Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (17 page)

Byron reformulated Shelley’s conception of Platonic love and his plea for the importance of Wordsworth’s early work in important and troubling ways in the third canto of
Childe Harold
. Here, inspired by the example of the younger man, Byron found himself exploring love and its symbiotic relationship with nature in a way which was quite distinct from anything he had previously written. Later he would disown this moment in his intellectual development, reportedly telling a companion that ‘Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’,
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and he would reject Shelley’s philosophy in the fourth canto of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, announcing to Hobhouse, ‘I have parted company with Shelley and Wordsworth. Subject matter and treatment are alike anew.’
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But his later embarrassed dismissal of a brief moment of Shelleyan enthusiasm does not detract from the significant role Shelley’s views played in the development of Byron’s poetic voice. Nor was Shelley the only person to influence his thinking over the course of the summer. He would later tell one of his biographers that Mary was exceptionally clever, and, like Shelley, he found the thought of her parentage rather alluring. ‘Mrs Shelley is very clever, indeed it would be difficult for her not to be so; the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin . . . could be no common person.’
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Claire played little part in the intense exchange of ideas and literary opinions which dominated the summer. Although she may have started a ghost story like the others, she limited her literary activities to the copying out of the third canto of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
. This task had its advantages, in that it gave her daily entry to the Villa Diodati at a time when Byron was increasingly reluctant to see her, but it hardly put her at the centre of the group’s intellectual exchanges. Meanwhile, the goings-on at Diodati were a fertile topic for gossip and speculation. The local hotelier did a brisk trade in sailing trips on the lake during which shocked English visitors could inspect the washing drying outside Byron’s villa for evidence of female inhabitants – telescopes were thoughtfully included in the ticket price. John St Aubyn, who had settled in Geneva shortly before Byron’s arrival, reported the peer’s presence to a friend, remarking that he was accompanied by an ‘actress and another family of very suspicious appearance’.
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Polidori noted in passing that Mary was referred to by them all as ‘Mrs Shelley’, but this clearly did little to allay speculation about the nature of the Shelley ménage. In July Shelley, Mary and Claire removed themselves from Geneva for a little while and travelled to Chamouni, the village from which intrepid tourists could explore the Mont Blanc glacier. By the time they returned to Montalègre it was necessary to confront Byron with a development which Claire (and Shelley) had known about for some time. At eighteen, Claire, like Mary before her, was faced with the practical consequences of free love: she was pregnant with a child conceived with Byron before his departure from London.

Together, Claire and Shelley slowly worked their way towards an understanding with Byron about the baby’s future. These negotiations were difficult, and they disrupted the intellectually stimulating conversations which had characterised the summer. As soon as he knew she was pregnant Shelley took on responsibility for Claire, and, during his lake voyage with Byron, spent one evening at an inn where he made a new will, in which Claire was left £6,000 for herself and £6,000 in trust for any other person she cared to name (proof, if any were needed, that she took Shelley into her confidence early on). But Claire’s child would be Byron’s to do with as he pleased, a legal imbalance which was matched by the disparity in their respective incomes. Claire had no independent means; Byron was a wealthy man. Eventually Shelley, Claire and Byron agreed that Byron would send for the child when it was old enough to leave its mother and that Claire would have the right to see it when she desired. This arrangement would turn out to be unsatisfactorily vague, but it must have seemed to Claire to be preferable to Byron’s first suggestion, which entailed her handing her baby over to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Since Byron had occupied at least one evening by dropping hints to Claire about the dark and depraved nature of his relationship with Augusta, it is not surprising that she thought this suggestion repugnant. Shelley found himself in the position of mediator between Claire and Byron, which strained his relationship with both of them. For her part, Claire was made acutely aware of the social disparity between her and the powerful man to whom she had given her heart.

By the end of August the creativity of June and July had faded, to be replaced by tension and uncertainty about a future in which Claire and Byron were inextricably linked. Byron was joined by more friends – Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis (the author of one of the period’s most notorious gothic novels), Scrope Davis and John Cam Hobhouse.  These London society bucks made Shelley feel marginalised and loosened his bond with Byron still further. On 29 August, Shelley, Mary, Claire and William left Geneva for England, carrying with them the manuscripts of the third canto of
Childe Harold
, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the beginnings of
Frankenstein
, and some shorter poems by Byron.  It had, by any measure, been an astoundingly productive summer.

They arrived back at the end of the first week in September and made their way to Bath, where they settled for the winter. After a summer of poetry and good conversation, England and an English autumn proved to be rather a shock. The stormy weather which fired up Mary’s imagination that summer had a grimmer consequence in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Fanny’s account of England’s state of ‘evil’ and ‘misery’
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might have been dismissed as Fanny-ish gloom when read in a sunny garden but now they were back on English shores the accuracy of her description became apparent. The harvest had failed, food prices had risen, and there was much distress among the poor and labouring classes. Shelley was shocked by what he saw, telling Byron that ‘the whole fabric of society presents a most threatening aspect’. He was relieved to note that ‘the people appear calm, & steady even under situations of great excitement; & reform may come without revolution.’
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It is interesting to note that, again, the Shelley who wrote this held views which were distinctly more moderate than those of the Shelley of
Queen Mab
. Claire also wrote to Byron, describing the distress she and Shelley witnessed on their walks in the Bath countryside, but her letter went unanswered. Once again, Shelley, Mary and Claire were thrown together in an uncomfortable threesome. They were tied to Bath and each other by the necessity of keeping Claire’s pregnancy secret from Skinner Street, cut off from their friends and surrounded by frequent reminders of how badly the poor were suffering. Happy evenings by Lake Geneva with Byron and Polidori seemed like little more than a dream.

The ‘national distress’, and the failure of the government to alleviate it, dominated Hunt’s
Examiner
editorials in the autumn of 1816.  He called on the ‘Sinecurists’ – officials with comfortable government jobs – to lower taxes, and praised aristocrats who contributed to funds for poor relief. Like Shelley, Hunt was worried by the prospect of a revolution (‘We do not believe there is any necessity for Revolution in this country, though we are more and more of the opinion, if possible, that there is much for Reform’), but he did concede that ‘Revolutions are reckoning days with the abuses of the Great’ and that some kind of ‘reckoning’ was overdue.
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Although he deplored the state of the country, Hunt realised that national distress presented political opportunity and
The Examiner
’s strictures against corrupt and overpaid parliamentarians grew almost as loud as they had been before the imprisonment of its editor and printer.

In October Hunt made a new friend, when Charles Cowden Clarke introduced him to John Keats. Keats responded joyfully to the news that a meeting with Hunt had finally been arranged, telling Cowden Clarke ‘’t will be an era in my existence’,
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and the attraction between the two men was immediate. Keats was almost twenty-one when he met Hunt, and had just finished his medical training. In July 1816 he qualified to practice as a surgeon and physician and was admitted to the Society of Apothecaries. As his biographer Andrew Motion has noted, this was a considerable achievement in one so young.
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But qualifying brought home to Keats the tensions in his life between the professional path on which he was placed and the poetry he was tentatively beginning to write. Even while he worked towards membership of the Royal College of Surgeons he was exploring the different directions his life might take.

Hunt  – always more perceptive about the talents of others than about his own poetry – was quick to recognise Keats’s potential and to encourage him to write and develop his ideas. Keats found Hunt a cheerful, sympathetic listener who understood the difficulties facing a young poet and who, at the advanced age of thirty-two, had the experience to help him negotiate the pitfalls of the literary world. A first formal visit stretched into a series of calls and before long Keats was a frequent visitor at Hunt’s Hampstead cottage, sometimes staying for days at a time, sleeping night after night on the sofa in Hunt’s parlour. Charles Cowden Clarke recalled one evening spent in the company of both:

The occasion that recurs with the liveliest interest was one evening when . . . Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing, there, then and to time, a sonnet ‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’. No one was present but myself, and they accordingly set to. I, apart, with a book at the end of the sofa, could not avoid furtive glances every now and then at the emulants. I cannot say how long the trial lasted. I was not proposed umpire; and had no stopwatch for the occasion. The time, however, was short for such a performance, and Keats won as to time.  But the event of the after-scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement.
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Sonnet writing competitions were one way in which Hunt and Keats exchanged ideas, with Hunt recommending a poetic form he had always championed, and then praising Keats’s response to that form. He showed Keats a model for poetic endeavour in which poetry was occasional, spontaneous and celebratory and in which simultaneous composition was a tool for literary experimentation.

Huntian values permeated the poetry Keats now began to produce with increasing intensity. In his first major poem, ‘Sleep and Poetry’, Keats drew inspiration from the private world of Hunt’s cottage, as he celebrated its sounds, sights and colours. In the tiny study (‘Round about were hung/ The glorious features of the bards who sung/ In other ages’), Keats saw images of ‘fauns and satyrs taking aim/ At swelling apples’ and, in tribute to Marianne and Bess, ‘two sisters sweet/ Bending their graceful figures till they meet/ Over the trippings of a little child’.

‘Sleep and Poetry’ celebrated the transformative effect of a night spent surrounded by Hunt’s household gods: books, paintings, flowers. But it was also a statement of the importance of poetic retreat from society, and of a balance between conversation and silence. The poem ends at the point at which ‘the chimes/ Of friendly voices had just given place/ To as sweet a silence, when I ’gan retrace/ The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.’ A day spent with Hunt inspired Keats to write, but poetry could only be formulated in peace and quiet, once conversation had died away. From the very beginning of his acquaintance with Hunt, Keats explored the problematic tension between sociability and solitude, both of which had a profound influence on his early poetry. ‘Sleep and Poetry’ evokes an ideal balance between companionship and loneliness, but Keats would struggle to maintain this balance – which was crucial to his development of an independent poetic voice – as his friendship with Hunt progressed.

Within a few days of their first meeting, Keats was admitted to the inner ranks of Hunt’s circle, which at this point numbered among its members Charles Cowden Clarke, Benjamin Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds (another young poet encouraged by Hunt), William Hazlitt, the Novellos and Charles and Mary Lamb. Keats’s early delight at being part of the group is evident in his letters and poems from this period, but his presence in Hampstead was not without its problems. Days and nights spent in Hunt’s study were days and nights away from his medical training. And his presence destabilised some already fragile relationships, most notably that between Hunt and Haydon.