Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (49 page)

Claire was a good hater, and she never ceased to detest Byron. Mary felt rather differently about him, and his death was a blow to her. Yet another of her circle had died, leaving her behind. ‘What do I do here?’ she wondered in her diary. ‘Why am I doomed to live on seeing all expire before me? ... A new race is springing about me – At the age of twenty-six I am in the condition of an aged person – all my old friends are gone.’
¹⁶
Byron’s death caused a sensation in London, but for those who had known him, or had been on the fringes of his world, it was an occasion for introspection and discussion of the past. For Trelawny, who parted company from Byron soon after their arrival in Greece, news of his old friend’s death prompted powerful memories of the Pisan group. ‘Our Pisa circle is not one to be forgotten’, he wrote to Jane Williams. ‘There was no other such in the wide world – such hearts as ours united under the sunny clime of Italy – such scenes and events no time can fade.’
¹⁷
But the privilege of happy nostalgia was not afforded to Claire as she fought her way through a succession of vicious Russian winters. She remained in Moscow until 1826, in isolation and poverty. It was a high price to pay for the independence she craved.

Claire and Mary were not the only women to be thrown into a battle for survival by the events of 1822. Back in England Bess, who had been left behind when the Hunts sailed for Italy, was forced to confront the impact of the life she had lived with her brother-in-law. All three women had learnt of the reality of free love back in the 1810s, when their unorthodox living arrangements, and the ideals of Shelley and Hunt, had variously exposed their lives to public scrutiny and, in the case of Mary and Claire, their bodies to illegitimate pregnancy. This was also true for Jane Williams, whose children were born outside of wedlock and who had lost her male protector. Now that the men of the group were dead, or living abroad, the women were left behind to count the cost of youthful idealism: damaged reputations, limited earning capacity, and exclusion from polite society.

After several years in which Bess had been superfluous to Hunt’s requirements, supplanted in his affections by such figures as Shelley and Keats, she found that he once again required her support. Long, passionate letters passed between them and, in the summer of 1824, Hunt finally convinced Marianne to readmit her sister into their household. He wrote to Bess telling her to leave England for Italy but Bess, most unexpectedly, refused to accede to his demands. She believed she would be the subject of ‘calumny’ in Florence, and, she wrote frankly, had no wish to move to Italy merely to attend to the children’s sewing and act as Marianne’s unpaid housekeeper. Both Hunts were offended by this, and although Hunt attempted to mask his displeasure in affectionate remonstrance, his reply dripped with unspoken reproaches about Bess’s self-confessed inability to control her ‘fancies’ (by which she meant her temper):

As you still think yourself liable to those fancies . . . so, I on my part, in consequence of the progress of years . . . am certainly not a whit stronger, if so strong, to meet them without exhibiting anything angry.  I should be so vexed at their appearance, especially after the patient and tranquil manner in which you have borne yourself so long, that I should infallibly be most agitated; and a series of these agitations would have the worst possible effect both on myself and your sister.
¹⁸

Hunt did his best to counter Bess’s refusal by implying that her presence was not necessarily desirable or welcome, but his tangled, grammatically tortured response gave the lie to this suggestion. He also noted that Marianne was particularly displeased by Bess’s stated disinclination to resume responsibility for the family’s needlework. Marianne did not like needlework either, Hunt reminded his sister-in-law, ‘though she is still forced to attend to it’. And, he added, ‘she is quite persuaded, as well as myself, that you could have been of pleasanter service to us than in that manner.’
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Unsurprisingly, this missive, and others like it, did not change Bess’s mind.

Bess’s decision to remain in England rested – like the decisions made by Claire and Mary – on the issue of independence. Exclusion from the Hunts’ Italian adventure kept her apart from her brother-in-law, but this experience had not been entirely negative. It had enabled her to achieve a degree of emotional stability which she knew would be compromised if she joined Hunt and Marianne. She therefore no longer wished to reclaim the position – usurped by Shelley in 1817 – of Hunt’s intellectual soulmate. Distance appears to have revealed to Bess that, however much she loved Hunt, living in close proximity to him was simply too destructive. That she did love Hunt is clear from a rare surviving letter to him, written in September 1823. The letter centred on a message to ‘the dear fugitive friend with whom I parted at Ramsgate’. ‘Should you meet this other, warmer friend’, she wrote, in a complicated third-person address to Hunt, ‘tell him I have a painful pleasure in thinking of old times, some particular days, walks &c – more especially; – tell him I know how long and how sensibly, grasps may be felt . . . tell him, too, that I long most ardently, again, to return grasp for grasp, to see that dearest of dear faces, and you may add – in a whisper – that I should not be sorry to give him an opportunity of setting his conscience at rest.’ ‘God Bless you’, she continued, ‘my dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear dear Friend “One kind kiss before we part!” – again God Bless you.’
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Given the strength of her feelings, Bess’s refusal to join Hunt was remarkable. But her decision was in part the result of a dramatic change which took place in the period following Shelley’s death, when she too became a writer. In 1823, just over a year after she and Hunt parted, Bess published her first botanical book,
Flora Domestica
. It was no coincidence that she finally found the freedom to write after Hunt and Marianne left England.
Flora Domestica
was an exceptional achievement, especially for a woman who had received only a rudimentary education. Its full title gave some indication of the range of subjects it covered:
Flora Domestica; or, The Portable Flower-Garden; with Directions for the Treatment of Plants in Pots; and Illustrations from the Work of the Poets
. It was ostensibly a book about how to look after pot-plants written for those who, like the author, were ‘lover[s] of the country’ but ‘reside[d] in town’ and who might therefore wish to rear and preserve ‘a
portable garden
in pots’.
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Despite its seemingly contained purpose, its descriptions of plants ranged far beyond plant care, encompassing folk traditions, the genesis of plant names, Linnaean categorisations and discussions of the literary and historical significance of flowers. It was also an anthology, densely packed with quotations from English and Italian poets, from the Greeks and from living writers.

Most of all,
Flora Domestica
was a proclamation of Cockney ideals and the value of Cockney poetry. It quoted more from Keats and Hunt than from Shakespeare and Milton, and Keats was represented by excerpts from his early, Hunt-inspired poems, such as
Endymion
. It thus presented an alternative canon, in which the work of Horace Smith and Cockney acolytes like Bryan Procter overshadowed that of Wordsworth and Dryden. The Preface contained a long passage in praise of Shelley and Prince Mavrocordato, which allied
Flora Domestica
with the politics of European independence movements and, therefore, with the politics of
The Liberal
.
Flora Domestica
also extended and championed the democratic manifesto of
Foliage
. In it Bess showed that the beauties of nature were available to all. One did not need to be rich enough to travel to experience the pleasures of nature, since nature could be domesticated in a portable garden. Bess’s insistence on the availability of such pleasures was implicitly oppositional. In his fourth essay on the ‘Cockney School’, John Lockhart had attacked Hunt’s circle for presuming ‘to talk with contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at Vauxhall.’
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Blackwood’s
stereotyped the Cockneys as suburban gardeners, and attacked them for their limited knowledge of the beauties of nature untamed. Bess took this stereotype and subverted it, proclaiming a message of democratic luxury and suburban pleasure in the process.

Although Bess wrote
Flora Domestica
after Hunt’s departure for Italy, he played a significant role in the volume’s composition, sending her extracts of poetry and suggestions for quotation in long letters from Italy. The volume thus illustrated a curious tension in Hunt and Bess’s relationship. She was able to produce her first major work only in Hunt’s absence, but this work acknowledged his writing as an important influence. And though it arose from an enforced separation,
Flora Domestica
allowed Hunt and Bess to keep their relationship alive through letters in which discussion of her work was interspersed with ardent declarations of friendship and love.

But even as Hunt’s voice permeated Bess’s manuscript, her book allowed her to move away from his orbit of influence, and away from the circle in which her reputation had been tarnished. Although
Flora Domestica
was published anonymously, it established her as an author in her own right, who developed a professional working relationship with her publishers, Taylor and Hessey (who had also published Keats’s poems), and with the writers who subsequently discovered and enjoyed her work. Coleridge wrote approvingly of
Flora Domestica
to Taylor and Hessey, and suggested that they should commission her to write a second volume – a suggestion both they and Bess accepted immediately. Her second botanical book,
Sylvan Sketches
, was published two years later, and, in a conciliatory gesture, was dedicated to Marianne. And through Taylor and Hessey Bess formed an enduring epistolary friendship with the ‘peasant-poet’ John Clare, whose work
Flora Domestica
praised. Although Bess and Clare never met, they embarked on a long correspondence, and planned to collaborate on a book about British birds. Clare provided Bess with something she had never had before: a male friend who accepted her on her own merits, rather than as a member of Hunt’s circle. His poetic sensibility was also very different from Hunt’s, and his work captured the transient beauty of nature as Hunt’s had never been able to do. This was a revelation for a woman whose aesthetic and emotional existence was bound up with her response to the natural world. ‘I earnestly wished for your descriptive pen’, she wrote to Clare from the Isle of Wight, every part of which, she reported, was ‘cloaked with trees’. But, she continued, ‘I could command neither pen nor pencil that could do them justice, and could only bring away with me a pleasing recollection, which is not transferable.’
²³

Unlike
Foliage
and
Endymion
,
Flora Domestica
enjoyed some success. It went into a second edition within two years of publication, and met with approving notices in the London newspapers. This is perhaps surprising given Bess’s defence of Cockney ideals. However, these ideals were more subtly stated than in Hunt’s work, and Bess wrote her celebration of Hunt’s circle only after the group celebrated in
Foliage
had dissolved in the wake of the deaths of Keats and Shelley.
Flora Domestica
was a Cockney retrospective, an attempt to reshape the literary canon in favour of the writers Bess met in Hampstead in the 1810s. The volume was a riposte to
Blackwood’s
, but it was a riposte
in defence of a memory. It was ironic that, in elegising the group in whose shadows she stood, Bess reinvented herself, in the short term at least, as a successful, independent woman.
Flora Domestica
freed her from overbearing personal associations with the men whose work she celebrated.