Shelley: The Pursuit (5 page)

It was, finally, a decade of war: at first only a distant war, fought largely at sea; but later a war that came to every man’s doorstep in the form of conscription, high prices, food shortages bordering on famine, garrisoned soldiery, social unrest among the manufacturing classes, and a proliferation of agents from the Customs, Excise, Post Office and Home Office. Above all it came in the ceaseless, swelling, uncontrollable agitation — to a degree never before known in this island — of new
ideas
: a great wind of restless, contradictory, ill-defined ideas, but ideas none the less that blew open new doors and windows in men’s minds and changed their lives for ever. War had always accelerated both social and economic trends in England, and this war was to last for the best part of eighteen years.

Shelley was born into an age of upheaval. Yet it might be assumed that Horsham, Sussex, still slumbering in its traditional eighteenth-century pattern of seasonal labour, sheep markets, village festivals, and still dominated by squire and parson, was in reality very little affected by these distant commotions and rumblings among politicians, intellectuals and city-dwellers. But the social crust was no longer as solid as it seemed. This particularly applied to the family that occupied the squire’s house at Field Place, with its long drive, its plantations of oaks and cedars, its pond and eccentric ‘American Garden’ of redwoods and semi-tropical plants. In that part of southern England, ‘Shelley’ was indeed an ancient name in the county aristocracy, and the original family of the Shelley-Michelgroves had an impeccable pedigree and a baronetage bestowed by James I. But Shelley’s own family did not derive directly from this respected stock: his was a junior and inferior branch, descended by a long trellis of younger brothers and obscure marriages, and settling uneasily at the beginning of the eighteenth century on Fen Place, near Worth in Sussex.
²²
Here John Shelley, Shelley’s great-great-grandfather lived, and from here Shelley’s direct ancestry can be traced through the restless, indigent and rather murky history of two opportunist younger sons. It was to be an important factor in Shelley’s later life that at the time of his birth, the family at Field Place was socially
arriviste
. Its subsequently vaunted blood-connection with the literary Shelley-Sidneys of Penshurst Place was as tenuous as the most liberal laws of cousinage will allow.

Shelley’s great-grandfather, Timothy Shelley, the third of five sons, was forced to emigrate to America to make his living in the reign of George I. There it appears that he became a merchant, married a New York miller’s widow, lost
his money and turned into a quack doctor.
²³
During this period Bysshe Shelley, the second son and Shelley’s grandfather, was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1731. Some years later, Timothy’s fortune was saved by the death of one elder brother and the insanity of another, and he was able to bring his colonial family back to England, including his son Bysshe.

Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s grandfather, was a determined and individualistic man whose initiative and disregard for social proprieties was not squirearchical, but wholly of the New World. He was a tall, striking figure, with the long Shelley nose, cold eyes and a thin, purposeful lip. His drive and nonconformity brought him worldly success, together with the unpopularity of those descendants who benefited from him. In 1752 he instigated a family tradition by eloping with a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of a wealthy clergyman, and marrying her in Mayfair. The girl died nine years later, and Bysshe inherited the estates. In 1769 he repeated the process, with even greater success, this time eloping with a daughter of the aristocratic Sidney Perry family who owned estates in Sussex, Kent and Gloucester. This brought him social
cachet
rather than money. Bysshe inherited Field Place and the Fen Place estates in 1790, became a baronet in 1806, and died in 1815 leaving a fortune of £200,000. He spent much of his time in building a new ancestral home in the shape of Castle Goring by the sea in Sussex, but at the end of his life he preferred to live in his small cottage near the Horsham tavern, a crotchety eccentric feared by his children both legitimate and otherwise. £12,816 in loose banknotes was found dispersed among his furniture and books in the Horsham cottage at his death.
²⁴

Shelley’s father, Timothy — named after the American ‘apothecary’ — was born of Bysshe’s first marriage to Miss Mary Catherine Michell, the clergyman’s daughter, in 1753. In him, Bysshe’s wildness and self-assertion were temporarily subdued. As befitted the son of a self-made man, he quietly conformed to the new social surroundings and awaited the descent of the baronetcy from the father who always despised him. He attended University College, Oxford, and presented it with silver candlesticks; he then made the Grand Tour and entered Lincoln’s Inn. He became mildly interested in politics, and attached himself to Norfolk’s wing of the Foxite Whigs. But he was always in spirit an easy-going place-man, and a conformist. He did what was expected of him. Norfolk was fighting a local county battle against his Tory rival Lady Irwin, and bought up the Horsham electorate. He managed to get Timothy nominated as Member for the town for the 1790–2 parliamentary session. But finally Lady Irwin succeeded in a petition against the election, and Timothy was deprived of his seat, having to be re-elected for New Shoreham, another of the Duke’s extensive political properties.

Meanwhile, Timothy had married Elizabeth Pilfold of nearby Warnham in
October 1791. He installed his new bride in Field Place, as old Bysshe was busy building at Goring. Their first child, a son christened Percy Bysshe, was born ten months later on 4 August 1792. Timothy was aged 40, and his new wife aged 29.

Perhaps the most remarkable single fact of Shelley’s childhood is that while both parents comfortably outlived him, neither left a single word of reminiscence about his early boyhood.
[1]
We know nothing directly of his relationship with his mother during his first fifteen years, and Shelley rarely mentioned her in later life. From a few stray remarks in letters from Oxford, and from passing references by his cousin Tom Medwin and his undergraduate friend T. J. Hogg, we can gather that the feelings between mother and son were exceptionally close and warm up to the time that Shelley went to school. After this Shelley seems to have found his mother increasingly distant and unresponsive, and there are indications that he felt deeply rejected. Shelley’s sense of betrayal was finally to erupt in an extraordinary accusation of adultery which he made at the age of 19. But apart from this, his feelings were shrouded in mystery.

The marriage was not one which old Bysshe would have regarded as a favourable
coup
, although the Pilfolds had some standing locally in the ranks of the Sussex squirearchy. Elizabeth was a large, handsome woman, with bold features, a mass of light brown curling hair and a strong mouth which seemed to curl with a suggestion of disdain. Timothy Shelley was proud enough of her to have both their portraits painted by George Romney. She had a reputation for being a determined woman, a good letter writer but not interested in literature. Her main love was for horses and the countryside, and she much enjoyed her popularity among the common people of Warnham and Horsham. As a child she had lost her own mother when young, and had been brought up in the family of Lord and Lady Ferdinand Pool, whose main distinction was in the field of racehorse breeding.
²⁵
There is a hint of a somewhat masculine character, and it was rumoured that she could be domineering and even violent within her marriage, but this is not certain.
²⁶
She had seven children in all, two sons and five daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Her second son John (who eventually inherited the baronetcy) was, however, not born until 1806, when Shelley was 14 and already at Eton, and his presence never really impinged on Shelley himself either in boyhood or adolescence, though the sense of maternal betrayal may have been emphasized by a transfer of attention from the elder son to the
younger. For Shelley, the pre-Lapsarian land of Field Place was constructed from a society of sisters, and this was to have a marked affect on his later life in which the ‘sisterly’ ideal played a conscious part. His closest sister and greatest childhood friend was Elizabeth, born in May 1794, and it was with her that his first literary attempt was to be published. She was 8 when he first went to Syon House Academy. His other sisters were Mary, born in 1797, Hellen in 1799 and Margaret in 1801. It is again suggestive of the maternal influence that though they were all acknowledged to be markedly good-looking, only one of them eventually married.

If he was strangely silent about his mother, Shelley was always outspoken about his relationship with his father Timothy. Timothy was to play a major part in the upheavals of Shelley’s life between the ages of 18 and 23, and from that time on Shelley always dramatized him as the worst kind of tyrant and hypocrite. Subsequently he also interpreted his early childhood as a time of extreme oppression, with his father in the role of persecutor, and he was later to develop a story that he suffered continually from illness, while on one occasion his father Timothy tried to have him certified and taken away secretly to a madhouse. Quite apart from having no evidence from Timothy himself on these matters, there is every reason to treat these melodramatic accounts with great caution. At another level they are extremely suggestive, for they show the earliest development of that mythopoeic faculty which was to become one of the major elements in Shelley’s creative power and originality.

Shelley’s reaction against his family was also to develop a strong moral and political character. Writing from Shelley’s own point of view, this interpretation was to be put most thoughtfully by his Hampstead friend, the liberal editor Leigh Hunt, in an essay of 1828, long before the other memoirs and reminiscences of his boyhood had been collated or published.

The family connexions of Mr Shelley belonged to a small party in the House of Commons, itself belonging to another party. They were Whig Aristocrats . . . to a man of genius, endowed with a metaphysical acuteness to discern truth and falsehood, and a strong sensibility to give way to his sense of it, such an origin, however respectable in the ordinary point of view, was not the very luckiest that could have happened for the purpose of keeping him within ordinary bounds. With what feelings is truth to open its eyes upon this world among the most respectable of our mere party gentry? Among licensed contradictions of all sorts? Among the Christian doctrines and worldly practices? Among foxhunters and their chaplains? Among beneficed loungers, noli-episcopalian bishops, rakish old gentlemen, and more startling young ones who are old in the folly of
knowingness
? In short, among all those professed
demands of what is right and noble, mixed with real inculcations of what is wrong and full of hypocrisy. . . . Mr Shelley began to think at a very early age, and to think too of these anomalies. He saw that at every step in life some compromise was expected between a truth which he was expected not to violate, and a colouring and double meaning of it which forced him upon the violation.

Hunt went on to indict the class in more general terms, concluding: ‘Whenever a character like Mr Shelley’s appears in society, it must be considered with reference to these systems.’
²⁷

This is very much how Shelley expressed his own case in later life. At root it was a political case, but broadened out into a general claim for moral righteousness set over against the corruption of society.

It was during the two years spent at Syon House, between 1802 and 1804, that Shelley first came to feel that in some sense society as a whole was a hostile force and something to be combated. Besides his rages and his nightmares, he found other weapons close at hand in the games and magic of Field Place: horror books, alchemy, ghost-raising, chemical and electrical experiments, astronomy and the delights of outrageous speculation all served their turn. With these he found he could make his own kind of freedom within the stone walls of the Syon House playground, and also, as with his sisters, he found he could exert certain kinds of power and respect among his fellow-pupils, even a kind of hidden fear. One contemporary subsequently wrote:

During the time that I was there the most remarkable scholar was . . . Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was then about twelve or thirteen (as far as I can remember), and even at that early age exhibited considerable poetical talent, accompanied by a violent and extremely excitable temper, which manifested itself in all kinds of eccentricities. . . . His imagination was always roving upon something romantic and extraordinary, such as spirits, fairies, fighting, volcanoes, etc., and he not unfrequently astonished his schoolfellows by blowing up the boundary palings of the playground with gunpowder, also the lid of his desk in the middle of schooltime, to the great surprise of Dr Greenlaw himself and the whole school.
²⁸

Tom Medwin recalled him taking up his favourite position by the southern wall, day after day in the playground, pacing backwards and forwards like a caged animal, with his weird, impetuous movements and animated face: ‘I think I see him now — along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world.’
²⁹

One escape was simply to break bounds and go into Brentford. There was a
brisk trade in battered dictionaries and old books which were sold by the weight to a local grocer in return for cheese, bread and fruit.
³⁰
Shelley’s great discovery was a cheap bookseller who stocked Minerva Press editions, in their distinctive blue paper covers, each priced sixpence. Minerva Press, which was perhaps the greatest of the contemporary popular publishing houses, operating from a narrow shop in Leadenhall Street, printed most of the best horror novels and gothic romances of the period. Tom Medwin saw his cousin purchase at Norbury’s dark shop in the High Street Ann Radcliffe’s
The Italian
, a wild and sinister romance called
Zofloya, or the Moor
, Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk
and many other promising titles. They made for him an alternative world of ‘haunted castles, bandits, murderers and other grim personages’, a world which never entirely left him, as his later friend, Thomas Love Peacock, was vividly to testify. This world was no longer so innocent as it has been at Field Place: the devil had entered in. Moreover, it was no longer a happily shared fantasy, but a secretive, isolated, one; a world of sleepwalking and bad dreams.