Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (39 page)

The separation of male and female activities also introduced further distance into Mary and Shelley’s relationship. They were not like Edward and Jane, stealing away from the group to be alone together, although Shelley did occasionally walk with Mary and Jane rather than ride out with Byron and his attendants. Denied entry to Byron’s parties, Mary made other friends in Pisa, and began to show an interest in attending balls and the kind of functions that made Shelley recoil in horror. He sought and valued the company of intimates, but the idea of venturing out into Pisan society – of acting the part of a society husband and talking to inconsequential strangers – was appalling to him. At one point Mary suggested they host a party of their own, but Shelley reacted to the suggestion with such disgust that the idea was dropped.

With
Valperga
finished and sent to Godwin for publication, Mary amused herself by preparing the empty rooms on the ground floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi for the Hunts, making mince pies for Christmas, and playing with Percy, now an active toddler. She also copied some of Byron’s poems from manuscript for him, just as she had done in Geneva in 1816 and, in her desolation after Clara’s death, in Este in 1818. This meant that it was Edward, rather than Mary, who acted as Shelley’s literary companion: transcribing his poems, reading with him, and taking over Mary’s role as amanuensis in the translation of Spinoza. Edward had literary ambitions too, and received much advice (not all of it welcome) from Shelley about the play he was writing. One effect of this was that Shelley spent more time in Edward and Jane’s apartments than he did in his own. He quickly came to appreciate the charms of their cheerful, affectionate home, and of his pretty hostess.  As the winter progressed, his attraction to Jane grew stronger. Jane was musical, and he asked Horace Smith to send a harp for her from Paris. Smith declined to spend his money on Shelley’s behalf, so Shelley had to content himself with giving Jane a guitar, and with writing admiring lyrics about her.

At the end of January, Shelley sent his poem, ‘The Serpent is Shut Out from Paradise’, down to Edward and Jane’s apartment. In it he lamented his own ‘cold home’, and, in the final stanza, Mary’s unsympathetic scorn:

I asked her yesterday if she believed

That I had resolution. One who
had

 Would ne’er have thus relieved

His heart with words, but what his judgement bade

Would do, and leave the scorner unrelieved. —

 These verses were too sad

To send to you, but that I know

Happy yourself, you feel another’s woe.

Edward recorded receipt of Shelley’s ‘beautiful but too melancholy lines’ in his journal,
⁶
but not the fact that the note accompanying the poem stipulated that it should be seen by no one but him and Jane. Edward seems to have been flattered that his beautiful partner was so admired by Shelley, but at the beginning of March he called on Mary ‘by appointment’
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which suggests that they may have had a private conversation about Shelley’s latest infatuation, and about the best way to deal with it.  Mary knew from experience that unobtainable women were always more attractive to Shelley (as the Emilia Viviani episode demonstrated) and neither she nor Edward made any effort to keep Shelley and Jane apart. Edward was convinced of Jane’s loyalty to him, and – perhaps correctly – interpreted Shelley’s interest in her as a sign of admiration for them both, as well as a desire for the companionable romance they personified. And, as Mary realised, Shelley’s interest in another woman in no way precluded his continued fascination with her. Unlike any other woman he had met, she was his intellectual equal. It was for this reason that it mattered so much when she lavished praise on Byron’s poetry. In her old age, Claire claimed that Mary was the only person Shelley had ever truly loved, and that this was ‘because of her intellect’.
⁸
Mary and Claire spent a lifetime competing over Shelley, so this comment, made many years after Mary’s death, must carry some weight. In any case, the events of the winter of 1821–22 testify to the complexity of Shelley and Mary’s relationship. At the point that Shelley found a new object for infatuation in Jane, Mary became pregnant for a fifth time.

Christmas was celebrated by the ‘Pistol Club’ (named thus by Edward in tribute to their shooting expeditions) at a grand dinner hosted by Byron. Edward sent a glowing account of this ‘splendid feast’ to a friend, Edward John Trelawny, whom he and Medwin had met in Geneva two years previously.
⁹
In the same letter he urged Trelawny to come to Pisa, holding out the prospect of Lord Byron’s company as an inducement.

Edward was eager that Trelawny should join them in Pisa because in January 1822 the Pistol Club discovered a new hobby: boating. Shelley already owned the small vessel which he and Edward used to meander up and down the Arno, but by January they had exhausted the possibilities offered by so modest a craft. Edward decided that Trelawny was the ideal person to advise them on the design and construction of a grander, seafaring boat. ‘I shall reserve all that I have to say about the boat until we meet at the select committee, which is intended to be held on that subject when you arrive here’, he told his friend. ‘Have a boat we must.’
¹⁰

Edward’s letter also presented an alluring picture of a Byron who had revealed his hidden self to a select group of contemporaries. Trelawny was not the man to pass up the opportunity to find out the truth of Byron’s character for himself.  He arrived in Pisa on 14 January, tempted too by the prospect of friendship with Shelley, whose
Queen Mab
he admired. Within days of his arrival, this rugged, bearded creature had the entire Pisan group mesmerised by his charisma and by the extraordinary stories he related of his past adventures.

However, few of these stories were true. Edward Trelawny was the younger son of an MP and minor landowner, and he had in fact achieved remarkably little in the twenty-nine years of his existence. He was expelled from school for attacking a master who flogged him; joined the navy in 1805 (shortly
after
the battle of Trafalgar); and left it in 1812 without gaining an officer’s commission. He married in 1813 but his marriage ended in a messy and public divorce after his wife had an affair and Trelawny sued her lover for ‘Criminal Conversation’. In 1819 he left England and embarked on a restless progress around Europe.

No one who met Trelawny after his departure from England in 1819 would have guessed that his history consisted of an inglorious naval career and an unhappy marriage. Instead he constructed a fantastical history for himself, in which he deserted the navy, took up with a dashing privateer called de Ruyter and sailed the seas, acquiring an alluring teenage bride called Zela in the process. This was the story Trelawny recorded in his ‘autobiography’,
Adventures of a Younger Son
, summarised thus by Peter Cochran: ‘There are cruel pranks, sea fights, land raids, a shipboard orgy, and a tiger hunt from which only the elephants emerge with credit . . . Scotsmen, surgeons, and other human annoyances exist only to be beaten up or dropped into pits of offal, buildings exist only to be burnt or pulled down, and animals only to be hamstrung, shot, or eaten.’
¹¹
It is one of the more abiding mysteries to biographers of Shelley and Byron that a semi-literate Cornishman managed not only to convince both them and their friends of the veracity of his history (to the extent at least that they never openly questioned the stories he told them) but also that he inserted himself so seamlessly into the daily rituals of their circle. Byron eventually came to doubt Trelawny, but there is no suggestion that anyone present in Pisa in 1822 realised the extent of his deception. This may well be because Trelawny was such an able fantasist that by the time he arrived in Pisa he had half-convinced himself of the truth of his own tall tales.

There was an additional reason why Byron – the most sceptical and experienced member of the group – did not examine Trelawny’s history too closely.  Trelawny was himself a Byronic creation. He modelled himself on the hero of
The Corsair
, Byron’s tale of eastern adventure which had taken London by storm in 1814.  Trelawny was more Byronic than Byron himself, and it was flattering – if a little odd – for a poet to meet a man who had taken on the identity of one of his creations. For the others, the combination of Byron and the personification of his hero was irresistible.  

Mary was entranced by Trelawny, and her diary provides one of the best descriptions we have of him:

Trelawny is extravagant . . . if his abrupt, but not unpolished manners be assumed, they are nevertheless in unison with his Moorish face (for he looks oriental yet not Asiatic) his dark hair his herculean form. And then there is an air of extreme good nature which pervades his whole countenance, especially when he smiles, which assures me that his heart is good. He tells strange stories of himself – horrific ones – so that they harrow one up, while with his emphatic but unmodulated Voice – his simple yet strong language – he portrays the most frightful situations – then all these adventures took place between the ages of 13 & 20 – I believe them now I see the man – & tired with the everyday sleepiness of human intercourse I am glad to meet with one whom among other valuable qualities has the rare merit of arresting my imagination.
¹²

Now that the Pisan circle had both Byron and a Byronic hero in their midst they ceased to be the ‘Pistol Club’ and became the ‘Corsair Crew’.
¹³
Mary’s diary makes frequent references to the ‘Corsair’ and also to visits from the ‘Crew’, although, as had been the case before Trelawny’s arrival, these visits did not include the Crew’s erstwhile leader, Byron. A year later, when Joseph Severn met Trelawny in Rome, he christened him the ‘Cockney Corsair’,
¹⁴
which suggests that he detected a Huntian vulgarity underlying the persona of Byronic adventurer. But there were no such detractors in Pisa.

Trelawny’s arrival marked a new phase of theatricality in the lives of the Corsair Crew. ‘Trelawny dine[s]’, Edward recorded in his diary on 10 April. ‘We talk of a play of his singular life, and a plot to give it the air of Romance.’
¹⁵
This theatricality was given a focus when, at Trelawny’s instigation, the group decided to stage a performance of
Othello
at Byron’s
palazzo
. Trelawny was to play the Moor, and Byron – a great admirer of Edmund Kean – took the part of Iago. According to Teresa, Byron’s performance in the handkerchief scene in
Othello
was deeply moving, but she nevertheless put a stop to rehearsals because there was no suitable part for her. Thwarted in their theatrical ambitions, Trelawny escorted Mary and Jane to the public theatre of the Pisan carnival, for which they donned extravagant carnival outfits: Jane a ‘Hindoostani dress’ and Mary a ‘Turkish costume’.
¹⁶
He also took total command of the boat building project. Shelley ordered a thirty-foot sailing boat for himself and Edward; while Byron, not to be outdone, decided that he required a larger schooner, complete with cabins and guns. Lord Byron ‘intend[s] to enter into a competition with us in sailing’, Edward recorded somewhat ambivalently in his diary.
¹⁷
Trelawny placed the orders with his friend Daniel Roberts and made himself indispensable as plans for the summer were discussed. Meanwhile, the shooting and dinner parties continued. It was as if Trelawny had always been one of the ‘Corsair Crew’, rather than an interloper who had so recently imposed his imagined, plagiarised identity on the group.

By the beginning of 1822 Shelley’s long-imagined community of exiles had finally come into being. The only absentees were the Hunts, who were still in England several months after deciding to travel to Italy. Hunt ‘is hoped for in the Spring’, Byron told a correspondent. ‘I suppose’, he continued, ‘we shall see him by Xmas next.’
¹⁸
Hogg was ruder about the Hunts’ slow progress. ‘I would have written by Hunt’, he told Shelley at the end of January, ‘but I was unable to muster up sufficient gravity to address a grey-headed, deaf, double, tottering, spectacled old man, for such I was persuaded you would be before he reached Pisa’.
¹⁹
It was certainly the case that the Hunts did not have a great deal of luck as they attempted to leave their old life in England behind them. Their journey started on 14 November 1821 and their departure from Hampstead was witnessed by Charles Brown. It was, he told a friend, a ‘melancholy sight to see the whole of the family stuffed into a Hackney Coach, in search of a more favourable climate and more favourable friends.’
²⁰
The occupants of the Hackney Coach were Hunt, Marianne, an unnamed servant and the six Hunt children: Thornton (aged eleven), John (nine), Mary (eight), Swinburne (five), Percy (four) and Henry (two). It was a significant logistical undertaking to transport this number of children across the sea to Italy, but despite the fact that Marianne was dangerously ill – her main symptom, coughing blood, was thought to be an early sign of tuberculosis – Bess was not included in the party.