Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (52 page)

Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries
also had a negative effect on Hunt’s relationship with Mary. Although she never officially disavowed Hunt’s account of the past, she was convinced that it was thoroughly misguided, and she made repeated attempts to disentangle Shelley’s legacy from Hunt’s damaged reputation. With Hunt’s vision of a shared past irrevocably tainted by his mean-spirited attack on Byron, Mary was able to tap into a developing public preoccupation with the figure of the creative genius – a preoccupation which stemmed in part from Romantic poetry and from the phenomenon of Byron’s unprecedented celebrity – in order to recreate Shelley as the voice of Romantic isolation.

Mary developed this version of Shelley, as well as a similar portrait of Byron, in the novels she wrote in the 1830s, in which she drew on memories of both of them to describe characters who are separated from the world in which they live, isolated by the strength of their visions and their personality.
Lodore
and
Falkner
(published in 1835 and 1837 respectively) both centred on the figure of the Byronic hero – charismatic, embittered and lonely. In these novels Mary replaced Hunt’s vision of sociable creativity with a depiction of greatness that removed its subjects to the realm of tortured, brilliant individualism. And in 1839, Mary enshrined Shelley’s solitary genius once and for all, in her four volume
Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
.

Poetical Works
was the first authorised edition of Shelley’s work to appear since
Posthumous Poems
in 1824, and it represented the culmination of Mary’s efforts to transform her husband’s reputation. In the period between the publication of the two editions, pirated texts of Shelley’s work began to appear in London and Paris and his reputation rose steadily. His poetry was discovered by idealistic young poets like Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the taint of political radicalism was gradually erased from his public image.
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By the late 1830s even Sir Timothy Shelley (on whom Mary and her son depended financially) was forced to acknowledge the depth of public interest in his son’s work, and grudgingly allowed Mary to bring out a new edition of his poetry. Hunt wrote to offer a biographical Preface for the edition but Mary was determined not to let him interfere. ‘The edition’, she replied, ‘will be mine’.
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The Shelley of the
Poetical Works
was both a genius and a model man, but he was entirely disassociated from the world in which he lived. In a long series of biographical notes Mary idealised him as a uniquely creative individual, whose poetry was the product of ‘genuine and unforced inspiration’ of the kind envisaged by Wordsworth in the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads
. Mary transformed Shelley into the poet of
Alastor
, and endowed him with an intensity of perception which allowed him to understand the world anew and distanced him from its petty concerns.  She described him taking refuge from society by delivering ‘up his soul to poetry’ and sheltering ‘from the influence of human sympathies, in the wildest regions of his fancy’.
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 This set the tone for a volume in which Shelley was far removed from the realm of his friends. ‘Shelley never liked society in numbers’, Mary wrote, in her note on the poems of 1818. ‘But neither did he like loneliness, and usually when alone sheltered himself against memory and reflection, in a book’.
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As the literary critic Susan Wolfson has noted, the effect of Mary’s argument was to divest Shelley ‘of engagement with the political and historical world within which he wrote.’
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As Mary stripped Shelley of his political philosophy, she also wrote his social and intellectual context out of his life story.
Poetical Works
presented Shelley afresh for a new age, and transformed him from radical thinker into the ‘blithe spirit’ – an image from his much anthologised ‘Ode to a Skylark’ – so beloved by the Victorians.

This was the vision of Shelley which would acquire cultural significance in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was also a vision which acquired a new champion in 1849 when Mary’s son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley (he inherited the title directly from his grandfather) married Jane Gibson St John, a widow of independent means. The marriage of Percy and Jane brought Mary much happiness, even though she was seriously ill by the time of their wedding. Jane Shelley was devoted to her mother-in-law, and she was passionately interested in her husband’s Romantic parentage. She was in fact far more engaged with the Shelley family’s literary legacy than Percy, who, slightly to Mary’s disappointment, did not inherit the intellect of his brilliant parents and Godwin grandparents. Instead he happily filled his days with the management of his estates, boating and amateur theatricals, slotting easily into the role of Victorian country gentleman. But he was a loyal and attentive son, and he amply repaid his mother’s lifelong devotion.

Mary died of a brain tumour in 1851 at the age of fifty-three. Given the significance of her literary achievements, public reaction to her death was muted – just as it had been when Keats and Shelley died thirty years earlier. Sir Percy, however, was devastated by her early demise, and he willingly agreed to his energetic wife’s plans to canonise his parents for posterity. Jane Shelley transformed the reputations of Shelley and Mary through the sheer force of her personality. She had admired
Frankenstein
and Shelley’s poetry long before she met Percy, and after her marriage she came to view Mary as the embodiment of maligned virtue. After Mary died she appointed herself chief keeper of the Shelley flame, and created a shrine to her parents-in-law at Boscombe Manor, the house outside Bournemouth Percy bought shortly before Mary’s death. Jane even arranged to have the bodies of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft disinterred from the graveyard at St Pancras and reburied with Mary’s in the churchyard at Boscombe. This episode demonstrated both Jane’s forcefulness and her ruthlessness, since she left the body of the second Mrs Godwin to moulder alone at St Pancras. In addition, when the vicar of Boscombe refused to accept the bodies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft for burial, on the grounds of their dubious religious and political opinions, she waited with their coffins outside the churchyard until he relented. Above all, Jane collected Shelley papers. She jealously guarded Mary’s letters from the eyes of prying individuals, and, with her husband’s support, systematically added to the documents in the Boscombe collection by buying Shelley manuscripts whenever they were advertised for sale. She commissioned hagiographic biographies and ornate statues,
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and dealt ruthlessly with anyone who threatened to disrupt her vision of the past.

As Jane presented her sentimental re-creation of Shelley to the world as historical fact, his contemporaries underwent a similar transformation. Keats was sanctified as ‘the youthful poet’, first by his biographer Lord Houghton and then by successive generations of admirers, few of whom had any interest in his connection with Leigh Hunt. Byron was also removed far from Hunt’s orbit of influence, first by his friends and then by readers who wanted to remember him as a heroic freedom fighter, who died battling for the glory of Greece.

Hunt died eight years after Mary, and two years after his wife Marianne, whose final years were blighted by a descent into alcoholism. Those of his friends who outlived him had little investment in promoting his vision of a shared history. Like Claire, Bess Kent eventually became a governess, and died in 1861, worn down by poverty and ill health. She wrote a good deal about the past in her old age, but all in the form of letters to the Royal Literary Fund, who made her a series of hardship grants in recognition of the significance of her botanical works. Hogg died a year later, in 1862, having disgraced himself in the eyes of Hunt and Sir Percy by publishing an inaccurate, self-serving account of Shelley’s time at Oxford, in which he shamelessly manipulated documents from the Shelley family archive. Peacock did make various attempts to set the record straight about Shelley’s life, but his main concern was to rescue Harriet from any suggestion that she had behaved improperly. He died in 1866, one of the last witnesses to the early days of Shelley and Mary’s romance. Haydon continued to praise Keats and attack Hunt and Shelley in his private diary until the end of his life, but he never published an account of his time among poets. On 22 June 1846 he purchased a pistol and a razor, locked himself in his studio, cut his throat and shot himself, having never achieved the public recognition he believed he deserved.

By the end of the 1860s, almost all of the individuals who had once gathered around Shelley and Hunt were dead, and the battles over how a shared history should be narrated subsided. Only two custodians of the past remained, and they had different ideas about the way in which their life stories should be written. The first was Edward Trelawny, who outlived all the friends of his youth. The second was Claire Clairmont. Unlike other members of the circle, Claire never published a memoir, but she did write about her life and, in recent years, thanks to the efforts of skilled editors and archivists, her account of the experience of living according to a set of philosophical principles has come to light. This is important because Claire idealised neither the individual nor the group, but instead presented a more complicated version of a shared history; and because when one looks afresh at the story of the network’s turbulent communal existence, Claire’s history takes on a particular significance.

After all, without Claire, the story of the intertwined lives of Shelley, Hunt and Byron would have been very different. It was because of Claire that Shelley and Byron met on the shores of Lake Geneva, and because of Claire’s daughter that Shelley travelled in 1818 to Italy where he wrote the great poems of his maturity. Shelley’s friendship with Byron had an immeasurable impact on both poets, on the history of Romantic poetry, and on the lives of those around them, Hunt’s above all. Shelley’s summer with Byron propelled him towards Hunt on his return to England in 1816,  and towards a meeting which was certainly the most important of Hunt’s life.

Claire had a profound effect on Mary’s life too. Their upbringing, their closeness in age and their complex feelings for Shelley bound them together from the moment that Claire stepped into the Dover-bound post-chaise in 1814.  Mary’s marriage was shaped by Claire, and her character was altered by the difficulties of life with her stepsister. Claire’s own life was also shaped by her relationship with Mary, who was the catalyst for a series of events – such as the expulsion from Skinner Street and exile in Lynmouth – which irrevocably altered Claire’s history. Mary also provided Claire with an unusual example of female freedom. Claire’s relationship with Byron was partly the result of Shelley’s philosophy of free love, but it was also one element of a wider attempt on her part to establish her physical, emotional and intellectual independence. Claire, however, suffered the consequences of free love more acutely than any one else in the group. It is therefore intriguing to discover what she thought about it when, in her old age, she turned her attention once more to the events of her youth.

Claire’s life after her departure from Russia in 1826 was unremittingly difficult. She worked as a governess for two decades, but she was never reconciled to her profession. She was finally able to stop working in 1844, when Sir Timothy Shelley died and she received a legacy of £12,000 under the terms of the will Shelley made in Geneva in 1816. She converted to Catholicism and spent her final years in Florence, the city in which she had lived as a young woman, cared for by her brother Charles’s daughter Pauline. Although she was glad to be abroad, securely protected from the burgeoning English Shelley/ Byron industry, she nevertheless scoured books and articles about both poets for inaccuracies and, as she watched other people tell the story of which she had been a part, became determined to leave her own version of that story for posterity. She wrote long letters to Trelawny, in which she rehearsed the key events of her life and made a series of accusations against Byron. The wildest of these was that Allegra had not died in 1822 but that Byron, in the spirit of absolute villainy, decided to convince Claire of her demise by sending a goat in a child’s coffin to England. Trelawny robustly contradicted this and other similarly far-fetched suggestions, but he was alive to the narrative power of her letters, and encouraged her to record her memories systematically. ‘There is time for you to do it but not time to shilly shally’, he told her in 1875, when Claire was seventy-six. ‘Get some one to write and dictate – hitherto you have [done] nothing but prate: string the divers letters together by a simple narration – the unwilling have many excuses – they are always composed of lies!!!’
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