Shelley: The Pursuit (61 page)

Yet despite Mary’s irritation, Shelley continued to take Claire out with him during these months, to shop in the town, to negotiate with the solicitors and to disappear on long walks in Kensington Gardens and round the Serpentine. Had both Shelley and Mary mutually agreed to send her away, she would not have stayed. But Claire did stay, at least until the break-up of the London
ménage
in May.

One can conclude from these circumstances that the destruction of the journal was intended to obliterate the best documented of Shelley’s attempts at setting up a radical community of friends, in which everything was shared in common. Around the central relationship between himself and Mary, he tried to encourage secondary intimacies between Mary and Hogg, and himself and Claire. While Hogg adopted a slightly chivalric role of confidant and lover towards Mary, Shelley in turn adopted the tutorial one of philosophic friend and lover towards Claire.

Around their experimental household, there were satellite figures from Skinner Street: Fanny, and Claire’s brother Charles Clairmont — rather wild in the ‘Clairmont style’ as Mary noted. There was also Peacock, torn between his mistress Marianne St Croix and the unknown heiress who appeared briefly on his horizon, and equally troubled by summonses for debt. In January he went one worse than Shelley and landed himself briefly in prison.
⁵⁶
Further off there were rumblings from Chapel Street, for Harriet had also heard of the death of Sir Bysshe, and was now pressing hard for a definite legal settlement from Shelley. Shelley was all the time anxiously awaiting the outcome of two decisive events: the birth of Mary’s child, due in April, and the distribution of the settlement of Sir Bysshe’s will.

The emotional development of the
ménage
at Hans Place was effectively commanded by Mary. At the beginning of January, when only five months pregnant, yet almost permanently confined to bed, or at least the parlour, she was writing to Hogg: ‘You love me you say, — I think I could return it with the passion you deserve — but you are very good to me and tell me that you are quite happy with the affection which from the bottom of my heart I feel for you…you are so generous, so disinterested, that no one can help loving you. But, you know, Hogg, that we have known each other for so short a time, and I did not think about love, so that I think that
that
also will come in time & then we shall be happier, I do think, than the angels who sing for ever and ever, the lovers of Jane’s [Claire’s] world of perfection. There is a bright prospect before us, my dear friend — lovely — and — which renders it certain — wholly dependent on our own selves — for Shelley & myself I need promise nothing. . . .’
⁵⁷

Mary wrote in the language of Shelley, and echoed his emphasis on the due delicacy and sensitivity required in sexual matters — ‘
that
also will come in time’. Shelley’s steady attempt to set up a pattern of secondary pairing appeared in two notes sent simultaneously to Hogg a few days later, the first from Mary. ‘Shelley and Jane [Claire] are both gone out & from the number & distance of the places that they are going to I do not expect them till very late. Perhaps you can come and console a solitary lady in the mean time — but I do not wish to make you a truant against your conscience. . . . With one kiss Good bye Affectionately yours Mary.’ Meanwhile Shelley had sent round a brief note: ‘My dear friend, Mary wished to speak with you alone, for which purpose I have gone out & removed [her
deleted
] Clare. If you should return before this evening & are at leisure I need not direct your steps. Affectionately yours, PBS.’
⁵⁸

With her pregnancy, and the uncertainty of her position in relation to Shelley’s ‘deserted wife’, Mary was inclined to be cautious about full sexual intimacy with Hogg. On 7 January, the day when Sir Bysshe’s death was announced, Mary wrote to him. ‘My affection for you, although it is not now exactly as you would wish will I think daily become more so — then, what can you have to add to your happiness. I ask but for time, time which for other causes beside this — phisical [
sic
] causes — that must be given — Shelley will be subject to these also, & this, dear Hogg, will give time for that love to spring up which you deserve and will one day have.’
⁵⁹

But Claire was given no part in the picture of happiness which Mary began to anticipate. Where Shelley seems to have been genuinely unjealous of Hogg’s part in his life, the possessive instinct was already working powerfully in Mary. She was content with a
ménage à trois
, but not
à quatre
. Shelley was to find this a permanent difficulty in his social arrangements and experiments. By the end of
January Hogg had rechristened himself in the commune fashion, with the name of his sentimental hero.

When you return to your lodgings this evening, dearest Alexy, I hope it will cheer your solitude to find this letter from me, that you may read & kiss before you go to sleep. My own Alexy, I know how much and how tenderly you love me, and I rejoice to think that I am capable of constituting your happiness. We look forward to joy & delight in the summer when the trees are green, when the suns brightly & joyfully
[sic]
when, dearest Hogg, I have my little baby, with 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 wrapped up in him — you who have so sincere a friendship for him to make him happy — no, we need not try to do that, for every thing we do will make him that without exertion, but to see him so — to see his love, his tenderness, — dear, dearest Alexy, these are joys that fill your heart almost to bursting and draw tears more delicious than the smiles of love from your eyes. When I think of all that we three in. . . .

Here Mary broke off, and later finished the letter, adding briefly, ‘now Shelley and Clara are talking beside me, which is not a very good accompaniment when one is writing a letter to one one loves’.
⁶⁰

By another sad irony, on the very same day that Mary was conjuring this vision of mutual bliss, Harriet wrote to Mrs Nugent a miserable and hopeless letter.

I am sorry to tell you my poor little boy (Charles) has been very ill. . . .I am truly miserable my dear friend. I really see no termination to my sorrows. As to Mr Shelley I know nothing of him. He neither sends nor comes to see me. I am still at my father’s, which is very wretched. When I shall quit this house I know not. Everything goes against me. . . . At nineteen I could descend a willing victim to the tomb. How I wish those dear children had never been born. . . . Mr Shelley has much to answer for. He has been the cause of great misery to me and mine. I shall never live with him again. ’Tis impossible. I have been so deceived, so cruelly treated, that I can never forget it. . . . Is it wrong, do you think, to put an end to one’s sorrow? I often think of it, all is so gloomy and desolate.
⁶¹

Harriet remained alone, with her children, and this gloomy question.

At Hans Place, the end of January and the beginning of February saw the start of the sole literary scheme of this period. Shelley had a series of what seemed to
be highly unpromising talks with an Irish radical and editor called George Cannon, who planned to start up a monthly paper called
The Theological Inquirer, or, Polemical Magazine
. Cannon seems to have wanted both contributions and financial backing from Shelley. On the 29th they looked over Cannon’s papers, but concluded he was ‘a very foolish man’; and again, on 7 February, Cannon came and stayed the evening, a ‘vulgar brute’ as Shelley put it. Apparently his radicalism was too Irish for Shelley’s taste: ‘it is disgusting to hear such a beast speak of philosophy, &c. Let refinement and benevolence convey these ideas.’ In the end, however, Cannon performed an unexpected service for Shelley. Between March and July, his magazine published, with editorial comments under the name of ‘Erasmus Perkins’, nearly a third of the verse section of
Queen Mab
, and the whole of one of Shelley’s attacks on revealed religion,
A Refutation of Deism
.
⁶²
Shelley was still anxious to keep in circulation the political ideas set out in his early poem. The magazine announced, doubtless fictionally, that the poem had been discovered ‘during an excursion on the Continent’, and had been put into a correspondent’s hands by ‘the celebrated Kotzebue’, who ‘considered it too bold a production to issue from the British press’.

On 8 February, perhaps to absorb their enlarged household more comfortably, Shelley took new apartments in Hans Place, at No. 41. Mary was irritable and unwell, the child in the womb beginning to give her some anxiety and discomfort. The journal for the 9th records: ‘Prate with Shelley all day. After dinner talk; put things away. Finish Gibbons Letters. . . . Shelley and Clara sleep, as usual. Hogg does not come till 10. Work and talk. Shelley writes letters. Go to bed. A mess . . . .’
⁶³
Here the manuscript is torn out, and recommences only four days later.

On the 22nd Mary was suddenly and unexpectedly delivered of a child, the doctor arriving five minutes too late. It was a little girl, very tiny, and nearly two months premature. ‘Maie perfectly well’, noted Shelley; but the baby was not expected to live. Surprisingly though, it suckled properly, and began after five days to look strong. Shelley rather than Mary was exhausted by the strain. He was continually ‘unwell’, and his side gave him one of the first recorded spasms on the 26th after Fanny Godwin had kept him up talking until half past three in the morning. The next day he and Claire went out to get a cradle. It seemed as if the baby would live, and Mary had triumphed in the permanent bond between her and Shelley.

Shelley decided to leave Hans Place, and move to yet another apartment, this time nearer the river, in Pimlico. The place had become ‘horrid’, and the landlady was apparently determined to fleece them. No doubt she disapproved of illegitimate children. On 2 March, a mere ten days after the child’s birth, there
was the bustle of moving to 13 Arabella Road. Mary and the baby went alone at 3 in the afternoon, but Shelley and Claire did not arrive until 6. Four days later Mary woke to find the child dead; it looked as if it had had convulsions and Mary was appalled. Her reaction tells a good deal about the disposition of Shelley’s household at this time. She wrote immediately to Hogg: ‘My dearest Hogg my baby is dead — will you come to me as soon as you can — I wish to see you. . . . Will you come — you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk — for I am no longer a mother now Mary.’
⁶⁴
Her journal entry makes no mention of Shelley. ‘Find my baby dead. Send for Hogg. Talk. A miserable day. In the evening read
Fall of the Jesuits
. Hogg sleeps here.’
⁶⁵
Four days later Hogg also moved into Arabella Road, and Mary began to press Shelley to make Claire leave. But ‘the prospect appears to me more dismal than ever; not the least hope. This is, indeed, hard to bear.’ Shelley did at least get Claire to advertise under the initials ‘AZ’ in the papers for a position, but there were no results. They read together, drank tea, played endless games of chess, and when the weather looked up they walked to the park or to the museums, or to the animals on show at the Exeter Change. Shelley noted a panther, a lynx, monkeys, a cassowary and tortoises, and a ‘very pretty antelope’. The antelope appeared six years later, in a superb glowing image:

                                        An antelope,

In the suspended impulse of its lightness,

Were less aethereally light. . . .
⁶⁶

Godwin glimpsed them by chance near the cages, and later remarked to Charles Clairmont that ‘Shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked’.
⁶⁷
Meanwhile Mary had nightmares about her dead baby, and dreamt that it was still alive. For the first time she felt what was never quite to leave her, the shadow of Harriet. Harriet, after all, had borne Shelley a son. Shelley sailed paper boats with Claire on the Serpentine.

On 10 April Shelley passed the morning with Harriet, who was in ‘a surprisingly good humour’, discussing legal arrangements. Throughout the month, Shelley’s new solicitors P. W. Longdill were busy organizing his claims and debts to be presented to Sir Timothy for discharge. On the 21st and 22nd, Shelley again saw Harriet about presenting his little son Charles in court as part of the legal formalities; but this time, as Mary noted, ‘he was much teased with Harriet’. Eventually it was agreed that Shelley’s and Sir Timothy’s solicitors, Longdill and Whitton, should complete the arrangements between them. Shelley made no attempt to get custody of the children.

Instead he decided to take Mary away for a brief spring holiday in Berkshire, as the completion of legal matters was now nearly in sight. Claire was left to
look after the apartment. They departed on 24 April, to stay at the Windmill Inn at Salt Hill near Windsor, a part of the country which, despite its proximity to Eton, held considerable attractions for Shelley. They took a room overlooking a neat little garden planted with cypresses and enclosed by white palings. Hogg, whose law term had started again, could not come with them, though Mary made several coquettish attempts to get him out of London, saying that when his ‘letters arrived Shelley’s distitch was truly applicable — ’