Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

. . . . I suppose the moral is contained in what Falstaff says “For Gods sake talk like a man of this world” and yet looking deeper into it, is not the misdirected enthusiasm of Scythrop what J[esus] C[hrist] calls the salt of the earth?’ 20 But he made no reference to Scythrop’s shuttlecock love between the raven-haired intellectual Stella, and the fair-haired musical Marionetta, a cunning amalgam of Shelley’s torn affections between Harriet, Mary and Claire. 21 Mary, in her ‘Note on the Poems of 1817’, agreed that Peacock had ‘seized on some points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted Scythrop’; but she made it clear that Shelley was ‘not addicted to port or madeira’.
    While Shelley’s boating expeditions continued to take Claire, the Hunts and the children to Hampden, Virginia Water and Egham, Mary tended to remain behind. She was expecting another child, and liked to stay quietly at Albion House, making jellies for the children, and reading Brockden Brown’s horror novels. On 4 August they celebrated Shelley’s twenty-fifth birthday, and on the 30th, Mary’s twentieth.
    First Murray, and then Charles Ollier turned down Frankenstein , but at the end of the month Shelley’s persistence as Mary’s agent was rewarded by a contract with Lackington, Allen and Co., and the novel was hurried off to the printers. Lackington’s was a good catch, for their circulating library and bookshop, with its splendid circular display tables and book galleries, was one of the most popular in London. Shelley insisted on a tight and highly commercial contract, writing to Lackington: ‘You should take the risk of printing and advertising etc. entirely on yourselves and, after full deduction being made from the profits of the work to cover these expenses, that the clear produce, both of the first edition and of every succeeding edition should be divided between you and the author.’ 22 Shelley was never able to insist on a similar contract for any of his own works.
    With the coming of September, the golden chain of summer days began to dissolve, and the atmosphere seemed to grow chilly in Albion House. Mary noted that the lowered declination of the sun prevented it from reaching over the roof into the garden, and the rooms seemed to become perpetually dark and damp. Later she discovered that all Shelley’s books in the library had gathered a sinister blue mould. 23 Her child was born on the 2nd, and though both mother and baby remained well, Mary was constantly troubled by inability to provide sufficient milk. She knew that Shelley would not consider a wet-nurse, and the child had constant upsets from attempts to feed it cow’s milk. Shelley struggled on to finish his poem, but he could no longer spend the day comfortably outside, and he began to feel ill again, and now his chest especially troubled him.His new daughter did not move him as the birth of little William had done. He wrote archly to Byron: ‘Since I wrote to you last, Mary has presented me with a little girl. We call it Clara. Little Alba and William, who are fast friends, and amuse themselves with talking a most unintelligible language together, are dreadfully puzzled by the stranger, whom they consider very stupid for not coming to play with them on the floor.’ 24 With a great effort, Shelley pushed Laon and Cythna to a conclusion on 20 September. He wrote a dedication ‘To Mary’ —
So now my summer task is ended, Mary,
And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home;
As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry,
Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome . . . . 25
    But far from returning to his ‘heart’s home’, Shelley immediately left for London, arriving with Claire at Hunt’s on the evening of the 23rd. Suddenly he was immersed in business: correcting the proofs of Frankenstein , negotiating the publication of his poem with Ollier, and dealing with debts which had been growing ominously at Longdill’s