‘It appeared to myself and to others also, that his, i.e. Shelley’s recollections, were those of a person not quite recovered from a fever, which had attacked his brain, and still disturbed by the horrors of the disease. Truth and justice demand that no event of his life should be kept back, but that all materials for the formation of a correct judgment should be freely given.’
Other particulars of the story may have been no less baseless. That a servant told him of his father’s purpose, that he gave this servant orders and means to despatch a messenger to Dr. Lind, may have been mere fancies of the delirious brain. On the other hand, Lady Shelley may have had better authority than the poet’s words for attributing the painful conviction to a servant’s gossip. It can also be readily imagined that the sufferer from the distressing fancy gave his pocket-money to a servant, and bade him be off to Windsor for the doctor. These are points on which the reader may be left to form his own opinion, but he must altogether acquit Mr. Timothy Shelley of intending to send his boy to a madhouse.
The indisputable facts of the story are these:—The boy had a febrile illness attended with delirium; whilst ill he suffered from a fancy that his father meant to send him to a lunatic asylum; after this notion had fastened on the disordered brain, Dr. Lind was sent for; in compliance with the summons Dr. Lind came from Windsor to Field Place, and attended the boy till he was better. A reasonable view of these facts is that during his delirious sickness the patient expressed a strong desire to see Dr. Lind, and that, in their natural desire to do the best for their child’s comfort and recovery, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley invited the doctor to come to Field Place. Even Dr. Lind with all his eccentricity would not have presumed to visit Field Place without an invitation from the master of the house. Still less would he have ventured to force his way into the sick chamber against Mr. Timothy Shelley’s wish. The statement that he dared Mr. Shelley ‘to execute his purpose,’ and brought him to a sense of decency by ‘menaces,’ is simply ridiculous. Ever reluctant though she is to discredit any of the poet’s statements, Lady Shelley shows her opinion of the wildest extravagances of his marvellous story by being silent about them.
Something should be said about the probable time of this illness. Circumstances point to the latter part of 1808 as the period in which Dr. Lind attended Shelley in Field Place. Shelley may have been right in regarding the illness as an incident of one of his ‘holidays;’ but there are grounds for thinking it more probable that the illness ran its course during one of the Eton terms. Four-and-thirty years after the poet’s death, Miss Margaret Shelley could remember that, whilst her sister Hellen was at school at Clapham, Bysshe was sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness.
‘I went to school before Margaret,’ Miss Hellen Shelley wrote in 1856, ‘so that she recollects how Bysshe came home in the midst of the half-year to be nursed; and when he was allowed to leave the house, he came to the dining-room window, and kissed her through the pane of glass.’
Hellen’s age (she was born in 1799) seems to indicate that this illness cannot have taken place earlier than the autumn of 1808. Even then she would have been young to go to boarding-school. If this was the illness mentioned in the poet’s strange story, Dr. Lind’s visit to Field Place is a simple affair. Sent home when he was already sickening for an illness, the patient had been under Dr. Lind’s medical treatment before he was sent home to be nursed through an illness that would probably prove a severe one. What more natural and in the ordinary course of things, when the boy grew worse, and the village apothecary wished for ‘a second opinion,’ than for Mr. Timothy Shelley to summon the Windsor doctor who had seen the patient in the earliest stage of the malady. The conversation between Mr. Timothy Shelley and the village apothecary, which is said to have been so indiscreetly reported to the sick boy, may have turned wholly on the question, whether Dr. Lind should be sent for. Dr. Lind unquestionably was summoned; and as Mr. Shelley was at Field Place at the time, no one else is likely to have dispatched the summons. Had he imagined Dr. Lind had already been, or would soon be, the boy’s instructor in hard swearing, Mr. Shelley would, doubtless, have sent for another doctor. As the future poet left Eton towards the end of 1809; as the illness of the marvellous story occurred during the height of Dr. Lind’s influence over the boy; as that influence was certainly an affair of the later half of Bysshe’s stay at Eton (1808-9); and as Shelley was certainly sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness when his sister Hellen (born in September, 1799) was already at school and in ‘the middle of her half-year,’ most readers will concur with the present writer in thinking the illness mentioned in the story and the illness mentioned in the letter were one and the same illness,—and that the illness at the earliest took place in the autumn of 1808, at the latest in the spring of 1809, i.e. when Shelley was sixteen years old. If this manner of dealing with sure facts is acceptable to readers, they may congratulate themselves on having discovered the six months, at the beginning or end of which, the poet was first possessed by the fancy that his father was looking out for a pretext for locking him up in a madhouse:—the hideous fancy that (to use Love Peacock’s words) ‘haunted him throughout life.’
How came this ghastly and absolutely groundless fancy to take this early and enduring hold of his mind? The answer must be sought in the poet’s ancestral story, the characteristics of the romantic literature of which he had been a greedy devourer from his early childhood, and the conditions of his life at Eton. The answer to be extorted from these three sources of information is doubtless an answer, resting on inference and conjecture from facts, almost as much as upon facts themselves. Still it is an answer worth having, though veined with uncertainties. The Shelleys, who eventually blossomed into the Castle Goring house, resembled the eighteenth and nineteenth century Byrons in having a distinct strain of madness. Mention has already been made of the Newark apothecary’s elder brother, whose story is told in the following words of the Castle Goring pedigree:—
‘John Shelley, of Fen Place, aforesaid, esq., 2nd son, a lunatic. Bapt. at Worth 1st September, 1696; died unmarried at Uckfield, 7th October, 1772, buried at Worth 18th same month.’
This long-lived lunatic, who did not escape from his dismal doom in this world, till he had entered his seventy-seventh year, is a significant feature of the poet’s ancestral story. Brother of the Newark apothecary, this madman, whose affliction caused him to be set aside in the arrangements of the family (to his younger brother’s advantage), was the first baronet’s uncle, the poet’s great-great-uncle. The obscurity of the families, with whom this lunatic’s ancestors intermarried before his period, precludes the discovery of the number of the various channels through which insanity may have come to his brain. But it is not to the physiological credit of the Castle Goring Shelleys, that their ancestors married so many heiresses. Families, whose men have married for money in successive generations, are usually seen to suffer in bodily stamina and mental health from what has come together with money to the family story. There is, of course, no reason why an heiress should not be as healthy as a poor parson’s daughter. But there is nothing in money to exempt its possessor from struma in its various forms; and so long as he can win in his bride the first object of his desire, money, the male fortune-hunter is apt to shut his eyes to the indications that the advantages of the money must be taken with serious attendant drawbacks. Families, famous for marrying heiresses, whether they intermarry with noble stocks, or, like our poet’s ancestors, with mere gentle yeomanry (i.e. squireens entitled to bear arms), are seldom famous for the qualities that render individuals gracious and existence delightful. If they endure for centuries, such families often do so by suffering for centuries.
To account for the same revolting fancy, allowance must also be made for the morbid literature on which the boy had been mentally suckled from his tender infancy,—the tales of domestic horror and cruelties, in which he had revelled from early childhood. To the producers and readers of that literature, no character was more attractive than a wretched being unjustly dealt with as a lunatic by barbarous relations. It is at least probable that the stories of such cruelty, flowing as they did from the press in the period when Monk Lewis threw the audience of a crowded theatre into hysterical anguish by his monodrama of The Captive, may have inspired the boy with a morbid apprehension of life-long imprisonment in a mad-house.