Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy

Author:Fiona MacCarthy [Fiona MacCarthy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2014-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Even now, after so many setbacks and humiliations, Byron had not lost his grand ambition to do great things. If he lived ten years longer he foresaw that he would startle the world with something that ‘like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages’. He had an extraordinary resilience of spirit. But just then, in Venice in 1817, he doubted if his constitution would hold out.

Amidst all the new activity of Venice some of Byron’s memories of England started blurring. Hodgson’s ponderous letters from the vicarage in Bakewell, where the Duke of Rutland had given him a living, seemed like missives from another world. Byron’s desperate need for Augusta lessened as he became impatient with her confusion of remorse. Only his infant daughter Ada was still of urgent concern to him as he responded to reports that Lady Byron was planning to take or send their daughter to the continent, out of reach of possible abduction by her father. The information reached him indirectly via Lady Melbourne. He instructed Hanson to take preventative measures, if necessary legal action: ‘let it be immediately settled & understood that in no case is my daughter to leave the country.’ It was another painful episode in the power struggle between the Byrons, but one can also see it as a realistic concern on his small daughter’s behalf: ‘in the present state of the Continent’, he argued, ‘I would not have my child rambling over it for millions.’ A few weeks later he expressed his delight when Murray told him that the precocious one-year-old Ada was already making great progress with her speech.

Byron’s other absent daughter, his child by Claire Clairmont, was born in Bath on 12 January 1817. He had written coyly to Augusta to tell her that ‘the Demoiselle – who returned to England from Geneva – went there to produce a new baby B.’ Since Claire had travelled back from Geneva with Shelley and with Mary there had been a succession of family disasters. First, in October, Fanny Imlay Godwin, the daughter of Godwin’s first wife Mary Wollstonecraft by the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide in Swansea at the age of twenty-two. Only a few weeks later, on 10 December, the body of Shelley’s deserted young wife Harriet was discovered. She had drowned herself in the Serpentine. At the end of December Shelley and Mary married and were reconciled with the Godwins. In this unsettling atmosphere Claire awaited the birth of her baby. She was now in independent lodgings in New Bond Street in Bath, attended by the Shelleys’ Swiss nursemaid Elise Duvillard. Shelley was anxious that people should not assume that he was the father of Claire’s child.

Although she still wrote to him at length and with passion, Byron refused to communicate with Claire directly. Shelley acted as the go-between, sending news to Byron on 23 April about ‘a little being whom we – in the absence of all right to bestow a Christian designation – call Alba, or the Dawn’.

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