Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (2 page)

Against this backdrop, poetry took on a new significance, as young, idealistic poets looked for ways to express their views about the plight of the people. Literary journals were quick to condemn works which ran counter to their opinions, or to praise poets whose work supported their viewpoint.  Thus, in the hands of the younger generation of Romantic writers and their readers, poetry was transformed into a political weapon. Like William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft before them, this new generation turned to their art in order to proclaim both their independence and the depth of their political resistance.

Lord Liverpool’s Tory Government responded to public unrest and eloquent literary opposition with a series of repressive bills which placed limits on free speech and movement and which were designed to stamp out radical publications. Habeas Corpus was periodically suspended and prosecutions for libel increased dramatically between 1817 and 1822. The Whigs were unable to mount successful challenges to this barrage of legislation, and instead became hand-wringing observers, prepared neither to ally themselves with those calling for reform, nor with an unpopular administration. Faced with such a weak parliamentary opposition, a number of liberal journalists stepped into the political vacuum to hold the government to account in the pages of the popular press.

Chief among these was the editor of
The Examiner
,
Leigh Hunt, who stands at the centre of the circle of talented men and women this book explores. Over the course of the 1810s, Hunt’s sphere of influence expanded, as first Byron and then Keats and Shelley gravitated towards him and, in the process, brought their own friends and relations into his orbit. It was Keats who articulated most eloquently the complexity of the group in which he found himself when he compared its chains of allegiance to a ‘web . . . of mingled yarn’, an analogy borrowed from
All’s Well That Ends Well
. Shakespeare uses the metaphor to explore a series of delicate moral balances – ‘The web of our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill together’
¹
– but, in a different context, the image aptly describes the fragile yet powerful network which drew Shelley, Keats and Byron towards each other.

Writing about Shelley, Keats and Byron as figures in a web of social and intellectual allegiance is, at one level, counter-intuitive. Although, in the words of the literary critic Jeffrey Cox, ‘we no longer necessarily view the romantic poet as the solitary singer declaiming alone on the mountain-top or sitting in isolation, pondering a bird’s song’,
²
the myth of the isolated artist has had profound cultural significance over the past two centuries.
³
In the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth described poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ which ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’
⁴
and, in a single sentence, he pointed to a significant shift in the conception of the source of poetic inspiration. Shelley later extended and complicated Wordsworth’s argument in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’, when he suggested that ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed.’
⁵
No more would the poet be inspired purely by God or his muse (as in Milton, invoking the aid of the Heavenly Muse to aid his ‘adventurous song’).
⁶
Instead inspiration would stem from the soul of the individual.

Such statements about the source of inspiration transformed the way we think about creativity and genius. Creativity was repositioned as something internal and personal, and poetry – despite its political significance – as the product of an individual’s communion with his own mind. The artist became an isolated figure, striving alone to create works of genius. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the lives of Shelley, Keats and Byron were recorded in a series of biographies which took their inspiration from this idea. These were largely respectable, semi-hagiographic accounts of noble lives, lived out without much recourse to friends and family. While the history of biography is far from straightforward, and this model of biographical writing was pioneered earlier, it nevertheless owed much to a Victorian emphasis on individualism that derived in part from the Romantic period.
⁷
This emphasis, which led to the celebration of an idealised image of the individual as hero of his own life in single-subject, cradle-to-grave biographies, had a lasting effect on the genre.

Single-subject biographies can make for gripping, stimulating reading, and – especially in the hands of the great biographers who reinvigorated the genre in the final decades of the twentieth century – they present vividly contextualised portraits rich in detail, depth and colour. However, as the literary critic John Worthen has noted, while ‘we write biographies of individuals as islands . . . we live as part of the main’.
⁸
 Living as part of the main was particularly important for Shelley, Keats and Byron, who, as they became friends with Hunt, became part of a group in which friendship was politically and philosophically significant. It is therefore ironic that their work should have helped to shape a conception of creative genius which downplays the interconnectedness of human existence.

This book is about a web of lives, within which friendships fade, allegiances shift, and nothing remains static for very long.  The young Romantics were, in many respects, divided, but they were also united by  their oppositional politics, by the depth of their convictions, and by their youth. (At the time this story begins Leigh Hunt, the oldest of the group’s central figures, was twenty-eight, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the youngest, was fifteen.) They did not speak with one voice. But they
talked
to each other, in a conversation which transcended divisions of class and gender. They loved and hated each other. They were joined by shared ideals, but also by romance, sex and blood. They were friends, but they were also husbands, wives, brothers and sisters. Towards each other they were variously self-sacrificing, jealous, sympathetic, competitive, kind and cruel. The story of their tangled communal existence is, in many ways, as dramatic and as surprising as anything they ever wrote. It also sheds light on the creation of some of the most powerful writing in the English language.

PART ONE

Creating a Coterie

1

Husbands

On 3 February, 1813, Leigh Hunt began a two year prison sentence at Surrey Gaol in Horsemonger Lane, London.  His crime was libel; his victim the Prince Regent.  It was, by any standards, a harsh punishment, but Leigh Hunt was determined to bear imprisonment and separation from his family with fortitude. ‘I must feel like a brother, a father and a husband, but I can still act like a man’, he wrote. ‘I have friends above price; I have done my duty; I am an Englishman setting an example to my children and my country; and it would be hard, under all these circumstances, if I could not suffer any extremity rather than disgrace myself by effeminate lamentation or worse compromise.’
¹

Surrey Gaol was nestled among the narrow streets of modern-day Southwark.  It was one of the largest prisons in England and, like other county gaols, held a mixture of common criminals and debtors, who lived in and around the prison with their families. Its governor, Mr Ives, ran his establishment as a flourishing business, charging prisoners fees for ale, the services of prostitutes, the removal of chains, and even for release on acquittal by a court. Visitors formed an essential part of the prison economy, bringing the incarcerated food and money to pay fees as well as small home comforts – bedding, warm clothes – which made life inside more bearable.

A prisoner like twenty-eight year old Leigh Hunt offered the prospect of rich pickings for Ives and his staff. It was not uncommon for gentleman prisoners (largely white-collar criminals, guilty of offences such as libel, sedition and fraud) to serve out their sentences as guests of their gaoler, paying high rents to be accommodated in the master’s house. Ives greeted his newest inmate with profuse expressions of pity and immediately offered him rooms in his own apartments. Hunt rejected this offer, on two grounds: he could not afford Ives’s extortionate rent, and he objected to the gaoler’s unctuous expressions of sympathy, which were as insincere as they were fulsome. As a result, he was allocated a cell previously occupied by Colonel Despard, an Anglo-Irish rebel found guilty of high treason, who had been executed on the roof of Surrey Gaol in 1803.

It was not a promising beginning to his sentence, and Hunt’s first few days in gaol were dreadful. It was the sounds of prison life which distressed him the most: the noise of  ‘felons’ chains, mixed with . . . horrid execrations or despairing laughter’
²
was worse than the sight of the felons themselves, and the scraping of cell keys turning in locks represented ‘a malignant insult’ to Hunt’s ‘love of liberty’.
³
 A prison guard took him to see a woman about to be hanged for murdering her illegitimate baby, and Hunt was appalled that the gallows on which the woman was to be executed were ‘brought out within her hearing’.
⁴
He was also revolted by the voyeuristic whisperings of the guard, and chastised him roundly for his behaviour. Ives and his staff soon learnt that Hunt was not a man to condone cruel or dismissive remarks about his fellow prisoners.

Hunt’s brave talk boosted his morale but it did little for his health, which began to deteriorate under the strain of such an environment.  Sympathetic members of the prison’s board of magistrates agreed that, on health grounds, his bleak living conditions should be improved. His family were permitted to join him and two rooms were adapted for them in the old prison infirmary. The news that he was to be given a space of his own in which he could live with his wife and children spurred Hunt into action. The tradesmen who traipsed in and out of the prison selling their wares to its unfortunate inmates were joined by a team of decorators, who set about transforming the infirmary into accommodation fit for a gentleman.

Six weeks after the beginning of his sentence, Hunt was ready to receive visitors. His friends made their way through the dirty Southwark streets and the prison’s dark corridors to find him settled in a riot of colour and comfort.  He sat in splendidly appointed rooms, a fairy-tale king holding court in a bower of his own creation:

I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling coloured with clouds and sky; the barred windows were screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up with their busts, and flowers and a piano-forte made their appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side of the water.
⁵

Friends and admirers flocked to see him, some out of curiosity, but many more out of genuine affection. His cell became an unlikely literary salon, and a refuge – for both the prisoner and his visitors – from the cares of the world.  Tradesmen brought good food and wine; special dinners were ordered, and Hunt and his companions talked late into the night until Ives or his underlings came to escort them off the premises. Hunt spent the hours between visits reading, writing, and landscaping his garden, a small patch of outside space attached to the old infirmary, which he made private with green palings and a trellis. He created flowerbeds around its edges, in which he planted flowers and saplings, and had the centre of his garden covered with grass turf. Here he walked with his young nephews and his son and played at battledore and shuttlecock with Jeremy Bentham, one of his more sporty visitors.

Leigh Hunt’s name does not excite much attention today.
⁶
 One of the reasons for this is that his best work was his most ephemeral: unlike his more famous friends he was not first and foremost a poet, but a campaigning journalist. He spent his youth cocooned in the bosom of his family, the adored, delicate youngest child of Isaac Hunt, a loyalist refugee from Philadelphia, and his wife Mary. His ancestors on his father’s side were West Indian, and throughout his life his enemies would seize upon this, commenting in sly asides on his swarthy complexion, dark hair and thick lips. Isaac Hunt was a charismatic spendthrift, and some of Hunt’s earliest memories were of the rooms at the King’s Bench Prison where the family lived after Isaac was imprisoned for debt.  He spent his schooldays at Christ’s Hospital, then an unforgiving institution standing in the shadows of Newgate prison. In 1801, when Hunt was sixteen, his fond father arranged for the publication of his
Juvenilia
, funded by a group of eminent subscribers who supported Isaac because of his loyalist connections. It was most unusual to publish an author’s
Juvenilia
before he had established himself as a significant literary voice, and the volume was a sign of Isaac’s remarkable confidence in his son’s abilities.