From
Tan-yr-Allt to Mary Godwin
Bysshe and Harriet Shelley fled Wales—and their
hillside home, Tan-yr-allt, in Tremadoc—in late February 1813. They crossed the
Irish Sea to Ireland, where they spent nearly a month on various projects. As
I’ve already reported, Bysshe wrote a frantic note to his English publisher,
Thomas Hookham, on February 27: I have
just escaped an atrocious assassination. … you will perhaps hear of me no more.[1]
A week later, from aboard the Bangor Ferry (from
Bangor, Wales, to Dublin, Ireland—about 100 miles) Bysshe wrote to Hookham
again (thanking him for some £20
the publisher had advanced him), saying he needed a little breathing time to recover from the excitements—terror, really—of
his recent wrestling match with Death.[2]
In March, from Dublin, Bysshe sent his latest poem to
Hookham—Queen Mab. But his other
correspondence during this period involves pleas for money. His angry father,
Sir Timothy Shelley, had cut him off, and he was exploring every source he
could think of (except labor, of
course—one did not do that sort of thing) to acquire the funds he and Harriet
required to live in the way he wanted to live.
By the first of April, he had borrowed enough to pay
for their passage back to England, to London, and by April 5, they were living
at 23 Chapel Street, not far from Buckingham Palace, not far from the Serpentine,
a body of water in Hyde Park, just to their northwest, a body of water that
would one day—a day not too far in the future—provide one of the coldest
chapters in Bysshe Shelley’s life.
Meanwhile, where was Mary Godwin? In January 1813, she
was briefly back in London from Scotland, where she’d been living with the
Baxter family (her escape from her horrible relationship with her stepmother,
Mary Jane Godwin), in company with her new friend Christy Baxter. They went with
Godwin to see the premiere of Coleridge’s play Remorse at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (still standing—I've seen plays there), which had just recently
been rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1809. She and Christy were back in Dundee in June, the same month that Harriet Shelley would give birth to a daughter, Eliza Ianthe. It was nearly a year later—in late March 1814—that Mary returned to live at home in London. And not long after that, all the world would change. Her world. Bysshe’s world.
Harriet’s world. Little Ianthe’s world. Godwin’s world. Our world.
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