Dr. Greenlaw’s home for young gentlemen was a house of forbidding aspect. More than once as they walked from London to Bishopgate (familiar to those who are in the habit of entering Windsor Park from Englefield Green), Shelley directed Hogg’s attention to the gloomy walls of his first boarding-school. The house was unalluring, the master not incapable of outbreaks of anger, the boys by no means innocent of puerile rudeness and inhumanity. But the present writer, who in former time knew some of Dr. Greenlaw’s scholarly descendants, has reason to believe the doctor was a kindlier gentleman, and his school a much less defective establishment, than Mr. Medwin made the world imagine.
Taking much credit to himself for having been at Brentford a sympathetic and condescending senior schoolmate to his little far-away cousin, Tom Medwin speaks with ungenerous resentment of the seminary where they sipt the Pierian spring. All that his bitter words amount to is that Dr. Greenlaw was a pedagogue, and Sion House a seminary, ‘of an old school.’ If the bread served to the boys at breakfast and supper was parsimoniously dressed with butter, the fare was neither better nor worse than the bread and butter usually provided for schoolboys eighty years since. If the Saturday’s pie was a scrap-pie, and a poor specimen of its inferior kind of pie, it was only such a thing as schoolboys of the period were expected to eat with thankfulness. A schoolboy’s toilet, in the days of our grandfathers, was always a short and simple business. As the boys seldom saw the lady, who never harassed or troubled them in any way, Mr. Medwin might as well have forborne to sneer at Mrs. Greenlaw for priding herself less on her husband’s calling, than on being distantly related to the Duke of Argyll. Mr. Medwin was not a little proud of his slight relationship to the Castle Goring Shelleys, though they were not (to put the case mildly) the best of the Sussex families. He might, therefore, have spoken leniently of Mrs. Greenlaw’s sense of the dignity of her people, or been silent about the matter. Himself the son of a country attorney, Mr. Medwin should have written a little less disdainfully of his old schoolfellows, for being ‘mostly the sons of London shopkeepers.’ Nor is the Rev. Dr. Greenlaw (he was in holy orders and had a Scotch degree) to be severely judged if, when pupils were few, he was something less inquisitive than he might have been about the quality of parents. To live, schoolmasters must fill up their beds; and to be placed at school in the same dormitory with a cheesemonger’s son is an indignity, to be forgiven (after forty years) even by the son of a solicitor of the High Court of Judicature.
It may, however, be conceded that Sion House was no more a fit school for the heir of a great county family, than the Clapham school, where the poet’s sisters received their higher education, was a suitable seminary for the daughters of an aristocratic house. Whilst little Bysshe was still making Latin verses in the company of tradesmen’s sons, the elder of his sisters went to the Clapham school, where Harriett Westbrook (the daughter of a licensed victualler) in later time learnt something of French and the answers to Mangnall’s Questions. It may not, however, be inferred that Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, of Field Place, were deficient in proper care for their own dignity, or in proper concern for the welfare of their offspring. Though no place of education for the sons of the English aristocracy, Sion House was greatly superior to the ‘commercial schools’ where tradesmen sent their boys to be trained for the counter and the counting-house. It was a ‘classical school’ for the sons of ordinary professional men (boys like Tom Medwin), and the sons of well-to-do and ambitious tradesmen, bent on putting their boys into the liberal professions. The Clapham school for girls was a school of corresponding quality,—a place of education for the daughters of people moving in the middle way of life. That he sent his children to such schools merely shows that the Squire of Field Place was not possessed by the spirit of exclusiveness, that is a characteristic of aristocratic personages; that he was still far from rating himself with the aristocracy of his county, though he had taken a degree at Oxford, made the grand tour, and risen to represent New Shoreham in the House of Commons. That the children were sent to such schools shows how far the head of the family (old Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the son of the Newark apothecary and the friend of Graham, the quack) was from over-estimating his social position; how far he was from deeming himself one of the dignitaries of his shire, though he had married the heiress of Penshurst, and adding acre to acre, was rich enough to spend tens of thousands on the big castle, which he never finished or inhabited.
Instead of enjoying the status, which delusive biographers declare them to have enjoyed for successive centuries, the poet’s people were in his childhood only emerging from the middle class of society. Planted though they had been for some time within the outer breastworks of provincial gentility, they were still regarded by their patrician neighbours as people of ambiguous quality,—too wealthy to be rated with mere ‘gentle populace,’ and at the same time, too wanting in local influence and ancestral dignity to be rated with the élite of ‘the county.’ Fortunate though it had been, old Mr. Bysshe Shelley’s career was more calculated to provoke scandal than conciliate social sentiment. Though it had done much for his enrichment, his second marriage had also caused leading families of Sussex and Kent to regard him with animosity, and speak of him with disapproval. Strange stories were told of the ways in which the old man had made money,—was still making money. The sordid tastes and habits, that rendered him equally despicable and pitiable in his senility, were already revealing themselves, and confirming people of honest pride and good principle in their resolve to hold aloof from him. To personages of the county, who had long looked down upon them as obtrusive upstarts, the father and son grew more distasteful in proportion as they grew richer. Instead of being diminished, this disfavour was for a time quickened by the civilities, which for political reasons the Duke of Norfolk thought fit to offer to the Horsham capitalist and the Member for New Shoreham. Both within and without the lines of the Liberal party, dislike of these ‘new men’ was stimulated by the growing opinion that, if the younger kept his seat for the Sussex borough, and voted steadily in accordance with the Duke’s pleasure, the elder of them would in a few years be raised to the dignity for which he had long hungered.
Thus regarded in Sussex, it is not surprising that the poet’s father and grandfather lived more within the lines of their proper middle-class connexion, than with the higher gentry of their neighbourhood, and that, in selecting schools for his children, Mr. Timothy Shelley acted in harmony with the views of his middle-class friends and relations. It is not surprising that little Bysshe was sent to the school that was good enough for the boys of people like the Medwins, and none too good for the tradesmen’s sons who came between the wind and Tom Medwin’s nobility. Nor is it surprising that in later time little Bysshe’s sisters were sent to the suburban academy, where the youngest of them became intimate with Harriett Westbrook,—the lovely child of ‘Jew Westbrook,’ the licensed victualler. Had he in 1802 felt more certain of getting the baronetcy for which he was playing (and won only four years later—1806), it is probable that the Horsham money-maker would have loosened his purse-string, and told his son (the M.P.) that Sion House was not good enough school for the heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Had the father and son foreseen what embarrassment and scandal would come to the Castle Goring Shelleys from friendships made at the Clapham girls’-school, it is probable that the poet’s sisters would have been sent to a more select seminary, or have been educated, even to the finishing touches of their education, at Field Place.
That the Reverend Dr. Greenlaw was a fairly sufficient pedagogue may be inferred even from the reluctant admissions of the writer, who is our chief source of information respecting little Bysshe’s life at Sion House. Whilst telling apocryphal stories to the discredit of his scholarship, Medwin concedes that the Doctor was ‘a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,’ drilled his pupils assiduously in Homer, and carried them ‘in his own way’ through some of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mr. Medwin was not so precisely accurate a writer that we must accept all his statements to the schoolmaster’s disadvantage. Possibly, in recalling the teacher’s way of ‘driving straightforwards in defiance of obstacles,’ the biographer only remembered his own way of dealing with choruses and other perplexing passages of the Greek dramatists. The historian who misquoted the Ovidian verses, in his worst and most damaging story against the Doctor, may also have misquoted the sorry verses inscribed on the Scotch mull which Charles Mackintosh (a former pupil at Sion House) gave his preceptor. If the verses of the mull were as bad as the biographer represents, and were (as the same authority alleges) the production of the Doctor’s own head and hand, their extreme badness disproves the assertion that the Doctor ‘was a tolerable Greek and Latin Scholar.’ However much misquoted in Medwin’s Life of Shelley, the verses must have been bad; but it is more probable that ‘Carolus Mackintosh ... alumnus’ composed the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together by ‘the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,’ who had grown grey in teaching boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years, touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens Mr. Medwin’s testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value.
That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity in reference to a familiar passage of the Æneid, is less probable than that Tom Medwin’s memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines:
‘Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,’—
which little Bysshe ‘gave in’ as verses of his own manufacture. ‘Jam, jam!’ the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child’s small cheeks and ears. ‘Jam, jam! Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you think you are at your mother’s? Don’t you know that I have a sovereign objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their verses? haven’t I told you so a hundred times already? “Tacturas sidera summa putes,”—what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the stars, eh?—“summa sidera,”—who does not know that the stars are high? Where did you find that epithet?—in your Gradus ad Parnassum, I suppose. You will never mount so high. “Putes!” you may think this very fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There’ (with a final box on the little fellow’s nearest ear), ‘go now, sir, and see if you can’t write something better!’
It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of punishment for ‘giving in’ as his own the verses that were not his own,—an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last hour. ‘He was,’ says Lady Shelley in her Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, ‘more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.’