Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (28 page)

Baby Clara, born in Marlow the previous year, was already suffering in the August heat. She was teething and feverish, and six days on dusty Italian roads had a terrible effect on her health. By the time they reached Este she had developed dysentery and Mary was beside herself with anxiety. But when they arrived at Byron’s villa in the Euganean Hills they found that Claire was also ill with some mysterious ailment, and that Shelley, always prone to hypochondria, had made himself unwell by eating Italian cakes. Worse, Shelley appeared to think that Claire’s illness was more important than Clara’s. Claire was unwell; Clara could tag on to her aunt’s doctor’s appointments. After Mary’s arrival he departed temporarily for Venice, from where he sent her a further set of demanding instructions: ‘Claire says she is obliged to come to see the Medico whom we missed this morning, and who has appointed as the only hour at which he can be at leisure, half past eight in the morning – You must therefore arrange matters so that you should come to the
Stella d’Oro
a little before that hour – a thing only to be accomplished by setting out at half past three in the morning.’
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Mary duly made her way with Clara to Padua, where they were met by Shelley. The baby’s condition deteriorated and Shelley, now realising the urgency of the situation, rushed mother and child back into Venice, in search of more expert medical advice. As they were taken into the city on a gondola, Clara’s health worsened and Shelley deposited her and Mary in an inn while he went in search of a doctor. By the time he returned, the baby was dying in Mary’s arms. She was buried the following day.

On the day of the burial Shelley wrote to break the news to Claire, who was in Este with Allegra, William and Elise. ‘This unexpected stroke’, he told her, ‘reduced Mary to a kind of despair.’
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In the same letter he reported that Mary was now ‘better’, but this underestimated the devastating impact of her loss. Clara was the third child Mary had borne and the second to die. She attributed Clara’s death directly to Shelley’s actions and to the long journey she had made from Bagni di Lucca: a journey undertaken at his insistence for the sake of Claire and her illegitimate daughter. Moreover, Claire’s concerns were still paramount in Shelley’s mind, and after spending ten days alone with her at Este he was intensely focused on her and her problems. In a letter written just two days after Clara’s death, he assured her that Mary would do all she could to persuade Byron to let Allegra remain in their care. If Shelley did, as this suggests, ask Mary to champion her stepsister’s maternal needs just two days after the death of her own daughter, it is not surprising that he found her distant and cold in the months that followed.

Clara’s death marked the start of a period of restless, unhappy travelling for the Shelleys. From Venice, Shelley and Mary returned to Este, where they occupied themselves quietly. Shelley worked intermittently on ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and began a new project, a recasting of Aeschylus’s
Prometheus Bound
, and wrote complaining letters to Peacock which dwelt on the degraded nature of the Italians, borne down by Austrian and French rule, and on Hunt’s failure to keep up a regular correspondence. Mary copied ‘Mazeppa’ and the early cantos of
Don Juan
for Byron, a task he had asked her to take on in the hope that its mechanical nature would distract her from her grief. She also sent a subdued letter to Maria Gisborne, informing her of Clara’s death and of their plans for the winter. Since neither of the Shelleys wished to return to England, and Claire would not leave Italy while Allegra remained there, they decided to travel south, to Naples.

In November, Claire reluctantly relinquished Allegra for a second time and they began the long journey down through Italy. Their route took them to Bologna and Rome, from where Shelley sent vivid descriptions of the scenes through which they had passed to Peacock. They arrived in Naples at the beginning of December and found lodgings for the winter. Their new rooms had panoramic views over the Bay of Naples, but were nevertheless rather cramped after the Casa Bertini and Byron’s Euganean villa. Their days, briefly chronicled in Mary’s ‘journal of misfortune’, were spent reading, or on sightseeing trips to Herculaneum and Vesuvius. Claire was unwell, and was suffering after a second separation from Allegra. Elise, who travelled to Naples with them, embarked on a relationship with the Shelleys’ manservant Paolo Foggi and became pregnant. Paolo and Elise subsequently married and left the Shelleys’ service, and the manner of their parting does not appear to have been particularly friendly. Mary remained withdrawn and unhappy, and Shelley wrote a series of poems which expressed his own misery and isolation.

These verses – which included ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’ and ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’ – arose in quite different circumstances to ‘Julian and Maddalo’
and
Laon and Cythna
. They were poems prompted by misery, emotional isolation from Mary and continued separation from his friends. ‘I am one/ Whom men love not’, he wrote in ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’. He later made plans to publish some of these poems together; all his ‘saddest verses raked up into a heap’. ‘Julian and Maddalo’
was to be included in this collection. Had he done so, he would have produced a volume which encapsulated solitude and sociability as the twin sources of poetic inspiration. The short, sad poems of Este and Naples stand in striking contrast to ‘Julian and Maddalo’, shot through with memories of a day spent in the company of a friend.

Shelley’s letters to Peacock and Hunt from this period give some indication of the depth of his loneliness. He wistfully imagined his friends meeting in London, and pleaded with them to join him in Italy. He told Hunt that if he wanted to come to Italy Byron would lend them the money to pay for the journey, and stressed that Hunt should not feel awkward about accepting such an offer, though it is interesting to note that Byron’s offer of a loan of £400 or £500 was probably not enough to transport Hunt’s entire family to Italy.
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The reunion that he envisaged was to be a meeting of men, not of wives and children, an impression strengthened by his suggestion that Peacock and Hunt could travel out to Italy together.

Shelley sent Hogg fewer descriptions of Italian life than the others, but had an explanation for this seeming neglect: ‘I consider the letters I address to Peacock as nearly the same thing as a letter addressed to you, as I know you see him at certain intervals.’  Moreover, he continued, ‘I hear of you from Hunt. Do you often go there?’
²⁹
Shelley’s pleas did not have their desired effect: both Peacock and Hunt wrote regretfully that it was quite impossible for them to leave London.

There was an additional reason for unhappiness that winter. On 27 February 1819 Shelley registered the birth of a child: Elena Adelaide Shelley, born on 27 December 1818. The history of Elena Adelaide Shelley is one of the most mysterious episodes in Shelley’s biography. The facts are scarce. We know that at some point between December 1818 and February 1819 a female child was born in Naples, and that Shelley was either her father or felt in some way responsible for her welfare. We know that the child was not Mary’s, although on the birth certificate Shelley stated that he was Elena’s father and Mary was her mother. (Since Elena was left with foster parents in Naples this cannot be true.) We know that as a result of Elena’s birth Shelley was later the victim of a blackmail attempt, probably because he lied on her birth certificate, a criminal offence. That he did so suggests that he felt it was imperative that the true facts of Elena’s parentage be disguised. We also know that when Elena died aged eighteen months Shelley was deeply unhappy.
*
On 28 February, the day after Shelley had registered the birth, there was, according to Mary’s elliptical diary entry, ‘a most tremendous fuss’
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and they packed up and left Naples immediately.

We know almost nothing else about Elena Adelaide, but theories abound about her parentage and her short life. It has been suggested that Claire was Elena’s mother, and that her mysterious illness at Este was in fact the side effects of pregnancy. There is, however, no way of attesting to the accuracy of this supposition, and  – unsurprisingly – there are no written records to support it. Richard Hoppner later insinuated that Claire attempted to procure an abortion during her visits to the Medico in Padua, and if this was the case, it would explain Shelley’s overriding concern for her health when Mary, William and Clara arrived at Este. The letter in which Shelley told Claire of Clara’s death had a scratched out final line among its expressions of grief and affection: ‘All this is miserable enough – is it not?  but must be borne. – And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself.’
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There were doubtless undercurrents between Claire and Shelley which they did not wish to share with Mary.

However, if Claire did become pregnant in the course of 1818 then, in the words of Mary, she ‘had no child’.
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Mary emphatically denied that Claire had given birth to a second baby when the suggestion was put to her some years later, and she went as far as to swear the truth of her denial on the life of her sole surviving son.  Since she and Claire were sharing cramped lodgings at the time of Elena’s birth, it is impossible that Claire could have given birth without her stepsister’s knowledge. In any case, it is entirely improbable that Claire would have given birth to an illegitimate child and then abandoned it to foster parents. She was a devoted mother to Allegra, and missed her desperately. She would not have left a second child to a life of Neapolitan poverty. Likewise, she would not have aborted a child by Shelley, and Shelley would not have asked it of her. In
The Pursuit
, Richard Holmes put forward an alternative theory: namely that Elena was the child of Shelley and the nursemaid Elise. He then retracted this suggestion in a subsequent essay on the Shelleys, in which he argued it was unthinkable that Shelley would have left a child of his alone in a strange city.
³³
 There is nothing in Shelley’s papers, or in those of his contemporaries, to suggest that he had any kind of relationship with Elise.

It is possible – probable, even – that Elena was a foundling, adopted by Shelley to console Mary for the loss of Clara.
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This theory is, in many ways, the most convincing. It has the merit of fitting with what we know of Shelley’s impulsive behaviour, and of his desire for action. He had also attempted to acquire children before. In France in 1814 he tried to adopt a pretty little girl he saw on the side of the road, and in Marlow he turned the village girl Polly Rose into his pet and protégée. In Naples, Mary was bitterly unhappy and was mourning the loss of her daughter, a loss for which she held Shelley responsible. Shelley might have adopted Elena in the hope that doing so would ease Mary’s pain and give her another child to love. This theory fits the pattern of Mary’s pregnancies, which in two cases immediately followed the deaths of her children. William was born less than a year after Mary’s first baby died prematurely, and by the spring of 1819, a few months after Clara’s death, she was pregnant for a fourth time. There was clearly an element of planning in the timing of these pregnancies, as she and Shelley reacted to the loss of their children by conceiving new babies. Shelley may have wanted to speed up this process by adopting an unwanted infant. And we know that Elena’s existence provoked a heated row between Shelley and Mary: ‘fuss’ in Mary’s diary usually referred to an argument with Shelley, and the ‘fuss’ on the day after Shelley registered Elena’s birth was, apparently, ‘tremendous’.
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If Shelley presented Mary with an adopted baby girl in compensation for the loss of her daughter, then it would not have been surprising if she reacted furiously to his well-meant insensitivity.

The foundling theory accords with Shelley’s character, but it fits less well with the events as they unfolded. It is hard to see why the adoption of a foundling should have laid Shelley open to blackmail, or why it would have led him to lie on a birth certificate. It also seems unlikely that the death of an adopted baby would have caused Shelley the grief he felt when Elena died, aged eighteen months. In his 2005 biography of Shelley, James Bieri offered an alternative suggestion, based on the memoirs of Thomas Medwin.
³⁶
Medwin claimed that Shelley was propositioned by an aristocratic lady before he left London. According to him, this lady fell in love with Shelley through reading his poetry (especially
Queen Mab
), and offered herself to him in the spirit of free love. This sounds far-fetched, and Medwin is an unreliable witness, but he was sure of this story and retold it in all his accounts of Shelley’s life. It is possible that Medwin’s mysterious lady became pregnant by Shelley shortly before his departure for Italy, and that she followed him to Naples to give birth to her child. The Shelleys planned to go to Naples at the end of 1818 in advance of the event, and this was out of character.  Their Italian movements were generally more spontaneous than their Neapolitan winter. Perhaps Shelley had arranged to meet his mysterious lady (who, in the analysis presented by Bieri, may have been one of the daughters of Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury) in order to take responsibility for his illegitimate offspring. But Shelley would have had few opportunities to conduct a liaison in the spring of 1818 and none of the contemporary sources contains any hint that he embarked on such a relationship. There are also problems with making the lives of the various possible candidates for Shelley’s ‘mysterious lady’ fit the evidence of the dates. The truth about the parentage of Elena Adelaide Shelley will probably never be known, but what is clear is that her birth and tragically short life was a cause of great heartache for all concerned.