Mr.Timothy Shelley appeared on the scene, and, his feelings as a Christian and a father deeply outraged, did the worst thing he could possibly have done--he made forgiveness conditional on his son's giving up his friend.The next step was to cut off supplies and to forbid Field Place to him, lest he should corrupt his sisters' minds.Soon Hogg had to go to York to work in a conveyancer's office, and Shelley was left alone in London, depressed, a martyr, and determined to save others from similar persecution.In this mood he formed a connection destined to end in tragedy.His sisters were at a school at Clapham, where among the girls was one Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper.Shelley became intimate with the Westbrooks, and set about saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a neat figure, and a glib school-girl mind quick to catch up and reproduce his doctrines.The child seems to have been innocent enough, but her elder sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as a bait to entangle the future baronet; she played on Shelley's feelings by encouraging Harriet to believe herself the victim of tyranny at school.Still, it was six months before he took the final step.How he could save Harriet from scholastic and domestic bigotry was a grave question.In the first place, hatred of "matrimonialism" was one of his principles, yet it seemed unfair to drag a helpless woman into the risks of illicit union; in the second place, he was at this time passionately interested in another woman, a certain Miss Hitchener, a Sussex school mistress of republican and deistic principles, whom he idealised as an angel, only to discover soon, with equal falsity, that she was a demon.At last Harriet was worked up to throw herself on his protection.They fled by the northern mail, dropping at York a summons to Hogg to join them, and contracted a Scottish marriage at Edinburgh on August 28, 1811.
The story of the two years and nine months during which Shelley lived with Harriet must seem insane to a rational mind.Life was one comfortless picnic.When Shelley wanted food, he would dart into a shop and buy a loaf or a handful of raisins.
Always accompanied by Eliza, they changed their dwelling-place more than twelve times.Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt, Killarney, London (Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburgh again, and Windsor, successively received this fantastic household.Each fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, and each formed the base of operations for some new scheme of comprehensive beneficence.Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh coast, Shelley embarked on the construction of an embankment to reclaim a drowned tract of land; 'Queen Mab' was written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales; and from Ireland, where he had gone to regenerate the country, he opened correspondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of 'Political Justice'.His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal relations was as great as that which he threw into philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly.Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman of estimable qualities, quickly became "a blind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting", Miss Hitchener, who had been induced to give up her school and come to live with them "for ever," was discovered to be a "brown demon," and had to be pensioned off.He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted apart, and he found consolation in a sentimental attachment to a Mrs.Boinville and her daughter, Cornelia Turner, ladies who read Italian poetry with him and sang to guitars.Harriet had borne him a daughter, Ianthe, but she herself was a child, who soon wearied of philosophy and of being taught Latin; naturally she wanted fine clothes, fashion, a settlement.Egged on by her sister, she spent on plate and a carriage the money that Shelley would have squandered on humanity at large.Money difficulties and negotiations with his father were the background of all this period.On March 24, 1814, he married Harriet in church, to settle any possible question as to the legitimacy of his children; but they parted soon after.
Attempts were made at reconciliation, which might have.
succeeded had not Shelley during this summer drifted into a serious and relatively permanent passion.He made financial provision for his wife, who gave birth to a second child, a boy, on November 30, 1814; but, as the months passed, and Shelley was irrevocably bound to another, she lost heart for life in the dreariness of her father's house.An Irish officer took her for his mistress, and on December 10, 1816, she was found drowned in the Serpentine.Twenty days later Shelley married his second wife.
This marriage was the result of his correspondence with William Godwin, which had ripened into intimacy, based on community of principles, with the Godwin household.The philosopher, a short, stout old man, presided, with his big bald head, his leaden complexion, and his air of a dissenting minister, over a heterogeneous family at 41 Skinner Street, Holborn, supported in scrambling poverty by the energy of the second Mrs.Godwin, who carried on a business of publishing children's books.In letters of the time we see Mrs.Godwin as a fat little woman in a black velvet dress, bad-tempered and untruthful."She is a very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles," said Charles Lamb.Besides a small son of the Godwins, the family contained four other members--Clara Mary Jane Clairmont and Charles Clairmont (Mrs.Godwin's children by a previous marriage), Fanny Godwin (as she was called), and Mary Godwin.
