Percy Bysshe Shelley
Horsham, 1792 - 1822, near Viareggio
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), poet.
Biography:
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), poet, was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, the eldest son of Timothy, afterwards Sir Timothy Shelley, baronet (1753–1844), and his wife, Elizabeth (1763–1846), daughter of Charles Pilfold. He was baptized at Warnham, Sussex, on 7 September 1792.
1792–1811: early years and education
Shelley had four younger sisters and one younger brother: Elizabeth (1794–1831), to whom he was evidently close; Mary (1797–1884); Hellen (1799–1885), whose letters about Shelley's childhood, though written in the 1850s, are an invaluable mine of information (they are included in Hogg); Margaret (1801–1887); and John (1806–1866). The Shelley family had migrated to America in the person of the poet's great-grandfather Timothy (1700–1771). His son Sir Bysshe Shelley (1731–1815) returned to England, adding substantially to the family fortune and social status by two successive marriages, each involving elopement: the first with Mary Catherine Mitchell (1734–1760, married 1752); the second with Elizabeth Jane Sidney (1741–1781, married 1769).
Often Shelley is seen as something of a genetic mystery: where, it is asked, with his stolid background did he get his unique poetic genius? Perhaps his grandfather Sir Bysshe Shelley, a domineering figure, offers something of an answer. In a letter of 1812 Shelley wrote of him with distaste as ‘a bad man’ and ‘a curse on society’ for whom he ‘never had respect’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.239). Yet Shelley may have had more in common with his grandfather than he cared to notice. Edmund Blunden sees in a portrait of Sir Bysshe the depiction of ‘a sort of mystic, who trusted in the discovery of truths less by system than by sudden light through the clouds’ (Blunden, 18). Certainly Shelley inherited his intrepid courage and resoluteness.
The poet's father—well-meaning, decent, and utterly conventional—was a member of parliament for New Shoreham, a borough controlled by the duke of Norfolk, who was a supporter of the whig leader, Charles James Fox. Shelley grew up, therefore, in a climate sympathetic to whig notions of liberty, notions that had some influence on, even as they were outdone by, his mature political views; he assumed (as is witnessed by a letter he wrote to Leigh Hunt while at Oxford) that on attaining twenty-one he would enter public life, filling his father's seat (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.55). At the same time Shelley would have noticed, as Hunt points out in an incisive analysis of the ‘Whig Aristocrats’ to whom the poet's family belonged, the gap between ‘professed demands of what is right and noble’ and ‘real inculcations of what is wrong and full of hypocrisy’ (Holmes, 12–13).
Shelley's mother is usually treated as a peripheral presence in his life. But there is a growing recognition that she (and the family dynamics of which she and her son were a central part) may well provide a key to understanding the poet's complex personality. Shelley was largely silent about her, and yet his poetry shows a strong concern with the relations between mother and child, as well as between father and child. To judge from scattered anecdotes and the portrait of her by George Romney painted in May 1795, Elizabeth Shelley was an attractive, somewhat formidable woman who took pride in her son's cleverness; she liked to talk of his learning by heart, after one reading, Gray's ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’. Shelley grew up in a largely female household, much admired by his sisters. Elizabeth left no record of her memories, but Hellen remembered her considerably older brother as ‘full of cheerful fun’ if somewhat wild, telling his sisters stories of ghosts, alchemists, and the ‘“Great Tortoise” that lived in Warnham Pond’, and given to nocturnal walks, flights of fancy, and experiments involving ‘electricity’ (Hogg, 1.25, 22, 25, 23). There is a sense in poems such as the rhapsodic Epipsychidion (1821) that Shelley tries to create in imagination some equivalent to the emotional harmony he had known as a boy, the centre of female attention.
At the age of six Shelley went daily to the school run by the curate at Warnham, the Revd Evan Edwards. Here he began to learn Latin and Greek, languages of great importance for his poetic development; his father, thinking to make Shelley ‘a good and gentlemanly Scholar’ (Blunden, 12), no doubt hoped that a grounding in the classics would help his son's political career. When Shelley was ten he transferred to Syon House Academy, Isleworth, with his older cousin Thomas Medwin. The school was run by the Revd Dr Greenlaw and was not enjoyed by Shelley, who ‘passed among his schoolfellows’, according to Medwin, ‘as a strange and unsocial being’ (Mullan, 145). There is a drawing, probably of Shelley at this age, by Antoine-Philippe, duc de Montpensier. It shows a sensitive but determined face, with a strong nose, firm mouth, and calm eyes. At Syon House Shelley was teased and bullied, yet he found refuge from the traumas of school in reading Gothic romances. Here he attended lectures by Adam Walker on nature and science, which fired his imagination; the final act of Prometheus Unbound (1820) is the fruit of his passion for a type of scientific enquiry appropriately described as ‘speculative and imaginative’ (Holmes, 16).
In 1804 Shelley went to Eton College. There he was tormented, as at Syon House, by his fellows, especially in his early years at the school. The headmaster until 1809 was Dr Goodall, a jovial figure; in 1809 he gave way to his assistant John Keate, a sterner disciplinarian. At Eton, Shelley showed a characteristic refusal to submit to authority (he disliked the practice of fagging) as well as a capacity for anger in the face of injustice which stayed with him, for both good and ill. The poet who flayed political oppression in The Mask of Anarchy (1819) was also the young man who wrote some singularly violent letters to his father and sharply recriminating letters to his deserted first wife. One schoolfellow, W. H. Merle, recalled his response to the ‘practical jokes’ to which he was subjected as ‘a paroxysm of anger which made his eyes flash like a tiger's’ (Blunden, 27). During his time at Eton, Shelley excelled in composing Latin verse; he translated half of Pliny's Natural History, and came into contact with Dr James Lind, a scholar who served as something of a mentor and father figure for Shelley. Indeed, his final years at school seem to have been relatively happy. He enjoyed walking in the vicinity of the school, and a friend, Halliday, recalled ‘the sparkling poetry of his mind’ which ‘shone out of his speaking eye, when he was dwelling on anything good or great’ (ibid., 28). Shelley was still at Eton when he wrote and published a Gothic romance called Zastrozzi (Wilkie and Robinson, 1810). Like its successor St Irvyne, or, The Rosicrucian (published during Shelley's first term at Oxford by John Joseph Stockdale in December 1810, despite the 1811 date on its title-page), Zastrozzi attempts to cash in on the vogue for sensationalist fiction. But both novels warrant attention as looking ahead, in their concern with oppression, revolt, and subversion, to Shelley's more mature use of Gothic elements.
When Shelley went up to University College, Oxford, in 1810 he was already a published poet, the co-author with his sister Elizabeth of Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, published by Stockdale in 1810 but withdrawn after the discovery that one poem had been plagiarized from Monk Lewis. (Shelley blamed Elizabeth for this.) Some lyrics addressed to Shelley's cousin Harriet Grove (1791–1867), with whom he was in love, have an ease and grace that look ahead to much finer work, and hint at the metrical command characteristic of his mature writing. The budding love affair with Harriet Grove was a casualty of Shelley's increasingly fervent opposition to Christianity, an opposition which culminated in his expulsion from University College on 25 March 1811 after refusing to disavow authorship of The Necessity of Atheism (printed in Worthing by C. and W. Phillips in 1811). This work was co-written with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who was also expelled, after insisting that he share Shelley's punishment. According to Hogg, Shelley was presented at his interview with a sentence of expulsion that had already been ‘drawn up in due form, under the seal of the college’ (Hogg, 1.169). Hogg was a fellow student at University College, and Shelley's closest friend at Oxford. In his Life he has left a vivid if mischievous portrait of Shelley the undergraduate: a poetic genius, intellectually brilliant, and devoted to liberty in all forms, and yet the object of the biographer's worldly amusement. Hogg likes to present Shelley as wildly eccentric, snatching a baby from its mother's arms on Magdalen Bridge to see whether it would ‘tell us anything about pre-existence’ (ibid., 1.147), or falling asleep in front of a fire ‘like a cat’ (ibid., 1.59) before waking up and plunging straightaway into argument or reciting verse. These anecdotes, like so many told about Shelley, seem at once melodramatic and to contain a germ of truth. Hogg also praises Shelley's ‘pure, entire, and perfect gentility’ (ibid., 1.130). This quality, blended ‘intimately with his entire nature’, was commented on by many of Shelley's friends: according to Byron ‘Never did a more finished gentleman than Shelley step across a drawing-room!’ (ibid.); for him Shelley was ‘the most gentle, most amiable, and least worldly-minded person I ever met’ (Cameron, 87).
Shelley found the university academically uninspiring, but he continued with his reading and scientific experiments. Hogg claims that he helped Shelley to compose the seemingly burlesque but covertly anti-establishment collection of poems, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (published by Munday in 1810), an early example of Shelley's ability to deploy humour for serious ends. If that work failed to stir suspicion, The Necessity of Atheism went out of its way to provoke: its nonchalant conclusion, ‘Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.’ (Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 5), was, in particular, designed to vex the bishops, heads of colleges, and clergymen to whom the authors sent their pamphlet, often under assumed names.
1811–1814: first marriage and youthful writings
The expulsion from Oxford heralded a difficult period in Shelley's life. He moved to London, taking lodgings with Hogg at 15 Poland Street. His relations with his father deteriorated as he resisted Sir Timothy's attempts to make him forswear his atheism. At a loss to know how to manage his wayward son, Sir Timothy placed responsibility for dealing with Shelley with his solicitor William Whitton. Shelley, meanwhile, embarked on a period of restless wandering and growing involvement in political agitation. In August of this year he eloped with and married Harriet Westbrook (1795–1816), a fellow pupil of his sisters at a school in Clapham. Harriet was the sixteen-year-old daughter of the well-off owner of a coffee house. In an age of sharp social divisions she would have been regarded as beneath Shelley, and it cannot have been lost on her parents and her considerably older sister Eliza (b. 1782), who would become one of Shelley's bitterest enemies, that a match between her and the heir to Field Place would have its advantages. Unhappy at her school, Harriet wrote plaintively to Shelley, who had gone in July to Cwm Elan in Radnorshire, the estate of his cousin Thomas Grove, and who was maintaining an impressive if high-flown correspondence with Elizabeth Hitchener, a Sussex schoolteacher known to his uncle Captain Pilfold. The young poet described to Hogg the gist of Harriet's most significant letter thus: ‘she would fly with me, & threw herself on my protection’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.131). The couple eloped, arriving in Edinburgh on 28 August, where they were soon joined by Hogg, and, despite Shelley's objections to marriage as fettering free enquiry, were married the next day. It was to prove among the most fateful events in Shelley's life.
An immediate consequence was the breakdown of Shelley's relationship with his father, who cut off his allowance and ceased to communicate with his son. An indignant letter from Shelley to his father in October tells Sir Timothy, ‘You have treated me ill, vilely’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.149). Shelley had by this stage moved to 20 Coney Street, York. During this period his letters to his father oscillate between self-justification and an implicit desire for his father's approval. Late in October he visited Cuckfield, staying with Captain Pilfold, and causing considerable turmoil, partly by accusing his mother of having an affair with Edward Graham, a music teacher and protégé of Shelley's parents. On his return to York, Shelley discovered that Hogg had taken his friend's anti-matrimonial beliefs with inappropriate literalness and had tried to seduce Harriet. Shelley's letters to Hogg from Keswick, to which he, Harriet, and Eliza Westbrook (who had joined Harriet in York during Shelley's absence) had now moved, declare love for and disapproval of Hogg in equal measure, and it is clear that he was devastated by the temporary breakdown of their friendship.
In Keswick, Shelley met and exchanged ideas with Robert Southey, who treated the young radical poet with sympathy and middle-aged scepticism: ‘he has a very happy knack’, Shelley wrote to Hitchener, ‘when truth goes against him of saying, “Ah! when you are as old as I am you will think with me”’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.223). Shelley grew disenchanted with Southey, but the encounter made a powerful impact on both men. Shelley quotes Southey's remark that the younger man was ‘not an Atheist but a Pantheist’ (ibid., 1.219), while Southey, on whom Shelley acted as his ‘own ghost’, put Shelley ‘upon a course of Berkeley’ (ibid.), which led ultimately to Shelley's formulation of his own ‘intellectual philosophy’ (Reiman and Powers, 477) in his essay ‘On life’ (1819). Southey appears to have discussed Wordsworth with Shelley, who sent off to Hitchener an early version of what ended up as ‘A Tale of Society as it is, from Facts’, a poem that shows Wordsworthian influence in its plain diction and sensitive rhythms. This poem was included in a collection of his early work transcribed in the so-called ‘Esdaile Notebook’, which Shelley tried but failed to have published in 1813.
In January 1812 Shelley began a significant correspondence with William Godwin, the author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and the poet's future father-in-law. Political Justice, which Shelley may have first read while still at Eton, exercised a durable influence over his mind: he told Godwin that it changed him from ‘the votary of Romance’ into someone aware he ‘had duties to perform’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.227–8). Godwin's belief that human beings must be guided by rational self-rule and his faith in perfectibility pervade much of Shelley's mature work. Tension, however, as much as devotion is apparent in their relationship, and Shelley's visit to Ireland (February–April 1812) in support of agitation to repeal the Act of Union and secure Catholic emancipation was frowned on by his mentor, who preferred a quieter way of working towards a better world. Shelley wrote two pamphlets on Irish affairs, An Address, to the Irish People, aimed at poor Irish Catholics and energetically distributed by the young aristocrat, who threw copies at likely passers-by from his balcony in Sackville Street, and Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists, which is especially notable for its analysis of what went wrong with the French Revolution and for its commitment to the Godwinian belief that ‘We are in a state of continually progressive improvement’ (Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 52). Shelley's involvement in Ireland's troubled politics was short-lived but more than merely farcical. At the very least, his efforts brought him up hard against the obdurate realities of specific political problems.
Finally responding to Godwin's objections, Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza departed from Dublin on 4 April to live in a variety of dwellings, first in Nantgwillt, Radnorshire, then, briefly, in June with the Groves at Cwm Elan where Shelley wrote ‘The Retrospect’, among his most accomplished and self-revealing earlier poems. By the end of June the party was living in Lynmouth in north Devon. Here Shelley completed and distributed his prose work A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, protesting against Lord Ellenborough's harsh sentencing (prison and pillory) of Daniel Isaac Eaton, a radical bookseller. With Elizabeth Hitchener, who joined the Shelley household in mid-July, he distributed copies of the revolutionary A Declaration of Rights and the broadsheet ballad ‘The Devil's Walk’ by various means, including bottles thrown into the sea and even home-made fire balloons. In August Daniel Healey, Shelley's Irish servant, was arrested in Barnstaple for posting copies of A Declaration of Rights and imprisoned for six months, an event which brought Shelley's radical activities to the attention of the Home Office. The decision was taken not to prosecute Shelley for his seditious behaviour, but to have him watched. In the meantime, however, Shelley, with his female companions, left Lynmouth, giving the authorities the slip, and virtually stumbled on the would-be model village of Tremadoc created by William Madocks out of land reclaimed from the sea. Shelley supported this project, but over the months he came into conflict with local interests, a conflict culminating in his forced departure from his rented house (Tan-yr-Allt) in February 1813, after supposedly grappling with and being shot at by (and possibly himself firing at) a nocturnal assailant. Traditionally dismissed in the words of Thomas Love Peacock as a ‘sort of semi-delusion’ (Mullan, 315), Shelley's account of the incident has recently received cautious endorsement.
Between late 1812 and July 1814 Shelley's personal life went through a phase of great turbulence. In October 1812 he first met Godwin and through him other figures such as the eccentric John Frank Newton, whose vegetarian and Zoroastrian ideas made a considerable impression on the poet; about this time, too, he met Peacock, a man different in temperament from Shelley, but sharing with him and, indeed, doing much to foster in the younger poet over the years a love of classical literature: a love with heterodox ideological implications. In November 1812 Elizabeth Hitchener, who had, in Harriet's words, turned out to be a ‘great disappointment’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.331), left Shelley's household in a manner that suggests she was virtually expelled. Shelley emerges somewhat tarnished from the affair. To Hogg he acknowledged the ‘fatuity, inconsistency, and bad taste’ apparent in his idealization of his former Platonic soulmate, now known as the ‘Brown Demon’ (ibid., 1.336), and he arranged to pay her a small stipend.
After leaving Tan-yr-Allt, Shelley spent a few weeks in Dublin and Killarney. From Dublin he wrote to the publisher Thomas Hookham of his new poem Queen Mab, which should, he instructed, be printed ‘on fine paper & so as to catch the aristocrats’ whose sons and daughters Shelley hoped to reach (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.361), revealing his abiding and often shrewd concern for audience. Breathing indignation against tyranny in fiercely denunciatory blank verse, and containing eloquent essay-like notes on such subjects as the evils of meat-eating and marriage, Queen Mab shows the youthful radical poet in quintessential form. Shelley decided against publication, but he distributed some seventy copies to individuals. Frequently pirated, the poem was easily the most widely read of Shelley's poems for many years and inspired the Chartists and others. Subtitled ‘A Philosophical Poem’, the poem displays the range of Shelley's early intellectual interests, and forms something of a compendium of Enlightenment ideas. Queen Mab is especially influenced by the materialism of the philosophes. Preferring the impersonal concept of Necessity to the Christian notion of God, it is pervaded by a vision of existence as dynamic and capable of endless betterment.
In 1813 Shelley's money problems, which dogged him throughout his life, were acute, involving him, in October, in taking out a ‘post-obit’ loan of £2000 for £500. A daughter, Eliza Ianthe, was born to Shelley and Harriet in June 1813, but the first evidence of rifts between husband and wife appear in this year, when Shelley writes to Hogg in November that ‘I shall return to London alone’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.379–80). In the same year Shelley came to know Mme de Boinville and her daughter Cornelia, with whom he appears to have been briefly in love; Mme de Boinville was the widow of a French soldier who died during the retreat from Moscow in February 1813, and as late as April 1819 Shelley expressed his retrospective admiration for her, partly because of her sympathy for recent French history, as ‘the most admirable specimen of a human being I had ever seen’ (ibid., 2.92). In 1814 Shelley turned for comfort to Mme de Boinville and Cornelia as his ties with Harriet began to unravel; the domestic unhappiness he was experiencing, especially with regard to the influence exercised by Eliza Westbrook, and the tug of the Boinville household underlie his affecting ‘Stanzas.—April, 1814’, a poem whose rhythmic pulse quickens and slows in expressive ways. At the same time his interest in theological polemic resurfaces in his cunningly organized dialogue A Refutation of Deism, anonymously published in 1814. Though he remarried Harriet in March to ensure her legal status as his wife, Shelley's emotional restlessness is apparent in his actions and in certain verses. He began to feel, so he later told Hogg, that his marriage had failed, ‘as if a dead & living body had been linked together in loathsome & horrible communion’ (ibid., 1.402), and in May and June of 1814 he formed a passionate relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797–1851) [see Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft], his mentor's daughter. After a period of some anguish and self-division, he chose and was chosen by Mary, both these creative geniuses embarking on the most significant relationship of their lives after Mary told Shelley of her love beside the grave of her illustrious mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in St Pancras churchyard. Shelley spoke to Godwin of their feelings, but Godwin expressed disapproval of the relationship.
The upshot was Shelley's and Mary's secret elopement to the continent on 28 July. Mary's half-sister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont (1798–1879) accompanied them at Shelley's last minute suggestion, refusing to turn back at Calais, despite the pleas of her mother, the second Mrs Godwin, who had pursued and caught up with the runaways. Thus was fostered a triangular relationship that grew increasingly troubled over the years, and caused Mary, in particular, much distress. However, Shelley developed with Claire an intimate friendship of great importance to him. The three escapees travelled through France (where they witnessed the recent devastation caused by the Napoleonic wars) to Switzerland, and then by river back to Rotterdam, before returning to London. Shelley began The Assassins, a fragment of a novel, of interest for its attempt to imagine an ideal community.
Harriet lamented that Shelley had been seduced by Godwin's daughter and ideas, and had ceased to be the man she loved. Despite Shelley's quixotic offer in a letter from Switzerland that she should still live under his protection, their relations deteriorated over the year. As Harriet struggled to negotiate with Shelley, she received a number of coldly offensive letters from him, best understood as showing on Shelley's part repressed guilt about his decision to abandon his wife and daughter. As in other crises in his life, where Shelley's need to think well of himself was threatened by the possibility that others might criticize his conduct, his response to Harriet was to assert an ideal self-image. But despite his declaration in September 1814 that ‘You are plainly lost to me’ (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1.398), some measure of the messy intricacy of their relations is given by the fact that at the end of November their second child, Charles, was born. Shelley, Mary, and Claire spent the latter half of 1814 in a variety of London lodgings, including 56 Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, 5 Church Terrace, St Pancras, the Cross Keys inn in St John's Street, and 2 Nelson Square, Blackfriars Road. Often Shelley was on the run from bailiffs and creditors, able to meet the now pregnant Mary only intermittently.
1815–1816: poetry, travel, suicides
Shelley's financial difficulties were temporarily solved after the death of his grandfather Sir Bysshe in January 1815. He immediately took a large apartment at Hans Place in London. Leaving Mary with Hogg, Shelley went with Claire to Field Place for the reading of the will, but he was not permitted to enter the house; he awaited the outcome of the will sitting on the front steps, where he read Milton's Comus. The resulting settlement with his father (finalized in May) gave Shelley a lump sum of £4500 as well as a sum of £2900 to settle outstanding debts (which Shelley did only to a limited extent: unpaid creditors included Thomas Charters, from whom Shelley had ordered a carriage in 1813, and the Nash brothers, moneylenders from whom Shelley borrowed a large sum, also in 1813). By the financial arrangement Shelley also received a yearly allowance of £1000, to be paid quarterly, of which he agreed to give £200 per year to Harriet; he also paid Harriet a sum of £200 to cope with immediate difficulties. Shelley gave Godwin £1000, though that did little to stop the older man's demands for money.
The opening months of 1815 are harder to reconstruct than most periods in Shelley's life because relevant sections of Mary's (and Shelley's) journals have been destroyed. These sections may have documented his efforts to set up a shared community of friends, in which, in addition to the central relationship between himself and Mary, there would be a close intimacy (possibly sexual) between Mary and Hogg, as well as a tutor–pupil relationship between himself and Claire. Mary's letters to Hogg during this period suggest a flirtation just stopping short of sexual intimacy, and it is to Hogg she wrote for consolation after the death on 6 March of her unnamed baby daughter, who had been born prematurely on 22 February. Mary's relationship with Hogg did not survive long. Her jealousy with regard to Shelley and Claire was longer-lasting and made for difficulties, as it would throughout Shelley's life. As a result Claire temporarily left the Shelley household in May; she returned in the spring of 1816 when she pursued Lord Byron, having a brief affair with him that led to the birth of their daughter, Allegra.
It is in 1815 that Shelley emerges as a major poet, composing by the end of the year the blank-verse poem Alastor, his enigmatic and haunting study of longing, desire, and what in the ‘Preface’ he calls ‘self-centred seclusion’ (Reiman and Powers, 69). The poem was partly inspired by a boat trip taken by Shelley, Mary, Peacock, and Charles Clairmont in August up the Thames from Windsor lock (Shelley had rented a house in Bishopsgate, at the edge of Windsor Great Park) to Lechlade, and back again. Shelley's atmospheric and sceptically hopeful lyric ‘A Summer Evening Church-Yard’ was written at Lechlade, and included in a volume entitled Alastor, or, The Spirit of Solitude; and other Poems, published by Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy in February 1816 after Shelley had offered the title poem to John Murray, Byron's publisher. The volume also contained much revised versions of the first two cantos of Queen Mab, published under the title ‘The Daemon of the World’, along with another revised section (entitled ‘Superstition’) from canto 6. In style and theme Alastor shows the influence of Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) and its portrait of the disillusioned Solitary. While Shelley disliked Wordsworth's reactionary politics (as he saw them), Alastor reveals that he now regarded the question of the poet's role as provoking dilemmas. Furnished with an epigraph from St Augustine about wanting to love while not finding what to love, the poem, in its brooding introspection, is a world away from the explicit radicalism of Queen Mab. Alastor is at some level an elegy for Shelley's failed marriage with Harriet. It gives readers access, however obliquely, to Shelley's deepest feelings about that failure, and its sources in his compulsion to idealize. It sold reasonably well, though the reviews were not especially favourable, giving Shelley his first taste of the relative critical neglect which his published poems encountered during his lifetime.
In January 1816 Mary and Shelley's son William was born at Bishopsgate. Over the next few months Shelley moved with his family (by now including Claire once more) into several lodging addresses in London: 13 Norfolk Street, 32 Norfolk Street, and 26 Marchmont Street. On 3 May they left for the continent, partly driven to do so by continuing financial problems arising out of the decision by chancery not to allow the arrangement agreed between Shelley and his father the previous year (whereby Shelley would sell to his father the rights of reversion granted him by his grandfather's will). Shelley's party arrived in Paris on 8 May, leaving two days later for Geneva so that Claire could be near Byron; they got there on 13 May, first staying in Secheron, at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, where Byron arrived with Dr Polidori in late May. The poets, introduced by Claire, began a major, if sometimes fraught, personal and poetic friendship. Polidori, a somewhat trying presence, found Shelley ‘bashful, shy, consumptive’ at first meeting, but soon came to view him as ‘very clever’ (Mullan, 418). Early in June Shelley moved to a small cottage close to Lake Geneva near Cologny, while a few days later Byron took up residence in the Villa Diodati, a rather grander house once lived in by Milton. Shelley and Byron talked and sailed together, making an extended trip round the lake towards the end of June, during which they visited various places made famous by Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau is the subject of ambivalent stanzas in canto 3 of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, much of which was written in his stay at Geneva, and reflects the influence of Shelley and his advocacy of Wordsworth's poetry. Other works which resulted from this creative summer include Mary's Frankenstein, inspired, in part, by Shelley's and Byron's ideas: ‘Many and long’, she would later write, ‘were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener’ (Holmes, 328). Shelley contributed to the composition of the novel (the manuscript shows substantial additions and corrections in his hand), and the helpfulness of his interventions has been a matter of controversy. Readers can now study the evidence in Charles E. Robinson's facsimile edition; on balance, it is clear that the novel's composition repr
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