Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (7 page)

Why was Jane in the Dover-bound chaise?  There are several possible explanations. The simplest and the most convincing is that Jane was almost as dazzled by Shelley as was Mary, was thoroughly caught up in her stepsister’s adventure, and in consequence refused to be left behind. She never liked to be excluded, and may well have resisted the suggestion that she should remain in England to explain Mary’s disappearance to the Godwins. The prospect of returning to a penny-pinching existence in Skinner Street would, after all, not have been very attractive after the summer’s excitement. It is also possible that Shelley encouraged her to come, and that he anticipated a relationship between the three of them rather more fluid than Mary envisaged. All of them were caught up in a drama of their own making, and Shelley and Mary may have wanted an audience for their heady passion. Jane also spoke better French than the others, so her inclusion had certain practical advantages. It is certainly not the case, despite the testimony of documents redrafted by Jane in her old age, that she was duped into going with Mary – that she was tricked into entering the carriage and taken against her will to France. Probably her presence is best explained by a confluence of factors. Although they would cause much heartache in the years to come, the ties binding Mary and Jane were strong; and all three runaways were very young – too young to realise that the extent of Jane’s involvement in her stepsister’s affairs was emotionally and practically problematic. Shelley was twenty-one; Mary and Jane were both sixteen.  And, as would rapidly become apparent, nothing about the elopement was very well thought through.

Their adventure lasted just over a month, and was characterised by intense discomfort from the outset. There were no passages to Calais to be had at Dover in any of the regular transports, so Shelley, Mary and Jane crossed the Channel in an open boat. The crossing was dangerously rough and water poured over the travellers.  Mary was extremely seasick, which Shelley found rather romantic. ‘She lay in my arms thro the night’, he wrote in their joint diary, ‘the little strength which remained to my own exhausted frame was all expended in keeping her head in rest on my bosom.’
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 Mary did not start making entries in the diary for some days, which suggests that she may have found the experience less exhilarating; but the boat eventually arrived in Calais, and the bedraggled party took rooms at an inn.

They were still in Calais twenty-fours hours later, when Mrs Godwin appeared, furious and anxious in equal measure. She promptly washed her hands of Mary, but made strenuous efforts to persuade Jane to come home with her.  Jane wavered, agreed, talked to Shelley, and changed her mind, and Mrs Godwin was forced to return to England without either her daughter or stepdaughter.  Having successfully disposed of their pursuer, the trio proceeded to Paris, where they discovered they had too little money to go any further. After a few days, Shelley managed to arrange a payment of £60 from his English bankers and they decided to  continue on their journey through Europe. But because this was still a tiny sum of money, they opted to travel on foot.

The madness of this plan is another reminder of how young they all were.  France in August 1814 was an inhospitable, dangerous place. Until the Allied entry into Paris four months earlier, much of continental Europe had been impassable for British tourists (apart from a brief period following the Treaty of Amiens) for almost two decades. Shelley, Mary and Jane were adventurous not just in their choice of transport (none) but in their determination to cross France at all. They were horrified by what they saw. ‘The distress of the inhabitants’, Mary wrote, ‘has given a sting to my detestation of war, which none can feel who have not travelled through a country pillaged and wasted by this plague, which, in his pride, man inflicts upon his fellow.’
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 A little over twenty years earlier Mary Wollstonecraft had been in revolutionary Paris confidently awaiting the beginning of a new political dawn. Her daughter was now confronted by the bleak consequences of those revolutionary dreams: poverty, destruction, and violence.

Sobering political realities were matched by more practical problems. The donkey Shelley bought in Paris to transport their baggage proved unfit for the task. Jane was scared out of her own bed into Shelley and Mary’s by rats and the overtures of an excessively friendly landlord. Shelley sprained his ankle, forcing them to hire a carriage which stretched their meagre funds badly. The driver they engaged then abandoned them, compelling them to make their own way over the Swiss border.  All this made an arduous journey more difficult. Shelley was unable to walk, and Mary and Jane, who had lived most of their lives in London and were unused to the physical strains of walking day after day, found it a huge physical effort.

As they became increasingly tired, the disadvantages of eloping in a threesome became more apparent. When Shelley and Mary began a diary together, Jane responded by demanding paper so that she could start one too. Mary began to report walks taken by her and Shelley alone – without comment, but in a manner which suggests that snatched private moments were worthy of note. Jane wrote long descriptions of the scenery, interspersed with Wordsworthian meditations on the bountiful pleasures of nature. At one point Mary reported, rather cryptically, ‘Shelley & Jane talk concerning J’s character’
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from which one can divine that Jane was spoken to for the good of her soul, probably because she was sulking about being left out of Shelley and Mary’s private conferences and sight-seeing trips. At one point she took her revenge by taunting Mary when she refused to accede to Shelley’s suggestion that they should bathe naked in a pool under the beady eye of the carriage driver. Shelley was an erratic travelling companion. One day he decided to adopt a beautiful little girl he saw on the road, and was surprised and put out when her father informed him she was not available.

By the time the trio finally crossed over into Switzerland, they had almost run out of money again. Shelley, in his indomitable way, took action. He wrote to his abandoned wife Harriet, asking her to join them on a strictly platonic basis, and to bring some money with her. He would, he promised, be her ‘firm & constant friend . . . by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.’
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Unsurprisingly, Harriet was not convinced by this promise, and refused to cooperate with Shelley’s plans. She was pregnant with his second child, had no wish to become a member of his commune, platonic or otherwise, and did not feel inclined to courier papers and money across war-torn Europe on her errant husband’s behalf. Her unaccountable failure to oblige made it impossible for them to stay in Switzerland any longer and they decided to return to England. Jane did not realise how poor they were and seems to have thought they were returning because Mary and Shelley had tired of adventurous hardship.  ‘Most laughable’, she told her diary, ‘to think of our going to England the second day after we entered a new house for six months – All because the stove don’t suit.’
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She herself had little interest in such mundane considerations as smoking stoves, and wrote a lofty dismissal of the decision in her diary. She had expected never to see ‘dear England’ again, and it was most disappointing to be made to leave the splendour of Switzerland just because the accommodation failed to please her bourgeois stepsister. There is something rather poignant about Jane’s loftiness, which probably formed part of an attempt to dissociate herself from a decision from which she had already been excluded. It may also have allowed her to deny her own increasingly complicated feelings, which were becoming contradictory and unsettled after six weeks of being the odd one out in Shelley’s company.

The trio started their homeward journey on 27 August, a month after their early morning escape from London. They travelled by water up to Germany and into Holland, and during long days on ponderous boats – which ranged from cargo packets to vessels which were little more than kayaks – they filled the hours by reading Shakespeare and Wollstonecraft, and by writing of their adventures in their diaries.  At one point they amused themselves by taking against a fellow passenger, and seeing him off accordingly: ‘we frightened from us one man who spoke English and whom we did not like by talking of cutting off Kings’ heads.’
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They arrived back in England on Tuesday, 13 September and were followed from Gravesend to London by one of the crew of the boat in which they had crossed from Holland, whose captain doubted their promises to return and pay up.

As they made their way towards London, all three now had to face several unpleasant facts. The first was financial. They had no money at all. When they arrived in London they had nowhere to stay and no means of getting rid of the boatman, who refused to leave their side until they paid him what they owed.  Once again, in one of his more sublimely self-absorbed moments, Shelley turned to Harriet, who had moved back to her father’s London house. While Mary and Jane sat outside the Westbrooks’ establishment in a hackney carriage Shelley spent two hours inside with his estranged wife. He does not appear to have told her of the presence of his waiting companions, and eventually managed to convince her that she should settle his most pressing debt from the funds he had left for her. She agreed, the boatman was paid off, and Mary, Shelley and Jane were able to concentrate on the urgent business of finding lodgings for the night.

The second unpleasant reality that had to be faced was Godwin’s reaction to the runaways. From the time that Shelley and Mary first told him they were in love, they had grappled with fierce paternal opposition. When they returned to London, he simply refused to see any of them. The failure of a beloved father to understand the strength of their feelings for each other would have been upsetting under any circumstances. But in
Political Justice
Godwin had made the following statement:

Friendship, if by friendship we understand that affection for an individual which is measured singly by what we know of its worth, is one of the most exquisite gratifications, perhaps one of the most improving exercises of a rational mind. Friendship therefore may be expected to come in aid of the sexual intercourse, to refine its grossness and increase its delight. A friendship of this sort has no necessary connection with the cowardice which so notoriously characterises the present system of marriage, where each party desires to find in the other that flattering indulgence that overlooks every frailty, and carefully removes the occasions of fortitude.
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As far as Shelley was concerned, in leaving a wife he no longer loved to be with Mary he was simply acting in the spirit of Godwin’s own philosophy and righting a wrong which occurred when Godwin himself took the cowardly step of marrying. Shelley was
living
the radical philosophy of
Political Justice
, and Godwin’s ostracising of his adolescent daughters represented a terrible betrayal of both his and Godwin’s ideals. Mary, meanwhile, had been brought up on a combination of
Political Justice
and Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication
.  Now, her beloved father was not only behaving hypocritically but was turning into the kind of oppressive patriarchal figure condemned by her mother.

Shelley’s conviction that matrimony was a worthless institution also goes some way towards explaining his behaviour towards Harriet. His determination to be clear with his wife that he no longer loved her and his ardent expressions to her of his love for Mary formed part of his developing moral code. ‘It would be generous’, he told her, ‘to consider with kindness that woman whom my judgement and my heart have selected as the noblest and the most excellent of human beings . . . My attachment to Mary neither could nor ought to have been overcome: our spirits . . . are united. We met with passion, and she has resigned all for me.’
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 By the late summer of 1814 Shelley genuinely believed that in shaking off the bonds of matrimony when a relationship had faltered he was living his life in accordance with a set of principles which would reform the world. Moreover, he was acting as an example to all would-be reformers. It is not surprising that Harriet did not see it in this light. She was pregnant with Shelley’s second child, and she was receiving letters from her husband which were – no matter how fine the philosophy underpinning them – spectacularly cruel. ‘I was an idiot to expect greatness or generosity from you’, read one. ‘In your heart it seems you were always enslaved to the vilest superstitions, or ready to accept their support for your narrow and worldly views.’
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 As an old lady, Jane recalled one missive in response from Harriet, in which she made a heart-rending cry for her husband’s support: ‘even beasts’, she had pleaded, ‘stay by their kind when they are in a family way.’
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