Bysshe Shelley has been in London for about six weeks--meeting with one of his literary idols, William Godwin, whose 15-year-old daughter, Mary, was out of the country at the time.
About six weeks after their trip to London in the fall of 1812,
Bysshe and Harriet returned to Tremadoc. This time they lasted three months. He
was not popular in that Welsh community. His radical social and religious
ideas—many of which were Godwin-inspired—did not set well with the locals, who
had a far more conservative bent.
On February 26, 1813—following a stormy, unpleasant week—an …
episode, one that caused controversy among early Shelley scholars, even as it had
among Bysshe’s friends, more than one of whom concluded that his experience was
nothing more than another of his wild fantasies or hallucinations or
nightmares. Let’s follow what Richard Holmes says about the events:
The external events
seem clear. During the night the house [Tan-yr-allt] was twice disturbed;
several shots were fired; at least two, and possibly more, of the large glass
windows on the ground floor were smashed; the lawn outside the east front of
the house was trampled and Shelley rolled in the mud; Shelley’s nightgown was
shot through; and one pistol ball was found embedded in the wainscot under one
of the windows in the main drawing-room. By the next morning the whole
household was in a state of terror and exhaustion. Shelley especially was in a
state of severe nervous shock, amounting to something like nervous breakdown,
and his stomach seems to have been strained or kicked during a violent
struggle.[1]
Other scholars have weighed in over the years, the major ones
concluding, as Holmes does, that the attack occurred pretty much as Bysshe had
described.
Edward Dowden (Percy Bysshe
Shelley, 1896) offered reasons
for disbelief (has been a perplexity to
Shelley biographers)—but eventually settled for this: sufficiently disproved are the theories that the attack existed
only in his fertile imagination.[2]
Roger Ingpen (Shelley in
England, 1917): … the account of it given by Bysshe … [has]
now [been] proved to have been correct ….[3]
Walter Edwin Peck (Shelley:
His Life and Work, 1927) just
reports the events as if they were fact—gives no credence to the accusations that
Bysshe had manufactured a wild excuse to leave Tremadoc because of debts and
his constitutional restlessness.[4]
Newman Ivey White (Shelley, 1940): … Shelley’s wild story … [is] entitled to almost literal belief.[5]
Because these exciting events in Bysshe’s life occurred in
Tremadoc, I knew I had to go there—to see Tan-yr-allt, the place where gunshots
could have ended his life.
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