Romantic Nonsense

[bloodygranuaile]

I received Daisy Hay's Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation as a graduation gift, and I went into it with two hopes: one, that it would support my pet theory that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is in part written as a satire at the expense of the insufferable male poets in her life, and that reading about the Romantic poets would be more intriguing than reading Romantic poetry in 100-level English courses.

For the former, I was left more or less where I started. None of the letters and diaries concerning Mary Shelley contained any particular indication that the quietly subverted Romantic tropes in Frankenstein had anything to do with annoyance at Percy Shelley's, Lord Byron's, or anyone else's behavior, although I am perhaps more convinced that, if I were Mary Shelley, that is exactly why I would have put them in there.

As to the latter hope, I was not disappointed. Young Romantics tells a tangled story of a network of famous poets and their less-famous friends and family members, most of whom were very young, very brilliant, and very politically radical. The resulting drama makes their literary legacies—some of the most enduring in English writing—look positively boring in comparison.

There are more or less two central points to the social network that made up the Romantic group, giving the book two main narrative threads which sometimes interweave. The first thread follows journalist and free-speech activist Leigh Hunt, who kicks off the book with a two-year prison sentence for libel due to the political content of his newspaper, The Examiner. In prison and out of it, Hunt made himself and his rooms the epicenter of a salon of radicals, freethinkers, poets and journalists, as well as a rather large group of relatives including his wife Marianne, his botanist sister-in-law Bess, his brother John (co-owner of The Examiner and the only fiscally responsible person in the family), and an enormous brood of children.

The other main narrative thread follows Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, daughter of radical freethinker William Godwin and early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical anti-monarchist who was expelled from Oxford after writing a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism. Mary, as formidable a creative and intellectual force as her parents, would go on to be best known as the author of Frankenstein; Shelley, despite his political activism, would go on to become the poster boy for underweight, sentimental, tortured poetic genius. In Young Romantics, however, we get to know them as an idealistic young couple, prone to quarreling with their family members and making daring, ill-thought-out decisions, such as eloping to Italy without any money. The most frequently reoccurring characters in Percy and Mary's story include Mary's stepsister and Lord Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron himself, and their illegitimate daughter. Daisy Hay guides us through their personal dramas and literary achievements as the group continually splits up and comes back together again, traveling from England to Italy and back several times. Poems, novels, letters and diaries are written prolifically; children are born, and die, or become the subjects of vicious custody battles. Other Romantic celebrities such as John Keats, Thomas Love Peacock, Charles and Mary Lamb, William Hazlitt, Benjamin Haydon, and Vincent Novello drift in and out of their circle and Leigh Hunt's.

Young Romantics is not just a set of biographic stories of the individual Romantic greats, just as the Romantic movement (or “Cockney school,” as it was called at the time) was more than just a number of individual people who all wrote in a similar style. The Romantic group was held together as a group—as a movement—by a set of commonly shared concerns and principles, many of which are precisely what disposed the Romantic writers' lives so uniquely to such vast amounts of drama. Hay never lets us lose sight of these principles, and the impact they had on even the most deeply personal aspects of the Romantics' lives. Many of them were driven by radical political concerns, particularly freedom of speech, which is part of what caused so many visionaries to congregate around Leigh Hunt's imprisonment and the various liberal publications to come out of the Hunts' press. The Shelley group also tried to live according to principles of free-love, an idealistic, anti-marriage lifestyle that managed to backfire spectacularly upon its practitioners. Before the advent of reliable birth control and under the early nineteenth century's deeply sexist marriage and property laws, free-love was so impracticable that many of the most vocal free-love advocates ended up married. Perhaps the most important common bond of the Romantics, however, was their exploration of the relationship between sociability and creativity. The biographic sketches in the book are full of scenes of geniuses editing and inspiring each other's work, holding writing competitions and penning long epistles to one another. Fictionalized versions of friends and family members feature heavily in the Romantic writers' works, to a degree that they not only became known and mocked for it, but that the reading public began to attribute the fictional aspects of Romantic works to the writer's lives. (This caused serious damage to Bess and Claire's reputations when Hunt and Shelley wrote poems exploring themes of incest.) Daisy Hay balances exploring friendship as a Romantic ideal and chronicling the frequently tense, conflict-ridden actual friendships in question with grace, clarity and thorough research.

This centrality of friendship to the Romantic school raised a new concern following the tragically premature deaths of many of the notable Romantics, particularly Percy Shelley and Lord Byron: the issue of legacy. The surviving members of the network, such as Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley, spent years battling in writing over the legacies of their dead friends. Biographies, carefully edited posthumous anthologies, and newspaper reviews were the weapons of choice as Shelley, Hunt and even Claire Clairmont angled to cement certain visions of themselves and their social circle into the British imagination. Though most of the cast is dead, the last section in Young Romantics is particularly fascinating to a reader who is truly interested in history, since it does not merely report history as that which happened—it shows how the history of the Romantics, as we usually learn it, was actually made.

Young Romantics is an example of the best sort of non-fiction: meticulously well-researched, full of quirky historical tidbits and telling a story strange and dramatic enough to be fiction. Hay's writing is clear and well-organized, and seamlessly weaves in ample accounts of the subjects' lives in their own words. Though the book contains very little in the way of literary criticism, the links she establishes between the poets' lives and their works has me eyeing the collections of Romantic poetry I've had sitting around untouched for years, and that is no small feat.

It must be admitted that I may, however, merely wind up rereading Frankenstein.

***

If this review seems a little less capslocky than is usual when I really like a book, it is because I am attempting to write reviews that are a little more suitable to perhaps submit places as writing samples. Feed back would be super, super helpful. I also apologize for the excessive Wikipedia links; I know Wikipedia is not very scholarly, but I figure if you are anything like me, then you learned about these people several years ago and promptly forgot everything about them, so I figured Wikipedia links would be a brief way to be like "Oh yeah, that guy."

As always, there is a Hark! A Vagrant! comic for everything: Mary Shelley Quite Contrary