Being Shelley The Poet's Search for Himself

Chapter 1: Substance In later life, Charles MacFarlane recalled the moment more or less exactly. He was standing in the Royal Bourbon Museum in Naples in February 1819, admiring a statue assumed to be of Agrippina, when someone at his shoulder murmured words. The remark had something to do with the statue's gracefulness, little enough in itself, though it seemed 'that sort of commonplace which is not heard from the vulgar'. MacFarlane remembered rather the voice, soft and strangely touching. The speaker was a gentleman of twenty-five or twenty-six, English, thin, with a delicate and negligent, even wild, appearance. They had not been introduced. Falling in together, they wandered from statue to statue for the rest of the afternoon. His new escort talked avidly of Beauty, Justice, the Venus di Medici ('all over a goddess!'), love of the Ideal and the astonishments of modern archaeology. At the end he shook MacFarlane's hand, thanked him heartily, and disappeared. MacFarlane realised that he still had no idea who his 'unknown friend' had been. No name had been proffered, no visiting card. Instead he was left with fragments of deep thought, like leaves from a private notebook. His mysterious companion had a past. You could learn from his acquaintances that he was Percy Bysshe Shelley, born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, in 1792, the first son of Timothy Shelley, landowner, sometime MP for New Shoreham and, since 1815, a baronet.The family was large: Shelley had four younger sisters and a brother 14 years his junior. He had been schooled at Syon House Academy and Eton, where he excelled in Latin composition; and at University College, Oxford, where after one term, in March 1811, he had been expelled with his best friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, for writing a pamphlet entitledThe Necessity of Atheism. He had eloped the next August, aged nineteen, with a schoolgirl of sixteen, Harriet Westbrook; and then, that marriage having failed, had run off in 1814 with the almost-as-young Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin, the philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a champion of the rights of women. With Mary and her sixteen-year-old step-half-sister, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont, he had journeyed for six weeks through France and Germany in a sort ofmenage a trois, and had set up a household with the girls on returning. As a result of this extraordinary behaviour his father had severed all connection with him, leaving Shelley for a time almost destitute; and despite his eventual marriage to Mary Godwin, the Lord Chancellor in 1817 had deprived him, on the double grounds of immorality and atheism, of the two infant children of his first marriage. From boyhood he had written poems, as well as political tracts and the odd romantic novel. According to taste these were tedious, blasphemous or immoral, though a few saw beauty and genius in them. For a while, fearing that he had Jacobin tendencies and meant to revolutionise England in the style seen so recently in France, the government watched him, but most of his writings proved too obscure to be subversive. Disheartened and discredited, and convinced (for he had never retracted either his atheism or his singular notions of morality) that his two children by Mary Godwin would also be taken from him, he had left England in March 1818 for Italy. And there he seemed likely to remain. MacFarlane later learned a little of this, including Shelley's name, from mutual friends who formally introduced them. On a subsequent day they drove out in a carriage as far as Pompeii, hurtling crazily along to the ruins and back, and visited a macaroni factory where his companion, like a schoolboy, exulted in the giant levers that pressed out the pasta and, as he left, gave his small change to beggars. Of his liWroe, Ann is the author of 'Being Shelley The Poet's Search for Himself', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375424939 and ISBN 0375424938.