Nothing in the letter to the Editor of the Statesman implies that the imprisoned journalist had been in any way connected with the paper, or that the writer of the letter believed the imprisoned journalist to have been connected with the paper. Yet Mr. MacCarthy is at great pains to show how the Oxonian Shelley may have come to imagine that the cruelly entreated Mr. Finerty was editor of the paper, with which he in fact is not known to have had any professional connexion. The libel on Lord Castlereagh, for which Mr. Finerty was sent to prison, having been published in the Statesman as well as the Morning Chronicle, it was natural for Shelley (argues Mr. MacCarthy) to assume that Mr. Finerty was editor of the Statesman. Shelley was by no means such a fool as the ‘Shelleyan enthusiasts’ would have us think him. The youngster reasoned wildly sometimes, but he was not likely to think a journalist must be the editor of one paper because he had been sent to prison for libelling a Minister in another paper. Knowing well enough that Mr. Finerty (in whose concerns he took a lively interest) had been committed for eighteen months to Lincoln Gaol on 7th February, 1811, Shelley was not likely to imagine a fortnight later he was the Acting Editor of the London Statesman. Knowing right well Mr. Finerty had been sentenced to eighteen months, Shelley was not likely so soon after the sentence to imagine the journalist had been sent to prison for two years. To read Mr. MacCarthy’s perplexing pages is to see that the gentleman was not more successful in confounding his readers than in confounding himself. Yet because he threw a new kind of mud on Shelley’s earliest biographer, this superlatively inaccurate and stupefying writer has been cried up as a great Shelleyan authority.
After setting forth the words of the spurious epistle, Mr. MacCarthy remarks in his usual style of laborious inaccuracy:—
‘This letter, whatever its claim to authenticity may be, is dated February 22nd, 1811. Six days later—that is, on the 2nd of March in the same year—Shelley addressed, for the first time, another newspaper editor then personally unknown to him, but who became a few years later one of his most valued and intimate friends—Leigh Hunt.’
February 22nd, 1811. Six days later—that is, on the 2nd of March in the same year!—What particularity and what curious persistence in blundering! The gentleman, who is so severe on Hogg for an occasional slip, is more than usually fortunate when he is only twenty-five per cent wrong in a calculation of days. Mr. MacCarthy, however, is right in holding there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of the youthful Shelley’s first letter to the Editor of the Examiner. Written in the Oxonian Shelley’s best, but far from strenuous, style, the epistle (of 2nd March, 1811) to Leigh Hunt—the epistle Leigh Hunt never answered—could not have proceeded from any hand but Shelley’s hand. Strangely ingenious things have been done in the way of Shelleyan forgeries, but no fabricator of spurious letters and other materials for fictitious biography would have thought of manufacturing the delicious bit of puerile bounce that makes the letter end in this droll fashion:—
‘My father is in parliament, and on attaining twenty-one I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat. On account of the responsibility to which my residence in this University subjects me, I, of course, dare not publicly avow all I think; but the time will come when I hope that my every endeavour, insufficient as they may be, will be directed to the advancement of liberty.
‘Your most obedient servant,
‘P. B. Shelley.’
From his Eton days to a time considerably subsequent to his expulsion from Oxford, it was Shelley’s practice to open correspondence with strangers by telling them how greatly he differed in his worldly circumstances and prospects from ordinary young men. In this strain of boyish boastfulness, he is known to have approached so many people, that it is reasonable to suppose it to have been his usual device for putting himself in the favourable regard of persons, whose acquaintance he sought. To the Messrs. Longman, of Paternoster Row, he wrote from Eton: ‘My object in writing it was not pecuniary, as I am independent, being the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of Sussex.’ To Stockdale he introduced himself by word of mouth in much the same fashion. In the earliest days of their acquaintance, Hogg heard not a little from Sir Bysshe Shelley’s grandson, of matters redounding to the dignity of the Castle Goring Shelleys; the romantic traditions of his house; the arguments with which the Duke of Norfolk urged him to look to politics as his proper field of action. ‘My father is in parliament,’ he writes on 2nd March, 1811, to the editor of the Examiner, whom he has never seen, ‘and on attaining twenty-one I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat.’ Ten months later (10th January, 1812), he is writing to William Godwin, whilst seeking the philosopher’s friendship by letter before seeing him,
‘I am the son of a man of fortune in Sussex.... It will be necessary, in order to elucidate this part of my history, to inform you, that I am heir by entail to an estate of 6000l. per annum. My principles have induced me to regard the law of primogeniture as an evil of primary magnitude.’
In the musical egotisms of his poetry, the ear catches the same note of boastful arrogance and self-complacence. Whilst preaching the gospel of love, and proclaiming his determination to sacrifice himself for the good of others on the first convenient opportunity, Shelley knew how to remind his hearers that he would sacrifice a great deal more than the common sort of philanthropists; and there were moments when, not content with virtue’s peculiar and sweetest reward,—an approving conscience, he was more eager to provoke, than avoid, the plaudits of the multitude.
The reader of the epistle to Leigh Hunt may well smile at the youngster’s announcement that, in the course of two years, he would probably occupy a seat in the House of Commons, through his father’s timely retirement from political life. It is not the wont of even the most affectionate father to be so considerate for his heir-apparent; and though he was a much kindlier and more generous parent than the ‘Shelleyan enthusiasts’ like to admit, Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, was by no means a likely man to retreat into private life, in order that his eldest son might become Member of Parliament for New Shoreham in his twenty-second year. Delighting in the status of a member of elective assembly, the self-complacent and rather pompous gentleman plumed himself on standing well with his ‘party’ and ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and being so highly respected by ‘the house’ and ‘the country’ that he gave peculiar weight and moral influence to the committees to which he was appointed. By no means so destitute of imagination as numerous detractors have declared him, Mr. Timothy Shelley resembled his son in an aptitude for conceiving whatever tended for the moment to put him on good terms with himself. To hear Mr. Timothy Shelley repeat over his second bottle the compliments whispered into his ear by Mr. Speaker, was to infer that, if his words were reported accurately, Mr. Speaker was an habitual and extravagant flatterer, or had some unaccountable partiality for the Member for New Shoreham. To believe all the Member for New Shoreham said of himself, was to believe, that no committee was appointed in the Lower House until he and Ministers had spoken together respecting its constitution, that few nice questions of foreign policy were decided until Ministers had asked him what might, and what might not, be done. The kindly gentleman, who declared he had furnished Archdeacon Paley (or ‘Palley,’ as the Member for New Shoreham pronounced the name) with all the main arguments for the ‘Evidences,’ could persuade himself that his smile or frown determined the course of Ministers and Administrations. Whilst the Oxonian Shelley liked to imagine himself in parliament, his father delighted in imagining himself the very soul of parliament. So imaginative a father was not likely to vacate his seat for the advantage of so imaginative a son.