Hogg on Harriet Shelley
Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
George Routledge & Sons, London
E.P. Dutton, New York.
1858.
Below are descriptions of Harriet
Shelley from Hogg's brilliant, witty, sometimes quirky reminiscences of
his beloved friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley:
p. 235 Letter of PBS to Hogg [no date, but presumably in 1811]
“I am now called to Miss Westbrook; I was too hasty in telling my
first unfavourable impression: she is a very clever girl, though rather
affected.”
p. 244 Letter of PBS to Hogg, London, 15 August 1811. Shelley has
decided to marry Harriet, rather than attempt to practise Free Love:
I am now returned to London; direct to me as usual,
at Graham's. My father is here, wondering, possibly, at my London
business. He will be more surprised soon, possibly!
My unfortunate friend,
Harriet, is yet undecided; not with respect to me, but herself. How
much, my dear friend, have I to tell you! In my leisure moments
for thought, which since I wrote have been few, I have considered the
important point on which you reprobated my hasty decision. The ties of
love and honour are doubtless of sufficient strength to bind congenial
souls — they are doubtless indissoluble, but by the brutish force
of power; they are delicate and satisfactory. Yet the arguments of
impracticability, and what is even worse, the disproportionate
sacrifice which the female is called upon to make — these
arguments, which you have urged in a manner immediately irresistible, I
cannot withstand. Not that I suppose it to be likely that I shall
directly be called upon to evince my attachment to either theory. I am
become a perfect convert to matrimony, not from temporizing, but from
your arguments; nor, much as I wish to emulate your virtues and liken
myself to you, do I regret the prejudices of anti-matrimonialism from
your example or assertion. No. The one argument, which you have urged
so often with so much energy: the sacrifice made by the woman, so
disproportioned to any which the man can give, — this alone may
exculpate me, were it a fault, from uninquiring submission to your
superior intellect.
p. 247 Hogg:
Shelley's epistles show the progress of his
courtship, and that his marriage was not quite so hasty an affair as it
is commonly represented to have been. The wooing continued for half a
year at least, and this is a long time in the life, in the life of
love, of such young persons. [Shelley was 19, Harriet was 16.]
Harriet Westbrook appears to have been dissatisfied with her school,
but without any adequate cause, for she was kindly treated and well
educated there. It is not impossible that this discontent was prompted
and suggested to her, and that she was put up to it, and to much
besides, by somebody [presumably Harriet's sister, Eliza], who
conducted the whole affair — who had assumed, and steadily
persisted in keeping the complete direction of her.
p. 255 Hogg's first sight of Harriet, as he meets the newly wed Shelleys in Edinburgh:
I knocked at the door of a handsome house; it was
all right; and in a handsome front-parlour I was presently received
rapturously by my friend. He looked just as he used to look at Oxford,
and as he looked when I saw him last in April, in our trellised
apartment; but now joyous at meeting again, not as then sad at parting.
I also saw — and for the first time — his lovely young
bride, bright as the morning — as the morning of that bright day
on which we first met; bright, blooming, radiant with youth, health,
and beauty. I was hailed triumphantly by the new-married pair; my
arrival was more than welcome; they had got my letter and expected to
rejoice at my coming every moment. “We have met at last once
more!” Shelley exclaimed, “and we will never part
again!”
p. 267 Hogg:
She was fond of reading aloud; and she read
remarkably well, very correctly, and with a clear, distinct, agreeable
voice, and often emphatically. She was never weary of this exercise,
never fatigued; she never ceased of her own accord, and left off
reading only on some interruption. She has read to me for hours and
hours; whenever we were alone together, she took up a book and began to
read, or more commonly read aloud from the work, whatever it might be,
which she was reading to herself. If anybody entered the room she
ceased to read aloud, but recommenced the moment he retired. I was
grateful for her kindness; she has read to me grave and excellent books
innumerable. If some few of these were a little wearisome, on the whole
I profited greatly by her lectures. I have sometimes certainly wished
for rather less of the trite moral discourses of Idomeneus and
Justinian, which are so abundant in her two favourite authors, and a
little more of something less in the nature of truisms; but I never
showed any signs of impatience. In truth, the good girl liked a piece
of resistance, a solid tome, where a hungry reader might read and come
again. I have sometimes presumed to ask her to read some particular
work, but never to object to anything which she herself proposed. If it
was agreeable to listen to her, it was not less agreeable to look at
her; she was always pretty, always bright, always blooming; smart,
usually plain in her neatness; without a spot, without a wrinkle, not a
hair out of its place.... Hers was the most distinct utterance I ever
heard; I do not believe that I lost a single word of the thousands of
pages which she read to me.
pp. 280-82 Harriet discusses suicide. Perhaps, in light of her
suicide five years later, Hogg was attempting to downplay PBS's blame
for it by suggesting that Harriet had always had suicidal tendencies.
This is unconvincing, as Harriet was very happy then.
p. 420 Harriet is pregnant with her first child, Ianthe:
Harriet gave visible promise of being about to
provide an heir for an ancient and illustrious house; and, like all
little women, she looked very large upon the occasion. She was in
excellent voice, and fonder than ever of reading aloud; she promptly
seized every opportunity of indulging her taste....
p. 574 Letter from Shelley's cousin, C.H.G. (Charles Grove), to
Hogg, reminiscing about Shelley. Torquay, 16 February 1857. This
excerpt shows that Harriet Shelley was accepted as an equal by the
upper classes, in this case Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Grove:
The following spring I saw Bysshe and Mrs. Shelley
in London. They spent the summer of that year, 1812, with my brother
and sister at Cwm Elan. Mrs G. was very much pleased with Mrs. Shelley,
and sorry when they left them.