Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (4 page)

Pray Phoebus at length our political malice

May not get us lodgings within the same palace!
¹⁰

Byron was intrigued by Hunt, and he broadly agreed with the aims of
The Examiner
.
While it might be surprising to find a peer of the realm sympathetic to a publication which campaigned against the injustices perpetrated by the House of Lords, Byron was no ordinary aristocrat. He was born in 1788, to Captain John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron and his wife Catherine Gordon. He hardly knew his father, an infamous Regency rake who abandoned his wife and son in 1790 and died in 1791. His childhood was dominated by the women who brought him up: his mother, who inculcated a sense of aristocratic entitlement in her son, and his nurse, whose Calvinist preachings had a profound effect on her imaginative charge. He was born with a deformed foot and the combination of painful treatments and his pronounced limp separated him from other boys and made him vulnerable to bullies. As a result he quickly learnt to defend himself and later recalled childhood fights from which he would emerge triumphantly proclaiming the family’s motto: ‘Crede Byron’.
¹¹
 His life changed dramatically in 1798 when his grandfather died and, aged ten, he became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale. On his elevation to the peerage, Byron moved with his mother to Newstead Abbey (his family’s dilapidated ancestral seat) and then to London, from where he proceeded first to Harrow and then to Cambridge, where he made friends with a motley collection of young society roués. At Harrow he began a correspondence with his half-sister Augusta, the daughter of Mad Jack Byron and his first wife, Amelia D’Arcy.

By 1808, the year in which
The Examiner
was founded, twenty year old Byron had come down from Cambridge and was living in London, writing poetry and wining and dining with friends. These included John Cam Hobhouse, who would go on to a notable parliamentary career, Scrope Davis, a dandy and gambler, and Charles Skinner Matthews, who would drown himself in the Cam, tortured by his sexuality in one of the most repressively homophobic decades of the nineteenth century. Byron’s first volume of poetry,
Hours of Idleness
, was published in 1807 when he was nineteen, and his second,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
(which appeared in 1809), was an incendiary attack on the literary and political establishment. The reaction to the poem was furious and it was savaged in both Whig and Tory journals.  He spent much of 1810 and 1811 abroad, visiting southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, which would provide the backdrop for his Eastern Tales –
The Giaour
,
The Bride of Abydos
and
The Corsair
–
and for the early cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
.

The first two cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
were published in 1812, and they sold out within a few days. Byron suddenly found himself the darling of the Regency drawing room: a star guest at parties, whose fads and fashions were copied by crowds of admirers. He was drawn into the ‘Holland House’ set, the aristocratic circle surrounding the Whig leader Lord Holland, under whose aegis he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords. One younger member of the Holland House set, Lady Caroline Lamb, was particularly charmed by Byron and embarked on a determined pursuit of him, which resulted in a brief liaison. It was Lady Caroline who labelled Byron ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, although this is a phrase which could more accurately be applied to Caroline herself.  The affair quickly cooled but Caroline’s ardour for Byron did not. Lady Melbourne, Caroline’s mother-in-law and Byron’s confidante, suggested that her niece Annabella Milbanke might make him a suitable bride. In 1813, he started a correspondence with Annabella, and with the approval of Lady Melbourne made an offer of marriage which Annabella promptly refused. But the correspondence continued intermittently throughout 1813 and 1814 in a kind of shadow fencing match, with both parties simultaneously attracted and repelled by the perplexities of the other.

Early in 1813, Byron rediscovered an old acquaintance. Some years earlier his half-sister Augusta had married George Leigh, an impecunious and unsatisfactory army officer. When Augusta and Byron met again, after many years with little contact, the attraction was immediate. Their letters from this period make clear the strength of the affection between them and there seems little doubt that in the course of 1813 this developed into a sexual relationship.
*
When he first went to visit Hunt in Surrey Gaol, Byron was thus on the one hand conducting a strange epistolary romance with his putative bride, an ice maiden whom he would nickname (in ironic tribute to her mathematical abilities) the ‘princess of parallelograms’, and on the other becoming ever more entangled in a torturous affair with his half-sister.

According to the poet Thomas Moore, who introduced Byron to Hunt and accompanied him on his early visits to Surrey Gaol, Byron was initially unsettled to find himself dining among Hunt’s friends, rather than as the honoured guest of a suffering writer. This faltering start notwithstanding, Byron and Hunt’s acquaintance developed into friendship over the two years of Hunt’s imprisonment.  Hunt, a little starstruck, was flattered by the attentions of an aristocrat and celebrated poet. It reinforced his sense that he was suffering for a noble cause, and that he was supported by all right-thinking members of society. Indeed, Byron’s visits bolstered Hunt’s streak of vanity. He began to have thoughts of reforming him and told Marianne that he believed he could be of some use to the young peer. ‘He is a young man (24) evidently full, by his writings, of good natural feelings & a fine improvable sensibility, but led away, I am told, by a town life.’
¹²
Despite the fact that Byron, at twenty-five (not twenty-four as Hunt thought), was only three years younger than Hunt, the older man viewed the younger as a potential protégé, whose character he could help to form. But although Hunt’s attitude towards Byron was patronising, his analysis of his contradictory character was astute. Byron was capable of behaving appallingly, of being selfish, vain and egotistical. He was also uncomfortably aware of his own failings, which led him to assert his own importance and sometimes into vicious comment about his adversaries. But he could be generous in his estimation of others and had a talent for making and keeping friends.

For his part, Byron was forbearing in the face of Hunt’s reforming zeal and had considerable respect for him. Much later he would complain that Hunt had been ‘conceited into a martyr’ by Surrey Gaol
¹³
but in the months following their first meeting he was determinedly generous. There was something about Hunt ‘not exactly of the present age’, he wrote in his diary at the end of 1813, before remarking that ‘he is, perhaps, a little opinionated, as all men who are the
centre
of
circles
, wide or narrow.’
¹⁴
Byron found much to admire in Hunt, and was perhaps even a little envious: it was hard to avoid the fact that the individuals who gathered around Hunt did so out of real friendship, rather than a fascination with celebrity which brought crowds to the Regency parties at which Byron made an appearance. But Byron was not blinded by the glamour of ‘the wit in the dungeon’, and he was, in his turn, astute about his new friend. Hunt could be vain, egotistical, sanctimonious and naïve; and his own letters bear witness to the fact that he rather enjoyed his position as sufferer-in-chief for free speech and reform. But he was also exceptionally brave. He refused to trade his sentence for the promise of future silence (an opportunity spurned by John Hunt as well); insisted on paying his own fine of £500, despite an offer by a repentant juror from his trial to pay it for him; and faced the horrors of incarceration in a hanging gaol with cheerfulness.

By April 1813, the living quarters provided for Hunt’s family at Surrey Gaol were proving unsatisfactory. Two year old Thornton was a frail child, and his health declined quickly in the damp prison. Torn between the needs of her husband and son, Marianne decided that Thornton was in more danger than his father. Hunt and Marianne agreed that Thornton and baby John should be removed from prison while Thornton’s health recovered, and Marianne took them to Brighton, where they stayed for much of 1813.

In her absence, Marianne’s younger sister Elizabeth, now twenty-three years old, moved into the family’s prison quarters to look after Hunt. Elizabeth, universally known as Bess, lived with Hunt at Surrey Gaol for much of 1813, making his tea, writing letters for him, helping him with his
Examiner
column, and presiding over his dinner parties. It was Bess who chased his friends out when he needed to work, who kept him writing when he was about to miss a publication deadline, who made sure he only wrote letters to his friends when he had time, and who read him to sleep when insomnia struck. It was Bess, the more intellectual of the sisters, who watched Hunt’s weekly engagement with the world unfold in
The Examiner
, and who talked domestic and international politics with Hunt and his friends. While Marianne looked after two small children in a Brighton boarding house, Bess spent long, intimate days with her brother-in-law, talking, writing and entertaining.

Bess Kent is an enigmatic figure. We know she wrote voluminous letters, in which she laid her heart bare, but few have survived. We know that she wrote at least three books – two about flowers and trees and one for children, and that she planned to write another – but we know little about how she conducted her research, or how long these books took her to write. In the late 1810s and early 1820s she attempted to wean herself off opium, but there is little to indicate when she first developed this addiction. She made at least one suicide attempt and threatened to make others, but the circumstances surrounding them are a matter of conjecture. Several of her contemporaries commented on her appalling temper but only shadowy images of her survive. These suggest a woman of fierce intellect, who was more than capable of conducting business negotiations on behalf of her brother-in-law; a woman subject to ungovernable rages which made her periodically impossible to live with; and a woman with an immense capacity for affection, who looked after her sister’s family devotedly.

This devotion to members of her family by Bess was repaid by a singularly enlightened attitude to her temper. Some indication of this appears in a letter dating from 1830, written by her half-sister Nancy to Marianne. Nancy describes her attempts to find new lodgings following the death of their mother. She recounts how Bess has insulted an old family friend, rejected all lodgings found, and ‘as plainly as possible gave me to understand that she only wanted a convenient opportunity of destroying herself.’
¹⁵
Bess has made her stepfather Rowland Hunter furious, has had an irrevocable row with Hunt (Nancy wonders whether the suicide threats are an attempt to recapture his attention), and is making life miserable for all her family. Yet Nancy reproaches herself for her inability to be patient with her elder sister, and notes, in real perplexity, ‘she is a very strange person. Sometimes when she is angry with me . . . [she] looks at me with an expression of malignity, that seems as if I were an object of actual hatred to her, and at others, she laughs and talks, and behaves . . . as one sister should to another.’
¹⁶
Nancy’s letter was written some years after Bess’s residence with the Hunts and postdates the period when Bess and Hunt were living together in Surrey Gaol by almost twenty years. But it does suggest that Bess suffered throughout her life from some form of manic depression. Nancy’s letter is notable because, even without much understanding about the nature of depression, and without any diagnosis of a medical problem, it suggests that Bess’s family understood that she somehow could not be held accountable for her phases of virulent nastiness.

The Bess of Surrey Gaol, however, was not going through one of her more destructive phases. She knew Hunt needed her, and this knowledge gave her the confidence to run his rooms like the hostess of a literary salon. She appears in Hunt’s letters as a merry presence; and she was an object of some fascination to his friends. Most of them liked her, although some were made uneasy by her affectionate relationship with her brother-in-law. The painter Benjamin Haydon, for example, came to think that Hunt’s ‘smuggering fondness’
¹⁷
for her was positively disgusting, and was appalled by the public symptoms of their physical intimacy – an arm round a waist, heads too close together, a glance held for too long. Byron, in contrast, liked Bess and was charmed by her admiration for him. He found the sight of her and Hunt together arresting, and might have seen in their relationship a paradigm for an alternative kind of domesticity, where one lived in harmony with a woman to whom one was a little too closely related for comfort. Visiting Surrey Gaol had other advantages for Byron, not least that it provided an escape from the competing demands of Annabella and Augusta. It was a relief, once in a while, to slip away from society hostesses to sit with Hunt and Bess among the books and flowers, lapping up their admiration for his poetry, which they combined with a refreshing lack of interest in his rank.