is well.’
⁴⁴

By mid-February, the solicitors had discovered that the sale of the reversion to Sir Timothy might actually break the terms of Sir Bysshe’s will as a whole, and disqualify both Sir Timothy and his son, so that a test case was now required in Chancery. Shelley was in difficulties once again over his own ‘domestic expenditure’ at Bishopsgate, and he came briefly to London to see if anything could be hastened. It seems that Claire, who was staying at Bishopsgate, accompanied him, and went to stay for several days at Skinner Street, perhaps as part of the plan to melt Godwin and assuage Mrs Godwin. Shelley wrote to Godwin in much more openly warm terms from Hogg’s rooms on 16 February. ‘I intended to have left Town at 2 o’clock tomorrow. I will not do so if you wish to see me. In that latter case send a letter
by a porter
to Mr Hoggs, 1 Garden Temple Court, making your own appointment. Yet I do not know that it is best for you to see me. On me it would inflict deep dejection. But I would not refuse anything which I can do, so that I may benefit a man whom in spite of his wrongs to me I respect & love. Besides, I shall certainly not delay to depart from the haunts of men.’
⁴⁵
But these hopes were ill-founded, Godwin refused bluntly to see Shelley, and moreover, Longdill gave him a most depressing analysis of his prospects in the Chancery case.

One thing which did strike an anxious cord in Godwin’s heart was Shelley’s vague threat to depart from the haunts of men. Shelley had hinted before to
Godwin that he might shortly die from a recurrence of supposed consumption, but Godwin had been used to these prognostications of doom ever since he first corresponded with Shelley in 1812, and they had little effect. But the threat simply to
leave
English society, and go into voluntary exile did terrify Godwin, for he realized that Shelley had already adopted this course twice previously. At worst Shelley might choose to leave England altogether, and Godwin would be left to fend for himself among the money-lenders and buyers. At the end of February, he detailed Thomas Turner, the husband of Shelley’s old friend of the Bracknell days, Cornelia Boinville, to act as a personal intermediary on his behalf. After the first of Turner’s visits on 20 February, Shelley had detected Godwin’s concern which indicated softening, and played upon it with considerable skill in a long letter of the following day. First, he sweepingly denied that he had any such intention. ‘I shall certainly not leave this country, or even remove to a greater distance from the neighbourhood of London, until the unfavourable aspect assumed by my affairs shall appear to be unalterable, or until all has been done by me which it is possible for me to do for the relief of yours.’

But then, carefully moving in the opposite direction, he allowed Godwin to see further into his mind. For the first time Shelley explicitly stated the full implications of a lifelong exile. This was an important moment of realization in his own mind, and he approached it first of all as a personal and family matter, rather than a literary one. The moral which Godwin was intended to draw about his own ostracism of Shelley was unavoidable.

‘You are perhaps aware that one of the chief motives which strongly urges me either to desert my native country, dear to me from many considerations, or resort to its most distant and solitary regions, is the perpetual experience of neglect or enmity from almost everyone but those who are supported by my resources.’ This last was indeed a formidable realization, and contained a great deal of truth.

‘I shall cling, perhaps, during the infancy of my children to all the prepossessions attached to the country of my birth, hiding myself and Mary from that contempt which we so unjustly endure. I think, therefore, at present only of settling in Cumberland or Scotland. In the event the evils which will flow to my children from our desolate and solitary situation here point out an exile as the only resource to them against that injustice which we can easily despise.’
⁴⁶
Godwin had much food for thought.

In the beginning of March, negotiations demanded Shelley’s presence in London so frequently that he took lodgings first at 13 and then at 32 Norfolk Street. Preliminaries for the Chancery case were already on hand, and Shelley had among other things to present in court his son by Harriet, little Charles, in order to have a legal guardian assigned. Harriet prevented him from doing this
until an order of attachment was delivered by the Messenger of the Court and the child was apprehended.
⁴⁷
No immediate decision was forthcoming, and, even more frustrating, Godwin still refused to grant a personal interview. Without Mary’s calming influence, for she was still at Bishopsgate with William, Shelley’s patience finally gave way and he wrote to Godwin from Norfolk Street in a fury of reproach and scorn. The letter reminds one instantly of his notes to Sir Timothy of 1811. Whatever social arrangements were subsequently patched up, neither Shelley nor Godwin ever recrossed the emotional gulf opened up by this explosive letter. The explosion had, in effect, been delayed since the winter of 1814.

In my judgement neither I, nor your daughter, nor her offspring ought to receive the treatment which we encounter on every side. It has perpetually appeared to me to have been your especial duty to see that, so far as mankind value your good opinion, we were dealt justly by, and that a young family, innocent and benevolent and united, should not be confounded with prostitutes and seducers. My astonishment, and I will confess when I have been treated with most harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation has been extreme, that, knowing as you do my nature, any considerations should have prevailed on you to be thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my ruined hopes, of all that your genius once taught me to expect from your virtue, when I found that for yourself, your family, and your creditors, you would submit to that communication with me which you once rejected and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or sufferings, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of
forgiveness
again to me, for my blood boils in my veins, and my gall rises against all that bears the human form, when I think of what I, their benefactor and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt from you and from all mankind.
⁴⁸

But Shelley was still trapped in his own emotional contradictions. The following day, he sent Godwin a note, confirming that the financial negotiations were still continuing, and pitifully asking for understanding. ‘I must appear the reverse of what I really am, haughty & hard, if I am not to see myself & all that I love trampled upon and outraged.’
⁴⁹
Yet still Godwin did not relent, and several days later, when Shelley actually called at Skinner Street, he was refused admittance: not once, but three times.
⁵⁰
Gradually and painfully the resolution to see the Chancery case through, and leave Godwin to his fate was forming in Shelley’s mind.

March too saw another event which was decisive in Shelley’s departure from England. Claire, after shuttling between London and Bishopsgate, took advantage of Shelley’s residence in London to make the first moves in a little
project of her own. This was the invasion, storm and capture of Byron. It says much for Claire, still only just 18, that where many others, more powerful and more beautiful, had failed, she — at least temporarily — succeeded.

Lord Byron was at this time aged 28. His life had been disordered and made directionless by a desperately unhappy marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815. The legal separation proceedings were now drawing to a close in a storm of bills and claims after months of separations and
rapprochements
. The basis of the settlement was agreed on 17 March.
⁵¹
His emotional tangle was further complicated by an intimate relationship with his half-sister Augusta, in an advanced state of pregnancy, who had just removed from his house at 13 Piccadilly Terrace to lie in at her rooms at St James’s Palace. The friendship had caused Byron endless public acrimony. He wished above all to leave England before he should be caught in further scandals, legal complications or even in the clutches of the bailiffs. He planned his escape for April. His old friends Scrope Daves and John Cam Hobhouse were making preparations for a secret departure, and Byron’s faithful valet Fletcher was discreetly preparing trunks at No. 13. The city firm of Baxter’s were engaged to construct a new Napoleonic carriage for his travels, for which he paid £500. Byron hoped that escape to the Continent in the spring might also restart the creative mechanism which had faltered in 1813, after the completion of two cantos of
Childe Harold
. The delights of marriage and the glitter of social and literary celebrity both seemed to him intolerably faded. He desperately needed the break.