Mr. Dowden says: “From an assurance that she (Harriet) had ceased to love him, Shelley had passed to a conviction that she had given her heart to another, and had linked her life to his.”[36] This statement he repeats without qualification: “He had left her, believing she was unfaithful to him.”[37] The documents which Mr. Dowden quotes to establish Shelley’s belief in Harriet’s unfaithfulness before the separation are three in number.[38] First, a letter from Shelley to his second wife, dated January 11, 1817. Secondly, a letter from Godwin to Mr. W. T. Baxter, dated May 12, 1817. Thirdly, a note appended by Miss Clairmont to transcripts from her mother’s letters, made some time after 1832. I have enumerated these in chronological order, because their greater or less remoteness from the year 1814 considerably affects their value as evidence regarding Shelley’s belief at that period.
It must be borne in mind that Harriet committed suicide in November, 1816, and very soon after this event the Westbrook family began a suit in Chancery with the object of depriving Shelley of the custody of his two children by her. On the 11th of January, 1817, then, Shelley wrote to Mary: “I learn just now from Godwin that he has evidence that Harriet was unfaithful to me _four months_ before I left England with you. If we can succeed in establishing this, our connexion will receive an additional sanction, and plea be overborne.”[39] As a matter of fact, when the pleadings began, he did not establish this, nor did he allude to the matter in the memorandum he drew up of his case.[40] Godwin writes upon the 12th of May: “The late Mrs. Shelley has turned out to be a woman of great levity. I know from unquestionable authority, wholly unconnected with Shelley (though I cannot with propriety be quoted for this), that she had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation.” On the strength of these two passages, the pith and kernel of which is that Godwin, some months after Harriet’s death, credited a tale told him by an unknown person, which he repeated to Shelley, we are asked to suppose that Shelley in July, 1814, two and a half years earlier, was convinced of Harriet’s infidelity. But Miss Clairmont has still to be heard. She, writing at some uncertain date subsequently to 1832, and therefore at least eighteen years after the separation, recorded that: “He (Shelley) succeeded in persuading her (Mary) by declaring that Harriet did not really care for him; that she was in love with a Major Ryan; and the child she would have was certainly not his. This Mary told me herself, adding that this justified his having another attachment.” When we come to examine Miss Clairmont’s reminiscences, we find them untrustworthy in so many instances that her evidence carries no weight.[41] In the second place it is unquestioned and unquestionable that Shelley firmly believed the second child he had by Harriet to be his own. He announced the boy’s birth to his friends, had him named Charles Bysshe, used him in his efforts to raise money, and passionately claimed him when Harriet’s relatives refused to give him up. Yet we are invited to accept the memorandum of an inaccurate woman, penned at least eighteen years after the event, and including one palpable and serious misstatement, as proof that Shelley judged his first wife unfaithful before he eloped with Mary.