With all his desire to deal fairly with Harriett Westbrook’s reputation, Mr. Rossetti is less than fair to her in arguing that up to the moment of her Scotch wedding she was ready to become Shelley’s mistress, because she threw herself on his protection (by letter) three weeks earlier. Ladies have a proverbial right to change their minds; and if we must concede that Harriett had a mind to be Shelley’s mistress when he was at Rhayader, it cannot be questioned she had changed her mind on that particular matter before he came to her again in London. Living in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, under the eye of an elder sister, who, possessing her confidence, knew how to keep her well in hand, Harriett was not so completely at Shelley’s mercy as Mr. Rossetti would have us think. It is inconceivable that Shelley would have been allowed to possess himself of the school-girl on terms which wanted the elder sister’s approval; and it is not to be imagined that Miss Elizabeth Westbrook, favouring Shelley’s suit, partly from romantic affectionateness, and partly from social ambition, would have consented to an arrangement for making her sister the mere kept mistress of a gentlemanly scapegrace, who might one day become a baronet. The elder Miss Westbrook was no person to allow herself to be treated as a nonentity, or aught less than a very considerable personage, in an affair touching her dignity and self-respect so delicately and deeply. Under these circumstances it is in the highest degree improbable that Miss Westbrook, who facilitated the elopement which promised to make her younger sister eventually a lady of title and estate, would have permitted herself to be made the sister of such a person as Harriett would have become, on passing to Shelley’s keeping without marriage.
There are other reasons for questioning whether Shelley should be credited with nobility of conduct, in forbearing to do what he would not have been permitted to do. Had he in May or June made Harriett his mistress without marrying her, he would only have acted in accordance with his notions of morality. He did no more at the end of August or the beginning of September when he made her his wife by marriage. If he should be credited with distinctly noble conduct merely for taking what he thought the right course in September, he would have been no less distinctly noble three months earlier for merely taking what he thought the right and moral course in May and June. Had the future poet, however, made the girl his mistress in either of those last-named months, Mr. Rossetti would scarcely have ventured to credit him with distinct nobility of action in doing so, merely because he conceived himself under a moral obligation to do so. It should be observed that Shelley’s sentiments respecting marriage were during this period of his career greatly modified by Hogg’s arguments against them; and that, in commending the future poet’s conduct in making Harriett Westbrook a wife instead of a mistress, Mr. Rossetti applauds him for conduct largely, if not altogether referable to Hogg’s influence, and may, therefore, be said to give Shelley the praise that should rather be given to his friend.
The evidence of Hogg’s beneficial, though only transient, influence on his friend in this respect is conclusive. The shrewd and humorous north-countryman, who nursed the hope of marrying his friend’s sister Elizabeth, was, at this stage of his story, a robust and resolute defender of matrimony and the laws for its protection; and in the many letters that passed between him and Shelley in the spring and summer of 1811, he seized every opportunity for combating and correcting what he deemed his friend’s perverse and erroneous views on the usages and ethics of marriage. It is to Hogg’s credit (at least in the opinion of those who regard marriage with reverential jealousy) that on seeing his friend more and more strongly set on some kind of domestic association with Harriett Westbrook, he made the most strenuous efforts to induce him to marry the girl in a legal way, instead of uniting himself to her in a way that would, at least in law and social sentiment, render her only his mistress. Besides being strenuous, these efforts were successful. Having regard to the miserable consequences of the match, some readers may, perhaps, regret that Hogg was so busy and successful. Perhaps it would have been better for both parties to the disastrous union, had Hogg left ill alone. Had the north-countryman been less energetic, it is conceivable that Mr. Westbrook’s pretty daughter would have escaped the misery of being Shelley’s wife, without falling to the shame of being his mistress. But Hogg’s action was none the less meritorious, because it may have been hurtful to the friend he wished to serve.
Shelley’s stay in Radnorshire did not end before he admitted the force of his friend’s demonstrations of the convenience and beneficence of lawful marriage. In the very letter that declared his puerile delight in Harriett’s appeal to him for protection from her inhuman father, he says, ‘We shall see you at York. I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism, by which I am now almost convinced.’ Some ten days later (15th August, 1811), when he had passed through London, made a flying visit to Horsham and Cuckfield, and returned to town for stolen interviews with Harriett, he wrote to his incomparable Hogg at York, stating most precisely that he had relinquished his purpose of making Harriett his mistress, and had determined to make her his wife, in pure submission to Hogg’s counsel, and to the force of the arguments with which that counsel was enforced. ‘I am become,’ Shelley wrote, ‘a perfect convert to matrimony, not from temporising, but from your arguments.... The one argument, which you have urged so often with so much energy; the sacrifice made by the woman, so disproportioned to any which the man can give,—this alone may exculpate me, were it a fault, from an inquiring submission to your superior intellect.’ Shelley’s words respecting himself and his own affairs must of course be always used with caution and lively suspicion. But the words written by him to Hogg himself on 15th August, 1811, are good evidence that, on finding Shelley set on taking Harriett Westbrook to himself, either as a mistress or as his wife, and strongly disposed to take her in the former capacity, Hogg used all his power to make him see that he was bound to marry her.
It does not speak much for Shelley’s innate chivalry and generous tenderness for womankind, of which so much extravagant stuff has been written by his idolaters, that he could not discover for himself the most obvious considerations why no man of honour should place a woman of sensibility and refinement in the ignominious position of a kept mistress; that he could not without Hogg’s assistance see, how much the woman sacrifices of her social dignity and legal rights, who humours masculine insolence and selfishness, by sinking to a position, which, giving her all the trials and responsibilities, withholds from her all the higher privileges of a wife. On the other hand, it is something to the credit of the youngster, who could not discover these facts for himself, that he could see them when they were pointed out to him, and was withheld by the timely expostulations of sober common-sense from the sin of acting on his ‘hasty decision.’
In the letter, from which the last extract is taken, Shelley says, ‘I am now returned to London; direct to me as usual at Graham’s. My father is here; wondering, possibly, at my London business. He will be more surprised soon, possibly.’ At the same moment, on the same sheet of paper, he chuckles over the surprise his speedy elopement with Harriett Westbrook will occasion his father, and pretends to think it unlikely he shall soon be called upon to make a choice between Marriage and Free Love. It was like Shelley, to contradict himself in this fashion almost in the same breath.
The particulars of Shelley’s movements between the 15th of August and the end of the month are unknown, with the exception of a few details, which, in the absence of positive testimony, the imagination would furnish as matters of course. For the expenses of the elopement, Shelley obtained 25l. from Tom Medwin’s father (the Horsham attorney), who lent him the money without knowing or suspecting the purpose for which it was needed; a slender sum, that seems to have been reduced considerably before the future poet paid the fares for two inside places in the mail from London to Edinburgh. There were secret interviews between the lovers; interviews of which Mr. Westbrook probably knew nothing, and Miss Eliza Westbrook was doubtless cognizant, even when she was not present at them. Charles Henry Grove (younger than Shelley by something less than two years) was in his cousin’s confidence during these days of pleasant excitement and romantic conspiracy, and accompanied the future poet on some of his visits to Harriett. There were understandings and misunderstandings, decisions and changes of purpose, arrangements and re-arrangements. Then came the hour of early morning when Harriett Westbrook, in all the brightness of her still childish beauty—the lovely girl who, a few years later, escaped from unendurable shame and wretchedness by self-murder—stept from her father’s house, and entered the hackney-coach, that conveyed her, together with the two cousins (Shelley and Charles Henry Grove), to the ‘Green Dragon,’ in Gracechurch Street, where they remained all day, till the northern mail was packed and ready to start. Another minute, and the two childish adventurers were at the outset of their long journey for Edinburgh, viâ York, whilst the guard’s horn sounded cheerily, and Charley Grove (left standing on the pavement) waved a last farewell to the departing vehicle.
It is a question whether the elopement was made at the end of August or in the beginning of September. I have little hesitation in saying Harriett left her father’s house in September; none in saying she was married to Shelley in Edinburgh in the first week of that month. The girl may have crossed her father’s threshold on the morning of Saturday 31st August, but it is more probable she did so on Sunday the 1st, or Monday the 2nd of September. On passing through York at midnight, after spending an entire night and the following day (allowance made for the usual stoppages) in the coach, Shelley, with care for the replenishment of his almost empty purse, wrote a hasty and careless note to Hogg, begging for the loan of 10l., and saying that he and Harriett would ‘have 75l. on Sunday.’
‘On Sunday,’ of course, meant ‘next Sunday.’ After answering the brief note, as soon as it was brought to him on the following morning by a messenger from the Inn, Hogg packed his portmanteau, and in the afternoon of the same day ‘in the first week of September,’ was on the road to Edinburgh, where he arrived some two or three days before the Sunday, when Shelley hoped to get the 75l. Dating from Field Place on Sunday, 8th September, 1811, immediately on hearing his son and Hogg were together in the Scotch capital, Mr. Timothy Shelley wrote from Field Place on 8th September, 1811, to Mr. John Hogg, of Norton: announcing that Shelley had ‘withdrawn himself from’ the writer’s ‘protection, and set off for Scotland with a young female.’
Hogg is certain that he answered Shelley’s note immediately on getting it, that he started for Edinburgh in the afternoon of the same day, and that he made the journey to Edinburgh in the first week of September. Mr. Timothy Shelley’s letter makes it certain the young men were together in Edinburgh in that week. Had the ‘on Sunday’ of Shelley’s note pointed to Sunday, 1st September; had he written for the 10l. for his expenses till that Sunday, Hogg’s run to the Scotch capital would have been made in the last week of August.