NORTH WALES AND THE SECOND IRISH TRIP.
William A. Madocks--The Tremadoc Embankment--Shelley’s Zeal for the
People of Tremadoc--His big Subscription to the Embankment
Fund--Tanyrallt Lodge--Shelley in London--Sussex Selfishness--The
Reconciliation with Hogg--Miss Hitchener in Disgrace--She is banished
from ‘Percy’s Little Circle’--Brown Demon and Hermaphroditical
Beast--Shelley in Skinner Street--Claire and Mary--Fanny Imlay’s
Intercourse with Shelley--The Worth and Worthlessness of Claire’s
Evidence--Shelley’s Prodigality--Back at Tanyrallt--At Work on _Queen
Mab_--At War with Neighbours--Embankment Annoyances--Livelier Delight
in Harriett--Wheedling Letter to the Duke of Norfolk--Diet and
Dyspepsia--The Hunts in trouble--Shelley’s Contribution for their
Relief--The odious Leeson--Daniel Hill’s liberation from Prison--His
Arrival at Tanyrallt Lodge--The Tanyrallt Mystery--Shelley’s
marvellous and conflicting Stories--Exhibition of the
Evidence--Inquisition and Verdict--Shelley’s ignominious Position--His
virtuous Indignation at the World’s Villany--His undiminished Concern
for Liberty and Virtue--His Withdrawal from Wales to Ireland--He
hastens from Dublin to Killarney--Hogg in Dublin--The Shelleys back in
London.
(4.)--TANYRALLT, CARNARVONSHIRE, N.W.
In default of data, by which their course could be traced precisely, the
historian can only say of the movements of the four adventurers between
Ilfracombe and Tremadoc, that they appear to have arrived at the latter
place without greatly exceeding the time that would be usually spent by
tourists in a trip from North Devon, across the Bristol Channel, and
onwards from Cardiff to Carnarvon. Readers will not be far wrong in
assuming that on the day of William Godwin’s arrival at Lynmouth (18th
September, 1812), his young friend had been two or three days at Tremadoc.
Either from the moment of his arrival at Tremadoc, or from a quickly
following day, Shelley was for some time in a scene of excitement that
diverted his mind from the painful circumstances of his flight from
Lynton. In September, 1812, an unusually high tide swept away portions of
the breakwater and embankment, that had been raised a few years earlier by
a considerable landowner of the neighbourhood (William A. Madocks, Esq.,
Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, and Member of Parliament) for the
preservation of lands, which he was set on reclaiming from the sea. The
immediate consequence of the injury to the insufficient works was a flood
that, sweeping across the imperfectly reclaimed lands, inflicted much
suffering and loss on humble tillers and other occupants of the soil.
Whether the flood preceded, or followed Shelley’s arrival at Tremadoc by a
few days, or was precisely coincident with it, does not appear; but it is
certain that he was deeply stirred by the results of the calamity.
Commiserating the poor people, driven from their tenements by the sea, he
sympathized also with the wealthier sufferers. Approaching Mr. Madocks,
seignior of Tremadoc, and Mr. Williams, the great man’s agent, with
appropriate expressions of concern for the trouble that had befallen them
and their dependents, Shelley explained to them _more suo_, that he was
the eldest son of Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the county of
Sussex, and eventual inheritor of the baronetcy and broad acres of his
grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley. At present a minor, with his hands tied
as the hands of minors ever are, he was in the twenty-first year of his
minority; but next August, on attaining his majority, he should be in a
position to contribute handsomely to the fund that must be raised to
restore Tremadoc to prosperity. In fact, he spoke to the gentlemen of
Tremadoc just such brave words of himself, as a few months since had
caused honest Jack Lawless to write of him as the immediate heir to one of
the first fortunes of England, and a young gentleman who would do great
things for the benefit of Ireland.
It is not wonderful that the Tremadoc gentry were caught by these promises
of assistance. A man of politics and affairs, a Fellow of All Souls, and a
student of human nature, Mr. Madocks saw the young man’s enthusiasm was
sincere, and knew just enough of his history to have no hesitation in
taking the young gentleman, at his own valuation. It was not for Mr.
Madocks to cross-examine the young gentleman who spoke so frankly of his
parentage and prospects. In truth, there was nothing in Shelley’s talk to
move either Mr. Madocks, or his local agent (Mr. Williams), to suspicion.
Young gentlemen often come into easy circumstances on coming of age, even
though they must wait for their father’s estates. Sir Bysshe Shelley had
the reputation of being the wealthiest commoner of his county. The whole
House of Commons knew the Member for New Shoreham would, in the usual
course of things, succeed to great wealth. What more natural than for the
eldest son of so considerable a squire, the grandson of so wealthy a
baronet, to step into money on the attainment of his majority?
By the elders of Tremadoc a scheme, that showed excellently on paper, was
devised for the future security and welfare of the town. The old
breakwater and embankment having proved ineffectual for the protection of
the imperfectly reclaimed five thousand acres of land, it was determined
to build a stronger and more imposing embankment, and make on its top a
coach-road, that, uniting two Welsh counties, would be advantageous to
England and Ireland, as well as Wales, by shortening the journey from
Dublin to Bath and London. There being no question with the projectors
respecting the fertility of the land, if it could be duly guarded from the
salt-water, it was estimated that the four or five thousand acres of
reclaimable soil would soon yield a rental of from 8000_l._ to 10,000_l._
a-year. These advantages would result from an embankment, made at an
estimated cost of 20,000_l._
To practical critics it may appear that, unless this scheme were not based
on misconception, the owners of the reclaimable land must have been
strangely neglectful of their interests. To the same critics it may seem
that, as the embankment would yield a revenue of from 8000_l._ to
10,000_l._ a-year to the owners of the land, they were the persons to
provide the 20,000_l._ To the Tremadoc elders, however, it appeared only
reasonable that the capital, to be so expended for the enrichment of these
landowners, should be provided by all persons of the general public,
wishing well to Tremadoc and the United Kingdom, of which Tremadoc was
part. It does not appear what interest, or whether any interest, was to be
paid for money advanced by subscribers. From the way in which she commends
Shelley for the largeness of his subscription, it is obvious Lady Shelley
regards the moneys proffered by subscribers as differing in no respect
from moneys given to a benevolent enterprise.
Shelley thought that the landowners, who would be so greatly benefited by
the embankment, should be invited to subscribe liberally. Acting on this
view, the impetuous minor assailed several of the neighbouring gentry with
personal entreaties for money, for the good cause;--entreaties he could
make with a good grace, since, to set richer folk a good example, he had
headed the subscription list ‘with a donation’ (says Lady Shelley) ‘of
500_l._, though his means, as the reader has seen, were small.’ It was,
doubtless, understood by Messrs. Madocks and Williams, that the young
gentleman should not be asked to pay anything for this spirited stroke of
his pen, until he should have entered on the financial plenitude, that
would follow the attainment of his majority. At the same time the
enthusiastic youth undertook to gather subscriptions in his native county,
and more especially from his friend, the Duke of Norfolk.
Seeing how set Shelley was on furthering the interests of Tremadoc, it was
only natural for Mr. Madocks to have pleasure in letting his young friend
a certain furnished cottage at Tanyrallt. Called a cottage, Tanyrallt
Lodge differed greatly from the tenement in which the adventurers had been
lodging at Lynton. A cottage of gentility, with a billiard-room and
circumambient lawns, this lodge almost justified Shelley in writing of it
to Hogg, as ‘a cottage extensive and tasty enough for the villa of an
Italian Prince.’ Good taste, of course, forbade the Lord of Tremadoc to
name a rent beneath the dignity of a tenant who, besides being a gentleman
of quality, would soon be in easy circumstances. Even Shelley thought the
rent ‘large, but,’ as he wrote with winning candour to Hogg, ‘it is an
object with us that they allow it to remain unpaid till I am of age.’ The
place was worth the deferred rent; and the landlord lived with his tenant
on the friendliest terms; speaking to him confidentially of the descent of
Madockses, of Tremadoc, from Prince Madoc, and doubtless listening with
proper interest to his youthful tenant’s stories of the Shelleys of olden
time, and the ancient snake of the Field Place gardens. At the same time
Mrs. Madocks and Miss Westbrook became fast friends, after the wont of
gentlewomen, who conceive it is to their interest to be very intimate with
one another.
Shelley had done well for himself and his attendant gentlewomen in
migrating from North Devon to Carnarvonshire, and throwing himself so
impetuously into the embankment business. At Tanyrallt he and they lived
(pleasantly for awhile) with the best people of the neighbourhood; and
enjoyed the change of scene and society all the more, because in
pre-railway days Tremadoc was too far a call from Lynton, for them to fear
the talk of the Lynmouth tattlers would come to the ears of the quality
round about Tanyrallt. But an altogether wrong view is taken of the
position by readers, who question the genuineness of Shelley’s affection
for Tremadoc, or suspect him of entertaining his new friends with hopes he
intended to disappoint. For the moment he was quite as earnest for the new
breakwater as a few months before he had been for Catholic Emancipation.
He had been for so long a time looking to the attainment of his majority
as a point of his existence, when he should be able to make better terms
with his father, or raise money at a comparatively easy rate on his
expectations, that he was quite honest in speaking of his coming of age,
as a time when he should be able to give 500_l._ to the Tremadoc
embankment, and pay the deferred rent for Tanyrallt Lodge. The impetuous
and imaginative young man had fairly talked himself into conceiving, that
to raise a handsome sum for the embankment fund he had only to carry the
subscription list to the Duke of Norfolk and his other friends in Sussex.
(5.)--LONDON: ST. JAMES’S COFFEE-HOUSE.
Soon (say ten days or a fortnight) after taking possession of the
Tanyrallt Lodge, Shelley went to London with the ladies of his party. The
authorities are at variance respecting the objects, incidents, or duration
of this visit. Hogg, who knew nothing of Shelley’s frequent visits to
Godwin during this period, seems to have been under the impression that
Shelley’s first act, after coming to town, was to seek him out; whereas
the interview of reconciliation did not take place till the poet had been
at least four weeks in town. Working on Hogg’s misconception, and his own
erroneous assumption that Shelley must have left London for Tanyrallt on
Thursday, 12th November, because, on the previous Saturday, he intended
doing so, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy concludes that Shelley’s ‘brief
visit’ to town ‘lasted little more than a week,’ and that Hogg dined with
the Shelleys only on one occasion during the visit; whereas the visit
exceeded six weeks by a single day, and Hogg dined twice with the Shelleys
at the St. James’s Coffee-house. With respect to the length of the stay in
London, Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong only by a single day. Lady Shelley, of
course, makes several mistakes about the business. (1) Speaking of
Shelley’s exertions for the Tremadoc embankment, she says, ‘But he did not
allow his zeal to stop even here; for, accompanied by his wife, he hurried
up to London to obtain further succour.’ He was accompanied by Miss
Hitchener and Miss Westbrook, as well as his wife; and he went to town on
other matters besides the Tremadoc embankment. (2) Speaking of the poet’s
intercourse with the author of _Political Justice_, Lady Shelley says,
‘During his visit to London, Shelley made the personal acquaintance of
Godwin, with whom he lived for a time;’ whereas it is certain that, though
calling frequently on Godwin and becoming very intimate with the Skinner
Street family, Shelley slept at the St. James’s Coffee-house. (3) Speaking
of Shelley’s intercourse with Fanny Imlay, Lady Shelley calls her Fanny
Godwin, says she was ‘the philosopher’s daughter,’ and adds in a note that
‘Fanny Godwin was the only sister of Shelley’s second wife;’ whereas Mary
Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, by Gilbert Imlay, had no right to
Godwin’s surname, was _not_ the philosopher’s daughter, and was only the
illegitimate uterine sister of Shelley’s second wife. It is curious to
observe how, whilst pushing poor Claire out of all sisterly relation to
Shelley’s second wife, whose sister-by-affinity she unquestionably was,
Lady Shelley affiliates Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child on
William Godwin, and promotes her to the dignity of being whole-sister of
Shelley’s second wife. (4) Speaking of Fanny’s death, Lady Shelley says
the poor girl ‘died early in 1815.’ Lady Shelley is doubly wrong in these
few words; for Fanny did not die in 1815, nor did she die early in any
year. She killed herself on 9th October, 1816.
Hurrying up to London (to use Lady Shelley’s expression) Shelley took
rooms at the St. James’s Coffee-house, and whilst in town accomplished
several objects that had quite as much to do with his trip to the capital,
as his avowed purpose of winning subscribers to the Tremadoc embankment.
He left Lynton with the intention of being in London in a fortnight. Set
on making Godwin’s personal acquaintance, he also wished for reconcilement
to Hogg. From the fact that he was a month in town before seeking him out,
it may not be inferred that the poet’s desire for intercourse with his
college friend was a feeble inclination. Shelley knew enough of the
lawyers and their haunts to be aware that he should be only wasting his
time in hunting for Hogg, before the barristers and students of the Four
Inns had returned to town for Michaelmas Term. He had good reason to think
that Hogg, a man of rural birth and nurture, would be slaughtering
pheasants till the end of the Long Vacation. Arriving in London on Sunday,
4th October, 1812, Shelley lost no time in going to Skinner Street,
because he knew Godwin would be there. Whilst going, almost daily for
several weeks, to Skinner Street, he kept away from the Inns of Court,
till he could hope to find Hogg in one of them. On the opening of the
Michaelmas Term he hastened to the Inns, discovered his old friend’s
lodgings, and rushed in upon him at night, in the manner already set forth
in these pages. As Hogg ‘returned from the country at the end of October,
1812’ (_vide_ Hogg’s _Life_, Vol. ii., p. 165), Shelley might have found
his old friend a day or too earlier; but he was right in thinking he would
waste his time and pains in hunting for him much sooner.
For any good he could do the projectors of the embankment Shelley might as
well have stayed at Tanyrallt. In promising to do much for them he had
‘talked too fast,’--a fault of which youthful and impetuous persons of
both sexes are often guilty; and in due course he was punished for his
fast _talk_ by the annoyance that came to him from the pressure, put upon
him to _do_ something in fulfilment of his brave words. From one of his
letters it seems that he made some faint attempts to get subscribers to
the embankment fund in Sussex. Possibly he wrote to his uncle Pilfold and
Mr. Medwin on the subject; but it is certain he received neither from them
nor any one else in the county any assistance for the great scheme. ‘I
see,’ he wrote to Mr. Williams of Tremadoc from the St. James’s
Coffee-house on 7th November, 1812, ‘no hope of effecting, on my part, any
grand or decisive scheme until the expiration of my minority,’--words
comically indicative of the grand and decisive things he had promised to
do for Tremadoc, as soon as he should come of age. In Sussex he met with
no encouragement. The cold and unsympathetic animals of his native shire
cared only for eating, drinking, and sleeping. But his fervid hopes,
ardent desires, and unremitting personal exertions, were all engaged for
the great cause of the Tremadoc embankment, ‘which he would desert but
with his life’:--a declaration not unworthy of Mr. Micawber in his
happiest moments.
At the date of this letter Shelley had not seen, nor does he appear to
have written to, his particular friend, the Duke of Norfolk, on the
enterprise for benefiting owners of property in and near Tremadoc; for he
says in the epistle, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has just returned to London. I
shall call upon him this morning, and shall spare no pains in engaging his
interest, or perhaps his better feelings, in our and our country’s cause.’
If Shelley talked to the Duke of the Tremadoc embankment in the style in
which he wrote about it to the Welsh agent, his Grace of Norfolk must have
found it difficult to refrain from laughing outright at the youngster.
Though it is questionable whether Shelley journeyed from Tanyrallt to
London with a clear purpose of dismissing Miss Hitchener from his little
circle, before he should return to the Principality, there are grounds for
a strong opinion that he did not travel with Portia from Lynton to
Tremadoc, without discovering she was by no means the angelic person he
had formerly imagined her. At Lynton, where she was mistaken for a
foreigner, whilst climbing the cliffs with her Percy, this tall, thin,
rather bony, somewhat masculine, slightly bearded, perceptibly moustached,
all too swarthy, far too loquacious young woman had for some time retained
her power over Shelley, and even given promise of drawing Harriett under
her sway:--facts that did not soften Miss Westbrook to the brown-eyed and
brown-skinned intruder. Before they stole away from Lynton, Portia and
Eliza were at war, more often open than covert, with one another. Touring
under the most favourable circumstances is necessarily attended with
conditions likely to try the tempers of imperfectly congenial
fellow-travellers; and the journey of the four adventurers from North
Devon to North Wales cannot have disposed the ladies-at-war to think less
bitterly of each other. Whilst the schoolmistress thought Eliza no worthy
member of ‘Percy’s little circle,’ the gentlewoman, whose papa belonged to
the highest grade of licensed victuallers, thought any circle too good for
the talkative woman, whose father kept a common ale-house. It is not
strange, therefore, that in London, if not at Tanyrallt, Shelley decided
to banish Portia from his little circle for ever.
On receiving this sentence of extrusion, Portia turned upon her poet with
a demand for pecuniary compensation. Wanting, though it must be declared,
in the delicacy and highmindedness, appropriate to an incomparable Portia,
this demand by a provincial innkeeper’s daughter was not unreasonable.
The demandant’s case was this:--‘When you crossed my path I had the
respect of my neighbours, and a school by which I made a decent
livelihood, both of which valuable things I surrendered at your earnest
entreaty that I would come to you and live with you _for ever_. I did not
force myself on you. On the contrary, I declined your pressing invitations
to come to you in Ireland. Instead of hastening to you in Wales, I asked
you to come to me at Hurstpierpoint. I should not have joined you in North
Devon, had you not persuaded me you could never be happy without me. A few
months of it have sufficed to make you weary of my company; and now you
have had all the amusement I am capable of affording you, you tell me to
be off. At least, you should help me to place myself in as good a position
as the one I surrendered at your request and for your pleasure.’ Shelley
could not deny there was justice in the demand. To be quit of her without
further quarrelling, he promised to make her an allowance. What he engaged
to give in quarterly payments does not appear; but he may be assumed to
have promised her forty or fifty pounds a-year. This matter having been
settled, it was arranged that Miss Hitchener should spend Sunday, 15th
November, 1812, with the trio--dining with them at the St. James’s
Coffee-house, and bidding them farewell for ever, at the close of the
evening.
Calling on the morning of that same Sunday at the St. James’s Coffee-house
to see his friends, Hogg was pressed to be the fifth person at the
farewell dinner. Shelley being precluded from walking with him by some
special engagement, and Harriett being a sufferer from headache, that made
her other than the bright and blooming Harriett with whom he had dined at
the same hotel a few days earlier, Hogg was on this occasion induced to
attend Eliza and Portia for a promenade in the parks before dinner.
Nothing droller can be found in Hogg’s book than his account of his walk
in the parks with the brown demon (Miss Hitchener) on his right arm, and
the black diamond (Miss Westbrook) on his left. Moving between the
belligerent women, Hogg had reason to admire the tone of haughty contempt
with which the Black Diamond tossed her insults at the Brown Demon, and
the meek contumacy with which Miss Hitchener returned her enemy’s fire.
For awhile the fighting was sharp; but in little more than half-an-hour
the victory was with the Brown Demon, whose galling meekness and poisonous
malice fairly silenced her insolent foe. The Black Diamond turning sulky
and silent, Hogg gave his ear for the rest of the walk to the Brown Demon,
who poured from her bearded lips the stream of gentle eloquence that
afforded him new views on the rights of women.
On their return from this pleasant ‘airing’ in the parks, as they were
crossing the threshold of the St. James’s Coffee-house, Miss Eliza
Westbrook said viciously to Hogg, ‘How could you talk to that nasty
creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Why
did you encourage her? Harriett will be seriously displeased with you, I
assure you; she will be very angry!’
True to her mission, Portia strove to illuminate Percy’s little circle to
the last moment of her connexion with it. Hogg happening to refer to the
rights of the gentler sex, Miss Hitchener reopened her parable after tea
and discoursed eloquently on the high theme, even to the moment of the
arrival of the hackney-coach, which had been summoned to remove her from
her auditors for ever. Whilst the lady was delivering this final oration,
Percy quitted his chair, and taking up a position before her drank-in the
musical utterances of her wisdom with a comical show of approval.
If Shelley softened to Portia at the moment of parting, the weakness was
transient; for he soon learnt to speak as well as think of her with a
resentment that might almost be styled ferocious. As the hour approached
for the first of the quarterly payments he rose to rage at the mere
thought of the hateful creature.
‘The Brown Demon,’ he wrote to Hogg from Tanyrallt on 3rd December,
1812, ‘as we call our late tormentor and schoolmistress, must receive
her stipend.... She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical
beast of a woman, and my astonishment at my fatuity, inconsistency,
and bad taste, was never so great, as after living four months with
her as an inmate. What would Hell be, were such a woman in Heaven?’
‘_Hermaphroditical beast of a woman!_’ Surely these are strangely strong
words for a chivalric gentleman to apply to a woman, whatever her failings
may have been!
Whatever disappointments Shelley encountered during this sojourn in
London, none of them can have come to him from his treatment in Skinner
Street. Welcomed by Godwin with open arms, Shelley entered at once on
personal relations with the philosopher, that accorded in every particular
with the relations they had maintained towards one another by written
words. Coming to the eminent man of letters for sympathy, counsel, and
instruction, Shelley received what he sought. So much pitifully snobbish
stuff has been written about the intercourse of William Godwin and
Shelley, as though the author of _Political Justice_ was greatly honoured
and his dwelling glorified by the visits of the heir to a Sussex
baronetcy, that it is necessary to remind the reader of the relation which
Godwin condescended to hold towards Shelley, and of the relation in which
Shelley was reasonably proud to stand in towards Godwin. The position of
Godwin towards Shelley was that of a teacher, patron, benefactor. The
position of Shelley towards Godwin was that of a pupil and worshiper. And
it is to the credit of both that each of the scholars occupied his
respective position gracefully, till one of them was guilty of perhaps the
wildest extravagance of domestic treason recorded in the annals of men of
letters. Whilst Godwin’s condescension and kindness to his youthful
_protégé_ had no tincture of arrogance, Shelley’s acknowledgments of his
teacher’s kindness were rendered in terms of generous homage and grateful
devotion.
At the same time Godwin’s house was open at all hours to Shelley. Let it
be observed (for the servility of certain writers requires the clear
statement of a matter about which good taste would rather be silent) that,
though the Godwins were far from prosperous, the Skinner-Street household
was a family no man of culture and sensibility could enter without feeling
himself in the home of gentle people. If Godwin looked like a Dissenting
minister, and showed signs of his lowly origin, to look into his eyes and
to listen to his speech was to recognize a man of unusual intellect. A
woman of gentle birth and literary achievements, Mrs. Godwin, somewhat too
stout for elegance but none too massive for matronly dignity, was a
bright, clever, vivacious, charming woman in society, though she had a
faulty temper. Possessing no facial beauty apart from the agreeable
expression of her countenance, the eldest daughter of the house (Fanny
Imlay) had the voice, carriage, and air of an agreeable and well-mannered
young gentlewoman. Charles Clairmont was at Edinburgh when Shelley made
the personal acquaintance of the Skinner-Street Godwins; but had the old
Charterhouse boy, of comely face and quick brain, been at home in the
October and November of 1812, Shelley would have met a young man,
qualified by nature and training for an honourable career. Godwin’s son by
his second wife was a promising little fellow. The fifteen-years-old
damsels, Claire and Mary, were already coming into possession of the wit
and personal attractiveness that distinguished them a few years later.
Mainly dependent though they were for their food and raiment and pleasures
on the shop, over which they had their home, the members of this curiously
composed family might be rated with the _bourgeoisie_ from one point of
view; but in manner, taste, tone, intellectual interests and aspirations,
they were as much gentle people as Shelley’s more fortunate relatives.
Beyond thinking them a pair of bright and winsome children, Shelley in the
autumn of 1812 does not seem to have taken much notice of Claire and Mary;
but the evidence is abundant that he was no less strongly than agreeably
interested in Fanny Imlay. Being thus interested in her, it was a matter
of course with Shelley to press her to correspond with him, in order that
he might know her more intimately, and contribute to the development of
her intellectual and moral nature. Probably he invited her to a
correspondence, in the hope that her letters would prove a sufficient
substitute for the diverting letters he had for so many months received
from the Brown Demon, whose longest epistles for the future would be a
mere acknowledgment of her quarterly stipend, should it ever be paid to
her. Instead of accepting this invitation with alacrity, Fanny Imlay
demurred to the proposal on considerations of propriety. She would have
accepted such an invitation from Harriett with glee, but hesitated to
enter on a sentimental correspondence with Harriett’s husband; the
hesitation being due to scruples, that would not have troubled her, had
she been educated in accordance with the theories and proposals of her
mother’s _Rights of Woman_. These scruples were not the less influential
with Fanny in December of 1812, because she had good reason to think that
Shelley and Mrs. Shelley, after enjoying the free run of the
Skinner-Street house during their stay in town, showed her father and
mother scant courtesy in returning to Wales, without bidding them
good-bye.
Notwithstanding his practice of asking young women to correspond with
him, Shelley would scarcely have asked Fanny to write to him, without
feeling an interest in her. Nor is it probable that he made the request,
without thinking he had rendered himself an object of her friendly regard.
Instead of indicating indifference, the hesitancy she displayed in
acceding to his entreaty may be regarded as evidence, that she was
conscious of feeling too warmly for the young man, who after throwing
himself on her family for sympathy and social diversion, had gone away
from them so lightly. Her resentment of his neglect to render her family
the courtesy of a formal adieu, may also be taken as evidence that she was
interested in him.
It is no new story that just four years after Shelley made her
acquaintance, Fanny killed herself at Swansea. It is no new story that
Claire was of opinion that Fanny so destroyed herself, from love of
Shelley. Field Place is sure that Claire never really believed any such
thing, but was only fibbing in her usual wicked way, when she uttered the
story. It is curious to observe, how in the opinion of Field Place, Claire
is by turns a liar and a witness of the highest credibility. When she says
anything that fits-in with the biographical romance, which is to be
substituted for Shelley’s true history, she is a virtuous witness; but
when she utters anything at discord with the fictitious narrative, she
becomes a miracle of mendacity. When she writes, or seems to have written,
that she took Shelley and Mary against their will from London to Geneva;
took them there without letting them know she was Byron’s mistress; and,
living with them there, in the capacity of Byron’s mistress, managed
matters so cleverly that they had no suspicion of her intimacy with
Byron--statements so preposterous that they are not to be believed on any
conceivable evidence--she is declared a witness of the highest
credibility; and Mr. Froude is told-off to declare the preposterous
statements must be true, because Claire made them in a withheld document.
On the other hand, when this exemplary witness makes the quite credible
statement, that Fanny committed suicide for love of Shelley, she is
declared a mendacious witness, and Mr. Kegan Paul is instructed to write
in _William Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries_:
‘The theory, which owes its origin to Miss Clairmont, that Fanny was
in love with Shelley, and that his flight with her sister prompted
self-destruction, is one above all others absolutely groundless. To
Shelley, as to Mary, she was an attached sister; she was never in love
with him, either before or after her sister’s flight.’
How can Mr. Kegan Paul be justified in making this sweeping statement? He
does not offer evidence, and can have no sufficient evidence, in support
of the comprehensive assertion. At best his statement can be nothing more
than Mrs. Shelley’s confident opinion, that her sister was never in love
with Shelley. Which of the two, Mary or Claire, was the more likely to
know the truth? Mary, who, after her flight with Shelley, saw but little
of her sister Fanny; or Claire, who between the elopement in July 1814 and
the spring of 1816, saw a great deal of Fanny? Mary, from whom Fanny, if
she loved Shelley, would be careful to conceal the cause of her deepening
melancholy; or Claire, to whom Fanny may have confided or unconsciously
revealed the secret of her wretchedness?
‘The theory’ (as Mr. Kegan Paul calls it) certainly was not ‘absolutely
groundless.’ (1) By inviting her to correspond with him, Shelley showed a
strong interest in Fanny, and paid her a compliment which would be likely
to make her take an interest in him, if she had felt none in him before,
or to deepen any concern, she had already entertained for him. (2) Their
intercourse in the ensuing year was of a nature to stimulate and feed her
interest in him. (3) From the date of her sister’s flight with Shelley,
her natural disposition to melancholy steadily deepened:--a fact accordant
with the notion that she loved Shelley.
On the other hand, it must be remembered, that the increase of her
melancholy may be otherwise accounted for. The affectionate girl may well
have fretted about the shame coming to the whole Godwin household from her
sister’s elopement with another woman’s husband. She may also have made
herself greatly miserable about the circumstances of her mother’s story,
which most likely came to her shortly before her sister’s flight. Still,
the steady increase of her gloom from the end of July 1814, to the 9th
October, 1816, is a ground for regarding Claire’s view of the case
respectfully.
Unlike Field Place (to whom Claire is a sufficient witness to prove
anything they wish people to believe), I cannot, having regard to her
unquestionable faculty for fibbing, deem her unsupported testimony
adequate for the settlement of any nicely perplexing question. Having
regard, however, to Claire’s better means of observation, and several
matters giving at least a colour of probability to her view, I would on
this matter rather rely on Claire, who sometimes told fibs, than on the
Mary Godwin, who sometimes said things that were the reverse of fact. In
the absence of sufficient evidence for a confident conclusion, I hold my
judgment in suspense with respect to the question, whether Fanny’s death
resulted from the cause to which Claire attributed it. And I advise the
reader to do likewise.
(6.)--TANYRALLT.
Returning to Tanyrallt in the middle of November, 1812, Shelley remained
there till some day following closely on 26th February, 1813, and left
Carnarvonshire for Dublin on 6th March, 1813. Beginning somewhere about
the middle of September 1812, the whole term of his domestication in the
county of Carnarvon (including the six weeks’ stay in London) was
something less than six months. Before the trip to town he had on his
hands his wife, Miss Westbrook, and Miss Hitchener. Whilst he and Harriett
stayed at the St. James’ Coffee-house, Miss Westbrook probably stayed
chiefly at her father’s house, so as not to increase greatly the charges
her brother-in-law was at in the hotel. Miss Hitchener also may be
presumed to have visited her friends in Sussex, or elsewhere, whilst
Shelley was enjoying the society of the Godwins, so that he was at a
smaller expense for her than he would have been, had she stayed the whole
six weeks at the West-End hotel. Still the cost to Shelley of the
locomotion of so large a party from Tanyrallt to London, and of so long a
sojourn in town, must have been greatly in excess of his narrow means.
After the return to Wales, till the end of February 1813, he lived at
Tanyrallt Lodge (for which he had engaged to pay a ‘large rent’) with his
wife, sister-in-law, and three female servants. At the same time he bought
expensive books of or through Mr. Hookham of Bond Street, incurred a
considerable debt for the printing of _Queen Mab_, and put himself under
an obligation to pay Miss Hitchener a quarterly stipend. These items of
expenditure being taken into account, it may be computed that, from the
middle of September 1812, to the beginning of March 1813, he lived, at the
least, at the rate of 1000_l._ a-year; no account being taken of the
500_l._ which he had promised to give to the Tremadoc Embankment when he
should come of age. This sum being added to the total of his expenditure
during less than six calendar months, it follows that the young gentleman,
with only 400_l._ a-year, was for the same term living at the rate of
2000_l._ a-year,--was in fact living beyond his sufficient income by 400
per cent. It is certain therefore that the letter, in which Godwin warned
his young friend against the inconveniences of financial extravagance, was
no untimely intrusion of needless advice. Following so closely on the
admonitory letter, and the epistle in which he declared his freedom from
the weakness imputed to him, this outbreak of prodigality shows how
cautious the poet’s biographers should be in assuming that his actions
corresponded closely with his words.
Whilst living so much beyond his means, Shelley experienced several
annoyances in the lovely neighbourhood where he had, for a brief moment,
hoped to be happy for ever. Having by the end of the year exhausted the
excitement of figuring before the people of Tremadoc as a benefactor, who
would never desert them nor grow indifferent to their interests, he
discovered in his neighbours the usual qualities of countryfolk, whether
they live on the Welsh coast, or in North Devon, or in the Rapes of
Sussex. By no means devoid of intellectual narrowness, they were animated
with religious bigotry. Believing in Christianity, they mistrusted and
disliked those who scoffed at it. Whilst the gentry were proud and
grasping, the peasantry were poor and cringing. The farmers were ignorant
fools, the squires were (in Shelley’s opinion) insufferably dull fellows.
‘The society in Wales,’ he wrote from Tanyrallt to Hogg, even as early as
3rd December, 1812, ‘is very stupid. They are all aristocrats and saints;
but that, I tell you, I do not mind in the least; the unpleasant part of
the business is, that they hunt people to death who are not so likewise.’
The result, or rather the fruitlessness, of Shelley’s excursion to London
was, of course, a great disappointment to the Tremadoc populace, and to
others of the gentry, besides Mr. Madocks and Mr. Williams. Instead of
returning with a handsome list of subscribers, headed by his particular
friend the Duke of Norfolk, he was constrained to acknowledge he had not
found a single subscriber in London or Sussex. It was clear to the
Welshmen that the young gentleman had been talking too fast, and that they
had been taken-in by his plausible speech. Angry with themselves for being
such simpletons, some of them were disposed to punish him for their own
folly. In his annoyance at feeling that his Tremadoc friends had
discovered the value of his grand talk, Shelley wrote bitterly, from
Tanyrallt on 7th February, 1813, to Hogg of ‘the variety of discomfitures’
coming to him from ‘the embankment affairs, in which he had thoughtlessly
engaged!’
Indications are not wanting that for a brief while after coming to
Tremadoc, Shelley was less loquacious than he had been for some years
about those of his views on politics and religion, that could not fail to
be as offensive to the people of Carnarvonshire as they had proved to
persons of other counties. But it was not in his nature to be so discreet
for many weeks together. Hence it came to pass that before leaving Wales
he was superlatively distasteful to several of his Tanyrallt neighbours on
account of his infidelity and ultra-radicalism. By some means or other one
of his Irish pamphlets fell into the hands of a certain Mr. Leeson, who,
discovering treason in the essay, sent it up to the Government, and then
went about the neighbourhood, saying the author of the pamphlet was a
pestilent Republican, who ought to be driven out of the country. Shelley
and Harriett tried to persuade themselves that Mr. Leeson’s animosity
against them was due to their firmness in refusing to receive him within
their doors, because they knew him to be ‘malignant and cruel to the
greatest degree,’--a view of the case that, on coming to Mr. Leeson’s
ears, cannot have rendered him less desirous of ridding the neighbourhood
of those pestilent Shelleys.
In one of the earlier weeks (probably towards the end of the second week)
of November, 1812, whilst the Shelleys were still at the St. James’s
Coffee-house, Hogg appears to have urged his friend for pecuniary ends to
make overtures for a reconciliation with his father, and to appeal to the
Duke of Norfolk for his good offices in rendering the overtures
successful. It being obvious to Hogg that the Shelleys were living greatly
beyond their means, he may well have pressed this scheme upon them as the
only plan of preserving them from a scandalous exposure of their financial
troubles. The advice thus given in the first instance by word of mouth,
was renewed by words of the pen, to which Shelley (more truth-loving, be
it remembered, than most men) replied from Tanyrallt, on 3rd December,
1812, in a letter, containing these remarkable words:--‘_I_ will, this
instant, sit down and do penance for my involuntary crime by writing a
long wheedling letter to his Grace, and you shall be informed of the
success of the experiment.’ At the same time, whilst avowing his despair
of influencing his father by any but selfish considerations, Shelley
declared his intention of approaching old Killjoy with an air of good
humour and a conciliatory countenance, and essaying to conquer his
austerity with civil speeches. ‘When I see him,’ he remarks, ‘though I
shall say the civilest things imaginable, yet I shall not look as if I
liked him, because I do not like him.’
To wheedle, is to entice, coax, cajole with flattering and false words for
the attainment of an end. To write a wheedling letter is to write false
and flattering words for the attainment of an end. Such a letter Shelley
coolly declares his intention of writing to his father’s patron, in order
to get money by doing so. At the same time he coolly declares his
intention to say ‘the civilest imaginable things’ to his father (whilst
hating him cordially), in order to get money out of his pocket.
An incident of English public affairs to stir Shelley greatly during his
residence at Tanyrallt was the punishment of the Hunts for libelling the
Prince Regent in the _Examiner_ newspaper, the sentence on each of the
brothers being a fine of 500_l._ with imprisonment for two years. Though
the facts of the case have been strangely misrepresented (the virulent
libel on the Prince Regent in his private character having been minimized
into a saucy reference to his age and corpulence), there is no need to set
them forth precisely in this chapter. Whether the libel was well deserved
(as Mr. Rossetti avers, whilst admitting with his usual honesty the
extreme virulence of the attack) is a question beside the main question,
viz., whether the ministers responsible for the efficient government of
the country would have been justified in allowing clever and resolute
journalists to use such violent and scurrilous language, in order to
inflame the public against the individual who was the _ipso facto_
sovereign. On this question no opinion is here offered. It is enough to
record that the poet (by this time slightly acquainted with Leigh Hunt)
felt that the Hunts had been punished with excessive severity, and should
be relieved of the pecuniary part of their punishment. Acting on this
sentiment Shelley wrote, on some day of February, 1813, from Tanyrallt, to
Mr. Hookham of Old Bond Street,--‘I am rather poor at present, but I have
20_l._ which is not immediately wanted. Pray begin a subscription for the
Hunts; put my name down for that sum, and, when I hear that you have
complied with my request, I will send it to you.... P S.--... On second
thoughts I enclose the 20_l._’
Applauding Shelley for subscribing 500_l._ for the Tremadoc embankment,
Lady Shelley applauds him for coming forward with 20_l._ ‘to vindicate and
support an oppressed fellow-struggler for liberty and justice.’ A matter,
to be mentioned in connexion with the gift to the Hunts, is that Shelley
was in debt to divers of the petty tradesmen of his neighbourhood, who, in
the opinion of some readers, may have had a stronger claim to the money so
gallantly sent off to the journalists in trouble; his debts to small
tradesmen being the more worthy of notice, because they did not give him
their goods on the understanding that they should wait for payment till he
came of age.
Shelley’s letters from Tanyrallt show that he was reading history and
philosophy in the last month of 1812 and the opening months of 1813. The
books sent him in this period by his London bookseller comprise works by
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Spinoza, and Kant, it being
worthy of notice that, whilst ordering Greek classics, he requires
editions having ‘Latin or English translations printed opposite.’
At the same time he is at work on _Queen Mab_. In a former chapter
reference was made to metrical compositions, that were in course of time
expanded and worked into _Queen Mab_. But though there are grounds for a
confident opinion, that it comprised a considerable quantity of his
earlier verse, the first of Shelley’s compositions to be mentioned amongst
the fruits of his poetical genius, was the production of 1812 and the
opening months of 1813. _Queen Mab_ was unquestionably the work of which
he wrote on 18th August, 1812, from Lynton to Mr. Thomas Hookham: ‘I
conceive I have matter for six more cantos.... Indeed, a poem is safe; the
iron-souled Attorney-General would scarcely dare to attack.’ Writing of
the same poem from Tanyrallt to Hogg on 7th February, 1813, he says,
‘_Mab_ has gone on but slowly, although she is nearly finished.’ On a
later day of the same month he wrote to Mr. Hookham, ‘_Queen Mab_ is
finished and transcribed.’ The use made of old material does not touch the
fact that the poem was mainly written in his twenty-first year, instead of
his nineteenth year. When he wrote (June, 1821) in the _Examiner_ the
words, ‘a poem, entitled _Queen Mab_, was written by me at the age of
eighteen--I dare say in a sufficiently intemperate spirit,’ he was guilty
of an error to be grouped with his misstatements to Godwin, respecting the
time when he wrote _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. After announcing the
completion of the poem to Hookham, the poet adds, ‘I am now preparing the
notes, which shall be long and philosophical.’ It is worthy of remark that
he was working upon the notes when he was at a distance from Godwin, who,
on no evidence whatever, has been declared personally accountable for the
note touching love and marriage,--a note comprising sentiments which
Godwin had promulgated when Shelley was playing with his corals, and
abandoned before the close of the last century.
The most agreeable aspect of Shelley’s life at Tanyrallt affords a view of
his intercourse with his wife. As she gave birth to Shelley’s eldest
child, Ianthe Eliza, in London, on 28th June, 1813, Harriett, at the turn
of the year 1812-13, had for some time been in a state of health, to
animate Shelley with a renewal of tenderness for her, and to quicken their
mutual affection. Stirred with the hope of becoming a father in the
ensuing summer, the poet who had longed at Dublin and Nantgwillt for the
delights of conversation with his philosophical school-mistress, now found
in his wife the sufficient mate she had not been to him either in Ireland
or at Keswick. Possibly his discovery of a Brown Demon in the whilom
angelical Miss Hitchener was, in some degree, accountable for his
contentment with the wife who promised soon to give him an heir. Anyhow
there can be no question that the moderate satisfaction with which he may
be said to have regarded his bride for several months after the subsidence
of the first excitements of the honeymoon, was now replaced by a state of
feeling that caused him to write of her with mingled pride and gladness.
The letter in which, whilst defending her from the imputation of being ‘a
fine lady,’ he spoke admiringly of ‘the uncalculating connexion of her
thoughts and speech,’ was dated to Fanny Imlay on 10th December, 1812. In
a letter of later date, referring to his unconcern whether he came to
terms with his father, he associates Harriett’s happiness with his own
contentment;--‘Harriett is very happy as we are, and I am very happy.’
Though he writes complainingly in a yet later letter (7th February, 1813)
of vexation coming to him from ‘the embankment affair,’ he speaks of his
home as a place where he forgets the annoyance, and knows nought but joy
in Harriett’s society;--‘for when I come home to Harriett I am the
happiest of the happy.’ Whilst reading Greek classics with the help of
‘cribs,’ he is teaching Harriett Latin so as to give her a general notion
of Horace’s _Odes_ and Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. ‘Harriett,’ he writes to
Hogg on the 7th February, 1813, ‘has a bold scheme of writing you a Latin
letter. If you have an Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, she will thank you to bring
it.’
Whilst Hogg (who had promised to stay with his friends at Tanyrallt in the
next month) is thus invited to take part and interest in her higher
education, Harriett is corresponding with the man who (according to the
Shelleyan idolaters) was guilty of trying to seduce her some sixteen
months since. Even to these idolaters it must appear that Shelley’s
confidence in his wife’s goodness was perfect, when he encouraged her to
live in affectionate intimacy with the man whom he still (according to the
idolaters) thought guilty of having so recently essayed to seduce her. By
them also it must be admitted that this confidence in her goodness was at
Tanyrallt associated in Shelley’s breast with lively affection for her.
The happy state of feeling was in its brightest season and tenderest hour
when Shelley produced the famous dedicatory lines of _Queen Mab_.
‘TO HARRIET * * * * *
‘Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world,
Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn?
Whose is the warm and partial praise,
Virtue’s most sweet reward?
Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul
Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow?
Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on,
And loved mankind the more?
Harriet! on thine:--thou wert my purer mind;
Thou wert the inspiration of my song;
Thine are these early wilding flowers,
Though garlanded by me.
Then press into thy breast this pledge of love;
And know, though time may change and years may roll,
Each floweret gathered in my heart
It consecrates to thine.’
In representing that these verses were written in 1810, and addressed in
the first instance to Harriett Grove, Medwin committed the most ludicrous
blunder of his unreliable book;--the mistake, moreover, that, of all his
multitudinous blunders about Shelley, is most easily shown to be a
mistake. (1) The critical reader has only to compare these verses with the
puerile sets of rhymes in _St. Irvyne_ to be satisfied that in 1810
Shelley could not have written them, to save his own life or compass his
father’s death. (2) The first two stanzas are so completely out of harmony
with the certain facts of Shelley’s pursuit of his cousin’s affection, as
to prove conclusively that she was not in his mind when he wrote the
verses. Instead of ‘gleaming through the world,’ Harriett Grove’s love of
her cousin was less than apparent even to his own sister. Instead of
warding off the poisonous arrow of the world’s scorn, the world had no
sooner displayed a disposition to speak scornfully of him, than Harriett
Grove told him to go about his business. Instead of speaking of him with
‘warm and partial praise,’ Harriett Grove never discovered anything to
commend in him. Shelley and Harriett Grove had parted company for ever,
months before he had endured the disgrace, from whose withering effects he
describes himself as recovering under the sympathetic looks of the
Harriett to whom the poem is addressed. (3) On the other hand, the
descriptive lines are appropriate to the circumstances under which he won
Harriett’s love, and she gave him her heart, whilst social disgrace was
new to him. (4) In June, 1821, though forgetful of the exact year of his
life in which _Queen Mab_ was written, Shelley remembered so clearly
having dedicated the poem to his first wife that he wrote from Italy to
Mr. Ollier in that month:--
‘I ought to say, however, that I am obliged to this piratical fellow
in one respect: that he has omitted, with a delicacy for which I thank
him heartily, a foolish dedication to my late wife, the publication of
which would have annoyed me, and indeed is the only part of the
business that could seriously have annoyed me, although it is my duty
to protest against the whole.’
These facts notwithstanding, some of the Shelleyan enthusiasts (in their
reluctance to believe that Shelley ever cared much for Harriett Westbrook)
insist that Medwin may have been right in this business, because the
verses appeared in the original edition of _Queen Mab_ under this
heading, ‘To Harriet *****,’ the number of the asterisks being the same as
the number of the letters in the surname ‘Grove,’ whereas there are _nine_
letters in ‘Westbrook,’ and _seven_ in ‘Shelley.’ ‘The number of
asterisks,’ says Mr. Buxton Forman, ‘it will be observed, corresponds with
the name of Grove; and they might have been left simply by oversight when
the dedication went to press as for Harriet Shelley.’
For the argument to have the faintest force, it would be needful to show
that, when indicating a name by asterisks, Shelley was careful to use the
same number of asterisks as the name had letters. Was this Shelley’s
practice? Though the _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_ was made up chiefly of
a journal kept by Mary Godwin, it comprises letters and other original
writing by Shelley, who saw the little book through the press, and made
himself responsible for its typographical details. In the ‘journal’
‘Shelley’ (a name of seven letters) is indicated by ‘S***,’ the initial
letter and _three_ asterisks; ‘Claire,’ a name of six letters, being also
indicated by ‘C***,’ the initial letter and three asterisks. In the
original writing by Shelley, the names ‘Mary’ and ‘Claire’ are indicated
thus: ‘We dined (M***, C***, and I) on the grass:’ the initial of the name
of four letters and the initial of the name of six letters being alike
followed by _three_ asterisks.
Though he was happy in Harriett’s society, there is reason for thinking
Shelley was much out of health towards the end of his stay at Tanyrallt.
In the middle of February, 1813, he had been living for three months on
vegetables. Living at this period of his story ‘on what he could get,’
_i.e._ chops and steaks, when he was on journeys and feeding at inns,
Shelley persisted in the diet of vegetarians when he was at home. ‘I
continue vegetable,’ he wrote to Hogg on 27th December, 1812; ‘Harriet
means to be slightly animal until the arrival of spring.’ Of course, he
persuaded himself that this diet favoured his health; but we know from
Peacock, who may be termed the physiological observer of his friend’s
peculiarities, that, instead of being good for him, it was hurtful to the
delicate and nervous Shelley in various ways.
‘When,’ says Peacock, ‘he was fixed in a place, he adhered to this
diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree
with him: it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the
sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thick-coming
fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place.’
The maker of these discreet observations gives a remarkable example of the
quickness, with which Shelley rose from a condition of physical weakness
to a high state of bodily vigour and enjoyment under the stimulus of
animal food. During the excursion (August, 1815) on the Thames, from Old
Windsor to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, Shelley, on ‘the way up,’ was so
weak and otherwise out of order, as to feel he ought to return. Having
taken medical advice at Oxford with no apparent advantage, he was
entreated by Peacock to eat three well-peppered mutton-chops. Acting on
the wise counsel, Shelley forthwith ate with keen relish three
well-peppered mutton-chops, and went on his way rejoicing. ‘He lived in my
way,’ says Peacock, ‘for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was
cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one
week of thorough enjoyment of life.’ Living thus carnivorously at the
comfortable inn at Lechlade, where the party rested for two nights, he
there wrote the _Lines in Lechlade Churchyard_.
How Byron and Shelley came to resemble one another in eccentricity of diet
is uncertain. The older poet had recourse to his regimen of Epsom salts
and vegetarian starvation in the first instance for the reduction of his
fatness; but Shelley’s natural habit of body forbids the suspicion that he
took to abstinence for the same purpose. Nor can the influence of the
vegetarians, with whom he lived intimately in London and at Bracknell, be
held accountable for his first trial of a diet, which he adopted in
Dublin, before making their acquaintance. Perhaps he adopted the Byronic
diet just as he adopted the Byronic shirt-collar, in imitation of the poet
whom he admired so greatly. It is conceivable that, had he not heard of
Byron’s dinners of hard biscuits or mashed vegetables, washed down with
soda-water, he would have continued to eat and drink, as he had done from
boyhood to the middle of his twentieth year. Anyhow, it is certain that
Shelley’s vegetarianism, attended with intermissions of the regimen when
he was on his journeys and ‘ate what he could get,’ differed little from
Byron’s general rule of abstinence from the luxuries of the table, broken
with occasional dinners and suppers, at which he devoured whatever came in
his way. For thus feeding themselves, the two poets have fared
differently at the hands of history. Whilst Byron has been generally
ridiculed for living low in order to preserve his beauty; Shelley has been
no less generally applauded for his indifference to the pleasures of the
table.
The diet, which affected them so differently in reputation, had the same
results on their nerves and health. Under the regimen of starvation
(accompanied in the case of Byron, by far the stronger man, with a more
free use of purgative medicine) they became weak and nervous sufferers
from a peculiar kind of spasmodic dyspepsia, that in its sharper assaults
disposed them to seek relief from pain in laudanum, and may perhaps have
been the first and chief cause of their perilous familiarity with opium.
In drinking laudanum to deaden the pangs of spasmodic dyspepsia,
consequent on long persistence in a lowering, and otherwise hurtful diet,
Shelley (be it observed) took opium when he had been slowly reduced to a
condition, that rendered the drug more powerful to derange his nerves for
several days, than it would have been had he been previously sustained by
sufficient food. This is a matter for readers to bear in mind whilst
considering circumstances soon to be narrated.
It follows that, after living for three months on the diet usual with him
in this period of his career, Shelley may be regarded as in a state of
health that, besides making him restless and disposing him to have
recourse to opium, would be fruitful of ‘those thick-coming fancies which
almost invariably preceded his change of place.’
Several circumstances, apart from his health, may also be assumed to have
disposed him just then to think of getting away from Tanyrallt. He had
just finished _Queen Mab_; and the act of completing an intellectual
enterprise, that has engaged a scholar’s faculties for several months, is
often followed by a yearning for diversion in new scenes. At war with some
of his neighbours, living on uneasy terms with others, and sick of the
embankment folly, that had for some time been fruitful of annoyances, he
may well have wished to fly off from a place that had lost the charms of
novelty. Pecuniary considerations may also have disposed him to fly from
Tremadoc. If he remained at Tanyrallt for another six months, Mr. Madocks
would be pressing him for payment of a certain deferred rent; Mr. Williams
would be pressing him for the settlement of certain other small affairs
of business; and the projectors of the new embankment would be asking when
he would find it convenient to pay the promised 500_l._ Another affair,
that may be presumed to have troubled Shelley in the middle of February,
1813, was the near approach of the day when Daniel Hill would appear at
Tanyrallt with a reasonable expectation of being again taken into the
service of the master, who had caused him to be imprisoned in North Devon.
It is not suggested that Shelley was meditating flight from North Wales in
order to get out of Daniel Hill’s way. By showing that Shelley had given
Daniel Hill timely information where to find him, the servant’s arrival at
Tanyrallt on the 26th of February, 1813, would of itself be sufficient to
show the injustice of any such suggestion. But though he was ready to
befriend the Irishman, who had suffered so much in his service, Shelley
may well have wished to leave his corner of Carnarvonshire, as soon as
Daniel should appear in Mr. Leeson’s neighbourhood. The inquisitive,
prying, malevolent, relentless Mr. Leeson would, of course, think it his
duty to learn whence Daniel had come, and what he had been doing since his
master’s arrival at Tremadoc. Shelley had reason to apprehend that Mr.
Leeson (already in correspondence with the Solicitor of the Treasury about
the poet) would receive official information of Daniel’s recent trouble,
and his master’s not remote activity in North Devon. In which case there
would be talk in Tremadoc, that would make Tanyrallt an especially
disagreeable place of abode for Daniel Hill’s master.
Such was the position of affairs in North Wales, when, during the night of
26th February, 1813 (and within a few hours of the Barnstaple gaol-bird’s
appearance at the villa, fit for an Italian prince), Tanyrallt became the
scene of certain curious incidents. The weather was cold and stormy, the
wind in its violence made an uproar loud as thunder about the gables and
chimneys of Tanyrallt Lodge, and the rain fell in torrents, when Shelley
loaded a pair of pistols, under strong impression that he should have
occasion to use them during the night. Having loaded the weapons, the poet
went to bed between the hours of ten and eleven p.m., and remained in bed
for about half-an-hour, when, on hearing a noise in one of the parlours,
he rose from Harriett’s side, and, taking his pistols, went downstairs. A
minute or two later, the sound of a pistol-shot was heard in the house.
This pistol-shot was followed at a brief interval by a second explosion
of the same kind. Audible to Harriett in her bedroom, to Miss Westbrook in
her bedroom, and to the domestic servants (three maids and Daniel Hill),
who, though in the act of going to rest, had not yet got into their beds,
the firing caused the ladies and servitors to assemble hurriedly in the
chief parlour of the house, where Shelley gave them this stirring account
of what had taken place.
On getting to the bottom of the stairs he went to the billiard-room, where
the noise of steps was audible. Following these steps he went through the
billiard-room into the little room, called ‘the office,’ where he saw a
man in the act of quitting the room through the glass-door, opening into
the shrubbery. Shelley was so fortunate as to avoid the shot of the
pistol, which the retreating miscreant fired at him. Shelley did his best
to return the shot, but by ill-luck his pistol only flashed in the pan.
The next incident of the affair was that the assassin knocked Shelley
down;--an incident that afforded the assassin an opportunity of flying
into the outer darkness. Instead of making off, the assassin grappled with
Shelley and struggled with him on the floor. During this struggle, the
narrator drew his second pistol and fired a shot, that caused the man to
shriek, as he rose from the floor and went away into the shrubbery. The
assassin had fled, but not without being wounded in the shoulder, if
Shelley estimated rightly the effect of his second shot. A very remarkable
incident of the affair was, that, after seeming to be wounded in the
shoulder, and just before turning to fly, the assassin delivered himself
of this rather too melodramatic utterance:--‘By God, I will be revenged! I
will murder your wife; I will ravish your sister! By God, I will be
revenged!’
One can imagine how poor little Harriett shuddered and cried, ‘Oh, the
wretch!’ It is more difficult to realize Miss Westbrook’s sensations. Of
course, the party of seven did not separate immediately after hearing
Shelley’s horrible tale. On the contrary, they remained in the parlour for
about two hours, before Shelley (thinking it highly improbable that the
wounded assassin would return before the morning, to execute his atrocious
menaces) advised the two ladies to retire to rest. In accordance with this
advice, the women went off to bed, leaving Shelley and Daniel Hill to sit
up and keep guard, in case the villain should make a second attack.
In declaring it improbable that the assassin, with a bullet in his
shoulder, would return before daybreak to murder Harriett and ravish her
sister, the author of _Zastrozzi_ showed how imperfectly he realized the
possibilities of the position. After returning to her bed at about one
a.m., Harriett had occupied it just upon three hours, when at about 4
a.m., she heard a third pistol explosion, which caused her immediately to
rise from her couch, and run downstairs to her husband, who received her
with a thrilling statement of his narrow escape from death by the pistol
that had just gone off. His story was this:--He had sent Daniel Hill out
of the room to see what o’clock it was, when, in the servant’s absence, he
heard a noise at the parlour window, and, on approaching the window, saw a
man thrust his arm _through the glass_ and fire a pistol at him. Hence the
broken window and the explosion that had brought Harriett from her
bedroom. Thank Heaven! instead of bedding itself in his body, the pistol’s
ball had passed through his flannel night-shirt, without even grazing his
skin. Had he not been standing sideways towards the window, Shelley said
he must have been killed. In support of these statements, he pointed to
the broken window and the holes made in his flannel night-dress by the
bullet. Further, he assured Harriett that, after so narrowly escaping
death, he aimed and pulled the trigger of his pistol, but it would not go
off:--this being the second time for him to draw trigger, with no result
save a flash in the pan. His pistol having failed him again, Shelley aimed
a blow at his assailant with an old sword, which the miscreant had almost
succeeded in wresting from him, when Daniel Hill rushed into the room. On
Daniel Hill’s appearance, the twice-baffled assassin let go his hold of
the old sword, and again disappeared in the darkness. All this took place
during the night of Friday, 26th February, 1813. On Saturday, the 27th
instant, Shelley went off with his marvellous story (differing in
important particulars from the narrative of the previous pages) to the
Solicitor-General of the county, who lived at a distance of some twelve
miles from the scene of the outrage.
My account of what took place, and of what was alleged by Shelley to have
taken place in Tanyrallt Lodge on the night of 26th February, 1813, is
made from the statements of what may be called the circular letter which
Mrs. Shelley sent at her husband’s request, to divers of his friends, whom
they wished to inform precisely of a matter, likely to be greatly
misrepresented. As this letter was intended to be the enduring and
authoritative record of the strange and perplexing business, I have used
it for my narrative. It should, however, be observed, that the account of
the matter so given by the Shelleys, some ten or fourteen days after the
affair, differs materially from what Shelley himself seems to have told
the Solicitor-General and Mr. Madocks of the affair on the 27th of
February. Medwin’s report of what Mr. Madocks told him of Shelley’s own
statement, is to this effect:--That, whilst sitting in the study on the
eventful night, Shelley ‘heard a noise at the window, saw one of the
shutters gradually unclosed, and a hand advanced into the room armed with
a pistol;’ that the weapon having missed fire, Shelley ran to seize the
ruffian who had pulled the trigger; that, on passing through the door into
the garden, to get at the villain, Shelley found himself face to face with
his assailant; that the villain made a second attempt to shoot Shelley
with a pistol, which, like the other pistol, missed fire; that, after this
second essay at shooting, the poet and his assailant wrestled with one
another desperately in the garden, till the latter escaped from the lawn
to the shrubbery, and disappeared. The inaccurate Medwin’s report of what
Mr. Madocks told him at Florence long after 1813, is, of course, to be
read with suspicion and distrust. On one or two points of his account of
the affair, Medwin is guilty of mistakes of fact, for which he alone is to
be held accountable. But it was not in Shelley’s power to tell the
exciting story twice in the same fortnight, or on two following days,
without discrepancies. That his story to Mr. Madocks on 27th February,
1813, gave particulars of ‘long and painful wrestling on the lawn’ is more
than probable; the lawn having been trodden and rolled upon by some person
or persons, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of
violent wrestling.
The story, of course, flew like wildfire. In Tremadoc it was received with
general incredulity and derision, as a tale made up by young Mr. Shelley,
in order to have a pretext for leaving the neighbourhood in a trice
without paying his bills; but Shelley and Harriett begged their friends to
understand that the story would not have been received in this insulting
way, had it not been for the malevolent action of Mr. Leeson, who
hastened to assure the Tremadoc shopkeepers they were being trifled with
by an impostor.
The affair having been reported by Shelley to the Solicitor-General, it
became the subject of careful investigation. Not only was the evidence of
the alleged attack sifted, but it was sifted by persons peculiarly
qualified to examine it. The Solicitor-General of the county (an expert in
evidence touching assaults and other outrages against the law),
keen-witted Mr. Madocks (a man of affairs, familiar with the people of the
neighbourhood), Mr. Williams (Mr. Madocks’s agent, a shrewd Welshman), Mr.
Williams’s brother (a man of similar shrewdness) were amongst the persons
to look into the matter. All these persons were friendly to Shelley,
though they had for some time thought him given to talk too fast. All four
were on familiar terms with him. The Solicitor-General received the
Shelleys into his own house, and entertained them there from 27th February
to the day in the first week of March, on which they left North Wales for
Ireland. Consequently the investigation was directed, made, carried out by
the gentleman, who was at the moment of the investigation Shelley’s host.
Mr. Madocks and the Messrs. Williams had a distinct interest in keeping on
friendly terms with Shelley, and doing all that was just for the
maintenance of his credit. Consequently the investigation was in the hands
of Shelley’s especial friends. Yet the unanimous verdict of local opinion
was that no attack had been made, and that Shelley’s allegations
respecting the attacks said to have been made on him during the night of
the 26th of February were baseless and untruthful,--their untruthfulness
being referable either to delusion or falsehood on his part. No single
voice (except the voices of Harriett, Miss Westbrook, Shelley, doubtless
Daniel Hill, and possibly the other servants of the house,) was raised in
Carnarvonshire against the result of an investigation, which, be it
observed, was (from the wetness of the ground about the lodge, at the time
of the alleged assaults) made under peculiarly favourable conditions. With
the single exception of Mr. Hookham (who seems, at least for a moment, to
have believed the wild story), Shelley’s London friends were no less
unanimous in thinking the verdict of the inquisitors a just one. Hogg says
of the alleged attack, ‘Persons acquainted with the localities and with
the circumstances, and who had carefully investigated the matter, were
unanimous in the opinion, that no such attempt was ever made. _I never met
with any person who believed in it._’ In the summer of 1813 (within a few
months of the alleged attack), Peacock, who had made Shelley’s
acquaintance in the previous autumn, went from London to Wales, and
prosecuted inquiries on the spot respecting this Tanyrallt business; the
result being that he had no doubt the attacks were never made, and that
Shelley’s perplexing part in the affair was referable to
‘semi-delusion,’--the condition of mind in which Shelley, according to
Peacock, was partly deluded and partly untruthful.
How could the investigators come to any other conclusion on the main
question than that the attacks had not been made?
(1) It did not escape them that Shelley, living in a peaceful nook of
Carnarvon, loaded his pistols before going to bed under circumstances,
indicating in some degree a mental predisposition to find an occasion for
using the weapons during the night.
(2) It did not escape them, that of the seven persons in the house, no
one, with the exception of Shelley, professed to have seen the assassin,
either on the occasion of attack No. 1 in the little office, or on the
occasion of attack No. 2, at the parlour window.
(3) It did not escape them, that Shelley admitted no third person was
present on the occasion of either his first or his second conflict with
the assassin.
(4) It did not escape them, that no one of the seven persons, with the
exception of Shelley, could speak to having heard a sound, that might not
be referred either to the storm, or Shelley’s action, or to the action of
some person lawfully in the house.
(5) It did not escape them, that the two pistol explosions in the little
office might have been caused by Shelley’s two pistols, there being no
evidence (apart from his bare assertion) that one of his pistols had only
flashed in the pan during affair No. 1.
(6) It did not escape them, that, as he was passing through the window
into the shrubbery at the very moment of Shelley’s appearance in the
little office, the assassin acted very strangely in suddenly changing his
mind and attacking Shelley, when he had it in his power to accomplish his
purpose of passing into the outer darkness.
(7) It did not escape them, that, after knocking Shelley clean down, the
assassin surrendered the advantage coming to him from the _coup_, so far
as to throw himself on the floor, and struggle with his adversary, instead
of kicking him on the head.
(8) It did not escape them, that, after shrieking from Shelley’s
pistol-shot and recovering his feet, the assassin acted in a very
unbusiness-like way, in saying, ‘By God, I will be revenged! I will murder
your wife; I will ravish your sister! By God, I will be revenged!’
(9) Questions were, of course, put to Shelley respecting the light, which
enabled him to see his assailant in the act of quitting the room ‘through
a glass-door which opened into the shrubbery.’ It being a starless,
pitch-dark night (for the rain descended in torrents), Shelley, if he saw
an assailant, must have discerned him by artificial light. It is not to be
imagined that the billiard-room and little office were illuminated with
many candles, so as to give the combatants a good view of one another.
Shelley would scarcely have gone in search of nocturnal enemies with a
candle in his hand. If he took a candle into the little office, it must
surely have been extinguished soon after he entered the small chamber. The
proximity of the shrubbery outside the glass door, would not have lessened
the darkness of the room or of the space on which the glass-door opened.
What questions were put to Shelley, and what he said, about the light,
which rendered the assassin visible, does not appear.
(10) To the investigators it must have appeared strange that the assassin,
either with or without a bullet in his shoulder, returned in three hours
to make a second attempt on Shelley’s life.
(11) To the same inquisitors it must have seemed remarkable that the
assassin preluded this second essay at murder, by thrusting his arm
through the glass, and thereby smashing the window. It is unusual for
nocturnal assailants to be so noisy in their preliminary movements.
(12) Through the wetness of the ground about the house, the assassin could
not have approached the parlour window for the accomplishment of his
deadly purpose, or after the second futile attempt at murder, without
leaving clear footprints on the soaking-wet lawn. There were marks of
footsteps on the grass, to which the investigators paid particular
attention. On visiting Tremadoc and Tanyrallt in the summer of 1813, when
all the circumstances of the alleged assaults were fresh in the memory of
the people in those parts, Peacock received information, that years
afterwards caused him to write these words:--‘Persons who had examined the
premises on the following morning had found that the grass of the lawn
appeared to have been much trampled and rolled on, but there were no
footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the
window.’ Why was the lawn thus trampled and rolled upon at some distance
from the parlour window? To give the ground an appearance that would
accord with some account given by Shelley of his final struggle with the
assassin, other than the account given of the contention in Harriett’s
well-known letter on this subject? Who had trampled and rolled about on
the wet grass, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of
a struggle? Shelley? or Daniel Hill? or both of them? As there were no
footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the
window, it was, of course, obvious to the investigators, that the persons,
accountable for the hard usage of the turf in one particular spot of the
lawn, had entered the house and remained there, after so trampling and
disordering the surface of the sward; and also, that no persons had been
about the garden during the night, with the exception of persons of the
house. Of course, the investigators narrowly scrutinized the footprints,
which certainly occupied much of their intention. Doubtless the
Solicitor-General satisfied himself whether any of the footprints
corresponded with the soles of Shelley’s shoes, the soles of Daniel Hill’s
boots, the soles of boots and shoes worn by the women of the house. Of the
particulars of the Solicitor-General’s conclusions respecting these
damnatory marks on the wet grass there is no record. There is no reason to
regret the absence of such particulars from the record. It is enough to
know that the investigators examined the footprints, and came to the
conclusion that they were made by no foreigner to the household.
(13) But it still remains to state the most remarkable matter of evidence
that came under the notice of the investigators. On coming to Shelley in
the parlour immediately after the second of the alleged attacks, Mrs
Shelley perceived that the window-curtain and her husband’s flannel
night-shirt had been penetrated by a bullet. Shelley told her that this
injury had been done to the curtain and his night-dress by the ball of the
pistol that had been fired at him by the assassin,--firing _from_ the
window into the room. The mark of this ball was found by the inquisitors
in the wainscot near the window; the position and character of the mark
showing that the pistol, instead of being fired _from_, had been fired
_towards_ the window;--that, instead of being fired by the assassin
outside the window, the pistol had been fired by Shelley _from_ the
interior of the room.
This piece of dynamical evidence satisfied the inquisitors that Shelley’s
baffled assassin was an imaginary caitiff. Till it can be shown that a
ball, issuing from a pistol pointed due south, must necessarily take a
course due north, Shelley (all his superb poetry notwithstanding) must be
held to have said what was directly the reverse of the fact, when he told
his wife that the bullet, which, after passing through his flannel shirt
and the window-curtain, penetrated the wainscot near the parlour window,
was shot from the window in the direction of the opposite wall. The
discovery of that bullet-mark gave the _coup-de-grace_ to whatever
remained of the favourable regard in which Shelley had been held by the
people of Tremadoc.
It is probable that Peacock first hit upon his curious term
‘semi-delusions,’ after reviewing all the facts that came to his knowledge
about this singular affair in the summer of 1813. How much of Shelley’s
chief part in the strange affair should be attributed to hallucination?
How much to deceptive intention? I would fain attribute the whole of it to
delusion. But I cannot do so. In previous pages prominence has been given
to every consideration, that may be produced honestly, in order to dispose
the reader to think delusion chiefly accountable for the poet’s final
escapade at Tanyrallt. There is no positive evidence that he was seriously
out of health, or under the dominion of morbid fancy, or taking laudanum
with extraordinary freedom at this particular time; but for his
reputation’s sake I have been careful to adduce every matter favourable to
the opinion that his action in what is usually called ‘the Tanyrallt
mystery,’ should be referred to nervous derangement rather than to moral
obliquity. In a previous chapter especial notice was taken of his
imaginary escape at Keswick from the grasp of an imaginary robber--a
delusion which seems to have been in no degree complicated with deceitful
designs--in order that the incident should be remembered to his
advantage, when the readers of this work should be invited to decide for
themselves how far he was deluded, and how far false, in this Tanyrallt
business.
Notwithstanding the numerous and obvious reasons for thinking he acted
dishonestly throughout the whole affair, it is conceivable that he was
under the influence of delusion in the earlier passages of the drama. In
loading the pistols before he went to bed, and declaring a fear that he
would have occasion to use them before the morning, he only did and said
what has been done in nervous apprehension by countless men, whose honesty
has never been called in question. In leaving his bed so soon after his
retirement to the couch, and going downstairs with his weapons to look for
a housebreaker, he displayed only the alarm that was likely to ensue from
the anticipation of disturbance. The nervous man, who passes at night
through dark passages in search of a burglar, is apt to imagine he sees
the intruder for whom he is looking. All the imaginary incidents of the
imaginary encounter in the little room are reconcilable with the theory
that Shelley acted sincerely in the whole affair. It was natural for the
author of _Zastrozzi_ to imagine himself addressed by the imaginary
assassin in such language, as might have proceeded from any one of the
villains of that marvellous romance. In spite of the suspicious
circumstance that he sent Daniel Hill out of the room before seeing the
assassin again at the window of the parlour, I can just conceive it
possible that Shelley really believed he saw the villain at the window.
But at this point my ability to imagine, that he may have acted and spoken
from misconception, comes to an end. His pistol may have exploded
accidentally, though it is more reasonable to think he fired it with
design;--intending that the ball should pass through his night-dress, and
holding the flannel well out from his body with the left hand, so that the
bullet in passing through the night-dress should not graze the skin of his
body. But it is inconceivable that he attributed the explosion of his own
pistol to the imaginary weapon of an imaginary assassin. As the ball of
Shelley’s weapon struck and pierced the wainscot of the window, it cannot
be supposed to have smashed the window. To Shelley’s muscles, acting upon
glass and frame in Daniel Hill’s absence, it must be attributed that the
window was injured in a manner, accordant with what he a few minutes later
told Mrs. Shelley of his conflict with the assassin. The old sword, which
the imaginary assassin was alleged to have tried to wrest from him, seems
to have been used by Shelley as an instrument for smashing the window.
Even by those, who can believe the poet imagined himself struggling
desperately with an assailant _on the other side of the window frame_
whilst he was thus smashing the window, it will be conceded that the
indications of struggling, put subsequently on the wet grass of the lawn
at a considerable distance from the house, must have been put on the turf
for evidential ends, and with a deceptive purpose. The turf cannot have
been trampled upon, stamped down and rolled upon, in order to keep a
nocturnal assailant out of the house. The grass must have been so treated
in order to give it a show of having been the scene of a violent struggle
between persons, alternately wrestling with and rolling over one
another:--a show that should on the morrow accord with Shelley’s original
account to the Solicitor-General, which seems to have differed materially
from his account of the struggle to Harriett. Shelley cannot be imagined
to have gone out of his house at an early hour of a cold February morning,
immediately after a night of alarm and wakefulness, and to have danced and
rolled upon the grass of his wet lawn for mere amusement. Nor are servants
wont to act in so insane a fashion for the mere fun of the thing. For what
end, but the one already stated, can the grass have been thus danced,
trodden, and rolled upon? Whether the signs of a struggle were put upon
the grass by Shelley himself, or by some other person or persons of his
household, the work of disordering the turf’s surface must be regarded as
_his_ work.
But though the evidence is so conclusive that Shelley was _not_ attacked
by an assassin at Tanyrallt on the night of 26th February, 1813, and that
he with his own pistol shot through the flannel night-dress the bullet,
which he declared to have been shot through it by another person, his
wildest idolaters insist that he was so attacked and shot at. Lady Shelley
says, ‘Yet this continual beneficence could not save Shelley from an
attempt on his life of a most atrocious and extraordinary kind.’ Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy wishes us to believe that the baffled assassin was no
other person than Miss Hitchener’s father.
Assuming that the first quarterly allowance of Miss Hitchener’s stipend
was not paid; assuming that ineffectual demands had been made to Shelley
for payment of the money; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s account of
Shelley’s treatment of her had caused much angry talk against him in her
father’s tap-room; assuming that this angry talk incensed Miss Hitchener’s
papa against the Shelleys; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s papa (formerly a
smuggler) journeyed from his Sussex village to Carnarvonshire, in order to
wreak his wrath on the hateful trio; Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy argues
that Miss Hitchener’s papa was the villain who tried to shoot Shelley in
the little room opening into the shrubbery, and who, some hours later,
appeared at the parlour window and shot the bullet through Shelley’s
flannel shirt:--a bullet that, according to Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy,
must have passed from the window, through the window-curtains, and through
Shelley’s flannel-shirt, and then turning round in the parlour have come
straight back to the wainscot on the window side of the room. Positively
Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy has given this explanation of the Tanyrallt
mystery, and been cordially applauded by Shelleyan enthusiasts for the
sagacity and reasonableness of his way of showing, that Shelley was shot
at in the manner declared by him. This is the way in which Shelley’s
biography has been dealt with by a ring of gentlemen, of whose acuteness
and discretion Mr. James Anthony Froude has the highest opinion.
It is not surprising that Shelley hastened in a few days from the scene of
his humiliating exposure. He would have left Carnarvonshire sooner, had he
not been detained by want of money. To get the means of flight the young
gentleman, who a few days earlier sent 20_l._ to Mr. T. Hookham for the
relief of the Hunts, now wrote a hasty note to Mr. T. Hookham for the
restoration of the money, in order that he might have the means of getting
away from Tremadoc. To this brief note by the excited poet Mrs. Shelley
added a postscript in somewhat less agitated style:--
‘_Tanyralt, March 3rd, 1813_.
‘DEAR SIR,--I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. Oh send
the twenty pounds, if you have it! You will probably hear of me no
more!--Your Friend,
PERCY SHELLEY.’
‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day from being up all night
that I am afraid what he has written will alarm you very much. We
intend to leave this place as soon as possible, as our lives are not
safe as long as we remain. It is no common robber we dread, but a
person who is actuated by revenge,--who threatens my life and my
sister’s as well. If you can send us the money it will add greatly to
our comfort.--Sir, I remain your sincere friend,
H. SHELLEY.’
The printed transcripts of this note and postscript differ in several
minute particulars from the printed transcripts of the same writings in
Lady Shelley’s book; but the only important difference between the two
sets of printed transcripts is that, whilst it is given without any date
in Lady Shelley’s book, the note is given in Hogg’s version with an
obviously erroneous date.
One of the mistakes of Lady Shelley’s inaccurate book is the
representation that, in writing the brief note to Mr. T. Hookham, Shelley
merely asked the bookseller for a loan of 20_l._ ‘It would appear,’ the
lady says, ‘that after sending off the 20_l._ for the Hunt subscription he
was in want of money. Hence the request to Mr. Hookham for a little
temporary accommodation to enable him to make the necessary removal from
Tanyrallt.’ It is, however, certain that Shelley wished the receiver of
his note to regard him as asking for the restoration of _the_ 20_l._ sent
a few days earlier to Bond Street, as a contribution to the Hunt fund. It
has been already remarked that the letter accompanying this remittance to
Mr. Hookham for the Hunt Fund was dated, ‘February, 1813,’ without a note
of the particular day. Hence the precise day on which the money was
despatched from Tanyrallt to London is unknown. But there is evidence for
fixing the approximate date of the remittance. On 7th February, 1813,
Shelley wrote to Hogg from Tanyrallt, ‘_Mab_ has gone on, but slowly,
although she is nearly finished.’ In the subsequent letter to Mr. Hookham,
accompanying the contribution to the Hunt Fund, Shelley says, ‘_Queen Mab_
is finished and transcribed.’ Consequently between the date of the earlier
letter and the composition of the later epistle, Shelley had _finished_
and _transcribed_ his poem,--work that may be computed to have given him
occupation for a fortnight. This computation would give the 22nd February
as the approximate date of the letter, accompanying the remittance for the
Hunt Fund, to Mr. Hookham. Written and posted on Monday, 22nd February at
Tanyrallt, or Tremadoc, the letter would start on its journey by mail for
London in the early morning of Tuesday, 23rd February, and arriving in
London on the evening or night of Thursday, 25th February, would be
delivered in Old Bond Street on the morning of Friday, 26th February--the
morning of the very day, on whose night the first of the imaginary
attacks was made by the imaginary assassin at Tanyrallt. According to this
calculation Shelley found himself in urgent need of the money he had so
recklessly given away, just twenty-four hours after the note or notes for
the money came to the hands of the Bond-Street bookseller.
There are differences between Hogg’s transcript of the assassination-note
to Mr. Hookham and Lady Shelley’s transcript of the same note. One of the
discrepancies is that Lady Shelley gives us ‘Oh! send me 20_l._, if you
have it,’ whereas Hogg gives us ‘O send the twenty pounds, if you have
it.’ Whichever of the two versions is taken, it is clear that ‘if you have
it’ signifies ‘if you have not parted with it to the Hunt Fund Committee,’
and that Shelley was asking for the return of his own money. As he had no
reason to suppose the prosperous bookseller might be without twenty pounds
either in his till or at the bank, by ‘if you have it’ Shelley cannot have
meant ‘if you are the possessor of so much money.’ Affording no indication
that Shelley felt he was putting himself under a pecuniary obligation to
the man of business, the language of the note precludes the assumption
that he was asking outright for a loan of money. Though he may have felt,
and probably did feel, that his note would move Mr. Hookham to lend him
20_l._ if he had parted with the subscribed 20_l._, Shelley asked for the
restoration of his own 20_l._ Much the same may be said of Mrs. Shelley
and her postscript. Instead of writing as though she and her husband were
asking Mr. Hookham to do them a considerable kindness, she wrote as though
she were merely asking for their own money.
When the assassination-note came to Mr. Hookham’s hands on the morning of
Tuesday, 3rd March, he had passed Shelley’s gift on to the Hunt Fund. In
his inability to return the subscribed money, the bookseller sent him
20_l._ as a loan; a loan which Shelley acknowledged from Bangor Ferry, on
6th March, 1813, in terms affording proof that the present writer has not
misconstrued the assassination-note. Lady Shelley’s printed transcript of
the letter from Bangor Ferry, makes Shelley write thus,--
‘From the tenor of your letter I augur’ (_argue_ ?) ‘that you have
applied the 20_l._ I sent to the benefit of the Hunts.... By your
kindness and generosity we are perfectly relieved from all pecuniary
difficulties. We only wanted a little breathing time, which the
rapidity of our persecutions was unwilling to allow us. We shall
readily repay the 20_l._ when I hear from my correspondent in London;
but when can I repay the friendship, the disinterestedness, and the
zeal of your confidence?’
Mr. Hookham having sent Shelley 20_l._ as a loan, instead of returning the
subscribed money, the poet argues from the bookseller’s action and
epistle, that the latter has ‘applied the 20_l._’ (sent for that purpose)
‘to the benefit of the Hunts.’
Within a few hours of writing the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham,
Shelley wrote to Mr. Williams, begging for 25_l._ he needed for the
payment of ‘little debts;’ observing in the same note, ‘I am surprised
that the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of. Surely enquiries
have not been sufficiently general, or particular?’
Whilst Mrs. Shelley’s words, ‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day,
_from being up all night_,’ indicate that the assassination-note to Mr.
Hookham was written on the morrow of the imaginary attacks at Tanyrallt,
the manner in which Shelley here refers to measures for discovering the
assassin shows that the note to Mr. Williams must have been written at a
time when ‘the investigations’ were in an early stage of their progress to
a damnatory conclusion. Had he known of the discovery of the bullet-mark
in the wainscot, Shelley could scarcely have suggested that the
investigations of the case had not been sufficiently ‘particular.’ A few
hours later, when he heard how particular they had been, his slight face
must by turns have flushed with annoyance and then whitened with shame.
The evidence is abundant that Shelley was touched acutely by the shame of
his position, during the last days of his sojourn in Carnarvonshire. There
is a pathetic note of sincerity in one passage of the insincere letter he
wrote from Bangor Ferry to the bookseller of Old Bond Street;--the passage
in which he declared he was less delighted by the arrival of Mr. Hookham’s
remittance, because it rescued him from ‘a situation of peculiar
perplexity,’ than because it assured him he still retained the confidence
of at least one friend, whose generous conduct ‘made amends to’ his
‘feelings, wounded by the suspicion, coldness, and villany of the world.’
It was thus that the young man, with a singular aptitude for thinking
himself persecuted by any one who presumed to call him to order, spoke of
his Carnarvonshire neighbours, because they were offended by his attempt
to trifle with their credulity. Those of them who kept out of his way, or
otherwise showed a disinclination to speak to him of his latest escapade,
were frigid, unfeeling, hard-hearted. Those, who hinted their inability to
see how a bullet issuing from a pistol pointed due south could take a
course due north, were meanly suspicious. Those, who frankly declared
their disbelief of the assassination-story, were sheer villains. Though
the discovery of the bullet-mark in a place it could not have reached,
after passing from the window through his night-dress, must have convinced
him (if he needed to be convinced) that the ball had issued from his own
pistol, he persisted in declaring the ball had proceeded from the weapon
of his imaginary assailant. ‘The ball,’ he wrote from Bangor Ferry, ‘of
the assassain’s pistols (he fired at me twice), penetrated my night-gown
and pierced the wainscot;’--omitting to add, for his correspondent’s
information, that the ball struck the wainscot in a way proving the bullet
to have issued from his own pistol. As might be expected of the young man,
who three years earlier had declared his intention to have recourse to
deception because it would answer his purpose, and just three months
earlier had declared his intention to write a wheedling letter to the Duke
of Norfolk because he might get some money by doing so, Shelley stuck to
his erroneous statements when he must have known them to be misstatements,
however much he may have been under the influence of pure hallucination,
when he first uttered them. His stubborn adherence to the misstatements,
in the letter to Mr. Hookham, is rendered the more offensive by the
Pecksniffian style in which he, in the same letter, proclaims his delight
in contemplating truth and virtue. ‘If,’ he remarks, ‘the discovery of
truth be a pleasure of singular purity, how far surpassing is the
discovery of virtue!’ In the same vein he observes in the
postscript,--‘Though overwhelmed with our distresses, we are by no means
indifferent to those of liberty and virtue!!!’
(7.)--DUBLIN AND KILLARNEY.
Preserving amidst his varied distresses this honourable concern for the
interests of liberty and virtue, Shelley journeyed from Bangor to
Holyhead, and after a tedious and rough sea-passage (of forty hours
duration) arrived on Tuesday, 9th March, 1813, at Dublin, where he passed
several days at 35 Cuffe Street, Stephen’s Green, the residence of Mr.
John Lawless.
Ignorant of his friend’s intimacy with the Irishman of letters, who in
1813 was at work on the _Compendium of the History of Ireland_, Hogg may
well have been at a loss how to account for Shelley’s second visit to the
people, whose wrongs he had failed to redress with two pamphlets and a
broadside. But with their imperfect knowledge of the poet’s relations with
honest Jack Lawless, the readers of this page can readily discover motives
for the second visit to the land of greenness and thraldom. There is no
positive evidence that Shelley procured money either from Mr. Medwin or
anyone else for the publication of a voluminous _History of Ireland_. But
a _Compendium_ (though scarcely a voluminous one) _of Irish History_ was
produced by honest Jack Lawless in 1814; and twenty-eight years later,
Frederick William Conway (who was editor of the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_
in 1812-13, with good opportunities for observing the nature of honest
Jack’s intercourse with the _immediate_ heir to one of the first fortunes
of England), referred to Shelley in the _Dublin Evening Post_ (November
17th, 1842), as having been ‘made the pecuniary dupe of a person not less
sincere in his politics, but in money matters less honest,’--words that
unquestionably referred to honest Jack Lawless’s pecuniary dealings with
the youthful poet. Other evidence has already been given that Lawless’s
friendly relations with Shelley were attended with pecuniary arrangements.
Harum-scarum youngster though he was, Shelley would scarcely have given
his Lynton landlady the draft on ‘Lord Cloncurry’s brother,’ without any
grounds for thinking that Jack Lawless was under an obligation to honour
the writing. One would like to know more of honest Jack’s literary and
financial relations with the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes
of England; but enough is known to justify readers in assuming that,
besides going to Ireland in March, 1813, to receive the solace of his
friend’s sympathy with his distress, Shelley went to 35 Cuffe Street,
Stephen’s Green, Dublin, to see how his ‘literary friend’ was getting on
with ‘the work,’ that on its publication could not fail to ‘produce great
profits.’
It is in the reader’s memory that Hogg promised to visit the Shelleys in
Carnarvonshire, and pass a few days with them at Tanyrallt, in March,
1813,--an arrangement that could not be carried out, when the poet, with
his wife and sister-in-law, had left Wales for Ireland. To spare him the
annoyance (similar to the annoyance Godwin endured half-a-year earlier)
of journeying to Tanyrallt, only to find they had departed, Mrs. Shelley
had given Hogg timely information of the circumstances which had
determined her and her husband to fly to Ireland. As the letter, which
afforded him this information, was ‘written from Tanyrallt, a day or two
after the catastrophe,’ Hogg was guilty of a curious slip when (writing
from memory of the lost epistle) he declared that, to the best of his
recollection, apart from the different date, it was ‘precisely similar,
word for word,’ indeed, to the letter Harriett wrote to Mr. Hookham of Old
Bond Street, from Dublin on the 12th (Lady Shelley says 11th) of March,
giving the details of the alleged attacks. As Harriett’s later letter to
Mr. Hookham began with the words, ‘My Dear Sir, We arrived here last
Tuesday, after a most tedious passage, during the whole of which time we
were dreadfully ill,’ it cannot have corresponded so precisely, as Hogg
represents, with her earlier letter from Tanyrallt. Had the Shelleyan
enthusiasts noticed this droll slip, they would have discovered in it yet
another proof of Hogg’s incomparable villany, instead of attributing the
excessive statement to the writer’s honest purpose of saying emphatically
that, in so far as it related to the alleged attempts at assassination,
the later epistle to Mr. Hookham seemed like a copy of the earlier letter
to him. It appeared also that Harriett (_not_ Shelley) wrote similar
accounts of the assassination-incidents either from Tanyrallt or Ireland,
to other persons, besides Mr. Hookham and Hogg. ‘I have been informed,’
says the biographer, ‘that she also sent to other persons a narrative of
the nightly fears in the same terms, writing descriptive circulars, and
dispatching them in different directions.’ Why were these letters of
intelligence written by Harriett instead of her husband, who certainly was
the natural and fittest person to put on record the matters, so closely
touching his honour? Though she made it to one of her correspondents,
readers may smile at the statement, that Harriett wrote the letters, in
order to spare her husband the pain of recalling again and again the
horrors of that awful night.
Having made arrangements for the long journey to Carnarvonshire, Hogg
determined to make the longer trip to Dublin, in accordance with his
friends’ entreaties that he would join them at 35 Cuffe Street. The result
of the determination was, that some few days later he experienced in the
Irish metropolis just such a disappointment as William Godwin had
experienced at Lynton. On coming to Cuffe Street, after an unusually
rough and trying journey, he learnt that the Shelleys, with Miss
Westbrook, had gone off to Killarney. Of course he lost no time in asking
the fugitives, through the post, why they had treated him so unhandsomely,
and whilst awaiting their reply amused himself as he best could in
exploring Dublin, and studying the manners and humours of the people with
whom he became acquainted, chiefly through Jack Lawless’s friendly
offices. For a moment readers of this page may well imagine, that Shelley
had relapsed into his former hallucination respecting Hogg’s intentions
towards Harriett, and had carried her off to Killarney in order to keep
her out of his way. But Shelley’s action, on hearing of his friend’s
arrival in Dublin, disposes of the suspicion. There had been
misunderstanding on the part of the Shelleys, attended with uncertainty
whether Hogg would cross the sea. A sudden whim for visiting Killarney was
enough to convert this uncertainty respecting his purpose into a
confidence that he would not come to them. So off they went to Killarney,
in the very worst season for viewing the Lakes, a few days before Hogg
appeared at Jack Lawless’s door.
Mr. Lawless advised Hogg to run to Killarney and join his friends there;
but Hogg did not think it advisable to spend money in running south after
the trio who might have already started for the Giant’s Causeway. After
spending nearly all the time and money at his disposal, the young Templar
returned to London without coming to the presence of the people he had
travelled so far to see; but not without gathering materials for a
singularly vivid and humorous account of life and manners in Dublin
seventy years since. Bidding his Irish acquaintances adieu, Hogg started
on his homeward journey some four-and-twenty hours before Shelley and
Harriett arrived at the Cork Hotel, Dublin, after covering two hundred and
forty English miles in less than forty-eight hours. Intelligence of Hogg’s
appearance in Dublin having come to them at noon on Monday, 29th March,
1813, Shelley and his wife (now within three calendar months of her
accouchement), without Miss Westbrook, started for the capital, posting to
Cork, where they caught the mail that deposited them in Dublin at 3 p.m.
of Wednesday, 31st March. Though Lady Shelley says they did not return to
London till May, 1813, it is certain that Shelley and Harriett were at 23
Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, in the second week of April.