Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (40 page)

The letters Hunt wrote to his sister-in-law after his arrival in Italy suggest that her exclusion from the expedition caused both of them much pain. But the same letters make reference to the malice of scandalmongers, and to the circulation of persistent rumours about the exact nature of Hunt and Bess’s relationship. Bess was left behind in order that her reputation – and Hunt’s – might be salvaged, but also because Marianne was utterly opposed to the idea that she should accompany them.  Like Claire, marooned in Florence, Bess was to be left out of Shelley’s community of exiles.

The Hunts’ hackney coach took them to Blackwall, where they boarded the vessel which was to take them to Italy. The Novellos accompanied them on board and presented them with a goat, in order that the children could have fresh milk for breakfast during their journey. Their transport, the
Jane
, was a cargo ship, and its official cargo sugar. Also on board were fifty barrels of gunpowder, which were being illicitly transported to Greece. These barrels rightly caused Hunt and Marianne a good deal of concern, especially when the ship’s drunken cook staggered down into the hold with his candle alight. The Hunts were the only passengers, and had the boat’s main cabin to themselves. Even so, there were not enough berths available for everyone, so the children shared the bunks lining the walls while Hunt and Marianne made themselves a bed on the floor. Their servant slept in a tiny closet adjoining the main cabin, and the captain in a similar cubby hole. The rest of the crew occupied cramped quarters at the other end of the ship, which were permanently soaked by waves crashing overhead. The goat was tethered on deck, along with some equally unfortunate caged ducks. Eventually Hunt took pity on the goat and carried it into the cabin, where it slid around as the ship pitched from side to side.

Hunt never forgot the start of their journey in the
Jane
. The conditions were so bad that the captain was forced to make for port at Ramsgate, where they stayed for three weeks, waiting for an improvement in the weather. The Hunts took lodgings in the town (thus incurring more expense) and by the time they set sail again, on 11 December, Marianne was so ill she had to be carried aboard. For ten days, the
Jane
battled down the English Channel towards the Atlantic, fighting against the worst weather in seafaring memory. Storm after storm pitched the boat and its passengers all over the place, one gale lasting fifty-six hours without pause. It was bitterly cold and wet: water dripped through the cabin roof, making it impossible to keep anything dry. The constant motion made a mockery of meal times. Hunt later described how he was compelled to throw food from the table in the middle of the cabin to the inhabitants of the bunks at its side, since neither Marianne nor the children were able to stand. Everyone was seasick, and Marianne continued to spit blood, and to spend her waking hours frantic with worry about her children.

It was no better for the other inhabitants of the
Jane
. The goat was so terrified that her milk supplies dried up, and the waves which battered the boat broke the wings and legs of the ducks, spraying bones and bird carcases everywhere. Hunt devoted his energies to playing elaborate games to distract the children, telling them, on one occasion, that the squawking of the tortured ducks was in fact the sound of a friend laughing, but he was horrified by the danger to which he had exposed his family, and tormented by thoughts of the friends they had left at home. ‘I used to think of them’, Hunt confessed in his memoirs, ‘reading, chatting, and laughing, playing music . . . then retiring to easy beds amidst happy families; and perhaps, as the wind howled, thinking of us.’
²¹
Once, when despondency overcame him, and the rocks off the Scilly Isles looked dangerously close, he asked the ship’s mate to throw open the lid to the cabin stairs if the worst should happen, so that his children should not know the agony of a prolonged death. The ship’s crew appear to have been very kind to the terrified family, telling the children stories of sea adventures and reassuring Marianne that the conditions they were experiencing were not dangerous. But in actual fact they were worse than anybody on board had ever known. On 22 December, after an abortive attempt to reach the safety of Falmouth harbour, the
Jane
turned back and put into port at Dartmouth.

At the beginning of January the
Jane
set sail for Italy once more, but this time it left its passengers behind. The torments of their battles down the English Channel had been too much for Marianne, who flatly refused to be carried on board again. Her health had deteriorated to the extent that Hunt doubted whether she would even survive the journey. So they forfeited their passages and travelled to Plymouth, where they waited for the spring. ‘Oh Novello!’ Hunt wrote at the beginning of February, ‘what a disappointing, wearisome, vexatious, billowy, up-and-downy, unbearable, beautiful world it is!’
²²
But Hunt had more than disappointment to contend with. His expenses were, once again, escalating out of control. The delay was not his fault, but new passages had to be bought, and Plymouth lodgings had to be paid for. In November, John Hunt had written to Shelley from his prison cell in Coldbath Fields, to thank him for his generosity towards his brother. But his letter also contained some serious words of advice. ‘You will, above all, advise him to be more mindful of his domestic expenses, a negligence of which has been the chief cause of his embarrassments.’
²³

It was now Shelley’s turn to learn something of the strain Hunt’s impecuniousness placed on his friends. His own resources were not sufficient to permit him to fund Hunt’s delayed journey, so he was forced to ask Byron for more money on Hunt’s behalf. This placed him in an invidious position. It turned him from an equal of Byron’s into yet another supplicant, and Byron was at his least generous when he was required to provide financial support. Byron agreed to lend Hunt money (a loan guaranteed by Shelley since, as he told Byron, ‘I do not think poor Hunt’s promise to pay in a given time is worth very much’),
²⁴
but the request did not dispose him more favourably towards the plan for the journal, in which he was beginning to lose interest. To make matters worse, both Shelley and Byron believed that Hunt was coming to Italy supported by income from
The Examiner
, in which they supposed him still to have a share. In fact, he was bringing his family across the sea without any means of support at all, and had all hopes of economic survival pinned on the new journal.

Hunt himself did not help the delicate financial negotiations conducted on his behalf by Shelley. Once Byron had agreed to lend him money to complete his journey he wrote a letter of thanks which both illustrated his streak of vanity and which might have been calculated to annoy his benefactor. It started badly: ‘My dear Byron (For I will not abate a jot of my democracy, at least on occasions of letter-writing).’ This mode of address might have pleased Byron when it came from an imprisoned radical but it did not endear him to a man who had importuned him for money. Hunt did not improve matters by electing to patronise his patron. He confessed his unease at accepting Byron’s money since ‘from the first hour I knew you, I had got a romantic notion in my head, perhaps a coxcombical one . . . of awakening your school-day ideas of friendship again, & shewing you that a man could cultivate your regard, merely from a disinterested love of your intellectual qualities and of that very generosity.’
²⁵
 Byron was rewarded for lending money to Hunt not with gratitude but a lecture on his flaws, and by the news that he would be further reformed once Hunt arrived in Italy.

Shelley did warn Hunt to treat Byron with respect and caution, but, despite this, Hunt remained unaware of the strain his demands placed on Shelley and Byron’s relationship, and on the whole journal scheme. He wrote enthusiastically to both of them of his plans for their periodical; his desk, he told them, was ‘teeming’ with ideas. The first number could open, he suggested, with an account of Byron’s journey to Italy, ‘which I might follow in the next number with that of a sea-one, and then we might have essays, stories, poetry, poetical translation, especially from the Italian, – in short, any thing we chose to blurt out or to be inspired with.’  One can only imagine Byron’s reaction when he discovered he had been co-opted into funding and co-writing a Pisan version of the thoroughly bourgeois
Indicator
. But Hunt’s enthusiasm was boundless. A vision of literary collaboration in Italy sustained him through the winter in Plymouth. ‘I fancy’, he told Byron, eagerly, ‘the delight of sitting with you & Shelley round a green table with some Italian wine & fruit upon it, settling what is to be done.’
²⁶

Others in England were equally enthusiastic about the projected journal, and about the colony gathered in Pisa. Hogg, tied to England by the legal circuit, wrote offering to contribute articles to the periodical, as did William Hazlitt, while Joseph Severn, who remained in Rome after Keats’s death, received a friendly invitation from Shelley offering him hospitality in Pisa. Charles Brown now seriously began to contemplate following Severn and Hunt to Italy. Keats, his closest friend, had died there and Severn showed no signs of returning to England. Shelley and Byron were there, gathering interesting friends around them, and the Hunts had talked of Italy as the place where one could start a new life.

Brown had plenty of reasons for wanting to follow his friends abroad, and his own life in England was not free from complications. These complications centred around his illegitimate son, Charles (known as Carlino), who was born to Brown’s housekeeper in July 1820, and was given into his sole care in the spring of 1822.  Brown cut an unusual figure in London, as a single father with responsibility for the welfare of a toddler. ‘What think you of my playing the nurse? – washing, combing, dressing &c a marmoset of 2 years old’ he asked Severn shortly after he and Carlino arrived in Pisa in September 1822.
²⁷
 Although a servant was eventually hired to attend to Carlino, Brown’s son was never to know the pampered loneliness of Allegra’s aristocratic childhood in Byron’s houses and at the Convent of Bagnacavallo.

The Hunts spent the winter quietly in Plymouth, waiting until spring to resume their journey. Marianne was confined to her bed for much of the time, although her health did improve a little as a result of the enforced peace and quiet. The children grew strong in the sea air, and Hunt found that their suspended seaside existence restored his own health. He walked a great deal, and even felt strong enough to write the occasional column for
The Examiner
, after an absence from its pages of many months. His spirits were buoyed when some
Examiner
readers in Plymouth presented him with a silver cup in token of his efforts ‘for freedom, truth and humanity’ and invited him into their houses for tea and conversation. Bess wrote to him of the kindness of the Novellos, who were doing their best to cheer her up and to relieve the pain of separation from her brother-in-law. ‘It delights me to see the intimacy there is between you and Miss K.’, Hunt told Novello. ‘She speaks in the most affectionate terms of you and your wife, and receives all the solace from your intercourse which I expected.’
²⁸
He begged the Novellos to visit him in Plymouth, noting that the road from London was excellent, and the journey could be easily accomplished. ‘You must not talk of your music, till Novello is here to inspire a pianoforte which I have just hired for a month. It is the only pleasure to which I have treated myself, and without him find it but a pain.’
²⁹
It was probably a good thing that neither Shelley, who was scraping together all the money he could spare for Hunt, nor Byron, who lent the remainder so reluctantly, got to hear of the piano. It was a relief to all concerned when the Hunts secured new passages aboard the
David Walter
and finally set sail once more, on 13 May 1822.

Shelley and Byron’s relationship, already complicated by negotiations over Hunt’s expenses, was put under further strain by Claire’s affairs. Claire was bitterly unhappy in Florence, especially after a meeting with Elise Foggi exposed her to the rumours circulated by the Hoppners about her relationship with Shelley. In the spring of 1822, her actions became impetuous and desperate, and she wrote a series of letters to the Pisan colony announcing her intention of leaving Italy for good. The only one of these letters which survives is that which she wrote to Byron, in which she begged to be allowed to see Allegra for a final time. ‘I leave my friends with regret’, she told him, ‘but indeed I cannot go without having first seen and embraced Allegra.’ The same letter expressed the fear at the forefront of Claire’s mind: ‘I can no longer resist the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her any more.’
³⁰
Byron ignored this letter, but the Shelleys took Claire’s plans seriously. She was immediately collected from Florence and taken back to Pisa, where she succumbed to Mary, Shelley and Mrs Mason’s arguments that she should not act precipitately, before returning to her isolated life in Florence.