Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (30 page)

Of all their correspondents, it was Hunt – a loving father himself – who worked hardest to comfort Shelley and Mary; to find the words which would express his sympathy without exacerbating their grief. Like Hogg, he was full of praise for William, but he was able to express more fluently than the lawyerly Hogg an acknowledgement that friends, no matter how well-meaning, could do little in such circumstances. He wrote lightly of his views on poetry and the soul, in the hope that his fancies might lift his friends momentarily from their despair, and that his letters might make them smile. But he was not afraid to confront their grief. ‘My dear friends, I affront your understanding & feelings with none of the ordinary topics of consolation. We must all weep on these occasions, & it is better for the kindly fountains within us that we should.’
⁵
In 1813, Hunt’s friends had rallied round to make sure he knew he was not forgotten as he languished in his flower-filled prison cell in Surrey Gaol. Now he did the same for Shelley and Mary, immured not in prison but in a geographical and emotional exile. In a series of long letters written between July and December 1819 he attempted to bridge the distance between them through an imaginative evocation of physical proximity. ‘Whenever I write to you’, he told them in a letter written towards the end of August, ‘I seem to be transported to your presence. I dart out of the windows like a bird, dash into a southwestern current of air, skim over the cool waters, hurry over the basking lands, rise like a lark over the mountains, fling like a swallow into the vallies, skim again, pant for breath.’
⁶
He suggested that they should all write letters to each other every Monday morning, so that they might have the satisfaction of knowing that despite the hundreds of miles which separated them they were thinking of each other at the same time. At the Shelleys’ request, Hunt sent them a portrait of himself, along with letters which brimmed over with messages of love from Marianne and Bess, with news of friends and his work, and with descriptions of the English summer.

Hunt shared Godwin’s concerns about Mary, although he expressed his anxiety more delicately. He was grieved, he told her, by accounts of her low spirits, and by her susceptibility to depression: ‘you have a tendency, partly constitutional perhaps & partly owing to the turn of your philosophy, to look over-intensely at the dark side of human things; & they must present double dreariness through such tears as you are now shedding.’
⁷
He asked her to turn her attention back to her work and her friends, talking of
Frankenstein
and describing picnics in the fields with the Lambs, Hazlitt, the Novellos and Charles Cowden Clarke. He told her she and Shelley were much missed by their friends in London. At the opera, he reported, ‘we look up to your box, almost hoping to see a thin patrician-looking young cosmopolite yearning out upon us, & a sedate-faced young lady, bending in a similar direction with her great tablet of a forehead, and her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.’
⁸
But he recognised the limitations of such evocations, and that letters alone could not break through Mary’s grief or relieve Shelley’s isolation. ‘I wish in truth I knew how to amuse you just now, & that I were in Italy to try’, he confessed. ‘I would walk about with Shelley, wherever he pleased, having resumed my old good habits that way; & I would be merry or quiet, chat, read, or impudently play and sing you Italian airs all the evening.’
⁹
But his obligations to
The Examiner
and his permanently precarious finances made it impossible for him to travel to Italy, so he had to content himself with laying bare the constituent parts of his life for his friends, in the hope that they might thus derive some vicarious comfort.

Hunt’s life in the summer of 1819 was dominated by politics. On 16 August, a reform meeting in Manchester was broken up by mounted yeomanry. At least eleven people were killed and hundreds injured, among them many women and children. In the immediate aftermath of ‘Peterloo’,
*
newspapers such as the
Courier
condemned the crowd and offered their sympathy to the soldiers who perpetrated the violence, but such a response was rapidly drowned out by a groundswell of public anger. Supported on this occasion by several other commentators, Hunt elided the local militia who attacked the crowd with the government. ‘A body of military dashed through them sword in hand, tramped down opposition, bruised and wounded many, and bore off the flags and speakers to the county jail . . . The sensation in the Metropolis is great and bitter.’
¹⁰
As the organisers of the meeting in St Peter’s Field were tried for sedition and found guilty, Hunt reserved some rhetorical animus for a legal system, which was ‘too quick to take a
side
in these questions’.
¹¹
He was equally scathing about the Whigs, who failed to hold the government to account in either the Lords or the Commons. ‘None of the Opposition in Parliament have come forward to second the voice of the people. Are they doubtful whether Ministers are right or wrong in this instance? Oh no! Is it because they do not like Radical Reform? But where is the necessity of identifying themselves with the Radical Reformers, because they join in reprobating a violence
done
to law, justice, and humanity?’
¹²

Strident editorials in
The Examiner
proved of little use in the weeks and months following Peterloo. The government, horrified by an outbreak of seemingly revolutionary violence in Britain, rushed a package of repressive measures through parliament. The ‘Six Acts’ clamped down on the reform movement by banning meetings, increasing stamp duty (which made newspapers much more expensive) and by tightening up the laws against ‘blasphemous and seditious libel’ to make it easier to prosecute those who criticised the actions of the government. Local magistrates saw their powers increased, and the legal process was streamlined so that bail could be denied and cases prosecuted more quickly. Such a legislative assault on freedom of speech and movement had not been seen in Britain since the mid-1790s.

Peterloo demonstrated two things to Hunt. It revealed the limits of language in the war between liberalism and repression; that language itself was fragile and vulnerable to attack. It also highlighted the limitations of the collegiate approach to reform represented by Hunt and his friends in
The Examiner
. Confronted by punitive new legal restrictions, Hunt was compelled to alter the focus of his writing. In 1809, after the first two triumphant years of
The Examiner
, he had proudly proclaimed ‘that if with a good cause on our side, we summon up the wisdom and virtue of our forefathers, we shall have powers with us over which nothing can prevail.’
¹³
The events of 16 August 1819 proved that this was naïve, and that the sword was definitively mightier than the pen.

Hunt responded by turning to a new project, in which the discussion of politics was put aside in favour of a more imaginative kind of writing. In the autumn of 1819 he established a new journal,
The Indicator
, designed as an antidote to
The Examiner
for both Hunt and his readers. Its title – a reference to an African honey-hunting bird – was suggested by Mary Novello, and its focus was determinedly apolitical:

The Indicator will attend to no subject whatsoever of immediate or temporary interest. His business is with the honey in the old woods.  The Editor has enough to agitate his spirits during the present eventful times, in another periodical work; and he is willing to be so agitated: but as he is accustomed to use his pen, as habitually as a bird his pinion, and to betake himself with it into the nests and bowers of more lasting speculations, when he has done with public ones, he is determined to keep those haunts of his recreation free from all noise and wrangling, both for his own pleasure and for those who may chuse to accompany him.
¹⁴

The Indicator
appeared every Wednesday morning ‘at an hour early enough for the breakfast-table’.
¹⁵
It contained essays on country houses, autumnal firesides, toleration, famous Londoners, the weather, sleep, ‘old gentlemen’, hats and shops, as well as critical commentary on new and old literary works. Unlike
The Examiner
, its engagement with the business of everyday life was observational rather than political.  It was dominated by Hunt’s voice but was also collaborative: short stories by Mary Novello and Charles Cowden Clarke appeared in its pages, as did original poetry by Shelley and long discussions by Hunt of
The Cenci
and Keats’s
Lamia
, published in 1820.

Hunt was sensitive to accusations that the appearance of
The Indicator
marked a decline in the fortunes of
The Examiner
and that the new periodical would lead to neglect of the paper which had made his name. He reassured his readers that
The Indicator
would be dropped should it threaten to injure
The Examiner
, but the analogy he used to support his argument was illuminating:

The fact is, that as far as the Editor is concerned, the Examiner is to be regarded as the reflection of his public literature, and the Indicator of his private. In the one he has a sort of public meeting with his friends: in the other, a more retired one. The Examiner is his tavern-room for politics, for political pleasantry, for criticism upon the theatres and living writers. The Indicator is his private room, his study, his retreat from public care and criticism.
¹⁶

The imaginative shift in the location of Hunt’s engagement with the world from public tavern-room to private study was significant. He had always retreated to the comfort of his books and his fireside in times of strain, making his study, or his prison cell, a refuge from the cares of the world. Now, this physical haven had a rhetorical equivalent.
The Indicator
represented an intellectual withdrawal from the cut and thrust of political discussion – a discussion in which, for over a decade, Hunt played a key role. He was not the first to respond to a barrage of repressive legislation by retreating from the public stage, but his self-imposed exile from political debate worried his friends. Shelley liked
The Indicator
and promised to send material for it, but he did not like the change it represented in Hunt’s writing.  ‘You . . . never write politics’, he protested, towards the end of 1819:

I wish . . . that you would write a paper in the Examiner on the actual state of the country; & what, under all the circumstances of the conflicting passions & interests of men, we are to expect, – Not what we ought to expect or what if so and so were to happen we might expect; but what as things are there is reason to believe will come; & send it me for my information.  Every word a man has to say is valuable to the public now, & thus you will at once gratify your friend, nay instruct & either exhilarate him, or force him to be resigned, and awaken the minds of the people.
¹⁷

Shelley’s reaction to the shift in Hunt’s writing illustrated that the ramifications of Peterloo were personal as well as political. In its aftermath Shelley and Hunt differed sharply about how best to respond to its violence and about how to contend with the clampdown on freedom of speech which followed. This was the first serious disagreement in their three-year friendship, and it was an important moment for both of them, since it demonstrated that despite the closeness of their relationship, and the outpouring of sympathy which followed William’s death, they were not immune to failures of understanding.

Shelley’s stay in Italy placed him at a distance from the momentous political events taking place in England that summer. News of Peterloo reached the Villa Valsovano in early September, when Shelley received a letter and a package of articles about the outrage from Thomas Love Peacock. He responded with a poem, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written in a white heat of rage in the two weeks following the arrival of Peacock’s parcel. The poem’s 372 lines describe Anarchy, faithfully accompanied by Murder (‘He had a mask like Castlereagh’)
*
and Fraud (‘and he had on,/ Like Eldon, an ermined gown’),
^†
wreaking havoc through the towns and counties of England.  Children have ‘their brains knocked out by them’, and their followers ‘With their trampling shook the ground,/ Waving each a bloody sword,/ For the service of their Lord’. The violence of Peterloo is reproduced as Anarchy achieves dominion throughout the country. His forces are eventually banished by a maiden who represents both Hope and Despair. The poem ends with her commanding the masses to ‘Rise like lions after slumber’ against the forces of oppression, to shake off the chains of their own political lethargy. Shelley sent ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ to Hunt on 23 September, but Hunt, most unusually, remained silent on the subject in his letters, and he did not publish the poem. In mid-November Shelley wrote to Hunt again, reiterating that ‘The Mask’ was intended for the political
Examiner
, rather than for the light-hearted
Indicator
.
But despite Shelley’s urging ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ did not appear in either of Hunt’s publications, nor did Hunt explain the reasons for this to Shelley.