Shelleys: Introduction
Shelleys: Godwin-Wollstonecraft background
Percy born August 4 1792, Sussex.
Mary born August 30 1797; mother Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) dies Sept 10. Father: William Godwin (1756-1836), author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, etc.
Percy discovers from Southey that Godwin isn't dead . . . writes to him out of the blue, Jan 3rd 1812:
You will be surprised at hearing from a stranger. -- No introduction has, nor in all probability ever will authorize that which common thinkers would call a liberty . . . The name of Godwin has been used to to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration, I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him, and from the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles I have ardently desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations. -- Considering then these feelings you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learned of your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name on the list of the honorable dead. I had felt regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. -- It is not so -- you still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of humankind. (Letters I, 219-20)
-- had already been expelled from Oxford, Feb 1811, over Atheism pamphlet with Thomas Hogg. Begins:
There Is No God
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
Marries Harriet Westbrook (August 29 1811), they elope to the north (rescue from parental tyranny), attempted seduction of Harriet by Thomas Hogg
Queen Mab (1813): the extract for discussion is an attack on Christianity
Mary, meanwhile: birth /death of mother; Godwin's remarriage to Mary Jane Clairmont, December 1801.
-- Mary's anomalous position in the Godwin household -- as cherished focus of father's interest and hopes, precocious;
-- but a problem with Mrs Godwin; Mary is exiled to Scotland for most of 2 years (1812, 1813-14);
-- rejection by father? -- cf. Frankenstein's rejection of monster
-- meets Percy, probably in May 1814; elopes in August (across France to Switzerland)
Mary & Percy set up house with Claire (renames herself from Jane Clairmont)
-- "Alastor": self-exploration, rejection of a self? vision: lover as "antitype";
-- living by river Thames near Windsor, Marlow
~~ Central issues for our course:
1. Political / atheism: Percy's campaigns while in England; transmutes into later poetry;
absorbs and transcends Godwin - "the most fatal error that ever happened in the world was the seperation of political and ethical science, that the former ought to be entirely regulated by the latter" (Letters I, 221)
2. Love and marriage: peculiarly modern tensions - "open" marriage?
Mary's experiences of childbirth, deaths of children --- daughter (premature), March 1815; Clara (aged 1), Sept 1818; William (aged 3 ½), June 1819
Her troubled relation to her dead mother; rejection of radical stance?
Why Matilda (1819-20)?
Percy's idealization of love; yet his apparent neglect of Mary
-- Frankenstein also possibly a portrait of Percy
3. Imagination. cf. Defence:
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life -- our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world -- and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. (530)
Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. . . .it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms. (532-3)
But compare Frankenstein: "All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell." (155)
The cosmopolitan Shelleys. . .
Second visit to Switzerland, famous summer of 1816; meet Byron, Claire's affair; inception of Frankenstein.
-- Percy's "Mont Blanc"; sublime; ecological view?
To Italy in March 1818, for Shelley's health. Exile in Italy from 1818 to 1822. Resumes connection with Byron at Venice, Ravenna, Pisa. Percy's Prometheus Unbound, "Julian and Maddalo"; "Mask of Anarchy" (August 1819), Defence of Poetry; unfinished "The Triumph of Life."
July 8 1822 Percy dies sailing off the coast of Italy near Pisa.
Mary's efforts to earn a living by writing;
-- her posthumous idealization of Percy, as in The Last Man (1826)
-- problem with Timothy Shelley; 1838 edition of Percy's poetry;
-- dominant view of Shelley as ineffectual angel until recently
Texts for discussion: see On love & marriage
Document created September 2nd 2003