13. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 382-421

Two: America; 38-41

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Mr. Dimdown had been a passenger in the coach -- a foppish young man (a "macaroni" in the contemporary argot) who enjoyed flashing his "hanger" -- a cutlass. He "had been drinking steadily whatever Spirits came to hand, for the three days previous, attempting, as he explains, 'to get the Time to pass differently, that's all.'" His sudden attack on Allègre could have been fatal, but "Immediately, Inches short of its target, the Weapon, from no cause visible to anyone, leaves Dimdown's Grasp and sails across the Room in a slow, some might say insolent Arc, directly in among the blazing Logs of the Hearth, where none may reach."

The duck, it seems, has found Allègre, having developed the ability to fly "ever longer Distances." He explains that he had awakened "to find her perch'd at the end of the Bed, quacking merrily as a Milk-maid." He likens the duck to an angel, which reminds Frau Redzinger of her husband, Peter. But he is grateful after all that he left Europe for America, which he regards as a land of plenty: "the tomatoes, terrapins, peaches, rockfish, crabs, Indian Corn, Venison! Bear! Beaver! To create the Beaver Bourguignon, -- who knows, perhaps even the ... the Beaver soufflé, non?" And when Frau Redzinger reveals that she knows how to cook beaver, he falls in love. It is the making of a triangle: "the incorruptible Pietist, the exil'd Chef, and the infatuated Duck."

They are snowbound in the inn, and Mitzi is flirting with "the stable-hands and Scullery-Boys" as well as helping Allègre in the kitchen. And eventually she flirts with Dimdown, having rescued his sword from the ashes and sharpened it for him. She reports that Allègre "has forsworn Violence in the Kitchen, -- not only toward Meat, but the Vegetables as well, for as little now can he bring himself to chop and Onion, as to slice a Turnip, or even scrub a Mushroom. She also engineers an apology by Dimdown to Allègre

Meanwhile, Mason and Dixon are quarreling again, about Mason's melancholy and Dixon's expanding waistline. So when the snow stops, they decide to go about their mission separately, flipping a coin that sends Mason north and Dixon south. Dixon journeys as far as Williamsburg, where he discovers the colonials in an uproar over the Stamp Act. In "Raleigh's Tavern, Virginians young and old are standing to toast the King's Confoundment." When his turn comes to propose a toast, Dixon comes up with, "To the pursuit of Happiness." This attracts the notice of "a tall red-headed youth" who asks if he might use the phrase sometime. Discovering that Dixon is a surveyor, the young man asks, "are you Mason, or Dixon?" "'Tom takes a Relative interest in West Lines," quips the Landlord, "his father having help'd run the one that forms our own southern border." And so Dixon falls into conversation with Jefferson (though not identified as such in the novel).

Mason travels to New York, where he meets a young woman named Amelia, "a Milk-Maid of Brooklyn, somehow alone in New-York without funds." She "is dress'd from Boots to Bonnet all in different Articles of black, a curious choice for a milkmaid, it seems to Mason, tho', as he has been instructed ever to remind himself, this is New-York, where other Customs prevail." He feeds her  and accompanies her back to Brooklyn, where he finds himself among "an assortment of Rogues weirder than any Mason has yet seen, be it at Portsmouth, or the Cape, or even Lancaster Town." When he reveals that he's an astronomer and that he knows how to repair a telescope, he's asked to repair theirs, which Mason is perplexed to find has been trained on the horizon and not on the stars. The real problem with the instrument, however, is that the lenses have been knocked out of alignment. He agrees to repair it, and "Feeling not quite a Prisoner, Mason works thro' the Day."

Like Dixon, Mason is surrounded by angry talk about the Stamp Act. When someone says, "the Stamp Act is simple Tyranny, and our duty's to resist it,"

Mason expects shock'd murmurs at this, -- that there are none shocks him even more gravely, allowing him a brief, careening glimpse at how far and fast all this may be moving, -- something styling itself  'America,' coming into being, ripening, like a Tree-ful of Cherries in a good summer, almost as one stands and watches, -- something no one in London, however plac'd in the Web of Privilege, however up-to-the-minute, seems to know much about. What is happening? 

More shocking is the suggestion that he is a serf, "As they call it here, a Slave." He resists the idea, but when he tells them he's from Stroud, he's reminded of how then-Col. James Wolfe put down an effort by weavers in Stroud to bring about an increase in their wages:

Mason recalls well enough that autumn of '56, when the celebrated future Martyr of Quebec, with six companies of Infantry, occupied that unhappy town after wages were all cut in half ... and a weaver was lucky to earn tuppence for eight hours' work. Mason in those same Weeks was preparing to leave the Golden Valley, to begin his job as Bradley's assistant, even as Soldiers were beating citizens and slaughtering sheep for their pleasure, fouling and making sick Streams once holy, -- his father meantimes cursing his Son for a Coward.... Mason, seeing the Choices, had chosen Bradley, and Bradley's world, when he should instead have stood by his father, and their small doom'd Paradise. 

Having repaired the telescope, Mason is accompanied to New Jersey by a member of the group, Patsy, who bid him farewell with, "We could be at War, in another Year. What a Thought, hey?"

At this point, LeSpark reveals that he met Mason and Dixon at a "ridotto" at Lepton Castle on the "well-guarded, and in the estimate of some, iniquitous, Iron-Plantation of Lord and Lady Lepton." Mason and Dixon stumble upon the castle by accident, taking shelter one night in a cabin that, like the coach they rode in earlier, turns out to be larger inside than outside. They walk through corridors, hearing "new music, advanced music," and finally reach a grand hall where they are announced to the gathering as "Mr. Mason, and Mr. Dixon, Astronomers of London." Dixon's promotion to astronomer annoys Mason, but they proceed "into what, in London, is term'd an 'Hurricanoe,' -- a thick humidity of Intrigue and Masks realiz'd in locally obtained Fur and Plumage, clamorous with Chatter and what seems now more to resemble Dancing-Music."

Among the crowd Mason "belatedly recognizes the notorious Calvert agent Captain Dasp." Meeting Lady Lepton, Dixon recalls that he had seen her when they were both much younger, at Raby Castle. "Dixon ... is finding all this, to his delight, dangerously interesting."

Somehow this fearlessly independent Girl had then gone on to marry the ill-famed, the drooling and sneering, multiply-bepoxed Lord Lepton, an insatiate Gamester who failed to pay his losses, forever a-twittering, even as he tumbled to ruin in one of the period's more extravagant Stock-Bubbles, summarily ejected from Clubs high and low, advised by friend and enemy that his only decent course would be to step off the Edge of the World. 

Lepton took this to mean "go to America," where he made his fortune in iron. He is also rumored to be a member of the Hellfire Club.

The servants in the hall are black slaves in white wigs -- "black Major-domos and black Soubrettes. One of the latter passes by with a tray of drinks." She looks at Dixon as if she knows him. "For a frightening moment, he seems to know her." And Mason has recognized that Captain Dasp is a French spy. But "no one at the moment has anything but Gaming of one sort or another in mind."

11. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 295-313

Part IV: Fire, 1. Daring

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Shelley was drawn to fire both as symbol and as substance. He meditated on candle flames and glowing coals, and would sometimes sleep so close to the hearth that his "friends, wondering how he could bear it, moved him away and put a blanket on him, but he rolled back, throwing it aside.... He claimed to have the temperament of a salamander, a creature generated and nourished by flame." Naturally, the image of the moth drawn to the flame suited him, too. "In Epipsychidion he imagined his own moth's flight, unsteadily, towards apotheosis in the evening star."

As a boy he literally played with fire, including electricity, doing experiments and playing pranks. "Hogg claimed that analysis of fire especially intrigued his friend. Shelley wished to investigate all its properties, testing whether clay or stones or even water could be made to burn too.... His fascination with chemistry long outlasted Oxford.... He continued to read Humphry Davy (Elements of Chemical Philosophy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry) and to take notes on him. In consequence his visions kept the shocks and smoke of chemical and physical experiment: electrical charges, green-glowing Leyden jars, gases and combustion." When he was at Eton, "Chemistry books were banned as private reading, so he read them. Experiments were forbidden in the boys' rooms, so he performed them."

Later, he would perceive a connection between fire (and electricity) and life, inspired by his reading of Lucan's Pharsalia, in which a witch reanimates a corpse, and accounts of experiments in galvanism in London where audiences saw cadavers made to twitch and grin by electrical current. "He too beguiled the summer of 1816 by wondering how creatures might be put together and heated into life. But he left such things to Mary, and to Frankenstein." He knew of Newton's theory of "the mediating aether that surrounded the world. Electricity, magnetism, heat and light all surged through aether, as did Love."

Newton had discovered through the luminous aether God's presence in everything, life-giving and expanding. Shelley, at the peak of his materialism, grappled less piously with what aether was. "Is the electrical fluid material?" he asked an elderly physician with whom he was in earnest correspondence about these things.

But what he was really interested in was the Promethean Poet:

The best of writers -- Milton, Bacon, Bryon -- gathered up lightning in their wings and dispensed it as blinding, liberating light. They were eagles, fire-birds who could soar into the sun, or the light of Truth beyond the sun, and gaze on it until the scales of mere mortal dullness fell away from their eyes. It was impossible, Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry in 1821, "to read the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled by the electric life which burns within their words." The more revolutionary the truth, the more extreme the lightning: chasms, ravines, rivers of it, splitting the whole sky.

He was fascinated by scientific investigations into the nature of the sun, but was more absorbed by "the sun of myth and prophecy" and by the figure of Apollo, god of both the sun and poetry. "Shelley often saw himself as a mirror or a shield on which truth glanced and blazed, as it did from the sun." The poem by Keats that he most admired was "Hyperion, the story of Apollo's election as the new young god of the sun.... Keats had never finished Hyperion. His life had been extinguished first, his consumption apparently aggravated by the reviewers' bile. Shelley thought himself stronger and bolder, his shield-mirror dazzling, his arrows primed against the Critic." Poets were prophets, not in the fortune-telling sense, but as vehicles through which the god spoke, "often astonishing themselves as well as others.... The dictum of the Oracle at Delphi was a simple two-word command, the motto of Shelley's life: Know thyself. Through the sun-principle in himself, that truth-reflecting power, he intended to. But his ambitions, and his desire, could not end there."

6. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 147-181

Part II: Water, 2. Reflection from "What he also sought in water or in mirrors ..." through end. 3. Escape through "... leaned down towards an embrace."

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Reflections were also, in Shelley's Platonic idealism, a medium through which ultimate reality could be perceived. "The mind, Plato said, should be treated like an eye, guided gently from obscurity to light." For Shelley, the eye was also the window to the soul. He gazed deeply into Mary's eyes, and sketched images of eyes in his noteooks.

Eyes, he believed, became intricate from "the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment." Dreams, too, could be read there. In their "mazy depth of colour behind colour" he could lose himself with looking, as Narcissus did, at his own idealised image reflected in the mind of another.... In deepest thought, using the inner eye of his mind, he could sometimes begin to observe within himself the bright form of which Shelley, with his lined cheeks and greying hair, was only the mortal shadow.... Hence the hours spent musing by ponds and pools and, in female company, the uncomfortable intensity of his longing, blue-eyed stare. 

It was Southey, whom Shelley visited in 1811, who suggested he read Berkeley, who conceived of reality as "a construct of mind." He didn't go to the solipsistic extreme, but argued, "Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive." He also posited a universal Mind, not a divinity to be worshiped but "a source from which his thoughts drew energy." This concept was reinforced by an Alpine epiphany in the summer of 1816 in which he "sensed a presence in the mountains" when he visited the glacier at Chamounix.

As he picnicked with Mary and Claire at the glacier's edge they could hear it creak and crack; they once saw, not far off, the thunderclap smoke and rubble of an avalanche it caused, bearing down into the valley "all the ruins of the mountains."... Three years later, in Prometheus Unbound, he made this the echo of all men's thoughts suddenly released from the ice.... The great mountain represented the secret law that governed though: solemn, inaccessible, transcendent. Mutability and chance could not come near it. Only mind could ponder it. In its remoteness it marked the last of the visible and natural causes men could see before ... they lost the thread of their understanding and reached, clumsily and blindly for the notion "God." 

Shelley crossed a bridge over the river Arve and saw the torrent below as an image of "his own thoughts, 'now dark -- now glittering,' and ceaselessly bursting and raving among the rocks." He wrote to Peacock of his "realisation that his existence and the mountain's were one in his mind. He had made the whole landscape his idea, his thought, and part of him. Mind became what it contemplated, and what he saw became himself." As Poet, "he could shape, colour, fill with meaning, invest with light and life." The human mind was a mirror of the vast sea of mind. "The notion of 'distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature,' was a delusion. He was simply an infinitesimal ripple in a Mind infinitely extensive."

In Dante's Convito, God dreamed man and the divine Intelligences made him, according to God's idea. But in Shelley's Queen Mab, man dreamed God. Y los sueños, sueños son. ... Others, standing in awe under the same Swiss sky, had bowed before the God who made the mountain. Shelley had been made aware of, and had tested, his own power. 

This concept of the power of mind informed his politics. "Perceptions, opinions and dispositions could be changed, not least by his own writing and incessant, urgent arguing.... Mind would triumph over matter, and the world could be transformed."

"You talk Utopia," said Byron shortly. Perhaps Shelley did; he knew that men did not dare this, that they did not even know their lack of daring, that "the good want power, but to weep barren tears," and that the revolution in France had failed precisely because its promoters had persisted in seeing the world in terms of oppression and revenge. But he talked Utopia because "some few, like we know who" saw it believed it, and knew it had to be shown forth to other minds. It could be built that way.

Shelley thought of his political writings as stones cast into the lake, the ripple made by the disturbance spreading outward. It was an image suggested by Godwin, who called truth "the pebble in the lake." "The Necessity of Atheism had been one such pebble, in Shelley's view." In November 1817, he wrote his Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, in which he contrasted the widespread grief over the death of the young princess with the "indifference to the death of Liberty in England." Two years later, in Italy, he began work on A Philosophical View of Reform, but it was left unfinished and unpublished for a century. "Shelley crouched by the water with his mind full of spreading circles of light. But the pond, and England, slept again."

One problem is that Shelley had a short attention span: "His life seemed compounded of eddying ideas that begged to be heeded and followed. Sudden notions drove him to grab friends by the arm and tug them eastwards, westwards, sideways, into bread-shops and pawn-shops in the London streets." Trelawny said, "He overbore all opposition in those less self-willed than he was." In Hogg's view, "Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from whatever it was that moved him."

Increasingly, Shelley resorted to images of "free fall through nothingness, or water, or the illusory solidity of the body and the self." In 1820, he jumped into the Arno from the Ponte della Trinità in Florence, from which Trelawny, who had failed to teach him to swim, rescued him. Despite the horror of Harriet's drowning, he had convinced himself that he would drown calmly. In 1816, he had been sailing with Byron on Lake Geneva when they were caught in a sudden windstorm. Byron, a strong swimmer, "assured him he could save him, as long as he did not struggle. Shelley replied that he had no notion of being saved." And when Trelawny rescued him from the Arno, "Shelley was sorely disappointed that he had not left him there."

He took Jane Williams and her two small children out in a small boat in the Bay of Lerici in the spring of 1822 and fell oddly silent as the little coracle drifted far from shore. "Jane watched him as he sat, head bowed, motionless and wordless. His melancholy was terrifying." Finally he announced his interest in finding out what mysteries lay in the afterlife. Jane told him that she and the children would rather have dinner first, and when they got back to shore she "swore she would never go out in a boat with Shelley again."

He had persuaded himself that drowning "was a state much like sleeping."

He was confident ... that thought did not die. It might even become more influential once the thinker had gone. Books, paintings, sculptures, products of mind, survived, with immortality in them as long as men lived to admire them. ... Yet the question for Shelley was whether minds themselves persisted, and whether his own mind, with all its pulsings of thought, would dissolve as a billow in the ocean or go on. His reasoning self insisted that things beyond the grave could not be known. Men could believe, if they cared to, in eternal life; but in belief of that sort, the sort that priests demanded, the will was passive and the intellect suspended.... Nothing beyond visible phenomena could be subjected to rational analysis. It was a realm of phantoms and faith. The first he had outgrown, the second he rejected as poison. But looking into water -- water running deep and quiet, his own face looking back at him -- he sometimes felt he was on the edge of understanding, and leaned down towards an embrace.

2. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 37-56

Part I: Earth, 2. Chains through "... The which I make & call it melody"

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Shelley's tour of the dungeons of the Castle of Chillon in 1816 reinforced a fascination with prisons as a manifestation of the restrictions placed on liberty. He regarded the schools he had attended as prisons, and had once been imprisoned himself, for debt, in 1817.

In his view slavery pervaded life, even the otiose and disgusting lives of emperors, priests and kings. He drew them on iron thrones, weighed under iron sceptres, heavily dragging their carcasses to east and shackled to the very systems they imposed on others. Under them, the people groaned.... If man was a slave, woman was his "bond-slave." Shelley saw young women downtrodden and dishonoured by convention -- models of his favourite heroine, Antigone, destroyed by her love and pity by the Theban laws -- while young men like himself were forced to visit prostitutes by "monkish" rules of chastity that spread disease and repair. 

Children, in Shelley's view, had it worst, "restrained by parental discipline, church, school, and worse" -- the horror of child labor. It led him in August 1811 to "rescue" Harriet Westbrook from the school she attended in Clapham. She was sixteen and he was nineteen, and he really didn't want to marry her -- "Matrimony revolted him" as another form of bondage. But he did so on August 29, 1811, in Edinburgh. He made his attempts to educate her, teaching her Latin and converting her to vegetarianism. "Yet her mind was in fetters of another kind, bound by propriety, seemliness and fashion as tightly as ribbons on a bonnet, and Shelley could neither change her nor, in the end, save her." Her older sister, Eliza, moved in with them in October, bringing "censoriousness and rectitude, scolding and 'nerves,' while endlessly brushing her long black hair." Shelley, the believer in free love, "was now confined, numb, tranquillised."

Their daughter, Ianthe, was born in 1813, and they renewed their vows in 1814, just in case the marriage in Scotland was judged illegal. But that summer he met Mary Godwin, who was sixteen and "imbued with the feminist free-thinking of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died just after she was born." They had sex "in St Pancras churchyard, by her mother's grave," in June 1814 and a month later fled to Scotland, leaving Harriet, who was four months pregnant. He wrote Harriet preachy letters about how she had failed to follow the path to freedom he had shown her. "In curt postscripts, he asked her to send him 'hanks' and stockings and to lend him money." Harriet committed suicide in December 1816, and "he was forced by custom and the Godwins" to marry Mary on December 30.

Mary had "been a kindred soul" and had perhaps even slept with his friend Hogg with his encouragement, but she "became a fretting and domesticated wife," jealous of Claire Clairmont, her step-half-sister -- christened Jane -- who had joined them when they eloped. The high-strung Claire also got on Mary's nerves. Mary gave birth to William in 1816 and Clara in 1817, but the move to Italy in 1818 proved fatal to the children, both of whom died in the summer of 1819. That November a third child, Percy Florence, was born, but the Shelleys had fallen out of love with each other. "When he could he escaped with Claire, who would love him -- perhaps physically, perhaps not -- but would not, in any case, possess him.

In 1820, he became acquainted with Teresa Emilia Viviani, nineteen, who was boarding in a convent in Pisa while waiting to be married. Shelley saw her as another prisoner and wrote poems to her, but Emilia chose to get married once the contract was arranged and "to live contentedly and soberly with her 'clod of earth.'" Like so many others, however, Emilia asked him for money. "For most of his life Shelley had enough, either in anticipation or reality, to be 'the purse of his friends,' including [Leigh] Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Claire." His father-in-law, William Godwin, also "made it clear that it was Shelley's duty to bail him out.... By August 1819 he reckoned he had given Godwin £4,700, and had 'bought bitter knowledge' with it. That begging was to continue, and worsen, for the remaining three years of Shelley's life."

Shelley's father had cut off his allowance for a few months when he eloped with Harriet, so Shelley knew what it was like to need money. But it didn't teach him to handle it wisely. "His private income -- eventually settled as an annuity of £1,000 when, in 1815, his grandfather's death freed up his funds -- removed him fom the sordidness of earning a living." But when he had money he spent it or gave it away, and he borrowed at "such colossal rates of interest that by March 1822, four months before his death, he reckoned his debts might amount to £25,000."

His wanderings were expensive, too. "To tie him to any particular landscape, as Wordsworth was tethered to his lakes and fells, was hopeless.... [H]e moved incessantly." In 1811, when he left Oxford, he went to London, York, Edinburgh, Keswick and Dublin. Then to Wales, Devon, Wales again, Ireland again, London again, Berkeshire, London again, Bishopsgate and Marlow. He and Mary and Claire wandered in France and Germany in the summer of 1814; "in July 1816 he was with Mary, Claire and Byron in Switzerland; in March 1818 he left England for definitive exile in Italy. Yet there too he moved constantly, from Milan to Pisa, to Leghorn, to Bagni de Lucca, to Venice, to Rome (by 1819), to Naples, to Pisa, to Villa Magni at San Terenzo, near Lerici." Some of these moves seem to have been inspired by paranoia: "Many wanderings were blamed on government spies, creditors, his father's agents (his father, he was sure, ever seeking a pretext to imprison him), and men of vague but broad menace against him, some real, some imaginary."

And some of the restlessness came from a fear of being imprisoned by ties to a place.

If he were to settle anywhere he would sink into time, and the hours would close round him. Too dull and comfortable to struggle, he would not escape.... Time inhabited his poems as a figure wrapped in shroud-like wings, driving a chariot slowly forward. Shelley could neither push the chariot faster (though he sometimes longed to whip it till the wheels burned), nor get out of its way. Time weighed him down and tormented him. He longed to be suspended, unthinking and therefore unaware of the slow hours passing, in some spell of inspiration, or in the unknowable state that followed death.... If Shelley were to say, with Faust, to the passing moment, Verweile doch, du bist [so] schön! "Remain thou, thou art so beautiful!", he was consigning himself to death in life, as surely as if he were to live for ever within the same four walls. 

1. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. ix-34

Introduction; Prelude: The Voyage Out; Part I: Earth, 1. Substance

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Ann Wroe says her book is "an experiment, ... an attempt to write the life of a poet from the inside out: that is, from the perspective of the creative spirit struggling to discover its true nature." She wants to "reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding," because she regrets that, in the twentieth century, so much attention was directed at Shelley's politics that "his spiritual force seems to have been largely forgotten." The narrative of the book is not chronological but instead tracks "the poet's quest for truth through the steadily rarefying elements of earth, water, air and fire." And if the book shifts the focus away from the life to the ideas, so be it. Shelley believed, "No revolution in the moral and social order could take place until he, and all men and women, knew themselves for what they were and could unlock the true power they possessed."

Wroe's "Prelude: the voyage out" is an impressionist series of vignettes in which the poet launches his words onto the sea in paper boats on which the ink begins to "blur and run." Each is "a shell of woven paper" moving "intrepidly and madly on the sea." "To the casual eye he was on shore, a tall, stooped young man with tangled hair and yet more boats in his pockets.... Yet in reality he was out on the huge sea adventuring, one of them." Inevitably the boats sink, foreshadowing the poet's own death: "His body would go on falling through the blue deep, softly, like paper. He had once told a small boy, watching with him, that this would be his favourite of all deaths."

Charles MacFarlane remembered his first encounter with Shelley in the Royal Bourbon Museum in Naples in February 1819. The stranger, who joined him in admiring a statue, had a "soft and strangely touching" voice and "was a gentleman of twenty-five or twenty-six, thin, with a delicate and negligent, even wild, appearance." Their conversation left MacFarlane with "fragments of deep thought, like leaves from a private notebook."

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, in 1792. His father was Timothy Shelley, a landowner who would become a baronet in 1815. Bysshe, as his family called him, was the oldest child, and would be joined by four sisters and, 14 years later, a brother. He attended Syon House Academy and Eton, but was expelled from Oxford after one term, in 1811, for writing, along with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, "a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism." In August he eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, and after that marriage failed in 1814 with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary's step-half-sister, Jane Clairmont, who would later be called Claire, went with them France and Germany and set up house with them after they returned to England. His father cut off ties with him, and in 1817, the Lord Chancellor "deprived him, on the double grounds of immorality and atheism, of the two infant children of his first marriage. He left England for Italy in March 1818.

Shelley told many stories about his childhood, but Hogg observed, "He was altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever, according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare naked realities of actual life." Sometimes he thought of himself as a farmer, which is what he entered as his occupation on the register when he married Harriet. He was interested in agricultural chemistry and his poetic imagery often reflects his rural background. He inspected things so closely that people thought he was near-sighted, but "Shelley himself sometimes complained not of dim vision but the reverse."

One of his most treasured possessions, from boyhood onwards, was a solar microscope in a heavy mahogany box that projected, on a sheet or a wall, giant images of the animalculae that wriggled in vinegar, or the overlapping plates of a fly's wing, or the mites entombed in cheese.... He believed with Erasmus Darwin, whose books on science and Nature he also devoured as a schoolboy, that the minute worlds he saw suffered and felt as he did.... From his earliest years of scientific enquiry Shelley pictured Nature as one concurring whole, with an iron chain of Necessity binding the smallest to the mightiest.

Following the logic of Hume, he rejected the notion of "a designer and a cause," setting forth his ideas in The Necessity of Atheism. For him, "Unending mutability was the nature of existence.... Chance atoms came together: Shelley lived. He would die when by some stroke they dispersed again."

For all his ties to the land, "Earth was not his element, either in its substance or its society." He simply didn't like getting dirty: "At Eton he roared with pain when leather footballs, caked and soaked from the field, were kicked deliberately and hard against the boy who would not play games.... 'Filth' was almost the strongest word in his lexicon, a spasm of horror." But for all his finickiness, he was a fighter:

Contemporaries remembered ... a prankster and a brawler, a tall, slovenly looking boy (though also like 'a girl in Boy's clothes') who flailed around with his fists and was fearsomely violent when thwarted. Yet in his mind he was the quiet, trembling youth at the edge of the playing field.

At some point, he seems to have had an epiphany of sorts, a "sudden awakening, on one particular morning, to the shadow of the Spirit of Beauty in the world.... Several of his poems described the moment of conversion, but enclosed it in details too vague to pinpoint where or when it had occurred." In any case, it seems to have confirmed him in his radicalism.

His relationship with his parents was one manifestation of this radicalism. "He nursed no strong feelings for his mother, whom he thought mildly ineffectual and 'narrow-minded.' Towards his father he came to feel nothing but loathing and defiance." His father was shocked by everything he did, but especially when in April 1811, he decided "to give up the entail on his grandfather's estate, exchanging a secure landed inheritance for £200 yearly in cash." Even the annuity was cut off in August, when he eloped with Harriet Westbrook. For Shelley, his father symbolized tyranny. Shelley believed that his father, whom he referred to as "Old Buck" "had never loved him, but only the continuation of a name, property and status he represented, like a house or a field."

But though the break with his father left him destitute, Shelley never gave up his taste for luxury. At Oxford he "wore extraordinary clothes," and after he was expelled he boasted that he could live on £50 a year. But by 1817 he was in debt to the most fashionable upholsterers in Bath for £1,192 1s. 10d. He skipped out on the debt when he left for Italy. "For most of his life he kept horses and a carriage," but by 1819 he had decided that

It was the duty of the rich man to give and the right of the poor man to demand. On that principle, Shelley gave away his shoes (arriving at a neighbour's barefoot), his money, and Mary's clothes, continuing to hand out spontaneous charity until the last weeks of his life. On the same principle he took other men's books, and raided [Leigh] Hunt's wardrobe for waistcoats and handkerchiefs he might need himself. To take as well as give -- though sometimes blushing "not a little," Hunt said, in doing it -- was proper redistributive justice. 

But he also looked down on the poor: "most men, he was convinced, lived in a state of 'squalid ignorance, & moral imbecility' from which he foresaw no improvement." And he felt a contempt for the physical: "The link between political oppression, moral evil and physical degradation was all too obvious to him. The common folk of Dublin were 'one mass of animated filth,' the Austrian-occupied Italians 'stupid & shrivelled slaves.'" He thought that human corruption was the result not of "original sin" but of education, of "the 'wrong impressions' stamped on the young by nurses and parents and, if they grew older, by the barbarity of schools and systems of government."

Shelley himself was "tall, vigorous and strong-limbed.... In his notebooks he drew himself naked and muscle-bound, often with weapons in his hands." But the Poet thought of himself as frail and sickly, as susceptible to "'the contagion of the world's slow stain,' so easily fatal to poets, the sort of languors and vapours and excessive sensibilities that made young men throw themselves into chairs with their handkerchiefs pressed to their faces." He suffered from what may have been kidney stones and his hair had premature gray touches, "a syphilitic symptom that filled him with foreboding."


For a while he seemed to live on bread and milk and tea, but with occasional indulgences in gluttony. "From at least the age of nineteen, he was a practising vegetarian" and when he wanted to evoke a sense of horror "he described the eating of flesh, usually human, dwelling on its warm fibrous feel between his teeth and the rust or salt 'bitterness' of blood." He drank mostly water -- alcohol overstimulated him. "Yet his resolution wavered. He was found demolishing bacon ('Bring more bacon!') and feasting on veal chops, well peppered. Cold meat was discovered on his luncheon plate in Italy.... In general, however, the diet and the scruples were observed." Byron worried that if the Shelleys were to raise his daughter Allegra, "she would 'perish of Starvation, and green fruit.'"


He was thought to be mad by a lot of people, including sometimes himself. "This madness was always of the same kind: seeing what others could not see, yearning for what others could not fathom, not belonging." In Julian and Maddalo, "He was both the serious, idealistic Julian ... and a Maniac in a madhouse."

Each Shelley-character held a memory -- disturbed, but not eclipsed, even by stark grief -- of a blissful, momentary, controlling presence both within and beyond himself. This was what had made him mad.... Under its influence, Shelley had made his boyhood vow -- stumblingly, but devotedly -- to Truth, Beauty, Liberty and Love.... He did not know to whom, or what, he made this promise. For years he could not even try to name what it was that had so moved him. But his search for it became his history, and his life.