Shelley: The Pursuit Read Free Page A

Chartism.
    In a field across which immense troops of scholars are now constantly being deployed, one hesitates to claim originality. The reader who asks what is literally ‘new’ partly misunderstands the nature of this kind of biographical research. It is more the case that perspectives change, ‘old’ facts and events and documents take on new significance and relations, while fresh local research puts events and experiences in a new setting, drawing in elements that before had not been given proper consideration. What is constantly new is not the past itself, but the way we look back on it. My book will be found to be different from previous biographies in several ways, apart from the original local research upon which it is based. I have used both Mary’s and Claire’s Journals more fully than previous writers, and for the first time I think Claire is given her full and proper place in Shelley’s life. I have offered fully documented reinterpretations of the two great biographical mysteries in Shelley’s career — the‘assassination’ attempt in Wales in 1813, and the problematical ‘Neapolitan’ child born in the winter of 1818. I have made constant reference to Shelley’s manuscript working notebooks in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in an attempt to show more clearly how Shelley’s great poetic themes were gradually conceived and progressively executed. Finally, I have redrawn the critical estimate of both Shelley’s major poetry and his prose, and attempted to set it as vividly as possible in its immediate physical setting, and against the disturbed and excited political period which brought it into being, and which flashes up through the years towards our own. This last is a comparison that I have never presumed to mention, since that has not been my task. But it stands there for anyone who has eyes to see, ears to hear, or heart to feel, sometimes so close that Shelley’s life seems more a haunting than a history.

SHELLEY

Illustrations: Section I

    1. Field Place, south façade: Shelley’s windows are on the first floor, to the right (photograph by Adrian Holmes)

    2. Sir Bysshe Shelley by Sir William Beechey

    3. Sir Timothy Shelley by George Romney

    4. Lady Elizabeth Shelley by George Romney

    5. Margaret and Hellen Shelley by an unknown artist

    6. ‘The Nightmare’ by Henry Fuseli

    7. Robert Southey in 1804 by H. Edridge

    8. T. L. Peacock by R. Jean

    9. Lynmouth, Devon: harbour and village. The site of Shelley’s house is on the extreme left

    10. Tan-y-rallt, Tremadoc: general view from the south

    11. Tan-y-rallt, the east windows and lawn

    12. Assailant’s target-view diagonally across drawing-room, from the east window to the south

    13. Copy of a drawing Shelley supposedly made of his Tan-y-rallt assailant. First published in (Century Magazine) 1905 — a myth in the making

    14. William Godwin by James Northcote

12. Up the River: Bishopsgate 1815
    During the summer months of June and July 1815, Shelley’s whereabouts in England is largely unknown. But what has survived suggests that he was in a state of great uncertainty about his immediate future. This was complicated by the first serious bout of his chronic abdominal illness, together with consumptive symptoms, which led him in July or August to put himself under the care of Sir William Lawrence, the eminent London consultant surgeon and medical author who wrote one of the early essays on modern evolutionary theory. It is not until the very end of August that he sent a calm, but strangely soulful letter to Hogg, announcing that he had finally taken a house near Peacock in Bishops-gate, and was living there quietly reading and writing with Mary. During the intervening months he had undergone a decisive change, one of the effects of which was the recommencement of his creative output. Another expression of this change was his decision to set up house properly with Mary, and to start a second family.
    This decision was not