by Clarissa Campbell Orr
[Campbell Orr, Clarissa. "Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy,
the Celebrity Author, and the undiscovered country
of the human heart." Romanticism On the Net
11 (August 1998) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/rambles.html>]
In an essay for Leigh Hunt’s periodical The Liberal, Mary Shelley used
a review of the Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani,
to reflect on authors who project their personalities into their writing.
Their books, she said
are often the peculiar favourites among men
of imagination and sensibility. Such persons turn to the human heart as
the undiscovered country...As a help to the
science of self-knowledge, and also as a continuance of it, they wish
to study the mind of others, and particularly
those of greatest merit. (1)
She cited examples of books which explored this subjective terra incognita,
including Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
and concluded her list with this tribute to her
mother: "this I, this sensitive, imaginative, suffering, enthusiastic
pronoun, spreads an inexpressible charm over Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway". (2)
Like her mother’s book, Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844)
demands to be read as a portrait of her personal
landscape. But we must also look at the portrait in the context of
the era in which it was painted and the kinds of self-portrait
possible for authors, especially women authors, writing travel books.
In this essay, I propose to look at Shelley’s last book in
relation to her parents, peers, and progeny--that is to say, in relation
to her mother’s Letters from Norway; to travel writing by
her nearer predecessors and contemporaries, especially Lady Morgan,
Frances Trollope, and Samuel Rogers; and to the
strategies for self-promotion available to nineteenth-century authors
of famous literary offspring. (3) I shall conclude with some
comments on the nature of Shelley’s Romanticism and the character of
English writing from the 1820s to the 1840s, when most
of Shelley’s work was published, which might suggest a framework for
further study of Shelley and her contemporaries. (4)
* * * * *
Women writing travel books in the early nineteenth century had basically
two choices. One was to write a useful guidebook,
like Mariana Starke’s Travels in Europe for the use of Travellers on
the Continent (1820). (5) A second was to follow
what I would call the model of the celebrity author. Here Germaine
de Staël’s De L’Allemagne, and her novel Corinne, were
seminal texts. I have discussed elsewhere how De Staël had shown
women that to write on literature, the arts, and social
morals was to write on topics that were both held to be a woman’s province,
but which also penetrated to the heart of
civilisation and its constituent elements. (6) Such writing was "philosophical",
in the sense used in the Enlightenment, in quite
comprehensive ways. It examined the role of the arts in society and
interrogated the contribution made by the macrosphere of
politics and the microsphere of the family. It examined manners and
morals--what would today be called values and lifestyle,
looking at how the characteristic social relations of a nation contributed
toward nurturing its distinctive cultural productions. (7)
De Staël’s description of Germany was also profoundly political:
it was implicitly a manifesto of liberalism challenging the
autocracy of the Napoleonic empire. The Coppet circle’s cosmopolitan
interests in other European cultures established the
terms of debate for the articulation of nationalism and liberalism
in the nineteenth century. (8)
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway (1796) were profoundly philosophical
in this Enlightened sense. Few writers
visited northern Europe, and her visit to a land of small homesteads,
fishing hamlets, and a handful of large towns enabled her to
offer a series of sustained reflections on the nature of civilisation
and the refinement of manners; on the progress of the human
race in relation to the physical environment, and on the connection
between ruling nations and their colonial dependencies. For
a woman of modest means earning a living by her writing, she was well
travelled, having worked in Ireland, and visited Portugal
and France; while her relationship with the American Gilbert Imlay
gave her a transatlantic perspective. When she visited
Scandinavia, she had just finished writing about the revolution in
France, trying to provide an "historical and moral" analysis, that
is to say, an analysis based on the historical and political theories
of the Enlightenment, not simply a narrative account. (9) The
violent change she had personally witnessed there gave added weight
to her evaluation of the efforts of the Enlightened minister
A. P. Bernstorff to modernise Denmark-Norway, and to a general discussion
of how societies could reform themselves,
together with the proper future direction that the Scandinavian realms
might take. Her travel book offered a biting critique of the
distorting moral and psychological effects of commercial society. It
was also a deeply personal book, which celebrated the
grandeur of the northern landscape and its capacity to solace the human
heart; it hinted at private disappointment, even
betrayal, from a man whose soul had been among those deformed by commercial
ruthlessness, and voiced a mother’s concerns
at the prospects for her daughter’s future, given the "oppressed state
of my sex". (10) The personal dilemma was touching, yet
always opened into consideration of the wider social typology. (11)
Letters from Norway was commercially Wollstonecraft’s most successful
book. Yet the notoriety surrounding the author after
her widowed husband Godwin published his Memoir of her together with
some of her letters to Imlay, made her a problematic
model for philosophical women--a problem I shall return to. Germaine
de Staël’s private life was almost as problematic as
Wollstonecraft’s; knowing English prudishness, Prosper Merimee advised
Shelley against attempting a biography of De Staël,
and John Murray turned down the idea. (12) When she included De Staël
in the Lardner’s Lives of the Most Eminent
Literary and Scientific Men of France, she offered a tactfully anodyne
account. Yet somehow De Staël’s reputation as a
woman of literary genius and as an opponent of Napoleon transcended
rumour and scandal, in a way that Wollstonecraft’s did
not. It was her example rather than Mary Wollstonecraft’s that pointed
out a way for women to write with intellectual authority
on European culture, and in so doing to assert their political sympathies.
This self-assertion could be achieved either by fiction or "fact". In
De L’Allemagne, De Staël had deployed analytic and
descriptive commentary of her visits to Germany and of the conversations
she had had with literary figures to convey her views
on the current state of European civilisation. The book was important
to Shelley in many ways, and nourished some of her own
literary offspring. De Staël’s comments on a Doctor Koreff having
discovered the principles of life and death found its way into
the setting of Ingolstadt University, where Victor Frankenstein made
the same discovery. (Sunstein 288) In Marilyn Butler’s
analysis, the later novel Valperga, though set in Italy, celebrates
German ideals of culture, drawing on De Staël’s evaluation of
Germany, and the motif much discussed in the Coppet circle of the contrasts
between Northern and Southern Europe. (13) De
Staël can be counted among Shelley’s intellectual mothers. But
there were aspects of De Staël’s example she found less
inspiring or helpful. For as well as De Staël’s "factual", discursive
approach in De L’Allemagne, De Staël had constructed a
fictional alter-ego, Corinne, who, in the eponymous novel, acts as
a cultural mentor to her English lover Lord Neville, revealing
to him the nature of Italian civilisation. This creation of a fictional
persona preceded the journalistic stance of De L’Allemagne.
Shelley did not create a fictional persona like Corinne, but other
women did emulate the pattern of using their achievement of
literary celebrity as a springboard for authoritative comment on national
cultures.
In looking at this strategy used by Mme de Staël and her followers,
we must keep in mind the distinction between the literary
persona, the celebrity’s own self-representation, and her "true" personal
views. What the writer sincerely believed, and what it
was politically necessary or appropriate for her to articulate, had
to be carefully calculated. Equally, it was just as much a
matter of calculation if, in her public and social appearances, the
writer elided the gap between herself and a fictional alter ego.
The line between a novel as a cultural guide and a piece of prose travel-writing
that was a "real" description of the author’s
experience was a fluid one. Mme de Staël deliberately identified
herself with her heroine, Corinne, the improvisatrice who
embodied Italian culture and personified the woman of artistic genius.
She dressed like the imaginary Corinne in Sybil-like
robes and perpetually twirled a piece of laurel between her fingers
during her soirees. (14) This offered a female model for the
Romantic ideal of artistic self-expression.
The case was similar with Sydney Owenson, the "Irish Corinne". Her novel
The Wild Irish Girl (1805) preceded Corinne by
a year, but the public mind associated her with De Staël. When
Owenson was taken up by literary and fashionable circles in
London she dressed picturesquely in a cloak like her heroine, the Irish
princess who embodied the forgotten culture of Ireland.
Owenson, later Lady Morgan, spent the rest of her literary career playing
the part of Irish national genius, guardian of its
sorrows and poetry. (15)
Lady Morgan’s reputation as a novelist dealing with national character
earned her the invitation to write a book on France
(published in 1817). Riding the crest of fresh acclaim and controversy
by its hostility to the restored Bourbons, she followed
this up with a two-volume quarto book on Italy (published in 1821).
As well as giving thorough coverage to the major centres
and their cultural attractions, this too flung down the gauntlet to
the legitimise, conservative ideology of "throne and altar" and
defended Napoleon’s modernisation of Italy. Her outspoken criticism
of the Papacy earned the book its place on the Index of
prohibited books. She prefaced the second edition with a scathing rejoinder
to the critics who had accused her of ignorance,
aligning herself with the account of Italian republicanism by the Coppet
insider, Sismondi. She was thrilled to know that en route
to Italy she had been given the hotel room previously used by Mme de
Staël herself.
In another example of the celebrity author, the unknown Anna Jameson
invented her own persona, the Byronic ennuyee weary
of life and suffering from some unexplained sorrow, for her first book,
Diary of an Ennuyee, an account of a journey to Italy.
Shelley disliked this mix of fact and fiction, and the fictional ennuyee
who dies of unexplained melancholy and weariness by the
end of the book, became a little bit of an embarrassment when readers
discovered her creator was robustly alive. But her
self-creation of "celebrity" helped establish Jameson as a writer on
foreign countries, and she consolidated her reputation with
books on Germany on Canada which were vehicles for her meditation on
women’s social position as well as the discussions of
the character of a nation’s culture. Her role model was again Mme de
Staël. (16)
Frances Trollope, ever alive to the possibility of parody, offered her
own caricature of this kind of literary celebrity in her
portrait of Mrs Sherbourne in Charles Chesterfield (1841). Mrs Sherbourne
explains her upbringing to the editor,
Marchmont, to whom she is "pitching" her memoirs:
Born on the bosom of the Adriatic, in a steam-boat,
bound to Ancona, the first breath I drew was impregnated
with poetry and love...nor yet will I give
you even a glance of the mazy labyrinth of youthful passion through which
it was my lot to wind my tangled doubtful
way, at an age when girls less set apart and marked by fate are still
playing with their waxen babies in the nursery.
(17)
However, she does show him a scandalous extract concerning a duke and
a lady, which clinches the deal. She assures him that
she intends to commit suicide once the memoirs are complete, so they
will be even more saleable for their shock value:
I have tried all things, Marchmont, and all
things that I have touched upon have returned an empty, hollow sound,
sadly unlike the music that I sought. (18)
Simultaneously with bidding up her price with this assurance of her
impending demise, she is inveigling into marriage the naive
young hero, star-struck with literary heroes and heroines, and drunk
with vanity at the assiduous flattery of Sherbourne and the
editor Marchmont, quite unaware that his attraction to both is the
legacy he is about to inherit.
Mrs Sherbourne, like De Staël / Corinne or Morgan / The Wild Irish
Girl, had a trademark mannerism that was easily
recognisable:
The morning-dress of Mrs Sherbourne never varied,
at least to its style. Summer and winter she was always
décolleté, and summer and winter
she was always enveloped, more or less, in a black cashmere shawl … Her
existence, therefore, glided on through a
series of small literary labours, cheered by a series, equally unbroken,
of
small literary flirtations. (19)
Mrs. Sherbourne was allegedly modelled on Anna Jameson: the red hair
she gave her character would fit this, as well as the
world-weariness, an obvious allusion to Jameson’s Ennuyee, and her
residences abroad, where she has devoted herself to
"studying the genius of the various nations among whom I have lived".
But her flirtatiousness and her love poetry suggests a
swipe at LEL, while her diminutive size and habit of dropping foreign
phrases recalls Lady Morgan.
Trollope’s own literary celebrity derived not from a fictional character
but from her own sprightly candour as a commentator on
American life. Domestic Manners and Morals of the Americans catapulted
her into attention in 1832. Among the friends
seeing her and her party off to America in 1827 had been Shelley, a
friend in turn of Frances Wright, the utopian socialist who
had suggested to Trollope the possibility of earning money in America.
(Letters II, 16n) The Trollope’s commercial venture
there failed spectacularly, but Trollope recouped her losses with her
pen. Being no less in need of literary earning power than
her own Mrs. Sherbourne, the success of this travel book put her in
a position to make contracts with Murray and then Bentley
who between them commissioned books on Belgium and the Rhineland, Paris,
Vienna, and Italy. Her fiction, which they also
published, subsidised the outlay she incurred in paying for her travels.
Trollope was keenly aware of her niche in the literary
market-place: negotiating a contract for a sequence of books with Bentley
she wrote "my reputation must chiefly be sustained
by travelling", but that the novels she could write for him could pay
for the "costly ramblings" which would also be turned into
books. (20)
In Trollope’s case, her unplanned, unexpected success as a commentator
on America meant that she created herself from the
outset as a "character", that of the caustic-tongued, forthright woman
traveller. This persona was a literary construction as much
as a "fictional" character would have been. This character’s hallmark
was a daringness of mind and body: her willingness not
only to say what she thought, but also to undertake excursions beyond
the normally expected itinerary. This meant for instance
that she would supplement her account of her stay in Vienna, where
she became an admiring visitor to the Metternich circle,
with tales of excursions down a salt mine. By 1847 a reviewer in the
New Monthly Magazine had described a difficult journey
as one only "the most enterprising tourist--a very Trollope--would
undertake." (21)
As well a making herself the indomitable heroine of her journeys, Trollope
used fictional techniques, as Helen Heineman has
argued, to enliven her accounts: caricature, dialogue, accumulation
of incident. Hervieu’s sketches were the visual analogue of
these incidents. The line between the travel book illustrated with
vignettes and sketches, and the novel with pictures by
illustrators such as Phiz or Leech, is a fluid one. In Trollope’s writing
career, the narrator as intrepid traveller precedes the
creation of more obviously fictional heroines, unlike Lady Morgan,
whose travel writing went forward on the basis of her
success in fiction. Such was the competition in both genres in a crowded
literary market and the fluidity between the two genres
that when Lady Morgan learned that Trollope was about to publish her
book on Belgium, she turned her own plans for a travel
book on that country into a novel, rather than waste her time, material,
and earning power.
Trollope’s fiction therefore "traded" on her travel, rather than the
other way around, although the economic reality was that the
fiction subsidised the travel research. Heinemann has also argued that
as well as using fictional techniques in her book on
America to dramatise her observations, Mrs. Trollope projected herself
into her most famous literary character, Mrs. Barnaby.
She was a traveller both literally and figuratively, a vulgar and irrepressible
widow and social climber who begins her
adventures, spread over three novels, in provincial Gloucestershire,
before setting out to conquer fashionable society in Clifton,
Cheltenham and London. The two sequels see her adventuring to Australia
and America with her card-sharping second
husband, Major Allen. And if the character of Mrs. Sherbourne sees
Trollope turning a sardonic eye on the other women
writers competing in the same market, she was also able to parody herself
and her reputation for her damning of American
society by making Mrs. Barnaby, in her American adventures, write a
book to please her hostess, entitled "Justice Done at
Last". By this time, Mrs. Barnaby has developed from being a picaresque
female rogue, a throwback almost to Defoe’s morally
ambiguous heroines, to being Trollope’s fictional alter ego, the "strong
woman" triumphing against the odds. (22)
Reviewers considered both Trollope’s novels and her travels as vulgar.
Without possessing either Wollstonecraft’s or Shelley’s
radical political agenda, she was nonetheless labelled with that stock
epithet "Amazonian" habitually used to deride women who
stepped out of line. What irked some of her readers, and made her book
on America such a controversial success, was its
bearing on woman’s role. It debunked the ideal of "separate spheres"
as practised in America, which she believed had been
shaped in such a way as to deform American society. She saw that misogyny
lay behind the cult of true womanhood and that
women in America, despite the cant of being a republican and egalitarian
society, did not have the same degree of shared social
and cultural interests and moral "influence" which Trollope, together
with Morgan and Jameson, argued was appropriate to
them. But in looking at a nation’s manners and morals, and their bearing
on the position of women, Trollope was in line with the
tradition of Enlightenment philosophy I have discussed above, combined
with, in the example of Trollope and many others, the
Christian sentiment that religion contributed to a better treatment
for women. A cardinal belief of this historiography was that its
treatment of women was a criterion by which a society’s degree of civilisation
could be judged. In her book on America
Trollope was being philosophical in the way that De Staël or Wollstonecraft
had been philosophical because she was using an
examination of social practices and assumptions as her way in to understanding
the character of a nation. (23)
Trollope’s book on Italy, published two years before Shelley’s in 1842,
has this element of philosophical reflection, as well as
being a narration of her visit. She enjoyed her encounter with Italy
so much she made up her mind to move to Florence, so she
gave a zestful account of her tourism and social life in the usual
centres the British visited: Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples.
In addition she contributed to the contemporary discussion of the condition
of Italy: the nationalist movement, the character of
Austrian rule, Catholicism, social progress. Unlike Shelley, Trollope
was not in advance of her visit an advocate of Italian
independence from Austria and reunification, and although she was a
Whig and not hostile to political change, she abhorred the
idea of revolution. On the other hand, she was keenly sensitive to
various kinds of social injustice, and some of her novels
addressed themselves to these issues. (24) Consequently, the further
south she travelled, the more her complacency gave way
before her concern for the evidence of Papal or Neapolitan mis-government
in its impact on ordinary people. Like
twentieth-century travellers in developing countries whose foreign
exchange boosts the host country’s revenue while traditional
ways of life are disrupted to provide a synthetic tourist experience,
she felt guilty when a carter whose vehicle slowed down her
carriage outside Naples was beaten by the sentry on duty:
I was disgusted as much as the strongest theoretical
democrat could be, when I saw the style in which a sentinel at
the gate of Capua treated a peasant..." (25)
In fact there is a more vivid sense of the plight of the poor in this
recorded incident than in any of Shelley’s more generalised
advocacy of the Carbonari and other Italian patriots. As she travelled
further south, Trollope began to realise that
the moral, the political, the Christian philosopher,
if he opens his eyes beyond the brilliant precincts enumerated by
Mrs. Starkie (sic), cannot fail to see much
that will shock his eyes and maim his heart. (A Visit II, 239)
Until this point in her travels, Trollope had rather enjoyed contradicting
conventional British sentiment about Austrian rule in
Venice, or the repression behind the paternal government of Florence,
thus living up to her reputation for boldness as well as
honouring her friendship with the Austrian Chancellor Metternich and
his circle. Her emphasis was on the trends moulding the
future, not sentimentality over the past. In Venice, she argued the
physical fabric would be conserved under Austrian
administration, and that most ordinary Venetians were content to accept
loss of independence, in the hope that the city would
benefit from economic regeneration. It was only the reclusive aristocracy
who lamented the past. Besides, with her
characteristic astringency she declared that the much vaunted Venetian
liberty had been erroneously lauded:
no single volume I have ever read concerning
her greatness has left my mind any impression of her virtue, even in
her very best days, or have ever exercised
any favourable influence upon human happiness. (A Visit II, 120)
Shelley’s association with Byron while he was living in Venice meant
that she, by contrast, was imbued with the Romantics’
nostalgia for a poignant and glamorous Venetian past. Similarly in
Florence, Trollope acknowledged that because of political
censorship the Tuscans lacked the English privilege of freedom of thought,
but argued that they had very little to complain about
from the paternalistic and forward-looking Grand Duke. Her visit coincided
with a scientific congress held to mark the revival
of the Academia del Cimenti, with lavish ducal sponsorship, which she
described thoroughly and approvingly.
As she became more sympathetic to the need for Italian independence,
Trollope offered a critical analysis of the usual
arguments and remedies. For instance, in the Papal States, she questioned
the usual equation between Catholicism and national
degradation. She argued that a political constitution, economic stimulus,
and public education (the usual Whig remedies) would
bring about the desired changes, and that the profession of Catholicism,
far preferable to the godless atheism of the
revolutionary mind, would be compatible with these prescriptions. Moreover,
although she expressed the usual Protestant
prejudice against "Popish fetes and festivals" which fostered idleness,
she also deplored the indecorum of English visitors to St.
Peter’s in Easter week, who popped their champagne corks and talked
throughout the services. (A Visit II, 302-3; II, 203; II,
272-3) Trollope could not be further from Shelley’s political position,
who had grown up in a household advocating revolution,
whose mother had witnessed, albeit with increasing alarm at the excesses
of the Jacobins, the French Revolution which had
stamped Trollope with a horror of mob violence, and who was to give
some space in her book to a vindication of the
Carbonari, a secret society which had used violent insurgency. All
the same, both women were more sympathetic to
Catholicism when they saw it first hand than they had expected to be,
and if Trollope would have disagreed with Shelley on the
tactics for bringing about change in Italy, she at least conceded that
the Italians could be trusted with governing themselves.
Secondly, how did Trollope project herself as a "celebrity author"?
If she were being published today her book would probably
be marketed as "Fanny Trollope’s Italy", just as we have Peter Mayle’s
Provence, or Jan Morris’s Wales. The
nineteenth-century version of this was a title page reading "A Visit
to Italy by Mrs. Trollope, author of Paris and the
Parisians, Vienna and the Austrians, Domestic Manners of the Americans,
etc. etc." The title page scanned, her reader
then finds on the first page a quote from her friend Basil Hall, whose
book on America had precede Trollope’s debut:
In this poor exhausted Italy, countless scholars,
men of wit and fancy, Blues, Roman Catholics, Protestants,
Poets, Painters, Philosophers, with ten thousand
others of all persuasions, capacities, politics, tastes, and
experiences, have worried and scourged the
land till it will scarcely bear a blade of decent grass or even a thistle
for any stray donkey that may be passing...it
must be a bold donkey, you will say, who, after this, shall venture to
bray about Italy.
All the same, she proclaims her intention to "gossip" about Italy, and
her view that most travellers have made unsound
inferences about the place: a bold donkey indeed.
Like many travel books, she adopted the epistolary format, which absolves
a writer from the need to provide exhaustive
accounts, and vindicates the personal. She keeps assuring her putative
correspondent, who stands for the reader, that she will
not provide her with a catalogue of churches or pictures; when she
does describe a famous church or gallery, she is selective.
After a second visit to the Pitti, the reader is assured
I am almost afraid to ask you to go with me
to the Pitti palace again, lest you should fancy that I intend to turn
myself into a catalogue, and then insist upon
your reading me. But I will do no such thing. Ah!...if you did but
know what that Pitti palace gallery is, you
would allow that, for an old lady recounting her adventures I am the
most considerate and forebearing that ever
wagged her pen. (A Visit I, 155-6)
The old lady and the bold donkey between them were willing to admit
it if they found a renowned statue, like the Venus de
Medici, disappointing on first sight, or to assert that a Holy Family
by Michaelangelo would not be worth £5 if it was not
known to be by him. (A Visit I, 125; I, 131) Hers was thus a running
commentary, not a guidebook--though she does throw
out the occasional advice about what to see and how to go about it--and
she has fun playing off contradictory artistic
evaluations of two of her Florence guidebooks, so that she could vindicate
her individual experience:
Do you not think I should have done better
to have let my books alone, and permitted myself to like, or dislike,
according to my own fancy without troubling
myself to discover what wiser folks thought about the matter? (A
Visit I, 138-9) (26)
She thus sets up an implied characterisation of her reader, who is assumed
like her to be reasonably well-read and informed
(for instance, she will think of Dante when visiting Florence), but
who will have the honesty to admit what he or she genuinely
likes when they see it, instead of hiding behind the expected reaction.
She also presumes that her reader will be as eager as she
is to try out all the excursions and sample at first hand all the sights
that have been so much described. Above all, Trollope
conveys a great deal about the pleasures of tourism. After the reader
has accompanied her on a long and thorough tour of the
Ducal palace at Venice, her mouth is vicariously watering when her
guide thoroughly enjoys her ices at Cafe Florian afterwards.
Paradoxically then, although she is writing as a "personality", as
a celebrity author trading on her previous marketability, there is
actually very little of Trollope’s interior emotional landscape on
view; what comes over most is someone enthusiastically
enjoying herself as well as doing the sights thoroughly. (27)
* * * * *
Morgan, Jameson and Trollope all found ways of writing original travel
books with a philosophical intent, that would also stand
out in a crowded market by trading on their literary celebrity. Shelley
knew and admired all three women, and spoke
appreciatively of Lady Morgan’s Italy in her preface to Rambles. (28)
When she came to construct a travel book drawing on
her two trips abroad in 1840-1842, it is at least conceivable that
Shelley could have done something similar. Besides, her own
mother, in her Letters from Norway, had shown how to construct an attractive
literary persona, using her observations on
Scandinavian life, but letting only a very stylised fraction of her
actual personal dilemma to emerge from the narrative. This had
been successful for her as a writer; she had in effect commercialised
herself, and made herself and her perceptions the centre of
the "story" of the letters. It had also succeeded in a more intimate
and unforeseen way in concluding the emotional anguish she
had experienced during the time in Scandinavia from her disintegrating
relationship with Imlay, since Godwin had taken a fresh
interest in the "sensitive, imaginative, suffering, enthusiastic" self
who had written the book. Although they had met before her
affair with Imlay, he had not been drawn to her. Now they became companions
and lovers, and the parents of Shelley.
In addition to her mother’s example in constructing an attractive persona
as a philosophical traveller, Shelley could have
capitalised on her own status as a literary celebrity, the author of
Frankenstein. All her subsequent novels had been sold as "by
the author of Frankenstein", which had originally appeared anonymously,
not as by "Mary Shelley", or by "Mrs. Shelley"--the
name on the title page of Rambles. (29) That stunningly successful
novel was cast in the framework of a travel narrative, and
the stories of Victor Frankenstein and the monster framed by this were
both travel narratives of a kind, too: Frankenstein’s
search for the key to life and his tracking down of the monster took
him along part of the Rhine itinerary subsequently followed
by Shelley’s rambles. Given the way that authors identified themselves
with their fictions, could not Shelley have alluded to
following in Frankenstein’s footsteps? The disadvantage of doing this,
however, would have been that it would draw attention
to herself as a "transgressive" author, who had invented a fiction
that dared to imagine how a human scientist could usurp the
creative power of the deity.
The fact was that either as daughter or author, Shelley was always too
much of a celebrity. Unlike Morgan or Jameson or
Trollope, she did not have to create her own celebrity, since its more
problematic relative, notoriety, had been imposed on her
since her father’s memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft had publicised such
facts as her mother’s unmarried liaison with Gilbert
Imlay and their daughter’s illegitimacy, and her attempts at suicide.
After the polemics of her Vindications of the Rights of Men
and of Women, Wollstonecraft had reinvented herself as a heroine of
sensibility in the Letters from Norway. But she had
already become a literary caricature, the standard vulgar and argumentative
feminist in a cluster of novels: Bridgetina Botherim
in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, the eponymous
Adeline Mowbray by her former friend Maria
Hays, Harriet Freke in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. After her death,
her husband idealised her in his novel St. Leon, and
compared her letters to Imlay to the romance depicted in Goethe’s Werther.
Shelley must have been keenly aware of the
manifold ways a writer’s life could be represented and misrepresented:
notoriety was the flip-side to celebrity. Being
Wollstonecraft’s daughter was, to the majority of the British reading
public, a fact to live down rather than play up. Shelley was
not going to be able to establish an authorial persona on a clean slate.
Shelley then compounded this family legacy of notoriety by her elopement
with P. B. Shelley while he was still legally the
husband of his estranged wife Harriet Westbrook, who subsequently committed
suicide. The elopement was additionally to be
persistently accompanied by rumours of incest, since Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin and P. B. Shelley were accompanied by
Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont. This fostered the recurrent allegations
that the two women were shared in common by
Shelley and by Byron. (Sunstein 119, 160, 165)
In Coleridge’s phrase, the romantic age was the "age of personality"
and there were plenty of secondary figures around the
"great" writers who hitched their literary wagons to brighter stars.
Even if Shelley hesitated in identifying herself as daughter or
author, could she have "traded" more on her status as grieving widow
at the heart of the drama of Shelley’s death by drowning?
Why not do the same as Trelawny, Medwin, Hunt, who all made the most
of knowing Byron and Shelley? (30) Could she have
made her woes into her subject matter? Why didn’t she make her very
notoriety work for her? Why not adopt a signature style
of dress, suggesting perhaps Italian sympathies, and make herself into
a tragic celebrity author?
The answer lies both in her temperament as in her circumstances. Reviewing
Anna Jameson’s Loves of the Poets, she
commented approvingly that in her treatment of living poets, Jameson
was
afraid, justly so--for the practice of shewing
up our friends is the vice and shame of our literature,--of dragging
into undesired publicity the modest and retiring.
(Works II, 200)
Shelley respected her privacy and that of others, helping Theresa Guiccioli,
for instance, to recover some of her letters to Byron
and prevent their publication. Her pain at losing Shelley, and her
respect for him as a poet, was too great too tempt her to
exploit it selfishly. It would be left to her son and daughter-in-law
to create the myth of the devoted widow. But added to this
natural reticence was an acceptance of a code of femininity which may
seem surprising in Wollstonecraft’s daughter: as she
wrote to Trelawny when he tried to enlist her aid in writing a biography
of her husband,
You know me--or you do not, in which case I
will tell you what I am--a silly goose--who far from wishing to
stand forward to assert myself in any way,
now that I am alone in the world, have but the desire to wrap night and
obscurity of insignificance around me. This
is weakness--but I cannot help it--to be in print--the subject of men’s
observations--of the bitter hard world’s commentaries,
to be attacked or defended--this ill becomes one who
knows how little she possesses worthy to attract
attention--and whose chief merit--if it be one--is a love of that
privacy which no woman can emerge from without
regret–(Letters II, 71-2)
Even if Mary was here exaggerating her timidity in order to underline
her reluctance to help Trelawny, the flinching from further
exposure rings true.
In addition to her personal disinclination for the limelight, there
was another powerful incentive to avoid celebrity mannerisms:
her need to be circumspect in the face of her father-in-law’s hostility,
in order to protect the allowance on which she and her
surviving son depended, and to avoid compromising his future. Since
Sir Timothy Shelley prohibited her writing a biography of
his son or even contributing material to anyone else’s, she could not
venture anything autobiographical either. This necessary
caution would also preclude her taking any overt position in controversy
over women’s status; her writing, unlike her mother’s,
or Trollope’s and Jameson’s, could not explicitly become a vehicle
for "feminist" discussion, although she was throughout her
life ready to help women friends who found themselves in unconventional
circumstances. Her only comment on women’s status
in Rambles is the uncontroversial one that in feudal times women were
confined "to hope, to fear, to pray, and to embroider."
(31) Modern woman has gained not so much in rights as in emotional
intensity: "We must act, suffer, or enjoy; or the worst of
all torments is ours--such restless agony as old poets figured as befalling
a living soul imprisoned in the bark of a tree. We are
not born to be cabbages". (Works VIII, 91)
Her editorial notes to Shelley’s poems published in 1839 had subtly
evaded the prohibition on a biography by giving a personal
context for her husband’s poems. She had recounted the circumstances
of his drowning and the deaths of their children,
William and Clara in her editorial apparatus, but although she inevitably
alluded to her own grief, she was essentially
subordinating her own story to the task of presenting her husband’s
oeuvre. However, her father-in-law died in 1843 while she
was preparing Rambles for publication. This meant that the book, which
turned out to be her final work, can be seen in a
certain sense as the autobiography she had hitherto been unable to
write. Although planned before Sir Timothy died, she was
now freer to allude to herself; self-censorship was no longer imperative.
(32)
Instead of capitalising on her personal drama as Shelley’s widow, or
inventing any other kind of "celebrity" character for herself,
Shelley adopted the travel persona of a mother; moreover, not one reflecting
on the "oppressed state" of a daughter, but a more
conventional kind of mother, worrying about her university age son.
She identified with the life-stages of a normal member of
the elite although this was a very selective version of herself and
her son. But this persona is not consistently sustained. Her
book is uneven in tone, even polyvocal. In choosing the title Rambles
she was deliberately signalling that the book would
"wander, travel, make [its] way about in a free unrestrained manner
and without definite aim or direction", to follow the OED
definition. Similarly, Anna Jameson had called her book on Canada Winter
Rambles and Summer Sketches, giving herself
scope to "ramble" or reflect mentally on her country of the heart,
Germany, its literature, customs, and the friends she
corresponded with there, while she was physically confined to an Ontario
winter. Similarly, too, Wollstonecraft’s Letters from
Norway had referred to its author as "rambling". (33) The title of
Shelley’s book suggested that it would include an element of
reflection: it would be "philosophical" without suggesting any systematic
probing.
Consequently, Shelley’s Rambles do not pretend to the exhaustiveness
of Lady Morgan’s or the zestful thoroughness of Fanny
Trollope’s travelogues. Both of these were commissioned, whereas Shelley
decided to make a book out of her personal
journey after her return. She wrote her book in epistolary form and
offered the reader comments in a number of registers.
These include personal narratives of the difficulty of a journey, on
her varying health, her budgetary constraint; comments on
whether Murray’s guide-book advice as to hotels, routes or sights was
reliable; her subjective responses to the pictures,
statues, cities and landscapes she has seen; reports on her occupations
and those of her companions; historical disquisitions on
such topics as the Tyrolean struggle against Napoleon, or the origins
of the Carbonari; and authoritative analysis of the present
and future state of Italian literature. In fact, not all of the letters
were her own composition; one motive for offering the book to
Murray was to assist her Italian exiled friend Gatteschi, who needed
to earn money from writing. She translated his essay on the
Carbonari and inserted it among the letters. The format of "rambling"
with its implied repudiation of systematic coverage also
meant that, unlike most books on Italy, she was able to exclude any
account of the journey home. Instead she leaves the reader
somewhat abruptly once she has reached and described Naples.
Despite the disparate nature of these letters, the book has an artistic
unity, found not in its portmanteau-like literary form, but in
its theme. The territory of the human heart it traces is the recovery
of paradise. The travelling self is not a young man seeking
lost love, not a Childe Harold, not an ennuyee, or any other Romantic
persona but a middle-aged mother who has known
bereavement and fears the loss of her student son. In this role, Shelley
constantly emphasises that she is only experiencing what
any mother would feel; she does not underline her singularity. But
the dominant self-characterisation as mother obscures,
conveniently for a woman who wanted to deflect attention from herself,
the fact that this mother is also a thinking woman and
scholar, who has written authoritatively on Italian literature and
believes that the cultural entity of the nation should have it
political counterpart independent of foreign control. This safe persona
means that she can insinuate her strong views without
confrontation. It also means that it is Shelley the scholarly writer
who is implicitly being projected here, not Shelley the novelist
or the Keepsake author. Scholarly writing was anonymous, the very opposite
of the celebrity author. In Rambles, the authorial
presence is therefore both "philosophical" and deeply personal, but
the personal is presented to a great degree as part of the
experience of motherhood in general; this also makes it a philosophical
kind of projection of motherhood.
It is significant that Rambles was dedicated not to a friend like Lady
Morgan with a political agenda, but to the poet Samuel
Rogers. She may have meant by this to underline her assertion in her
preface that she was offering a collection of fragments, not
a political dissertation; but it is a collection that has a poetic
unity, which shared some characteristics of Rogers’ esteemed
poem on Italy. (34) Although Shelley’s Rambles belongs to the category
"travel", it can also be construed, I would suggest, as
a prose-poem, which like Rogers’ poem had death and memory as central
themes. Rogers’ poem Italy was based on his
personal visits there but the obsessive reworkings he gave it produced
a poem that was somewhat impersonal. It was suffused
with a nostalgia mediated through the poet’s reading of classical poetry
and medieval story. For instance, his visit to Modena
recalls the story of the bride Ginevra, locked in her bridal chest
on the eve of her wedding. This tale is a good example of the
kind of sentimental picturesque anecdote which found its way into the
annuals and keepsakes. Shelley wrote some herself and
gave several of them this type of idealised Italian historical setting.
(35)
A central image however of Rogers’ poem was not a prettified medieval
incident, but an evocation of death. Following directly
after his description of the Coliseum in Rome is a substantial section
describing the funeral procession of a woman stabbed in
jealousy; the gloom of the ceremony seems in harmony with the solemn
surroundings:
Death, when we meet the spectre in our walks,
As we did yesterday and shall to-morrow
Soon grows familiar--like most other things,
Seen, not observed; but in a foreign clime,
Changing his shape to something new and strange....
Knocks at the heart. His form and fashion
here
To me, I do confess, reflect a gloom,
A sadness round; yet one I would not lose;
Being in unison with all things else
In this, this land of shadows, where we live
More in past time than present, where the
ground,
League beyond league, like one great cemetery,
Is covered o’er with mouldering monuments;
And let the living wander where they will,
They cannot leave the footsteps of the dead.
Concluding his poem, the poet prophesies he will return to the English
winter and think about Elysium. So too Shelley had
returned to England, leaving behind two dead children as well as a
husband, and had spent seventeen years remembering her
Elysian fields.
Rambles covered three years of Shelley’s life and recorded two visits
to Italy. The first was relatively brief; the party travelled
down the Rhine and Moselle, stopping only briefly en route, before
arriving at Lake Como, where they spent the rest of July
and August. In mid-September her son and his two companions went on
ahead while Mary waited in Milan for some delayed
money; she then returned via Geneva, revisiting the area of Byron’s
Villa Diodati which had inspired Frankenstein: an
opportunity to link herself to her literary progeny she did not exploit.
Her meditations on loss and death are superseded by the
authorial persona she chooses to foreground: that of a mother, making
her son and his needs into the centre of the travels. In its
self-effacement and devotion to another, this is the opposite of a
celebrity persona.
She establishes her authorial persona as mother very immediately, plunging
the reader in to the conclusion of family councils, as
if already privy to the plans and suggestions for travel that have
implicitly preceded the opening of the book. She introduces
herself as a traveller happy to accompany an undergraduate son and
two friends:
I am glad to say, that our frequent discussions
this spring have terminated in a manner very agreeable to every one
concerned in them. My son and his two friends
have decided on spending their summer vacation on the shores of
the lake of Como-there to study for the degree,
which they are to take next winter. They wish me to accompany
them, and I gladly consent. (Works VIII, 75)
(36)
What could be more respectable? A middle-aged mother of University sons
decides rather unusually to join them on a summer
reading party, implying they all enjoy an established position in the
landed and professional elite of England whose children
attended Oxford or Cambridge as a matter of course. This however is
already a subtle re-positioning of the truth of Shelley’s
precarious toehold in English society and of her son’s passivity. As
her letters to Claire Clairmont show, she despaired
frequently at young Percy’s lack of initiative in developing his interests
or social contacts even while she tried to hard on the
slender allowances allowed them by her father-in-law, to provide a
suitable social context for his future as a Baronet and
Sussex landowner. (see, for instance, Letters III, 48-50)
The second paragraph introduces the autobiographical sub-text that appears
and reappears throughout the Rambles, alluding
only briefly to her past but powerfully invoking the association of
Italy and death:
Can it, indeed, be true that I am about to
revisit Italy? How many years are gone since I quitted that country!
There I left the mortal remains of those beloved
-- my husband and my children, whose loss changed my whole
existence, substituting, for happy peace and
the interchange of deep-rooted affections, years of deep-rooted
solitude, and a hard struggle with the world;
which only now, as my son is growing up, is brightening into a better
day The name of Italy has magic in its very
syllables. The hope of seeing it again recalls vividly to my memory that
time, when misfortune seemed an empty word,
and my habitation on earth a secure abode, which no evil could
shake. Graves have opened in my path since
then; and instead of the cheerfulness of the living, I have dwelt
among the early tombs of those I loved. Now
a new generation has sprung up; and at the name of Italy, I grow
young again in their enjoyments, and gladly
prepare to share them. (Works VIII, 75)
But notice how few details there are of this loss. The reader ignorant
of Shelley’s life could read this in fairly conventional terms
of the grieving woman.
After this introduction to the "landscape of the human heart", the rest
of the letters describing the journey to Como contain little
personal reflection; Shelley’s reticence contributes to the charm of
her book and lend gravity to her few personal allusions when
she does make them. The letters concentrate instead on comments on
the means of travel, fellow-passengers, landscapes or
townscapes. At Baden-Baden, the bereaved woman reappears: suddenly
she longs to stay there instead of facing the scene of
her memories and the possibility that her son’s plans to sail on Lake
Como, renowned for its storms and accidents, will tempt
fate. (Works VIII, 95) But the travellers press on as planned. At Chur,
the author literally finds again her Italian voice; to the
amazement of the young men, her Italian is fluent and practical, she
is able to make all the travel arrangements with despatch,
and clearly feels at home. Soon the scenery changes from the bleak,
northern face of the Alps to "ever-vernal" Italy, and
"Thus...after dreary old age and the sickening pass of death, does
the saint open his eyes upon Paradise". (Works VIII, 106)
The rest of Part I describes their daily life and a few excursions,
reflects on the Italian character, opera and literature, quietly
notes her victory over fear of sailing on the Lake, and records, quoting
from Dante’s Paradiso, moments of rapturous
communion with the evening calm of the lake. (Works VIII, 123) Shelley
makes light in her published account of the hideous
anxiety of waiting by herself in Milan for her delayed remittance,
dwelling instead on her sight-seeing and on the need for the
Italians’ need for independence from Austrian control, just as her
mother’s letters to Imlay in the published version of Letters
from Norway provide only a slight glimpse of all her tormented feelings,
evincing instead a determination to immerse herself in
the natural scenery and her social investigations.
Travelling home through Switzerland prompts more self-revelation. She
must resume her mantle of middle-age and loneliness.
But her allusions to her previous life in Geneva are again all the
more powerful for being so distilled; a reader unaware of her
history would have a lot to do to fill in the details of her allusions,
and she declines the opportunity to identify herself as "the
author of Frankenstein" which her visit to the scenes where she conceived
the story might have prompted. In fact she may
have considered that it was superfluous to repeat her account of the
novel’s genesis which she had supplied in a preface for the
1831 edition; but a celebrity author of the Mrs. Sherbourne type would
not have hesitated to remind her readership of this
association. Instead she says reflectively and generalisingly as "an
aged person":
While yet very young, I had reached the position
of an aged person, driven back on memory for companionship
with the beloved; and now I looked on the
inanimate objects that had surrounded me, which survived, the same in
aspect as then , to feel that all my life
since was but an unreal phantasmagoria--the shades that gathered around
there were the realities--the substance and
truth of the soul’s life, which I shall, I trust, hereafter rejoin. (Works
VIII, 148)
Such interior landscapes implicitly undercut the whole genre of philosophical
travel-writing’s emphasis on external sites and their
historical and cultural associations, suggesting that a journey or
a place only really attains meaning in relation to our personal
biography. Yet Part I swiftly changes key again, reverting to conventional
subject matter: the conveniences and otherwise of a
French diligence, and the new vulgarity of French manners (which are
compared with Frances Trollope’s account of American
behaviour). Part I concludes implicitly with Shelley’s role a mother,
since the last letter is an account written by one of her son’s
companions of their difficult passage over the Alps on leaving Milan.
It is a narrative underlining the youthful resilience her
journey has invoked.
Part I of the Rambles may thus be seen as a prelude which gave Shelley
a glimpse of paradise regained, but it was of short
duration. In Paris on the way home she learnt that her friend the widower
Aubrey Beauclerk had in her absence married her
friend and financial dependent Rosa Robinson. This was the second time
that she had warmed toward him and he had married
someone else. The blow compounded her misery in returning to cold and
lonely England, she fretted for Italian skies, and
bewailed the frustrations of trying to motivate her son. (Journals
572) This was a season in hell. But before she could return to
the south, she must pass through Purgatory.
In the summer of 1842 she was finally able to resume her travels, again
accompanied by Percy and two different friends of his,
one of whom, the musician Henry Pearson, joined them in Dresden. Her
route to Italy therefore took her to new German
scenes: to Bad Kissengen via Cologne and Frankfurt to take the waters;
to Saxony, including the Wartburg and its associations
with Luther, and Weimar with reminders of Goethe; and a diversion to
Berlin before settling for a month in Dresden. Shelley
tried to enjoy this part of her journey, but she never felt at home
in Germany. She had a reading but not a speaking knowledge
of German so she had no "voice" there; her poor health and an unexpected
heat-wave in Dresden also debilitated her. She
wrote to Claire that she would not commit her disappointment to print,
but her verdict even from beautiful Dresden was that "I
cannot exercise my imagination about the Germans..." (Letters III,
35-7) Perhaps her disappointment with the actuality of
Germany in contrast with its imagined character in Frankenstein was
another reason she declined to identify herself as
Frankenstein’s progenitor with the setting of the novel.
Part II of Rambles which covers this second set of travels elides completely
the interval back in London and simply resumes a
letter-form narrative, giving no details at all of the change of personnel,
or the background to going abroad again. She alludes
briefly to various initial mishaps with money and luggage and then
declares her credo, a determination to look forward to new
experiences:
what can be so delightful as the perpetual
novelty--the exhaustless current of new ideas suggested by travelling?
We read, to gather thought and knowledge;
travelling is a book of the Creator’s own writing, and imparts
sublimer wisdom than the printed words of
man. (Works VIII, 157)
This manifesto of the pleasures and solace to be found in new places
and new scenery shows herself truly to be her mother’s
daughter. The deflection from mentioning her worries and health to
declare her determination to embrace the journey ahead,
though less dramatic than the famous passage in Letters from Norway
when Wollstonecraft, reflecting on happier times,
suddenly beckons the reader "Now--but let me talk of something else--will
you go with me to the cascade?" shares its spirit.
(37)
Shelley dutifully writes of what she found interesting in Germany and
invokes the idea of the country: a land of forests and
heroes, according to Tacitus; or of the spiritual freedom imparted
by Luther’s Reformation--both familiar tropes. However her
heart is never really in this section of the book. The image that stands
out is when she discovers a grass-hopper in the folds of
her dress who had nestled there when she spent a few days in a country
hamlet. She carelessly tossed it out of the window in
hot and dusty Dresden and spent the night regretting her heedlessness.
Finding it had come back through the window in the
morning, she gave it water and eventually released it on the riverbank.
Her identification with this fragile insect out of its element
is palpable, and the most striking episode in the narrative in Germany.
(Works VIII, 209-10)
The only other lift to her spirits before arriving in Italy came as
she travelled toward and through Austria. She found the lake at
Gmunden sublime, suggestive of the plenitude of the creation where,
quoting Milton "Millions of spiritual creatures walk the
earth/unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." (Works VIII, 241)
Salzburg combined the grandeur of mountain
scenery with rural domesticity of meadows, gardens and country-houses,
while the Tyrol spelled a mix of majestic mountains
and the heroic reputation of its people’s traditions of frugal liberty.
Writing up her memories of this landscape back in London, this part
of her book became an essay celebrating the modern form
of religious struggle--the cause of secular nationalism and its "saint",
the Tyrolese leader Andreas Hofer, who had led resistance
to Napoleon: "these valleys are filled with his name, and it were sacrilege
to traverse them without commemorating his glory and
lamenting his downfall". (Works VIII, 256) Landscape here becomes a
cultural artefact "seen" not through the lens of geological
knowledge, or of a sense, so pervasive in her mother’s Letters from
Norway, of a progressive domination by man of the
natural environment, but through contemporary history and romantic
patriotism. (38)
This coexistence of the historically epic and the personally idyllic
has its counterpart in textual design and literary form: There is
a parallel between the vignette and the anecdote. Many books were illustrated
with frontispieces, half-title illustrations, and
chapter heading vignettes. The format of the annuals was image-driven:
an engraved picture would be offered to a writer as a
theme around which a short story or poem would be written. Shelley’s
first story for the Keepsake was ‘The Lake of Albano’,
built around a water-colour by Turner. Volumes of poetry were particularly
likely to be illustrated. Only when Rogers’ Italy
was published with the vignettes and full-page illustrations by Turner
and Stothard in 1830 did it really become a "hit".
Travel books were not commonly illustrated; instead the writer had to
rely on her or his skill in constructing word-pictures,
either passages of scenic description or the narration of a telling
anecdote. Shelley had an acute eye; she had from a child been
taken to see exhibited pictures and her father knew Turner. Her scenic
descriptions of natural landscape are often very
successful. Additionally, in order to describe her Italian experiences
better, she twice refers her reader to the Turner vignettes
of Rogers’ poem: once to conjure up the atmosphere of Venice, and once
in connection with the last episode in the book, the
excursion to Amalfi. The point about a vignette, especially in the
hands of a master like Turner, was that it could distil and
concentrate an intense historical moment or place redolent with associations
without diluting it. The experience may be
miniaturised, but it does not thereby diminish it. Thus Turner’s vignette
of Napoleon crossing the Alps has all the charisma we
associate with large-scale history paintings like the famous image
by David, portraying the general as heroic conqueror.
In a similar way, Shelley’s account of the Tyrolean uprising conjures
up events on a grand historic scale up within the confines
of a relatively short letter and the episodic format of the epistolary
travel book. This chapter distils Shelley’s passionate
identification with the Tyrolese and gives enough essential historical
information to illuminate her subject. This kind of topic is
not the only one dealt with in a book of episodic travels, any more
than a vignette can dominate physically the page on which it
appears. The historical is succeeded by the contemporaneous and the
personal, just as a jewel-like vignette will be followed by
several unillustrated pages. But the sum total of the reading experience
will be an anthology of moods, details, information,
impressions, held together and sustained by the authorial presence.
As Shelley intended, her book acts as personal journey
through her interior landscape, but this landscape includes thought,
and political opinion informed by historical knowledge,
making it both an exercise in philosophical travel as well as a memoir.
After the Tyrol, the process of leaving the "abrupt, gloomy, sublime
north" (Works VIII, 265) for the delicious joy of Italy is
welcomed with classical allusions from herself and her student companions.
Shelley subtly reminds the reader that the party
includes gentlemen with the classical education to match, and that
she is present in a role of adult, maternal chaperone.
En route to Venice along the Brenta, however, grief makes its first
appearance in the second set of rambles. In 1818 Shelley
and her husband had travelled that way, nursing their dying daughter.
But Shelley generalises rather than specifies her grief as a
sorrow proper to and peculiar to a mother: "I was agitated again by
emotions -- by passions -- and those the deepest a
woman’s heart can harbour -- a dread to see her child even at that
instant expire -- which then occupied me". (Works VIII,
269) She then aligns this universal emotion with four writers who have
observed how under intense emotion the details of one’s
physical surroundings become deeply etched on the suffering mind: Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Holcroft. This is
a pantheon which assimilates three personal friends of her father’s
circle to the level of England’s greatest writer, and by
implication suggests that a mother’s grief is a species of sublime.
From this point, most of Shelley’s letters become elegant essays of
cultural criticism, i.e. they become almost entirely
philosophical travel. The thinking and knowledgeable woman predominates
over personal memory of Venice, Florence or
Rome. "I dwell on the beauty, the majesty, the dreamy enjoyments of
Venice" she declares, although, had she wished to pose
as a celebrity author, she might have elaborated on her acquaintance
with Byron. (Works VIII, 283) Significantly, she is
resolutely non-biographical; the pictures that move her most are those
depicting the Virgin, that is to say, a mother. She also
persisted, against received opinion, in admiring Titian’s Pieta portraying
Mary Magdalen’s sickening terror when she finds the
body of Christ gone, which was not then held to be a masterpiece. Her
empathy with this depiction of loss tells its own story in
spite of her determination to welcome the new.
In fact, although her retrospective account of this part of the trip
suggests a calm and considered mood, her situation was not
running smoothly. She was constantly worried about money; every outing
a pleasure had to be carefully managed. Unlike Fanny
Trollope, she could not relax on outings and eat ices at will. Pearson
became an awkward companion and left them at
Florence; her health was bad; and the snubs she encountered from Lord
and Lady Holland of the British embassy in Florence
brought home forcefully to her that she no longer cared to placate
British proprieties. She alludes neither to her contemporary
difficulties--though they fill her letters to Claire Clairmont written
during these visits--nor to her memories. As she had declared
in her credo, she wanted to dwell on new ideas, and at this time she
was looking at paintings in Florence and Rome through the
eyes of the French art critic Rio and his wife, whom she had met in
London, seen in Dresden and now accompanied around
galleries in Rome. What is new for Shelley in revisiting Venice, Florence
and Rome is her consistent study of art.
Since to contemporary nationalists the nation was constituted by its
cultural achievements, it is logical in compiling her book that
after her summary of her new responses to Florentine art she should
insert Gatteschi’s essay on the Carbonari. This is followed
by her own comments on the current political and social position of
Tuscany, and a letter summarising the present state of
literature and linguistic debate in Italy, which drew on the extensive
reading she had done for the volumes of Italian lives she had
written for Lardner. (39)
In the next five letters of Part II, recounting her Roman experiences,
it is the philosophic traveller who continues to
predominate, and the personal sub-text is resolutely pared down. Compared
with Trollope’s growing sense of outrage at Italian
mis-government, Shelley’s support for change is muted by her historical
perspective. Like Rogers’ poem, where the sequence
of the funeral followed the section on the Coliseum, she alludes to
her losses in the same breath with these ancient ruins:
Besides all that Rome itself affords of delight
to the eye and imagination, I revisit it as the bourne of a pious
pilgrimage. The treasures of my youth lie
buried there. ... The sky is bright -- the air impregnated with the soft
odours of spring -- we take our books and
wile away the morning hours among the ruins of the Baths of
Caracalla, or the Coliseum. (Works VIII, 348)
The autobiographical sub-text is once again very distilled and like
all distillations, powerful. Her "philosophic" topics include a
letter devoted to Raphael and other religious art, one to the music
and ceremonies of Holy Week, where she is sympathetic to
their imaginative appeal to the worshippers, and one to a discussion
of the Papal government’s handling of the cholera
epidemic, which lacks the bite of Trollope’s strictures. Her belief
that the improvement of "just laws and an upright
administration" is needed is muted by her historical awareness that
there have been repeated calls for reform since Dante’s era.
(Works VIII, 358)
It is in the final two letters that Shelley returns to the style of
a travelogue of daily sights and excursions and allows her delight in
Naples and associated visits free expression. Her determination to
look forward is rewarded by an enjoyment of Naples far
surpassing her previous, winter visits. Now Paradise has been regained,
a paradise not so much like the one described not by
Dante or Milton, but invoked by Tasso or Ariosto in their descriptions
of earthly delight. She is even tranquil at her son’s sailing
excursions, presided over by a conscientious young sailor. In contrast
with Trollope’s anger at being seen as a rich traveller for
to whom the locals must defer, she refracts her sympathy for the hard-working
peasants through a belief that the benevolent
climate makes suffering more bearable. Visits to Capri, Pompey, Amalfi,
Ravello are made; and returning from the latter she
feels that their rented lodgings have become home. Echoing Milton,
when he described the earth as "this pendent world, in
bigness as a star of smallest magnitude close by the moon" (Paradise
Lost, II, 1053-4), she concludes her book with this
vision of the earthly paradise:
it is a joy to return to our terrace, to breathe
the fragrance of the orange flowers--to see the calm sea spread out
at our feet, as we look over the bay to Naples--while
above us bends a sky-- in whose pure depths ship-like
clouds --and the moon hangs luminous, a pendant
sphere of silver fire. (Works VIII, 386)
It is as if, completing the book in familiar London with all its troubles
and ill-health she could not bear to relate the expulsion
from this second taste of bliss, and she leaves herself and the reader
there in her spiritual home as if it had translated itself into
permanence.
Her book has shown the reader glimpses of her own private landscape
alongside the "philosophical" travel, and in concluding it
is the personal that is allowed to dominate. Yet this self-revelation
has been discreet and very distilled--almost classical in its
restraint, the opposite of the path taken by the celebrity author mode
of writing where the personal flavour if stimulating is also
relentless. Like her mother’s Letters from Norway, her book succeeds
in blending the subjective and the philosophical. It too
conveys a "sensitive, imaginative, suffering" self, but the full extent
of this suffering is seen only revealed in her letters and journal
written at the same time as Rambles. Like her mother’s book, Shelley’s
conveyed an "inexpressible charm" and it was one of
her best received books. This is testimony to Shelley’s enormous powers
of literary determination in wresting her material into
published form and disciplining very severely the amount of herself
she was willing to reveal. In this she was truly her mother’s
daughter. Letters from Norway represents a tremendous, and ultimately
successful attempt to move outward from her misery
over Imlay; to be comforted and inspired by the majestic scenery or
the simplicity of Scandinavian small-holders, to connect
with another sense of life. Likewise Shelley has wrought gold from
her alloyed life, but her persona is quieter, less intrepid than
her mother’s and her allusions to sorrow more generalised. Although
her mother’s book alluded to ill-health, its very subject
matter of little-visited corner of Europe is testament to her intrepidity,
and she is able to record her reinvigoration; with
hindsight, we know that Shelley’s book was written under the shadow
of the brain tumour from which she probably died in her
early fifties. Often commenting wryly on her experience of taking the
sure at the German spa of Kissingen, she makes light of
her illness, though her text portrays her frequently being unable to
take part in the youthful excursions of her son and his friends.
Without the self-pity of the invalid or the self-dramatisation characteristic
of the celebrity writer, she has quietly reflected on the
poignant tragedy of her life and offered the reader a self-portrait
without fuss or fanfare.
* * * * *
In conclusion I would like to suggest a way in which we can regard Rambles
in relation to English Romanticism. Consideration
of women’s writing has extended the conventional periodisation of Romanticism
into the 1830s, but it is usually still argued that
the 1840s are important for the writing careers of the first Victorians:
Gaskell, Thackeray, Dickens, and the Brontes. How does
"late romanticism" relate to "early Victorianism"? How--if we need
these labels and schematic periodisations--can we do justice
to a variety of writers as well as reintegrate women into our understanding
of the literary profession?
I believe the work of the American comparatist Virgil Nemoianu, though
written without explicit attention to women writers, let
alone feminist literary revisionism, nonetheless offers some useful
ideas. In The Taming of Romanticism: European
Literature in the Age of Biedermeier, he argues that the continental
label of "Biedermeier" can be extended to describe the
literature and culture of Britain and France between 1815 and 1848,
in addition to its more normal usage with reference to
Germany and Central Europe. Nemoianu takes as a starting point of his
definition of Romanticism that of Murray Abrams,
summarising it as "The possible-impossible expansion of the self to
a seamless identification with the universe". (40) The taming
of this romanticism consequently involves a "secularization of a secularization":
instead of the essentially religious search for
transcendent unity that is displaced into a secular mode in romanticism,
"tamed" romanticism recognises that history might spell
out the course of a return to a specific historic moment, not to a
pre-lapsarian paradise. It accepts separation rather than
integration: the separation from universalism into different national
schools, for instance; the distinction between nature and
culture, and between reason and imagination. Fragmentation means acceptance
of loss and disappointment, not the glimpses of
an impossible totality. Absolute love makes way for "the glorification
of family affection and domestic peace". (41) The idyll
becomes a popular mood, with its own genres to match. Projects for
regenerative political and social change have to accept
defeat and limitation as inherent to the process.
Applying this specifically to England, Nemoianu draws a line between
the "high romantics"--the 1790s of the Lyrical Ballads,
Blake, Gothic novels, Paine and Godwin’s radical politics, Southey’s
ballads and shorter epics, the oeuvre of P. B. Shelley, the
Scott of the ballads and Scottish songs, Keats’s Endymion, and Byron’s
Childe Harold--and the period after 1815, when
there is a withdrawal from the absolutist paradigm to "peaceful zones
of intellectual activity". There follows first a transitional
stage: the later, ironic poems of Byron; Keat’s realisation that paradise
is never going to be reached; Wordsworth’s revisions to
The Prelude; the political conservatism of Coleridge, Wordsworth and
Shelley. By the 1820s, writers are taming romanticism
to the practical and domestic, the social and intimate. For Nemoianu,
Charles Lamb is the quintessential Biedermeier writer,
whose literary criticism offers a positive evaluation of romantic writing
while toning down its excesses, while his essays offer a
deliberate miniaturisation of conflicts between self and infinitude.
Meanwhile, Scott’s historical novels move romanticism
acceptably into the parlour. The boom in travel writing signals an
armchair reduction of the romantic quest. Annuals such as The
Keepsake diffuse a popular lyricism in the traditions of Thomas Moore,
Samuel Rogers and Thomas Campbell.
Nemoianu’s argument is a subtle one, worked out with detailed parallels
between comparable German developments. Leigh
Hunt’s periodicals, The Examiner and The Liberal, are likened for example
to the journals of the Young Deutschland
movement. Myopically, however, in spite of noting the emphasis on domestic
affection and intimacy, which Anne Mellor and
Stuart Curran have both seen as characteristic of female romanticism,
Nemoianu does not broaden his sights to look at women
alongside men. Nonetheless, the foregoing suggests how readily Shelley’s
oeuvre would fit into a category of English
Biedermeier. Indeed, the circumstances of her family life already suggest
the beginning of this "taming of romanticism, as her
father Godwin began to accept the idea that publishing children’s books
might serve as a quieter, more feasible way of
educating the new generation than the Utopian vision of Political Justice.
Tellingly, it is Godwin who commissions from
Charles and Mary Lamb the Tales from Shakespeare, that reduction of
the great romantic cultural icon to children’s presumed
capacities.
Emily Sunstein’s biography traces Shelley’s path from "Romance" to "Reality".
Anne Mellor never uses the term "taming" as
such but she sees as a major characteristic of Shelley’s fiction a
critique of male egotism, and its advocacy in contrast of "an
ethic of care". She also discerns in Frankenstein a mistrust of the
heroic revolutionary project, which devoured its own
children. (42) Much of Shelley’s output in the 1830s was for the "Keepsake"
type of annuals market. But what I find
particularly pertinent in Nemoianu’s characterisation of Biedermeier
is his idea of the high romantic projects coexisting with
disappointment or reversal; with epic aspiration nestling alongside
quotidian contentment. For it is this pluralism of mood which
above all characterises the Rambles: the celebration of the Tyrolean
struggle follows on from the stultifying heat of Dresden
where a released grasshopper carries symbolic weight; the sublimity
of ancient Roman ruins is a backdrop for a family picnic in
which a reminder of private grief is included. The personal and monumental
coexist, with neither displacing the other.
The framework of "English Biedermeier" to characterise writing in the
1820s to the 1840s by men and women might well prove
fruitful for "placing" other women: Mary Howitt, who with her husband
William combined translation of and critical commentary
on German and Scandinavian literature, with writing for children; or
Mary Cowden Clarke, nee Novello, who in another marital
partnership with Charles Cowden Clarke, son of Keat’s schoolmaster,
followed Charles and Mary Lamb by writing children’s
versions of an iconic writer, Chaucer, and composed numerous children’s
books alongside the literary work of scholarly
editions and a concordance of Shakespeare; or Anna Jameson, who wrote
for the "Keepsake" type of female audience, moved
on to interpret German Beidermeier culture to a British audience, and
then matured into a scholar of art history. Beidermeier
culture could include the novels of Mrs. Gore, Caroline Norton, or
Barbara Holford, while Mary Russell Mitford is a classic
exponent of the idyll. Far from being a trough between the peaks of
Romanticism and Victorianism, the period 1820-1840 is a
varied and important chapter in English culture. The recent attention
given to Shelley opens just one door into this period, which
awaits deeper investigation in spite of the advances that have been
made. The idea of Biedermeier culture might help to open
other doors, and frame new vistas in assessing writing by men and women,
as well as exploring aspects of the visual, musical
and theatrical culture of these decades, and its architecture, design,
and domestic decoration.
Notes
(1) "Giovanni Villani", The Liberal 4 (1824) pp. 281-297, rprt. in The
Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, General
editor Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering,
1996) vol. II, p. 130; hereafter cited as Works.
(back)
(2) The title page of the first edition read Letters written during
a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. For
this essay, I shall follow Shelley in calling it Letters from Norway.
(back)
(3) I must express here my appreciation to my colleague Nora Crook,
whose invitation to contribute a paper on Shelley’s
Rambles at her Bicentenary Conference at Anglia Polytechnic University,
Cambridge ‘Mary Shelley: Peers, Parents, Progeny’
(12-14th September 1997) was the genesis and inspiration for this paper.
I am extremely grateful to all the participants at the
conference for a stimulating discussion. (back)
(4) Esther Schor’s essay, "Mary Shelley in Transit", in The Other Mary
Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch,
Anne K. Mellor, Esther H. Schor (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), which also begins with Shelley’s
review of Villani, came to my attention after I had completed the first
draft of this essay. Schor is also interested in Shelley’s
construction of the self, the relationship of Rambles to Letters from
Norway, and of both texts to Enlightenment and
mid-Victorian discourses of anthropology, but from within a different
if often complementary emphasis on textual analysis. As a
literature student turned intellectual historian, trained originally
in the history of science, I am however unhappy with her
assertion that Shelley "outstrips her Enlightenment paradigm to anticipate
the analytic methods of twentieth-century
anthropology", which, perhaps unintentionally, suggests a linear development
in the "progress" of scientific discourse that can
therefore be "anticipated", and that writers are the more valuable
to us because of the way they might approximate ourselves;
e.g.,"Shelley’s appreciation of these regional differences bespeaks
a relativism that is the hall-mark of post-Boasian cultural
anthropology". (p. 251) That may be; but this begs the question of
whether Boasian cultural relativism is really intellectually and
philosophically "commensurable" with Romanticism’s interests in the
variety of national cultures. Instead of looking for
anticipations, more historically, we can suggest Shelley may well have
derived this sympathetic interest in national difference
from the books we know she read, written by members of the Coppet circle.
The danger of drawing comparisons forward into
the twentieth century is that this overemphasises the search for foremothers,
and we blur our own differences from them.
Historical discourses then have a tendency to collapse into our own
current languages the more affinities that are ‘found’. I am
more comfortable with Schor’s endeavour to show that British Romanticism
engendered a variety of egotisms, and that what
characterised Shelley’s self-presentation is a two-fold sympathy, one
of "emotional accord" as well as "political inclination".
What I characterise as Shelley’s refusal to play the celebrity card
and invest her book with her own egotism, is for Schor a
hall-mark of her desire to direct her reader toward the plight of the
Italian people and their hopes for political emancipation:
"Instead of exploiting description to portray her own sensibility,
Shelley assimilates description to the discourse of
companionship". (p. 239) (back)
(5) For a well-researched and stimulating overview of women travellers,
see Shirley Foster, Across New Worlds:
Nineteenth-Century Women Travellers and their writing (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1990) which includes Mariana
Starke Lady Morgan, Anna Jameson, Frances Trollope, Mary Shelley and
others in chapter 2 "Italy: the land of dreams".
(back)
(6) Clarissa Campbell Orr, "The Corinne Complex: Gender, Genius and
National Identity", in Women in the Victorian Art
World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1995). (back)
(7) See also my introduction to Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood
in England and France, 1780-1920
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) and references there,
for women and philosophical travel. (back)
(8) John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: truth
and propaganda in Staël’s ‘De L’Allemagne’
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Susan Tennenbaum, "The
Coppet Circle: Literary criticism as political
discourse", History of Political Theory I (1980) pp. 453-374. (back)
(9) An Historical and Moral View of the origin and progress of the French
Revolution; and the effect it has produced in
Europe (1794), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd
and Marilyn Butler, 8 vols. (London: William
Pickering, 1989) vol. VI. (back)
(10) Wollstonecraft, Letters from Norway, rpt. in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft vol. VI, p. 325. (back)
(11) Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction
of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993) offers a stimulating reconsideration of the
rhetorical use of letters in the revolutionary era by
Wollstonecraft and by Helen Maria Williams, insisting that the "interplay
between the feeling woman and the acute thinker" in
Wollstonecraft’s book demands these two aspects of her literary persona
be considered together, not separately, forcing us to
reconsider in what way Wollstonecraft’s letters can be characterised
as "womanly correspondence". (p. 97) Jeanne Moskal,
"The Picturesque and the Affectionate in Wollstonecraft’s Letters from
Norway", in Modern Language Quarterly 52 (1991)
pp. 263-294, puts the relationship between mother and daughter as the
"conceptual centre" of the book, which revises
accepted, gendered conventions of the picturesque. Her treatment is
informed by Nancy Chodorov’s psycho-analytical
approach. Moskal does not draw on the Enlightenment discourse of philosophical
travel; her concern is to rescue the genre of
travel writing from being seen simply as a quarry for Romantic writers’
imagery, so that it can be seen as "formally central and
thematically integrated into the literary and cultural world of the
British Romantic period." She also wants to argue that the
"gender categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque
did not silence women" but facilitated the work of authors
such as Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Shelley, and Lady Morgan. (pp.
293-4) Richard Holmes in his introduction to his edition
of the Letters from Norway, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and
Denmark, and William Godwin, Memoirs of the
Author of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) sees Wollstonecraft’s
book as an important early
document of Romanticism and underplays the Enlightened discourse it
contains. (back)
(12) Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1989) p. 302; hereafter
Sunstein., The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T.
Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980-88) vol. II, 89n; hereafter abbreviated as Letters.
(back)
(13) Marilyn Butler, "Pitt’s Terror and the Amazons", paper given at
‘Mary Shelley: Parents, Peers, Progeny’. For the historical
background to Valperga, Shelley consulted Jean-Charles-Leonard Sismonde
de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques
italiennes du moyen age (1807-9). (back)
(14) For more information, see Madelyn Gutwirth, Mme de Staël,
Novelist. The emergence of the Artist as Woman
(London: University of Illinois Press, 1978). (back)
(15) For Morgan, see Campbell Orr, "The Corinne Complex"; Mary Campbell,
Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of
Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora Press, 1988); Lady Morgan, Memoirs;
Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence,
2 vols. (London, 1862). Richard C. Sha provides a helpful discussion
of Morgan’s travel book on Ireland, Patriotic Sketches
of Ireland, (1807), in "Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The
prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and
Helen Maria Williams", in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Counter-Voices,
ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M.
Kelley (London: University Presses of New England, 1995). (back)
(16) Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough. The Life of Anna Jameson (London,
Ont.: University of Ontario Press, 1967)
provides an authoritative biography of Jameson, while Judith Johnston.
Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of
Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997) offers a feminist reading alongside
some literary context. Shelley reviewed the Diary
of an Ennuyee together with two other books on Italy in "The English
in Italy", The Westminster Review 6 (October 1826):
325-341, rpt. in Works II, 147-163. Shelley first met Anna Jameson
in 1841 at Lady Morgan’s house. She had told the latter
she had long wanted to meet her; see Letters III, 12. (back)
(17) Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Charles Chesterfield, 3 vols. (London, 1841) vol. II, p. 270. (back)
(18) Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Charles Chesterfield II, 284. (back)
(19) Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Charles Chesterfield II, 203, 204. (back)
(20) Helen Heineman, Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth
Century (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University
Press, 1979) pp. 130-1, citing a letter to Richard Bentley dated 24
June 1835. (back)
(21) Johanna Johnston, The Life, Manners and Travels of Fanny Trollope (London: Constable, 1979) pp. 193, 255. (back)
(22) Heineman, Mrs. Trollope ch. 9. (back)
(23) Trollope makes this philosophical intention explicit in her preface
to Domestic Manners of the Americans: "The United
States of America contain a considerable variety of interesting objects
in most branches of natural science, besides much that is
new, a good deal that is beautiful, and some things which are wonderful.
Nevertheless, as it is the moral and religious condition
of the people which, beyond anything, demands the attention of the
philosophical enquirer, the author would consider her
work as completely successful, could she but awaken a more general
interest in this subject". [cited from The Domestic
Manners of the Americans, ed. H. Van Thal (London: Folio Society, 1994)
n. p.; my italics] Heineman ignores this
Enlightenment tradition in an otherwise excellent study and as a result
overstates Trollope’s originality. For the Enlightenment
historical discourse on women and the progress of civilisation, see
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women
in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780-1860 (London: Macmillan,
1985); Jane Rendall, ‘Introduction’, in William
Alexander, History of Women (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995); Sylvana
Thomaselli, "The Enlightenment debate on Women",
History Workshop 20 (1985): 201-204. Heineman also argues that Trollope
substituted her original preface for one in 1832
which was opportunistically linked to Reform Act agitation; e.g. Trollope
comments "the chief object she has in view is to
encourage her countrymen to hold fast by a constitution that ensures
all the blessings which flow from established habits and
solid principles. If they forego these, they will incur the fearful
risk of breaking up their repose by introducing the jarring tumult
and universal degradation which invariably follow the wild scheme of
placing all the power of the state in the hands of the
populace". But the tradition of Enlightened history, Scottish and French,
which permeated much early nineteenth-century
historical writing, De Staël and Wollstonecraft included, followed
Montesquieu in showing the interconnections of political and
religious institutions with social custom, environment and economy.
Trollope was making a genuine point, surely, as well as a
topical one. Similarly her preface to the revised 1839 edition emphasised
the topicality of her comments on slavery, given the
recent agitation in Great Britain to abolish it altogether in British
possessions. This too was a good marketing strategy, but does
not mean her abhorrence of slavery was any the less sincere. In 1836
she published a novel condemning slavery, The Life and
Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or scenes on the Mississippi.
(back)
(24) In addition, her anti-slavery novel Jessie Phillips: A tale of
the present day (1844) dealt with the new Poor Law, and
The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840)
with child labour. (back)
(25) A Visit to Italy by Mrs. Trollope, 2 vols. (London, 1842) II, 204; hereafter abbreviated as A Visit. (back)
(26) She compares Antoine Claude Pasquin’s dit Valery, Italy and its
Comforts (1841, English edition) with John Bell’s
Observations on Italy (1825). (back)
(27) However, despite her success in sounding fresh and engaging about
a familiar place, the book did not attract very admiring
notices; reviewers liked the more caustic Mrs. Trollope than the enthusiastic
and sympathetic one. (back)
(28) "Time was, when travels in Italy were filled with contemptuous
censures of the effeminacy of the Italians--diatribes against
the vice and cowardice of the nobles--sneers at the courtly verses
of the poets, who were content to celebrate a marriage or a
birth among the great:--their learned men fared better, for there were
always writers in Italy whose names adorned European
letters--yet still contempt was the general tone; and of late years
travellers (with the exception of Lady Morgan, whose book is
dear to the Italians, parrot the same, not because these things still
exist, but because they know no better." (Works II, 66)
(back)
(29) I am very grateful to my colleague Rick Allen for making this point
and prompting me to enlarge on Shelley’s reasons for
shunning the "celebrity author" strategy. Valperga, The Last Man, Perkin
Warbeck, and Lodore were all sold as "by the
author of Frankenstein"; Falkner was described as by the author of
Frankenstein and The Last Man. Shelley’s first book, A
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, co-written after her elopement with P.
B. Shelley and before his death and that of her children,
betrays a very different tendency to project herself as an eccentric
and improvident young traveller on a youthful escapade and
is full of her opinions and negative reactions to new scenes; much
more a "celebrity author" production in the making. Shelley
was enjoying the elan of her transgressive and adulterous elopement
although we know that the painful defiance of her father’s
disapproval was a source of acute anxiety as well, as was the financial
precariousness of the young couple which made it useful
to create a book out of their first foreign journey. (back)
(30) E.g. Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and some of his contemporaries (1828);
Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord
Byron (1830)--for which Shelley gave Moore assistance--; Thomas Medwin’s
Life of Shelley was suppressed in 1848 when
Shelley paid him £250; Edward Trelawny, Recollections of the
Last Days of Byron and Shelley (1858) and Records of
Shelley, Byron and the Author (1878) were both uncomplimentary to Shelley;
see Sunstein 390-392. (back)
(31) The feminist controversies of the 1830s are well covered by John
Killham, Tennyson and the Princess: Reflections of
an Age (London: The Athlone Press, 1978). For Shelley’s help to her
women friends, see Sunstein 268, 273, 303, 304,
305-6. See also The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, ed. Paula R.
Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987) pp. 553-9 (hereafter Journals), on her disillusionment
with the political radicals and her reluctance to
speak out publicly on behalf of women. The idea that the age of chivalry
had meant advances for women in terms of the
respectful treatment they received was a commonplace of Enlightenment
historiography. The link between chivalry and
women’s status shows through clearly in Shelley’s letter to John Murray
III with various suggestions for books, 8th Sept. 1830,
"I have also thought of the Lives of Celebrated Women,--or a history
of Woman--her position in society and her influence upon
it--historically considered, and a History of Chivalry". (Letters II,
115) Lady Morgan wrote a history of women, Woman and
Her Master, in 1840. (back)
(32) Jeanne Moskal argues that she was also freer to show her sympathy
for the Risorgimento. [Jeanne Moskal, "Gender,
Italian Nationalism and British Imperialism in Mary Shelley’s Rambles
in Germany and Italy", in Placing and Displacing
Romanticism, eds. Nicholas Roe and Peter J. Kitson (Aldershot: Scolar
Press, forthcoming)] I am greatly indebted to Dr
Moskal for making this available to me in typescript. (back)
(33) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft vol. VI, 289; 344: "I do not feel inclined to ramble any further this year...". (back)
(34) Shelley wrote: "While we visit Italy, we become what the Italians
were censured for being,--enjoyers of the beauties of
nature, the elegance of art, the delights of climate, the recollections
of the past, and the pleasures of society, without a thought
beyond. Such to a degree was I while there, and my book does not pretend
to be a political history or dissertation. I give
fragments--not a whole". (Works VIII, 70) (back)
(35) E.g. "The Sisters of Albano" (Keepsake 1829), "Transformation"
(Keepsake 1830), and "The Brother and the Sister"
(Keepsake 1833). As Jean de Palacio notes, in the long interlude which
separated Shelley’s departure as a widow from Italy
and her return, Italy became in her imagination a site either of the
past, or, in the case of the twenty-first century setting of her
novel The Last Man, an hypothetical future. Up to the composition of
Rambles, Shelley’s remembered Italian paradise had
often attained printed form in a guise similar to Rogers’. [Jean de
Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre. Contribution aux
etudes shelleyennes (Paris: Lincksieck, 1969) pp 81-2] (back)
(36) By contrast to my insistence on Shelley’s underlying melancholy
and Schor’s on her anxious revolutionary vision, Elizabeth
Nitchie’s pioneering essay on Shelley’s two travel books, A History
of a Six Week’s Tour, and Rambles, written when
editions of either work were scarce and the books were largely unread,
takes Shelley declaration to Murray that she wanted to
write with a light touch somewhat at face value, pointing out Shelley’s
dry wit but not her quiet allusions to pain. However
Nitchie signalled that Rambles was the work of "a woman who thinks
for herself on all subjects, and who dares to say what she
thinks" and "a woman with a masculine and original mind". [Elizabeth
Nitchie, "Mary Shelley Traveller", Keats-Shelley Journal
10 (1961): 29-42] (back)
(37) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft VI, 310. (back)
(38) For a discussion on the link between travel and historical commemoration
citing texts by William Godwin and Archibald
Alison--whose History of Europe during the French Revolution was a
major source for Shelley’s account of the Tyrol--see
Mark Salber Phillips, "William Godwin and the Idea of Historical Commemoration:
History as Public Memory and Private
Sentiment", in Shifting the Boundaries, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley
Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995).
(back)
(39) Shelley’s scholarly articles for Lardner are an underexplored topic,
and might usefully be considered in relation to the
scholarly work of other women writing on European culture, such as
Anna Jameson and Sarah Austin on Germany, or Mary
and William Howitt on Scandinavia. In discussing her interest in Italian
nationalism, I differ slightly from the emphasis in Moskal,
"Gender". She suggests that Shelley makes her support for the Risorgimento
more palatable by relating her political advocacy
to literary and aesthetic concerns. (p.16) However, the argument for
the nation-state in nineteenth-century liberal nationalism
followed on from the assertion of its cultural nationhood, which deserved
political institutions which would reflect this cultural
identity. To discuss culture is to discuss politics in another form.
(back)
(40) Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature
in the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984) p. 27. (back)
(41) Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism p.33. (back)
(42) See Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: her life, her fiction, her monsters (London: Routledge, 1988). (back)
Clarissa Campbell Orr
Anglia Polytechnic University
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