Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (12 page)

By the time the Byrons returned to London their marriage was falling to pieces. In the early summer of 1815 Augusta arrived in London to take up an appointment as lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, and stayed with her half-brother and sister-in-law at their ruinously expensive home in Piccadilly Terrace. The hellish scenes of the honeymoon were repeated with increasing frequency.  Annabella, who fulfilled her wifely duty by becoming pregnant immediately after her marriage, later reported that she was driven to the edge of insanity by the constant presence of both Byron and Augusta: ‘I must not . . . omit to state that my feelings were once – in London – so worked up by the continual excitement of horrible ideas . . . that in a moment when one of them became to my imagination
a fact
– I turned round to use a deadly weapon lying by – not against him, but against one whose treachery seemed at that instant revealed.’
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With tensions running so high, it is little wonder that Byron escaped with increasing frequency to Hunt’s lily-themed study. The subject of their conversations, however, cannot have helped to dampen down the feverish atmosphere at Piccadilly Terrace. Byron and Hunt met several times over the summer to talk about Hunt’s poem,
The Story of Rimini
. The poem retold the tragic romance of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, the brother and sister-in-law lovers of Canto V of the
Inferno
. On publication it was condemned for its celebration of incest, even though the relationship between its protagonists was no closer than that between Hunt and Bess.  Byron made comments on the manuscript of
Rimini
, suggested cuts, and queried some of Hunt’s more verbose expressions,
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and in return Hunt dedicated the poem to him.  Throughout their joint work on the
Rimini
manuscript, Hunt displayed a characteristic combination of condescension and neediness. At one point he thanked Byron for his suggestions and informed him that ‘I shall avail myself of the objecting ones for alteration in some instances, and if I do not do so in the greater number, you will do me justice enough to believe that it is not from mere vain rejection, but in vindication of a theory which I have got on the subject.’
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Byron was a touchy and difficult man, and it is perhaps surprising that he put up with Hunt’s manner so patiently. There were, however, rewards for doing so.  Byron had always found Hunt’s domestic ménage
fascinating. At Surrey Gaol his hostess had been either Bess or Marianne, but now both sisters were living in cramped conditions under the same roof, sharing responsibility for looking after Hunt and the children. It was no coincidence that once work on
Rimini
was complete Byron began his own celebration of incest in
Parisina
, written during the second half of 1815, and both
Rimini
and
Parisina
suggest that Hunt and Byron found the presence in their households of Bess and Augusta intellectually stimulating and erotically suggestive. One wonders what Annabella made of it all. At one point, she seized upon the manuscript of
Rimini
, which was at Piccadilly Terrace while Byron edited it, and copied out Hunt’s description of a difficult husband, perhaps to console herself with the thought that other women suffered as she did. ‘He kept no reckoning with his sweets and sours;/ He’d hold a sullen countenance for hours’
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must have read as an all too accurate description of Byron himself.

As 1815 progressed, however, the opportunities for intimate discussions in Maida Vale receded. By May, Hunt’s health was so bad he was forced to apologise to his readers for the meagre matter of
The Examiner
, and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy led to a series of gloomy editorials about the way in which the European powers had squandered their post-Waterloo chance for reform. In the autumn the Hunts moved from Maida Vale to Hampstead, and while the move had a beneficial effect on Hunt’s agoraphobia, the transition from lodgings to house did nothing to alleviate the pressing money problems which were now dominating family life. By the end of the year, Hunt’s literary and political reputation was as glorious as it ever would be. But in his private life, money, an ever-increasing family and tensions between a newly pregnant Marianne and her sister combined with his own ill health to make life out of gaol more difficult than it had been during his imprisonment.

With Claire safely in Lynmouth, and with their financial worries alleviated, Shelley and Mary were free to do as they pleased. They disappeared from London and embarked on a tour of the West Country, although their precise movements in the early summer of 1815 are not known. Shelley was unwell at one stage and as a result they certainly spent some time in London, where he sought the advice of Sir William Lawrence, an eminent physician who would become a trusted friend. Lawrence’s calm good sense exercised a beneficial influence over Shelley, who suffered from periodic and debilitating abdominal pain. Since he was predisposed to hypochondria, this made him intensely anxious. He was also experiencing consumption-like symptoms, and believed the disease would kill him. But by midsummer his health had recovered sufficiently to enable him to make plans for the future, and he began looking for a suitable home for him, Mary, and the baby due to be born at the end of the year.

In August, Shelley’s house-hunting produced a result, and he and Mary installed themselves in a rented house near Windsor. Their new home was a snug, square little building in the hamlet of Bishopsgate, at the eastern entrance to Windsor Park, and it was larger and more comfortable than the London lodgings they had shared with Claire. For the first time in their life together they had a house to themselves, and the move – and a second pregnancy – signified a new level of permanence in their relationship. A pattern of reading, writing and talking was established. Hogg visited intermittently, and there was no Claire to disturb the peace and quiet. Mary’s letters from this period do not survive, but in her biographical notes to Shelley’s poems, published in 1839, she described the ‘several months of comparative health and tranquil happiness’
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of their Bishopsgate residence.  Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock had moved to the Georgian village of Marlow, and he frequently made the long walk along the Thames to Bishopsgate, staying for several nights at a time with Shelley and Mary. In relaxed, congenial circumstances, Mary and Peacock gradually grew to like each other, a process made easier by their mutual respect for the other’s intellect.

At twenty-nine, Peacock was seven years older than Shelley, and, since their meeting in 1812, had become a close friend and adviser to the younger man. He was a poet of some repute and a brilliant – and entirely self-taught – classical scholar, who exercised a powerful influence over Shelley’s reading of Latin and Greek texts. He had no independent income, however, and was struggling to maintain both himself and his elderly mother on his literary earnings. But, like Harriet and Godwin, he was a beneficiary of Shelley’s financial negotiations with his father and, from 1815 onwards, accepted an annuity from Shelley of £120 per year to act as his agent and business adviser. The annuity enabled Peacock to establish a permanent home in Marlow and over the course of the winter Mary came to value his energy and his robust practical streak, both of which did much to stir Shelley out of melancholic brooding on his health.

Peacock persuaded Shelley to give up his diet of bread, butter, and ‘a sort of spurious lemonade’
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and to start eating meat again, which helped to improve his pallid complexion. He offered the young couple a certain level of practical protection from their creditors, as he assumed responsibility for Shelley’s financial negotiations. He was frequently sceptical about some of Shelley’s wilder ideas and he acted as a calming influence, introducing a new element of domestic equilibrium into their previously turbulent life together. And his presence brought a new level of focus to the household’s joint reading, as he directed their attention towards the classical texts he had taught himself to love. He came to realise that Mary was a more suitable partner for Shelley than Harriet, and that she contributed a great deal to his happiness. This did not alter that fact that he felt Harriet had been treated very badly, but he did concede that ‘Shelley’s second wife was intellectually better suited to him than his first.’ He also understood how important her support was to Shelley, noting ‘that a man, who lived so totally out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas, needed such an ever-present sympathy more than the general run of men.’
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The benefits of Peacock’s friendship with Shelley and Mary were reciprocal.  While he provided them with practical and moral support, they repaid him by welcoming his presence at their fireside and including him in their conversations and literary pursuits. For the first time in his life, Peacock found himself part of a circle from which he could draw both emotional and intellectual support. The fruits of this became apparent in the second half of 1815 as he finished
Headlong Hall
, the first of the satirical works which would make his name.
Headlong Hall
and the novels which followed it were comedic arguments, in which plot was made subservient to debate and dialogue.
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The conversations of this period would be played out and reworked in Peacock’s subsequent novels,
Melincourt
and
Nightmare Abbey
, both of which simultaneously celebrated and criticised the friends from whom he derived his inspiration.

Peacock opened Shelley and Mary’s eyes to the beauty of the Buckinghamshire countryside, and to the intellectual and aesthetic possibilities of Thames-side living. In his 1810 poem,
The Genius of the Thames
, he had explicitly linked the river with politically reformist ideals. The Thames was the place ‘Where peace, with freedom hand-in-hand,/ Walks forth along the sparkling strand/ And cheerful toil, and glowing health/ Proclaim a patriot nation’s wealth.’
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Such ideas were most inspiring, and they had a powerful effect on Mary’s stepbrother, Charles Clairmont, who visited Bishopsgate shortly after Shelley and Mary’s arrival there.  Charles was a pleasant twenty year old, brimming over with ideas for his future, all of which involved substantial funding from Shelley. This could be trying and Peacock took Charles off on day-long walks by the river in order to give Shelley and Mary some time alone. Charles was delighted by his new surroundings, and in mid-September the combination of his infectious enthusiasm, Peacock’s expertise and Shelley’s restless energy prompted the group to embark on a boating expedition up the Thames. They acquired a sturdy open boat which the three young men rowed in turn while Mary sat demure in the prow, admiring the shifting scenery.

As they rowed they discussed history, literature and politics with the eager conviction of the principled young. A flavour of their conversation survives in a letter Charles later wrote to Claire. He recounted a day spent wandering through the quadrangles and winding streets of Oxford, during which they visited Shelley’s old rooms at University College. Charles’s account suggests they worked themselves up into a fine frenzy about the behaviour of the university authorities: ‘We visited the very rooms where the two noted Infidels Shelley & Hogg . . . poured with the incessant & unwearied application of an Alchemyst over the artificial & natural boundaries of human knowledge; brooded over the perceptions which were the offspring of their villainous & imprudent penetration & even dared to threaten the World with the horrid & diabolical project of telling mankind to
open its eye
.’
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Charles’s images are strikingly similar to those which would appear in
Frankenstein
. Mary was evidently listening carefully, filing away snippets of conversation for future use.

After Oxford they rowed further upstream to Lechlade where, buoyed by their success, they hatched grand plans for continuing up to the source of the Thames, and then into Wales and up to the Lake District. More practical considerations prevented this: the fee for passing through the Severn Canal was £20, and the river became so shallow they were obliged to lift the boat out of the water and turn around. ‘We have all felt the good effects of this jaunt’, Charles reported, ‘but in Shelley the change is quite remarkable; he has now the ruddy healthy complexion of the autumn upon his countenance, & he is twice as fat as he used to be.’
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