The Monsters by Dorothy Hoobler

money to take them to London. The expulsion caused
     a breach with his father that never healed. His father wrote a letter about his son to his solicitor, in which he blamed Percy’s
     trouble on the pernicious influence of Godwin. “He is such a Pupil of Godwin,” he wrote, “that I can scarcely hope he will
     be persuaded that he owes any sort of obedience or compliance to the wishes or directions of his Parents.”
    Refusing his father’s demands to renounce his atheism and to abandon his friend Hogg, Shelley set out to make a living with
     his pen. One of his first purchases in London was a copy of a poem entitled
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
in a shop on Oxford Street. Shelley had never heard of the author, Lord Byron, but was impressed by Byron’s taking poetic
     revenge on the reviewers who had been harshly critical of his earlier poetry. Shelley read the poem aloud to Hogg and was
     inspired.
    In the spring Shelley went home to try to make peace with his father and family. His uncle interceded for him, and Sir Timothy
     granted Percy an allowance of two hundred pounds a year. For someone else this might have been adequate, but for Shelley it
     was never enough; he would spend much of his life trying to avoid financial disaster and keeping ahead of debt collectors.
     While at Field Place, Shelley again tried to get his favorite sister Elizabeth interested in Hogg. She was not enthusiastic
     but Percy smuggled Hogg into Field Place, where he hid in Shelley’s bedroom. Nevertheless, Elizabeth still refused to see
     him. Hogg only got a peep at the girl through the windows of the local church. Such matchmaking efforts were ultimately doomed.
     Three of Percy’s sisters never married and the fourth, after giving birth to three children, deserted her husband for another
     man, causing a scandal that had to be settled in the House of Lords.
    Hogg went home to York to pursue a legal career, leaving Shelley alone in London. He was plagued by bad dreams and, as he
     often did in times of stress, started to sleepwalk again. Two of his sisters, Hellen and Mary, went to a boarding school in
     the city and Shelley often visited them. On one occasion he met their fifteen-year-old friend Harriet Westbrook, who soon
     became another of Shelley’s hero worshippers. She parroted his opinions on everything, including atheism. Soon Harriet claimed
     that she was picked on by her teachers and others at the school because of her new, enlightened views. Shelley had found a
     disciple.
    Thomas Peacock, another young author who became Shelley’s friend, said of Westbrook: “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; the laugh spontaneous, hearty and joyous.” Hellen Shelley thought she looked
     “quite like a poet’s dream.” Though Percy probably never passionately loved Harriet, the idea of rescuing her from a school
     where she was being persecuted, and from her overbearing father as well, increased his desire for her. “I was in love with
     loving,” he later wrote, quoting what was originally a Latin epigram by St. Augustine, “I was looking for something to love,
     loving to love.” At the same time that he was courting Harriet he wrote to Hogg, “
Your
noble and exalted friendship, the prosecution of your happiness, can alone engross my impassioned interest.”
    Percy had learned from reading Godwin that the institution of marriage was a form of slavery, but changed his mind after reading
     Amelia Opie’s novel
Adeline Mowbray,
which Harriet sent to him. The novel, written by a former friend of Mary Wollstonecraft who was now the wife of John Opie
     (whose portrait of Mary hung in the Godwin home), showed that the problems for a woman who lived with a man and gave birth
     outside of marriage were far worse than for the man in the