Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (9 page)

The result was that by the end of his prison sentence Hunt had established ‘sociability’ as an important ideological principle. He did so in an experiment in living which elevated the rituals of friendship – communal dining, music making, letter writing, shared reading – so that, in Hunt’s rooms in the old infirmary, these rituals took on a co-operative, oppositional significance. In
The Examiner
, such activities were given a public outlet, as conversations over dinner were rewritten in the collaborative ‘Table Talk’ columns, letters from friends were published and discussed in editorials, and as different members of Hunt’s circle contributed theatrical and literary reviews which reflected the group’s diversity as well as its coherence.

Hunt’s enforced stillness pulled his friends and admirers towards him, positioning him at the centre of the group’s emergent identity. The contrast with Shelley, restlessly moving about Europe and London, could hardly have been more marked. Shelley’s search for companionship brought him profound isolation, which, from July 1814 onwards, he shared with Mary and Jane.  But loneliness and failure did not dampen his political and philosophical ambitions, and he continued to work towards the creation of an association of ideal individuals which would match that meeting in Hunt’s cell. Indeed, even as his own social circle shrank to a tiny, claustrophobic unit, Shelley remained determined to join the collegiate, literary world represented by
The Examiner
, and by Hunt and his friends. That determination would eventually bring him into contact with Hunt, even though at the end of 1814 he was too absorbed by the emotional ramifications of his domestic arrangements to seek out new acquaintances. In 1815, these arrangements would take on a further degree of complexity, postponing a meeting with Hunt still further. As Hunt passed his second Christmas in prison and Byron, after much vacillation, made his way northwards to marry his parallegrammatical princess, Annabella Milbanke, Shelley, Mary and Jane, like Hunt and his friends before them, embarked on an experiment in living of their own.

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Wives and Mistresses

‘S & M talk in the morning.  A note & present from Hogg to the own Maie ... Clara & S walk to Hookhams & Westminster Abbey to Mrs Peacocks. Hogg comes in the evening’,
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wrote Shelley in the diary he shared with Mary on 1 January 1815.  ‘Clara’ was Jane, who, over the course of the winter decided to rename herself, first Clara, and then Claire. She was tired of being plain Jane, of playing second fiddle to her brilliant elder stepsister, and her new glamorously alliterative name – ‘Claire Clairmont’ – signified her determination to assert herself. It was a conscious reinvention, and a sign of a new dynamic in her relationship with Shelley. While Mary remained at home, tied down by the late stages of her pregnancy, irritating Jane vanished, to be replaced by a rational, sympathetic, rather alluring Claire, who was only too happy to accompany Shelley on expeditions around London, and to talk to him for hours about his schemes for reforming the world.

On 1 January, the date of the diary entry, one such scheme – an experiment with the ideal of free love – took flight.  It did so partly as a result of Jane’s transformation, but also because of the presence in London of Shelley’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Hogg had been expelled from Oxford alongside Shelley in the aftermath of the
Necessity of Atheism
scandal and, like Shelley, he was twenty-two at the beginning of 1815. He was serious, reserved and bookish, and had little of his friend’s effortless magnetism. He was, however, more fortunate than Shelley in one respect, since he had an affectionate, sensible and practical father, who reacted to the expulsion decisively, removing his errant son back to his Durham home before enrolling him as a legal apprentice. John Hogg was concerned by his impressionable offspring’s infatuation with Shelley and he seized the opportunity offered by the expulsion to separate the young men. But Hogg was not to be parted from Shelley so easily. It was only when he attempted to proposition Harriet during the Shelleys’ brief 1811 residence in York that Shelley made a decisive break, which lasted until November 1812 when they met again in London.

By the end of 1814 Hogg had been admitted to the Middle Temple to train as a barrister and was living in London during the legal term. Mary and Claire were initially rather uninterested in him, but as he shook off his shyness they found him unexpectedly appealing. He had written a novel,
Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff
, an extended reverie on love, seduction and desire, and despite his lawyerly seriousness he had something of Shelley’s rebelliousness. By January 1815, Hogg was spending much of his free time in their lodgings, where he would join late night talks about spirit worlds, ghosts, and ‘making an Association of philosophical people’.
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It was perhaps predictable that Hogg should fall in love with Mary. He had some practice in losing his heart to women attached to Shelley, and Mary was beautiful and clever: a far more intriguing prospect than the conventional Harriet. Moreover, this time Shelley seemed predisposed to encourage his friend’s interest. Accordingly, the little household entered into a risky emotional experiment. It would be a testing out of the Shelleyan idea that ‘constancy has nothing virtuous in itself’. ‘Love is free’, Shelley wrote in the notes to
Queen Mab
. ‘To promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.’
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While it is easy to view the events of January 1815 cynically, it would be short-sighted not to take Shelley’s views on free love seriously. The key sentiment in the quotation from
Queen Mab
is not its denigration of monogamy, but its proposition that it excludes enquiry. Shelley wanted to push at the boundaries of monogamous relationships, but he did not wish to do so purely to satisfy his own libido. The claustrophobic community in which he found himself in January 1815 provided an ideal opportunity to test out an alternative model for human relationships.  This model was not promiscuous, but neither was it wholly monogamous. The cast of experimenters must have seemed most suited to the task. Shelley and Hogg had some experience of sharing a woman before, although they had been hampered, in Shelley’s view, by the deceitful way Hogg concealed his feelings for Harriet until his friend was temporarily absent, and by Harriet’s distress at finding herself the object of Hogg’s attentions. Since then, however, Shelley had developed his ideas about the limits of monogamy, becoming a more ardent Godwinian than Godwin himself, and Mary was no Harriet. She was an intellectual heavyweight, a disciple of Wollstonecraft who understood the value of throwing off social constraints on the behaviour of women.  And Claire – well, Claire’s role in the plan was rather unclear. But she undeniably evened up the numbers.

If it is important to take Shelley’s pronouncements on marriage seriously, and to read them as a genuine attempt to free human behaviour from the shackles of social expectation, it is also important not to be too crude about what exactly he had in mind for his mistress and his best friend. In Mary, Claire and Hogg Shelley believed he had found three co-philosophers who understood the intellectual significance of ideal communities, an ideal first articulated in his 1811 letter to Hunt. Monogamy would only be practised if it reflected the genuine passions and desires of the parties involved, and restrictive social conventions would be ignored. Shelley’s previous attempts to establish such a community had failed, but now he was surrounded by people who were all a little dazzled by the power of his convictions, and who were thus prepared to follow his lead and put his ideas into practice. The conditions in which they were living only made them more inclined to do so, for while the solitude of the winter gave Shelley time to reflect on the benefits of such an association, exile from Skinner Street predisposed Mary and Claire to align themselves with his ideals, in a gesture of filial defiance. Hogg, meanwhile, had long been willing to fall in with Shelley’s wilder ideas.

On 1 January three things happened.  First, Shelley and Mary talked, a fact duly recorded by Shelley in the joint diary. They did so in response to a letter from Hogg to Mary in which he declared his love for her. Then Shelley wrote a short note to Hogg telling him that ‘Mary wishe[s] to speak with you alone, for which purpose I have gone out & removed Claire.’
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Hogg did call in the evening, but if he also accepted Shelley’s invitation to visit Mary alone, then she was unaware that such an invitation had been issued, and she wrote her own letter to him shortly after Shelley and Claire had left: ‘As they have both left me and I am here all alone I have nothing better to do than take up my pen and say a few words to you – as I do not expect you this morning.’ Her ‘few words’ thanked him for his expression of love, but suggested gently that she was not able to return his feelings fully. She reminded him how brief their acquaintance had been, and predicted confidently that their friendship would grow until they would be happier than the ‘lovers of Janes world of perfection’. A ‘bright prospect’ was before them all, she told him reassuringly.
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Three days later, this ‘bright prospect’ had grown rather more luminous.  Now Hogg received a missive informing him that ‘Shelley & Jane are both gone out and . . . I do not expect them till very late – perhaps you can come and console a solitary lady in the mean time . . . You are so good & disinterested a creature that I love you more & more . . . but still I do not wish to persuade you to do that which you ought not.’
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That Mary was attracted to Hogg is evident, but there is more than a straightforward come-hither in her letter. The impression given by both her correspondence with Hogg and her diary is that he provided a welcome relief from the boredom of the last months of her pregnancy. Shelley was out all day, visiting booksellers and negotiating with money lenders with the ever-faithful Claire at his side, and Mary had little to do except sit at home reading, and feel fat and unwanted. Her letter also indicates that Hogg was having more difficulty in throwing off the fetters of social convention than he cared to admit to Shelley. Shelley had encouraged a relationship between Mary and Hogg as part of a lofty experiment in ideal living, but Hogg was forced to weigh up his attraction to Mary against the deeply inculcated values of his upbringing. Harriet might have found this rather surprising, but for Hogg there was a difference between kissing his friend’s wife in a moment of passion and embarking on a condoned affair with the same friend’s mistress.

Nevertheless, by 7 January, the roles had reversed, and it was he who was encouraging Mary to move things forward. Now, confronted with the reality of his desires, Mary wrote to him in a slightly different vein. ‘My affection for you although it is not now exactly as you would wish will I think dayly become more so . . . I ask but for time – time for which other causes besides this – phisical causes – that must be given – Shelley will be subject to these also.’
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 Her advancing pregnancy was an obvious reason to deny Hogg the kind of relationship he wanted, but there is something about Mary’s letter which indicates it was not only this that caused her to prevaricate. It is possible that Hogg had become rather insistent in the few days since he and Mary began to discuss developing their friendship, and her letter does suggest that, despite her earlier protestations of affection, she remained unsure about both her own emotions and the path on which she and Hogg were embarked. Loneliness, rather than passion (philosophical or physical) motivated her to write to him on 4 January; now the prospect of dealing with that loneliness by sleeping with him was rather appalling.  Philosophy aside, Mary may have found it hard to see how entering into a relationship with Hogg would draw Shelley closer to her – and it was Shelley who she wanted to relieve her loneliness; Shelley who she wanted by her side, rather than away on expeditions with Claire. She followed Shelley’s lead as she invited Hogg’s attention, but she did so for Shelley himself. And at some level, with a degree of insight not granted to the others, she must have realised that, philosophical protestations notwithstanding, sleeping with Hogg would only drive Shelley further away.

All the parties in this particular experiment were very young, and they were still learning how disruptive and unpredictable their own emotions could be. Some of this is evident in the final letter Mary wrote to Hogg before the birth of her baby. ‘When . . . dearest Hogg I have my little baby with me what exquisite pleasure shall we pass the time – you are to teach me Italian you know & how many books we will read together but our still greater happiness will be in Shelley – I who love him so tenderly & entirely whose life hangs on the beam of his eye and whose whole soul is entirely wrapt up in him – you who have so sincere a friendship for him to make him happy.’ She then broke off rather abruptly: Shelley and Claire had returned and ‘are talking besides me which is not a very good accompaniment when one is writing a letter to one, one loves.’
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