Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
In January 1812 Shelley was taking laudanum for his nerves, and the medication may have set off a strange episode in which
Shelley believed that he had been attacked at his cottage door. A neighbor heard his screams and came running only to find
him unconscious and no one else around. Later Shelley played down the incident. The next year Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza
were staying in a house in Wales when one night Shelley heard a noise and went downstairs with a pistol. Those upstairs heard
a shot and rushed to help. Shelley claimed that a man leaving through a window had fired a pistol at him. Shelley urged his
wife and sister-in-law to go back to bed while he and a servant waited up. Around four a.m., while the servant was in another
room, more shots rang out. This time Shelley claimed that the same man had fired at him through the window and then fled.
Shelley made a sketch of the so-called assassin; it resembled not a human, but a Satanic figure with horns.
Shelley had written some childish poetry, but in 1812 he set out to make his mark on the world through verse. He began working
on his first long poem,
Queen Mab,
which was published the next year. Shelley was not writing to entertain; he saw himself as leading the way to a social revolution
that would mirror the political changes of the American and French Revolutions. Shelley boldly declared, “Poets . . . are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and in fact, long after Shelley’s death, the Chartists, a radical movement of
working-class Britons, used
Queen Mab
to educate and inspire their followers.
The poem combined two different traditions; it was both an elaborate allegorical fairy tale and a historical political argument.
The poem describes the fairy Queen Mab with her girl pupil Ianthe traveling away from the earth through space in a magic chariot
to envision a new organization of society. In more than two thousand lines, Shelley attacks war, the church, monarchy, and
the consumption of meat—all in verse. He advocates freedom of speech, dietary reform, repeal of the Act of Union, and Catholic
emancipation. Appended to the poem were Shelley’s extensive notes explaining his philosophy more fully.
Queen Mab
also attempted to discredit marriage. Though Shelley was a married man and dedicated the poem to Harriet, he shared Godwin’s
dim view of the institution. In the notes he wrote: “A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each
other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable
tyranny.” He added, “Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe
the same creed.” Fair warning to Harriet.
While at work on the poem, Shelley wrote a letter to William Godwin, expressing his admiration. “It is now . . . more than
two years since first I saw your inestimable book on ‘Political Justice,’” Shelley wrote. “It opened to my mind fresh & more
extensive view; it materially influenced my character, and I rose from its perusal a wiser and a better man.” These words,
which would warm the heart of any writer, came with an appeal for Godwin to adopt Shelley as his pupil and devoted follower.
Godwin, living in near obscurity, was flattered, even though Shelley tactlessly added that he had not written earlier because
he thought Godwin was dead. The two men began a correspondence that would be life-changing for both.
In a rash moment, Shelley also offered to help Godwin financially. Godwin would henceforth hold Shelley to his promise even
when Shelley himself was in need of funds. Shelley could obtain loans because it was expected that some day he would come
into a considerable inheritance, and lenders would advance funds on the agreement that he would repay them afterward. But
these financial instruments, known as obit loans, came at huge rates of interest, and Shelley had trouble servicing his debt.
At the time, delinquent debtors were not only subject to losing their possessions, but they could also be thrown in jail.
Shelley’s kind offer would turn out to be a thorn in the relationship between the two men.
Later in the year Shelley and Harriet came to London and met the Godwins at home for dinner. Harriet noted on the visit that
Godwin looked like Socrates, Fanny Imlay was plain but sensible, and the portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft was lovely. Through
Godwin, Shelley met John Newton, a vegetarian and health fanatic. Shelley was already a vegetarian, but henceforth he adopted
a lifestyle based on Newton’s philosophy that what was “natural” was good. Hogg had earlier complained about his friend’s
eating habits: he ignored mealtimes, eating only when he was hungry, and according to Hogg, the poet lived on bread, raisins,
nuts, tea, and honey. Later in 1812, Shelley would publish another tract, titled
A Vindication of Natural Diet,
in which he confidently stated, “There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has
not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.”
Percy and Harriet seemed overjoyed by the birth of their first child, a daughter, in June 1813. They named her Ianthe, after
the heroine of
Queen Mab
. Unfortunately, the deterioration in their marriage began with that event. Shelley was distraught when Harriet refused to
breastfeed the child, a topic about which he was passionate. One of Shelley’s fantasies was that he could change sex at will,
and he went so far as to try to breastfeed the infant himself. When that failed, Peacock recalled, the couple hired “a wet-nurse
whom he [Percy] did not like, and [the child] was much looked after by his wife’s sister, whom he intensely disliked. I have
often thought that if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if this sister had not lived with them, the link of their married
love would not have been so readily broken.”
At the end of July, Shelley, his wife, and their daughter moved into the home of John Newton’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Jean Baptiste
Chastel de Boinville, who lived about thirty miles outside London. Her French husband had died during Napoleon’s Russian campaign.
Also part of the household were Mrs. de Boinville’s eighteen-year-old daughter Cornelia and her husband, a lawyer who was
another devotee of Godwin’s. Percy began taking Italian lessons from Cornelia, and a short-lived romance blossomed. Some months
later, Shelley wrote Hogg about his experience:
The contemplation of female excellence is the favorite food of my imagination. . . . I had been unaccustomed to the mildness
the intelligence the delicacy of a cultivated female. The presence of Mrs. Boinville & her daughter afforded a strange contrast
to my former friendless & deplorable condition. . . . I saw the full extent of the calamity which my rash & heartless union
with Harriet . . . had produced.
Nonetheless, in March of 1814, Shelley agreed to go through a second marriage ceremony with Harriet. The event may have come
at the insistence of Harriet’s family, because they feared that her age at the time of the first wedding might make the union
technically illegal and thus threaten the legitimacy of their child, along with her right to inherit the Shelley fortune.
Harriet conceived another baby, but the relationship had lost its zest for Percy. He blamed many of their problems on Harriet’s
sister Eliza, who doted on Ianthe. But in his mind Harriet was to blame too. She had given up their former practice of reading
books aloud to each other, and it seemed to Percy that her efforts to improve her intellectual talents were slackening. Nor
was she as devoted a disciple of his social ideas as she had been. Shelley wrote that it was only “duty” that was keeping
the marriage together, and in a letter to Hogg, he identified himself with the poet John Milton, whose words he echoed: “a
dead & living body had been linked together in loathsome & horrible communion.”
The couple separated in March 1814, with Harriet and Eliza taking Ianthe to the west country of England. By the time Harriet
and Percy’s son, Charles, was born in November of 1814, the separation was permanent. Shelley had met someone else: Mary Godwin.
The relationship with Harriet set a pattern for Percy’s later loves. He combined sexual ambiguity with a sense of omnisexuality.
For him there were no limits. “I go on till I am stopped,” he later told a friend, “and I am never stopped.” He was not faithful
in his first marriage, and he would not be in his second either.
M
ary had originally met Percy on November 11, 1812, when he, his wife, and Eliza were visiting Godwin; the encounter seemed
to make little impression on any of those present. By the time they met again, on May 5, 1814, her father and Shelley had
become good friends, and indeed Godwin was by now financially dependent on the young poet. Since her return from Scotland,
Mary had heard only good things about Shelley. On his part, now that his separation from Harriet had taken place, Shelley
saw Mary with new eyes. He was immediately attracted to her because of her beauty, intellect, name, and personality. “The
originality & loveliness of Mary’s character was apparent to me from her very motions & tones of voice. . . . Her smile, how
persuasive it was & how pathetic!” he wrote. Mary had a high, smooth brow, dazzling fair skin, light brown hair, and large
hazel eyes. She was then sixteen, the same age as Harriet had been at the time she and Shelley had wed.
Shelley recognized in Mary the “woman-symbol of intellectual beauty” that he sought. Yet he was torn between his feelings
and loyalties. Thomas Love Peacock saw him frequently at this time and noted the poet’s agony. Peacock called his state of
mind “suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.” He remembered Shelley as being in a mad state, his
hair and clothes disordered and his eyes bloodshot as he clutched his bottle of laudanum for security. But Mary’s allure won
out over Shelley’s doubts.
In a sense Shelley was preconditioned to love Mary, for he greatly admired both of her parents. He had ordered Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
in 1812 and was strongly influenced by her ideas on women’s rights, so much so that she became in his mind a figure of the
ideal woman; he would use her as the model for Cythna, the New Woman in his later poem
The Revolt of Islam,
who “doth equal laws and justice teach / To woman, outraged and polluted long.” Harriet was not merely expressing sour grapes
when she later said that Shelley was in love with the
idea
of Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter: Mary, for Percy, was an intellectual trophy wife. He would write of her:
They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child
I wonder not—for One then left this earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory; still her fame
Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild
Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim
The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name.
For Mary, the attraction was immediate as well. She had no experience with love. Her youth had been spent in a world of ideas,
where it was taken for granted that ideas would change the world, and that ideas were more important than the conventions
of society. Shelley, who had a lifelong love affair with ideas, was the embodiment of what she held dear. The fact that he
was married and unconventional in other ways didn’t matter to someone who had grown up in a family where all five children
had a different set of parents, where adults with unconventional ideas constantly came to visit. Mary was innocent of actual
experience, intellectually brilliant, but immature and insecure. Her passionate nature was given a chance to bloom, and it
did.
It didn’t hurt that Percy was epicenely handsome. His sandy, unkempt hair stuck out around his face like a halo. Mary, who
had inherited her father’s large nose, felt herself unattractive. Shelley, who charmed her with his brilliant conversation
and his devotion to noble causes, loved her for the only thing she was sure of: her own intelligence, which in those times
was commonly thought to be a quality women should best keep hidden. Shelley would become her mentor, picking up where her
father had left off. And who better to take this role than a man who had absorbed Godwin’s philosophy? To Mary, Shelley appeared
as one of the select group of people charged with bringing about the Godwinian future.
Furthermore, Shelley brought adventure. He confessed to her that he was trapped in an unhappy marriage with a woman who wasn’t
capable of understanding him the way Mary could. Equally trapped in the Skinner Street household with a critical stepmother
and a father who was emotionally distant, Mary saw Shelley as her way to escape.
Their emotions meshed with their literary bent. The whole Shelley / Godwin / Wollstonecraft circle were living out of novels—they
wrote their lives in their books, and their lives were in turn influenced and formed by their reading and writing. Mary and
Percy were the heroine and hero of the most romantic novel of all, and at the beginning of their relationship, life became
enchantment.
Some of their feelings are captured in Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s account of his first sight of Mary at Skinner Street.
I followed him [Shelley, whom Hogg called Bysshe] through the shop, which was the only entrance, and upstairs. We entered
the room on the first floor; it was shaped like a quadrant. In the arc were windows; in one radius a fireplace, and in the
other a door, and shelves with many old books. William Godwin was not at home. Bysshe strode about the room, causing the crazy
floor of the ill-built, unowned dwelling-house to shake and tremble under his impatient footsteps. He appeared to be displeased
at not finding the fountain of Political Justice. “Where is Godwin?” he asked me several times, as if I knew. I did not know,
and to say the truth, I did not care. He continued his uneasy promenade; and I stood reading the names of old English authors
on the backs of the venerable volumes, when the door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called “Shelley!”
A thrilling voice answered “Mary!” And he darted out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king. A very
young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in
London at that time, had called him out of the room. He was absent a very short time—a minute or two; and then returned. “Godwin
is out; there is no use in waiting.” So we continued our walk along Holborn.