The Poet and the Vampyre by Andrew McConnell Stott

Author:Andrew McConnell Stott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

By the time Alba turned one in 1818, Shelley had been spared prison but resigned himself to losing custody of Charles and Ianthe after the Lord Chancellor had ruled that neither he nor the Westbrooks could raise them, and that they should placed in the care of a Hanwell doctor named Hume. With nothing to keep them in England, a plan to take Alba to Italy was agreed. Claire commemorated her daughter’s first birthday by sending Byron a lock of her hair. ‘My dear friend how I envy you,’ she wrote to him, imagining the time when they should soon live together.

You will have a little darling to crawl to your knees and pull you till you take her up – then she will sit on the crook of your arm and you will give her raisins out of your own plate and a little drop of wine from your own glass and she will think herself a little Queen in Creation. When she shall be older she will run about your house like a lapwing; if you are miserable her light careless voice will make you happy. But there is one delight above all this: if it shall please you, you may delight yourself in contemplating a creature growing under your own hands as it were. You may look at her and think ‘this is my work.’

Claire could only sustain the vision temporarily before it collapsed to reveal her fears:

If you knew the extreme happiness I feel when she nestles closer to me, I could tear my flesh in twenty thousand different directions to ensure her good and when I fear for her residing with you it is not the dread I have to commence the long series of painful anxiety I know I shall have to endure it is lest I should behold her sickly and wasted with improper management lest I should live to hear you neglected her.

There was still a chance that things could work out differently. The thought of Claire’s departure spurred Peacock into making her a proposal of marriage. He was her senior by thirteen years, yet generally considered to be handsome and, with his small income and growing reputation as an author of satirical novels, he was by no means an unfavourable prospect. But the proposition so embarrassed Claire that she took to hiding upstairs to avoid his calls, leaving Peacock to gaze at the soundless piano and lament to Hogg, ‘Here’s the harp she used to touch. Oh, how that touch enchanted.’

A week after Alba’s birthday, the lease of Albion House was sold along with its furniture for a thousand pounds. An additional fourteen hundred went as a gift to Hunt, who had cemented his attachment to the family by naming his newest son Percy Bysshe Shelley Hunt. A little income balanced these outgoings as, after rejections from three publishers, including John Murray, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was published on New Year’s Day 1818, by Lackington’s, the biggest bookseller in London, and a well-known purveyor of horror, magic and supernatural tales.

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