The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES General Editor: Claude Rawson

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A Critical Biography

John Worthen This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of John Worthen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Worthen, John, author. Title: The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley : a critical biography / John Worthen. Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Blackwell critical biographies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018038903 (print) | LCCN 2018038972 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118533963 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118534038 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118534045 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822. | Poets, English–19th century–Biography. Classification: LCC PR5431 (ebook) | LCC PR5431 .W67 2019 (print) | DDC 821/.7 [B] –dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038903 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © John Worthern Set in 10/12pt Bembo by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 for David Ellis

Sil. Is’t not so? Fal. ’Tis so. Sil. Is’t so? Why then say an old man can do somwhat.

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations and Texts xiii Foreword xvii

Part I Background, Foreground 1792–1811 1 1 A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 1792 –1810 3 2 ‘Bit’ 1796 –1811 12 3 Panting to Seize the Wings of Morn 1810 –1811 21 4 Printing Freaks 1810 –1811 32 5 The Necessity of Atheism, Expulsion & Debt 1811 43

Part II Lover of Mankind, Democrat & Atheist 1811–1818 55 6 A Shelley Business! 1811 57 7 My New Sister 1811 –1813 67 8 Tan‐yr‐allt 1813 78 9 Queen Mab: Shadows of the Dream 1812 –1813 83 10 A Rash & Heartless Union 1813 –1814 96 11 Mary Godwin 1814 103 12 This is a Vampire 1814 –1815 113 13 Alastor 1815 –1816 124 14 Geneva and Byron 1816 135 15 A Series of Pain 1816 149 16 Drowned, Frozen, Dead 1816 158 17 Laon and Cythna: Writing against Death 1817 167 18 My Country Dear to Me Forever 1817 –1818 180

vii Contents

Part III Expatriation 1818–1821 191 19 Italy: As Light in the Sun, Throned 1818 193 20 Flowering Islands 1818 207 21 A Birth in Naples 1818 –1819 222 22 Exceeding Grief: The Cenci 1819 230 23 Prometheus Unbound 1819 240 24 Satiric Reality 1819 248 25 Beam‐Anatomising Prism 1819 –1820 258 26 Harmonious Madness 1820 268 27 Swellfoot the Tyrant 1820 280 28 Epipsychidion v. Flesh & Blood 1820–1821 291 29 Defending Poetry 1821 302 30 This Latest of my Orphans 1821 313

Part IV No Rest or Respite 1821–1822 321 31 Ariel to Miranda 1821 –1822 323 32 To the Villa Magni 1822 335 33 ‘The Triumph of Life’ 1822 342 34 Enchanted Heart 1822 349 35 Upon a Precipice 1822 362 36 Going to Join Friend Plato 1822 370 37 Beyond this Life 379

Notes 393 Bibliography 448 Index 457

viii List of Illustrations

1 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (1793–1822) (Newman Ivey White, Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940, Volume II, facing page 524) xviii 2 Elizabeth Shelley [‘Mrs Shelley (So‐called)’] (1763–1846), graphite drawing with pen and brown ink (c.1795) by George Romney (1734–1802) (Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr and Mrs J. Richardson Dilworth, B.A. 1938) 13 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, tinted drawing (?1802–1804) by Antoine‐Philippe, Duc de Montpensier (1775–1807) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelley Relics 7) 14 4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), detail of oil portrait (1839–1840) by Richard Rothwell (1800–1868) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 1235) 104 5 Clara Mary Jane (Claire) Clairmont (1798–1879), oil portrait (Rome 5–6 May 1819) by Amelia Curran (1775–1847), Newstead Abbey NA 271 (public domain) 139 6 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), oil portrait (1813) by Richard Westall (1765–1836) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 4243) 140 7 Lateen‐rigged sailing boat, photograph (Lake Geneva c. 1900) (in collection of John Worthen) 143 8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, oil portrait (c. 1829) by George Clint (1770–1854), after Amelia Curran (1819) (© National Portrait Gallery, London, no. 1271) 232 9 Jane Williams Hogg (1798–1884), photograph (c. 1851) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, [Pr] Shelley adds. e. 8 facing page 1244) 305

ix List of Illustrations

10 Edward Ellerker Williams (1793–1822), detail of pencil and crayon self‐portrait (1821–1822) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, [Pr] Shelley adds. e. 7 facing page 736) 306 11 Detail of page of ‘Coliseum’ manuscript (post 1818) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 201v) 333 12 ‘Casa Magni’, watercolour (1879) by Henry Roderick Newman (1833–1918), whereabouts unknown (copyright © City of London, Keats House, Hampstead) 339 13 Final page of manuscript of ‘Bright wanderer’ (1822) (The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Oxford, Shelley adds. c. 4, f. 36v) 360 14 Percy Bysshe Shelley, pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (Newman Ivey White. Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940, Volume II, facing page 524) 368

x Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge a huge debt to the editors of The Poems of Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, and the Shelley vol- umes of The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics. I am also extremely fortunate in being able to draw on the work of previous Shelley biographers, in particular Newman Ivey White, Richard Holmes and James Bieri. I am grateful to the Bodleian Library for its assistance in my researches, and for granting me permission to use a number of illustrations drawn from its collection. Bruce Barker‐Benfield was wonderfully kind in helping me with his extraordinary knowledge of Shelley and the Shelley archive. Nicolas Bell opened up the riches of the Trinity College Cambridge library holdings for me, and I wish to thank him for that; Linda Bree read the submitted draft of the book and made a large number of very helpful comments, for which I am profoundly grateful. Mario and Julia Broglia explained the explanations of those selling cheese and oil in Naples; Nora Crook was marvellously patient, set me right on many occasions, and employed the huge range of her competence in Shelley matters on my behalf, so that I am more thankful than I can say. Michael Erkelenz, with utter generosity, gave me a copy of his own BSM volume; Steele Haughton was very informative about Shelley’s trees; Caroline Murray allowed me to tap into her knowledge of (almost) everything, and specifically kept my Greek straight. Michael Rossington was wonderfully helpful in leading one ignorant of Shelley scholarship through the minefield of ‘The Triumph of Life’, after I had more than once tripped over explosive material; my publisher’s Readers also helped enormously with various scholarly matters, including the text of ‘Bright wanderer’. Katherine Carr, my copy‐editor, did her very best for the book; remaining peculiarities in my texts and readings are due entirely to my own pig‐headedness. Cornelia Rumpf‐Worthen read the final drafts and made more helpful suggestions (an ambiguity she would have queried) than even she can have realised. Anne Serafin read a good deal of an early draft with care and loving attention; Danaya C. Wright helped me understand Chancery proceedings.

xi Acknowledgements

Throughout, Claude Rawson patiently listened to insights spoken in enthusiasm, and supported me as a General Editor should. Simon Collins and Thomas Nowack produced fine photographic images for me from difficult originals; I am indebted to them. I also wish to thank Benjamin Colbert, Keith Crook, Kelvin Everest, Lesley Haughton, Paul Hamilton, Michael O’Neill, Angela and Paul Poplawski, Alyson Price (of the British Institute in Florence), John and Moyra Tourlamain, and Sue Wilson for various kinds of assistance.

xii Abbreviations and Texts

Shelley’s Work

1824 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1824) 1839 i.−iv. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 Vols. (London, 1839) 1840 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs Shelley, 1 Vol. (London, 1839, distributed 1840) 2016 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London, 2016) BSM i.−xxiii The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al, 23 Vols. (New York, 1986–2002) Cenci The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts (London, 1821) CPPBS i. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume One, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London, 2003) CPPBS ii. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume Two, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London, 2004) CPPBS iii. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume Three, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, with Nora Crook (Baltimore and London, 2012) MYRS i.−viii. The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics [Percy Bysshe Shelley], ed. Donald H. Reiman et al., 8 Vols. (New York, 1985–1997) PE Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (London, 1811) PS i. The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 1 (1804–1817), ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London, 1989) PS ii. The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 2 (1817–1819), ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, with Jack Donovan, Ralph Pite and Michael Rossington (London, 2000) PS iii. The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 3 (1819–1820), ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington, with Laura Barlow (London, 2011)

xiii Abbreviations and Texts

PS iv. The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 4 (1820–1821), ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Kelvin Everest, with Andrew Lacey and Laura Barlow (London, 2014) PWS i. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1811–1817, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford, 1993) SL i.−ii. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1964) SMW Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 2003) SPP Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn. (New York, 2002) St.I St. Irvyne [see Zastrozzi] Zastrozzi Zastrozzi, A Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Ontario, 2002)

Biographical and Scholarly Material

Bieri James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Biography (Baltimore, 2008) BLJ i.−xiii Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 Vols. (London, 1973–1994) CC i.–ii. The Clairmont Correspondence, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 Vols. (Baltimore and London, 1995) CCJ The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge MA, 1968) Dowden i.−ii. Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1886) Elopement H. B. Forman, The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin (Privately Printed, 1911) Enquiry William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793], ed. Mark Philp (London, 2013) Fraser’s lvii. Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Part I, Fraser’s Magazine, lvii (June 1858), 643–659 Fraser’s lxi. Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, Part II, Fraser’s Magazine, lxi (January 1860), 92–109 Gisborne Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. F. L. Jones (Norman OK, 1951) Guitar Shelley’s Guitar: A Bicentenary exhibition of manuscripts, first editions and relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, catalogue by B. C. Barker‐ Benfield (Oxford, 1992)

xiv Abbreviations and Texts

Hearth Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth (Durham, NC, 1938) Holmes Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 1974) Hogg i.−ii. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1858) Ingpen Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England: New Facts and Letters (London, 1917) K‐SJ Keats‐Shelley Journal K‐SMB Keats‐Shelley Memorial Bulletin LB William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797– 1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992) Med.33 Thomas Medwin, The Shelley Papers: Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1833) Med.47 i.−ii. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 Vols. (London, 1847) MSJ i.−ii. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott‐Kilvert, 2 Vols. (Oxford, 1987) MSL i.−iii. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 Vols. (Baltimore & London, 1980–1988) OED Oxford English Dictionary OHPBS The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford, 2013) Oxford Robert Montgomery, Oxford: A Poem, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1835) Peck i.−ii. Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 Vols. (Boston, 1927) Robinson i.−iii. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 Vols. (London, 1938) Rogers Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1967) SC i.−x. Shelley and his Circle, ed. Kenneth Cameron et al., 10 Vols. (Cambridge MA and London, 1961–2002) Seymour Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London, 2000) TLS Times Literary Supplement Trel.58 Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London, 1858) Trel.78 Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author [1878], ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, 1973) Trel.Letters Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford, 1910) White i.−ii. Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 Vols. (New York, 1940)

xv Abbreviations and Texts

Names

CC Claire Clairmont [originally Mary Jane Clairmont, also Clare and Clara: Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont on her tomb] LB Lord Byron LH Leigh Hunt MWG Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin [until 30 xii 1816] MWS Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [from 30 xii 1816] PBS Percy Bysshe Shelley

Texts

There is (2019) still no authoritative complete edition of Shelley’s poetry, nor a complete edition of his prose. PS, with conventionalised punctuation, has published four volumes out of five; CPPBS, with three volumes published of eight planned, is more authoritative but less complete. Of the three easily available scholarly selec- tions (SPP, SMW and 2016) the last is textually the most comprehensive and reli- able, and contains a good selection of Shelley’s prose. In‐text references here are therefore to 2016, giving page numbers and, following a colon, line numbers and where appropriate section and Act numbers. e.g. (90), (591:57–58), (272:IV.570–578). Other references – to Shelley’s letters, to poetry only appearing in CPPBS and PS (with preference given to CPPBS), to manuscript readings, editorial emendations and all other material – appear in endnotes. Oddities in original spelling (e.g. ‘Appenines’, ‘embarassed’) and non‐standard grammar (e.g. ‘not one of whose opin- ions coincide with mine’) have been marked [sic] only when confusion seems likely (e.g. ‘sive’ for ‘sieve’).

xvi Foreword

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you? And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems, and new!’1 Robert Browning (1812–1889)

Seeing Shelley ‘plain’, as Browning put it in 1851, is harder than one might imagine. The best‐known portrait of him, painted in 1819 by Amelia Curran, was – the artist herself admitted – ‘so ill done’ that she nearly destroyed it (it was never finished).2 There exist, however, life‐drawings by Shelley’s friend Edward Williams, including a profile confirming just how ‘boyish looking’ he appeared, together with a ghostly back view (see Figure 1). His brown hair was always wild, his face freckled when he caught the sun; he grew tall but, as the pictures suggest, remained slight, with something of a stoop: small head, narrow shoulders, long legs.3 Readers of this book will find a concentration upon the actual: pistols fired in enclosed spaces, books printed in signatures, pieces of paper tightly folded. Shelley has so often been seen as an evanescent, barely human soul – his wife Mary remarked after his death that ‘I do not in any degree believe that his being was reg- ulated by the same laws that govern the existence of us common mortals’ – that we need to ground our understanding of him in what he called ‘the difficult and unbending realities of actual life’.4

This is a biography shorter than most of its predecessors:5 the man who writes (poetry, letters, pamphlets, discursive prose) is the central subject. Not because the works are autobiographical, but because they focus the most intense concerns of

xvii Foreword

Figure 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley, pencil drawing (Pisa 27 November 1821) by Edward Ellerker Williams (Newman Ivey White, Shelley, New York: Knopf, 1940, Volume II, facing page 524) the life: and because they are what makes Shelley extraordinary. He wrote so much that being comprehensive is, however, not an option. It is tempting to assume that he must always have known where he was going as a writer, but he took a long time to locate the styles and the approaches that suited him. As Julian Barnes has remarked, an artist’s career is ‘likely to be a matter of obsessional overlap, of ferrying back and forth, of process rather than result, journey rather than arrival’.6 Shelley came to the end of his journey so very suddenly, at the age of 29, that it seems entirely natural for him not to have known exactly where he was arriving: if, indeed, he was going to be a poet at all. He had started to write very early: in his penultimate year as a schoolboy at Eton, 1808–1809, when he was only 16, he began a highly coloured gothic novel, Zastrozzi. He had explained to a potential publisher in May 1809 that he expected no money for it (music to a publisher’s ears): ‘I am independent, being the heir of a gentleman of large fortune.’ The book came out in March 1810, when he was still at school. It got into print because he could afford to have it printed: he could even lay out £10 to bribe potential reviewers.7 And what followed was not just a stream but a flood of writing. His second book, Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, written with his sister Elizabeth (1794–1831), was printed at his own expense, though he

xviii Foreword failed to settle the printer’s bill (a massive £75) for some while. His third book, the novel St. Irvyne: or The Rosicrucian: A Romance, would be printed in December 1810, again at his own expense, and appeared in 1811, when Shelley was 18.8 But having his work printed and published privately became necessary, as he grew more critical of government, monarchy and Christianity, and as his reputation grew worse. Three pieces of political (in fact treasonable) writing had to be printed anonymously in 1812; copies identified as Shelley’s were nevertheless passed to the Home Office. In 1813, he realised that his poem Queen Mab could not be published as it stood, while the Notes he was planning would make it doubly impossible. Paying the real printer himself, he added his own name as printer, at his father‐in‐ law’s address (the law demanded that a printer be named), but even then the book was only distributed to friends, often with name and address removed. In 1816, Shelley had his poem Alastor printed at his own expense, as he did his poem The Revolt of Islam in 1818 (which must have cost him near to £1309). He sent printed copies of his play The Cenci to London from Italy in 1819; Adonais, too, was printed in Italy and the copies sent to London for publication. On the other hand, two of his greatest poems, written in 1819, The Mask of Anarchy and his sonnet ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King’, would only be published in the 1830s, years after his death, and long after the time when they made political sense. Such publishing – or failure to publish – was not conducive to Shelley’s making money. In one way, that was not a problem. As a gentleman possessed of a private income – in practice, an allowance awarded by his father Timothy Shelley (1753– 1844) – and with a future which looked financially assured, he made a point of not writing for money. For much of his life the idea was repellent to him. In February 1821, he would actually insist on not being paid for an essay which, he declared, he had ‘determined to write’ before learning of its potential publisher’s ‘liberal arrange- ments’10 for payment. On 25 January 1822, nearly 12 years after his first book had been published, he would tell his friend, the London critic and editor Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), that he had no idea how well his books sold: ‘I have never until now thought it worth while to inquire.’ Back in 1811, he had instructed the bookseller responsible for his second gothic novel: ‘Will you have the goodness to inform me of the number of copies which you have sold of “St. Irvyne”.’11 But by 1822, Shelley knew how pointless it would be to enquire how a book of his was selling – because so few sold. It seems likely that he never in fact earned a penny from any of his books.12 What makes this more startling is the fact that, by April 1822, he was in debt for over £20 000: in modern terms, over £1 million, as for rough equivalence 1800– 1822, sums can be multiplied by 50.13 He coupled his remark in 1822 about book sales with a question about his newest work, a play. A fortnight earlier he had given his usual publisher, Charles Ollier (1788–1859), an opportunity to buy it: now he asked whether Hunt might be able to find a publisher who would take it for £150

xix Foreword or £200. His questions to Ollier and Hunt seem to have been the first occasions in his life when Shelley had actually put a price on a piece of his writing. For, despite his constant, at times awful, local difficulties, he knew that he would – one day – be rich. But because he lived his entire life in the style appro- priate to the eldest son of a gentleman, his income from his father never proved adequate. His unpaid bills dictated where he could live; eventually his debts were crucially important in his decision to leave England, in 1818, and to settle in a country (Italy) where his income would go further and his old liabilities could not be pursued. His doctor’s warnings had also directed him to a warmer climate. Another necessary biographical topic – an often under‐rated problem – is that, from his early twenties until almost the end of his life, Shelley was beset by illness; in January 1821 he called himself a ‘feeble mass of diseases & infirmities’ dragged through the world by a ‘vapid & weary spirit’.14 He was frequently in severe pain: perhaps kidney stones, quite likely kidney damage and recurring infection. He was believed tubercular by an English doctor who examined him in 1817, though his life in Italy brought him a period of remission which lasted until his death. His astonishing achievements as a writer, along with ‘his habits of temperance and exercise’, con- firm his ‘remarkable degree of strength’. But because he was slightly built it is, rather bizarrely, possible to compile seven accounts of his being knocked or thrown to the ground, as an adult.15

There is another reason why this book is shorter than many Shelley biographies. Myths about Shelley are still being created and distributed. The idea that, at Tan‐­yr‐allt in North Wales in 1813, Shelley ‘claimed’ to have ‘twice fought off an intruder … perhaps a devil’, which he never at any stage claimed to have done, was repeated authoritatively in 2013.16 Because it remains problematic, and is likely to remain so, the Tan‐yr‐allt episode has become an opportunity for biographers to locate in it the Shelley they want: a man who narrowly escaped being murdered by a political opponent, a man who saw the devil, a man with acute psychological problems, a man not entirely sane, a man subject to what Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) would influentially call ‘semi‐delusion’. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2013, after stating that Shelley exchanged pistol shots with an intruder, came down firmly on both sides of the fence by adding: ‘This may have been another delusional episode.’17 Shelley biography needs to prioritize contemporary and documentary testi- mony. This will not always produce what is reliable, but some kinds of evidence are better than others and they should be identified. This book will, for example, depend as little as possible on the recollection of conversations or remarks written

xx Foreword down many years after the events they describe, even by close friends or relations. What we now know of the waywardness of autobiographical memory, and the extent to which all memories are reconstructed memories, should stop us hoping for any accuracy in such accounts. They reveal the teller and his or her changing relationship with Shelley: they are hardly ever reliable. George Eliot was aware of this as early as 1870: ‘The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.’18 It would be as well, too, not to be distracted by the siren calls of psychological analysis which proved so tempting to those writing in the second half of the twen- tieth century. Shelley himself beautifully described how reflections in the waters of a canal manage to ‘surpass & misrepresent truth’.19 They may reflect the actual, but they embellish it into the alluring.

xxi

Part I

Background, Foreground 1792–1811

1 A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet 1792 –1810

Shelley was born on 4 August 1792, just three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution. It was a well‐timed arrival. Although born in the eighteenth century, he grew up taking it for granted that the world would never be the same again; and when, at the age of 24, he visited Versailles and Fontainebleau, he thought the latter ‘the scene of some of the most interesting events of what may be called the master theme of the epoch in which we live’. From the age of 19 he had known how important it was that people should be active in opposing ‘religious, political, and domestic oppression’:1 in 1819, at the age of 27, he summed up his developed political philosophy:

That the majority [of the] people of England are destitute and miserable, ill‐clothed, ill‐fed, ill‐educated. That they know this, and that they are impatient to procure a reform of the cause of their abject and wretched state. That a cause of this peculiar misery is the unequal distribution which, under the form of the national debt, has been surreptitiously made of the products of their labour and the products of the labour of their ancestors; for all property is the produce of labour. That the cause of that cause is a defect in the government. (644)

He feared in 1811 that England itself might be ‘willfully rushing to a Revolution’, but continued to believe in progress, writing in 1817 how ‘There is a reflux in the

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography, First Edition. John Worthen. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

3 A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet tide of human things which bears the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven, after the storms are past. Methinks, those who now live have survived an age of despair.’2 Nevertheless, in spite of such radicalism, ‘He never could have been taken for anything but a true thoroughbred English gentleman.’3 He was not an aristocrat like his friend Lord Byron, but the eldest son of a Sussex landowning family (his father was Whig MP for Horsham, later a baronet: but that is not aristocracy). Shelley grew up with a knowledge of hare‐hunting and fox‐hunting along with a love of pistol‐shooting, riding, sailing and billiards. His carelessness (or worse) in paying shopkeepers and tradespeople – including printers and publishers – remained all his life an indication of his class, however egalitarian he became (Byron described being slow to pay a debt as treating someone ‘like a tradesman’). People with the status of Shelley and Byron were, though, also very likely to be cheated by those they employed; tradespeople could never be certain when – or even if – they would be paid. On Lake Geneva in 1816, the man who hired out boats asked Shelley ‘as a favour’ not to tell Byron that he was paying ‘double’ for the boat he had hired.4 Shelley’s everyday behaviour was very different from what was expected by people unprepared for his extraordinary courtesy. His politeness and amiability were not only those of a sweet disposition but of his upbringing: a friend insisted

that Shelley was almost the only example I have yet found, that was never wanting even in the most minute particular of the infinite & various observances of pure, entire, & perfect gentility.5

Such gentility, nonetheless, did not preclude the ferocious resolve which Shelley could also demonstrate; he regularly repeated lines from the third Canto of Childe Harold, ‘But there are wanderers o’er Eternity, / Whose bark drives on and on’ and sometime between 1821 and 1822 noted down ‘Ever press onward onward’. Such quotations may add credence to the otherwise problematic recollections of Edward Trelawny (1792–1881): Shelley saying ‘I always go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped’, for example, another version being ‘with exquisite gentleness of manner he would always do, and do on the instant, what he resolved on’.6 Driving on and on, never being stopped, demonstrated the kind of determination which could easily strike others as class‐based arrogance, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his ‘exquisite gentleness of manner’. Although always insisting on his absolute difference from his father, he remained throughout his life, in attitude and outlook, one of the gentry (‘People of gentle birth and breeding; the class…immediately below the nobility’). It would be hard to find a friend of Shelley’s who did not observe this, many of them with just a little sharpness: people with his kind of background were not usually the friends of

4 1792 –1810

­radicals. Leigh Hunt and Shelley’s acerbic acquaintance Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781–1851) both found Shelley ‘very gentlemanly’,7 but it is easy to see how ­limiting a compliment that might be. John Joseph Stockdale (?1777–1847), who met him in the autumn of 1810 and published his second gothic novel, St Irvyne, ­encountered a ‘somewhat natural haughtiness of disposition’, while his friend the writer and lawyer Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) thought him ‘in the main, eminently patrician’. Hunt took it on himself to rescue Shelley from that charge, but had himself called Shelley ‘patrician‐looking’; and in 1820 we find the Hunts and others laughing together ‘at S’s little occasional aristocratical sallies’.8 Exactly the opposite reaction came from the editor and writer J. G. Lockhart (1794–1854) of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in his insistence that ‘Mr. Shelly, whatever his errors may have been, is a scholar, a gentleman, and a poet’: that was a way of ­distinguishing him from the radical Hunt and from Hunt’s reformist Sunday paper The Examiner, with its ‘sonnets from Johnny Keats’. Less qualified recognition came (as might be expected) from Byron, always on the lookout for the behaviour of ‘a Gemman’,9 recalling his association with Hunt over the latter’s paper The Liberal, and thinking

Alas! poor Shelley!—how he would have laughed—had he lived, and how we used to laugh now & then—at various things—which are grave in the Suburbs.

That is, of importance to suburban people like the Hunts. But, for Byron, Shelley was very different, being as he was

as perfect a Gentleman as ever crossed a drawing room;—when he liked—& where he liked.—10

Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli (1800–1873), an aristocrat herself, who knew Shelley in Italy 1821–1822, in old age also recalled his ‘refinement’ and remarked that ‘he would always have seemed the most perfect of gentlemen, one in a ­thousand’. Although declaring himself in 1811 ‘no aristocrat, or any crat at all’ – he believed ‘the canker of aristocracy’11 endemic – Shelley was upper‐class through and through.

In Britain’s past it had often been the landowning gentry who had felt the respon- sibility (which went with wealth) not only of assisting the poor but of maintaining­ the stability and promoting a conservative development of society. It was not an accident that, the eldest son of only recently entrenched gentry, Shelley grew up determined to help the world ‘step by step’ on its way into change. In 1819 he

5 A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Poet declared it his ‘hereditary duty’ to prompt ‘the welfare of the great circle of man- kind’,12 it being incumbent upon people like him to change the world; they had been brought up to inherit power. He told Leigh Hunt in 1816 that ‘I am undecived in the belief that I have powers deeply to interest, or substantially to improve, mankind.’13 This can be seen in his response when he found, ill in the snow on the night of 19 December 1816, a woman who ‘The doctor said…would inevitably have ­perished, had she lain there only a short time longer.’ He helped the woman’s son get her to the nearest friendly house, the Hunts’ in Hampstead’s Vale of Health. But Shelley not only played the good Samaritan. He also confronted – and denounced – a house‐owner who refused to take the woman in. Here, Hunt’s account must depend on memory, but Shelley said something like:

‘It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable) recollect what I tell you;—you will have your house, that you refuse to put this mis- erable woman into, burnt over your head.’ ‘God bless me, sir! Dear me, sir!’ exclaimed the frightened wretch, and fluttered into his mansion.14

Shelley had confronted the 50‐year‐old Thomas Sheppard (1766–1858), owner of Upper Bowling Green House, at the top of Heath Street, Hampstead, who eventu- ally became MP for Frome. From the age of 19, Shelley’s poetry and prose writing had constantly stressed egalitarian change and the needs of the poor: he told a correspondent in July 1811 that

the noble has to[o] much therefore he is wretched & wicked, the peasant has too ­little – Are not then the consequences the same from causes which nothing but equality can annihilate.

And yet, although ‘Equality is natural’, the real problem was how far such change was possible. Shelley did not, after all, insist on ‘the doctrine of the natural equality of man’: he believed that ‘The question is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicability: so far as it is practicable, it is desirable’.15 And it was only to some degree practicable. What was indisputable was the duty of charity: the upper‐class man should be ‘the friend of the unfriended poor’,16 the one to whose door the needy would come. Shelley’s active ‘noble generosity’17 went far further than the ‘certain gener- osity in trifles’ which a man like Coleridge thought the ‘most commonly received attribute’18 of the gentleman. Shelley’s life was filled with examples of his support for the needy, especially when he was settled in places which he had come to regard as his community, as in Tremadog and Marlow (see Chapters 7 and 17). Timothy

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