The Trembling Hand

Eight years pass before I return to Edinburgh. I come because of Laetitia Call, the daughter of Edward John Trelawny, an adventurer with literary pretensions who befriended Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in January 1822. The two poets were at the heart of a free-spirited community of artists and intellectuals living in Italy, a country that Shelley experienced as the ‘Paradise of exiles – the retreat of Pariahs’.1 By July of that year, however, Shelley was dead, drowned in a boat whose construction Trelawny had overseen. In fact, Trelawny was one of the last people to see him alive, waving as the boat disappeared over the horizon, carrying Shelley, his friend Edward Williams and the sailing boy Charles Vivian.

Possibly driven by a prick of conscience, Trelawny made himself instrumental in searching for the lost boat, locating the three bodies where they had been washed up on shore, arranging for their cremation and the subsequent burial of Shelley’s ashes at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. ‘But the friend to whom we are eternally indebted is Trelawny’, Mary Shelley wrote in a letter describing the aftermath of her husband’s death; ‘he has gone through by himself all the annoyances of dancing attendance on consuls & governors for permissions to fulfil the last duties to those gone, & attending the ceremony himself, all the disagreeable part & all the fatigue fell on him’.2 In addition to securing the spot next to Shelley’s grave for his own future resting place, Trelawny was rewarded with the lasting gratitude of the two widows.

Mary and Jane. Close friends. The two families had been sharing a small house, Casa Magni, right on the edge of the sea, near the town of Lerici in the Gulf of Spezia. The deaths of Shelley and Williams tore their lives apart. Jane returned to London, whereas Mary stayed on in Italy for another year, during which time she decided to prepare an edition of her late husband’s work. As she sat down to her task, she faced several notebooks and piles of loose leaves that contained a near-illegible chaos: drafts of poems, translations, essays, and working notes for various abandoned projects. Mary Shelley’s editorial policy was ‘actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape’ her, and she methodically worked through Shelley’s literary remains to salvage every scrap and fragment of poetry that she could find.3

The result was Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), a collection that, more than anything Shelley had published in his lifetime, served to secure his place in the canon of British Romanticism. However, despite Mary Shelley’s best efforts at being comprehensive, there is a curious omission. Posthumous Poems does not include a series of poems that Shelley wrote in the spring of 1822, and which are now considered to be some of the finest lyrics in the English language. They are collectively known as the ‘Jane poems’, named after their recipient Jane Williams. Shelley took great pains with the poems he wrote for Jane – many of them survive in pretty presentation copies that he transcribed for her in his neatest handwriting. He must have purposefully destroyed all the drafts because, unusually, very few survive among his papers. This was probably to ensure that Mary would not accidentally come across them.

The first poem in the series is called ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’. Shelley wrapped it in a blank sheet (envelopes were not yet in use at that time), together with a cover note addressed to Edward Williams: ‘If any of the stanza’s should please you, you may read them to Jane, but to no one else’.4 The poem is written in a melancholy key: Shelley opens by likening himself to the biblical serpent who has been shut out from Paradise and must now roam the world alone. ‘I too, must seldom seek again / Near happy friends a mitigated pain.’5 As the poem unfolds, the poet reveals his bitter disappointment at his lack of success – ‘Indifference, which once hurt me, is now grown / Itself indifferent’ – as well as his marital troubles.6 Most readers agree that the poem’s fourth stanza is addressed to his wife:

When I return to my cold home, you ask

Why I am not as I have lately been?

You spoil me for the task

Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,

Of wearing on my brow the idle mask

Of author, great or mean,

In the world’s carnival. I sought

Peace thus, and but in you I found it not. 7

The Shelleys’ disconsolate cohabitation is contrasted with the happiness of the Williams household, as Shelley closes with the confession that ‘These verses were too sad / To send to you, but that I know, / Happy yourself you feel another’s woe’.8

Some believe that Shelley hid this poem from Mary because he wanted to spare her the knowledge of his dejection; others argue that she was just as cold and judgemental as the poem suggests. What is less ambiguous, however, is that Shelley really fancied Jane Williams. A few months later, he composed ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’, in which a woman named Jane practises animal magnetism (that is, hypnosis) on the poet. He enclosed the poem in a sheet of paper on which he wrote: ‘To Jane. Not to be opened unless you are alone, or with Williams.’9 The instruction is repeated at the top of the leaf containing the poem: ‘For Jane & Williams alone to see.’ Another poem, simply entitled ‘To Jane’, carries the rider that ‘I sate down to write some words for an ariette . . . I commit them to your secrecy & your mercy’.10 Since the two families shared a house, it seems clear that the person necessitating all this secrecy was his own wife. The fact that Mary did not include these poems in Posthumous Poems suggests that she was not aware of their existence at the time. Jane might not have had the heart to share them with the recently made widow, though there are also indications that, in the aftermath of the shipwreck that killed their husbands, Jane was spreading rumours that Shelley had tired of Mary and was about to divorce her when he died. Mary only found out about this five years later, in the summer of 1827, and the emotional upset is well documented in her letters and journals, though the exact reasons are not. ‘Not for worlds would I attempt to transfer the deathly blackness of my meditations to these pages’, Mary wrote in her journal; ‘let no trace remain – save the deep – bleeding, hidden wound of my lost heart’.11

The Shelley marriage makes for good gossip, and it is hard to avoid judging the people involved for their mistakes and blind spots, but on a professional level, as a literary critic, my focus is on the poetry rather than the drama. I am interested in how the Jane poems balance exquisite craftsmanship with emotional complexity. Take the stanza that I just quoted from ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’. Even as Shelley appears to speak of alienation from his wife, his syntax subtly undercuts his complaint about her coldness; the statement ‘I sought peace thus, and but in you I found it not’ can be read as saying that the poet had not found peace with Mary, or that the poet found peace nowhere but – except – with her. The poem holds two opposite meanings not because Shelley is confused about grammar, but because emotional truths often are self-contradictory. On another level, not as a serious critic but as a starstruck fan girl, I am thrilled by having access to the poet’s secrets; not just the knowledge of his infatuation with Jane, but the very slips of paper on which he wrote his furtive notes to her. It is dizzying to think that the little scraps that Shelley himself was at pains to hide from the person who knew him best have survived for two centuries – and that I can now go to an archive and pick them up in my hands.

The survival and transmission of literary relics such as Shelley’s stash of secret love poems to Jane illustrates how Romanticism has become part of Britain’s national heritage. Shelley and Williams drowned together in July 1822; Jane must have taken these manuscripts with her when she returned to London later that year. She eventually showed the poems to Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin, who published them in 1832, a decade after Shelley’s death. At some later point, Trelawny got his hands on the manuscripts, and when he died in 1881, he bequeathed them to his daughter Laetitia. In the six decades between the deaths of Shelley and Trelawny, Romantic ideas about creative genius had coupled with Victorian sentimentality to generate a mania for collecting autographs and original manuscripts. Items that had initially been preserved for personal reasons by close friends and relatives became relics infused with an almost supernatural trace of the poet’s presence. Even a casually scrawled note was treated as a treasure. Academic institutions were keen to join the fray and enrich their collections with original manuscripts. Against this backdrop, Laetitia Call (née Trelawny) decided to donate the Jane poems in her possession to libraries across the United Kingdom – one each to Aberdeen, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Eton, Glasgow, Manchester and Oxford.

Because of that eccentric decision, I am now embarking on a tour of Britain to see each and every one of these manuscripts. I do not go for the sake of reading the Jane poems – I can find them in any good edition of Shelley’s poetry (and countless bad editions online); my task is to analyse the paper that they are written on. Since paper was made by hand, each batch is unique. By conducting a detailed examination of its characteristics – primarily hard facts such as size, watermarks and what kind of mesh was used in the production process, but also more ineffable features such as shade, thickness and how it holds ink – it is possible to identify leaves belonging to the same batch. The next step is to identify when a particular batch of paper was in use, which then enables a qualified estimate as to when the poems written on that paper were composed. ‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’ occupies a single sheet, so thin it is almost translucent. Williams noted in his journal that Shelley presented him with the poem on 26 January 1822, which means that this paper was in use in the first months of that year.12 Now I want to figure out whether the same paper was used for any other writing, which we could therefore date to that period. This is why I return to Edinburgh.

As I exit the train station onto Waverley Bridge, I find myself at the airport bus stop where I alighted when I first arrived to study English Literature at the University of Edinburgh: eighteen years of age, with my life in an overweight piece of luggage. It feels as if I am stepping into a memory – the sense of wonder at the city’s beauty. It is still early on a bright December day. The rays of the sun, newly risen, stretch themselves lazily through the light mist that curls around the Old Town. As I head towards the university library, I am startled by the familiarity of everything around me. Eight years since last walking this route, yet every stone is at once seen and remembered. Maybe just that little bit smaller, in the way that places from our youth always appear shrunken to our adult gaze. I did not think so at the time, but I was little more than a child when I arrived. Head full of dreams, fancying myself a bit of a poet. Because it was above all poetry that had brought me to Edinburgh.

In one of our first lectures, we were told that the word ‘poetry’ is derived from the Greek verb poeien, ‘to make’, a conception that can still be heard in the Scottish word for poet, makar. For many centuries, poetic creation was a skill in word-making. This changed during the decades before and after 1800, when the movement now known as Romanticism came to prominence. Romantic thinkers, writers and artists transformed our understanding of creativity from being a question of craftsmanship to one of genius: the poet – the genius par excellence – expresses his inner soul through his words, and his inner soul is the mirror of the human soul at large. Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) is one of the most famous representations of Romantic man: it depicts a solitary figure facing a sublime landscape of rocks shrouded in fog stretching out into the distance, a not-so-subtle symbol of the unbounded regions of the human mind. ‘Freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘autonomy’ are the period’s favourite words; the genius actively seeks out his limits only to surpass them. ‘I always go on until I am stopped,’ was supposedly Shelley’s mantra, ‘and I never am stopped.’13

Friedrich’s Romantic landscape looks a lot like Scotland, and the lure of the Highlands contributed to my decision to study there even though I had never set foot in the country before accepting my place at the university. A photograph taken at the Scott Monument in the centre of the city during my first visit well captures my poetic pretensions. I am gazing out into the distance, very profound and earnest, surrounded by drizzle and misty vistas. Today, I find my juvenile posturing amusing, but it also illustrates how Romantic ideals have been diffused in our culture: I was impersonating Friedrich’s Wanderer even before I could distinguish between romantic – as in red roses, sweet perfume, heart-shaped chocolates – and Romanticism as an epoch in literary history.

I remain fascinated by the period because it is at once so distant and so near. Daily life at the turn of the nineteenth century confirms the adage that the past is a foreign country: the population of London reached a million inhabitants without any proper sewers; homes were heated by coal and lit by candlelight; electricity was believed to be a divine spark or a vital fluid; writing was done by hand with a goose-feather quill; most travel was conducted by horse carriage or sailing ship; medical science was more likely to kill you than cure you. The steam-engine train was on the cusp of being invented – though people would seriously argue that travelling at a speed of twenty miles per hour risked rupturing your inner organs.

Yet even as the technology might seem primitive and backwards, the Romantic period also gave rise to ideals that still infuse our worldview today: equality, human rights, freedom of speech, democratic governance – and, of course, a global order in which the West sought to colonize and dominate the rest. In the process, millions of people were displaced around the globe: some crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life, while others were kidnapped and forced to work the plantations of the New World. Yet others were shipped as prisoners to Australia or forcefully ‘repatriated’ to Africa. Indigenous populations in Asia and the Americas had their homelands destroyed by the pressure of European imperial expansion. All these migrations contributed to the racial stratifications of present-day societies.

The Romantic era was also a period of unprecedented environmental destruction: diverse habitats were replaced by monoculture plantations or polluting industries, many of which depended on the ruthless extraction of natural resources. These developments prompted a new appreciation of nature, especially ‘national’ landscapes like the Lake District in England or the Scottish Highlands. Women began to take a more active part in public and intellectual life. The campaign to abolish the slave trade that got underway in the late 1780s was the first political movement with substantial mass mobilization by women – who, as homemakers, could take a leading role in sugar boycotts designed to undermine the financial basis of plantation slavery. The modern university was founded, based on an ideal of empirical research that displaced the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric that had dominated academic inquiry since the Middle Ages. Growing literacy rates and technological advances in printing accelerated the dissemination of ideas in writing, while wealthy patrons of the arts were supplanted by a marketplace where authors and artists had to compete for popularity. Criticism emerged as its own distinct activity to tutor and guide the public taste. As a result, I am often surprised by how many issues that seem very contemporary to us – the promises and pitfalls of technological progress, anxieties about mass culture, the rights and wrongs of eating animals – were already hotly debated topics two hundred years ago.