Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (37 page)

He is gone – he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep – on the 23rd (Friday) at ½ past 4, the approaches of death came on –  “Severn – S – lift me up for I am dying – I shall die easy  – dont be frightened – thank God it has come” –  I lifted him up in my arms – and the phlegm seemed boiling in his throat – this increased until 11 at night, whe[n] he gradually sunk into death – so qui[e]t that I thought he slept – but I cannot say more now.
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Severn did his best to depict Keats on his deathbed as calm and resolute, but he could not hide from his correspondents the grim reality of the events which followed his friend’s death: first an autopsy, then, at the insistence of the Roman authorities, the burning of the contents of their shared apartment in a bid to reduce the spread of infection. Keats was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, in a plot near William Shelley’s small grave.

Back in England, Keats’s friends immersed themselves in discussions about headstones and epitaphs, in an attempt to distract themselves from the tragedy of a young poet’s untimely end. For Hunt such distractions offered few consolations, as the period following Keats’s death brought with it further departures from his social circle. The ties of friendship which bound Hunt, Hogg and Peacock together were weakened by Shelley’s continued absence, and they now met less often, particularly after Peacock’s marriage in 1820. Hunt’s longstanding friendship with William Hazlitt was badly strained when Hazlitt published disparaging remarks about Shelley in an essay ‘On Paradox and Commonplace’. Although they patched up their quarrel through an exchange of courteous letters, Hunt could not easily forgive Hazlitt’s attack on his friend. And in 1821, Horace Smith, a devoted companion of both Shelley and Hunt, decided to take his family to join the Shelleys in Italy, although his wife’s illness meant that they only made it as far as Versailles, where they settled for a number of years. For Hunt, it must have seemed as if his centre of gravity was shifting inexorably east and south. His closest friends were no longer in England, and the independence movements in Spain and Italy suggested that Europe’s best hope for political regeneration lay in the countries of the Mediterranean, rather than in post-Peterloo Britain.

The winter of 1820–1821 was blighted for the Hunts by a series of calamities, which weakened Hunt’s health and strained his finances even further. In February, in the week that Keats died, John Hunt was found guilty of libel, fined £1,000 and given a year in Coldbath Fields, the prison in which he had spent his first gaol sentence. John Hunt had effectively retired from
The Examiner
by mid-1820, leaving its day to day running to his son Henry, but he nevertheless wrote a letter to the newspaper on the trial of Queen Caroline, in which he described the House of Commons as a body ‘composed of venal boroughmongers, grasping placemen, greedy adventurers and aspiring title-hunters, – or the representatives of such worthies, – a body, in short, containing a far great portion of Public Criminals than Public Guardians’.
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John Hunt was tried, not as the author of the offending letter, but as the owner and printer of
The Examiner
. Leigh was not named in the indictment because he had withdrawn from ownership of the newspaper, in part because of his own ill health and also to ensure that, should another libel action arise,
The Examiner
would survive. The Hunt brothers doubted the feasibility of keeping the newspaper going if they were both sent to prison, since the friends who had helped them in 1813–1815 had dispersed, and, in the wake of the Six Acts,
The Examiner
’s finances were in a precarious state. However the terms of Leigh’s withdrawal were unclear and ownership of the paper would be a major bone of contention between the Hunt brothers in the years to come.

In the months after the culmination of the trial of Queen Caroline, Hunt wrote little for
The Examiner
, and
The Indicator
was filled with old essays, the work of friends, and short apologies from its editor, which cited his continuing ill health as the cause of the journal’s lack of material. Both he and his children were unwell over the course of the winter, and Marianne was afraid for the life of her youngest child, who at the age of nine months suffered a terrifying series of convulsions. Marianne’s troubles were compounded by a brutal letter from her nephew, Henry, who was himself under immense strain, as he tried to keep
The Examiner
going in spite of his father’s impending imprisonment (itself a worry, since John Hunt was now forty-six and less able to withstand the hardships of Coldbath Fields) and his uncle’s continuing ill health and financial mismanagement. Marianne wrote to Henry asking him for a loan, which she stipulated should be kept secret from Hunt. He responded furiously, citing the repeated warnings she had been given about the need to rein in her spending, the unhappiness her mismanagement was causing the entire family, and the damage her financial incompetence was doing to John Hunt’s health. He concluded with a warning: ‘The consequence of your continuing to encroach on my father’s share of
The Examiner
is obvious: the concern would be suddenly stopt by an execution for debts which my advances to you would prevent me from meeting; – & we should all be ruined.’
²⁷

Marianne’s inability to hold on to money was infuriating to all those who tried to help the Hunts, but there is no doubting the extent of her desperation that winter. She became convinced that their only hope for financial and physical survival was to sell their furniture and travel to the Shelleys in Italy, preferably by water, which would be cheaper than travelling over land. ‘Oh! how much I wish we could come to you!’ she told Mary. ‘I cannot – I dare not – unburden my heart, but read the numbers of the ‘Indicators’ and you will comprehend me.’
²⁸
There were only a few numbers of
The Indicator
left in which Mary and Shelley could judge the state of Hunt’s mood and health, since he was forced to give the journal up at the end of March. Spurred by Marianne’s desperation, in August Shelley reissued his invitation to the Hunts to join them in Italy. This time, however, the invitation offered more than companionship. It contained a proposal for a literary project which Shelley believed would secure Hunt’s future and his political and literary reputation.

By the spring of 1821, the Shelleys were settled once more at San Giuliano. It was there that Shelley wrote the bulk of the poem which formed his own response to Keats’s death,
Adonais
, in which Shelley, Byron, Hunt and others appear in stylised form as mourners in a funeral procession for Adonais, a youthful poetic spirit  proclaimed by Shelley as a descendant of Milton. Again, Shelley’s friends peopled his verses, but this time they did so to mark the passing of a fellow poet. In the eerie final stanza Shelley envisaged himself following Adonais, whose soul, ‘like a star,/ Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are’. This was both a comment on his own mortality and a defiant assertion of the value of his poetry, which, he claimed, would one day bring him the kind of immortality won by Adonais. Shelley told Claire that
Adonais
was ‘better than any thing I have yet written, & worthy both of him & me’.
²⁹
 He was proud enough of the poem to have it printed in Pisa, thus protecting his manuscript from the vagaries of international postage, as well as from the maulings of Charles Ollier and his typesetters. Yet again, it was through the imaginative evocation of friends that Shelley discovered new confidence in his poetic voice.

Perhaps the experience of writing
Adonais
spurred Shelley’s actions in the months that followed. With Claire in Florence, Shelley and Mary were able to develop a new kind of friendship, with a couple their own age. Their new acquaintances were Jane and Edward Williams, and they had arrived in Pisa – at the suggestion of their friend and Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin – in January 1821. Despite the fact that Jane was universally known as Jane Williams she and Edward were not actually married, since her abusive husband refused to grant her a divorce. She met Edward in India, where he and her husband were serving in the army. At the time of their arrival in Pisa Jane and Edward had lived together for two years, had a one year old son, named Medwin, and were expecting a second baby. They were, as their letters testify, very much in love.

Both Shelley and Mary were initially unimpressed by Jane, who was pretty, amiable and rather dim, but they were charmed by Edward’s cheerfulness and his enthusiasm for life. He was an eager reader and writer, a devoted father and partner, and both he and Jane joined in with the Shelleys’ daily pursuits with high-spirited energy. They took a house in the village of Pugnano, which was linked to San Giuliano by the canal joining the Arno to the river Serchio. Mary later described the canal as ‘a full and picturesque stream, making its way under verdant banks sheltered by trees that dipped their boughs into the murmuring waters’
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and here, and in the houses at Pugnano and San Giuliano, the Shelleys and the Williamses established their daily routine of reading, writing, walking and talking. Together the two couples explored mountain paths and river walks, meandered along the canal in Shelley’s boat, and in the evenings would sit amongst the cypress trees talking about the play Edward was writing. Mary rediscovered her love of the countryside and Shelley was so entranced by the beauty of their surroundings that he considered buying a farmhouse on the hills outside Pisa, so that they might always have a rural home. But he was also restless and shuttled back and forth to Pisa, where he visited Mrs Mason, sent letters to Claire not meant for Mary’s eyes, and organised the publication of
Adonais
. With Mrs Mason’s assistance he made arrangements for Claire to lodge in Livorno for the summer, and escorted her there himself in mid-June. Meanwhile Mary followed Greek politics and the progress of Mavrocordato’s battle for his country’s independence with much interest. She was thrilled that yet another Mediterranean country had thrown off the yoke of imperial rule, as her letters to Claire, Maria Gisborne and Hunt testify.

Byron was also watching the independence movements of southern Europe with a keen personal interest that summer. By the middle of 1821 it was clear that the efforts of the Carbonari to secure independence for Romagna had failed, and Teresa Guiccioli’s family, the Gambas, were exiled from the city-state. Since Teresa’s decree of separation from her husband was conditional upon her residence in her father’s house, Byron’s future was closely linked with the Gambas. If they had to leave Romagna then he had to go with them, in order to be with Teresa. By the summer he was therefore in a state of considerable uncertainty about his future. Shelley had proved himself to be a sympathetic listener in Geneva and in Venice, and, as Byron knew, felt a keen interest in his plans for Allegra, whose sequestered existence at Bagnacavallo was continuing to cause Claire much distress. In April Byron sent a long letter to Shelley, in which he expressed his thanks for Shelley’s support for his treatment of Allegra and discussed Keats’s death and
The Cenci
, as well as Shelley’s desire that Byron should stir himself to write a great poem. This he declined to do, on the grounds that ‘I have not the inclination nor the power’, and because ‘this late failure of the Italians has latterly disappointed me for many reasons, – some public, some personal.’ But the crux of his letter came at its very end, in a postscript: ‘Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could you not take a run
alone
?’
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At the beginning of August, Shelley took a ‘run’ over to Ravenna, as Byron had suggested. Claire was kept in ignorance of the fact he was going to visit Byron, and Mary in equal ignorance of the night he spent with Claire in Livorno on the way from Pisa to Florence – the night of his twenty-ninth birthday. He arrived in Ravenna on 6 August, two-and-a-half years after his last meeting with Byron. Since their parting in Venice in 1818, friction over Claire and Allegra had introduced a renewed formality to their relationship, but Shelley was nevertheless pleasantly surprised by the changes he discovered in Byron’s lifestyle, and by the improvements in his friend’s health, which he attributed to the calming effect of Teresa. Shelley was impressed too by Byron’s actions on behalf of the Carbonari, which, he told Mary, ‘will delight & surprise you’.
³²
He rapidly accommodated himself to Byron’s timetable, rising at twelve (two hours before his host), talking and reading in the afternoon; riding through the pine forests to the sea in the early evening; dining, and then talking the night away, before retiring to bed at four or five in the morning.