The results of the march on Keswick justified the enterprise from which Hogg had vainly tried to dissuade the trio. Whilst Harriett’s rare beauty and simple girlishness palliated to her august host and hostess the escapade that had stirred the Squire of Field Place to natural indignation, Shelley’s speech was no less conciliatory than the tone of his letter to his father’s patron. If she did little to enhance the effect of her sister’s loveliness and her brother-in-law’s discreet behaviour, Miss Westbrook was by no means the combative and offensive person she had shown herself to Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg at York. The young woman, who ruled her brother-in-law for many months, was clever enough to appear a fairly sensible and meritorious person for a few days to the Duchess of Norfolk and Lady Musgrave. Having consented to receive the trio under his roof, the Duke could not have declined to befriend them any further, even if they had offended him. But the prolongation of the visit to the ninth day is conclusive evidence that the visitors won the favour of their entertainers. Another and even stronger indication of ducal benignity appears in the arrangement that was made (certainly with the Duke’s approval, and probably at his instance) for providing the trio with a comfortable home during their sojourn at Keswick, where they seemed likely to linger to a time considerably later than the day, on which they eventually started from Cumberland for Ireland.
Before the visit at Greystoke came to an end, it was settled that the trio should move from their (second) uncomfortable lodgings in Keswick to rooms under Mr. Calvert’s roof at Greta Bank, to which the Duke’s useful neighbour agreed to welcome them in the twofold character of guests and lodgers;—as guests receiving Mrs. Calvert’s hospitable courtesies, and at the same time as lodgers rendering their entertainer a payment, that would enable them to live in his house for a considerable period (for several months, even for two or three years) without incurring an oppressive sense of pecuniary obligation. That a gentleman of Mr. Calvert’s social position consented to receive the trio on these terms is of itself a clear indication, that the domiciliary arrangement was expected to last for more than a few weeks. It is also conceivable that the Duke approved the pecuniary arrangement as a compact, that would render it easier for him to induce Mr. Timothy Shelley to renew the yearly allowance to his son. On hearing that his son and daughter-in-law had been received on such terms by one of his patron’s friends, the Squire of Field Place would of course feel it incumbent on his honour to put his son in a position to fulfil his pecuniary obligations to the Duke’s friend. This view of the pecuniary arrangement, and of the effect it could not fail to have on Mr. Timothy Shelley, accords with the ungracious terms in which the renewal of the allowance was soon afterwards announced to Shelley by his father’s man of business. Writing on 28th January, 1812, to William Godwin, Shelley says of his father’s action in this matter, ‘A little time since he sent to me a letter, through his attorney, renewing an allowance of two hundred pounds per annum, but with this remark “that his sole reason for so doing was to prevent my cheating strangers.”’ The strangers thus pointed to in the lawyer’s letters were doubtless the strangers (Mr. and Mrs. Calvert) who had taken the trio into their house.
The date of this letter, whose needless offensiveness (offensiveness, by the way, that may have been exaggerated by Shelley) was perhaps referable to the attorney’s ill-breeding rather than the Squire’s harshness, is unknown; but it may be assumed that the allowance was renewed soon after the arrangement with the Squire of Greta Bank came to Mr. Timothy Shelley’s knowledge, i.e. within two months of its withdrawal. The Squire of Field Place having thus again given his son an income (revocable at will) of 200l. per annum, Mr. Westbrook (no doubt mollified and flattered by the Duchess of Norfolk’s civility to his daughters) appears to have determined to act with equal liberality to his daughter Harriett and to raise her husband’s annual revenue to 400l. It has been questioned by successive biographers whether John Westbrook acted thus liberally. Even by Mr. Rossetti (an authority, from whom I never venture to differ without carefully reviewing the facts) it is doubted whether the poet had so good an income during his first marriage. But I see no grounds for thinking his yearly income in that term of his career was less than 400l.
Shelley had no obvious motive to overstate his means to William Godwin and Miss Hitchener in 1812. On the contrary, there were considerations that would dispose him to understate his income to those correspondents. Yet he assured both of them in that year that he had a yearly allowance of 400l. Writing on 14th January, 1812, on information given him by Shelley, Southey says Mrs. Shelley’s father allowed her and her husband 200l. a-year. A fortnight later (28th January, 1812) Shelley in the letter to Godwin, speaks of his father’s renewal (‘a little time since’) of ‘an allowance of two hundred pounds per annum.’ On the 14th of the next month Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener that he had ‘400l. per annum.’ Five months later (5th July, 1812) he wrote from Lynmouth, North Devon, to William Godwin, ‘I am, as you know, a minor, and as such depend upon a limited income (400l. per annum) allowed me by my relatives.’ During the three first months of his married life (i.e. the months preceding the renewal of his father’s 200l. a-year and his father-in-law’s first concession of a similar allowance) Shelley received considerably more than 100l. from different sources (i.e. 25l. from Mr. Medwin, spent on the charges of the elopement; 10l. from Hogg; 75l. sent to him at Edinburgh; the money [say 25l.] provided by Miss Westbrook for expenses at York and the journey to Keswick; and the ‘small sum’ [say another 25l.] sent to him at Keswick towards the end of November by Mr. Westbrook,—sums amounting to 160l.) There is no reason to suppose that Mr. Timothy Shelley withheld the allowance of 200l. a-year after its renewal, or that Mr. Westbrook failed to give the other 200l. a-year, till the poet’s rupture with his first wife in the spring of 1814. Surely then there are good grounds for saying Shelley had at least four hundred a-year from the date of his first marriage to the time of his quarrel with Harriett:—an income (equivalent to 600l. or 700l. a-year at the present time) that certainly acquits Mr. Timothy Shelley of the charges of scandalous and hurtful niggardliness to his perplexing and contumacious son.
Further evidence to the same conclusion is afforded by Shelley’s way of living throughout the period, when he is generally supposed to have suffered severely from insufficient means. So long as he tarried under Mr. Calvert’s roof he lived well within his average monthly income; but with the exception of this brief period of about three months, Shelley’s way of living from the September of 1811 to the midsummer of 1814 was a way in which he could not have persisted on less than 400l., even if no regard is had to the costly extravagances with which he indulged his wife in the later and inharmonious months of their conjugal association. To subsist on 200l. or 300l. a-year, it would have been necessary for Shelley and Harriett to live in one place and in the same small house, practising the petty domestic economies by which a little money may be made to go a long way. But instead of living in this manner, they chose a life of restless vagrancy—a way of living that of all modes of existence is the one most impoverishing to gentle folk of limited means. Economical in clothing and parsimonious in diet, they were prodigal in travelling expenses. Wandering hither and thither, from London to Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to York, from York to Keswick, from Keswick to the Isle of Man, from the Isle of Man to Dublin, from Dublin to Wales, from Wales back to Ireland, now lingering at Killarney, and now worshiping Nature in North Wales, they were incessant tourists at a time when touring (in respect to charges of locomotion) was far costlier than in these later years of grace. As tourists in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, and in a later stage of their joint-career as strangers in London, they spent yearly on hotel-keepers and lodginghouse-keepers twice the sum that would have maintained a cottage with two servants and a pony carriage in a Sussex village. At the same time it must be remembered that, though he seldom spent a shilling for pleasures on which young men of his degree are apt to spend many pounds, Shelley was by no means a man without ‘personal expenses.’ Giving much to beggars and other victims of distress, he was an habitual buyer of books, and in the execution of his literary enterprises, spent much on printers. Though he rarely bought wine, he often bought a costlier drink—laudanum, for his own drinking. How could he live in this way on 400l. a-year? Of course his expenses exceeded 400l. a-year. Of course in his wanderings he resembled the eighteenth-century poet, who dragged at each remove a lengthening chain of debt. But how could he have met the immediate, urgent, unavoidable and not-to-be-deferred charges of such incessant touring on less than four hundred a-year?
CHAPTER XVII.
GRETA BANK.
Shelley wishes for a Sussex Cottage—His Friends at Keswick—Southey at Home—Poet and Schoolmaster—Southey’s Way of handling Shelley—Shelley caught Napping—Mrs. Southey’s Tea-cakes—Eggs and Bacon on Hounslow Heath—At Home with the Calverts—Shelley’s remarkable Communications to Southey—His Story of Harriett’s Expulsion from School—The Story to Hogg’s Infamy—Mr. MacCarthy on the Posthumous Fragments—Miss Westbrook’s transient Contentment—Shelley’s For Ever and Never—His Interest in Ireland—Burning Questions—Southey and Shelley at War—The Address to the Irish People—Letters to Skinner Street—Godwin tickled by them—Shelleyan Conceptions and Misconceptions—Shelley forgets all about Dr. Lind—Preparations for the Irish Campaign—Letter of Introduction to Curran—Project for a happy Meeting in Wales—Miss Eliza Hitchener—Bright Angel and Brown Demon—Shelley’s Delight in her—His Abhorrence of her.