Leaving Oxford at the end of Michaelmas term, 1810, and journeying to Sussex by way of London, Mr. Bysshe Shelley was at Field Place on the 18th of December, on which day he wrote to Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, of Pall Mall, expressing approval of the publisher’s advertisement of St. Irvyne, and begging him to send a copy of the absurd story to each of the three following persons:—Miss Marshall, of Horsham, Sussex; Thomas Medwin, Esq., of the same place; and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Esq., at the Reverend Mr. Dayrell’s, Lynnington (a misspelling of Lillingstone) Dayrell, Buckinghamshire. At the same time the author requested that six copies should be sent to himself, and observed, at the close of his brief note, ‘I will enclose the printer’s account for your inspection in another letter;’ words of some moment to the reader who would get a view of the circumstances that soon resulted in the young author’s rupture with his publisher. Under ordinary circumstances, the printer’s bill for printing a book published at the author’s risk would be paid by the publisher, and would not come under the author’s notice save as an item of his publisher’s account. Paying the printer with a bill, or with ready-money, on which discount would be allowed, the publisher would charge the author with the full sum of the printer’s account, making on the transaction a considerable profit (to the amount of the discount), if he pays the printer in ‘cash’ and is promptly repaid by the author. Mr. Stockdale, of course, would not have been slow to arrange for getting this advantage, had he not by the middle of December discovered grounds for mistrusting the author’s ability to pay the charges for which he was responsible; or had he not somehow come to the opinion that the author (a minor) should be pressed for immediate payment of the costs of producing a book, whose sale would necessarily be trifling. That Mr. Gosnell, of Little Queen Street, London (the printer to whom Mr. Stockdale had himself sent ‘the copy’ of St. Irvyne, after the MS. had been ‘fitted for the press’), was thus asked to press the author for immediate payment for the printing, is alike significant of the publisher’s distrust of the author’s solvency, and of the publisher’s unfavourable opinion of the book.
If he was not in trouble and disgrace at Field Place from the first moment of his return to his boyhood’s home, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley did not pass many days of the Christmas vacation in Sussex, before his father spoke to him sharply, and his mother regarded him with sorrowful disapproval. A letter he wrote to Hogg on 20th December, 1810—a letter to be found in Hogg’s Life—shows that, at so early a time of the holidays, he found himself in a position of divers annoyances, several humiliations, and much embarrassment. Acting in the name of their daughter, and also with the authority pertaining to them as her natural guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Grove, of Fern House, Wiltshire, had written to Field Place, expressing reasonable surprise and displeasure at their nephew’s conduct in abusing the privileges of familiar intercourse so far and so outrageously as to write his cousin Harriett Grove (ætat. 17 to 18) letters, whose main purpose was to draw her into religious controversy, and lure her from Christianity,—the faith in which she had been educated; the faith of her parents and kindred. To Mr. and Mrs. Grove, it necessarily seemed that in thus acting towards their daughter, Bysshe had acted dishonourably, and shown himself unworthy of the love he required from her; unworthy even of the friendly intercourse with her, to which he had been entitled as her near kinsman. Under these circumstances, Shelley was informed that his correspondence with Miss Harriett Grove must be stayed at least for the present, and that his hope of marrying her must be dismissed for ever.
Holding old and wholesome views on certain questions of honour, though he certainly was no person to be compared with the Saviour of the World, Mr. Timothy Shelley concurred in the sentiments of Fern House on this affair, and told his son so in terms none too daintily worded. ‘The Fiery Hun’ blushed to think he had a son capable of sapping the faith and principles of a young lady, to whose familiar confidence he had been admitted under conditions of which no gentleman, old or young, was unmindful. To poor Mrs. Shelley, the case was even worse. Regarding the point of honour with her husband’s eyes, she thought also of the monstrous wickedness of her first-born child, who, throwing from him the truths of the Christian religion, had covered them with ridicule. In alarm, she thought of her girls. If Bysshe could act thus wickedly to his cousin Harriett, what was there to withhold him from acting in like manner to his sister Elizabeth? He and she were so closely attached to one another, that it was their practice to read and walk and write poetry together. During the whole of his single term of residence at Oxford, there had been letters passing between them. Had he already inspired the dear girl with sceptical sentiment? Instead of submitting to her father and mother, as Harriett Grove had done, the evil counsel he was giving her, had Elizabeth taken his impious words to heart? Was she pondering them secretly, and brooding over them, in doubt whether she should reject them as false, or hold to them as true? Or had she embraced them no less impetuously and strongly than furtively? Was she already a disbeliever?—an infidel? Then the terrified mother thought of her younger girls,—Mary, and Hellen, and Margaret. If he could tamper with the religious tenets of so young a girl as Elizabeth, still only sixteen years old, what was there in the tenderness of their infantile years to render Bysshe more heedful for the spiritual health and tranquillity of Elizabeth’s younger sisters?
It needs no lively imagination to conceive the terror that agitated this anxious mother, to realize the apprehensions that, fretting her spirits incessantly, gave her sleepless nights and sorrowful days. Instead of being touched and subdued by the words and looks, that made him cognizant of her maternal solicitude, the young gentleman (who might have been the Saviour of the World) wrote lightly to his fellow-collegian on January 11, 1811, about his mother’s alarm. She imagined him on the high road to perdition. She fancied him set on making infidels of his little sisters. Could anything be more laughable? It was, however, no laughable matter to the poor lady; and it should not have been a matter for laughter with her son. Why was his mother a simpleton for allowing such fears to trouble her, when the young gentleman was craftily and insidiously sapping his eldest sister’s belief in Christianity, apportioning the new doctrine of Free Thought with nice consideration for her girlish timidity, and for the weakness of her intellect,—giving it in doses large enough to awaken and stimulate curiosity, without stirring her to amazement and horror?
As he was working in this condescending and considerate manner on Elizabeth’s darkness and weakness on the 26th of December, 1810, why was his mother a mere goose for fearing he might be no less condescending, and considerate, and slily beneficent to Elizabeth’s younger sisters?
Moreover the time was near at hand when, in his fanatical intolerance of all opinion from which he differed, the youthful philosopher regarded Elizabeth’s younger sisters as quite old enough to digest the crumbs of truth, that fell from his lips. With all her disposition to minimize and palliate the feelings of her poet, Lady Shelley admits that such a youngster as the Oxonian Shelley would be a perplexing member of any household with a brood of children to be thought for. Indeed, she even goes the length of saying that, before accusing Mr. Timothy Shelley of treating his heir with inadequate tenderness, people should ask themselves how they would like to have in their houses a Spinozist or a Calvinist, so set on making converts, as to seek them in the butler’s pantry or the children’s schoolroom. Lady Shelley is even more particular, in moving every Christian mother to think, how she would like to entertain for her guest a Spinozist, desirous of making her ‘youngest daughter’ concur in his opinions.
Readers should bear in mind how clearly the author of Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, intimates that, instead of being the absurd and laughable fancy her son declared it, poor Mrs. Timothy Shelley’s fear for the spiritual safety of her younger girls was nothing less than a reasonable anticipation of what actually took place in their schoolroom, in respect to the youngest of them, before the poet turned his back on Field Place for ever.
Just about the same time at which his attention was called to his son’s sceptical opinions, and his zeal for making converts to them, by Mr. and Mrs. Grove, of Fern House, Mr. Timothy Shelley received some information, touching the same matters of painful interest from Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, of Pall Mall. As the man of business, who lived to be one of the blackest sheep of ‘the trade,’ was at no point of his career a person of extraordinary worth, the readers of the present chapter are not required to attribute the publisher’s action in this particular business to any sincere concern for the younger gentleman’s welfare, or for his father’s happiness. Before he became uneasy about the printer’s bill, for whose payment he was of course responsible, should the undergraduate of University College fail to pay it, Mr. Stockdale had been warned by several circumstances to exercise greater caution in his dealings with the young gentleman, whose Original Poetry had proved so inconveniently wanting in originality. Zastrozzi, of which he doubtless took a view after learning the name of its publisher, can scarcely have raised the author of the Victor-and-Cazire book in Mr. Stockdale’s estimation. The quality of St. Irvyne, and the pains he had himself taken to fit it for the press, cannot have disposed the man of business to think highly of the author’s ability. What he had heard about The Wandering Jew cannot have disposed the publisher to think less contemptuously of the young gentleman’s literary parts and ambition. The note touching the Hebrew Essay to the discredit of the Christian religion, was only one of several matters, to indicate to the publisher that his youthful client’s reading would possibly result in perilous writing. One can imagine how the publisher of novels and inferior poetry received the suggestion that he should publish the novel on Metaphysical and Political Opinions. On the approach of the Christmas holidays (1810-11), it was clear to Mr. Stockdale he had better press for a pecuniary settlement with Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley; and in case the young gentleman was not likely to pay his debt, to take measures for getting the money out of the young gentleman’s father. Hence, the publisher’s earlier interviews with the Member for New Shoreham, who was instructed that his son had fallen into evil hands at Oxford, and was a supporter of sceptical philosophy. How little the publisher got by his pains, and how he avenged himself on the Member of Parliament, whom he failed to bleed, are matters for subsequent pages.
When he wrote to Hogg on the 20th of December, 1810, Shelley had endured and was still enduring several sharp annoyances. Angry words had escaped ‘the Fiery Hun,’ who scolded his son for writing ridiculous books when he should be reading learned ones at Oxford; scolded him for running into debt with a publisher and printer, whom he had no means of paying; scolded him for adopting the damnable opinions of Hume, Paine, and the other infidels; scolded him royally for his most ungentlemanlike behaviour, in trying to lure his cousin Harriett from the sound Christian principles in which she had been educated by her most virtuous and exemplary parents. It was the way of fathers to scold their sons thus royally at the beginning of the present century; and it being part of the paternal style of George the Third’s time, no sound-hearted and loyal-hearted son ever resented so wholesome, though somewhat turbulent, an exercise of paternal authority. Now-a-days, fathers bring, or try to bring, their disorderly sons to meet contrition, with less noise and more dignity, but with speech quite as galling at the time, and more likely to rankle in the memory. To argue that Mr. Timothy Shelley was brutal and wanting in natural affection, because he scolded his naughty boy in this manner, is wild nonsense. However roundly he was spoken to, Mr. Bysshe Shelley received nothing more than he deserved. For awhile the father threatened to take his son from Oxford at once, but the threat was not carried out. It would have been better for Shelley had his father held to the threat. Mr. Bysshe Shelley’s grand averment that the menace was withdrawn, because he ‘would not consent to it,’ is a delicious piece of puerile ‘bounce.’
Shelley had reason for discontent. Forbidden to write to his cousin Harriett, he imagined, for a few days, he had loved her vehemently. Dismissed by her on account of his opinions, he deemed himself the victim of religious intolerance. By turns he thought of committing suicide, and wreaking his vengeance on the religion, which he held accountable for his greatest trouble. Swearing on what he was pleased to call the altar of perjured love, he vowed he would put an end to religious intolerance, by slaying secretly, stabbing secretly, the creed and the sentiment which generated religious intolerance. Dismissing the thought of killing himself, he confirmed himself in his purpose to kill superstition; and whilst maturing his plans for the achievement of this resolve, he determined to pursue his literary enterprises. But as ‘the Fiery Hun’ disapproved of his dealings with publishers, he determined to conceal his literary designs from his parents. On this point he wrote with instructive frankness to Hogg. ‘There is now,’ he wrote to his friend, ‘need of all my art: I must resort to deception.’ The deception he practised was to work on a new novel, with a view to early publication, whilst telling his father and mother he had no intention of publishing anything again. ‘Inconveniences would now result from my owning the novel,’ he wrote to Hogg, ‘which I have in preparation for the press. I give out, therefore, that I will publish no more.’ It pleased him to know that every one believed his false statement, with the exception of the few, who, being in his confidence, knew that it was a falsehood. One of the persons thus taken into his confidence was his sister Elizabeth (ætat. 16), whom he thus educated in deceit, by telling her how he was deceiving their parents. This was the course taken by the singularly outspoken and truth-loving Shelley in his own home,—towards his father and mother on the one hand, and towards his sister on the other. At the same time, whilst deceiving his father and mother, he was debating how he could impose his new book on a publisher by misrepresenting the tendency and purpose of the work. He was afraid that, though a thick-skulled man, Stockdale would detect the falsehood of the statement he was ready to make about the book.