Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (54 page)

*
 When Mary gave birth, on 22 February 1815, the child was described as a seven-months baby, but there is some doubt about this.  Miranda Seymour suggests that Mary and Shelley first slept together on 27 June 1814, and the baby may have been conceived then, or shortly afterwards: ‘Subsequent references by Shelley to . . . 27 June, as having been his true birthday (he was born on 4 August), suggest that this was the day on which he and Mary first made love.  The discreet north-eastern corner of St Pancras churchyard would have seemed an appropriate setting, as if Mary Wollstonecraft were presiding over their union. Her grave was conveniently shaded by willows’ (
Mary Shelley
, p.93).  Mary’s severe travel sickness during the journey to France supports this theory, as does the fact that her ‘seven-months’ baby survived its first few days, despite the fact that both the baby and Mary received only the most rudimentary medical care.

*
 Charles Shelley died of tuberculosis in 1826, aged eleven. Ianthe married a banker, Edward Esdaile, in 1837, and died in 1876. In the late 1850s she became extremely distressed by the way in which her mother’s name was being blackened by Shelley’s other descendants, and she subsequently ceased contact with her father’s family.

*
 When Elena became dangerously ill in June 1820, Shelley wrote of his distress in a letter to the Gisbornes, who were among the few people to know of her existence. ‘I suppose she will die, and leave another memory to those which already torture me’, he told them. A week later, when news arrived of the death of the baby, he wrote to them again in a similar vein: ‘My Neopolitan charge is dead. It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me were an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected with me’ (Shelley,
Letters
, II, 206, 211).

*
 So called because the meeting took place in St Peter’s Fields, in an ironic tribute to the British military victory at Waterloo.

*
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary.

^†
Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, who had deprived Shelley of his children by Harriet.

*
Reviews in the
Quarterly
were published anonymously, which made it difficult for defamed writers to defend themselves, since they had to mount counter-attacks against unknown assailants. Shelley believed the author of the
Quarterly
’s review of
The Revolt of Islam
to be Robert Southey, whom he had met in Keswick shortly after his marriage to Harriet. He believed that Southey had betrayed him by publishing details of their private conversations and wrote to him challenging him to deny his authorship. Southey duly did so, in a politely furious letter. ‘I can think of you’, this letter concluded, ‘only as of an individual whom I have known, and of whom I had once entertained high hopes – admiring his talents – giving him credit for good feelings and virtuous desires – and whom I now regard not more with condemnation than with pity’ (Shelley,
Letters
, II, 205).

*
 The name given by the English to Livorno in the first part of the nineteenth century.

*
 Robert Shout, who made plaster copies of well-known statues.

*
 atheist.

*
 ‘Wilful’ was the nickname Hunt bestowed on strong-minded Mary Novello.

*
 Hunt’s final humiliation came in 1852, when his weaknesses were cruelly immortalised by Charles Dickens in the figure of
Bleak House
’s Harold Skimpole.

*
 Even as Shelley’s reputation became more respectable, he still continued to attract the admiration of working-class writers and radicals.  Pirated editions of
Queen Mab
circulated in London from the 1820s onwards, and the poem eventually became a key text of the Chartist movement.  But this underground, subversive Shelley never attained the cultural significance of his ethereal, sentimental counterpart.

*
 Among other memorials, Jane commissioned the statue of Shelley by Edward Onslow Ford which now sits in be-domed glory at University College, Oxford. It depicts the body of the drowned Shelley washed ashore at Viareggio. Ford’s Shelley, like Louis Fournier’s before him, appears remarkably unscathed by a week under water.

Notes

Preface

Chapter One: Husbands