The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Critical Biography

John Worthen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781118534045
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118534038
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing especially on the many scholarly discoveries of recent years, this biography examines the life – and death ? of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Based on sceptical historical investigation and featuring an in-depth look at Shelley's personal, financial and familial situation, it builds a compelling narrative about a controversial writer and thinker whose personal and philosophical convictions caused much turmoil during his short yet extraordinarily influential life.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals sides of the author not often studied. It looks at Shelley as an intensely loving, thoughtful and responsible man and father, who (except in one case) took exemplary care of the women he loved and who fell in love with him. It shows how significant his status as a gentleman was; it examines his poetry, letters, notebooks  and discursive prose so that readers can comprehend the most important concerns of his life; it explores the financial and medical grounds for his years of exile; it is also the first biography to take account of his  recently discovered early long poem  the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.

This biography offers readers a unique look at a famous poet, scholar, gentleman, democrat, atheist and tragic icon of English Romanticism.

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 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 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 landowni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Texts
• Foreword
• Part I: Background, Foreground 1792–1811
• Part II: Lover of Mankind, Democrat & Atheist 1811–1818
• Part III: Expatriation 1818–1821
• Part IV: No Rest or Respite 1821–1822
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement