Shelley: The Pursuit (49 page)

His imagination was so much disturbed, that he was perpetually examining his own skin, and feeling and looking at that of others. One evening, during the access of his fancied disorder, when many young ladies were standing up for a country dance, he caused wonderful consternation amongst these charming creatures by walking slowly along the row of girls and curiously surveying them, placing his eyes close to their necks and bosoms, and feeling their breasts and bare arms, in order to ascertain whether any of the fair ones had taken the horrible disease. He proceeded with so much gravity and seriousness, and his looks were so woebegone, that they did not resist, or resent, the extraordinary liberties, but looked terrified and as if they were about to undergo some severe surgical operation at his hands.
⁵¹

Hogg seems to want to imply also, that Shelley was inexorably breaking loose from sexual loyalty to Harriet. Once more the undercurrent of fear, used as a catalyst in his relations with the opposite sex, makes itself felt in Shelley’s behaviour.

As September wore on, Harriet found that she and Shelley were having ‘many arguments concerning the respect that all men pay to property’.
⁵²
They seemed to agree, but it was a sore subject. Debtors had now begun to inquire after Shelley in London, and there was talk of his arrest. Shelley was bitterly resigned to his father’s withholding of the inheritance, and was already thinking of alternative ways of raising funds. Harriet still clung to every sign of goodwill
from Field Place, writing pathetically to Mrs Nugent: ‘The post has just brought me a letter from Mr Shelley’s sister, who says her father is doing all in his power to prevent his being arrested. I think even his family pride must long to give way on the present occasion. . . . Mrs Shelley tells her son everything she hears.’
⁵³
Yet in reality, there was neither help nor even sympathy forthcoming from Field Place. It was becoming imperative to leave the Home Counties for the time being. Harriet, anxious for the security of her child, suggested that they might try once more to lease the lovely farm at Nantgwillt, but the plan was ephemeral without ready capital to secure the stock. Harriet continued to dream of a home at Nantgwillt for many months, and it became her ideal setting for a family life with Shelley. Shelley on the other hand was increasingly unsettled and unsatisfied, and sometimes he was finding it easier to talk to Cornelia Boinville than his wife. Their new friend Peacock found himself steadily drawn into a mediating role.

At the end of September, Shelley decided that they must attempt to establish their own residence for the winter. Apparently through Hogg, he contacted a money-lender in London, called Starling, and began negotiations for a large loan. The coach built by Charters was packed up with belongings, while Shelley convinced Harriet that the child — still only three months old — would be safe to travel, and persuaded Peacock to accompany them. On Saturday, 2 October, he clinched a ruinous
post obit
loan for £500 payable on Sir Bysshe Shelley’s death at the rate of 300 per cent, which amounted to £2,000.
[7]
On Monday 4 October, the coach which was laden down with Shelley, Harriet and the baby, Eliza and Peacock and all their books and luggage, trundled slowly out of Bracknell and headed for Cumberland and the Lake District. At Warwick, Shelley posted back a note to Hogg informing him of their destination, the
post obit
loan and stressing the need for secrecy. ‘I
wish you to
consider all communications made to you on this subject as secret. I may confide to you surmises probably rash, & possibly ill-founded. To your secrecy and friendship I shall commit them.’
⁵⁴
There was also the more humdrum business of Peacock’s ‘small trunk’ of books, which required forwarding, as Shelley had off-loaded it at the last moment in deference to his coach springs. The same fate, presumably, had also overtaken little Ianthe’s wet nurse.

Shelley drove the coach quite hard, and they reached Low Wood Inn, Ambleside, within the week. Ianthe remained healthy, and Harriet seeing the mountains, was once more dreaming of ‘our dear Nantgwillt’.
⁵⁵
Shelley contacted the Calverts at Keswick, and began to ask around for a house for the winter. To his
surprise, none was forthcoming. Memories of the winter of 1811 probably lingered on about Shelley locally, and Shelley and Harriet in turn soon decided that ‘such a set of human beings’ occupied the Lakes that they would move on. North Wales held no attractions, so they set out on the road to Scotland and within sixteen days of leaving London found themselves in Edinburgh. Shelley took lodgings for them all at 36 Frederick Street, planning to remain for the winter. Peacock’s books arrived, and Shelley was encouraged to embark on a solid course of study, now mixing ancient with modern: notably Homer’s
Odyssey
and Laplace’s
Système du Monde
.
⁵⁶
The coach went in to John Dumbreck, Coach-maker, for service which it badly needed since Shelley had managed to break eight main plates, four steel springs, and smash two of the lamps so they had to be completely replaced. The bill came to £8 11s. which Mr Dumbreck was still trying to collect ten years later.
⁵⁷
Meanwhile Shelley translated two of Plutarch’s essays on vegetarianism, and busied himself, to Peacock’s bemused fascination, with preparing one of his most peculiar and crotchety productions, a pamphlet
On the Vegetable System of Diet
. In its thin, high-flown rhetoric, and its subordination of political and philosophical questions to those of speculative ‘dietetics’ one catches something of the tone and quality of the talk among the Newton — Boinville set:

With [what] arguments shall philosophy assail superstition, so long as terrifying phantoms crowd round the couch of its pale and prostrate victim, refuting with the indisputable evidence of sense the metaphysical scepticism of reason, while politician’s dreams and reveries of indiscribable horror testify? How shall we inspire the miserable man with kindness and humanity whose social feelings are jaundiced by a torture that lurks within his vitals. . . .
⁵⁸

For the time being, Shelley seemed to be content to argue that political injustice and oppression was the consequence of indigestion. Like the elephantiasis episode, it showed how he had been thrown off course since Tan-yr-allt, and turned in a restless, absurd circle of self-doubt and uncertainty which he had not experienced since the post-Oxford days in Poland Street. Parts of the essay also suggest the beginning of a constant worry about his own health (as again in the elephantiasis episode), which showed its symptoms in a combination of mental anxiety and physical discomfort in the region of the stomach and abdomen, perhaps accompanied by his first minor spasms.
[8]
‘Groundless terrors, vertigo, and delirium are frequently consequent upon a disease of the digestive organs; tremors and spasmodic affections, remote both in their nature and position from
disorders of the stomach, are yet in many cases to be traced to its derangement . . . .’
⁵⁹
Nevertheless he was not too caught up in his own concerns to let a novel by Hogg,
The Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff
, just published, go by unremarked; he wrote warmly to Hogg, praising the ‘extraordinary and animated tale’ and a hero ‘so natural and energetic as Alexy’.
⁶⁰
‘Believe me,’ he concluded, ‘to be ever sincerely attached to you.’

As the November days drew in at Frederick Street, Shelley and Peacock found themselves thrown together, studying, talking and reading Peacock’s beloved Greeks, while the women busied themselves with the baby. Peacock was at his most discreet and diplomatic, and Shelley had not yet penetrated into the wittiest and most original side of his character; his immediate impression was of the bland, well-mannered pedant. ‘He is a very mild, agreeable man, and a good scholar. His enthusiasm is not very ardent, nor his views very comprehensive: but he is neither superstitious, ill-tempered, dogmatical, nor proud.’
⁶¹
Which, coming from Shelley, was apt praise.

Peacock, if we are to believe his own evidence, quickly seized on the more extraordinary and eccentric elements of Shelley’s personality. He noted that Shelley was ‘especially fond’ of the horror-romances of Charles Brockden Brown, the American novelist
[9]
whose tales were ‘remarkable for the way in which natural causes were made to produce supernatural effects’. Shelley was ‘captivated by the picture of Clitheroe in his sleep digging a grave under a tree’ in
Edgar Huntley
; and he was always searching for a summerhouse like the one in
Wieland
where the hero’s father ‘died of spontaneous combustion’. Peacock argued that this gothic element, the mysterious and ‘superstitious terror of romance’ were permanent and central features of Shelley’s personality. Many years after Shelley’s death, Peacock still held the same view, and summarized it by literary analogy:

[Charles Brockden] Brown’s four novels, Schiller’s
Robbers
, and Goethe’s
Faust
, were, of all the works with which he was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind, and had the strongest influence in the formation of his character. . . . He devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a minor degree Southey . . . but admiration is one thing and assimilation is another; and nothing so blended itself with the structure of his interior mind as the creations of Brown.
⁶²

But for the time being, Peacock was really closer to Harriet than to Shelley, and perhaps not altogether consciously he was helping her to get a slightly more mature and objective opinion of her husband. Certainly by 23 November she showed in a letter to Mrs Nugent that she had no more illusions about how far father and son were divided over the inheritance, and an acid note has crept in: ‘There has been no conciliation between Mr S. and his father. Their opinions are so contrary, that I do not think there is the least chance of their being reconciled. His father is now ill with the gout; but there is no danger I suppose. If there was he would send for his son and be reconciled to him.’
⁶³

Shelley was cheered by one chance meeting in Edinburgh, with a young Brazilian medical student called Joachim Baptista Pereira, who qualified as a doctor in 1815. Pereira talked to Shelley about the revolutionary movements in South America, the news of which had so excited him in Dublin in 1812, and they compared notes on cordially abominated fathers. Pereira was swept off his feet by Shelley, and began a translation of
Queen Mab
into Portuguese as his contribution to the cause in South America. He showed Peacock a sonnet he had written as a preface to the translation, of which Peacock remembered two lines, the first and the last:

Sublime Shelley, cantor di verdade! . . .

Surja
Queen Mab
a restaurar o mundo

The two remained in touch for several months, and there is a letter from Shelley as late as September 1815 which seems to suggest that Pereira was going to Europe, and from there home to Brazil. Peacock says he ‘died early’ from a disease of the lungs.

The enthusiasm of Pereira, and the agreeableness of Peacock were not enough to see Shelley through the winter in Edinburgh. He seems to have discussed with Harriet the possibility of their spending Christmas apart. Within three days of each other, Harriet wrote to Mrs Nugent, who was poorly, suggesting that she might come to Dublin to ‘attend’ her; while Shelley wrote briskly to Hogg, on the 26th: ‘I am happy to hear that you have returned to London, as I shall shortly have pleasure of seeing you again. I shall return to London alone. My evenings will often be spent at the Newtons’, where, I presume, you are no unfrequent visitor.’
⁶⁴
Shelley was also drawn by Godwin, who although he had not featured much in their social life in London during the summer, had been writing to Shelley assiduously, as his diary shows. Since Shelley had left Bracknell in October, Godwin had dispatched six missives, most of which, as later evidence shows, were concerned not so much with political justice, as with the problems of Shelley’s inheritance, and the ways in which he might still raise money on his prospects.

Shelley finally decided, perhaps on the advice of Peacock, that it would be better if they all went south together, and at the very end of November the coach was once again loaded up and they rattled south through the foul weather on their brand-new springs. Peacock, Harriet and the baby, and Eliza were deposited at Bracknell, and on 10 December Godwin’s diary records that Shelley took breakfast with him alone at Skinner Street. This meeting marked a new stage in the relationship between Shelley and his philosophical mentor; William Godwin was now elevated to the position of paternal adviser in matters both spiritual and financial — an odd combination which produced some otherwise inexplicable results. Shelley’s filial dependence on Godwin lasted only in complete form for six months, until June 1814, when it was dramatically broken. But in fragmentary forms of guilt, admiration and the sense of accountability, this dependency hung on for many years after, with the direst consequences for Shelley’s financial affairs. For the time being, Godwin was the fount of wisdom and sympathy.