Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (34 page)

In the autumn of 1820, Claire travelled back to Livorno to stay there by herself, officially because the sea bathing was good for her, but in reality because she and Mary could no longer bear to live under the same roof. Shelley and Mary thus found themselves alone for the first time since arriving in Italy, and were forced to confront the changes which had taken place in each other and in their relationship in the intervening years. The passionate couple who dodged bailiffs and spent Sundays together in bed had disappeared, to be replaced by two sadder, older individuals, both wary of acknowledging the distance which entered their relationship following the deaths – only nine months apart –  of Clara and William. Shelley reacted by issuing invitations to Peacock, Hogg and Hunt, friends among whom he and Mary had once been happy. None of them was able to leave England.

As a result, Shelley and Mary had to content themselves with second-hand news of their friends passed on by the Gisbornes, who arrived in London at the beginning of the summer. There they visited Coleridge and Horace Smith, and spent time with the Godwins in Skinner Street, where they were taken aback by Godwin’s animosity towards Shelley and Mrs Godwin’s towards Mary. Godwin railed against Shelley’s failure to keep his promises of financial support and continually betrayed ‘his dislike of S in some shape or another’.
⁴²
His dislike of Shelley was largely motivated by the fact that Shelley refused to hand over as much of his income as Godwin felt to be his due, but both he and Mrs Godwin were intensely worried about Claire. Both of them remained in ignorance about Claire’s relationship with Byron, and for a long time they were unaware of Allegra’s existence. When they did eventually discover that Claire had produced an illegitimate child they assumed that Shelley was responsible. They also laid Fanny’s death at his door, an accusation duly recorded by Maria in her diary. ‘He supposes’, she wrote of Godwin, ‘that C[laire] had given herself up entirely to melancholy and despondence . . . Mr G told me that the three girls were all equally in love with —— and that the eldest put an end to her existence owing to the preference given to her younger sister.’
⁴³
Godwin did not share his wife’s bitterness against Mary (who, Mrs Godwin believed, was equally culpable in Claire’s downfall), but he refused to arrange for the publication of
Matilda
on the grounds of its ‘disgusting and detestable’ subject.
⁴⁴

The Gisbornes sought light relief from the bitterness of the Godwins with the Hunts. They took tea together and Maria was pleasantly surprised by Hunt’s appearance and his conversation. ‘He considers S[helley]’, she remembered, ‘as the discoverer of a pure original spring of human knowledge.’ Hunt was in good spirits that summer, and was a more than usually pleasant companion. The political columns of
The Examiner
, neglected after the establishment of
The Indicator
, leapt back into life in the middle of 1820 with a splutter of outrage at the treatment of Queen Caroline by the new monarch and his cronies in the House of Lords.

In January 1820 George III died and the Prince Regent finally became King.  His estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, travelled back to England from Italy, where she had been living in exile, to claim her throne. In order to prevent her from becoming Queen, George IV instigated divorce proceedings and brought an adultery charge against her, in a protracted trial in the House of Lords. The treatment of the Queen won her the sympathy of the British public, and reformers and radicals alike were outraged at the way the full weight of the state was being used to torment a woman whose husband had been unashamedly adulterous himself. Hunt recognised that although Queen Caroline was not a particularly impressive or attractive personage the invective directed against her by the King and his government supporters symbolised all that was corrupt and self-serving in the British political system. In a long series of
Examiner
editorials on the subject of the Queen’s trial, he poured scorn on her detractors. When the case against the Queen collapsed into farce, Hunt was suitably jubilant, both at her private triumph and at the way in which the public had been mobilised to call for change. ‘We congratulate her MAJESTY and her sex’, he proclaimed. ‘We congratulate her friends; which is another word for the whole country. We congratulate human nature. The QUEEN has triumphed.’
⁴⁵

Queen Caroline’s triumph seemed to Hunt to harbour a new phase in the progress of reform, in which the forces of corruption and ‘cant’ could be defeated by sound argument, good sense and the overwhelming force of public opinion. After the dark days of the winter of 1819–20, during which freedom of speech was drastically curtailed, Hunt and his fellow reformers seized on any indication, however slight, that the tide might be turning in their favour. The
Examiner
editorials on Queen Caroline’s trial were a rhetorical tour de force, but in the week following the trial’s culmination their cost became apparent, when a brief editorial note announced that Hunt would be taking a rest from his duties. His health was, once again, precarious, and the effort of producing two weekly newspapers was telling badly on him. He was acutely short of money, much to the disgust of John Hunt, who continued to resent the strain that his brother and sister-in-law’s haphazard impecuniousness placed on the resources of their extended family.

In the summer of 1820, in addition to the stresses of work and of providing for his ever-growing collection of offspring, Hunt accepted an additional claim on his time and money. On 23 June, John Keats moved into the Hunts’ new house, 13 Mortimer Terrace, on the borders of Hampstead and Kentish Town. On the face of it, this was rather surprising. After the death of his brother Tom from tuberculosis at the end of 1818, Keats moved away from Hunt’s orbit of influence and the two saw little of each other in the winter and spring of 1819–20. The
Peter Bell
interlude brought them briefly into contact, but thereafter Keats’s poetry –
The Eve of St Agnes
,
Hyperion
,
Lamia
, the Odes – revealed a genius and an intellectual ambition which sat uneasily with Hunt’s ephemeral work. For Keats, 1819 was characterised by periods of intense creativity and by his romance with Fanny Brawne, the daughter of his next door neighbour.

In January 1820, like his brother before him, Keats developed tuberculosis and became too ill to write. On 22 June, he suffered a massive haemorrhage, and his frantic landlady went to Hunt’s nearby house in search of help. Hunt insisted that Keats should move to Mortimer Terrace to be properly cared for, and within twenty-four hours Keats was installed in the house and had been visited by Hunt’s doctor. He remained there for several weeks, the old tensions about influence and discipleship swept away by Hunt and Marianne’s kindness. Hunt distracted him with talk of the forthcoming
Indicator
; Marianne by cutting his silhouette as he lay propped up on two chairs.  Even those of his friends who disliked his old association with Hunt conceded that he could not have received gentler or more considerate care. Meanwhile his doctors decided that his only hope for survival rested on travelling to Italy, away from the dampness of an English winter.

When Shelley heard of Keats’s illness and projected voyage to Italy he wrote immediately urging him to join them in Pisa, where, he told Marianne, ‘I shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him.’
⁴⁶
Keats was touched by Shelley’s offer, but knew too much from his medical training to believe he would be able to travel as far as Pisa. ‘If I do not take advantage of your invitation’, he replied, ‘it will be prevented by a circumstance I have very much at heart to prophesy.’
⁴⁷
On 17 September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, he boarded the
Maria Crowther
, and set sail for Italy.

Few outside Keats’s immediate circle noticed his departure from England, but Hunt, faithful as ever to his friends, made sure that the readers of
The Indicator
knew of the loss he, and the world of English letters, was suffering. ‘Ah dear friend’, he wrote, in a direct address to Keats. ‘We cannot, after all, find it in our hearts to be glad, now thou art gone away with the swallows to seek a kindlier clime.’ But, he added hopefully, ‘thou shalt return with thy friend the nightingale, and make all thy other friends as happy with thy voice as they are sorrowful to miss it. The little cage thou didst sometimes share with us, looks as deficient without thee, as thy present one may do without us.’ ‘Farewell for awhile’, he concluded. ‘Thy heart is in our fields: and thou will soon be back to rejoin it.’
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7

Travellers

By the time the
Maria Crowther
pushed out into the English Channel, Keats’s strength was fading. The voyage was appalling for all concerned. Keats and another ill female passenger had to cope with the horrors of tuberculosis – fever, sweats, coughing blood – in cramped and airless quarters. They lacked privacy and fresh provisions, and the ship was rocked by storms. Severn thought it was a wonder that Keats survived the passage, since he was tormented not only by his illness but by thoughts of the friends he knew he would never see again.

After a miserable quarantine period in Naples, Keats and Severn moved on to Rome, where Severn found a set of lodgings above the Spanish Steps. In stuffy rooms from which Keats could hear the sounds of Rome but see little of its glory, he wrote letters to his friends, including one, dated 30 November 1820, to Charles Brown. ‘’Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter’, he confessed. ‘I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.’
¹
A month after writing this Keats was confined to his bed, and both he and Severn knew that there was little they could do except wait for the end.

As Keats lived out his ‘posthumous existence’ in a hinterland between the life left behind in England and the death he knew to be inevitable, his poetry was being read with renewed interest by his friends and acquaintances in both England and Italy. Hunt, with characteristic generosity, sent letters in praise of his work, which he hoped would remind Keats of the richness of his life’s achievements. Hunt recognised that Keats had achieved a poetic greatness he could never hope to equal, and was confident that the world would come to realise the extent of his talent. ‘Tell him’, he implored Severn, ‘that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do.’
²
Keats’s final volume of poetry,
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems
, was published a few months before his death. In August 1820 he had sent a copy to Shelley, who was re-reading
Endymion
, and who thought that the new volume showed great promise. He lent
Lamia
to Claire, who read it attentively in the months that followed.  She was in no doubt about Keats’s talent, describing him in her diary as ‘the brightest promise of genius which England had seen for many days’.
³

In October 1820, Claire left Shelley and Mary in Pisa and moved to Florence, where Mrs Mason had arranged for her to stay as a paying guest in the house of Antonio Bojti, a distinguished Florentine doctor. Mrs Mason had grown fond of Claire, and was convinced, with justification, that she needed to separate herself from the Shelleys. Bojti had a German wife who taught Claire to speak German, and a bevy of small children, to whom Claire taught English in return. The Bojtis moved in elevated social circles and were willing to introduce Claire to their friends, thus allowing her to develop a group of acquaintances who had no connection with either Shelley or Mary.  Mrs Mason knew how much Claire enjoyed playing with her own daughters, Laurette and Nerina, and hoped that if Claire were installed in a house full of children she would miss Allegra a little less. Even if this did not prove to be the case, the Bojtis’ young and lively household was a suitable place for Claire to get used to the idea of living independently and earning her own living. Although she was supported in Florence by Shelley, Mrs Mason believed that life with the Bojtis would equip her with experiences which would help her forge a career as a governess.