Young Romantics: the tangled lives of English poetry's greatest generation, by Daisy Hay

This book focuses on the Shelley/Keats/Byron circle, which first took shape as a group supporting journalist Leigh Hunt (the original for Harold Skimpole in Bleak House). Though Hunt later becomes a tangential, even denounced figure, the principle of sociability he represents is important, Hay writes, to understanding sociability in general among the later Romantics (those coming after Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake).

Other important members of the fluidly changing groups discussed in the book are Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's sister and (for a time) Byron's mistress. She was very much part of the Shelley menage, accompanying Mary when she ran off at age 16 with Shelley. Other figures include Hazlitt, the Lambs, Thomas Love Peacock, and musician Vincent Novello. The book locates these Romantic figures in the context of their relationships with, between, and among one another. Hay does an especially good job of showing how Shelley, Mary, and Byron would, in some rented villa or another in Italy or Switzerland, spend the days wandering, sailing, picnicking, playing with the children, and then getting together at night to read and listen to each other's work.

The book also makes clear what a raw deal "free love" was for the women in the group. Claire Clairmont, young and hungry for love, threw herself at Byron and became pregnant. By the laws of the time, he as father was entitled to custody of the daughter, and he forced penniless Claire to hand over the 15-month-girl she doted on--just so Byron could ignore her and eventually stick her in a convent, when she was only four years old. Claire begged and pleaded to take care of her own daughter and get her out of the convent's unhealthy situation, but Byron ignored her, and the girl died at 5 from typhus.

Hay wants us to focus on the nature of shifting relationships and sociability, but my overwhelming impression was that when young men philosophize about radical politics, free love, life on the road, and all that, it's young women who suffer the heaviest consequences. Mary Shelley lost two small children in one year from illness and suffered greatly from depression, while Percy wrote self-pitying poems about how she was inexplicably cold to him. Claire was treated abominably. Shelley left his first wife, Harriet, for Mary, and she eventually drowned herself.

Keats, to me the most interesting poet of this group, gets little treatment in this book. He was too poor and too ill to really socialize much, and because he doesn't fit the author's thesis, we get little discussion of some of his greatest poems--The Eve of St. Agnes rates only a mention.

Hay takes us past the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron to follow Mary and Claire and the remaining figures to the ends of their lives. It's interesting stuff--especially when Mary, a depressed, almost penniless widow returns to Britain and one of the first things she discovers is that Frankenstein is a huge hit as a stage production. But Hay's focus on "tangled lives" is as much about the fraying of that tangle by the end.

I found the emphasis on sociability to be of some, but limited interest, and would have liked more discussion of the poetry as such. Still, I learned a lot about the biographies of these fascinating and talented people, and would recommend the book to anyone interested in the period. I recommend it too for fascinating tidbits like the Novellos. Vincent Novello helped to found the London Philharmonic Society, and founded a publishing company whose central principle "was that music should be made available to all and not just those who could travel to London to hear it." It's thanks to a man like Novello that parlor piano music, that mainstay of Victorian musical evenings, became available and cheap. Now there's sociability.