I've just finished Young Romantics, the really terrific book by Daisy Hay about the circle that had Percy and Mary Shelley at its centre. (It's a curiosity, by the way, that you can talk about John Keats and William Hazlitt, but nobody talks about Percy Shelley or George Byron.)
There's so much to say about that whole circle. But one thing that struck me while reading the book is that you could write a thriller about someone like Shelley. Almost everyone who knew him talked about his kindness, his generosity, his goodness. But for a kind, generous, good man, he was sure responsible for a lot of people dying. My rough tally goes as follows:
1) After he abandoned his first wife, Harriet, she drowned herself in the Serpentine.
2) Mary Shelley's sister Fanny also committed suicide, largely, it seems because she had been brutally abandoned and shut out by Mary and Percy.
(Shortly afterwards, Shelley virtually moved in with Leigh Hunt and then Hunt's sister-in-law, Bess, attempted suicide. Daisy Hay sees a clear connection with Shelley's very demanding presence. Anyway, she survived.)
3) Three of the Shelley's four children died young, and Hay suggests that the death of the second, Clara, was substantially due to Shelley's flagrant disregard of the baby's health.
4) You only need to read Shelley's poems, to realize that he wouldn't be much troubled by the idea of getting into an unseaworthy sailing boat, with no competent sailors and a storm coming. But on the reckless sea journey that killed him, he took with him a devoted friend, Edward Taylor, and an eighteen-year-old boy, Charles Vivian.
Five people. That's the same as Jack the Ripper. Great poet, though. (Shelley, that is.)
Comments