2024-10-13 10:16:00
It’s February 26, 1813 and a storm is hitting North Wales. Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley went to bed with two loaded pistols. He made some enemies over the winter. And they come twice that night.
The second woman Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped with later wrote Frankenstein; with the first, Harriet Westbrook, she reached the settlement of Tremadoc in the arid and mountainous north of Wales in the autumn of 1812, where they had a romantic cottage called Tan-yr; -old relative. From Tan-yr-alt, Under-the-Mountain, attention focused on an ambitious but economically shaky project to build a dam, because Tremadoc – now known as Tremadog and birthplace of Lawrence of Arabia – had to become a reformist city. A politician named William Alexander Madocks pulled the strings here. Williams and Leeson were its local governors.
Shelley, an ardent republican and ruthless atheist, was immediately enthusiastic about the project, pledging money he did not have and borrowing from the grocer – reason enough to later claim that he had fled Tremadoc to escape his debts and had an excuse for doing so. invented, which has haunted the history of literature ever since as “Shelley’s ghost”. Shelley was in fact sleepwalking and, in memory of the stormy night of February 26, 1813, drew a demon that survived.
But since his biographer Richard Holmes looked into the Tan-yr-alt affair, there has been almost no evidence left to suggest that Shelley was hallucinating and had simply imagined the “demon”. For during the freezing winter of Tremadoc, Shelley had changed his position. Instead of continuing to raise money for the dam construction project, in the eyes of Williams and Leeson, Madock was now egging on the starving workers. It is quite possible that the man who broke into Tan-yr-alt just before midnight was looking for revolutionary pamphlets.
“We had been in bed about half an hour,” wrote the now pregnant Harriet, who had never hallucinated, “when Mr. S heard a noise coming from one of the living rooms. He immediately went downstairs with the two pistols he had loaded that night because he hoped to be able to use them.
A singed dressing gown
On the ground floor, Shelley sneaks into the billiard room and encounters the thief in the window of a small study. Shots are fired, although it is unclear who fired first. The window is hit and shatters into a thousand pieces. Then Shelley and the thief fight on the grass in the pouring rain and Shelley also fires his second gun. But the stranger, apparently wounded in the shoulder, manages to escape. He has sworn revenge, Harriet reports, and truly: the stormy night is not over yet.
Shelley and a servant now take position on the ground floor, the second attack occurs at four in the morning – and this time it is not a thief, but a murderer who shoots Shelley from a window. But the shot only burns Shelley’s dressing gown; When Harriet arrives on the ground floor, her husband has already grabbed an old sword that is part of Tan-yr-alt’s inventory. Together with the servant, Shelley puts the killer to flight.
But who were the two men? Or better yet: who sent the nameless ones? In his research, Shelley’s biographer Richard Holmes came across pages of torn letters and a Welsh press which, contrary to its usual habits, remained silent on the Tan-yr-alt affair. She has also discovered a long-hidden passage from Harriet’s letter, which speaks of “this Mr. Leeson” who is determined to drive her out of Tremadoc. Sure enough, the Shelleys fled the next morning, in a persistent storm and without any luggage.
It is said that all writers’ lives are made of paper. In this series we provide evidence to the contrary.
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