Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives
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Authors: Daisy Hay
Young Romantics
The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives
Daisy Hay
In memory of
Anne Mackenzie-Stuart
and for
Matthew
‘The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn’
– John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 8 October 1817
Contents
This book has a large cast of characters, some of whom share surnames, and several of whom share first names. Applying consistent naming conventions therefore presents certain practical and ideological challenges. In order to overcome these I have used the names most frequently used by the group themselves. Throughout, Percy Bysshe Shelley is referred to as ‘Shelley’, the name used by his mistress and his friends from 1814 onwards. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is referred to as ‘Mary’, the name by which she was universally known. More generally, following the conventions adopted in the group’s letters and diaries, men are referred to by their surnames and women by their Christian names. In certain isolated cases the group themselves do not conform to this convention, and in these instances I have adopted their most frequently used alternatives.
The original spelling and punctuation of manuscript material has been retained, and mistakes and inconsistencies have been left uncorrected and unmarked by [
sic
], unless otherwise stated. Quotations from published primary sources follow the editorial conventions of particular volumes, which in most cases refrain from silent correction.
The Protestant cemetery in Rome stands at a distance from the grand sites of the rest of the city, just outside its old fortifications. To reach it on foot you have to trek along a road up past the Baths of Caracalla, through dusty and distinctly unlovely suburbs. I discovered this on the penultimate day of my honeymoon, as I marched my very new husband across Rome in the afternoon heat. We had been married for two weeks, but he already had good reason to think himself long-suffering, since although I had proposed the expedition to the cemetery, I had only a hazy idea about its location and had neglected to consult the scale on the map in our guidebook. While he gallantly agreed to my proposal, my husband was unconvinced about spending the little time we had left in Rome searching for the graves of long dead poets. The poets in question, however, were something of an obsession for me. They were the subjects of the PhD I had almost completed, and the book I was neglecting my PhD to research and write. They had become part of our lives, and their stories part of our story. Visiting their graves therefore seemed – at least to me – a strangely appropriate way to mark the beginning of our marriage.
I had read descriptions of the cemetery many times, and thought I knew what to expect. I knew that it wasn’t really a Protestant cemetery at all, but historically the only spot in the city in which non-Catholics could be interred and that as a result Percy Shelley and John Keats, whose graves we were going to see, were buried alongside some illustrious Orthodox Christians, Jews and atheists. I knew that Keats lay in the old burying ground and Shelley, who died two years later, in its western extension. But this did not prepare me for the contrast between the traffic-blocked surrounding streets and the sudden, green calm of the cemetery. I did not expect to feel so moved by this tranquil world of overgrown paths, haphazardly arranged graves and indolent stray cats, who lay sunning themselves at the base of the Pyramid of Cestius.
There was a further surprise in store. I had read that Shelley was buried next to his friend Edward John Trelawny, an adventurer who arrived in Italy during the last year of the poet’s life. I knew that Keats too had a graveside companion, Joseph Severn, who accompanied him to Rome and nursed him through his final illness. But I did not anticipate the emotional impact of seeing Shelley and Keats – both, in their different ways, icons of solitary genius – buried next to their friends, alongside men who were content to stand in their shadows. Even my sceptical husband found himself moved by the shared burial sites. When we returned to England two days later, memories of our visit spurred me onwards to finish my PhD and to complete the biography that had been illicitly germinating alongside my academic work for years.
This is not a biography of a particular person, nor does it tell the story of a tightly coherent group of individuals. Instead, it explores the interlinked lives of a group of writers, all of whom were characterised by their youth, by their idealism, and by a particularly passionate engagement with politics, art, and the romance of intellectual adventure. The stories of these writers have been told many times before, but in a way that downplays the significance of relationships in the shaping of individual lives and a Romantic conception of creativity. This is largely because the work of the most famous of these writers – Shelley, Keats and Byron – frequently depicts both poet and poetic hero as isolated figures. In so doing, it exemplifies many of the qualities which have come to define the British Romantic movement. In different ways, the poetry of all three asserts the supremacy of feelings and the imagination, attaches much significance to an intuitive, visionary conception of nature, and presents artistic endeavour as an inherently solitary activity. This book looks beyond the image of the isolated poet in order to restore relationships to the centre of the Romantic story.
In common with other young writers whose lives were linked with theirs, Shelley, Keats and Byron were indebted to an earlier trio of Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, whose work marked a striking break with the rational, Augustan poetry of the early eighteenth century. This break had a profound effect on literary culture in the decades following the French Revolution. Unlike Blake, whose work remained largely unread for decades after his death, Wordsworth and Coleridge were famous in their own time. Contemporaries of both poets were startled by the distinctiveness of their work, and by the new school of poetic thought they represented. Their example was both inspiring and troubling for the poets who followed them. The poetry of Shelley, Keats and Byron shared many of the concerns and ideas of their Romantic forebears, but it also demonstrated striking differences in outlook and opinion. This was in part the result of a significant generational gap between the two groups. Wordsworth and Coleridge started writing poetry in the 1790s, and their manifesto,
Lyrical Ballads
, was first published in 1798, when Byron, Shelley and Keats were aged ten, six and three respectively. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge would outlive the three younger poets and keep writing poetry and prose right through the period in which this book is set, their work was shaped by a different set of preoccupations and historical conditions to those that influenced their younger contemporaries. The first generation of Romantic poets were students of the French Revolution, an event which shaped all the poetry they subsequently wrote. Shelley, Keats and Byron, in contrast, produced their mature work in an intellectual landscape shaped by Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
This was a landscape of reaction and repression. As the inevitability of Napoleon’s fall became apparent, the victorious powers – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – met in Congress at Vienna to decide how to divide up Europe. Across the continent, imperial monarchies regained control of peoples and territory. Austria took back its Italian city states, Russia was given Poland, and the Bourbons were restored to the French throne. For liberals and reformers throughout Europe this represented the final failure of the French Revolution: a revolution that had promised so much – representative government, the end of aristocratic rule – and delivered so little.
In Britain the end of a two-decade long war resulted in unprecedented problems of mass unemployment, as demobilised soldiers flooded the labour market. This coincided with the introduction of the Corn Laws, protectionist measures that kept the price of bread artificially high and provoked outrage among the growing ranks of urban poor. The result was a resurgence of a kind of popular political agitation not seen in Britain since the 1790s. Crowds gathered in huge outdoor meetings to demand the reform of Parliament and universal manhood suffrage, and the radical press grew in both size and power. Fear was fuelled by the activities of a small group of underground agitators who were committed to achieving revolution by violent means. One group of plotters attempted to take control of the Tower of London and the Bank of England; another planned to assassinate the entire cabinet in one fell stroke. The prospect of a revolution in Britain seemed very real.