Mr. John Joseph Stockdale was no person to smart acutely from disdainful words. He was, of course, uneasy to think he had provoked the enmity of the two young men, who a short while hence might be able to injure him in his business; but, had it not been for this consideration, he would read their angry letters with more amusement than annoyance. Mr. Timothy Shelley’s scorn would have passed over his thick skin without causing him aught more than transient uneasiness, had it been accompanied with a cheque for the required sum. But it galled Mr. John Joseph Stockdale to miss the trick for which he had played so meanly,—galled him all the more because he was conscious of having played his poor cards badly. It must be confessed that the cards were no less weak than dirty. A cleverer rogue than Mr. Stockdale would have failed to win with them. Had he, in 1811, been the rich man he became in later times, Mr. Timothy Shelley might well have declined to pay the publisher’s demand, and thereby encourage other literary speculators to produce his son’s works in the expectation of being paid by his father. But till Sir Bysshe passed from the world, the Squire of Field Place, far from being wealthy for his station, was in no position to spend a hundred guineas lightly. Under these circumstances, the gentleman with several children and a pecuniary prospect that might even yet be darkened by the caprice of his eccentric father, was more than barely justified in saying that his son’s publisher must look to his client, not to his client’s father, for remuneration. It was not in Mr. Stockdale to take this obvious and reasonable view of a simple question. The money Mr. Timothy Shelley refused to give him was regarded by Mr. Stockdale as money basely and fraudulently withheld. To the publisher’s imagination the sum he failed to extort became a sum of which he had been robbed; the injury done him being the more outrageous and exasperating because he had rendered the doer of the wrong an important service.
In 1827, when the poet had been dead between four and five years, the publisher took his revenge on the perpetrator of so monstrous an injustice. By that time the embittered knave had dropt from the ways of decent trade, and was falling to the deeper disrepute in which he soon passed from view. A fabricator of scandalous literature as well as a publisher of it, he had already produced the Memoirs of Harriet Wilson, when he started the Budget, that bears his name, as a vehicle for airing a vanity, which had in some degree deranged a mind long fretted by imaginary grievances, and as an instrument for venting his spite on those who had provoked his displeasure, no less than as means of drawing relief to his indigence from the lovers of personal gossip. In this sordid serial, the broken and utterly discredited libeller produced a mendacious narrative of his transactions with Shelley and Shelley’s father. As he could get nothing in 1827 by abusing Shelley, it is not surprising that he spoke well of him at the instigation of self-interest, vanity, and spite. The man knew enough of the literary coteries to know the tide of social feeling had so far turned in Shelley’s favour that, whilst disparagement of the poet would not fail to offend, praise of him would not fail to conciliate the readers, most capable of commending the Budget to public favour. For the same reason vanity prompted the fellow to represent himself as the original discoverer and earliest fosterer of the poet’s genius. In praising the poet he was also actuated by spite against the poet’s father, whose treatment of his son would appear harsh and hateful, in proportion to the strength of the reader’s conviction that the poet deserved different usage. On the other hand, though chiefly actuated by malice, the libeller was also animated by vanity and self-interest in what he wrote to Sir Timothy Shelley’s discredit; for whilst it afforded him a pleasant sense of his own importance to speak authoritatively of a baronet’s misdemeanour, the slanderer knew the growing appetite for words to the poet’s credit was attended with an even keener appetite for evidence to his father’s discredit. Hence, whether he spoke of the poet or the poet’s father, he spoke at the instance of self-interest, vanity, and malice.
Such was the man, such were the motives of the man, in whose malignant and nauseous gossip about the poet and his father, Mr. Garnett discovers ‘traces of sincere affection’ for the author of Laon and Cythna. Not content with gushing over Stockdale’s ‘sincere affection for the young author whose acquaintance was certainly anything but advantageous to him in a pecuniary point of view,’ Mr. Garnett deals with the words of this professional slanderer as good evidence, that in their bitter differences the poet was guiltless of serious offence, and that the poet’s father was greatly to blame.
‘Stockdale,’ says Mr. Garnett, of this creditable witness to character and want of character, ‘had frequent opportunities of observing the uneasy terms on which the two stood towards each other, and unhesitatingly throws the entire blame upon the father, whom he represents as narrow-minded and wrong-headed, behaving with extreme niggardliness in money matters, and at the same time continually fretting Shelley by harsh and unnecessary interference with his most indifferent actions.’
What a use to make of the words of a slanderer-by-trade, a libeller surcharged with rancorous enmity against the poet’s father! To insult Shelley by making his character depend in any degree on the words of such a rascal as Stockdale, it is necessary that a man of letters should be a ‘Shelleyan enthusiast.’
It is not a fact that ‘Stockdale had frequent opportunities of observing the uneasy terms on which the two stood to each other.’ With the exception of the two or three occasions when the father and son came together to the Pall-Mall shop, Stockdale never saw them together. Doubtless there was uneasiness between them on those occasions, for they met on matters of disagreement, and in the presence of the man who, for his own advantage, was doing his best to render the father more than usually distrustful of, and anxious about, his son. The whole period of Stockdale’s acquaintance with Mr. Timothy Shelley was covered by the few weeks, during which time they exchanged letters and had two or three conferences touching the poet’s affairs,—the few weeks during which the unscrupulous tradesman was vainly endeavouring to wheedle the Member of Parliament into paying the minor’s bill for the publication of St. Irvyne. What opportunities can so brief and slight an intercourse have offered the publisher for using influence to dispose Mr. Shelley to be a better father? To believe the fellow’s impudent statements, one must believe that during those few weeks he assumed an almost parental authority over the gentleman on whose pocket he had designs. In 1827 sixteen years had elapsed since this slight intercourse of less than two months. How strange that after so many years, Stockdale should have had so clear a memory of the incidents of this slight intercourse,—so distinct a recollection of the peculiarities of the gentleman with whom he spoke on three or four occasions, and exchanged perhaps as many letters! How strange that ‘the Shelleyan enthusiasts’—so suspicious and distrustful of the accuracy of Hogg’s recollections of his most familiar friend whom he knew thoroughly—should accept so readily the publisher’s recollections of the gentleman, of whom he knew scarcely anything!
The same reflections are applicable to Stockdale’s vivid recollections of the Oxonian Shelley, and to Mr. Garnett’s reliance on the accuracy of those recollections. Though they exchanged letters in January, 1811, and had some disagreeable correspondence in later months of the same year, it does not appear that Shelley ever set eyes on the Pall-Mall publisher after December, 1810. The whole period of their personal intercourse cannot have exceeded four months:—months spent chiefly by Shelley at Oxford or in Sussex, whilst the publisher was attending to his affairs in London? To assume that during these four months they had a dozen meetings is to assume too much. It is more probable that they talked with one another on seven or eight several occasions. What opportunities could such an acquaintanceship afford the publisher for knowing his young client in such a way, that sixteen years later he could recall him clearly? Is it reasonable to suppose that the publisher during these interviews (and from several letters in no degree calculated to fill their receiver’s breast with tender emotion) conceived a strong affection—or any affection whatever—for the boy out of whom, or rather out of whose father, he meant to ‘make a bill?’
One might as reasonably imagine a money-lender overflowing with love for any young gentleman ‘in his teens,’ to whom he lends 50l. on the usual terms. Are London publishers so very different from other men of business, that they do business with youthful poets and novelists from impulses of affection, altogether pure of self-interest? I know something of London publishers: few men have better reason to think and speak well of them; to my last hour of consciousness I shall never recall a particular London publisher, without remembering him as one of the trustiest and dearest of the many friends who have contributed to my happiness; but still my impression is, and my experience has been, that a publisher’s regard for a young author has a tendency to rise and fall with the sale of the young author’s works. St. Irvyne having fallen dead from the press, even as Mr. Stockdale expected it to do, I have no doubt that Mr. Stockdale merely regarded his young author as a simpleton, whom he would not trust on any future occasion (during his minority) to pay the printer’s bill. To do Stockdale justice (and even to such a worm I would not be less than just) it should be remarked that he is no such preposterous ‘humbug’ as Mr. Garnett’s words imply. Though he whines hypocritically about ‘his too conscientious friendship’ for Mr. Bysshe Shelley, of University College, Oxford, the professional libeller does not profess to have loved the youth, with whom he was doing ‘risky business.’ In 1827, the disposition to think tenderly of Shelley had not gone so far as to produce a crop of ‘Shelleyan enthusiasts’ capable of believing that the publisher loved the author of St. Irvyne. Had Stockdale claimed credit for loving the dear boy, who came to his shop about the Original Poetry that was not original, the original readers of the Budget would have derided him, and denounced his Budget. Though he says civil things of Shelley, to heighten the effect of the uncivil things said of Shelley’s father, Stockdale forbears to descant on his affection for the future poet. It is enough for him to say, ‘Even from these boyish trifles’ (i.e. St. Irvyne, and the Victor-and-Cazire Book), ‘assisted by my personal intercourse with the author, I at once formed an opinion that he was not an everyday author.’ In saying this (as he meant the ambiguous words to be construed in the way most complimentary to the poet) the budgeteer told a lie,—but a lie not too outrageous to be believed. Further (to insult Sir Timothy Shelley, who in the scribbler’s opinion had refused to discharge ‘every honest claim upon him’), the libeller spoke highly of the poet’s ‘honour and rectitude,’ declaring him a man to ‘vegetate, rather than live, to effect the discharge of every honest claim upon him.’ But to speak of a man in this style is not to show signs of loving him. I know an author who certainly is no ‘everyday author,’ and would (I am sure) be at great pains to pay his creditors twenty shillings in the pound; but far from loving him, I would any day rather go without my dinner than eat it in his company.
Truth to tell, the ‘traces of a sincere affection for the young author,’ which Mr. Garnett has discovered in Stockdale’s words about Shelley, are so far from being distinctly apparent, that I have vainly sought for them in the pages, where they are so manifest to the author of Shelley in Pall Mall. I think Mr. Garnett goes a little too far in saying—
‘Percy Shelley captivated all hearts: the roughest were subdued by his sweetness, the most reserved won by his affectionate candour.... In spite of his disappointment, Stockdale really appears to have been captivated by Shelley, and to have been not more forcibly impressed by the energy of his intellect than by the loveliness of his character.’