CHAPTER VII.
LONDON AND BRACKNELL.
Imprint of Queen Mab—The Poem’s Notes—The Author’s Views touching Marriage—Places of Abode in London—Presentation Copies—Shelley ‘a Lion’—Half-Moon Street—Diet and Discomfort—Quacks and Crotchet-Mongers—‘Nakedized Children’—Cornelia Newton—Maimuna and her Salon—Elephantiasis—‘The Hampstead Stage’—Dinner Party at Norfolk House—The Duke’s Mediation between the Father and Son—Failure of the Negotiations—Shelley declines to be ‘a miserable Slave’—At the Pimlico Lodgings—Correspondence with Mr. Medwin, of Horsham—Birth of Ianthe Eliza—Shelley as a Father—Conflict of Evidence respecting his Parental Character—Shelley’s Kindness to Children—The Poet sets up his Carriage—His Prodigality in London—His Life at Bracknell—Maimuna at her Country-House—Last Visits to Field Place—Captain Kennedy’s Reminiscences—Medwin’s Gossip—The Trip to Scotland—Dissensions and Estrangements—Shelley and Harriett drifting apart—Queen Mab’s Vegetarian Note—Refutation of Deism.
(8).—London.
If Mr. Westbrook did not change his house in Chapel Street, between 11th January, 1811, when Shelley ordered a copy of St. Irvyne to be sent to Harriett at No. 10, and the following October, when he directed Mr. Medwin to write to him at No. 23 of that thoroughfare, the author of the novel may be assumed to have given his publisher a wrong address. Anyhow, it is almost as certain that Mr. Westbrook was living at No. 23 of his street, in the spring of 1813, as that Shelley put the said address on the title-page of his private edition of Queen Mab, and again in the concluding imprint of the work (‘Printed by P. B. Shelley, No. 23, Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, London’), as though the book had been printed by him at that address. It is almost needless to say there was no printing-press at 23 Chapel Street, and that Shelley was not a printer in the sense indicated by the imprint.
The poet, who, on the eve of Daniel Hill’s arrest in Barnstaple, wrote to Mr. Thomas Hookham, ‘a poem is safe; the iron-souled Attorney-General would scarcely dare to attack,’ had made considerable additions to his knowledge of the law touching seditious and heterodox publications, and the publication of printed papers, since those words were penned. Daniel Hill’s punishment ‘for publishing and dispersing printed papers without the printer’s name being on them,’ had taught Daniel Hill’s master a lesson he took to heart. If Shelley pressed Mr. Hookham to put himself before the world as the publisher of the poem, the bookseller declined to afford the Attorney-General an opportunity for showing the degree of audacity Shelley had declared impossible even in a Crown lawyer. It may be assumed that Shelley had inquired in vain for a competent printer, brave enough to print openly what no publisher would publish, before he relinquished his design of publishing the poem, and decided to produce the book for private circulation under a false imprint. Anyhow, an edition (of 250 copies) of the book (which Mr. Moxon was prosecuted for re-publishing seven-and-twenty years later) was printed by some unknown printer at some undiscovered press in the spring of 1813, with an untruth on its title-page, and a repetition of the untruth on the concluding leaf.
As criticism of Shelley’s poetry does not fall within the scope of the present work, I am silent respecting the poetical merits of Queen Mab; but it is incumbent on the poet’s biographer to say something of two of the lengthy notes appended to the performance,—notes so little known to the admirers of Shelley’s verse, that it may be questioned whether one out of every hundred persons who have read the poem attentively has ever glanced at the notes. The Anti-matrimonial Note and the Atheistical Note should be perused by all readers who would know The Real Shelley; the former being studied in connexion with the circumstances that resulted in his abandonment of his first wife; and the latter being studied in connexion with the evidence that, instead of being a mere syllabus of reasonings put together for the convenience of scholastic disputants (as Hogg and Lady Shelley declare it to have been), or the mere squib (which Mr. Garnett would have us think it), The Necessity of Atheism was a serious exposition of certain of the author’s views on matters pertaining to religion.
The Note, headed ‘There is no God,’ opens with a reproduction of the tract which caused the author’s extrusion from Oxford,—a reproduction differing from the original essay only in occasional amendments of the language, made for the sake of greater precision and elegance; such alterations in fact as are looked for in a new edition of a work by an author, who holds steadily to the principles and argumentative details of the original composition. Can stronger evidence be required that the tract was a serious and genuine declaration of the writer’s views in 1811, and that in the spring of 1813 he held the same views about The Necessity of Atheism as he held in the spring of the earlier year?