Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
The letter to Hogg may have been prompted by a revival of Shelley’s plans for a commune. On September 30, he had discussed
“liberating” two of his sisters, who were in boarding school in Hackney, a borough of London. On the night of October 7, when
Mary had gone to bed early, Shelley and Clara Jane sat up late discussing what Clara Jane called “an Association of philosophical
people,” including his sisters Elizabeth and Hellen. Awakening memories of childhood may have induced Shelley to try to frighten
Clara Jane, as he had often done to his sisters. According to her, “the conversation turned upon those unaccountable & mysterious
feelings about supernatural things that we are sometimes subject to.” Shelley gave her a strange look with his large, penetrating
blue eyes. He got the desired effect. “How horribly you look . . . take your eyes off!” Clara Jane cried.
She ran upstairs to bed, but the frightening impression persisted, and worked on her nerves. She placed her candle on a set
of drawers and noticed that her pillow lay in the middle of her bed. For a moment, she glanced out the window, and when she
turned back to the bed, the pillow was no longer there. It now lay on a chair. “I stood thinking for two moments,” Clara Jane
wrote. “Was it possible that I had deluded myself so far as to place it there myself & then forget the action? This was not
likely.” She ran downstairs. Shelley wrote that “Her countenance was distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay . . . Her
eyes were wide & starting: drawn almost from their sockets . . . as if they had been newly inserted in ghastly sport in the
sockets of a lifeless head.”
Clara Jane told him the story of the pillow and the two of them sat by the fire “engaging in awful conversation relative to
the nature of these mysteries.” Shelley read aloud from a novel Hogg had written, and then one of his own poems, and Clara
Jane seemed to calm down. Toward dawn, however, she told Shelley he was giving her the same frightening look that he had earlier.
He hid his face with his hands, he writes, but Clara Jane went into convulsions, shrieking and writhing on the floor. Shelley
took her upstairs to Mary, who soothed her until Clara Jane finally slept. In the morning they looked in her room and found
the pillow on the chair.
Mary, who by now had discovered she was pregnant, was somewhat annoyed that all this fuss had resulted over the placement
of a pillow. Shelley didn’t improve her mood two nights later when he began to read Clara Jane passages from Abbé Barruel’s
book about the mysterious Illuminati, causing her another sleepless night. Clara Jane, as even her mother said, had a somewhat
hysterical nature and Shelley could not stop himself from taking advantage of it. Mary, on the other hand, suspected that
Clara Jane actually enjoyed the attention her fits of hysteria brought her, and on October 14, the two stepsisters had an
argument. Clara Jane wrote in her diary, “How hateful it is to quarrel—to say a thousand unkind things—meaning none—things
produced by the bitterness of disappointment!” But that night she walked in her sleep again, and after listening to her groaning
in the hallway for two hours, Shelley brought her once more to a less-than-thrilled Mary to calm her down.
Shelley tried to patch things up between the sisters. He wrote in the mutual journal, knowing Mary would read it: “Converse
with Jane; her mind unsettled; her character unformed; occasion of hope from some instances of softness and feelings; she
is not exactly insensible to concessions.” A few nights later, Mary made her own contribution to the journal: “Shelley and
Jane sit up and for a wonder do not frighten themselves.”
There were threats beyond the imaginary. Godwin sent his friend James Marshall to persuade Clara Jane to return home, but
Shelley advised her not to. Shelley received a letter from Hogg that he felt was cold and unfriendly. On top of everything
else, the bill collectors were getting too close for comfort, and at times Shelley was forced to hide in Peacock’s rooms,
leaving the two women by themselves. Mary sometimes met him secretly at coffeehouses, and of course they sent letters to each
other. Wrote Mary: “in the morning I look for you and when I awake I turn to look on you—dearest Shelley you are solitary
and uncomfortable. Why cannot I be with you to cheer you and to press you to my heart . . . when shall we be free from fear
of treachery?”
Percy replied in passionate prose: “My beloved Mary, I know not whether these transient meetings produce not as much pain
as pleasure . . . I will not forget the sweet moments when I saw your eyes—the divine rapture of the few and fleeting kisses
. . . Mary, love, we must be united. I will not part from you again after Saturday night.” Yet on the very same day, he appealed
to Harriet, “I cannot raise money soon enough—unless you can effect something I must go to Prison & all our hopes of independence
be finished.”
Mary had continued to believe that Godwin would become reconciled toward her elopement. She recalled the description her father
wrote of her mother in the
Memoirs
—that she remained stoic in the face of criticism over her relationship with Imlay. But Godwin’s shunning continued. Mary
spent hours at her mother’s grave, now her favorite place for reading and writing. She sometimes blamed her stepmother for
her father’s hostility. “She plagues my father out of his life,” Mary wrote to Percy on October 28 (while he was hiding at
Peacock’s), “. . . do you not hate her my love?” Her father’s rejection only made Mary more dependent on Shelley. “Press me
to you and hug your own Mary to your heart,” she pleaded, “perhaps she will one day have a father till then be every thing
to me love—& indeed I will be a good girl and never vex you any more.”
Mary’s health suffered as her pregnancy proceeded. (“Mary is unwell” appears in her journal more than once.) Nonetheless,
Mary and Percy established a rigorous schedule of reading and writing, which they would stick to whenever possible for the
rest of their lives. In the morning they did their reading and writing separately. After the midday meal came the shopping,
sightseeing, and housework. They read together in the evenings, unless, as was sometimes the case when Shelley was not hiding,
they went to a play, an opera, or a lecture.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, awareness of scientific discoveries had filtered down from a small educated elite to
the general population. Public reading and lectures about exciting new developments by such famous scientists of the day as
Humphry Davy drew large crowds. Electricity and magnetism were among the much-discussed topics of the day. Speculation—sometimes
informed, sometimes imaginative—about the possibilities of science fueled both hopes of progress as well as fears that science
might be a danger.
Mary noted in her journal for December 28, 1814, that she and Percy went to Garnerin’s theater to hear a lecture on electricity.
Preceding the lecture was a display of “phantasmagoria,” a kind of magic lantern show that Mary would later have reason to
recall. The speaker that night was thirty-year-old Andrew Crosse, who had devised a variety of instruments for experimenting
with electricity. These instruments were located at his home in Somerset, and were too cumbersome to be transported. Nonetheless,
he described how he had captured electricity during a thunderstorm, à la Franklin, and conducted it through wires into his
laboratory, where he preserved it in Leyden jars. Some of Crosse’s claims were clearly exaggerated; for example, he claimed
that when he passed electricity through a stone, living insects emerged from it. But Mary, who had received little education
in science from her father, was fascinated. The connection between electricity and the generation of life was not lost on
her.
In November, Thomas Jefferson Hogg reappeared in Shelley’s life, bringing desperately needed financial help. Since their Oxford
days, Hogg had been emotionally dependent on Shelley and always wooed Shelley’s female companions; it was almost as though
he could strengthen his relationship with Shelley by sharing his women. Shelley, seeing an opportunity to expand the circle
of people living out his radical philosophy, had invited Hogg to visit, curious to see if a bond would form between him and
Mary. Afterward, Shelley noted in the mutual journal for Mary to read, “He was pleased with Mary.— this was the test by which
I had previously determined to judge his character.” Shelley tacitly encouraged Mary to sleep with his friend, often taking
Clara Jane for walks so the other two could be alone. Mary resisted the pressure; she seems to have befriended Hogg only to
please Shelley. At first she noted in her journal that Hogg was intellectually inferior: “. . . get into an argument about
virtue in which Hogg makes a sad bungle,” she wrote, adding, “quite muddle[d] on the point I perceive.” A few days later,
she argued with him about free will and wrote, “he quite wrong but quite puzzled—his arguments are very weak.” Hogg’s greatest
virtue was persistence; he doggedly paid court to Mary much as he had done earlier to Harriet Westbrook and, even earlier,
to Shelley’s sister Elizabeth. Mary adroitly used her pregnancy to avoid physical intimacy.
Was Shelley’s attempt to bring Mary and Hogg together intended to serve as an excuse for him to enjoy Clara Jane? Given the
pages missing from the journals of the principals at crucial times, it is impossible to say. Shelley may have been motivated
more by his utopian idea of establishing a free-love commune than by sheer physical attraction to Clara Jane, but it is clear
that after this time, Mary saw her stepsister in a new light. Henceforth, she regarded Clara Jane as a threat.
In November, when Clara Jane was spending much time with Percy, she announced that henceforth she wished to be known only
as Clara—later she would choose the name Claire (which is how we will refer to her from this point). The name change was possibly
a declaration of independence, but it would have escaped none of the threesome that Claire is the name of the lively dark
friend of the lovers in Rousseau’s
Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise,
one of Shelley’s favorite books. He described it as “an overflowing . . . of sublimest genius, and more than human sensibility,”
and Claire may well have adopted the name to bring herself closer to him.
Mary felt that her pregnancy and resulting health problems should have prompted Shelley’s sympathy, but in fact they probably
made her less sexually attractive, and Shelley never believed in exclusive relationships. There were also, of course,
two
women expecting babies fathered by Shelley. Harriet’s impending delivery was another source of anxiety for Mary, even though
Harriet herself had no illusions that the event would win back her husband. She wrote to a friend on November 20: “Next month
I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is
going on.” The child, a boy, was born prematurely November 30, and named Charles Bysshe. Harriet described Shelley’s reaction:
“As to his tenderness for me, none remains. He said he was glad it was a boy, because he would make money cheaper. You see
how that noble soul is debased. Money now, and not philosophy, is the grand spring of his actions.”
Mary’s attitude toward Harriet had been cruel; she had accepted all Shelley’s rationalizations for leaving his wife. After
the birth of Harriet’s son, a note of worry enters Mary’s journal, as she now seems uncertain that Percy will remain faithful
to
her
. On December 6th she jotted down,
Very unwell.— Clary & Shelley walk out as usual to heaps of places . . . a letter from Hookham to say that Harriet has been
brought to bed of a son and heir. S[helley] writes a number of circular letters on this event which ought to be ushered in
with ringing of bells, etc. for it is the son of his
wife
. Hogg comes in the evening . . . a letter from Harriet confirming the news in a letter from a
deserted wife
& telling us that he has been born a week.
Mary believed Shelley’s story that he and Harriet had separated by mutual agreement—hence her sarcasm about the “deserted
wife.” Just as she could read Shelley’s comments in their mutual journal, so this one was there for him to notice.
As Shelley spent more time with Claire, Mary in turn began to welcome Hogg’s company. She wrote eleven platonic but coquettish
love letters to him in the early months of 1815. “You love me you say —” she wrote on New Year’s Day, “I wish I could return
it with the passion you deserve.” On January 24, calling him “Alexy,” after the sensuous hero of Hogg’s recently published
novel (a hero obviously based on Shelley, who was the only person to review the book), she said, “I hope it will cheer your
solitude to find this letter from me that you may read & kiss before you go to sleep. . . . I know how much how tenderly you
love me and I rejoice to think that I am capable of constituting your happiness.” But there is no reason to believe that Mary
consummated the relationship with Hogg or that she was ever in love with him. Indeed she seems to have wanted to like him
more than she actually did. She left no doubt that Shelley was her one true love.
As Mary’s pregnancy advanced, it grew ever more troublesome. She suffered from bleeding and had to stay in bed for much of
the time. That gave rise to one of Shelley’s nicknames for her: the “Dormouse.” (He also called her “Maie” and “Pecksie,”
the latter a name from a children’s book; she sometimes used it to refer to herself in letters to Hogg and Shelley.) Mary
must have been frightened, for she was only seventeen and must have remembered the tragic outcome of her own birth. Nonetheless,
Shelley, like Mary’s father, seemed incapable of responding to her emotional needs. By January Shelley was turning more and
more of his attention to Claire, who took Mary’s place on their daily walks. Mary let her annoyance show in her journal entries:
one read, “Very ill all day. S and J. out all day hopping about the town.”
The Godwins had long suspected what Mary now perceived: Claire too was smitten with Percy and used her freaky moments to help
arouse his interest in her. The two shared a tendency to emotional excess and Shelley enjoyed his role as her intellectual
mentor. It is quite possible that during the winter of 1814-15, Shelley and Claire became lovers. Percy had always been in
favor of free love on principle. Mary obviously hoped that, following his betrayal of Harriet, it would remain a principle
rather than a reality, but Claire later described Shelley as “the Man whom I have loved, and from whom I have suffered much.”