With his usual ambiguity of expression, Medwin says, or seems to say, that he made Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne’s acquaintance in North Wales at the beginning of 1808 or somewhat before that year; subscribed for a volume of her poems when she was sixteen years old; and on his return from North Wales (in the earlier part of 1808) spoke of her and her writings to Shelley, in terms that caused him to write to the young lady. The perplexing Mr. Thomas Medwin writes thus:—
‘In the beginning of the first of these two years’ (i.e. 1808 and 1809), ‘I showed Shelley some poems to which I had subscribed by Felicia Browne, whom I had met in North Wales, where she had been on a visit at the house of a connexion of mine. She was then sixteen, and it was impossible not to be struck with the beauty (for beautiful she was), the grace, and charming simplicity and naiveté of this interesting girl; and on my return from Denbighshire, I made her and her works the frequent subject of conversation with.... He desired to become acquainted with the young authoress, and using my name wrote to her, as he was in the habit of doing to all those who in any way excited his sympathies. This letter produced an answer, and a correspondence of some length passed between them, which, of course, I never saw, but it is to be supposed that it turned on other subjects besides poetry. I mean that it was sceptical. It has been said by her biographer, that the poetess was at one period of her life, as is the case frequently with deeper thinkers on religion, inclined to doubt; and it is not impossible that such owed its origin to this interchange of thought. One may, indeed, suppose this to have been the case, from the circumstance of her mother writing to my father, and begging him to use his influence with Shelley to cease from any further communication with her daughter,—in fact, prohibiting their further correspondence.’
Medwin is obviously not right in his dates. Born on 23rd September, 1793, Felicia Browne (Hemans) attained the age of sixteen on 23rd September, 1809. If he made the young lady’s acquaintance at the end of 1807, or in the beginning of 1808, she was only fifteen years of age when he first made a bow to her. If she was in her seventeenth year when he first saw her, the meeting took place on some day between 23rd September, 1809, and 23rd September, 1810. It is much more probable that he was right about her age than about the year. The girl’s precise age is much more likely than the precise number of the year, in which he first saw her, to have lived in his memory. The admiration with which he regarded and remembered her is a state of feeling much more likely to have been caused by a girl of sixteen than a child of fifteen. If he made her acquaintance at the end of 1809, he made it at a time closely preceding the winter in which he saw so much of Shelley. If he made her acquaintance at the close of 1807, or the beginning of 1808, he would have had fewer opportunities for speaking about her to his cousin (still an Eton schoolboy); and in the spring and summer of 1809, he would scarcely have been cognizant of the correspondence of the boy at Eton and the girl in Wales. In the winter of 1809-10, and in the following spring, he would naturally know of the correspondence, and hear something of the letters he was not permitted to see.
It matters little whether the correspondence was an affair of this year or that year. The important fact is that, whilst still a stripling, the future poet opened a correspondence with the young lady, and used the opportunities of the correspondence to infuse her with sceptical sentiment, and disturb her faith in the religion in which she had been trained. What might come to Miss Felicia Browne from his intrusion on her spiritual life was no question to trouble him. What misery might ensue to the girl’s mother and other kindred from his action was no matter for him to consider. The rights and feelings of parents were rights and feelings to which the young gentleman (who might have been the Saviour of the World) was sublimely indifferent, whenever it pleased him to talk with a school-girl (whose acquaintance he had made without the sanction or knowledge of her parents) on the evidences of Christianity, the soul’s immortality, the existence of the Deity. No less heedless was he of his own mother’s wishes, anxieties, fears, hopes, when the humour came upon him to enlighten his sisters on matters about which she wished them to be left in ignorance. Himself a passionate disbeliever of the Christian religion, Shelley was possessed by a passion for making other people sharers of his disbelief, especially for raising the young ladies of his acquaintance to his own philosophical contempt for the delusions of Christianity. Any one who humoured his propensity to win converts to his own particular infidelity was a philosopher; every one who presumed to oppose it was an intolerant bigot. In the indulgence of this passion for making converts to unbelief, he was selfish.
Without receiving or seeking Mrs. Browne’s permission to address her daughter on matters pertaining to religion, or to have any kind of confidential relations with her, he opened a correspondence with the sixteen-years-old girl, and did his best to lure her from the religion in which she had been educated,—and was so far successful as to shake her faith in Christianity. A few weeks or months later, without receiving or seeking Mrs. Grove’s permission to address her daughter (a young girl of his own age) on matters of religion, he did his best by spoken words and written words to lure the girl from Christianity, though he must have known that he could not effect his purpose without inflicting inexpressible pain on his mother’s sister. Knowing his mother’s repugnance to infidelity, he did his best to lure his eldest sister (a girl of poetical sensibility and genius, who idolized him) from the Christian religion. In the following year, finding Harriett Westbrook still a sixteen-years-old school-girl, who held the usual religious views of an English school-girl educated within the lines of the Established Church, he approached her without asking her parents’ authority to do so, lured her from Christianity to Atheism, set her in rebellion against her father, and having made her an undutiful daughter and an atheist, married her,—marrying her instead of making her his mere mistress, only because Hogg made him see he was bound in honour to make her his lawfully wedded wife, before possessing himself of her person. In this period of his early manhood, he approached other girls of tender age in the same manner,—addressing them on matters of religion, disturbing their spiritual life, and shaking their faith in Christianity, when he did not succeed in his efforts to extinguish it. With the single exception of Miss Harriett Grove (who does not seem to have suffered from his sophistries) he seems to have been more or less successful in all his attempts on the faith of young girls.
In acting thus to young girls, without the sanction or knowledge of their natural guardians, the apt pupil of the hard-swearing Windsor doctor is declared by the most fervid of his admirers to have been justified, because he was a sincere and earnest teacher of what he believed to be the truth, an enthusiastic assailant of error, and a fervid enemy of intolerance. Though his action was often strangely wanting in candour and openness, was sometimes odiously secretive and treacherous towards the parents of the young girls with whose faith he tampered, the sincerity of his religious sentiments and utterances is open to no suspicion. It is unquestionable that he believed what he tried to make others believe,—that he was wholly convinced and absolutely certain of the falseness of the opinions which he entreated other people to repudiate as false. It cannot be doubted he was an enthusiastic assailant of what he thought to be error, and the majority of his acquaintance thought to be the reverse of error. In one sense, he was no doubt a disinterested assailant of what he thought to be error. But how about his tolerance? his hatred of intolerance? For the moment we are not thinking of the Italian Shelley, who, after warring wildly with all who differed from him in opinion, desisted in some degree from the bootless strife,—on discovering that what was truth to him might be error to higher intelligence, that the people from whom he differed in opinion had the same right to their manifestly erroneous opinions as he had to his possibly erroneous views; that human creatures could not be forced out of their errors by passionate speech; that disputants fighting with subtle arguments and hot words might be as essentially intolerant as disputants fighting with instruments of torture and blazing faggots. To say that the Shelley, who, after surviving the phrensies of his earlier manhood, wrote the Essay on Christianity, was devoid of tolerance would be unjust. But how about the Shelley who wrote Laon and Cythna, who raved against religion in Queen Mab, and was moved by hatred of error to teach Harriett Westbrook (ætat. 16), Harriett Grove (ætat. 17), his sister Elizabeth (ætat. 16), Felicia Browne (ætat. 16), that Christianity was made up of monstrous fables and delusions; that the Christian religion was accountable for the worst evils of human society; that the sentiment of the Christian faith was pernicious and execrable. Was this enemy of intolerance chiefly remarkable for tolerance? Whilst railing at the world’s want of tolerance, Shelley was himself a caricature of intolerance.
In regarding Shelley during the earlier stages of his crusade against Christianity, more especially in regarding his endeavours to dispel the religious delusions of Felicia Browne, Harriett Grove, his sister Elizabeth, Harriett Westbrook and other young ladies of his acquaintance, readers should judge him at least quite as severely as they would judge any young man of the present period, whom they should detect in sapping the religious faith and disturbing the religious life of young girls, still under their governesses. I might even go a step further and say that they should judge him even more severely than a young man of the present period: as in these days of Free Thought, when it is questioned by a considerable minority of people whether children are the better for being kept well within the lines of religious orthodoxy, a young man guilty of infusing the damsels of his familiar circle with sceptical sentiment, would offend social opinion less flagrantly and universally, than the Oxford undergraduate who was guilty of such conduct in days, when society was almost unanimous in attaching the highest value to religious orthodoxy, and in believing that to depart from it was to lay aside the only effectual armour against temptations to immorality.
Still, it is enough for readers to judge Shelley in this matter, precisely as they would judge a youthful delinquent of the present period, when the wholesome opinion still prevails that the man is guilty of heinous domestic treachery, who abuses the opportunities of familiar intercourse, so as to disturb the religious life of the young people of his acquaintance, and lure them from the tenets in which their natural guardians have educated them, and desire them still to be educated. What would the readers of this page say of any clever Etonian or Oxford undergraduate, whom they should overhear and catch in the very act of luring a girl of tender age from the religion of her parents (the religion in which they wish to confirm her) into Atheism? I conceive most readers of this page would pass judgment on the offender, without reference to the relative merits or demerits of the religion the girl was being lured to repudiate. I do not hesitate to say that in such a case I should tell the youthful apostle of Free Thought my opinion of his conduct, in a few words of homely English, that would make his ears tingle;—and the words of homely English would be none the less stinging and disdainful, because I knew the young gentleman to be a rather clever fellow, and even thought him likely to write good poetry some years hence.
Why do I presume to say without hesitation that Miss Harriett Grove’s correspondence with, and so-called engagement to, her cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, were affairs of the year 1810, whilst Lady Shelley (writing ‘from authentic sources’) declares them to have been affairs of the previous year 1809?
The authorities have blundered curiously about this affair of the two cousins. Mr. Thomas Love Peacock makes a great slip, where he says that ‘Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford brought to a summary conclusion his boyish passion for Miss Harriett Grove.’ Letters published in Hogg’s first volume put it beyond question that, whilst the brief familiar intercourse was an affair of the latter half of 1810, it was all over by the end of that year, or at latest before the end of the Christmas holidays of 1810-11. Shelley had ceased to sigh for Harriett Grove, some weeks before the expulsion.