Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (19 page)

Shelley and Mary returned to Bath at the end of September to find the periodicals advertising the third canto of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
. Shelley was taken aback to learn that Byron’s poem was already in print. He had delivered Byron’s manuscripts to John Murray on his return from Switzerland and in the process presented himself to Murray as Byron’s de facto
agent. He therefore felt snubbed when he learnt that the poem had been published without his involvement.  He did not understand that Murray had no intention of letting such a valuable commodity as a new Byron poem be tainted by the obscure author of
Queen Mab
.  Byron himself connived at this: although he asked Shelley to oversee publication, he was more than happy to let Murray organise matters as he wished. For Shelley, the episode symbolised his renewed exclusion from literary circles. After a summer during which he had felt himself to be an intimate of Byron’s, this was a blow.  Meanwhile a ‘stupid’ letter arrived from Fanny, disturbing their peace still further.
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Fanny’s ‘stupid’ letter was a cry for help, not for herself, but for her adopted parents. She criticised Mary for thinking unkind things about their stepmother (‘I know that she has every good
will
and wish for you & your child’) and Shelley for failing to help Godwin out of the financial mire in which he now found himself. ‘Is it not your and Shelley’s duty to consider these things?’ she demanded. ‘And to endeavour to prevent as far as lies in your power giving [Godwin] unnecessary pain and anxiety?’
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Six days after writing this, quiet, melancholic Fanny, who had tried so hard to keep her family together, equipped herself with an overdose of laudanum and wrote a second letter, this time to Godwin himself. This note was written from a Swansea inn:

I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as
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The note ended abruptly: someone – possibly the kindly owner of the inn – tore the signature off in order to avoid a formal identification of the body. Fanny was identifiable only by the initials embroidered into her stays, and by a watch Mary and Shelley brought her from Paris. With no signature on her note the Godwins were spared the humiliation of having their daughter publicly named as a suicide. After the inquest, Fanny’s body was interred in an unmarked grave.

Shelley, Mary and Claire knew that they had played a part in Fanny’s misery.
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 They had abandoned her, first in 1814, when she was excluded from their early morning flight to Europe, then in 1816, when they departed once again without warning. She was left to arbitrate between two warring parties and knew herself to be the object of some derision in the Shelley household. Her small kindnesses – walking through the rain to visit Mary after the death of her baby girl while Shelley and Claire were occupied elsewhere – were insufficiently appreciated, and her relationship with her Wollstonecraft aunts suffered as a result of Mary and Claire’s impropriety. It is clear she longed to be involved in their lives from her letters of the summer of 1816, which asked eagerly for details of Byron’s character: ‘for where I love the poet I should like to respect the man’.
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 In September she wrote wistfully of Mary’s ‘calm contented disposition, and the calm philosophical habits of life which pursue you, or rather which you pursue everywhere.’
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But all hints that she might join them for a while, that she might be relieved for a few days of her constant anxiety about Godwin, went unnoticed. We know much less about Fanny than we know about Mary and Claire, but there is no suggestion that she was any less shrewd. She may have been quieter and more obedient, but she was well aware of her Wollstonecraft heritage, and thanks to Godwin’s
Memoir
, of her mother’s attempts to kill herself. She probably recognised that she had inherited Wollstonecraft’s depressive tendencies, from which death seemed the only escape.  Fanny’s mother showed through example that attempting suicide was not dishonourable; that it was a legitimate act for a woman who had felt she had nothing else to live for. Mary and Claire paid their homage to Wollstonecraft by living: by running away, and by loving men to whom they were not married. Fanny paid hers by dying.

When news reached Bath of a first, desperate note from Fanny (in which she announced her intention to ‘depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove’)
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Shelley left immediately to find her and stop her. He followed her to Swansea, from where he returned with the ‘worst account’.
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Godwin forbade him from travelling back to Swansea to claim her body and embarked on a campaign of disinformation so effective that Charles Clairmont, journeying through Spain, only heard of her death six months later. Claire told Byron that Shelley’s health was damaged by the horror of it all, but it was a particularly cruel blow for Mary. She had been the main recipient of Fanny’s melancholy letters, and she failed to provide the answers and consolation which Fanny evidently needed. Moreover Fanny was her half-sister, in contrast to Claire, who was no blood relation, and they had spent their infancy together. Both knew themselves to be daughters of Wollstonecraft, something Claire rather resented (she later claimed that Fanny was pretentious about her mother).
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With Fanny dead, Mary found herself the sole inheritor of the Wollstonecraft legacy, of a name to which scandal and opprobrium were attached.

In the weeks following the suicide, Mary sought distraction in work, and she drafted the first four chapters of
Frankenstein
at great speed. She was pleased with the results, telling Shelley (who was house hunting again) ‘I have also finished the 4 Chap of Frankenstein which is a very long one & I think you would like it.’ But in the same letter, she expressed more pressing concerns about their future living arrangements.  She dreamt of ‘A house with a lawn a river or lake – noble trees & divine mountains that should be our little mousehole to retire to’ but all she really wanted was ‘a garden &
absentia Clariæ
.’ Give me this, she told Shelley, ‘and I will thank my love for many favours.’
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Mary’s wish for a home in ‘absentia Clariæ’ would grow in the years that followed into an all-consuming desire. In the autumn of 1816 it was brought on by her own misery and by the descent of the pregnant Claire into perpetual gloom. Poor Claire had ample reason to be miserable. She was eighteen, eight months pregnant, entirely without means to support herself and was being ignored by the father of her child. She dispatched pitiful letters to Byron, in which she begged for news and complained of her solitude. If he could not love her, she pleaded, could he at least love their baby? After all, the idea of a child deserted by its father was too melancholy for words. ‘My love is quite a gentle one’, she protested, ‘but if you are afraid of me who would rather die than do you the least harm, the moment I’ve read your letter I will either enclose it back to your dear self again or give it into Shelley’s keeping till you return.’
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But it was not fear of exposure which prevented Byron from writing to Claire. He might have been momentarily attracted by her forwardness, but he regarded her letters as nagging and sentimental almost from the outset. He left Geneva in September and, after sacking Polidori, travelled over the Alps to Italy in the company of his friend John Cam Hobhouse. By Christmas he was in Venice, where unsuitable Italian ladies, including the wife of his landlord, provided ample distraction. He soon grew bored of reading Claire’s missives and instructed her, via a letter to Shelley, to stop writing to him. ‘My hopes are therefore over’, she replied. ‘I will not write to teize you again.’
⁶⁴
 Her plan to acquire a poet of her own had backfired disastrously, and with it her hopes of independence.

For Shelley, the unexpected validation of his work in
The Examiner
provided a welcome relief from domestic misery. Hunt wrote to him to draw his attention to ‘Young Poets’, and must also have mentioned his financial distress, since Shelley then sent a substantial sum of money to help him out of his difficulties. This sounds rather crass – to praise a wealthy young poet and then to inform him of one’s poverty – but Hunt was taken aback by the gift, and promptly sent Shelley £5 in interest. With equal promptness Shelley returned the £5, citing his ability to help Hunt, Byron’s long-held admiration for him (‘I cannot doubt that he would not hesitate in contributing at least £100 towards extricating one whom he regards so highly from a state of embarrassment’) and suggested that Hunt spend the money on ‘some little literary luxury’ for himself.

In the correspondence which followed the article’s publication Shelley described himself to Hunt as an outcast mocked by all those who knew his work. He spoke too of how social exile had affected his sense of poetic vocation:

Perhaps I should have shrunk from persisting in the task which I had undertaken in early life, of opposing myself, in these evil times & among these evil tongues, to what I esteem misery & vice; if I must have lived in the solitude of the heart.  Fortunately my domestic circle incloses that within it which compensates for the loss. – But these are subjects for conversation, & I find that in using the privileges which you have permitted me of friendship, I have indulged that garrulity of self-love which only friendship can excuse or endure.
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A few days later, Shelley left his ‘domestic circle’ to visit Hunt. Mary recorded in her diary that Shelley was ‘pleased with Hunt’
⁶⁶
and he returned to Bath much gratified by the attentions of his new friend. Hunt was equally pleased with Shelley and their relationship got off to a bright new start, each of them intrigued by the character and ideas of the other. Shelley slotted comfortably into Hunt’s household and revelled in fireside conversations in the colourful study. Hunt offered him sympathy and kindness, as well as intellectual debate of the kind he had not experienced since parting from Byron.

For Hunt, it was refreshing to meet a man who did not need guidance and advice about how to pursue his poetic vocation, and who had no stake in the fraught cliques which were forming among his friends. Shelley was no Keats: he would not be blinded by the admiration of the likes of Haydon, or led away to other social groups by fulsome compliments. Recognising this, Hunt never attempted to patronise Shelley, despite their eight-year age gap. Instead, he treated him as an equal from the outset, and during Shelley’s first visit to Hampstead he and Hunt discovered the luxury of mutually respectful friendship, free from underlying tensions about age, class, or disparity of intellect.

Within a few days, however, Hunt’s friendship became crucial to Shelley.  Back in Bath, he received a letter from his bookseller Thomas Hookham, telling him that Harriet’s pregnant body had been found in the Serpentine. He set out immediately for London, determined to learn the circumstances of Harriet’s death and to claim his two children, four year old Ianthe and two year old Charles. When he arrived, however, he met stiff opposition from Harriet’s family. Shelley had no intention of leaving the children with the Westbrooks, who he believed would turn them against him and fill their minds with the poison of bourgeois hypocrisy, but Harriet’s sister Eliza and her father John would not give up her offspring to the atheistic radical who abandoned her during her second pregnancy. Faced with this impasse, both sides began to prepare for a custody battle in the courts.

If Harriet Shelley has not appeared very much in this narrative it is because she was effectively excluded from Shelley and Mary’s lives from the spring of 1815 onwards. After Shelley abandoned her she moved back with her children to her father’s house. Divorce was impossible, but without it she had no hope of re-establishing herself in domestic respectability, and no hope of ever again being the mistress of her own establishment. In the September before her death she left the children with her sister Eliza, and information about her thereafter is scarce. At some point she must have realised that she was pregnant, which may well have contributed to her decision to end her life. The identity of her unborn child’s father is not known, but it is unlikely to have been Shelley.
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In her suicide note Harriet begged Shelley to leave their daughter with her sister Eliza, and to be careful of their son: