Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (10 page)

The fluctuations in Mary’s feelings towards Hogg are particularly well-documented in the letters she sent him at the beginning of 1815. When we try and discover the true nature of the other important relationship in this ‘Association of philosophical people’ – that between Shelley and Claire – matters become more conjectural. No letters or diaries by Claire survive from this period, and Shelley’s letters for the beginning of 1815 are scarce. As a result, the exact nature of their relationship during the early months of the year is puzzling. They evidently became close, especially after Claire put off her sulks with her old ‘Jane’ persona, and as Mary retreated to the bedroom, worn out by the strains of pregnancy and by a vegetarian diet which was probably inadequate. Mary’s diary indicates that the pair spent many hours together out and about in London, and that this was an arrangement which made her feel lonely and unhappy. Shelley evidently welcomed – perhaps needed – Claire’s attention. But for the period when Mary and Hogg were conducting their strange wooing of each other, there are few contemporary descriptions of the relationship between Shelley and Claire.

The best sources for this period are a series of unreliable letters, purportedly written by the second Mrs Godwin, but substantially redrafted by Claire in her old age, and these suggest that her chief attraction for Shelley may have been the constancy of her presence at his side and her willingness to acquiesce to his demands. The letters also suggest that she took considerable pride in his interest in her. She depicted herself in her drafts as an intellectual Cinderella, forced to toil over French and Italian texts, verses from Dante, and the histories of Edward Gibbon. She described how Shelley put a stop to her music, and required her to follow him around wherever he walked. Doing so got her into further trouble, she claimed, both with Shelley (because it left her with too little time to do her lessons properly), and with her jealous stepsister. Claire presented herself in these documents as naïve, and more than a little bit bullied by her tutor. Yet Shelley’s bullying was presented as a sign of his interest in her, which Mary resented. And, although Claire herself might have resisted this interpretation of her papers, there is an undertow of erotic tension in her depiction of Shelley as dominant teacher and herself as submissive pupil.

The question of whether or not Shelley and Claire attempted to mimic Hogg and Mary’s relationship during the early weeks of 1815 will probably always remain unresolved. A plausible argument can be made that Shelley pushed his friend and his mistress together in order to allow him to spend more time with her stepsister, but this underestimates the complexity of the philosophical and emotional issues at stake. At no stage does he appear to have actively rejected Mary in favour of Claire, and he was full of praise for his mistress in his letters to Hogg. It seems more likely that he turned to Claire briefly in search of admiration and companionship of the kind temporarily withdrawn by a housebound Mary. He would periodically turn to Claire again in the years to come, again at times when Mary, for various reasons, focused her attention elsewhere. Claire could never compete with Mary intellectually, and nor, probably, could she understand Shelley as did her stepsister, but she could accompany him on expeditions, listen to his schemes, and agree with his opinions.

For her part, Claire undoubtedly enjoyed being the object of Shelley’s focus, but the episode, and its brief intensity, complicated her relationship with him, and made her presence even more disruptive for Mary. One remark made by Claire in old age also suggests that she was more alert to the damage Shelley’s behaviour could do than the other evidence suggests. In one of the many notebooks in which he recorded his conversations with Claire, a retired American sailor called Edward Silsbee reported that Claire had told him of Mary coming into her room and ‘putting her head on her [Claire’s] pillow & crying bitterly saying Shelley wants her to sleep with Hogg – that he said Beaumont & Fletcher had one mistress.’
⁹
Claire’s memoirs were unreliable, but this anecdote has a certain ring of authenticity about it – especially when read against the rather tortured ambivalence of Mary’s letters to Hogg, and it also suggests that the costs of experiments in living were particularly high for the women involved. In the throes of a wearing first pregnancy, faced with the prospect of childbirth (and with the knowledge that her own birth had killed her mother), Mary already knew something of the physical price to be paid for free love. Faced with this realisation, and having seen her stepsister in distress, would Claire have embarked on her own precarious experiment in ideal living? It is possible that during a time of heightened emotions and insecurities Mary and Claire found themselves more in sympathy with each other than the sparse documentary record suggests.

On 22 February 1815 Mary gave birth to a girl, several weeks prematurely. Mary, Shelley reported in their diary, was ‘perfectly well & at ease’; in contrast he was ‘much agitated & exhausted’.
¹⁰
The baby defied expectations by surviving its first night, and for almost ten days Mary revelled in new motherhood. Shelley and Claire bustled about procuring a cradle and arranging more suitable lodgings; Fanny and Charles stole away to visit their new niece; and, in a conciliatory gesture, Mrs Godwin sent linen to keep the baby warm. But a few days later Mary awoke to find that her daughter – still unnamed – had died in the night. ‘A miserable day’, she wrote in her diary. Hogg was sent for, to comfort the bereaved mother and to help with arrangements for the burial. Mary was ill in the days that followed, and preoccupied by her loss. Shelley and Claire resumed their daily visits to money lenders and booksellers, and she was left alone to ‘think of my little dead baby – this is foolish I suppose yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts & do not read to divert them they always come back to the same point – that I was a mother & am so no longer.’
¹¹
 It was Fanny who came through the rain to keep her younger sister company, and who defied Godwin’s prohibition to do so.

On the surface, life settled quickly back into its usual patterns. Mary continued to stay at home while the others jaunted about town, tied down now by the lethargy of grief, rather than by an advancing pregnancy. Their days were still characterised by reading, talking, and by Shelley’s endless financial negotiations.  Hogg continued to haunt their lodgings, although he was sufficiently sensitive not to renew his sexual attentions to a grieving Mary. Mary herself now found the constant presence of Claire increasingly difficult to bear. Claire had not lost a child, and was able to continue her daily activities as cheerfully and as alluringly as ever. Before the death of her baby, Mary was able to cope with the petty trials of communal living; now her resilience was gone. The confidence she had shown in her early dealings with Shelley disappeared, and she became increasingly worried by the stability of her relationship with him and by his continuing interest in Claire.

Claire, on the other hand, was in many respects unchanged from the idealistic adolescent whom Shelley had met the previous summer. She was, if anything, more vivacious and confident, and, perhaps because of this, Mary came to view her as the symbol of all that was wrong with her life. Claire was no longer the supportive sibling, prepared to stand by her stepsister as she battled with Mrs Godwin, or eloped to France. Instead, she was a threatening presence who undermined Mary’s relationship with Shelley. If she could be got rid of, then Mary and Shelley would have time to learn how to live with each other, unhampered by emotional distractions. Godwin’s memoir of Wollstonecraft had described how their friendship had slowly matured into love, and how they came together with their eyes open, fully aware of the quirks and difficulties of character which made successful cohabitation a thing to be worked at, an ideal to be achieved. Mary knew her father’s account of her mother’s life intimately, and must have been struck at the contrast between her parents’ relationship and the messy triangle in which she found herself. If it was even remotely possible that Shelley was slipping away from her, then there was an obvious solution.  Claire had to go.

But go where? In mid-March, Mary re-opened conversations with Shelley about the possibility of finding alternative lodging for Claire. Shelley was reluctant to see her depart, although he understood Mary’s desire for privacy, and he realised that they could not continue to live as a trio indefinitely. However, Claire refused to return to Godwin’s house in Skinner Street, and so, Mary noted mournfully, ‘our house is the only remaining place’.
¹²
Even if Claire had been prepared to return home, she might not have been welcome. Fanny’s Wollstonecraft aunts – her sole blood relatives – had a long-standing agreement with Godwin that they would take Fanny on as an assistant at the school they ran in Ireland once she was old enough to leave home. But their business suffered when Godwin’s explicit memoir of their sister appeared, and they were well aware that recent events in Skinner Street could prove equally damaging to Fanny’s (and their) reputation. While the Godwins refused to acknowledge the existence of their errant daughters, Fanny’s good name might be maintained, but if Claire were to be readmitted to the family, this would suggest that her parents implicitly condoned her behaviour. In that case, Fanny’s place in Ireland would have to be forfeited, since neither of the Wollstonecraft sisters could risk any more gossip about their already scandalous name. For Fanny’s sake, both Claire and Mary had to be kept out of the family home. Since the options for Fanny’s future were already severely limited, no one could afford to jeopardise her one prospect of respectable employment.

So Claire lingered on with Mary and Shelley. As winter turned to spring Mary’s mood began to lift, and the round of daily events recorded in her diary became a little more light-hearted. With Hogg and Peacock, they spent afternoons making paper boats and sailing them, no longer on the pond at Primrose Hill, but on the wider expanses of the Serpentine. Claire and Shelley bought lottery tickets; Mary went to the British Museum with Hogg. Shelley opened up a fragile line of communication with Harriet, and a slightly more robust communication channel, established after the birth of the baby, remained open with Skinner Street. Although Godwin still refused to see any of them, the ban on Fanny and Charles visiting seems to have been quietly lifted, and they called several times in March and April. Shelley was locked in a legal dispute with his father about the arrangements for his inheritance, but despite this, and because of a new threat from the bailiffs, at the end of April he and Mary disappeared out of London, on a short excursion of their own.  They spent a few nights in an inn in Salt Hill, now a suburb of Slough. Claire was left to look after their lodgings, and Hogg was not informed of their plans.

It was the first time Mary and Shelley had spent any significant time alone together, and Mary’s correspondence with Hogg show that it made her much happier. She loved being in the country, and a few days alone with Shelley, during which they conceived a second baby, instilled in her a new confidence about the future. Her letters to Hogg suggest that the emotional turmoil of the past few months had begun to recede, and that greater security in her relationship with Shelley enabled her to respond to Hogg’s renewed declarations of affection for her with more equanimity. Signing herself ‘Runaway Dormouse’ (Dormouse because she had spent most of the winter in bed), she sketched in their activities: ‘Rain has come after a mild beautiful day but Shelley & I are going to walk . . . How delightful it is to read Poetry among green shades.’  On their final day away she wrote cheerfully of their return: ‘We shall try to get a place in the mail which comes into London about seven so you must rise early to receive the Dormouse all fresh from grubbing under the oaks.’
¹³
 Even their perennial lack of money could not disturb her happiness. Hogg was directed, rather insouciantly, to ‘send us some money as I do not think we shall have quite enough.’

In mid-May, Shelley finally reached an agreement with his father about his finances. He was given enough money to cover his debts and to permit him to settle some of Godwin’s obligations, and an annual allowance of £1,000 a year was made over to him, out of which he agreed to award Harriet a separate allowance of £200 per year. It is one of the more remarkable features of Godwin’s behaviour in the months following the elopement that he continued to demand money from Shelley even as he refused to admit either him or Mary and Claire to his house, and it is also considerably to Shelley’s credit that he continued to provide financial support in return.
¹⁴
 Financial security had manifold advantages. The threat of the bailiffs disappeared, and it became possible to pay for alternative accommodation for Claire. Since she could not return to Skinner Street, Shelley arranged for her to lodge in Lynmouth, the village where he and Harriet had stayed some years previously. On the eastern end of the North Devon coast, Lynmouth was far away enough even for Mary. Claire and Shelley spent a last day together, reported caustically by Mary. ‘S. goes out with his friend . . . S. & the lady walk out . . . S. & his friend have a last conversation.’  She had actually written ‘S. & his friend indulge in a last conversation’ but with Claire’s departure imminent was able to cross this out and make a suitably magnanimous substitution.
¹⁵
 The next day Claire was sped on her way by Shelley, who stayed out all afternoon after seeing her on to the coach. This made Mary anxious and she was relieved when he returned a little after 6 p.m.  ‘The business is finished’, she wrote.  ‘I begin a new journal with our regeneration.’
¹⁶