Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (22 page)

There is something arresting about the idea that Keats accepted such a challenge and then used it to prove himself as a poet; that a moment of co-operative rivalry should have given rise to the poem in which he both asserted his independence from and acknowledged his indebtedness to his contemporaries. Writing later to his publisher, he recalled his ambitions in writing the poem:

In
Endymion
, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.
¹⁷

This image beautifully evokes the adventurous quality of
Endymion
, but the poem is as much a product of ‘tea and comfortable advice’ (or at least, of a reaction to this advice) as the result of independent exploration. Nevertheless, little was heard of Keats that summer. ‘What has become of Junkets’, Hunt wondered to Charles Cowden Clarke, using the diminutive nickname that Keats found so annoying. ‘I suppose Queen Mab has eaten him.’ When Keats did write to Hunt, however, it was to enquire rather wistfully after the activities of the circle he had left behind. ‘Does Shelley go on telling strange Stories of the Death of kings? Tell him there are strange Stories of the death of Poets – some have died before they were conceived.’
¹⁸
This letter, written from the seaside at Margate, where Keats had been joined by his brother Tom (‘I was too much in Solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought as an only resource’)
¹⁹
expresses Keats’s anxiety about his fitness to fulfil his poetic vocation: an anxiety heightened by Shelley’s visionary talent and confidence.

Albion House, the Shelleys’ new home, was a sturdy, spacious building on one of the main coaching roads out of Marlow. It had comfortably proportioned rooms, a huge drawing room and an extensive garden, and it was near the Thames and Peacock’s house. In many respects it was the home of Mary’s dreams, ‘a house with a lawn or river or lake [and] noble trees’, although it was not near ‘divine mountains’ and neither was it in ‘absentia Clariæ.’ The Hunts arrived at the beginning of April, and Shelley set about transforming the drawing room into a library, ordering crate-loads of books from his new publisher and bookseller, Charles Ollier, while Marianne refurbished two mouldering sculptures found in the building to lend the books a whiff of classical grandeur. Shelley procured a boat big enough to transport several adults and a pile of laughing children up and down the river, while Hunt set about ordering a piano so that he could accompany Claire’s singing in the evenings. Good-natured Vincent Novello organised delivery of the piano from London, and was still trying to arrange payment for his supplier years later. Other distractions were provided by Peacock, who spent much of his time at Albion House, and Hogg, who visited once the summer recess freed him from the demands of his legal profession.

In the upper reaches of Albion House Claire and Bess presided over the nursery, where William and Alba were joined by the little Hunts: Thornton, John, Mary and Swinburne. The presence of so many children helped to distract Shelley from the blow received in March when, to his surprise and dismay, he lost his custody battle with the Westbrooks. Charles and Ianthe were removed from their grandfather’s house and placed in the care of neutral guardians, and Shelley was instructed to make regular maintenance payments. He never saw either of his children by Harriet again.
*

The Hunt children had little experience of spring out of London, and while they ran wild in the garden and by the river, a pattern of daily activities slowly emerged. Claire spent her days playing with baby Alba, with whom she remained happily besotted. Marianne was suffering from the effects of yet another pregnancy, and was relieved to be free from the responsibilities of housekeeping for the first time since Hunt’s release from prison. Bess kept a watchful eye on her niece and nephews, but, when her services were not required by her sister, would slip away into the nearby countryside to study trees and flowers. Shelley, Hunt and Mary spent part of each day engaged in separate literary tasks. Hunt continued to write his
Examiner
editorials, sending them to London each week in time for publication. He drifted between house and garden, working either in Shelley’s library, among the books and sculptures, or in an outdoor study, which he described in a letter to Vincent Novello: ‘I am writing this letter, seated on a tufty mound in my friends’ garden, a little place with a rustic seat in it, shrouded and covered with trees, with a delightful field of sheep on one side, a white cottage among the leaves in a set of fields on the other, and the haymakers mowing and singing in the fields behind me.’
²⁰
Surrounded by scenes of English bucolic bliss, Hunt wrote a series of
Examiner
editorials on how the follies of an oligarchic ruling class impoverished ‘our native soil’ and offered only ‘an abundant harvest of weeds’.
²¹

Mary, meanwhile, established herself at a desk inside to correct the drafts of
Frankenstein
, a laborious, painstaking task which entailed transforming a two-volume draft into a three-volume novel, the incorporation of manuscript changes and the transcription of the entire corrected manuscript into fair copy. And Shelley embarked on a new poem: an allegorical, revolutionary epic entitled
Laon and Cythna
. He spent his working hours away from the house, drafting stanza after stanza in the garden, in a boat on the Thames, or in the woods around Marlow. Bess later recalled him returning from day-long rambles, pen and notebook in hand, ‘with his hat wreathed with briony, or wild convolvulus; his hand filled with bunches of wild-flowers plucked from the hedges as he passed.’
²²

Once work was over, the Shelleys and the Hunts joined forces for massed family outings. Transcriptions, editorials, and fragments of new verse were laid aside in favour of picnics and boating expeditions. While the children dangled their feet in the water and Mary and Hunt argued about politics, Shelley lay at the bottom of the boat with a book, his face turned up to the sunshine. But he was quite capable of joining in the fun when required, and Thornton Hunt, who was seven in 1817, later recalled his childish admiration for his father’s friend: a delightful, slightly frightening figure who was strong enough to tow a boat full of people up the Thames and who enjoyed sliding down steep banks as much as any child.
²³
Their expeditions took them to what Peacock described as ‘spots which were consecrated by the memories of Cromwell, Hampden and Milton’.
²⁴
These were places associated with seventeenth-century English republicanism, and with a historical narrative in which a corrupt monarchy was overthrown by a combination of patriotic resistance (represented by Hampden) and soaring intellectual indictment (represented by the Milton of
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
and
Eikonoklastes
). The contrast between the glorious history embedded in the Buckinghamshire countryside and the present suffering of the people who worked the land threw the need for a new moment of idealised political resistance into sharp relief. Mob rule had failed to do anything other than antagonise the government. Now, surrounded by the abject poverty of the Marlow villagers, discussion at Albion House turned to the form a new intellectual resistance, which took its inspiration from Hampden and Milton, might take.

These conversations were modulated into a long series of letters from Hunt ‘to the English People’, published in
The Examiner
between March and June 1817. In one such letter, Hunt wrote confidently that ‘the Corruptionists are certainly in a bad way, notwithstanding their apparent victories now and then, military and civil. They find that they cannot make people forget the broken promises of the Allies, or give up their right to a Reform in Parliament, or turn traitors to the advancing cause of philosophy and justice; and all this seems to deprive them of the little wits they possess.’
²⁵
 The suffering of the rural poor provoked Shelley to organise schemes for their relief. Blankets were distributed from Albion House, and Shelley took upon himself the education of a village girl called Polly Rose, who remembered her eccentric tutor arriving back from rambles with foliage in his hair.

In the evenings, once poor relief had been distributed, children put to bed and the boat put away, Shelley, Mary, Hunt, Marianne, Bess, Claire and Peacock would gather in the library for music and conversation. Marianne cut silhouettes of the others, an intricate procedure involving the rigging up of candles to cast a shadow and concentrated stillness from the sitter. They took turns to read aloud, and discussed the progress of the day’s work – Mary’s
Frankenstein
corrections, the subject of Hunt’s next
Examiner
column. They planned future expeditions and read and dissected the newspapers from London. The variety of indoor and outdoor spaces at Albion House served Shelley and Hunt well, and allowed them to replicate the separate habits of previous friendships. Hunt could remain ensconced in the house or in the intimate corners of the flowery garden, in spaces which allowed him to talk and write in stationary calm. Shelley, in contrast, could talk, read and battle out ideas with Mary and the others in woods and on water. In the evening the entire party could retire to the library, where they re-enacted the musical scenes of the Novellos’ sitting room. Like Geneva, Hampstead and Bishopsgate before it, Marlow was transformed by Shelley, Hunt and Mary into a site of co-operative creativity.

The combination of people and place resulted in an intensely productive summer. Mary finished work on
Frankenstein
in May, a mere nine months after the novel’s ghostly conception at the Villa Diodati. She immediately embarked on a new work, her
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
, a compilation of letters and poetry, written by both her and Shelley, describing their travels through Europe in 1814 and 1816. Hunt sent column after column to the
Examiner
offices and embarked on ‘The Nymphs’, a long poem of his own. Shelley and Peacock pursued a study of Greek poetry and philosophy which built on their conversations and shared reading in Bishopsgate in 1815. The effect of this study on Peacock’s thinking was most evident in
Rhododaphne
, a poem in seven cantos (described by Shelley in an unpublished review as ‘Greek and Pagan’) written during the spring and summer of 1817 and subsequently transcribed by Mary.
²⁶
Once
Rhododaphne
was completed, Peacock began putting together ideas for a new novel, which would synthesise the conversations and characters of Albion House with a critique of the philosophy of Coleridge and the Lake poets to glorious effect. This novel – published in the autumn of 1818 as
Nightmare Abbey
– was a comic masterpiece, and it pleased Shelley greatly, despite the fact that he was lampooned in the figure of Scythrop, a melancholic dreamer hopelessly caught between two women. Stella, one of
Nightmare Abbey
’s two heroines, is herself a complicated amalgam of Mary and Claire, and the pronouncements of the cheerful Mr Hilary, who is the living embodiment of his philosophy that ‘a happy disposition finds materials of enjoyment everywhere’, are benign pastiches of similar pronouncements by Hunt.
²⁷

Peacock later remembered the summer of 1817 with particular affection and as one of the most companionable periods of the Shelleys’ residence in England. It brought with it its own disappointments though: he fell in love with Claire, and wanted to marry her. She was too absorbed in Alba and her hopes for a reconciliation with Byron to be interested in Shelley’s academic, cerebral friend.

While Mary turned
Frankenstein
into a printer’s draft, Hunt wrote political columns and Peacock produced
Rhododaphne
, Shelley turned his attention to
Laon and Cythna
, his first major poem since
Alastor
. Even in a highly productive household, in which two other writers were working on long poems, the scale of
Laon and Cythna
was in itself a significant achievement: Shelley wrote almost 5,000 lines of poetry between March and October. The idea of writing a long poem on the subject of revolution probably first occurred to him during conversations with Byron in Geneva in 1816, although his original suggestion was that Byron should be the one to write it.
²⁸
Byron showed little interest in doing so, however, and in the spring of 1817 Shelley embarked on the ambitious project. The evening conversations at Albion House – about parliamentary reform, political unrest and Cromwellian republicanism – all found their way into
Laon and Cythna
’s complex revolutionary allegory. As had happened to Hunt in Surrey Gaol, Mary in Geneva and Shelley himself in Bishopsgate, the presence of friends inspired him to new heights of creativity. Like
Frankenstein
and
Alastor
,
Laon and Cythna
was proof that great literature did not have to be the work of isolated genius; that it could also be inspired by conversation and friendship.