Shelley: The Pursuit (27 page)

On 3 February, as the little party waited for their boat in the unsettled weather and rain at Whitehaven, they drew together all their physical and emotional resources, and concentrated, as Shelley said, on the greater object, ‘the welfare of general man’.
⁸⁹
The new contact opened with Godwin was a great inspiration at this time. As they embarked, Shelley fired off one last letter to Miss Hitchener. The packet was to leave at 12 midnight, stopping at the Isle of Man on the way. They were glad to leave Whitehaven, ‘a miserable manufacturing seaport Town’, where the Inn was horrible. The sea looked rough and there was talk of a storm. Shelley’s thoughts dwelt briefly on the lost comforts of the Calverts’ house and especially Mrs Calvert’s kindness. But their spirits were excellent, their purpose determined, and Shelley struck a note of valiant confidence. ‘To give you an idea of the perfect fearlessness with which Harriet and Eliza accompany my attempt, they think of no inconveniences but those of a wet night and sea-sickness, which in fact we find to be the only real ones. — Assassination either by private or public enemies appears to me to be the phantoms of a mind whose affectionate friendship has outrun the real state of the case.’
⁹⁰
He closed the note with an unexpected little sally. ‘Pray what are you to be
called
when you come to us for Eliza’s name is Eliza and Miss Hitchener is too long too broad and too deep. Adieu. Your P.B. Shelley.’
⁹¹

The crossing was very rough. It took nearly thirty hours, and they were swept far up into the North of Ireland. They were all exhausted on arrival. But no one was sick; and there were no assassinations. Their mission had begun.

[1]
After acting faithfully as Shelley’s literary agent in London during 1810 and spring 1811, Graham had fallen from favour. Like John Grove, he had apparently made an offer for Elizabeth Shelley’s hand, and Shelley was overwhelmed by feelings of betrayal. Stories of adultery between Graham and Mrs Timothy Shelley — which Shelley had dismissed as a joke in May (
Letters
, 1, No. 71, p. 85) — were now resurrected as hard facts, and Shelley wrote bitterly to his mother: ‘I suspect your motives for
so violently so persecutingly
desiring to unite my sister Elizabeth to the music master Graham, I suspect that it was intended to shield
yourself
. . . .’ Mrs Shelley, like Timothy, was now also seen as a sexual hypocrite and family tyrant; and Graham’s role was that of a mere pawn in the emotional drama. There is no independent evidence of adultery, nor did Elizabeth marry the unfortunate music-master. The episode throws light on the intensity of Shelley’s feelings both for his mother and his sister, and the frailty of his early friendships.

[2]
This interpretation is strongly supported by comparable events and liaisons in spring 1813, and again in spring 1815. See Chapters 9 and 11.

[3]
Both poets were in the middle of a bitter quarrel, which seems to have been started by a misunderstanding of certain remarks that Wordsworth made to Coleridge’s host in London Basil Montagu, about Coleridge being ‘a rotten drunkard’ and ‘an absolute nuisance in his family’. See Mary Moorman,
Wordsworth: A Biography
, 1965, 11, pp. 199–201.

[4]
E. P. Thompson has written: ‘It is true that Napoleon’s Continental System and the retaliatory Orders in Council [of Lord Liverpool’s administration] had so disrupted the market for British textiles that the industries of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands were stagnant. Both war and successive bad harvests had contributed to the raising of the price of provisions to “famine” heights. But this will not do as an explanation of Luddism; it may help to explain its occasion, but not its character.’
The Making of the English Working Class
, 1968, p. 593.

[5]
It went through varied vicissitudes but it was never finally printed in Shelley’s lifetime though some of the poems appeared in the Esdaile MS Notebook. See Chapter 3, Ref. 7.

[6]
Shelley had been introduced to Southey by William Calvert, whom he had met at Greystoke. Calvert, whose brother had befriended Wordsworth, had instantly struck both Shelley and Harriet with his earnest, sympathetic gaze, so that they remarked upon it in their letters. Calvert seemed to know all about the Held Place and Oxford background; he helped the Shelleys with practical details like getting the rent on Chesnut Cottage reduced to a guinea a week, and supplying linen. Shelley, incidentally, wrote to Medwin that the rent was 30 shillings.

[7]
It is remarkable to compare the impressions of William Hazlitt, who saw both men in their youth, and described them in similar language and tone. Of Southey he wrote ‘Mr Southey, as we formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. . . . It was the dawn of Liberty that still tinged his cheek, a smile between hope and sadness that still played upon his quivering lip. . . . He was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world.’ (From
The Spirit of the Age
, 1824.) Compare this with p. 362.

[8]
It had first been published in
The Morning Post
, 6 September 1799.

[9]
The original of this poem was probably the one Shelley tried to sell at Oxford for Peter Finnerty’s benefit; its subject of the social injustice of warfare would have been particularly suitable. The poem is worth reading in full.

[10]
Dowden’s ‘summary’ of this report, which has been consistently given in previous biographies, altered the whole emphasis of the news article, and by suppressing circumstantial details, contrived to make the whole incident inherently unlikely. (Dowden, I, p. 227.) Like many other writers, Dowden found Shelley’s ‘hallucinations’ very convenient. See also Ref. 76.

[11]
Later, when Shelley was on the Continent, we have several detailed records of such hysterical attacks; they are also connected with the early somnambulism which Medwin noted.

≠
5. Irish Revolutionaries: 1812

The Shelleys finally reached Dublin, after a laborious coach-journey southwards, late on the ‘night of 12 February 1812, and put up at the first available hotel. The next day Shelley took first-floor rooms at No. 7 Sackville Street, with a wrought-iron balcony suspended elegantly over the busy thoroughfare. The house was owned by a prosperous woollen draper, and Sackville Street was in the thriving commercial quarter, with the city centre just a few minutes’ walk away. Shelley posted a five-line note to Miss Hitchener to say that they had all arrived safely, but forgot to include their new address; Harriet slipped it in as a postscript with the injunction, ‘write soon’. In the evening the three of them stood on their balcony and gazed round at the bustling city which, over the next six weeks, was to provide Shelley with the most intensive period of practical political education that he experienced in his life.

The following morning, St Valentine’s Day, Shelley made his opening moves. He took the introductory letter that Godwin had sent him at Keswick, and left it at the house of the Irish barrister and Master of the Rolls, John Philpot Curran, on St Stephen’s Green.
[1]
On his way back, at Winetavern Street he found a printer, Isaac Eton, who was prepared to set up the manuscript of his first Irish pamphlet,
An Address to the Irish People
. Eton promised delivery of 1,500 copies within the week. During the afternoon Shelley picked up a newspaper, probably an American one, as these were available in Dublin, and read with ecstatic delight an article on the republican revolution that had broken out in Mexico at the end of 1810, led first by the liberal priest Miguel Hidalgo, and, after his execution, by José Morelos. He rushed back to Sackville Street to tell Harriet and Eliza, and in the enthusiasm of the moment they felt as if the forces of
freedom were breaking out simultaneously all over the globe. Shelley sat down and wrote:

Earth’s remotest bounds shall start

Every despot’s bloated cheek,

Pallid as his bloodless heart

Frenzy, woe, and dread shall speak . . .

The poem, ‘To the Republicans of North America’, as he wrote it that day in five stanzas, celebrated his American ‘brothers’ and called on the great Ecuadorian volcano Cotopaxi to blast out the news of freedom across the mountain-tops of the whole American continent:

Cotopaxi! bid the sound

Through thy sister mountains ring,

Till each valley smile around

At the blissful welcoming!

This was the first time that he used one of his favourite images, the erupting volcano which symbolizes the egalitarian revolution in society and the revolution of love in the human heart.
[2]
The idea of worldwide revolution constantly recurred to Shelley in moments of optimism throughout his life, and he eventually incorporated it in his theory of the evolution of Liberty through human history. Worldwide revolution was also one of the secret articles of the Illuminists.

In this poem Shelley also touched on the problem that was to haunt him with increasing perplexity during his time in Dublin, the question of violent revolution. Could bloodshed ever be justified in the cause of freedom? Using the renowned image of the Liberty Tree, which had been on the lips of both Thomas Jefferson and Barère in the National Convention,
¹
Shelley wrote confidently:

Blood may fertilize the tree

Of new bursting Liberty

Let the guiltiness then be

On the slaves that ruin wreak

On the unnatural tyrant-brood

Slow to peace and swift to blood.
²

Writing to Miss Hitchener that evening, and uncertain ‘whether our letters be inspected or not’, he adopted a less fiery tone and promised her that his conduct in Dublin would be marked by ‘openness and sincerity’, and that his writings should ‘breathe the spirit of peace, toleration, and patience’. When he copied out the poem for her, he omitted the blood-fertilizing stanza, which in his notebook is the penultimate one. But he could not suppress his enthusiasm which was so great that he had actually persuaded Eliza to agree to edit a selection of Tom Paine’s works that they might print in Dublin to help educate the working classes, though just at that moment Eliza was ‘making a red cloak which will be finished before dinner’. He was full of printing schemes, and was trying to get hold of the works of Benjamin Flower, the radical propagandist and agitator who had edited the
Cambridge Intelligencer
during the French Revolution, and later founded the
Political Register
which was eventually taken over by William Cobbett. His own pamphlets, wrote Shelley, would contain ‘downright proposals for instituting associations for bettering the condition of human kind.
I
even I, weak young poor as I am will attempt to organize them. The society of peace and love! . . . This is a crisis for the attempt.’
³

Four days later the first sheets came off Eton’s press; they were almost illegibly printed on bad paper, and the whole pamphlet ran to the absurd length of thirty pages. Shelley was delighted nevertheless, and sent off proofs to Miss Hitchener. The style, he assured her, ‘is adapted to the lowest comprehension that can read’.
⁴
By the 24th, the
Address
was published, and he sent a copy to her, with a rapturous letter: ‘let us mingle our identities inseparably, and burst upon tyrants with the accumulated impetuosity of our acquirements and resolutions. I am eager, firm, convinced.’ Godwin too was immediately sent a copy, with the promise of a second pamphlet already in the press: ‘a crisis like this’, Shelley repeated enthusiastically to Godwin, ‘ought not to be permitted to pass unoccupied or unimproved’.
⁵

The
Address
now had to be distributed, and the vigour with which Shelley undertook this is one of the most impressive features of his whole stay. Scores of copies were mailed to prominent liberals like Curran and Hamilton Rowan.
[3]
No less than sixty copies were sent out to public houses in the centre and surrounds of the city — an apt method in Dublin, which he had learnt from Paine’s experiences. He hired a servant especially to distribute copies, with instructions when to give them away and when to sell them, depending on the look of the potential customer. Shelley himself took copies into the streets, throwing them into passing carriages and open windows, pushing them into the hands of beggars, drunkards and street ladies. Harriet sometimes went with him, delighting
in Shelley’s passionate eagerness, and yet laughing at him too: ‘We throw them out of [the] window and give them to men that we pass in the streets; for myself I am ready to die of laughter when it is done and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman’s hood of a cloak. She knew nothing of it and we passed her. I could hardly get on my muscles were so irritated.’
⁶
In the evenings Shelley stood on the balcony at Sackville Street watching for a passer-by who looked ‘likely’, and then tossing down a pamphlet.