In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson

Author:Fiona Sampson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

Chapter 8

Emigrants

For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments.

AS 1818 OPENS WE FIND OURSELVES looking at the map of Europe: its cities, rivers and staging posts, its mountain ranges and borders. It’s a colourful image, but the colours aren’t quite where we’d expect them to be. Europe is embarking on a period of profound if piecemeal transformation, a domino of changes that won’t be equalled in scale and significance until the twentieth century’s world wars and ensuing Cold War. After the Vienna Congress of 1814-15, which aimed to resolve a Napoleonic legacy of new and unstable borders, Central Europe is now dominated by the Austrian Empire – extending hugely east to include Galicia and Transylvania, south into Italy and along the Danube to Belgrade – and the German Confederation, which nudges up against Switzerland and Lombardy and includes both Prussian Baltic and Hanoverian North Sea coasts. To the south and east, the Ottoman and Russian Empires press in on the Austrian. Western Europe is a map of kingdoms rather than nation-states. ‘Congress Poland’ is tiny and still awaits Adam Mickiewicz, Frédéric Chopin and the mid-century surge in Polish nationalism that will produce the inevitably tragic Krakow Uprising of 1846. Risorgimento Italy is ‘Young’, and just embarking on a long nationalist struggle for unification that will culminate, in 1871, with Rome becoming the national capital. France’s Napoleonic ‘Republic’ has ended with the Emperor’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and his exile to St Helena.

In this rapidly changing picture it can seem as if only Britain retains its traditional political institutions. But stability comes at a price. Governments who ride out such periods of radical change necessarily fear revolution. In 1817 the British government suspends Habeas Corpus so that it can try suspects (such as revolutionary conspirators who have gone into hiding) in absentia, which means that the right to legal self-defence is also suspended. This directly threatens the radical intellectual community clustered around Leigh Hunt and The Examiner, who are an obvious target for official British suspicion.

The group are also finding themselves unfashionable. At the end of 1817 the widely read Blackwood’s Magazine starts a campaign of leader articles against the ‘Cockney School’ of writers and artists. Sheltering behind anonymity its author, John Lockhart, claims that Hunt and his friends are chaotic, immoral and vulgar. This is a line that countless cultural establishments have used against the ‘Young Turks’ of the next generation, with their ‘small-r’ rebellious private lives and artistic perspectives. But it’s disproportionately effective here, because many of those whom Lockhart attacks – particularly John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley – are relative newcomers, powerless against the reputation-making institution that is Blackwood’s.

Because he’s publishing little, Percy suffers less direct attack; Keats, though, is nearly destroyed. In August 1818 Lockhart sneers that his newly published Endymion cannot possibly attain classical beauty because:

Mr Keats [...] is merely a young Cockney rhymester, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full of the moon.

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