stined to end in
tragedy. His sisters were at a school at Clapham, where among the
girls was one Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a
coffee-house keeper. Shelley became intimate with the Westbrooks, and
set about saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a neat
figure, and a glib school-girl mind quick to catch up and reproduce his
doctrines. The child seems to have been innocent enough, but her elder
sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as a bait to entangle
the future baronet; she played on Shelley's feelings by encouraging
Harriet to believe herself the victim of tyranny at school. Still, it
was six months before he took the final step. How he could save Harriet
from scholastic and domestic bigotry was a grave question. In the first
place, hatred of "matrimonialism" was one of his principles, yet it
seemed unfair to drag a helpless woman into the risks of illicit union;
in the second place, he was at this time passionately interested in
another woman, a certain Miss Hitchener, a Sussex school mistress of
republican and deistic principles, whom he idealised as an angel, only
to discover soon, with equal falsity, that she was a demon. At last
Harriet was worked up to throw herself on his protection. They fled by
the northern mail, dropping at York a summons to Hogg to join them, and
contracted a Scottish marriage at Edinburgh on August 28, 1811.

The story of the two years and nine months during which Shelley
lived with Harriet must seem insane to a rational mind. Life was one
comfortless picnic. When Shelley wanted food, he would dart into a shop
and buy a loaf or a handful of raisins. Always accompanied by Eliza,
they changed their dwelling-place more than twelve times. Edinburgh,
York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt,
Killarney, London (Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburgh
again, and Windsor, successively received this fantastic household.
Each fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, and
each formed the base of operations for some new scheme of comprehensive
beneficence. Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh coast, Shelley embarked on
the construction of an embankment to reclaim a drowned tract of land;
'Queen Mab' was written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales; and
from Ireland, where he had gone to regenerate the country, he opened
correspondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of
'Political Jus