Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (31 page)

Shelley and Hunt never had a frank exchange about Hunt’s failure to publish ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, but it is easy to see why each man felt injured by the actions of the other. From Hunt’s perspective, Shelley, safely beyond the reach of English law in Italy, had asked him to risk his livelihood and his liberty just when the laws on libel had been tightened considerably. Had ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ appeared in either
The Indicator
or
The Examiner
, it is likely that Hunt, as editor and proprietor, would have been found guilty of libel and sedition and would have had to serve a second custodial sentence. Moreover, he would have been tried by a legal system which was substantially more punitive than that which had sent him to prison in 1813. As far as he was concerned, it was simply not worth taking such a risk.

For Shelley, on the other hand, Hunt’s failure to publish the poem represented an abnegation of political responsibility which began when he turned his attention away from
The Examiner
to write ephemeral froth for
The Indicator
. Hunt’s own political silence was bad enough, but he was now silencing Shelley’s voice as well.  This was a far cry from the heady days of 1817, only two years previously, when they talked politics and produced heated political prose on reform and the death of Princess Charlotte. As far as Shelley was concerned, Hunt’s failure was twofold: he denied Shelley the opportunity to contribute to political debate, and he refused to enter into conversation about his decision not to publish and the shift in his own writing. Hunt’s silence on the subject – which represented a refusal of open communication – was almost more wounding than his decision to suppress Shelley’s work in the first place.  It was a personal, political and literary betrayal, and it caused Shelley’s faith in Hunt to falter.

This loss of trust was distressing, but it did not mark the end of Hunt and Shelley’s friendship. Indeed, in one of the more surprising twists in their story, Shelley discovered renewed creative impetus in the columns of
The Examiner
even as he reacted to the shock of Hunt’s failure to publish. Earlier that summer, before news of Peterloo broke, he had received a bundle of old copies of
The Examiner
, in which were included two reviews of poems entitled
Peter Bell
. The original
Peter Bell
was by Wordsworth, and was reviewed by Hunt in
The Examiner
on 2 May. Hunt objected strongly to the pedagogic morality of Wordsworth’s poem, in which Methodism, repentance and religious piety were presented as redemptive forces. Hunt castigated the poem as a ‘didactic little horror . . . founded on the bewitching principles of fear, bigotry, and diseased impulse.’
¹⁸
He thought its vision of salvation was repugnant, and its self-satisfied piety abhorrent. This view was shared by John Hamilton Reynolds, the young poet whose work Hunt praised in his ‘Young Poets’ article of 1816. Reynolds produced a parody of
Peter Bell
, which was reviewed in
The Examiner
by Keats.  Keats was rather embarrassed by Reynolds’s denigration of Wordsworth, but he nevertheless praised the wit of his friend’s poem and, in so doing, demonstrated his underlying loyalty to Hunt and to the circle of writers who had supported him at the start of his career.

The
Peter Bell
poems were important for Hunt, Keats and Reynolds, since they demonstrated that the conversation which once held them together could still flare back into life. But the belated discovery of the poems was equally significant for Shelley. With ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ completed, he embarked on his own Wordsworthian parody, entitled ‘Peter Bell the Third’. His poem was inspired by
The
Examiner
reviews and by the thought of Keats, Reynolds and Hunt united once more in productive conversation, and was indebted to Hunt’s objections to Wordsworth’s didactic religious morality. It was of course also indebted to Wordsworth himself, although it is not clear whether Shelley actually saw Wordsworth’s poem before he completed his parody, or whether he instead relied on the extracts printed by Hunt in
The Examiner
. Shelley’s poem mocked Wordsworth’s emphasis on hell-fire damnation, and it also poked fun at the abusers of Hunt, whom Shelley ventriloquised in a prefatory description of ‘Mr Examiner Hunt’ as a ‘murderous and smiling villain’, an ‘odious thief, liar, scoundrel, coxcomb and monster’.
¹⁹
But ‘Peter Bell the Third’ was more than a straightforward comic parody. Shelley used Hunt’s review as a cue to launch a poetic attack on the corrupt society of which Wordsworth had become both a symptom and a part. In his poem the Devil plans to build himself a mansion in fashionable Grosvenor Square, before ‘aping fashion’ by travelling to Wordsworth’s Lake District, ‘To see what was romantic there.’

‘Hell is a city much like London’, Shelley wrote, in one of the poem’s most famous stanzas. The world of his poem is peopled with soulless spectres: the Poet Laureate Southey (‘who has lost/ His wits, or sold them’); a thieving parliament; the corpses of Canning and Castlereagh. Together the ghosts of politicians, lawyers and fawning poets meet at ‘Suppers of epic poets; – teas,/ Where small talk dies in agonies’; or at balls and in ‘drawing rooms –/ Courts of law – committees – calls/ Of a morning – clubs – book stalls –/ Churches – masquerades and tombs’. These were the spaces where a corrupt elite met, and they stood in stark contrast to the private, domesticated havens created by Hunt for his friends. Like ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘Peter Bell the Third’ formed part of Shelley’s response to post-Peterloo Britain. It was an angry poem, but it balanced its anger with a celebration of Hunt’s oppositional political and religious views. It remains one of Shelley’s funniest and most enduring works.

From the summer of 1819 onwards, Shelley found it increasingly difficult to disseminate his writing. He became disenchanted with Charles Ollier, his publisher and bookseller, who, despite his protests, ignored ‘Peter Bell the Third’ just as Hunt had ignored ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. Peacock tried and failed to arrange a production of
The Cenci
at Covent Garden, and the play remained unstaged. In July, Hunt sent an encouraging report of Shelley’s reputation in England, but his analysis (‘your reputation is certainly rising greatly in your native country’)
²⁰
was not supported by critical reaction to his friend’s work. Nor did it acknowledge the battering Shelley’s reputation received in the April edition of the
Quarterly Review
, which carried a long review of
The Revolt of Islam
. The review was by John Taylor Coleridge (nephew of the poet), who was at Eton at the same time as Shelley. This was the most negative review of his work to appear in Shelley’s lifetime, and it was a vicious attack which hurt him deeply. It contained unpleasant insinuations about Mary (who, it suggested, was the model for Cythna); it brought up his expulsion from Oxford; and, in a clear reference to Harriet’s death, dismissed him as a reprobate on a ‘downward course of infidelity and immorality’. It ended with a condemnation of everything for which Shelley stood:

If we might withdraw the veil of private life, and tell what we
now
know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text; it is not easy for those who
read only
, to conceive how much low pride, how much selfishness, how much unmanly cruelty are consistent with the laws of this ‘universal’ and ‘lawless love’. But we must only use our knowledge to check the groundless hopes which we were once prone to entertain of him.
²¹

Nor did the
Quarterly Review
reserve its animus for Shelley alone. Yet again, he found himself publicly linked with Hunt in terms which were unfavourable to them both.
The Revolt of Islam
, John Coleridge told his readers, was the work of a Cockney songster, who shared the faults of his ‘friend and leader Mr Hunt’: ‘Like him . . . Mr Shelley is a very vain man; and like most very vain men, he is but half instructed in knowledge, and less than half-disciplined in his reasoning powers’. John Coleridge magnanimously accepted that Shelley did not display Hunt’s ‘bustling vulgarity, the ludicrous affectation, the factious flippancy, or [his] selfish heartlessness’, but this was hardly very comforting. The
Quarterly Review
insulted Shelley’s work, his friends and his morals. It also dismissed
The Revolt of Islam
as a Cockney grace note, thus denying Shelley’s intellectual significance and making it more difficult for Hunt to write in his defence.

Despite this, Hunt published a three-part rebuttal of the review in
The Examiner
between September and October. He was angry about both its substance and approach, and was particularly incensed by the way in which its anonymous author
*
dragged Shelley’s private life into discussion of his work:

The Reviewer talks of what he ‘
now
’ knows of Mr Shelley. What does this pretended
judge
and actual male-gossip, this willing listener to scandal, this minister to the petty wants of excitement, now know more than he ever knew, of an absent man, whose own side of whatever stories have been told him he has never heard? ... If the use of private matters in public criticism is not to be incompatible with the decencies and charities of life, let it be proved so; and we know who would be the sufferers.
²²

John Coleridge’s review of
The Revolt of Islam
was undeniably petty and vindictive, but Hunt’s rebuttal of it was at its least convincing when he attacked its focus on Shelley’s private life. After all, in the days and months following their elopement, Shelley, Mary and Claire had attempted to live out their private lives according to a set of public ideals, and they planned to reform the world by refusing to conform to its hypocritical conventions.
The Revolt of Islam
contained a long dedication to Mary which told the story of their courtship, and Hunt himself pioneered the practice of using the personal and the private to public ends. ‘Cockney’ poetry stood out because of its proclamation of private pleasures: this was one of the ways in which it established its counter-cultural practices, and it was the element which its critics found most objectionable.  It all meant that, as far as John Coleridge and the
Quarterly
Review
were concerned, Shelley’s private life was fair game.

The second half of 1819 was one of the bleakest periods either the Shelleys or Claire had yet experienced. Their children were dead or living far away, and Mary was trapped in a black depression from which Shelley was unable to lift her. His letters show that he was fiercely protective of her, and that he understood she was ill. He was determined not to let her depression suffocate their relationship, and recognising that he could do little to help her apart from provide stability and companionship, he concentrated on his own writing, producing an extraordinary rich variety of work in the months following William’s death. In addition to ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’, he composed several sonnets, including the gloriously angry ‘England in 1819’; completed
The Cenci
and, towards the end of the year, wrote the visionary fourth act of
Prometheus Unbound
. He spent his mornings alone in his study at the top of the house, and after lunch read Dante with Mary. He visited Mrs Gisborne in Livorno (with whom he was learning Spanish) and every evening returned with her to the Villa Valsovano to take Mary for a walk. He was lonely and missed his friends in London, complaining to Peacock that Claire did not get up early enough to walk with him. But he was patient, pinning his hopes for a restoration of normality on the fact that Mary was pregnant again, and expecting a baby in November. ‘The birth of a child’, he told Hunt, ‘will probably relieve her from some part of her present melancholy depression.’
²³