I am very glad you are delighted with Trelawny. My affections are entirely without jealousy; the more those I love love others, and are loved by them, the better pleased am I. I am in a vile humour for writing a letter; you would not wonder at it if you knew how I am plagued. I can say from experience that the wonderful variety there is of miseries in this world is truly astonishing; if some Linnæus would class them as he did flowers, the number of their kinds would far surpass the boasted infinitude of the vegetable creation. Not a day nor hour passes but introduces me to some new pain, and each one contains within itself swarms of smaller ones—animalculæ pains which float up and down in it, and compose its existence and their own. What Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse was for love, I am for pain,—all my letters are on the same subject, and yet I hope I do not repeat myself, for truly, with such diversity of experience, I ought not.
Our friends here send their best love to you, and are interested in your perilous destiny. I have just received a letter from my Mother, and in obedience to her representations draw my breath as peacefully as I can till the month of January. Will you explain to me one phrase of her letter? Talking of the chances of their getting money, she says: “Then Miss Northcote is not expected to live over the winter,” and not a word beside. Who in the world is Miss Northcote? and what influence can her death have in bettering their prospects?
Notwithstanding my writing such a beastly letter as this to you, pray do write. I work myself into the most dreadful state of irritation when I am long without letters from some of you. Tell Jane I entreat her to write, and tell my Mother that the bill of lading of the parcel for me is come, but Mrs. Mason sent it off to Leghorn without my seeing it, and was too ill herself to look at the date, so I know not when it was shipped, but as Mr. Routh has the bill, I suppose I shall hear when it has arrived and performed quarantine.
Thank Trelawny for me for his kindness about the article. Pisa is very dull yet. I am told there are seven or eight English families arrived, but I have not seen them.
Farewell, my dear Mary. Be well and happy, and excuse my dulness.—Yours ever affectionately,
C. Clairmont.
One term’s experience was enough to convince Mrs. Shelley that she could only afford to continue her son’s school education by leaving London herself and settling with him at Harrow for some years.
In January 1833 she wrote an account of her affairs to her old friend, Mrs. Gisborne—
Never was poor body so worried as I have been ever since I last wrote, I think; worries which plague and press on one, and keep one fretting. Money, of course, is the Alpha and Omega of my tale. Harrow proves so fearfully expensive that I have been sadly put to it to pay Percy’s bill for one quarter (£60, soltanto), and, to achieve it, am hampered for the whole year. My only resource is to live at Harrow, for in every other respect I like the school, and would not take him from it. He will become a home boarder, and school expenses will be very light. I shall take a house, being promised many facilities for furnishing it by a kind friend.
To go and live at pretty Harrow, with my boy, who improves each day and is everything I could wish, is no bad prospect, but I have much to go through, and am so poor that I can hardly turn myself. It is hard on my poor dear Father, and I sometimes think it hard on myself to leave a knot of acquaintances I like; but that is a fiction, for half the times I am asked out I cannot go because of the expense, and I am suffering now for the times when I do go, and so incur debt.