During all this time Shelley was in need of money, and shortly after their arrival at York went south to induce his father to provide them with the means of living. While he was absent Hogg tried to seduce Harriet. Shelley sought an explanation from Hogg, and pardoned him “fully and freely.” Shelley’s account of the affair in a letter to Miss Hitchener savors much of Godwinism. “I desired to know fully the account of this affair. I heard it from him and I believe he was sincere. All I can recollect of that terrible day was that I pardoned him—fully, freely pardoned him; that I would still be a friend to him and hoped soon to convince him how lovely virtue was; that his crime, not himself, was the object of my detestation; that I value a human being not for what it has been but for what it is; that I hoped the time would come when he would regard this horrible error with as much disgust as I did.”[15]
Early in November, Shelley, his wife, and Eliza left York suddenly for Keswick. Shelley’s father and grandfather feared that the poet would parcel out the family estate to soulmates, and so they proposed to allow him £2,000 a year if he would consent to entail the property on his eldest son, and in default of issue, on his brother. The proposition was indignantly rejected. He considered that kinship bore that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire. “I am led to love a being not because it stands in the physical relation of blood to me but because I discern an intellectual relationship.”
Early in 1812 Shelley started a correspondence with William Godwin, to whom he was then a stranger. In his first letter he writes: “The name of Godwin has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles I have ardently desired to share, on the footing of intimacy, that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations.”
Godwin’s influence with the revolutionists of this time was great. Coleridge and Southey were his ardent disciples for a time. “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a student, “and read Godwin on necessity.” This philosopher seemed to provide them with a simple, comprehensive code of morality, which gave unlimited freedom to the reason, and justice as complete as possible to the individual.
In February, 1812, the Shelleys went to Dublin to help on the cause of moral and intellectual reform. He published there an “Address to the Irish People” which he had written during his stay at Keswick. Shelley’s mission was moral and educational rather than political. He advocated Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal of the Union; but he thought that he should first of all strive to dispel bigotry and intolerance—“to awaken a noble nation from the lethargy of despair.”[16] What Irishmen needed most of all were knowledge, sobriety, peace, benevolence—in a word, virtue and wisdom. “When you have these things,” he said, “you may defy the tyrant.” It is not surprising that his mission turned out to be a fiasco. Godwin wrote Shelley several letters in which he tried to convince him that his pamphlets and Association would stir up strife and rebellion. “Shelley,” he writes, “you are preparing a scene of blood.” The poet accordingly withdrew his pamphlets from circulation and quitted Ireland.
Shelley then crossed over to Wales, and after a short residence at Nangwillt settled at Lynmouth. Elizabeth Hitchener, “the sister of his soul,”[17] joined them there. The poet first met her at Cuckfield while visiting his uncle, Captain Pilfold. She was a schoolmistress, professing very liberal opinions and possessing “a tongue of energy and an eye of fire.” Everybody that Shelley admired seemed to him perfect, while those whom he disliked were fiends. Their correspondence, which extends over a period of more than a year, gives us a good picture of the workings of Shelley’s mind during this time. They all moved to London in November. It was not to be expected that a combination of even such disinterested, enlightened superior mortals as these could last long. Elizabeth’s influence over Shelley soon began to wane. His dislike for her was equalled only by his former extravagant praise. She was no longer his angel, but was now known as the “Brown Demon.” “She is,” he writes, “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?” Miss Hitchener took her leave of the Shelleys and again became a schoolmistress.
Shelley and his family spent some time in Wales and Dublin and then returned again to London in April, 1813.
It was about this time that he finished Queen Mab. On February 19, 1813, Shelley wrote to Hookham, his publisher: “You will receive Queen Mab with the other poems; I think that the whole should form one volume.” Medwin says that he commenced this work in the autumn of 1809. “After his expulsion he reverted to his Queen Mab commenced a year and a half before, and converted what was a mere imaginative poem into a systematic attack on the institutions of society.” What was it that induced him to make the change? There is no doubt but it was his experience of the misery and suffering around him that prompted him to attack society as he did.
Radicalism, as has already been shown, springs from discontent. The worse existing conditions are, the more pronounced will be the radicalism that usually arises. Conditions—moral, political and social—during the latter half of the eighteenth century were very bad indeed. In his inimitable sketches of the four Georges, Thackeray asserts that the dissoluteness of the nation was awful. He depicts the lives of its princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion as idle, profligate, and criminal. “Around a young king himself of the most exemplary life and undoubted piety lived a court society as dissolute as our country ever knew.” Education was sadly neglected. In Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, published 1753, Charlotte gives an account of her two lovers. One of them is an ideal specimen of the young nobility and is represented as spelling pretty well for a lord. In Ireland, the colonies, and even in England itself, oppression was well-nigh intolerable. Byron’s Age of Bronze contains a good description of the way in which the landlords treated their tenants. The changes that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution caused untold suffering. The spread of machinery destroyed the old domestic industries of spinning and weaving, and many were consequently deprived of their most important source of subsistence. Children took up the places of the master craftsmen; and the amount of misery that this substitution entailed to both children and craftsmen is almost incredible.[18] Politics was rotten to the core. Even the great commoner, William Pitt, has been convicted by Macaulay, of sacrificing his principles without any scruple whatever. The political corruption started by Walpole was organized into a system. Every man had his price. “Politicians are mere jobbers; officers are gamblers and bullies; the clergy are contemned and are contemptible; low spirits and nervous disorders have notoriously increased, until the people are no longer capable of self-defense.”[19] In their struggle with the Stuarts the people were completely victorious; but it soon became apparent that they had simply substituted one evil for another. The despotism exercised by the Stuarts was now practiced by the Dodingtons and the Winningtons. Burke observes: “The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century. In this the distempers of Parliament.”
The House of Commons was not responsible to anybody; and its members showed very little consideration for their constituents. Persons who were not acceptable to the ruling party were often fined and imprisoned without due process of law. It is little wonder then that Godwin, Shelley, and others declaimed against all forms of government. They were acquainted only with the Parliament of the Georges and the oligarchy of the Stuarts, and the one was as bad as the other.