Book Review: Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives

Published on Friday 14 May 2010 19:10

Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives by Daisy Hay Bloomsbury, 364pp, £20

AT the end of 1816, an article appeared in the liberal magazine The Examiner called "Young Poets". It was an article written by the magazine's controversial editor Leigh Hunt, and it celebrated a new generation of poets, identified as Shelley, Keats and the now largely forgotten John Hamilton Reynolds. But this wasn't just a younger generation kicking against the old guard. As Daisy Hay argues in her highly accessible and fascinating debut, this article also showed a new sense of group activity among writers.

We know that the earlier generation of Romantic poets and authors knew each other: Wordsworth and Coleridge were friends and produced a joint book of poems; Coleridge also knew William Godwin, who married Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There is no sense that the previous generation held themselves apart from each other, or did not socialise together, but there certainly is something different about the next generation, the Shelleys and Hunts and Byrons, whose lives mingled in unprecedented ways. Even Wordsworth was not immune to the new community, as Penelope Hughes-Hallett showed in her 2000 biography The Immortal Dinner, when painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (a close friend of Leigh Hunt) held a dinner at the end of 1817 for Keats, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb.

But this sense of community is an ironic one, as Hay shows, considering that so much of the poetic philosophy of Shelley, Keats and Byron depended on the notion of the artist as an individual, of the poet as a man singled out, an "unacknowledged legislator of the world", as Shelley described it in A Defence of Poetry. Poets were no longer inspired by some muse: they were moved by their internal voice. It was the poet as a solitary individual, perhaps first immortalised by Wordsworth's "wandering lonely as a cloud", that this generation embraced.

The theory was hardly shored by the practice. There was plenty of embracing going on. Leigh Hunt had begun his magazine with his brother John, and both of them had been imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent. It didn't stop them printing more controversial views once they were released, but Hay argues that Leigh Hunt's time in prison, when he was visited by an endless stream of literary celebrities including Byron, developed his need for constant company. He depended on his wife's sister to facilitate dinners with those he now called friends, largely because his wife was taking care of their rapidly expanding family, and because her sister Bess was more academic and better-read.

Hay parallels Hunt's need for constant company with that of Shelley. Shelley might romanticise about the lone poet, but he was never alone. After eloping with Harriet Westbrook when she was only 16, marrying her and having two children with her, he fell in love with Mary Godwin when he visited her famous father at his home. He and Mary then ran away to the continent, taking Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister, with them. He wanted to establish some kind of communal living (much as Coleridge had once fancied), and suggested that Harriet join them.

These plans came to nothing, but Claire would stay with the Shelley household for much of her early life. Seeking to outdo her glamorous and clever stepsister Mary, she sought a poet of her own and went after the biggest she could find, Byron, by whom she had a daughter, Allegra. When Allegra died, aged only five and victim of her careless father's neglect, Mary and Shelley were married (Harriet had committed suicide by drowning), but Claire was alone in the world, with a black mark against her name. Only Shelley's protection saved her, and when he died in 1822, that was gone.

Writers such as Janet Todd have focused on the damage done to the women involved in Shelley's utopian dreams. Hay includes some previously unpublished material, where an elderly Claire Clairmont rages against a "self-interested and harmful" value system. But Hay also shows how vital that need to live around others of like mind was: Shelley's poetry benefited greatly, as did Byron's and Hunt's writing. Keats too, the more ghostly presence in this tale of like-minded individuals, was defended by them when critics sought to bring him down, and if he felt overwhelmed by more forceful personalities like Shelley, he benefited too.

It is not surprising that such a band of writers should throw up contradictions about their theories and lifestyles: they have been doing that for the last 200 years. Hay's book then is not so novel as it might at first appear. But it is engaging, well researched and, with such figures to discuss, full of the best kind of literary gossip.