Shelley: The Pursuit (127 page)

On the 15th began an odd fortnight of alternate shuttling by Shelley and Claire between Pisa and Livorno. Consultations were going on with the Masons at the Casa Silva, and there was talk of finding Claire a separate position and situation outside the Shelley household, and perhaps outside Italy. In the meantime, Shelley was looking for retired and discreet lodgings where they might pass the heat of the summer, since the Bagni di Lucca, with its large English population, was now out of the question. Shelley visited Pisa on the 15th and returned on the 17th; while Claire stayed at the Casa Silva from the 18th to the 20th, riding over at the end in a
calèsse
with Mrs Mason and the two children, which then returned the same evening with Shelley, who again stayed until the 25th.
⁸⁷

Shelley explained to the Gisbornes: ‘We are about to take a villa about seven miles from Pisa — at least I think so. — Mary wishes for the mountains. Clare is yet with us, and is reading Latin and Spanish with great resolution. Poor thing! She is an excellent girl, though I don’t think she will ever become a witch. Mary, who, you know, is always wise, has been lately very good. I wish she were as wise now as she will be at 45, or as misfortune has made me. She would then live on very good terms with Clare. — We hear from Paris that Clare’s reception there, as an Englishwoman, is impossible: but our Irish friend [Helen Williams] is exerting herself to the utmost to discover some substitute. . . .’ This was written as a postscript to a letter of Mary’s, but Shelley said specifically that Mary had not read his ‘transverse writing’ — ‘so take no notice of it in any letter intended for her inspection’. He had also enclosed another piece of secret writing, either a poem, or something in connection with del Rosso.
⁸⁸
He still intended to keep Mary only partially informed of his affairs and feelings, and there were many inexplicable things in his correspondence at this time.

The scheme to get Claire away from the household was not abandoned. Various temporary measures were taken in August and September, until finally in October she was sent to Florence. This was to prove a separation as significant between Shelley and Claire, as that insisted upon by Mary in England during the spring of 1815. Shelley, as always, appeared deeply ambiguous towards these arrangements. He recognized that it was necessary for Claire to become independent, and he outwardly agreed and co-operated with Mary and the Masons when such arrangements were made. Yet he always contrived to see Claire at frequent intervals, and sometimes for several days at a time. In the private letters he wrote to her during October and November 1820, it is transparently clear that he missed her greatly, and was continually planning for her return. That a separation was finally brought about after two years together in Italy, was very largely the result of two circumstances: first, the mist of scandal that surrounded the del Rosso lawsuit; and second, the influence of Mrs Mason in her powerful personae as Lady Mountcashell and ‘Minerva’.

During his absences at Pisa, Shelley somehow found time to write to John Keats in London. Sad news had reached him through the Gisbornes of Keats’s first serious lung haemorrhage, which had occurred on the night after their visit to Hampstead of 22 June. He urged Keats to come to Italy to cure himself, and suggested his own household in Pisa or its environs. ‘Mrs Shelley unites with myself in urging the request, that you would take up your residence with us.’
⁸⁹

He also wrote again to Medwin at Geneva. Shelley had heard that Medwin had been touring the Alps with the Williamses, and he repeated his invitation to come south, referring longingly to their freedom of movement which he himself had once enjoyed. ‘How much I envy you, or rather how much I sympathise with your wandering. I have a passion for such expeditions, although partly the capriciousness of my health, and partly the want of the incitement of a companion, keep me at home. I see the mountains, the sky, and the trees from my windows and recollect, as an old man does the mistress of his youth, the raptures of a more familiar intercourse. . . .’
⁹⁰

At the end of July, Shelley succeeded in renting a good set of rooms at the little spa of the Bagni di Pisa, some four miles outside the city walls. On 2 August he returned to the Casa Ricci, bringing with him excitedly the latest news of the recent insurrection in Naples. He told Mary that he was quite happy now to forgo all thoughts of his long-delayed journey to England. ‘
I
have no thoughts of leaving Italy — the best thing we can do, is to save money, & if things take a decided turn (which I am convinced they will at last — but not perhaps for two or three years) it will be time for me to assert my rights and preserve my annuity . . . . Kiss sweet babe, & kiss yourself for me. I love you affectionately — P.B.S.’
⁹¹

[1]
The growth of a full economic analysis of the forces which were transforming the conditions of the English lower classes was painfully slow at this time. The main landmarks were David Ricardo’s
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(1817); James Mill’s
Elements of Political Economy
(1821) and the radical journal the
Westminster Review
founded by Bentham, Mill, Brougham and others in 1824. The 1830s brought the on-the-spot
Blue Book
reports of Sir Edwin Chadwick and Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. These separate analytic traditions combined in the two classics of the late-Chartist period, Frederick Engels’s
The Condition of the Working Class in England
(1844) and John Stuart Mill’s
Principles of Political Economy
(1848). Both J. S. Mill and Engels acknowledged the profound influence of Shelley in their twenties. For a general survey, see J.L. and B. Hammond,
The Skilled Labourer
(1919); E. Halevy,
The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism
(1928) and J.P. Guinn,
Shelley’s Political Thought
(1969).

[2]
A Bill granting equal voting rights to men and women was not put through the English House of Commons until 1928.

[3]
Here Shelley was clearly thinking of the recent trials of William Hone, Richard Carlile, Henry Hunt, Sir Francis Burdett and Thomas Wooler of the
Black Dwarf
; and also no doubt of the failure of his own editor and publisher to appear in the lists.

[4]
To obtain an enlightening and sometimes not unamusing comparative estimate of the liveliness and progressiveness of Shelley’s thought, see the useful collection
Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley
, edited by R.J. White, Cambridge University Press, 1953.

[5]
The volume eventually appeared as
Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in 4 Acts, with Other Poems
in August 1820. Although accurate figures are unknown, it is reputed not to have sold more than a score of copies. But in June 1820, the name of
The Cenci
was on many readers’ lips in London, and the prospect looked fair.

[6]
These cryptic entries by Mary and Claire are characteristic of the mysterious secrecy that always shrouded the manoeuvres of Paolo Foggi and the fate of Elena in all the extant personal documents of the Shelley household. Mary’s moon symbol could refer equally to Claire herself (though elsewhere in Mary’s journal she is represented by a sun symbol); to Elise Foggi; or to little Elena (‘moon-child’ — illegitimate child? ‘moon-calf’ — abortion?). But it is impossible to interpret either this — or Claire’s nursery rhymes — with any certainty. Shelley’s correspondence is equally delphic or circumlocutory on these matters; Paolo’s motives, apart from greed, are reminiscent of Iago’s; and the del Rosso papers have never been discovered. However in general there is a clear sense of the nervous tension and extreme irritability brought about by Shelley’s difficulties over the illegitimate baby and what he called Paolo’s ‘infernal business’.

25. The Moons of Pisa: 1820

The road to the Bagni wound out from the northern gate of Pisa, and crossing the flat plain which is marked by occasional farm buildings and broken by the loosely cultivated lines of vines and vegetables, approached the distant curves of the Monte Pisano. On the way it picked up the line of the little canal which connects the Arno at Pisa with the Serchio at Lucca, finally crossing over by a stone bridge, shaded with plane trees, and entering the single half-crescent of stone buildings which form the tiny centre of the village, which was known locally as San Giuliano.

Huddled at the foot of the Monte Pisano, the crescent faced the solid, foursquare eighteenth-century building of the
bagni
proper, which was surmounted by a large clock flanked with decorative urns. Immediately behind it rose the steep sides of the mountains, covered with wild olives, and terraced on its lower slopes with walkways and pergolas which remained from the time of its original popularity during the period of the Medici. But San Giuliano at the time of Shelley’s arrival in August 1820 was like the rest of Pisa, in a period of decline, and except for local market days and fairs the village was not much frequented even by Italians from Pisa. Sporadically new researches were undertaken by the medical faculty at the university into the supposed curative properties of the waters. Traditionally it had been the resort of the Tuscan Court, but the shortness of the season, which tended to end abruptly in September with torrential flooding from the mountainside, had long since forced it to yield in popularity and elegance to the
bagni
at Lucca.

Shelley’s apartments were in the Casa Prinni, the second house on the left of the entrance to the crescent. It had large ground-floor rooms flanking an arched entrance hall, and a back garden planted with oranges and lemons which stretched right down to the banks of the canal.
¹
Shelley rented the whole house at about thirteen sequins a month, which was not altogether cheap for such a retired situation: ‘I could get others something cheaper & a great deal worse; but
if we would write it is requisite to have space.’
²
He was to remain relatively peacefully in this retreat until the end of October.

The little household, with an Italian cook Caterina, settled in quickly enough, although Claire was ill shortly after moving, and noted cryptically that she dreamt she saw a ghost.
³
The escape to San Giuliano came as a great relief to Shelley. One of his first actions was to unburden his feelings in a long and demolishing letter to Godwin. For this, he spent one day at Pisa consulting with Tatty Tighe in his study among the shelves of sprouting potatoes in glass pots, and then carefully wrote out a five-page draft. He had at last found adequate words for what should perhaps have been said long before he left England: ‘I have given you within a few years the amount of a considerable fortune, & have destituted myself, for the purpose of realising it of nearly four times the amount. Except for the
good will
which this transaction seems to have produced between you & me, this money, for any
advantage
that it ever conferred on you, might as well have been thrown into the sea. Had I kept in my own hands this £4 or £5000 & administered it in trust for your permanent advantage I should have been indeed your benefactor. The error however was greater in the man of mature age extensive experience & penetrating intellect than in the crude & impetuous boy. Such an error is seldom committed twice.’

He explained further that his present situation was delicate, and Mary had not been kept fully informed. ‘My affairs are in a state of the most complicated embarrassment: added to which I am surrounded by circumstances in which any diminution of my very limited resources might involve me in personal peril. I fear that you & I are not on such terms as to justify me in exposing to you the actual state of my delicate & emergent situation which the most sacred considerations imperiously require me to conceal from Mary. . . .’ This was a course of concealment that Mary herself had acquiesced in, to spare herself, and through her the baby, pain or ill-health. ‘Your letters from their style & spirit (such is your erroneous notion of taste) never fail to produce an appalling effect on her frame; on one occasion, [united with other circumstances —
deleted in draft
] agitation of mind produced through her a disorder in the child, similar to that which destroyed our little girl two years ago. . . . On that occasion Mary at my request [gave me the liberty —
deleted in draft
] authorized me to intercept such letters or information as I might judge likely to disturb her mind.’
⁴
Besides Godwin’s financial importunities, Shelley was here undoubtedly referring to the events of 14–17 June concerning Elena. There is another fragment of a draft which refers to his own severe nephritic pains on that occasion.
⁵

Godwin’s fury on receiving this letter was demonstrated by the long explanation and tirade to which he subjected the Gisbornes in London. There was much discussion of Claire’s folly and Paolo’s villainy, though as far as can be judged
this concerned what Maria Gisborne called ‘the old story’ — that is, Byron and Allegra. Whether the Gisbornes in turn told Godwin of Elena Adelaide Shelley seems doubtful. But their good opinion of Shelley was undermined when they returned to Italy.
⁶