Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (8 page)

Mary and Jane’s situation was, in some respects, almost as unenviable as Harriet’s, even though their plight was of their own making. Having left the protection of their father, they were entirely dependent on another man, on whom they had no legal claim. Shelley had a degree of independence, by virtue of his sex and his position as his father’s heir. But for both Mary and Jane the practical consequences of the elopement were potentially devastating, and bound them together in a shared dependence on Shelley. Forced under the same roof by their physical vulnerability, the close, sisterly relationship which sustained them during the long years of their Godwin upbringing now began to buckle under the strain of continued, inescapable companionship.

The problems of proximity were compounded by an isolation which dated from the elopement. Shelley, Mary and Jane might have crossed Europe, but they met few people on their travels. Nor did they experience anything like the engagement with the politics of the countries they visited demonstrated by Hunt from his prison cell in
The Examiner
each week. Indeed, the further they travelled the more inward-looking they became. It might have been fun to torment fellow passengers with talk of cutting off the heads of kings, but this was a poor substitute for political action.

On their return, they shuttled between temporary lodgings, and saw very few people. Chief among their limited number of callers were Thomas Hogg and Thomas Love Peacock. Throughout 1814 Peacock was in considerable sympathy with Harriet and he did his best to support her through Shelley’s long absences. Perhaps for this reason, it took Mary and Jane a little while to warm to him. Shelley was also in regular contact with his bookseller, Thomas Hookham, and with various lawyers and money lenders, and Jane’s brother Charles Clairmont visited occasionally. He did so in spite of a prohibition issued by Godwin, who, in addition to refusing the three admittance to his house, forbade them contact with his other children. Fanny and Charles defied him to act as illicit conduits for news from Skinner Street throughout the winter, but it caused poor Fanny considerable anxiety to disobey her step-parents. Peacock later remembered that winter as the most solitary period of Shelley’s life, and it was equally so for Mary and Jane, thrown together by their exclusion from their family home.

In addition to bitter rows by letter with Harriet, money worries and estrangement from Godwin, there was another problem: seventeen year old Mary was pregnant, with a baby conceived earlier in the summer.
*
 The combination of pregnancy and the vegetarian diet insisted upon by Shelley (who had praised vegetarianism in the notes to
Queen Mab
)
made her ill and sleepy. As a result, Jane and Shelley spent long hours together. They sat up late at night talking about ideal communities, ghosts and spirit worlds. On one occasion Shelley spooked Jane into hysterics, and she had to be put to bed with Mary to calm her down. Shelley rather enjoyed the effects of his powers of invention on Jane; Mary was less amused.  ‘Shelley and Jane sit up and for a wonder do not frighten themselves’,
⁴⁰
she noted rather wryly in her diary a couple of days later. And while Jane might have been easy to scare, she was not easy to live with. An argument between her and Shelley caused him to write huffily of ‘Janes insensibility & incapacity for the slightest degree of friendship’
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while Jane herself reported Mary saying seemingly unkind things which made her feel deeply ‘the imaginary cruelties I conjured up’.
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As the winter drew on, Mary began to think about finding alternative accommodation for her stepsister.  But no solution seemed to present itself and so the three of them spent their days reading, quarrelling, sailing paper boats on the pond in Primrose Hill and hatching mad schemes with Peacock to kidnap Shelley’s younger sisters from their school.

Any semblance of stability disappeared abruptly in mid-October when Shelley’s creditors set the bailiffs on him. In order to escape arrest for debt he was forced to leave Mary and Jane in lodgings and to go into hiding. He stayed with Peacock and then in a succession of dingy hotels in the city and spent his days trying to arrange further loans and his nights writing passionate letters to Mary. ‘Know you my best Mary that I feel myself in your absence degraded to the level of the vulgar & impure’, he told her before adding, rather coyly, ‘Adieu remember love at vespers – before sleep. I do not omit
my prayers
.’
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Her letters to him were equally heartfelt.  She assured him of her love, and of her intention never to vex him. She would learn Greek in order to please him, she promised, noting that doing so might help her overcome her desolation at her estrangement from her father. It all suggests that their relationship was not exactly argument-free. For Mary – seventeen, pregnant, impoverished, ostracised by her father, her lover in hiding and with only a moody stepsister for company – life towards the end of 1814 continued to look bleak. Until Shelley managed to raise enough money to settle his debts, meetings with him were restricted to snatched conversations on the steps of St Paul’s, the occasional evening together in a hotel, and Sundays together at home, since bailiffs were not permitted to make arrests on the Sabbath. Shelley and Mary spent their Sundays together in bed, getting up only to plan his movements and to eat. ‘To sleep & talk’, Jane noted sniffily in her diary, ‘why this is merely vegetating.’
⁴⁴
Jane does not seem to have taken kindly to being left alone while Mary spent evenings with Shelley, nor to being sidelined during snatched conversations in London squares. A diary entry following a meeting in Gray’s Inn Gardens noting that ‘I am much disappointed in Shelley to-day’ is followed by a report of ‘A letter from Shelley – putting all the fault of yesterday’s Interview on me.’
⁴⁵
Mary and Shelley’s desire for privacy was natural, but it reinforced Jane’s sense of emotional and physical exclusion. By the close of 1814, Shelley had become both the most fascinating and the most important person in her life, and when he disappeared with Mary, or criticised her behaviour, it mattered a great deal. Shelley might sit up late talking with Jane, and he might even enjoy the sexual frisson which stemmed from her ambivalent position in his household, but it was Mary’s bed to which he retired.

Leigh Hunt spent 1814 confined to the few square yards of his prison rooms and garden, but the second year of his imprisonment was even busier than the first. As well as bringing out weekly editions of
The Examiner
, much of his time was given over to the composition of
The Descent of Liberty
, a masque (in the style of Milton’s
Comus
) written to celebrate the allied victory over Napoleon in 1814.  This was Hunt’s first sustained attempt at representing his political views through poetry and constituted an important new development in his writing.

In
The Descent of Liberty
Hunt argued that political reform was a subject not only for the editors of newspapers but for all creative thinkers. In the 1790s, restrictions on free speech and political activity had acted as a creative spur for a whole generation of writers. This was the decade in which Wordsworth and Coleridge produced
Lyrical Ballads
, when Wollstonecraft wrote her
Vindication
and Godwin produced
Political Justice
.  It was during this decade that Coleridge and Robert Southey formulated their ambitious plan for a political utopia, Pantisocracy, a society of equals to be founded in the United States. Opposition proved fruitful for these writers, who produced their most influential and important work in a decade when they themselves were marginalised and vulnerable.

In the 1810s something similar happened to a new generation of intellectuals.
The Descent of Liberty
showed how a man who was oppressed through incarceration could reach out beyond the confines of political campaigning to find a new, literary readership, just as Shelley hoped to do in
Queen Mab
. Like
Queen Mab
, it also showed that poetry could be transformed into a vehicle for political protest.
Although
The Descent of Liberty
celebrated the defeat of Napoleon, it had some strident criticisms to make of the victorious allied powers. But despite its subject – and because of its form – it was warmly received by periodicals who had previously taken very little interest in Hunt. While some of his political enemies were predictably unpleasant about his work, other commentators were quick to praise it. The
British Lady’s Magazine
, not known for its support of radical journalists, was positively sentimental about him: ‘Our readers will no doubt smile at the idea of a poet within the wall of a prison celebrating . . . the final triumph of Liberty, and descanting upon the blessings likely to ensue, with as much freedom and poetical spirits as if reclining at his ease upon the green bed of nature, with no other canopies than the oak and the heavens.’
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 Hunt’s friends were equally complimentary. Thomas Moore thought the poem had the permanence of a portrait by Joshua Reynolds, and a joint letter to Hunt from Henry Robertson, William Havell and Charles Ollier (the last of whom would publish Shelley’s work) described how they had met ‘in solemn council’ to read the work through. It left them, they reported, with ‘such an impression of excellence on our minds . . . that we resolved thus to address you.’
⁴⁷
 The support and inspiration provided by Hunt’s friends was crucial to the success of
The Descent of Liberty
.  In it Hunt re-worked conversations with his visitors about the progress of European politics into poetry, and his letters for the winter of 1814 show that his supporters’ encouragement of his literary activities sustained his creative energy and enthusiasm in less tangible ways as well.

From this point onwards Hunt increasingly used poetry as the vehicle for the expression of a political will. The effect of this was twofold.  First,
The Examiner
became more eclectic and a significant number of poems sympathetic to its liberal aims began to appear in its pages. Second, Hunt’s political activities ceased to be confined to the pages of
The Examiner
and began to reverberate through all areas of his literary life. These were important philosophical shifts for both newspaper and editor. Of course, there was nothing particularly original in the idea that art could be put at the service of politics. But the degree of integration envisaged by Hunt
was
new, as was the idea that a group of intellectuals, like those who contributed to the prison editions of
The Examiner
, could come from their different disciplines to work together in a way which would epitomise the ideals of reform and political resistance.

By the end of 1814,
The Examiner
was firmly established as the organ through which Hunt kept in touch with the world. Throughout the summer he had produced a series of brilliant commentaries on post-war Europe. He was dubious about the wisdom of exiling Napoleon to Elba and eyed the restoration of the Bourbons with undisguised scepticism, noting ‘We confess indeed that if we could have
our
choice, we would have neither BONAPARTE nor BOURBON, whether limited in their power or not.’
⁴⁸
 He wrote a series of dismissive articles about the delegations of European leaders who came to London to discuss peace plans, and on the arrangements for their entertainment put in place by the Prince Regent; and provided his readers with a detailed analysis of Norway’s position in the peace negotiations. He condemned the use of military torture and the Regent’s ill-treatment of his daughter, Princess Charlotte of Wales, after her refusal to marry William of Orange.  In the autumn he embarked on a long series of articles on the approaching Congress of Vienna, which seemed to offer an opportunity for the reformation of corrupt political systems across Europe – an opportunity which the Allied powers looked likely to squander.

As 1814 drew to a close Hunt seemed to have the whole of Europe under his gaze. No free man could have been more engaged with the cut and thrust of domestic and international politics. His sentence did not silence him as intended; instead it gave him the freedom to consolidate his thinking about the relationship between politics, literature and friendship. And throughout his sentence, his friends continued to work hard to make sure he knew he was neither deserted nor forgotten.  Haydon wrote long letters from Paris when he arrived there shortly after the Peace, extracts from which were published in
The Examiner
. Charles Lamb visited regularly, sometimes struggling through rain and snow to get to Surrey Gaol, and often after he had worked long days in his office at the East India Company. Charles Cowden Clarke sent vegetables from his garden and eggs from his hens, and he too visited frequently, sometimes in the company of other members of his family. Thomas Mitchell and Thomas Barnes wrote often, as did Henry Brougham. In one such note Mitchell reassured Hunt that he thought of him whenever he opened
The Examiner.
‘I consider your paper . . . which I regularly see as a sort of weekly intercourse, & wish you could contrive in the Table Talk to introduce some kind of covert Bulletin, which unknown to the general reader, might combine to inform your absent friends of the state of your health.’
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