Wednesday, October 20.—Finish the First Book of Horace’s Odes. Work, walk, read, etc. On Saturday letters are sent to England. On Tuesday one to Venice. Shelley visits the Galleries. Reads Spenser and Clarendon aloud.
Thursday, October 28.—Work; read; copy Peter Bell. Monday night a great fright with Charles Clairmont. Shelley reads Clarendon aloud and Plato’s Republic. Walk. On Thursday the protest from the Bankers. Shelley writes to them, and to Peacock, Longdill, and H. Smith.
Tuesday, November 9.—Read Madame de Sevigné. Bad news from London. Shelley reads Clarendon aloud, and Plato. He writes to Papa.
On the 12th of November a son was born to the Shelleys, and brought the first true balm of consolation to his poor mother’s heart.
“You may imagine,” wrote Shelley to Leigh Hunt, “that this is a great relief and a great comfort to me amongst all my misfortunes.... Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled; for we have spent, as you may imagine, a miserable five months.”
The child was healthy and pretty, and very like William. Neither Mary’s strength nor her spirits were altogether re-established for some time, but the birth of “Percy Florence” was, none the less, the beginning of a new life for her. She turned, with the renewed energy of hope, to her literary work and studies. One of her first tasks was to transcribe the just written fourth act of Prometheus Unbound. She had work of her own on hand too; a historical novel, Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (afterwards published as Valperga), a laborious but very congenial task, which occupied her for many months.
And indeed all the solace of new and tender ties, all the animating interest of intellectual pursuits, was sorely needed to counteract the wearing effect of harassing cares and threatening calamities. Godwin was now being pressed for the accumulated unpaid house-rent of many years; so many that, when the call came, it was unexpected by him, and he challenged its justice. He had engaged in a law-suit on the matter, which he eventually lost. The only point which appeared to admit of no reasonable doubt was that Shelley would shortly be called upon to find a large sum of money for him, and this at a time when he was himself in unexpected pecuniary straits, owing to the non-arrival of his own remittances from England—a circumstance rendered doubly vexatious by the fact that a large portion of the money was pledged to Henry Reveley for the furtherance of his steamboat. A draft for £200, destined for this purpose, was returned, protested by Shelley’s bankers. And though the money was ultimately recovered, its temporary loss caused no small alarm. Meanwhile every mail brought letters from Godwin of the most harrowing nature; the philosophy which he inculcated in a case of bereavement was null and void where impending bankruptcy was concerned. He well knew how to work on his daughter’s feelings, and he did not spare her. Poor Shelley was at his wits’ end.
“Mary is well,” he wrote (in December) to the Gisbornes; “but for this affair in London I think her spirits would be good. What shall I, what can I, what ought I to do? You cannot picture to yourself my perplexity.”
It appeared not unlikely that he might even have to go to England, a journey for which his present state of health quite unfitted him, and which he could not but be conscious would be no permanent remedy, but only a temporary alleviation, of Godwin’s thoroughly unsound circumstances. Mary, in her grief for her father, began to think that the best thing for him might be to leave England altogether and settle abroad; an idea from which Mrs. Mason, with her strong sagacity, earnestly dissuaded her.
Her views on the point were expressed in a letter to Shelley Mary had written asking her if she could give Charles Clairmont any introductions at Vienna, where he had now gone to seek his fortune as a teacher of languages; and also begging for such assistance as she might be able to lend in the matter of obtaining access to historical documents or other MS. bearing on the subjects of Mary’s projected novel.