Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (45 page)

Mary had no wish to be left behind alone in Pisa. In spite of all the tension between herself and Hunt she hoped that by remaining with the others she would be able to live more cheaply than if she returned to England. Accordingly, she packed up her apartment and made the long journey north ahead of the Hunts to find a house she could share with them. She rented the Casa Negroto in Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, which was about a mile from Byron’s new home. Casa Negroto was a large, imposing building, with a grand hall and dozens of barely furnished rooms which were cheap to rent but prohibitively expensive to heat. For several weeks Mary lived alone in the empty house, with only Percy (now almost three years old) and her memories of Shelley for company. In some ways, it was a relief to be alone for a while, but Mary recognised that such isolation was not healthy. ‘There are moments’, she told Maria Gisborne, ‘when . . . quite alone . . . it is with difficulty I prevent myself from flying . . . in to that vast grave (the sea).’
²⁴
Percy provided her with a reason to stay alive, and she hoped that by immersing herself in his well-being, her writing, and the education and care of the Hunt children she would be able to regain a degree of equilibrium. In any case, she wrote in her diary, she did not expect to live very long.  Her mother only lived until the age of thirty-six, and Mary decided that she would die at the same age. In the years which remained to her she planned to memorialise the past and to ensure that, in death, Shelley gained the recognition denied him during his lifetime. Accordingly, she wrote to Peacock requesting a writing desk left at Marlow, which was full of letters and manuscripts, and began the difficult task of pulling Shelley’s unpublished verse together from his many draft notebooks.

The Hunts, meanwhile, prepared to embark on their own progress north.  They broke their journey at Lerici, where they paid a melancholy visit to Casa Magni and joined forces with Byron’s party. Travelling part of the way in Byron’s lengthy entourage may have saved the Hunts a little money but it also highlighted problems which had been brewing since the beginning of the summer. In the months following Shelley’s death, Byron tired of living in close quarters with the Hunts. He found Hunt over-sensitive, Marianne censorious, and their children out of control. Byron had kindly offered to buy Mary’s furniture in order to supply her with funds without hurting her pride but by the time he arrived in Genoa he had found an additional reason for this gesture. ‘I have a particular dislike to any thing of S’s being within the same walls with Mr Hunt’s children’, he told her. ‘They are dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos what they can[’t] destroy with their filth they will with their fingers.’
²⁵

Hunt’s unfortunate children were indeed wild and unruly. Their father was preoccupied by trying to scrape together a living through the establishment of
The Liberal
, and their mother was often ill and depressed, spending long hours in her bed, where she imagined being visited by the ghost of Shelley. But the children were not the main reason for Byron’s disenchantment with his new living companions.  Shelley’s death threw the Hunts entirely on Byron’s mercy, and committed him to participation in a project in which he had lost interest. Even more sympathetic members of Hunt’s coterie were irritated by his neediness and Byron found his endless demands for money particularly annoying. To make matters worse, Byron’s more conservative friends disapproved of his connection with Hunt, and he was forced to defend his decision to support him. ‘I am afraid the Journal
is
a
bad
business’, he confessed to John Murray, ‘but in it I am sacrificing
myself
for others
– I
can have no advantage in it’:

I believe the
brothers
H to be honest men – I am sure they are poor ones. – They have not a rap – they pressed me to engage in this work – and in an evil hour I consented . . . The death of Shelley left them totally aground – and I could not see them in such a state without using the common feelings of humanity – & what means were in my power to set them afloat again.
²⁶

Byron’s desire to help Hunt was genuine but, as others had found out before, he was not an easy man to help and this was made worse by Shelley’s death, which was a huge loss for a man so sensitive to the literary and political implications of friendship. As a result, Shelley quickly became an icon of perfection in Hunt’s eyes, while Byron was riddled with faults.  The relationship between Byron and Hunt also snagged on Hunt’s vanity and on the way Hunt reacted to his financial dependence on Byron by adopting a superior tone.  Hunt’s memoirs suggest he and Marianne made little effort to conceal their disgust with their patron’s habits and style of life. Byron, Hunt reported, was unimpressed when he realised that Marianne ‘was destitute, to a remarkable degree, of all care about rank and titles’. Hunt refused to laugh at Byron’s ‘worldly common-places’ and his ‘bad jokes on women’, and found himself labelled a ‘proser’ by his host. After his arrival in Pisa, Hunt, this time heeding Shelley’s warning, insisted on addressing Byron by his full title. Byron attempted to ‘banter’ Hunt back into his old habits, one day addressing a letter to him beginning ‘Dear Lord Hunt’. But Hunt remained adamant because, he wrote, ‘neither of us could afford a change back again to the old entire familiarity’.
²⁷

This was a key problem for both Byron and Hunt. They had based their plans for
The Liberal
on the way life had been six years earlier, in 1816: Byron, glad of Hunt’s congenial friendship during his separation from Annabella, and proud of his acquaintance with the martyr of Surrey Gaol; Hunt, convinced that Byron saw him as an equal, both as a poet and a friend, whom he could address as ‘my dear Byron’ without a thought for etiquette. But both men had changed a good deal between 1816 and 1822, and they were bitterly disappointed by the disjunction between memory and reality. Hunt learned that being Byron’s pensioner was very different from being his friend, and Byron discovered that Hunt was no longer the brave, independent figure he so much admired, but rather a man diminished by poverty, illness and misfortune, who masked his decline with infuriating conceit. Without Shelley there was little to hold the two men together. It was not a good basis for a collaborative enterprise.

Despite this, plans for
The Liberal
moved steadily forward through the summer and autumn of 1822. By the time everyone was settled in Genoa, Hunt was putting the finishing touches to the first issue. Even though he was compelled to write a substantial proportion of the issue himself, it nevertheless looked as if the journal might succeed. John Hunt was in the process of extricating Byron’s ‘The Vision of Judgment’
from John Murray’s clutches for publication in the first number, and Mary supplied a manuscript of Shelley’s translation of
Faust
. Charles Brown, Hogg, Hazlitt and Mary promised to contribute to future issues, and Hunt busied himself with the composition of a long Preface, which was to set out the new journal’s aims and philosophy. He identified its contributors with the ‘large bodies of men who are called LIBERALS’ and promised that although the journal was not explicitly political, it would expose cant and hypocrisy wherever it found it. ‘The force of our answers’, Hunt announced, ‘will always be proportioned to the want of liberality in the assailant.’ Hunt envisaged
The Liberal
as a collaborative endeavour, in which he and his fellow contributors would ‘do our work quietly’ and ‘contribute our liberalities in the shape of Poetry, Essays, Tales, Translations, and other amenities, of which kings themselves may read and profit.’
²⁸

Like
The Examiner
,
The Liberal
celebrated the allegiances of its contributing members, but it also announced a much wider allegiance, with all those who wanted to see the cause of liberalism furthered throughout Europe. Its focus was highlighted in its subtitle: ‘Verse and Prose from the South’. Translations of Italian poetry; stories set, like Mary Shelley’s
Valperga
, in medieval Italy; and essays on Rousseau and on the Greeks’ discussions of love set the tone for a journal which allied itself with the independence movements of southern Europe, rather than with the Germanic Romanticism of the Lake Poets and their northern contemporaries.
The Liberal
’s principal villain was Southey, who had labelled Byron’s friends ‘the Satanic School’ and expressed his horror at the Swiss ‘league of incest’. In ‘The Vision of Judgment’, poems by Hunt and essays by Hazlitt, Southey was denounced as an apostate traitor of the liberal cause.

The first number of
The Liberal
met with disdain from Tory reviewers, who were particularly displeased that Byron was in-volving himself with a vulgar Cockney like Hunt. ‘What, in the name of Katterfelto’,
Blackwood’s
screeched, ‘can Byron mean by patronising a Cockney? A Bear at College was all very well; – but, my lord, think on it, a Cockney at Pisa! – Fie, my lord! This is by far the greatest outrage you have ever yet committed on manners, and morals, and intellectuals.’
²⁹
The reviews were full of thinly veiled references to the incestuous practices of the ‘Pisan Alliance’. Such innuendo was directed at all the participants in the endeavour: Byron (whose liaison with Augusta was still the subject of society whispers), Hunt (whose relationship with Bess had been discussed in reviews of
The Story of Rimini
) and Shelley, who had eloped with two sisters and was rumoured to be the author of
Epipyschidion
, a poem which,
Blackwood’s
noted, made references to both ‘sister’ and ‘spouse’.
³⁰

Bad reviews of the first issue of
The Liberal
were compounded by a piece of mischief-making by John Murray, who had been told by Byron to hand over ‘The Vision of Judgment’
to John Hunt, the journal’s printer. Murray did so, but he handed over the wrong version of the poem, and kept back the placatory Preface Byron wrote to minimise the chances of libel charges. Since the poem depicted mad King George III attempting to gain entry into heaven, the threat of libel action was real. John Hunt published the poem without its Preface, and found himself faced with a libel writ and the prospect of yet another court case, fine, and prison sentence. Byron broke with John Murray after this, but not before Murray spread rumours that Byron was regretting his alliance with the Hunts and had written him a letter to that effect. When news of this got back first to John Hunt, and then to Leigh, both were very hurt.  Byron was apologetic, defensive, and angry with Murray, but the affair nevertheless contributed to a further cooling of his relationship with the brothers. He was also angry with John Hunt, who had freely advertised Byron’s connection with the journal.  ‘That d——d advertisement of Mr J. Hunt is out of the limits’, he raged to Murray before their break. ‘I did not lend him my name to be hawked about in this way.’
³¹

Although four issues of
The Liberal
appeared before the journal’s eventual collapse, Hunt never managed to overcome the difficulties which it faced from its inception. He was in no doubt as to the cause of
The Liberal
’s failure, placing the blame squarely on Byron and his narrow-minded friends. ‘Enemies’, he wrote in 1828, in his
Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries
, ‘had been already at work.  Lord Byron was alarmed for his credit with his fashionable friends; among whom, although on the liberal side, patriotism was less in favour, than the talk about it.’
³²
 Hunt bitterly resented the failure of
The Liberal
, which left him stranded in Italy without any means of supporting his family, and made him even more dependent on Byron’s largesse. As the inevitability of the journal’s collapse became apparent, communication between Byron and the inhabitants of Casa Negroto became less frequent. Hunt visited Byron periodically, and Byron remained a loyal friend to Mary, dealing with Timothy Shelley on her behalf and asking her to accept money in return for copying
Don Juan
. But his interest in Shelley’s widow did not extend to paying frequent visits to a house dominated by Hunt’s objectionable offspring.