The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 2 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

It appears, therefore, that these proceedings in the Court of Chancery left Shelley with the clear income of 880l. a-year; a larger revenue by 80l. a-year than the yearly income he had reserved for his own use on raising Harriett’s allowance to its highest sum:—a fact to be borne in mind, since successive writers have spoken of these proceedings, as seriously reducing the income at his command before the first Mrs. Shelley’s death.

From the August of 1817, even to this year of grace, Lord Eldon has been written of bitterly for depriving so bright a genius and so virtuous a citizen as Shelley of the care of his own offspring; and so long as organs of social opinion, so powerful as the Edinburgh Review, continue to misstate the grounds of the Lord Chancellor’s decree, he will continue to be denounced as a prodigy of intolerance. It will be otherwise, if writers bear in mind what were the real grounds of the judgment, for which he has been censured so vehemently.

To say thus much in the Lord Chancellor’s justification is not to say that his reasonable opinion would have been justified by the event, had Shelley contrived to get possession of the two children, and carrying them beyond the limits of the Chancellor’s jurisdiction, educated them in accordance with his notions of parental duty. On the contrary, I have little doubt that, had he taken them to Italy together with Willie and Clara, and lived long enough to form their morals, he would not have educated them in his anti-matrimonial views, but would have trained them for the most part like the majority of English boys and girls, living abroad under the control of liberal-minded Christian parents. I have two reasons for this opinion. Unless I am greatly mistaken, had he lived well into life’s middle term, long before the children had attained the age at which he would have thought of directing their young minds to questions touching the intercourse of the sexes, the author of Laon and Cythna would have so far survived his enthusiasm for the Free Contract and his wilder Free Love phantasies, as to have no wish to see his children avoid the bonds of lawful marriage. Had it been otherwise with him, I am confident that Mrs. Shelley would have resisted strenuously and successfully his wish to educate his children to prefer the Free Contract to lawful wedlock. Of the girls, whom he tried for any considerable period to illuminate out of Christianity and conventional respectability, his strong-willed second wife was perhaps his least submissive pupil. The young woman, who made him marry her on the earliest opportunity; who at Great Marlow used to order him about as though he were a child; who had her children christened before taking them out of England in 1818; who used to attend the services of the Anglican Church in Italian cities; who during her residence in Italy hungered for social recognition; and who in her later time was no less mindful of social opinion than for ‘a brief hour of her girlhood she had been reckless and defiant of it,’ was not the woman to allow her children to be educated in disregard for the sanctity of the matrimonial rite. Nurtured within the lines of orthodoxy, and educated for respectability by the step-mother, of whom she lived to speak and write ungenerously, Shelley’s second wife was not a woman to let him train her own daughters (had they lived), or Harriett’s little Ianthe, to follow in the steps of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Much romantic and sensational stuff has been written of the anguish that came to Shelley from Lord Eldon’s barbarity. It has been told again and again how these interesting babes were torn from his breast. As he had left the elder of them of his own accord, when he left her mother, and was content to let them remain in Chapel Street after losing sight of their mother, they can scarcely be said to have been torn from his breast. Such writing (like the story of his going clean mad from grief for Harriett) may go for what it is worth, whilst judicious readers are content to allow, that Shelley must have been acutely mortified and incensed by a judgment affecting his honour so darkly and deeply, and that he probably mistook for torture of wounded affection, what was only sharp chagrin at an humiliating misadventure. Some of the sensational writers give curious reasons for thinking Shelley suffered unimaginable anguish from the violence done to his parental feelings. For instance, Hunt is sure that Shelley suffered inordinately from the loss of the children because, after the subsidence of his first violent agitation at the Chancellor’s cruelty, he never spoke about them. That Byron was no more insincere in gushing to the whole world about the Ada be might not look upon, than Shelley was in writing The Billows on the Beach, is a matter admitting of proof.

This poem ‘To William Shelley’ has been used by successive writers as sure evidence that, in leaving England in 1818 with his family, Shelley was mainly moved by a desire to carry his children beyond the reach of Lord Eldon, whom he suspected of a design to tear them from him. Dealing with this poem, as Lady Shelley deals with the poet’s imaginary reminiscences of his boyhood in Laon and Cythna, what do we learn from it? That the poet carried his son William across the sea, when the sky was black and the wind boisterous; that he carried the boy over the stormy water, in order that the servants of the Court of Chancery should not tear them asunder; that the Court of Chancery had already taken from the boy a brother and sister who were known and dear to him; that Mrs. Shelley and her little girl were companions of this voyage over a wind-swept sea; that little William was alarmed at the rocking of the boat, and the cold spray, and the wild clamour; that the poet and his wife had reason to think the storm, with all its dark and hungry billows, less cruel than the Court of Chancery, and to regard themselves as flying from merciless agents of that Court; that little William was old enough to be likely to hold in remembrance the flight over the stormy sea; that, though perhaps not old enough to apprehend the meaning of the written verses, he was at least old enough to comprehend their sentiment when put in language, adapted to the understanding of a young child. It is, no doubt, very absurd to read a poem in this way, and reduce its figurative expressions into bald statement. But biographers have not hesitated to deal in this way with the imaginary reminiscences of Laon and Cythna and Prince Athanase.

Now for the facts to set in array beside the statements of the poem. Instead of being old enough to apprehend the meaning of his father’s words, and to be likely to remember the voyage as a dream of long-forgotten days, little William was only two years and two months old when he crossed the Channel. No brother and sister had been taken from him. His father and mother were not flying from the Court of Chancery, when they went abroad. They did not go to Italy to get out of the Lord Chancellor’s grip. They knew that, in respect to William and little Clara, they had nothing to fear from the Court. How far did the conditions and incidents of their passage over the water accord with the descriptive touches of the poem? Heaven knows. Heaven also knows that the poem was written months before the voyage was made. The poem To William Shelley was written in 1817, the voyage was made in March, 1818. This fact shows how cautious people should be in building up the poet’s personal story out of passages from his poems and letters. Shelley’s accounts of his school-days in Laon and Cythna, or of any other matter of his past history, were as imaginary as his description of his flight across the Channel, or any other matter of his future history.

It may be urged, but evidence forbids it to be conceded, that, whilst writing the imaginary piece of autobiography, Shelley was under the impression that, unless he took his two children by Mary Godwin abroad, the Court of Chancery would wrest them from him. Such a fear might have possessed Shelley before the Chancery suit, but even Shelley could not have entertained so wild a fancy after the suit, which had made him a lawyer in respect to the Court’s power to do what he pretended to fear. He knew that the Court would not have listened to Mr. Westbrook’s suit had he not made a provision for the children by settling 2000l. upon them. He knew that till some similar provision, in property of some sort, had been made for William and Clara, no proceedings could be taken in Chancery to remove them from his control. Moreover, he knew that the Court would not think of taking them from their mother.

It would not surprise me to come upon letters, written by Shelley to induce some of his friends to think he suffered from the fear, but they would not affect my strong opinion that he was never troubled by the apprehension between the delivery of the Lord Chancellor’s decree and the departure for Italy, whither he went in 1818 from several motives, any one of which would have been sufficient to account for his action,—(a) from restlessness; (b) from a desire to get away from his creditors, who were troubling him; (c) from a desire to get away from friends who were sponging upon him and draining his resources extortionately; (d) from a desire to be nearer Byron, a strong attraction to him from 1818 to a few months before his death; (e) from a notion that by going out to Italy with Clara and little Allegra, instead of sending the child (just a year and two months old) thither under the charge of a servant, he might render his wife’s ‘sister’ good service; (f) from a notion that his health required a southern climate. These are the motives that caused him to go abroad.

In a letter (vide Shelley Memorials) to William Godwin (dated from Marlow, 7th December, 1817) Shelley rested his determination altogether on the state of his health, in these words:—

‘I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and, although at present it has passed away without any considerable vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true nature of my disease to be consumption.... In the event of its assuming any decided shape, it would be my duty to go to Italy without delay; and it is only when that measure becomes an indispensable duty that, contrary to both Mary’s feelings and mine, as they regard you, I shall go to Italy.’