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Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [Around 1811]. Harriet Westbrook, he said, was a schoolfellow of one of his sisters; and when, after his expulsion from Oxford, he was in London, without money, his father having refused him all assistance, this sister had requested her fair schoolfellow to be the medium of conveying to him such small sums as she and her sisters could afford to send, and other little presents which they thought would be acceptable. Under these circumstances the ministry of the young and beautiful girl presented itself like that of a guardian angel, and there was a charm about their intercourse which he readily persuaded himself could not be exhausted in the duration of life. The result was that in August, 1811, they eloped to Scotland, and were married in Edinburgh.1 Their journey had absorbed their stock of money. They took a lodging, and Shelley immediately told the landlord who they were, what they had come for, and the exhaustion of their resources, and asked him if he would take them in, and advance them money to get married and to carry them on till they could get a remittance. This the man agreed to do, on condition that Shelley would treat him and his friends to a supper in honour of the occasion. It was arranged accordingly; but the man was more obtrusive and officious than Shelley was disposed to tolerate. The marriage was concluded, and in the evening Shelley and his bride were alone together, when the man tapped at their door. Shelley opened it, and the landlord said to him — It is customary here at weddings for the guests to come in, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride with whisky." "I immediately," said Shelley, "caught up my brace of pistols, and pointing them both at him, said to him, — I have had enough of your impertinence; if you give me any more of it I will blow your brains out; on which he ran or rather tumbled down stairs, and I bolted the doors."
Note 1. Not at Gretna Green, as stated by Captain Medwin. [T. L. P.]
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1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. After 25th March 1811. [her future husband] Shelley (age 18) and Hogg came up to London, where Shelley was soon left alone, as his friend went to York to study conveyancing. Percy and his incensed father did not at once come to terms and for a while he had no resource beyond pocket-money saved up by his sisters (four in number altogether) and sent round to him, sometimes by the hand of a singularly pretty school-fellow, Miss Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a retired and moderately rich hotel-keeper. Shelley, in early youth, had a somewhat "priggish" turn for moralizing and argumentation, and a decided mania for proselytizing; his school-girl sisters, and their little Methodist friend Miss Westbrook, aged between fifteen and sixteen, must all be enlightened and converted to anti-Christianity. He therefore cultivated the society of Harriet, calling at the house of her father, and being encouraged in his assiduity by her much older sister Eliza. Harriet not unnaturally fell in love with him; and he, though not it would seem at any time ardently in love with her, dallied along the Bowery pathway which leads to sentiment and a definite courtship. This was not his first love-affair; for he had but a very few months before been courting his cousin Miss Harriet Grove, who, alarmed at his heterodoxies, finally broke off with him - to his no small grief and perturbation at the time. It is averred, and seemingly with truth, that Shelley never indulged in any sensual or dissipated amour; and, as he advances in life, it becomes apparent that, though capable of the passion of love, and unusually prone to regard with much effusion of sentiment women who interested his mind and heart, the mere attraction of a pretty face or an alluring figure left him unenthralled.
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. After August 1811. Harriet Shelley was not only beautiful; she was amiable, accommodating, adequately well educated and well bred. She liked reading, and her reading was not strictly frivolous. But she could not (as [her future husband] Shelley (age 18) said at a later date) "feel poetry and understand philosophy." Her attractions were all on the surface; there was (to use a common phrase) "nothing particular in her." For nearly three years Shelley and she led a shifting sort of life upon an income of £400 a year, one-half of which was allowed (after his first severe indignation at the mésalliance was past) by Mr [her future father-in-law] Timothy Shelley (age 57), and the other half by Mr Westbrook. The couple left Edinburgh for York and the society of Hogg; broke with him upon a charge made by Harriet, and evidently fully believed by Shelley at the time, that, during a temporary absence of his upon business in Sussex, Hogg had tried to seduce her (this quarrel was entirely made up at the end of about a year); moved off to Keswick in Cumberland, where they received kind attentions from Southey (age 36), and some hospitality from the duke of Norfolk (age 65), who, as chief magnate in the Shoreham region of Sussex, was at pains to reconcile the father and his too unfilial heir;
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. After a while [her husband] Percy (age 19) was reconciled to his father, revisited his family in Sussex, and then stayed with a cousin in Wales. Hence he was recalled to London by Miss Harriet Westbrook, who wrote complaining of her father's resolve to send her back to her school, in which she was now regarded with repulsion as having become too apt a pupil of the atheist Shelley. He replied counselling resistance. "She wrote to say" (these are the words of Shelley in a letter to Hogg, dating towards the end of July 1811) "that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection." Shelley, therefore, returned to London, where he found Harriet agitated and wavering; finally they agreed to elope, travelled in haste to Edinburgh, and there, on the 28th of August, were married with the rites of the Scottish Church. Shelley, it should be understood, had by this time openly broken, not only with the dogmas and conventions of Christian religion, but with many of the institutions of Christian polity, and in especial with such as enforce and regulate marriage; he held - with William Godwin (age 55) and some other theorists - that marriage ought to be simply a voluntary relation between a man and a woman, to be assumed at joint option and terminated at the after-option of either party. If, therefore, he had acted upon his personal conviction of the right, he would never have wedded Harriet, whether by, Scotch, English or any other law; but he waived his own theory in favour of thee consideration that in such an experiment the woman's stake, land the disadvantages accruing to her, are out of all comparison with the man's. His conduct, therefore, was so far entirely honourable; and, if it derogated from a principle of his own (a principle which, however contrary to the morality of other people, was and always remained matter of genuine conviction on his individual part), this was only in deference to a higher and more imperious standard of right.
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On 28th August 1811 Percy Bysshe Shelley (age 19) and Harriet Westbrook were married at Edinburgh having eloped on the 25th August 1811.
Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [1812]. Mr. Hogg is mistaken about Shelley's feelings as to his first child. He was extremely fond of it, and would walk up and down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a monotonous melody of his own making, which ran on the repetition of a word of his own making. His song was i Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yahmani.'1 It did not please me, but, what was more important, it pleased the child, and lulled it when it was fretful. Shelley was extremely fond of his children. He was pre-eminently an affectionate father. But to this first-born there were accompaniments which did not please him. The child had a wet-nurse whom he did not like, and was much looked after by his wife's sister, whom he intensely disliked. I have often thought that if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if this sister had not lived with them, the link of their married love would not have been so readily broken. But of this hereafter, when we come to speak of the separation.
Note 1. The tune was the uniform repetition of three notes, not very true in their intervals. The nearest resemblance to it will be found in the second, third, and fourth of a minor key: BCD, for example, on the key of A natural: a crotchet and two quavers. [T. L. P.]
Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [10th December 1812]. The Scotch marriage had taken place in August, 1811. In a letter which he wrote to a female friend sixteen months later (Dec. 10, 1812), he had said —
How is Harriet a fine lady? You indirectly accuse her in your letter of this offence — to me the most unpardonable of all. The ease and simplicity of her habits, the unassuming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connexion of her thought and speech, have ever formed in my eyes her greatest charms: and none of these are compatible with fashionable life, or the attempted assumption of its vulgar and noisy eclat. You have a prejudice to contend with in making me a convert to this last opinion of yours, which, so long as I have a living and daily witness to its futility before me, I fear will be insurmountable. — Memorials, p. 44.
Thus there had been no estrangement to the end of 1812. My own memory sufficiently attests that there was none in 1813.
From Bracknell, in the autumn of 1813, Shelley went to the Cumberland lakes; then to Edinburgh. In Edinburgh he became acquainted with a young Brazilian named Baptista, who had gone there to study medicine by his father's desire, and not from any vocation to the science, which he cordially abominated, as being all hypothesis, without the fraction of a basis of certainty to rest on. They corresponded after Shelley left Edinburgh, and subsequently renewed their intimacy in London. He was a frank, warm-hearted, very gentlemanly young man. He was a great enthusiast, and sympathized earnestly in all Shelley's views, even to the adoption of vegetable diet. He made some progress in a translation of Queen Mab into Portuguese. He showed me a sonnet, which he intended to prefix to his translation. It began —
Sublime Shelley, cantor di verdade!
and ended —
Surja Queen Mab a restaurar o mundo.
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In June 1813 [her daughter] Ianthe Eliza Shelley was born to [her husband] Percy Bysshe Shelley (age 20) and Harriet Westbrook.
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Here, in June 1813, Harriet gave birth to her daughter [her daughter] Ianthe Eliza (she married a Mr Esdaile, and died in 1876). Here also [her husband] Shelley (age 20) brought out his first poem of any importance, Queen Mab; it was privately printed, as its exceedingly aggressive tone in matters of religion and morals would not allow of publication. In July the Shelleys took a house at Bracknell near Windsor Forest, where they had congenial neighbours, Mrs Boinville and her family.
Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [1814]. Few are now living who remember Harriet Shelley. I remember her well, and will describe her to the best of my recollection. She had a good figure, light, active, and graceful. Her features were regular and well proportioned. Her hair was light brown, and dressed with taste and simplicity. In her dress she was truly simplex munditiis [simple in elagance]. Her complexion was beautifully transparent; the tint of the blush rose shining through the lily. The tone of her voice was pleasant; her speech the essence of frankness and cordiality; her spirits always cheerful; her laugh spontaneous, hearty, and joyous. She was well educated. She read agreeably and intelligently. She wrote only letters, but she wrote them well. Her manners were good; and her whole aspect and demeanour such manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature, that to be once in her company was to know her thoroughly. She was fond of her husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed the change of scene.
Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [24th March 1814]. Shelley returned to London shortly before Christmas, then took a furnished house for two or three months at Windsor, visiting London occasionally. In March, 1814, he married Harriet a second time, according to the following certificate: —
Marriages in March 1814.
164. [her husband] Percy Bysshe Shelley (age 21) and Harriet Shelley (formerly Harriet Westbrook, Spinster, a Minor), both of this Parish, were remarried in this Church by Licence (the parties having been already married to each other according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of Scotland), in order to obviate all doubts that have arisen, or shall or may arise, touching or concerning the validity of the aforesaid Marriage (by and with the consent of John Westbrook, the natural and lawful father of the said Minor), this Twenty-fourth day of March, in the Year 1814.
By me,
Edward Williams, Curate.
This Marriage was solemnized between us: Harriet Shelley, formerly Harriet Westbrook, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In the presence of John Westbrook, John Stanley.
The above is a true extract from the Register Book of Marriages belonging to the Parish of Saint George, Hanover-square; extracted thence this eleventh day of April, 1859.— By me, H. Weightman, Curate.
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1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. It was towards May 1814 that [her husband] Shelley (age 21) first saw Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (age 16) as a grown-up girl (she was well on towards seventeen); he instantly fell in love with her, and she with him. Just before this, on the 24th of March, Shelley had remarried Harriet in London, apparently with a view to strengthening his position in his relations with his father as to the family property; but, on becoming enamoured of Mary, he seems to have rapidly made up his mind that Harriet should not stand in the way. She was at Bath while he was in London. They had, however, met again in London and come to some sort of understanding before the final crisis arrived-Harriet remonstrating and indignant, but incapable of effective resistance-Shelley sick of her companionship, and bent upon gratifying his own wishes, which as we have already seen were not at odds with his avowed principles of conduct. For some months past there had been bickering's and misunderstandings between him and Harriet, aggravated by the now detested presence of Miss Westbrook in the house; more than this cannot be said, and it seems dubious whether more will be hereafter known. Shelley, and not he alone, alleged grave misdoing on Harriet's part - perhaps mistakenly.
Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [28th July 1814]. Again, he said more calmly: 'Every one who knows me must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither.' I said, 'It always appeared to me that you were very fond of Harriet.' Without affirming or denying this, he answered: 'But you did not know how I hated her sister.'
The term 'noble animal' he applied to his wife, in conversation with another friend now living, intimating that the nobleness which he thus ascribed to her would induce her to acquiesce in the inevitable transfer of his affections to their new shrine. She did not so acquiesce, and he cut the Gordian knot of the difficulty by leaving England with Miss Godwin on the 28th of July, 1814.
Shortly after this I received a letter from Harriet, wishing to see me. I called on her at her father's house in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. She then gave me her own account of the transaction, which, as I have said, decidedly contradicted the supposition of anything like separation by mutual consent.
She at the same time gave me a description, by no means flattering, of Shelley's new love, whom I had not then seen. I said, 'If you have described her correctly, what could he see in her?' 'Nothing,' she said, but that her name was Mary, and not only Mary, but Mary Wollstonecraft.'
The lady had nevertheless great personal and intellectual attractions, though it is not to be wondered at that Harriet could not see them.
Shortly after this I received a letter from Harriet, wishing to see me. I called on her at her father's house in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. She then gave me her own account of the transaction, which, as I have said, decidedly contradicted the supposition of anything like separation by mutual consent.
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In November 1815 [her son] Charles Bysshe Shelley was born to [her husband] Percy Bysshe Shelley (age 23) and Harriet Westbrook.
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. September 1816. The return of the [her husband] Shelleys (age 24) was closely followed by two suicides - first that of Fanny Wollstonecraft (already referred to), and second that of Harriet Shelley, who on the 9th of November drowned herself in the Serpentine. The body was not found until the 10th of December. The latest stages of the lovely and ill-starred Harriet's career have never been very explicitly recorded. It seems that she formed a connexion with some gentleman from whom circumstances or desertion separated her, that her habits became intemperate, and that she was treated with contumelious harshness by her sister during an illness of their father. She had always had a propensity (often laughed at in earlier and happier days) to the idea of suicide, and she now carried it out in act-possibly without anything which could be regarded as an extremely cogent predisposing motive, although the total weight of her distresses, accumulating within the past two years and a half, was beyond question heavy to bear. Shelley, then at Bath, hurried up to London when he heard of Harriet's death, giving manifest signs of the shock which so terrible a catastrophe had produced on him. Some self-reproach must no doubt have mingled with his affliction and dismay; yet he does not appear to have considered himself gravely in the wrong at any stage in the transaction, and it is established that in the train of quite recent events which immediately led up to Harriet's suicide he had borne no part. This was the time when Shelley began to see a great ideal of Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, editor of the Examiner; they were close friends, and Hunt did something to uphold the reputation of Shelley as a poet-which, we may here say once for all, scarcely obtained any public acceptance or solidity during his brief lifetime.
Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley. [9th November 1816]. In December, 1816, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine river, not, as Captain Medwin says, ill a pond at the bottom of her father's garden at Bath. Her father had not then left his house in Chapel Street, and to that house his daughter's body was carried.
On 9th November 1816 Harriet Westbrook committed suicide by drowning in the The Serpentine, Hyde Park.
She had written a letter to her sister and parents explaining her actions:
"When you read this letr. I shall be no more an inhabitant of this miserable world. do not regret the loss of one who could never be anything but a source of vexation & misery to you all belonging to me. .. My dear [her husband] Bysshe (age 24) ... if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of... so shall my spirit find rest & forgiveness. God bless you all is the last prayer of the unfortunate Harriet S---"
Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 248. 248. To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (age 19)
(Bath) London, December 15 [16], 18161
I have spent a day, my beloved, of somewhat agonizing sensations, such as the contemplation of vice and folly and hard-heartedness, exceeding all conception, must produce. Leigh Hunt has been with me all day, and his delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of you, have sustained me against the weight of the horror of this event.
Note 1. Shelley returned to Bath on Dec. 14, from his visit to Leigh Hunt at Hampstead, and was much pleased with his new friend.
On the day following he received the terrible tidings of Harriet Shelley's suicide. After her separation from Shelley, Harriet had lived for some time at her father's house in Chapel Street. Mary writes in her diary in April, 1815, "We hear that Harriet has left her father's house," and shortly afterwards there is a record of two visits paid to her by Shelley. But in June, 1816, she addressed a letter to Mr. Newton from 23 Chapel Street, from which it would seem that she was still on good terms with her family. It has been stated that her father's door was shut against her by order of her sister. In November Shelley had applied to Thomas Hookham for news of Harriet, but in vain. Her last lodgings were at a house in Queen Street, Brompton, from which place she disappeared on Nov. 9th, and about a month later, on Dec. 15th, Hookham wrote to Shelley to say that her body had been taken out of the Serpentine on Dec. 10; that little information respecting her was laid before the jury at the coroner's inquest, and that her name had been given as that of Harriet Smith. He also mentioned that had she lived a little longer she would have given birth to a child. Shelley was deeply shocked at this awful calamity. Leigh Hunt, who was with him at this time, says "he never forgot it. For a time it tore his being to pieces." Shelley did not, however, regard himself as responsible for Harriet's tragic end. In writing to Southey some years later, he said: "I take God to witness, if such a Being is now regarding both you and me, and I pledge myself, if we meet, as perhaps you expect, before Him after death, to repeat the same in His presence— that you accuse me wrongfully. I am innocent of ill, either done or intended." Although Shelley had parted from his wife, he had not only made ample provision for her and his children, but had kept in touch with her movements. On the day that he received the news from Hookham, he went to London to claim his two children; he could not, however, have arrived till the evening, so that this letter must have been dated 15th instead of 16th by mistake.
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30th December 1816 [her former husband] Percy Bysshe Shelley (age 24) and Mary Godwin aka Shelley (age 19) were married.
All About History Books
The Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbroke. Baker was a secular clerk from Swinbroke, now Swinbrook, an Oxfordshire village two miles east of Burford. His Chronicle describes the events of the period 1303-1356: Gaveston, Bannockburn, Boroughbridge, the murder of King Edward II, the Scottish Wars, Sluys, Crécy, the Black Death, Winchelsea and Poitiers. To quote Herbert Bruce 'it possesses a vigorous and characteristic style, and its value for particular events between 1303 and 1356 has been recognised by its editor and by subsequent writers'. The book provides remarkable detail about the events it describes. Baker's text has been augmented with hundreds of notes, including extracts from other contemporary chronicles, such as the Annales Londonienses, Annales Paulini, Murimuth, Lanercost, Avesbury, Guisborough and Froissart to enrich the reader's understanding. The translation takes as its source the 'Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke' published in 1889, edited by Edward Maunde Thompson. Available at Amazon in eBook and Paperback.
On 8th July 1822 [her former husband] Percy Bysshe Shelley (age 29) drowned. He was returning on the Don Juan with Edward Williams from a meeting at Livorno with Leigh Hunt and Byron to make arrangements for a new journal, The Liberal. The boat was sunk is a storm. Shelley's badly decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later and was identified by Trelawny from the clothing and a copy of Keats's Lamia in a jacket pocket. On 16th August 1822 his body was cremated on a beach near Viareggio and the ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. The cremation was attended by George "Lord Byron" 6th Baron Byron (age 34). His wife Mary Godwin aka Shelley (age 24) did not attend.
