On her husband’s death, Mrs. Shelley was in a pitiable condition. In Italy she had no friends, able and at the same time willing to render her effectual help. The Gisbornes were poor; the Hunts, in losing Shelley, had lost their surest means of subsistence in the foreign land; for several years Claire would have enough to do, to shift for herself; Mrs. Williams was not provided for bountifully; and, apart from them, the poet’s widow knew in Italy scarcely any one whom she could regard as aught more than a mere acquaintance. Trelawny, who (without liking her) befriended her nobly in the crisis of her troubles, she had known for little more than half-a-year. For months her husband’s and her own relations with Byron had been strained almost to rupture. Though he recognized her cleverness, and was not insensible to her beauty, Byron had never delighted in her greatly; and now that Shelley was gone, he had lost his strongest reason for trying to regard her cordially. Fretted by the Hunts, he was on uneasy terms with the woman, who was too closely associated with them, for him not to think of her position as part of the embarrassment arising out of the Liberal. Knowing they had her affection, he was, of course, aware that she gave them her sympathy, and thought he treated them badly. Still he rendered her the civilities to which she was entitled at his hands; and whilst consulting him on her affairs, she confided to him the delicate and difficult task of addressing Sir Timothy Shelley in her behalf.
Whilst the widow’s position in Italy was depressing, her prospect in England was cheerless. Eight years older and poorer than he was on the July morning that saw her flit from his roof, her father could only give her sympathy, invite her to a smaller home, and assure her that, should she be placed in sudden and urgent need of money, he would do his best to send her a small sum. At Field Place she was known only by name, and by circumstances that were necessarily regarded there as circumstances to her discredit. To use Lady Shelley’s expression, the young widow (still only four-and-twenty years of age) was ‘coldly regarded by her husband’s family.’ It would have been strange had the family regarded her affectionately. The persons of all the world, with the exception of her own kindred, who had suffered most from her career, are scarcely to be censured for thinking of her with disapproval. What title had she to the affection of her husband’s father, mother, sisters? She had no doubt a son, who was Sir Timothy Shelley’s grandson? But in 1822 this little boy was not heir-apparent to the Castle Goring baronetcy, Shelley’s son (Charles Bysshe) being the heir-apparent; and it was not till Charles’s death, in 1826, that William Godwin’s daughter could say, ‘If my boy survives his grandfather, he will be Sir Percy Florence Shelley.’ It is not surprising that, whilst recognizing Percy’s claim to his grand-paternal consideration, Sir Timothy could not see what title the little fellow’s mother had to his paternal care. In reply to Byron’s letter, it seemed enough to Sir Timothy Shelley, that he should offer to take charge of Mary’s boy, should she consent to surrender the little fellow unreservedly to his custody and government—a proposal which, stirring William Godwin to indignation, was, of course, declined with disdainful firmness by his daughter.
Returning with her child to England in the autumn of 1823, Mrs. Shelley lived under her father’s roof in the Strand, till she moved into the small house in Kentish Town, from whose window she and Mrs. Williams saw Byron’s hearse pass slowly on its way from London to Nottinghamshire. Some ten years later (1833) she moved to Harrow, where she remained during the period of her boy’s education at the famous school. For some time after her return to England, she and her child lived on the earnings of her pen; but at a later time she received from her father-in-law the allowance, which, towards the end of 1838, he threatened to stop, if she ventured to write and publish her husband’s life. By her friends Sir Timothy Shelley was declared guilty of revolting inhumanity in denying her the solace she would have derived from producing a worthy record of her husband’s virtues. But in forbidding her to write a book, that could scarcely have failed to pain him acutely and torture even more sharply the feelings of his children, Sir Timothy cannot be fairly charged with exceeding the powers pertaining to him as the chief of his family. There are also reasons why every judicious admirer of Shelley’s genius, and all sober worshipers of his memory, should be thankful for the menace that determined Mrs. Shelley to relinquish the work which she began in the vein of fantastic egotism, that caused her to proclaim herself ‘the chosen mate of a celestial spirit’ whom she hoped ‘to join in his native sky,’ and to speak of herself as ‘moonshine’ destined to ‘be united to her planet and wander no more, a sad reflection of all she loved on earth.’
The marvellous piece of egotism on the highest of romantic stilts, from which these scraps are taken, appears at large in the preface to Hogg’s Life, where it is followed by the letter (dated 41 Park Street, Dec. 11, 1838, from Moonshine to her Celestial Spirit’s future biographer) containing these words: ‘Sir Timothy forbids Biography, under a threat of stopping the supplies.’ Certainly the present generation has no reason to regret Sir Timothy’s menace and its consequence. A biography, written in a vein of such affectation, could not have redounded to the poet’s honour. Nor would it have been in any way creditable to Moonshine, who, without ever fulfilling the promise of her first work of fiction, was in her sober and unaffected moods an equally industrious and capable woman of letters. The examples given in previous pages of her ways of dealing with matters of her own, her father’s, and her husband’s history, warrant a confident opinion, that, had she been allowed to go her own way by the stern Sir Timothy, Mrs. Shelley’s biography of the poet would not have been commendable for severe accuracy.
Of Mrs. Shelley’s way of living, from the date of her husband’s to the moment of her own death, no biographer will venture to speak disrespectfully, apart from such slight reprehension as may be fairly awarded to her exhibitions of animosity and vindictiveness against her stepmother and her stepmother’s daughter. Trelawny, who thought her a fretful, trying, jealous wife at Pisa, found fault with her in subsequent years for her nervous sensitiveness of social opinion, and excessive care for the conventional proprieties. Instead of blaming her for the pains she took in her later time to stand well with the world, most readers of this page will probably concur in thinking it to her credit, that she expressed in so natural and appropriate a manner her regret for the indiscretions of her girlhood. A good daughter to her old father in his declining years, an affectionate friend, and a faultless mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s child had at least a fair share of the womanly virtues, though she was not the phenomenally noble creature people have been required to think her. Surviving her father by about fourteen years and ten months, she died in February, 1851, nearly seven years after her son’s succession to the Castle Goring baronetcy. For the one great error of her life, the error of her girlhood, she rendered ample atonement; and had it not been for the extravagances of her eulogists, her other failings would by this time have passed from human interest and recollection.
How about Mary’s sister-by-affinity? Reference has been made in a previous chapter to the liberality with which Shelley, by his will, provided for the charming and vivacious Claire, in whose brilliant endowments he delighted, whilst pitying her for her misfortunes. Trelawny seems to have been one of those who thought that Claire gained twice as much by the poet’s testament as he meant to bequeath her. ‘Trelawny,’ says Mr. Rossetti, in his equally valuable and entertaining Talks with Trelawny, contributed to the Athenæum in 1882, ‘says that Shelley left Miss Clairmont, by will, no less a sum than 12,000l. He had left 6000l. in the body of the will, and then (whether by inadvertence or otherwise) he bequeathed another 6000l. in a codicil. Miss Clairmont, however, did not manage the money prudently—one unfortunate speculation being the purchase of a box or boxes in Lumley’s Italian Opera-house, now burned down. She is still in Florence, Via Valfonda. I asked Trelawny whether he thought I might call on her if I am at Florence this year; but he considers she would not be pleased at my doing so. He and I continued talking about Shelley’s will, which he says was regarded as a remarkable document in a legal sense.’ In a previous chapter it was remarked how little Trelawny knew about the will, of which he spoke so freely and confidently to Mr. Rossetti:—a will drawn by a lawyer, to which no codicil is attached. Trelawny was, however, right in saying that Claire was neither prudent nor fortunate in her investments. Mrs. Shelley may well have disapproved of her husband’s great, and even excessive, testamentary munificence to her sister-by-affinity; though she was wrong in thinking that the entire bequest exceeded the testator’s purpose, at the date of the will. Of course Claire did not come into the legacy till the settlement of the poet’s affairs after his father’s death, which took place in 1844. Since 29th April, 1873, the date of Mr. Rossetti’s talk with Trelawny about the poet’s will, Claire passed from this world to the majority of the actors of the Byronic-Shelleyan drama. In the time when she used to flash about London after coming into her money, Claire was on friendly terms with more than one of the present writer’s acquaintance. Surviving most of those, who knew her in the days of her girlish waywardness and brightest womanly loveliness, she became a devout member of the Catholic Church (‘a somewhat bigotted Roman Catholic,’ in Trelawny’s opinion), and did not close her old age, without having suffered from straitened circumstances and much painful illness. Possibly affection for her lost child may have been an influence, disposing her to seek spiritual solace from the Church, in whose arms they both died. Anyhow it gives another pathetic touch to her story that Claire lived to embrace the faith, from which she did her utmost to preserve her little Allegra.
CHAPTER XVIII.
LAST WORDS.