rt a wife at a time when she is about to
become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of
L1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only L200 to a deserted wife
and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love.
A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in
order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of
three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an
intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it is
suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops
instead of supporting Shelley's exhortations to her that she should
cultivate her mind. "Harriet," says Mr. Ingpen in _Shelley in England_,
"foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose
advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon
Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive
clothes." We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same
time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to
remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even
to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was
love, not matrimony," for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage," Shelley had
once written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of
ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its
energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he
now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had
always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a
time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same
intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the
great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed
the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock:
"Everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life
should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a
noble animal, but she can do neither." "It always appeared to me," said
Peacock, "that you were very fond of Harriet." Shelley replied: "But you
did not know how I hated her sister." And so Harriet's marriage-lines
were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of pap