Recovery and Revision

In an essay on the ‘lost’ facts of history, Virginia Woolf described Eliza Draper as ‘an obscure woman […] whose thirty-five years would have been utterly forgotten were it not that for three months in one of them she was loved by Laurence Sterne’.Footnote ⁷ A similar assessment can be made of Hitchener, who would remain unknown were it not for the eighteenth months in which Shelley ordained her ‘the sister of my soul’. Like Draper, Hitchener occupies a paradoxical place in the literary history of the long eighteenth century as a woman both remembered and forgotten. Hitchener appears in almost every biography of Shelley; the story of their companionship, her joining his ménage, and her ostracism from the group, has acquired near-mythical status; and works of Romantic criticism abound in references to the letters Shelley wrote to her. Yet Hitchener has interested scholars only for as long as she remains close – as correspondent, co-dweller, and finally enemy – to the male canonical cynosure. As a published author, Hitchener is ‘utterly forgotten’ or otherwise spurned. In Finding Elizabeth Hitchener we bring Hitchener’s life and work into focus using an approach which, in Devoney Looser’s words, repudiates conceptions of history as a ‘male enclave devoid of female subjects’ by exploring ‘materials by and about women that had previously been neglected or ignored’.Footnote ⁸ The Hitchener that emerges existed before and after her association with Shelley: she is an exemplar of developments in eighteenth-century female education and thought, a celebrated teacher, an agile correspondent, an occasional travel writer, and a distinctive poet of history and of place.

The Element is not only concerned with those parts of Hitchener’s life and work that have been ‘neglected or ignored’. It is concerned, too, with the small part of Hitchener’s life, her life proximate to Shelley, that has been misrepresented to the detriment of her legacy. Any figure whose life is written as a byproduct of somebody else’s is at the mercy of what Sidney Lee calls ‘the biographer’s indulgence in the partial view’.Footnote ⁹ In Hitchener’s case, the ‘partial view’ has been unduly influenced by Shelley’s final characterisation of her as ‘an ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman’ and ‘The Brown Demon’.Footnote ¹⁰ How and why has this image of Hitchener come to reign over all others? Brenda Ayres talks of the need ‘to expose the distortions, gaps, inconsistencies, biases, contradictions, mistakes, misconceptions, and misappropriation of information’ in biographies of female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹ Hitchener has received no dedicated biography, but distortions, inconsistencies, and biases plague her portrayal in accounts of Shelley’s life. By attending to Hitchener as a woman at times forgotten and at others remembered unjustly, the Element deploys a two-pronged critical method that comprises recovery and revision. Finding Elizabeth Hitchener contends that Shelley and his circle, and subsequently biographers, critics, and editors, have obscured the real Elizabeth Hitchener and her achievements by fabricating versions of her which neglect, misrepresent, or bury the truth. In this context, ‘finding’ serves at once as a metaphor for the act of recovery (we reveal a wealth of new biographical information, offer the most substantial explication to date of the Hitchener-Shelley correspondence, and provide the first critical account of her published verse), and for the difficulties faced in performing that act of recovery (the struggle to nullify obfuscating critical and editorial practices, and to see beyond the pervasive – often prejudiced – gaze of Shelley’s biographers).

Places and Names

Finding Hitchener involves negotiating with her own complex self-depictions. Hitchener published three volumes of verse: The Fireside Bagatelle (1818), The Weald of Sussex (1822), and the posthumous Enigmas, Historical and Geographical (1834).Footnote ¹² In each, she speaks as a poet of place who yields readers and biographers none of the revelations of her self-dramatising male contemporaries. The ‘Dedicatory Ode’ offered ‘To Some Amiable Young Friends’ at the start of The Fireside Bagatelle justifies a mode the scale and temperament of which guards against discovery:

The allusion secreted in these lines – only the ‘Amiable Young Friends’, themselves unknown, know what it ‘hides’ – reserves personal space amid the poetry’s public voice. In what follows, we advance a method of reading responsive to a body of writing which is both stylistically (in Hitchener’s poems) and literally (in the drafts that survive of her letters) sheltered. In part a pleasure, remaining ‘hidden’ was also a pressure Hitchener faced in her life as poet and teacher. Female education, as Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote, had to be pursued in ‘a quiet and unobserved manner’ in the period, ‘only connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed, punished with disgrace’.Footnote ¹⁴ Hitchener’s Enigmas practise an art of concealment that negotiates this cultural expectation. Even the more public voice of The Weald submerges selfhood in the history and traditions of the Sussex landscape and resists what Anne K. Mellor calls ‘the introspective and personal meditations’ which have motivated the ‘recovery’ of Romantic ‘poetesses’ such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.Footnote ¹⁵ That Hitchener has gone largely ‘unobserved’ in literary history is an ironic reflection of her enigmatic talents.

Hitchener came of age in a region close to the border – and the threat – of revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. We trace the manifestations of the political vision to which that experience gave rise. Her education was informed by the ideas of Wollstonecraft and the intellectual foment of the French Revolution, and the early parts of this Element find a young female radical emerging from the 1790s as a champion of the Rights of Women and an exponent of Rational Dissent. Hitchener’s proto-feminism was mocked by Shelley’s early biographers, but she was more pragmatic than they make out. Although Shelley imagined her as the ‘votary’ of a ‘virtue’ entirely at one with his own radicalism, Hitchener was as much the antagonist to Shelley’s idealism as its cheerleader.Footnote ¹⁶ In a review of Shelley’s letters to Hitchener, Woolf observed that it ‘would be delightful if we could have Miss Hitchener’s letters also, for some allusions in Shelley’s answers show the way in which, on occasion, she would try to cap his speculations’.Footnote ¹⁷ Drafts of some of those letters (fully transcribed for the first time for this Element) survive, and they show Hitchener arguing for ‘practical political virtue in degenerate times’.Footnote ¹⁸ An emphasis on the real consequences of political power is central to her most ambitious poem, The Weald of Sussex, in which Hitchener surveys a local cultural inheritance that impedes revolutionary fervour. ‘Ere you of order’s law | One line destroy, think well you can restore?’ she asks, warning of the ‘common sea of ruin’ that awaits if ‘this fair cultured scene, this lovely Weald’ should be ‘Rudely defaced by wild and lawless hands’.Footnote ¹⁹ The lines, underpinned by a Whiggish sense of cumulative progress, typify a practicality which capped some of Shelley’s abstruse musings. It is a vision shaped by the local attachment that Hitchener saw as the fountain of ‘earthly bliss’ and spiritual reward: ‘In Paradise its source began | And followed, leads us there’.Footnote ²⁰ The ‘native’ character of Hitchener’s poems earns her a distinctive place among women writers of the Romantic period who, in Mellor’s terms, ‘spoke to and for the nation’.Footnote ²¹

The Element reveals the connectedness of a seemingly rooted life. As well as being invitations to settle, Hitchener’s poems are inducements to explore. The Enigmas take readers as far as Persia, Rome, Switzerland, and the West Indies, while The Weald begins on Hitchener’s ‘native downs’ and ends in a celebration of the freedom to ‘walk […] ’mong nations of the Earth’.Footnote ²² We present Hitchener as a local author with a sense of humanity’s ‘universal’ ties.Footnote ²³ In some prescient lines, she contemplates the resistance to migrants among ‘Sussex Yeomen’, whose ‘failing’ is

Hitchener valued travel as a vehicle of cultural and intellectual exchange. Her correspondence with Shelley connected her with Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, and Radnorshire; it eventually took her to London, Devon, and Wales. Underlying the lines just quoted might be the suspicions visited upon Hitchener after she had joined the Shelleys in Lynmouth and was subsequently ostracised from polite society. Hitchener committed at considerable cost to the networks circulating the ‘liberal sentiments and just ideas’, which she saw as a cure for the ‘clan-ship’ of Sussex society.Footnote ²⁵ This Element is in part concerned with how the ‘jealous dread’ directed towards a woman who was in social and cultural terms a ‘new-comer’ motivated her rejection and neglect.

Hitchener aimed to ‘preserve’ the ‘name’ of those who had shaped her native culture.Footnote ²⁶ In restoring Hitchener’s own name to literary history, we are driven by Woolf’s interrogation of the assumptions underlying ‘The Art of Biography’:

The rapidity with which those questions are posed implies an assent that might be withheld by a reader who pauses to give them thought. Our aim is to present Hitchener as a human being, not a heroine. Nevertheless, the sense that ‘there is no person so insignificant’ that they do not mark the lives around them is the burden of one of the wisest moments in Hitchener’s letters,Footnote ²⁸ and in such a vein this Element offers a model for a more inclusive mode of literary biography.

Hitchener’s fragile foothold in history is caught in the question of her own ‘name’. In the biographical record she appears variously as ‘Hichener’, ‘Tichener’, ‘Kitchener’, and ‘Hitchner’.Footnote ²⁹ The Shelleys were uncertain how to address her. ‘Pray what are you to be called when you come to us’, Shelley wondered. ‘Elizabeth’ was too close to his sister-in-law, Eliza. ‘Miss Hitchener’, on the other hand, was ‘too long too broad and too deep’ (whatever that means).Footnote ³⁰ Someone, either Shelley or Hitchener, suggested ‘Portia’, thereby gracing Hitchener with Shakespearean splendour.Footnote ³¹ Shelley’s wife Harriet, who was well-educated but self-conscious about her own non-aristocratic background, thought this a bit much. Did it imply Hitchener was akin to the woman whom Brutus, trampling social hierarchies, calls his ‘true and honourable wife’? Or the Portia in which Bassiano ‘finds the joys of heaven here on earth’?Footnote ³² Although Hitchener was never wealthy and members of her family were beset by financial difficulties, by the time the Shelleys knew her she could be considered a well-educated woman of middling status. The Shelleys, however, returned to the idea of her ‘poverty’ initially to acclaim her exceptionalism and later to discredit her virtues.Footnote ³³ That Harriet protested against Portia is revealing: ‘I do not like the name you have taken but mind only the name. You are fully worthy of it but being a name so much out of the common way it excites so much curiosity in the mind of the hearer this is my only reas[on] for not liking it’. Hitchener was to take something ‘more common & more pleasing to the ear’: ‘Bessy’.Footnote ³⁴ Shelley’s letters had transported Hitchener into an idealised realm. Harriet’s jittery reassertion of her ‘common’ status contains the seeds – in class animus, even sexual jealousy – of her eventual dismissal. But Hitchener was, in the best sense, ‘out of the common way’. This Element goes in search of her. It finds no ‘mortal breathing saint’,Footnote ³⁵ but a woman whose attachments were to ‘the peopled Earth’.Footnote ³⁶

Finding a Form

‘The biographer truly succeeds if a distinct literary form can be found for the particular life’, wrote Leon Edel.Footnote ³⁷ Much of Hitchener’s life has been forgotten; other parts of it cannot be disentangled from her afterlives. Accordingly, the form we have chosen for this Element charts Hitchener’s achievements as a teacher and writer and, in its latter stages especially, reflects our engagement with those critics and biographers who have prevented her finding her place in history – it enacts a process of ‘recovery’ and ‘revision’, to return to the terms deployed earlier. We study Hitchener’s life chronologically, remaining responsive to the sporadically rich but often sparse records available. Our first section, ‘Woman’, offers a detailed account of Hitchener’s largely overlooked life before Shelley and places her accomplishments as a teacher within the context of eighteenth-century developments in female education. ‘Angel’ is concerned with a single year. It examines Hitchener’s correspondence with Shelley, which constituted one of the most significant intellectual exchanges of his life, and which precipitated their ménage along with Harriet Shelley and Eliza Westbrook during the summer of 1812. The fallout from this experiment in co-habitation, and the shadow it casts over Hitchener in the eyes of Shelley scholars, is examined in ‘Demon’, which considers the enduring characterisations of Hitchener from 1812 to the present day. ‘Poet’ and the ‘Coda’ address Hitchener’s life after Shelley as a published author and successful schoolmistress, before her death at the age of thirty-eight.

Finding Elizabeth Hitchener also offers a counter-biography that challenges existing stories of Hitchener’s life and tells newly discovered truths. The kaleidoscope of prejudice through which Hitchener has been seen – as demon, temptress, swindler, upstart, poetess – had its genesis in the biased testimonies of the Shelley circle (Percy and Harriet Shelley, and Eliza Westbrook) which were put into print by contemporary biographers (Shelley’s friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and his cousin, Thomas Medwin) and taken up uncritically from the nineteenth century onwards. We begin the work of revision in ‘Woman’ by deploying seriously a label that has motivated the opprobrium directed towards her. The subsequent movement from ‘Angel’ to ‘Demon’ follows the teleology established by Hitchener’s detractors in order to question it: the section titles are borrowed from Irving Babbitt’s line that Shelley ‘begins by seeing in Elizabeth Hitchener an angel of light and then discovers that she is instead a “Brown Demon”’.Footnote ³⁸ The final chapter takes its cue from a sneering observation that Hitchener ‘fancied herself a poetess’ to assert her accomplishment as a poet.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Recovering’ and ‘revising’ Hitchener’s life and work in this way, the Element reveals both the mechanisms of Hitchener’s neglect and her status as a significant intellectual figure who, to apply Orianne Smith’s re-conception of the female writer of the period, ‘seldom conform[s] to the familiar outlines of what we have customarily regarded as the male Romantic poetic tradition in Britain’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The aim is not simply to recover what we can of Hitchener’s life and work, but to find her place in literary history.

By the Same Means as Men

Elizabeth Hitchener was baptised in Keymer, a parish of Sussex, on 22 April 1783.Footnote ⁴⁵ She was the second of five children born to Thomas Hitchener (b. 1749),Footnote ⁴⁶ a former smuggler who appears to have changed his name from Yorke (or York)Footnote ⁴⁷ to Hitchener before becoming landlord of the Fryar’s Oak Inn in Clayton, Sussex,Footnote ⁴⁸ and Elizabeth Hitchener (née Greenwood), whose status was recorded as ‘Widow’ when she married Thomas at St. Andrew’s church in Holborn, London, on 16 November 1780.Footnote ⁴⁹ The parish of Keymer encompassed a Saxon parish church, a manor house, and Oldland Windmill, and extended to its south in ‘a long, narrow strip up the side of the South Downs to a height of over 700 ft.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Determining how Hitchener felt about her early life in Keymer is difficult because the record depends upon a couple of brief and nebulous accounts. In one of her letters to Shelley, Hitchener told him that she had ‘visionary’ sentiments from ‘very early’ on and lamented that ‘they’ – seemingly Keymer villagers – ‘pronounced me romantic, eccentric & conceited, & compelled me to live without sympathy’.Footnote ⁵¹ The ‘Apologetic Stanzas’ attached to The Weald of Sussex (1822) offer another reflection on the ‘disadvantages’ of her early years:

Since the ‘thee’ to which these lines are addressed is the personified volume of verse, not Hitchener herself, the account is only obliquely autobiographical, and the denial of social and intellectual influence (‘No kindred friendship’, ‘No brilliant converse’) is partly a strategy to downplay expectations. It is also possible that Hitchener is recasting the myth Shelley made for her of the visionary’s self-impelled flight from obscurity, for we know that Hitchener did find ‘kindred friendship’ in at least one of her siblings: she had a younger sister called Ann (baptised 19 September 1785),Footnote ⁵³ with whom she eventually co-founded a school and to whom she remained close throughout her life. She also had two younger brothers, Thomas, who died ‘young’ and was buried in Keymer on 23 September 1784, four days after his baptism,Footnote ⁵⁴ and James (baptised 13 July 1787),Footnote ⁵⁵ as well as a notable elder brother, William Henry Hitchener (baptised 30 December 1781).Footnote ⁵⁶ After impressing in the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV, Part I at Thornton’s, a boys’ boarding school for ‘young gentlemen’ in Horsham,Footnote ⁵⁷ by 1811 William was, in the words of the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, a ‘deserving and improving’ actor with the Surrey Theatre.Footnote ⁵⁸ He wrote two plays, Love in a Desert. A Musical Entertainment, in Two Acts (1802) and Ivor; or, The Sighs of Ulla. A Tragedy (Ivor was performed in Henley-on-Thames in 1808 with ‘Mr. Hitchener’ in the starring role).Footnote ⁵⁹ He also published two novels, St Leonard’s Forest; or, the Child of Chance. A Novel (1813) and The Towers of Ravenswold; or, Days of Ironside. A Romance (1813), the latter of which features Adeliza, a woman with a ‘mind’ of ‘superior cast’ possibly based on his sister.Footnote ⁶⁰ An ode about a barber shop was ridiculed in The British Critic in 1804: ‘We do not know this Mr. Hitchener, but conjecture he may be the shaver himself, though no cunning one certainly’.Footnote ⁶¹ Elizabeth would follow her brother in becoming a published author that the literary establishment did ‘not know’.

Scholars have claimed that Hitchener ‘owed little to father or mother’.Footnote ⁶² The observation feeds into the myth of the autonomous child prodigy while smuggling in a class-based animus. Of what use could unwealthy parents be to a future member of Shelley’s circle? Yet the fact that an eighteenth-century Sussex publican and his wife produced two published authors is enough to suggest that bookish interests and ‘brilliant converse’ were nurtured in their household. From some aggrieved comments Hitchener made in a letter to Shelley it has been concluded that her mother was a ‘rigid’ and ‘conventional’ woman.Footnote ⁶³ But these comments need to be read in context. They show the twenty-eight-year-old Hitchener reflecting upon her mother’s disapproval of her dedication to the welfare of Hannah Adams, her former teacher and mentor, whom Hitchener regarded as ‘the Mother of my soul’:

Just because Hitchener’s mother felt that Hannah Adams was too liberal in encouraging some of her daughter’s opinions, it does not follow that her own values were ‘rigid’. And just because ‘she did not treat’ Hitchener as Adams ‘had done’, it does not mean that she treated her badly. Hitchener in fact retreats from her claim that the love she holds for her mother is secondary: ‘nay I know not as to loving more’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Shelley, who had never met Hitchener’s mother, responded by describing her as ‘one of those everyday characters by whom the stock of prejudice is augmented rather than decreased’.Footnote ⁶⁶

At the very least, Hitchener had her mother to thank for ‘the school she selected in which reason not accident directed her’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In choosing Adams’ Girls’ Boarding School, co-founded by Hannah and her sister Mary Adams circa 1774,Footnote ⁶⁸ Hitchener’s mother secured for her eldest daughter an education as ‘superior’Footnote ⁶⁹ as the education she had secured for her eldest son – which was to risk incensing moralists of the period who considered sending a daughter to school an example of ‘bad mothering’ that encouraged corruption.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hitchener started at Adams’ School, situated on School Hill in Lewes, when she was nine (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁷¹ Stretching down ‘a beautiful declivity of the South Downs’, as Hitchener described it,Footnote ⁷² Lewes is just over eight miles from Keymer. Its radical credentials, as Harvey J. Kaye has shown, were apparent from the ‘several Nonconformist churches, and a tradition of opposition to the monarchy and pro-republican sentiments going back to the revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century’, and it was here that Thomas Paine had begun his political activities while living above a tobacco shop between 1768 and 1774.Footnote ⁷³ At a town meeting held in the year Hitchener started school, the grammar-school usher Paul Dunvan was characterised as ‘riotous’ (he went on to publish anonymously what John Caffyn calls the ‘aggressively radical’ Ancient and Modern History of Lewes and Brighthelmston in 1795, which Hitchener cites in notes to The Weald of Sussex).Footnote ⁷⁴ Lewes was therefore a suitable setting for Hitchener’s introduction to ‘the dear woman’ who educated her in the principles of virtue and truth: ‘when first I heard her speak,’ Hitchener said of Adams, ‘I listen’d with a delight I never tasted before’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Figure 1

Thomas Henwood, ‘A View from Baxter’s Library, High Street, School Hill, Lewes’ (1828),

© Tracery Prints.

Hannah Adams was in the vanguard of an ‘educational innovation’, the commercial girls’ school, that emerged ‘when there was widespread interest in female education’.Footnote ⁷⁶ As Susan Skedd points out, these schools ‘gave girls the opportunity of an extensive school education as an alternative to a private education in the home’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In one way the education Hitchener received was conventional: she was taught ‘plain’ and ‘fine’ (i.e. ornamental) needlework in preparation for an industrious life in the home.Footnote ⁷⁸ In other ways Hitchener’s was a ‘proper education’ of the pioneering kind Wollstonecraft envisioned in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was published a few months before Hitchener began her schooling and came to exert a lasting influence on her.Footnote ⁷⁹ The ‘enlightened’Footnote ⁸⁰ Hannah Adams sought to fulfil the Wollstonecraftian aim of furnishing young women with ‘well-stored mind[s]’ by fostering their ‘dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge’.Footnote ⁸¹ But she was not present for all of Hitchener’s time at the school. Towards the end of 1792, several months after Hitchener’s enrolment, Adams departed for revolutionary France.Footnote ⁸² Adams must have arrived in Paris a month or two prior to the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, and, once France had declared war on England in February 1793, she was left stranded by a law that prevented foreigners from leaving the country. It is possible that Adams came into contact with the circles of expatriates in which Wollstonecraft (who had travelled there around the same time) found solace in Paris, and even with Wollstonecraft herself.Footnote ⁸³ Meanwhile, for over two years Hitchener’s education, as well as that of over twenty other girls,Footnote ⁸⁴ likely fell under the remit of Mary Adams, who Lewes locals labelled a ‘reactionary’,Footnote ⁸⁵ and to whom Hitchener assumedly referred when she later described ‘a Sister, who is the opposite of her’.Footnote ⁸⁶

When Hannah Adams returned to the school in 1795, she grew ever closer to Hitchener, who she came to ‘love as her child’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Hitchener adored Adams in return as mother-figure, teacher, and incarnation of her own emerging radicalism: ‘to love her & virtue was the same’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In December 1795, Adams’ School published an advertisement, written in both English and French presumably to exhibit the school’s prestige, outlining an ambitious curriculum that included English, French, geography, and ancient and modern history.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pupils were also encouraged to participate in philanthropy, as when in 1790 (two years prior to Hitchener’s enrolment) the ‘Young Ladies at Miss Adam’s Boarding School’ raised £2 2s for a public appeal to aid three orphaned children.Footnote ⁹⁰ One area that could not be included in the published advertisement, to which Adams likely introduced Hitchener during her schoolyears, was religious questioning influenced by Rational Dissent, which saw increased female interest from the mid-eighteenth century. The belief in ‘the right to private judgement in matters of religious faith’, as Valerie Smith defines it,Footnote ⁹¹ may have informed some of the opinions to which Hitchener’s mother objected, and Hitchener later brought to bear her ‘private’ thoughts concerning Christian orthodoxy on her correspondence with Shelley.

A surviving bill of 1804 for Adams’ School details costs in addition to the annual day fee of £2 2s (cheaper than a number of contemporaneous Sussex girls’ schools)Footnote ⁹² for a ‘Miss Grover’:

Table 1.01

Table 1.01 Long description

The additional costs are listed in abbreviated prose according to the educational item received or the class taken. ‘Miss Grover half a year’s Edu’n to Chmas’ cost one pound and one shilling; ‘A french Gram’r’ cost three shillings and six pence; ‘A Copy-Book’ cost eight pence; ‘Fables Vo. french’ cost two shillings and six pence; ‘A Spellg. Book’ cost one shilling and three pence; ‘Dancing’ cost two pounds and two shillings; ‘Entrance to Do.’ cost ten shillings and six pence; ‘French’ cost one pound and one shilling; ‘Entrance to Do.’ cost ten shillings and six pence; ‘Use of Books & News p’r.’ cost two shillings; ‘Breaking up & Fine’ cost three shillings and six pence. The total is given as five pounds, eighteen shillings, and five pence, before ‘Dancing’ costs of two pounds and two shillings are ‘deducted’. The final total is given as three pounds, sixteen shillings, and five pence.

Hitchener had left the school by 1804, but the bill gives a sense of the expertise, equipment, books, and newspapers from which her education would have benefited. It marks, too, the coming to fruition of the call for women’s access to literature that had gained momentum during the eighteenth century. In 1748, the clergyman Thomas Seward had published ‘The Female Right to Literature’, a poem which inspired his daughter Anna’s literary ambitions: ‘But, say, Britannia,’ one of his apostrophes begins, ‘do thy sons who claim | A birth-right liberty, dispense the same | In equal scales? Why then does Custom bind | In chains of ignorance the female mind?’Footnote ⁹⁴ Maria Edgeworth then echoed Seward’s call by publishing a second edition of Letters for Literary Ladies in 1798 with the aim of asserting ‘more distinctly the female right to literature’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Hitchener’s own enigmas and The Weald of Sussex reflect the expansive curriculum she followed at Adams’ School and attest to her lasting interests in Roman, Greek, and early English history and etymology, among other things, in what the Sussex historian William Smith Ellis described in 1837 as ‘a most unfeminine and ostentatious display of learning’.Footnote ⁹⁶ At one point in The Weald Hitchener pays tribute to ‘the Graces’ of ‘fair Lewes’, before reflecting on the ‘treasures’ of early education:

The allusion to the Greek Muses signals Hitchener’s abiding advocation of female inspiration; and, for any reader familiar with her biography, out of those proliferating hers the presence of Hannah Adams emerges like the solution to one of Hitchener’s enigmas.

The tendency of Shelley and his critics to obfuscate details of Hitchener’s childhood, even if partly inspired by her self-identification as a ‘visionary’, has served to efface the truth that her intellectual and political instincts were fostered by radical advancements in female education, typified by Hannah Adams and her school. These advancements challenged the ‘wild chimera’ of Rousseau’s Émile – that ‘All the ideas of women, which have not the immediate tendency to points of duty, should be directed to the study of men’Footnote ⁹⁸ – a doctrine which Wollstonecraft rebuked in A Vindication:

Shelley’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg sarcastically remembered interrogating Hitchener ‘about the Rights of Women, respectfully requesting to be informed what they were’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The lofty sobriquet to which he has recourse – ‘I represented my view of the matter to the scholastic Minerva’ – is hardly respectful.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For the truth is that any well-educated man of privilege who held even the slightest reservations regarding female progress had reason to feel unnerved by Hitchener. Even while her ‘very humble’ background defied Wollstonecraft’s bourgeois ‘natural state’,Footnote ¹⁰² Hitchener had acquired ‘human virtues’ by the ‘same means as men’. She was the incarnation of Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary ideals.

An Establishment for Young Ladies

Inspired by her experience at Adams’ School, Hitchener chose to dedicate her life to female education. ‘The most common and often the only qualification that a teacher could rely on’, Skedd points out, ‘was her own experience of a school education, which in itself was seen as an investment for future employment’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Sometime around 1803, aged twenty, Hitchener founded her own girls’ boarding school (‘an Establishment for Young Ladies’) in Hurstpierpoint, about nine miles from Lewes, which appears to have occupied a building known as Patchwork Hall.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For a female teacher to get a school up and running in the period was an achievement: in 1783 Wollstonecraft had abandoned her own first attempt at founding a boarding school in Islington after struggling to enrol pupils.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Hitchener later explained to Shelley that her ‘principal motive for engaging in a School’ was to offer Hannah Adams a refuge from reactionary presences both local and familial:

As two educated and (ultimately) persecuted women, Hitchener and Adams formed an enduring bond belonging to a category of female friendship that ‘emerged through women’s agency’ in the long eighteenth century ‘as a powerful resource in the struggle for autonomy and authority’, according to Susan S. Lanser.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Hitchener and Adams take their place alongside Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot, Charlotte Smith and Henrietta O’Neill, Anna Seward and Honora Sneyd, Lucy Aikin and Joanna Baillie, as women whose companionship facilitated spiritual and intellectual growth, and, for Hitchener and Adams at least, a vibrant exchange of political ideas: friendship is ‘That name’, wrote Ann Yearsley in her ‘Address to Friendship’ (1785), ‘which never yet cou’d dare exist | But in equality’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such a friendship could not reach its zenith through correspondence alone. Taking heed of Aristotle’s belief that ‘[t]hose who welcome each other but do not live together would seem to have goodwill rather than friendship’, Hitchener imagined an ‘asylum’ in which she and Adams would live together, read, teach, and engage in philanthropy, perhaps in part out of financial necessity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As her later reflections attest, Hitchener was persistent in encouraging Adams to join her in Hurstpierpoint, while lamenting that, owing to the oppressive influence of her sister,

Hitchener’s vision of a shared home and school in which each woman’s ‘independance’ would be preserved aligns with Nicole Pohl’s description of the eighteenth-century model of the ‘sentimental household’ – composed of ‘attachments that allow for emotional fulfilment and self-possession in opposition to “the texture of female subordination” in contemporary family and household structures’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The model found its most alluring expression in the utopian community of altruistic women at the centre of Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762): ‘In the bow’, observes the enthralled male traveller who enters the manor’s ‘Attic school’, ‘sat two ladies reading, with pen, ink, and paper on the table before them, at which was a young girl translating out of French. At the lower end of the room was a lady painting with quite exquisite art indeed, a beautiful Madona; near her another, drawing a landscape out of her own imagination; a third, carving a picture-frame in wood, in the finest manner; a fourth, engraving; and a young girl reading aloud to them’.Footnote ¹¹² In the late eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, traces of Scott’s eutopia can be found in the biographies of Hannah More, who established schools and engaged in acts of philanthropy while living with her sister Patty in Somerset, and Jane Austen, who enjoyed the company of her sister Cassandra at Chawton, where, as their niece recorded, ‘our Aunts occupied themselves in working for the poor & teaching here & there some boy or girl to read & write’.Footnote ¹¹³ When Hitchener later agreed, after much hesitation, to go and live with the Shelleys in 1812, she was responding in part to her own unsatisfied yearning for a ‘Millenium Hall’.

No evidence exists to indicate that Hannah Adams ever resided with Hitchener in Hurstpierpoint – she appears to have stayed at Adams’ School until she married a John Stanley in 1813, before moving to Cornwall in 1817Footnote ¹¹⁴ – but her mentorship and companionship were enabling factors in the foundation of Hitchener’s own school. Here Hitchener offered a radical curriculum inspired by Adams, both in terms of its range and richness and the Rational Dissenting spirit in which she ‘publickly instructed youth as a Deist, & a Republican’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ anchored by her own attunement to the realities of ‘practical’ learning: ‘experience of Mankind’, she later told Shelley, ‘is of all schools the severest, its ingenuous pupils purchase their knowledge with tears of blood, (here ignorance is indeed bliss), like every other knowledge you early obtain it’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ While parallels can be drawn between Hitchener and figures such as Wollstonecraft and Ann Murry (author of Mentoria; or, the Young Ladies Instructor (1778)) who made a living teaching in London in the1780s and 90s, she was also part of a lesser-known constellation of women outside of the capital – including Ellenor Fenn (1743–1813) in Norfolk and Catharine Cappe (1744–1821) in York – who combined teaching with writing and philanthropy. Fenn, for instance, assisted in the founding of a Sunday school, adopted an orphaned heiress, and from her home in Dereham wrote dozens of books aimed primarily at young girls under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Teachwell’. The transmission of her work through reprints in the United States and her public support for the National Society for the Education of the Poor testifies to the influence that the position of teacher-author opened to women in the period.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Although Hitchener’s own establishment and the school she attended were not charity schools, this did not preclude a concern for the education of the poor and pupils of modest means. The aspect of commercial girls’ schooling that ‘most exercised moralists and educationalists’ in the eighteenth century, as Michèle Cohen has shown, ‘was the “promiscuous” mixing of social classes’, condemned because girls could ‘acquire ideas above their station’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At Adams’ School, which set lower fees, promoted philanthropic endeavours, and offered an advanced education, possibly enabled by donations, to girls like herself, Hitchener found inspiration in an environment that embraced this ‘mixing of social classes’. Within her own Hurstpierpoint establishment, Hitchener counted among her pupils the girls of an American family as well as Emma Pilfold, the daughter of Shelley’s uncle Captain John Pilfold, a naval officer, but she doubtless educated local girls who had suffered the ‘disadvantages of birth’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Report of the Select Committee on the Education of the Poor recorded two endowments in 1806 totalling nearly £14,000 for the education of one hundred poor children, including girls, who were sent to ‘different schools in the parish’ of Hurstpierpoint, Hitchener’s possibly among them.Footnote ¹²⁰

Contemporary testimonies tell us that Hitchener was ‘well spoken of’ in Hurstpierpoint, was ‘said to be very clever’, and was ‘successful in the speculation’ of running a school.Footnote ¹²¹ She would never have come into contact with Shelley had she not earned the admiration of Captain Pilfold, who in the early summer of 1811 (when she was twenty-eight)Footnote ¹²² invited her to dine at the family home in Cuckfield. It was there that she first met Shelley, who was ten years her junior; he was struck by her intelligence and agility as a conversationalist. Judging by the letter he sent to her afterwards, the meeting facilitated a lively discussion about education and stimulating ‘arguments’ concerning religion that would play out in the pair’s correspondence (the subject of the next section, ‘Angel’) over the coming months.Footnote ¹²³ But the Cuckfield encounter also marks the point at which Shelley’s biographers begin to denounce Hitchener’s character, gender, and politics, and one way in which they do this is by calling her blue.

A Bomb-Proof Blue

Hogg introduces Hitchener to us as ‘a tower-proof, fire-proof, bomb-proof blue; free from and above all prejudices; and a resolute champion of the Rights of Women’, and Medwin follows suit by calling ‘Miss Kitchener’ ‘an esprit fort, ceruleanly blue’ and a ‘great stickler for the rights of her sex’.Footnote ¹²⁴ They are likely taking their cue from Byron’s stanzas in Don Juan IV (1820) about ‘learned ladies’:

In the latter part of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, ‘blue’, which originated from ‘Bluestocking’, could be used as a term of endearment for women ‘so wise, and so learned, so blue’, as Edgeworth put it in Patronage (1814);Footnote ¹²⁶ but it was often delivered, as here, with a mocking edge that discredited female learnedness, sustaining the pejorative connotations of ‘Bluestocking’ that emerged as early as the 1780s.Footnote ¹²⁷ When fifteen-year-old Fanny in the anonymously-authored Blue-Stocking Hall (1827) archly asks the older Mr Otway, ‘What is the meaning, dear Phil. of calling people Blue-stockings, whose stockings are really white?’, he pertinently replies: ‘Blue-stockings, my Fan, is a vulgar slang for learned ladies’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Otway goes on:

It is precisely the double-edged perception of Hitchener as knowledgeable and able and ‘inferior’ and female that induces the kind of ‘terror’ in Shelley’s biographers, disguised in the form of sniggering wit or unjustified wrath, that will be shown in its severest form in Section 3 of this Element.

Such slack deployment of ‘blue’ as ‘vulgar slang’ has also obscured a more profound truth: that Hitchener, as an educated woman of rural Sussex without property, embodied the class-dissolving evolution of the adjective (‘so wise, so learned, and so blue’) and the legacy of Bluestocking espousal of women’s education, writing, philanthropy, and patronage with which it was associated.Footnote ¹³⁰ This advocation originated in the elite assemblies hosted by Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu (Sarah Scott’s sister)Footnote ¹³¹ in London in the 1750s and 1760s, and was preserved by the measured proto-feminism of second-generation Bluestockings. At the same time, it was transmitted along the political spectrum to the Radical and Rational dissenting female intellectuals of the 1780s and 1790s, including national figures like Helen Maria Williams and regional ones like Hannah Adams, who in turn catalysed Hitchener’s career as a teacher and writer in the 1800s and 1810s. The ‘practical political virtue’ for which she advocated was therefore shaped at once by Radical and Bluestocking values. In addition to her reading of Wollstonecraft, Hitchener admired the work of Hannah More,Footnote ¹³² a participant in Bluestocking gatherings from 1778, whose ‘The Bas Bleu: or, Conversation’ (1786) pays ardent tribute to Bluestocking conversation as ‘that noblest commerce of Mankind’:

The poem ‘encapsulates’, in Elizabeth Eger’s words, ‘a particular mission to improve, self-consciously advertising a belief in the possibilities offered by conversation as a means of asserting social and intellectual equality’.Footnote ¹³⁴ This Bluestocking ‘belief’ echoes through Hitchener’s life and work: her poetry’s recognition that ‘brilliant converse’ can ‘elicit truth’; Harriet Shelley’s description of her talking ‘a great deal. If you like great talkers she will suit you. […] She laughs and talks and writes all day’;Footnote ¹³⁵ her desire to live alongside the woman who kindled her intellectual awakening ‘when first I heard her speak’; the interactive structures of her enigmas; and the longing for unbridled conversation – ‘will you indulge my familiar style & ity & allow me to chat at all seasons’Footnote ¹³⁶ – that inspired her correspondence with Shelley across 1811–12. By recovering elements of the pre-Shelleyan life that scholars have long denied Hitchener, and by finding her presence within the cultural and intellectual fabric of the long eighteenth century, this section has allowed such echoes to be heard.

No Other Friend Who Can Understand Me

The early correspondence is marked by the contrast between Shelley’s fluent atheism and Hitchener’s tentative defences of her faith:

When transcribed faithfully, as they have been for the first time for this Element, Hitchener’s drafts initially present an unpromising platform for the recovery of a literary reputation. One defence of their significance is to contend, with Isobel Grundy, that in the recovery of women writers ‘the argument from literary quality needs reinforcement from the argument for the value of knowledge’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The drafts are a valuable, if rough and attenuated, record of an unheard voice. Yet the very roughness of that voice is inscribed with the qualities that made Hitchener a stimulating correspondent. Hitchener’s corrections reveal her care to tailor her attitudes to Shelley – whether through a class- or gender-oriented subservience, an effort to manipulate his sympathies, or the pleasure of discovering her own beliefs in the act of writing. They show a mind in flux.

The ‘knowledge’ afforded by the drafts is often incomplete. ‘[O]nce I dreamt I had a friend’, Hitchener wrote in November 1811, ‘but the world stole her, I still admire that intellect the brilliancy of her mind, & often regret that I cannot love what I must admire her, in the warmth of youthful fancy my heart began to expand towards her, but she nipt the opening blossom, my heart bled then’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Nothing remains to identify this friend, or the nature of Hitchener’s affection for her. Hitchener’s lost dream of a friendship based on the ‘brilliancy’ of female ‘intellect’, however, shapes her correspondence with Shelley. ‘I have no other friend from whom I can seek improvement, no other friend who can understand me’, she wrote: ‘I wish therefore often to chat with you, to tell you my thoughts as they arise’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ ‘It was a trope in the eighteenth century that familiar writing should resemble conversation’, observes Cynthia Aalders.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Hitchener’s conception of friendship and ‘chat’ as vehicles for ‘improvement’ suggests how productively she understood the correspondence within a framework of eighteenth-century values. She quotes recurrently from the second ‘Night’ of Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts (‘On Time, Death, and Friendship’), expressing herself ‘peculiarly happy in possessing a Friend who can “set my mind abroach”’, yet grateful, too, that conversation gives ‘due restraint’ to ‘rude thought’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ She turns as well to More, quoting from Sensibility to pay tribute to her mentor Hannah Adams in terms which also illuminate her sense of the moral value of her discussions with Shelley: ‘“if any love of virtue glow in me” I first caught that love from her’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Although the material record of Hitchener’s correspondence is slight, the allusiveness of the surviving drafts indicates the seriousness with which she conceived of the exchange as an intellectual and literary endeavour.

In other respects, Hitchener’s letters complicate established ideals. Alexander Pope’s line that a letter presents ‘thoughts just warm from the brain, without any polishing or dress’ remained influential when Hitchener and Shelley were writing.Footnote ¹⁶² Hitchener’s drafts fulfil that ideal with disarming authenticity. Both their hesitations and their headlong energy expose the artifice of Popean spontaneity. Hitchener promised to write ‘with all the freedom of thought, that has not thought’,Footnote ¹⁶³ her idiom honouring the extemporising openness that captures the drama of ‘thoughts as they arise’:

The passage has an immediacy unavailable to more ‘polished’ prose. Sorrow at a world hostile to Hitchener’s ‘eccentricity’ is rescued by a cheerfulness that awakens spontaneously from contemplation of the ‘sympathy’ for which the letter longs. The indeterminate syntax suggests a mind gaining only momentary purchase on a solace it fears to be nothing more than a ‘charm’, prone to evaporate as soon as experienced. ‘Fraught with sentiments’, to use Hitchener’s own astutely ambivalent phrase, the draft speaks with a deftness that refutes accusations of ‘illiteracy’.

The ‘understanding’ nurtured by the letters was intellectual as well as emotional. ‘Conversation’, in More’s terms, was an agent of ‘moral truth’ and ‘wisdom’ as well as ‘delight’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ One context within which the letters can be understood is the tradition of epistolary mentorship that had grown following the publication of Lord Chesterfield’s letters in 1774. Hitchener and Shelley share little of Chesterfield’s interest in ‘good-breeding and politeness’,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ or the concern with conduct and manners that marks Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). Their concern with ‘virtue’ is more radically inflected.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ But Shelley, blithely inverting the conventions of age and professional experience, appears at first to have had something similarly didactic in mind. Proposing a ‘polemical correspondence’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ in June 1811, he anticipated a one-sided affair. To begin Hitchener’s ‘secondary education’,Footnote ¹⁶⁹ he arranged for copies of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810), and George Ensor’s On National Education (1811) to be sent to her. Ensor’s book makes the case for poetry as ‘the most powerful means of instructing youth’Footnote ¹⁷⁰ and underpinned Shelley’s puritanical view that ‘all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Yet the exchange proves the difficulty of ‘inculcating’ any single moral perspective. Although Hitchener looked forward to the development of her mind from a ‘chaos of disjointed ideas’ into ‘a seat of order and harmony’,Footnote ¹⁷² it is the ‘chaos’ of jostling arguments that animates the letters. In this respect, the model of epistolary mentorship at work is more Godwinian: ‘If we would […] improve the social institutions of men’, Godwin asserted in Political Justice, ‘we must write, we must argue, we must converse’.Footnote ¹⁷³ As Clare Brant observes, although late eighteenth-century paradigms ‘presumed an exchange of views which tempered assertion, letters, like dialogues, enabled women to argue’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ ‘[T]ho I presume not to argue I love to discuss’,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Hitchener herself declared. Eventually, Shelley encouraged her: ‘Preserve your individuality, reason for yourself, compare and discuss with me’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

From the start, Hitchener teasingly indulged Shelley’s teacherly earnestness. ‘Self-love’, she wrote, confessing to a quality which Shelley proudly renounced, ‘prompts me eagerly to accept the opportunity you offer me of improving my mind by a correspondence with you’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Conceding Locke’s arguments against innate ideas, a foundation of Shelley’s atheism and egalitarianism, she professed to ‘feel as if I had never thought before’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The phrase typifies Hitchener’s way of sounding both naïve and knowing; her emphases short-circuit Shelley’s attempts to disavow ‘feeling’ in favour of reason. Hitchener continues by putting the Essay to different ends than Shelley had anticipated. ‘I am so truly happy to find Locke saying we posses faculties to discover God’, she remarks,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ presumably noticing Locke’s description of ‘the knowledge of a GOD [as] the most natural discovery of humane reason’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ A surprised Shelley wondered whether ‘to expect an enemy or an ally in Locke?’ before impatiently stamping out Hitchener’s supposed misreading: ‘Locke proves that there are no innate ideas […] thus overturning all appeals of feeling in favor of Deity’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ By contrast, Hitchener’s encouragement of ‘discussion’ endows her letters with a wisdom in modesty:

Hitchener’s letters show her ‘striving […] with Shelley’s help, to come to grips with religious and philosophical problems’, says Cameron.Footnote ¹⁸³ It would be truer to say that Hitchener affords Shelley a lesson in the humility and flexibility necessary to productive argument.

Hitchener’s appeal to ‘feeling’ as a mode of intuition aligns her with female Rational Dissenters such as Mary Hays, who sought to moderate the ‘sour, haughty, and contentious’ consequences of a ‘purely mental and contemplative’ faith by advocating the ‘affecting and elevated emotions’ involved in Christian belief.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ In response to Shelley’s accusations of sentimentality, she conceded: ‘You reason almost too clearly for me on the subject of Deity; but the feeling has taken deep root, & I am sure you cannot be surpris’d when I say, if I reject on one side, I receive on the other’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Hitchener’s letters treat Shelley’s devotion to ‘reason’ with reasonable scepticism. ‘You tell me since you have been a decided votary of reason you have never felt happiness, & you ask me to comment on it’, Hitchener wrote in the same letter, picking up on the austere pride with which Shelley had announced that ‘since I have devoted myself unreservedly to its [i.e. reason’s] influencing I have never felt Happiness’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ To this self-flagellation, Hitchener responds: ‘your own arguments furnish me with an answer, viz “that reason sanctions an aberration from reason, when that aberration is productive of higher morality”’. Hitchener exposes the contradiction in Shelley’s avowal of disinterestedness and turns his naïve sense of the ease of altruism back upon him with a cool wit: ‘must not […]the children of virtue seek to be happy themselves lest they give pain to those who in others happiness find their own?’Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Shelley conceded the point: ‘“Reason sanctions an aberration from reason” – I admit it … ’Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Boas argues that in ‘writing intimately to one he knew so little [Shelley] was, in a way, talking to himself’Footnote ¹⁸⁹ (an impression reinforced by the claustrophobia of Shelley’s close-packed foolscap sheets (see Figure 3)). That did not stop Hitchener interjecting – and occasionally getting through. She argues with a dissenting spirit which, in Gina Luria Walker’s words, ‘integrates reason and feeling’.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Followed as a ‘discussion’, and not a monologue, the correspondence shows Hitchener as a mature and subtle antagonist.

Figure 3

Shelley to Hitchener, 14 March 1812. BL Add MSS 37496 f. 103^v,

©The British Library Board.

The Real Difference That Exists between Us

Hitchener emerged from the summer of 1811 as Shelley’s intellectual match. Through the autumn, she became his emotional support. When in October 1811, after a short gap in the correspondence, Shelley announced his marriage to Harriet, Hitchener yielded readily to his claim to have acted out of chivalry: ‘by doing as you have, you have defended her against an evil which she might not have known how to sustain alone’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The comment intimates Hitchener’s own isolation. For those who speculate Hitchener held romantic designs on Shelley the marriage was ‘a blow to her pride, and possibly to her hopes’.Footnote ¹⁹² But Hitchener’s generosity also strengthened their attachment. Shelley and Hitchener met for the third time on Shelley’s visit to Pilfold’s between 18 and 22 October. As their letters over the winter make clear, the ‘lovely sympathy’ that drew the two together then grew deeper in separation.

Hitchener’s importance for Shelley increased in the aftermath of Hogg’s advances upon Harriet. She became Shelley’s sole confidant. Her letters extended a loyalty and compassion that proved her credentials as Shelley’s ‘dearest friend’. The news has ‘absorbed in horror every faculty I possess’, she wrote, ‘I seem’d almost depriv’d of breath & sight’.Footnote ¹⁹³ Such outpourings are presumably what Shelley had in mind when he praised a ‘sincerity’ which ‘comes from the soul’ and ‘has the impassionateness of nature’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Yet Hitchener’s letter is tonally nuanced and self-aware in a way that makes ‘sincerity’ seem a one-dimensional virtue. Hitchener writes with new confidence, sensing a shift in the dynamics of the friendship. Her condemnation of Hogg supplies an implicit criticism of Shelley’s optimism about human perfectibility. She had hoped that Hogg might prove a model of virtue, but she sees now that he ‘mistook the love of virtue for the practice of it, splitting on that self-deluding rock which thousands have before, esteeming themselves virtuous because they admire virtue’ (the implications reach to Shelley, too). It is her knowledge of the propensity of human beings to do wrong, Hitchener says, that drives her to have

This is a fine illustration of the interplay between feeling and rationality complicating Hitchener’s faith. It is also a sympathetic correction of Shelley’s increasingly extreme adulation. Shelley overlooked it. His reply promised to treat Hitchener as his ‘best friend and sister’, although by this point affection had transformed into veneration: ‘I am convinced that the wildest bigot who ever carried fury & and fanaticism thro’ a country never could so firmly believe his Idol as I believe in you’.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ So ‘sincere’ do Shelley’s letters appear at such moments that, as Olwen Ward Campbell observes, it becomes hard to separate ‘imbecilities’ from ‘deep feeling’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Hitchener, expressing compassion and gratitude, not flattery, writes with more restraint: ‘when first I saw you […] little did I then foresee the gleam of sunshine_^^^{xxxxxxxxxcheering path} before me […] thus will new views open on your path’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ The revision, from ‘sunshine’ to ‘path’, meets ‘imbecilities’ with a grounded maturity. Those who criticise Hitchener for indulging Shelley’s fantasies should recognise her efforts to keep his ‘imbecilities’ in check.

The ‘sympathy’ Hitchener afforded Shelley in the autumn of 1811 cemented a bond impatient of conventions of social class and niceties of decorum. Through the months that followed, the letters played out a drama between Shelley’s pioneering if naïve efforts to encourage Hitchener into a household based on ‘the equality of friendship’Footnote ¹⁹⁹ and Hitchener’s more grounded sense of social relations, consolidated, no doubt, through her experience of commercial schooling. In Shelley’s eyes, Hitchener was the ‘isolated and friendless’ inhabitant of a world in which ‘all the dreary intercourse of daily life is unmingled by consolation, save the infrequent post days’.Footnote ²⁰⁰ But Hitchener retained a qualified attachment to Hurstpierpoint. A blend of alienation and loyalty emerges in the letter to Harriet of 1 January 1812:

The snobbery is redeemed by Hitchener’s realism and the closing vision of social usefulness. The letter ends by expressing a desire to ‘do away those distinctions which separate one human-being from another, there is no person so insignificant but has this influence to a certain degree, particularly in a village as small as the one I reside in’.Footnote ²⁰² It is testimony to Hitchener’s ‘practical’ sense of responsibility to a community which Shelley encouraged her to leave.

The ‘distinctions which separate one human-being from another’ are a defining matter of the correspondence. Shelley’s ‘polemic’ advocated a vision of ‘Equality’ based on the inauspicious proposal that ‘were I a moral legislator I would propose to my followers that they should arrive at the perfection of morality’.Footnote ²⁰³ Hitchener moderated such fantasies. But ‘distinction’ was not just a topic of debate; it was a matter of the social boundaries which the correspondence itself transgressed. In her (now lost) reply to the above letter, Hitchener had insisted, to Shelley’s ‘disappointment’, upon ‘the real difference that exists between us’.Footnote ²⁰⁴ To the more ‘practical’ minded Hitchener, ‘Nature has decidedly distinguished degrees among a degenerate race’.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Concerned, with Harriet in mind, that by continuing to write she ‘risk’d disquieting_^^to another by indulging myself’,Footnote ²⁰⁶ she questioned whether it was proper for the exchange to continue. For Shelley there was no doubt. Although he conceded around the time of their second meeting (in August) ‘the impropriety of dining with you, even of calling upon you’, he refused to ‘give up the friendship & correspondence of one whom however superior to me my arrogance calls an equal’.Footnote ²⁰⁷

Even outside radical circles, platonic correspondences between men and women were not uncommon in the late eighteenth century. Charlotte Smith’s exchange with the Wicklow-based antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker is an example local to Hitchener. Nor was it unusual for letters to cross boundaries of class. The correspondence between the rural Irish Quaker Mary Leadbetter and the Dublin author Melesina Trench bridged similar divisions.Footnote ²⁰⁸ ‘As to the “difference of personal circumstances” you allude to, it does not exist, for I am unencumbered by rank or precedence of any kind, and surely your friendship would throw a lustre on the highest’, Trench told Leadbetter, sounding not unlike Shelley.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Nonetheless, an exchange of letters between an aristocratic – and, for most of its duration, married – young man and an older, unmarried woman of a lower social class was unusual enough to raise consternation. Mary Favret observes that since ‘letters were imagined as fluid, spontaneous and unregulated’ they were feared to ‘encourage the writer to abandon all sense of propriety’.Footnote ²¹⁰ Shelley cared little for such decorum: ‘Prejudice […] is an idol to whom we bow not’.Footnote ²¹¹ The attitude slighted the circumstances faced by Hitchener, for whom the reputational risks were greater, and whose material and financial security were hard won. She possessed a surer sense of the world in which ideals must play out.

Hitchener handled gracefully the attempts upon her independence made by Shelley’s domineering ‘we’. In October 1811, Shelley suggested that Hitchener share his inheritance. Hitchener answered with anchoring realism: ‘you deceive yourself, see me more such as I really am, could you see the time I trifle you would alter your opinion’.Footnote ²¹² Shelley stuck to his idealistic guns: ‘it is no generosity – it is justice, bare simple justice’ – and turned Hitchener’s injunction upon her: ‘I know you to be superior to that mock modesty of self-depre{ci}ation; this therefore has no weight. – See yourself then as you are – ’.Footnote ²¹³ (There is an artless revelation of Shelley’s failure to see Hitchener as she ‘really was’ when he writes: ‘I could not believe you other than the being I have considered as enshrined in the identity of Elisabeth [sic.] Hitchener’.)Footnote ²¹⁴ The financial offer was part of a campaign to persuade Hitchener to ‘give up school’Footnote ²¹⁵ and join his household. Shelley pressed the invitation with wearying persistence: sometimes with sunlit idealism – ‘Dearest friend come to us all, – at midsummer never to part again – Lose in our little circle the tenets of the unthinking’Footnote ²¹⁶ – at other times with plaintive hopefulness: ‘Perhaps the Capt[ain] will come, and my aunt in [and] the little things, perhaps you will bring the dear little Americans, and my mother Mrs. Adams; Perhaps Godwin will come’ (Shelley had struck up a correspondence with the philosopher and was already pestering him with invitations, too).Footnote ²¹⁷ Hitchener resisted. As Woolf observed, ‘the prophetess kept one shrewd and sensible and, it must be added, honourable eye upon the earth’.Footnote ²¹⁸ Hitchener’s self-possession was often met by Shelley with a petulant failure to appreciate the sacrifices he was demanding. He offered an apology of sorts for suggesting that Hitchener abandon teaching, satisfying himself that ‘the warmth of our [sic.] hearts ran away with the coolness of our heads’,Footnote ²¹⁹ but two weeks later he was at it again: ‘resign your School, and live with us forever’.Footnote ²²⁰

Hitchener stood firm, but her letters reveal a longing for the consolations of home and family. The language of sisterhood that flowered in November 1811 as Hitchener welcomed news of Shelley’s marriage was scored with loneliness. ‘[A]re you not the Brother of my soul’, Hitchener ventured.Footnote ²²¹ ‘[Y]ou are the sister of my soul’, Shelley answered, ‘its dearest sister, & I think the component parts of that soul must undergo complete dissolution before its sympathies can perish’.Footnote ²²² Framing their relationship as one of sibling affection, Hitchener provided a bulwark against suspicions that her interests were romantic. Shelley’s attempts to assuage these suspicions were less sure-footed. In one letter he encouraged Hitchener to think of herself as Harriet’s teacher, or even mother: ‘If Harriet be not at sixteen all that you are at a more advanced age, assist me to mould a really noble soul into all that can make it[s] nobleness useful and lovely’.Footnote ²²³ The dynamic would have unnerved Harriet, whose education at Mrs Fenning’s Boarding School in Clapham – arranged by her aspirational father, who owned a coffee house on Grosvenor Square – had placed her in a more urban and elevated social strata than her proposed mentor. Hitchener refused to condescend anyway, or to play her professional role in private life. ‘I anticipate a Sister’s affection for her, I long to see, to know, & to love her’,Footnote ²²⁴ she answered. As Campbell remarks, ‘It is comforting’ amid the ‘unmitigated absurdity’ of Shelley’s worship of Hitchener, ‘to know that [Harriet] frequently added postscripts to her husband’s letters to his deity’.Footnote ²²⁵ When the two women started corresponding in January 1812 Harriet embraced Hitchener into a sisterhood that encompassed Eliza, too: ‘do not call her Miss Westbrook, she is your Sister and mine’.Footnote ²²⁶ Meanwhile, Shelley wavered between fumbling declarations of a ‘love’ unclouded by any relation to ‘the lump of organised matter which enshrines thy soul’, and proper recognitions of Hitchener’s intellectual mentorship: ‘not a thought shall arise which shall not seek its responsion in your bosom, not a motive of action shall be uncanvassed by your cooler reason – ’.Footnote ²²⁷ ‘I ought to count myself a favoured mortal with such a wife and friend (these human names and distinctions perhaps are necessary in the present state of society)’, Shelley later wrote,Footnote ²²⁸ urging that ‘in the great pursuit in which we are engaged’, he and Hitchener consider themselves ‘as little as possible in the light of individuals who have separate interest to gratify and separate ends to answer’.Footnote ²²⁹ That is a pioneering, if presumptuous, aspiration. Set against it, Hitchener’s ambition, expressed in her new year letter to Harriet, ‘to soften piques & asperities, & unite as much as possible all around you, to belong to no particular party, to blend all together’,Footnote ²³⁰ approaches social ‘distinctions’ with a more sympathetic and ‘practical’ understanding of the ‘individuals’ they held apart.

A Picture of Heaven

The sense that he and Hitchener were engaged on ‘a great pursuit’ had animated Shelley’s letters ever since the split with Hogg. Hitchener’s presence, he insisted in April 1812, was ‘all that is wanting to render’ existence ‘a perfect Heaven’.Footnote ²³¹ ‘What exactly she was to do’ when she joined him, Campbell observes dryly, ‘was left undefined; she was to help Shelley bring nearer the Millenium’.Footnote ²³² Announcing his conception of the poem that was to become Queen Mab in December 1811, Shelley had invoked Hitchener’s help in creating ‘a picture of the manners, simplicity, and delights of a perfect state of society’, and after that, ‘a picture of Heaven’.Footnote ²³³ Hitchener enjoyed puncturing Shelley’s designs for moral and social ‘perfection’ as ‘impossible’ and ‘unattainable’.Footnote ²³⁴ But in the early months of 1812 Shelley committed wholeheartedly to his ideals. At the start of February, Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza sailed to Dublin. They went to further the cause of Catholic emancipation, whose success, Shelley claimed in the Address to the Irish People he prepared for distribution in Dublin, would inspire ‘the peace, the harmony, and the happiness of Ireland, England, Europe, the World’.Footnote ²³⁵ Before the crossing, Shelley told Hitchener, ‘I fancy I hear you breathing to fill the sails of our packet and be like ministrant angels to us’.Footnote ²³⁶ Whatever Shelley fancied he had heard, the occasional gesture of reassurance in his replies (‘Do not fear what you say in your letters’)Footnote ²³⁷ suggests that Hitchener, whose drafts from this period do not survive, shared anxieties expressed by Godwin, who had warned ‘Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!’Footnote ²³⁸ Hitchener was right to be wary. Towards the end of his time in Ireland, Shelley posted her a box containing copies of his recent pamphlets: the demotic Address, the more theoretical Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists, and the Declaration of Rights, a sheet of radical principles which Harriet urged Hitchener to ‘Dispense’ in rural Sussex: ‘Percy says the farmers are very fond of having something posted on their walls’.Footnote ²³⁹ (Shelley noted optimistically that ‘it was by a similar expedient that Franklin propagated his commercial opinions among the Americans’.)Footnote ²⁴⁰ Shelley paid postage only as far as Holyhead, assuming aristocratically that Hitchener would cover the rest. The package was opened by the customs officers, who reported the discovery of ‘a Large deal box, directed to a “Miss Hitchener, Hurst per pier, Brighton, Sussex, England”’ which ‘contained, besides a great quantity of Pamphlets and printed papers, an open letter, of a tendency […] dangerous to Government’. The matter reached the Postmaster General, the Earl of Chichester, whose response identified a ‘Miss Hichener, of Hurstperpoint, [who] keeps a school there, and is well spoken of; her Father keeps a Publick House in the neighbourhood, he was originally a smugler, and changed his name from Yorke to Tichener, before he took the public House’. He promised to ‘have a watch upon the Daughter, and discover whether there is any connexion between her and Shelley’.Footnote ²⁴¹

In the 1790s, laws had been passed permitting government intervention in personal correspondence. Private conversations ‘are to be pried into with such inquisitional jealousy, as to make it dangerous for [people] to commit their thoughts to paper’, Charles James Fox had warned.Footnote ²⁴² Hitchener fell victim to these inspections. Soon after Shelley’s return to Wales, Hitchener informed him that salacious ‘reports’ were circulating in Cuckfield. Shelley was incredulous (‘I unfaithful to my Harriet! You a female Hogg!’) and judged them the invention of Captain Pilfold’s wife (‘she wants you in the country to educate her child’).Footnote ²⁴³ A few months earlier, Shelley had reassured Hitchener that Harriet was ‘above the littleness of jealousy of which you at first suspected her’.Footnote ²⁴⁴ But the rumours, if they reached Harriet, might have sown the seeds of insecurity that eventually caused her to turn on Hitchener. They certainly caused both Pilfold and Hitchener’s father to voice doubts about the scheme of cohabitation. Shelley’s first reaction was to suggest that Thomas Hitchener accompany his daughter to Wales and work their land: ‘He understands a farm, and its management would be an amusement to him’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ The class-based superiority that surfaces here carried over into two supercilious letters of protest. The first attempted to discredit the accusations in a polite, if pompous manner, perhaps playing on the former smuggler’s desire to uphold respectability (‘Sir, my moral character is unimpeached, & unimpeachable’).Footnote ²⁴⁶ The second scaled heights of self-righteousness: ‘I had some difficulty in stifling an indignant surprise on reading the sentence of your letter in which you refuse my invitation to your daughter. How are you entitled to do this? who made you her governor?’ For all he disavowed ‘distinctions’ when it suited him, Shelley retained a vein of entitlement which, without irony, he exerted here in a supposedly radical cause. ‘[W]hen I next hear from you’, he added, ‘I hope that time will have liberalized your sentiments’.Footnote ²⁴⁷ There is no record of any reply.

With a blithe lack of self-awareness, Shelley wondered whether Hitchener might ‘not be mistaken in attributing excellencies to your father which he does not posess? Both he & the Captain seem at least to share some of their qualities with the mule’.Footnote ²⁴⁸ Hitchener, characteristically, was more measured: ‘when I tell you how shamefully you have been represented to him you will pardon his opposition’.Footnote ²⁴⁹ At the same time, she extended affection towards Harriet, whom Shelley claimed to have suffered ‘a bilious attack which so overpowered her with languor that she could not hold a pen’.Footnote ²⁵⁰ ‘No one can read’ Hitchener’s letter of concern ‘without feeling that she was insincere, hypocritical, and, in a limited way, cunning’, writes Walter E. Peck, pressing his case that Hitchener was after Shelley’s money.Footnote ²⁵¹ The letter is awash with sentimentality; but exclamations such as ‘live oh live dearest Sister of my mind & soul live for thy Husband, thy Sister, thy Friend, not one dearest Harriet can spare thee’Footnote ²⁵² are a sympathetic extension of an idiom which Hitchener, on the whole, resisted. We might also detect a measure of desperation, driven by a determination not to be proven wrong. ‘I do know you, & far better than those who say I know you not’, Hitchener insisted:Footnote ²⁵³ her emphases suggest she knew she was protesting too much. By its culmination, the correspondence had transformed from an intellectual conversation into visionary courtship. Shelley’s final letter before their reunion rises to a crescendo in celebration of the ‘glorious cause’, in which the two heroes conspire against the bigotry of the world:

In reality, Shelley had allowed ‘falsehood’ to vanquish truth. His idealisation of Hitchener – as ‘soul-sister’ and ‘ministering’ angel – obscured the humane and ‘practical’ sensibility which ‘whispers’ through her letters.

Distortion of Fact and the Practical Sublime

Hitchener’s arrival in Lynmouth has been related in a way which suggests she fell from heaven the instant she walked through the door: ‘Arriving in Lynmouth, Hitchener’s troubles began … ’; ‘The enchantment, alas! was of short duration!’; ‘What a fall from the ideal reformer of the world!’; ‘It was, as might have been predicted, a disaster’.Footnote ²⁶⁰ The tone implies that Hitchener was foolish for thinking she could live up to her status, orchestrated by Shelley, as ‘the Roman Portia of the correspondence’.Footnote ²⁶¹ But the pair had met repeatedly in Cuckfield already, and the evidence indicates that Hitchener was a welcome arrival. Harriet’s letters enthuse over the intelligence, political inquisitiveness, eloquence, and humorousness that Hitchener’s letters had promised: ‘I knew our friend, whom we call Bessy,’ reflected Harriet, ‘just as well when we corresponded as I do now’.Footnote ²⁶² On 4 August, around two weeks on from Hitchener’s arrival, Harriet wrote brightly to her friend Catherine Nugent:

Harriet also provided a sketch of Hitchener’s appearance: ‘She is very dark in complexion, with a great quantity of long black hair […] She is taller than me or my sister, and as thin as it is possible to be. I hope you will see her some day. […] her age is 30. She looks like as if she was only 24 and her spirits are excellent’.Footnote ²⁶⁴ (As we will see, most Shelley biographers have chosen not to preserve this youthful image.) A week later, on 11 August, Harriet’s enthusiasm for ‘Bessy’ remained undiminished – which contradicts her later embittered claim that ‘no sooner’ had they invited Hitchener ‘to come and live with us’ ‘than we found out our mistake’.Footnote ²⁶⁵ Harriet delighted in informing Nugent, herself a Dubliner who had been active in the Irish rebellion of 1798,Footnote ²⁶⁶ of Hitchener’s reading in Irish history and her commitment to the republican cause:

Shelley was so inspired by Hitchener’s ‘desire of revenge’ that he sought (unsuccessfully)Footnote ²⁶⁸ to persuade the bookseller Thomas Hookham to republish William James MacNeven’s Pieces of Irish History (1807), which rallies against the ‘virulence of invective’, ‘violation of truth’, and ‘distortion of fact’ that ‘marked the conduct of the English faction towards the United Irishmen’.Footnote ²⁶⁹ It is common for biographers to refer to Hitchener as Shelley’s ‘eager pupil’ who ‘hung on his words with philosophic acquiescence’;Footnote ²⁷⁰ but Hitchener was the celebrated teacher, and she was exerting her own influence on Shelley’s radicalism in Lynmouth. On 29 July, Shelley wrote to Hookham requesting a copy of ‘“Rights of Woman” by Mary Wollstonecraft’, no doubt on the back of conversations Hitchener had initiated regarding the values, mechanisms, and possibilities of female progress.Footnote ²⁷¹

Hitchener also agreed again to assist Shelley in his efforts to circulate the Declaration of Rights and The Devil’s Walk. Shelley had devised some fanciful mechanisms for their distribution: fire balloons, floating bottles, and ‘miniature boat[s]’, all of which were sent into, or above, the Bristol Channel.Footnote ²⁷² Before Hitchener met Shelley her activism had consisted of sharing liberal ideas about politics and religion with her Hurstpierpoint pupils. The part she played in launching Shelley’s ‘Vessels of Heavenly medicine’Footnote ²⁷³ into sea and air took her own ‘practical political virtue’Footnote ²⁷⁴ in a new, more conspicuous and dangerous, albeit farcical, direction. When the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, got wind of Shelley’s activities in Lynmouth, he sent the town clerk of Barnstaple, Henry Drake, on a mission to watch ‘Mr. Shelley’s proceedings’.Footnote ²⁷⁵ Drake arrived only once the Shelleys had departed, but reported that ‘Mr. Shelley has been often observed on the beach in company with a female servant (supposed a foreigner), and […] frequently, in her presence only, has been observed to push out to sea, from the rocks, some small boxes’.Footnote ²⁷⁶ Whether the appetite of the fishermen of Devon for this radical material was any greater than that of the farmers of Sussex is questionable. But it was fortunate for Hitchener that Drake did not determine that she was the ‘female servant’ in question, given the government already had ‘a watch upon’ her after the interception of the ‘Inflammatory’ Irish materials.Footnote ²⁷⁷ On 19 August, the Shelleys’ Irish servant Daniel Healey was arrested in Barnstable, having been caught dispensing a broadside around the town that was deemed ‘seditious in its tone and contents’:Footnote ²⁷⁸ Shelley’s Declaration began with the line ‘Government has no Rights’.Footnote ²⁷⁹ The news must have come as a disconcerting reality-check for Hitchener, who knew she could be found guilty of similar charges. Since Shelley, who was fending off debtors, could not afford to pay the fine of £200, Healey was sentenced to six months in prison,Footnote ²⁸⁰ causing Shelley to predict (accurately, as Drake’s visit proves) that the authorities would soon be on his trail. The group left Lynmouth in a hurry on 28 August.Footnote ²⁸¹ They passed through Ilfracombe and Swansea, ‘travelled east, deeper and deeper into Wales’,Footnote ²⁸² before settling further north in Tremadoc, a new village erected on land claimed back from the estuary of Afon Glaslyn. The Whig MP William Alexander Madocks was the mastermind behind an embankment that would eventually enclose thousands of acres of land (see Figure 4). The Traeth Mawr was celebrated as a wonder of Wales. While Hitchener and the Shelleys were staying at the Madocks Arms in the new market square, Shelley negotiated an extended rent-free stay at Madocks’s own villa, Tan-yr-allt, which stood on a hill nestled beneath the wide rising crag that loomed over the village.Footnote ²⁸³

Figure 4

Matthew Dubourg, ‘The Embankment. Traeth Mawer, Tre-Madoc, north Wales’ (1811),

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

Even though the group remained in Wales for nearly three weeks, Hitchener’s presence in Tremadoc has been recorded at best in actual or implicit parentheses, with the effect of making her seem half absent: ‘Shelley and his considerable household (Elizabeth Hitchener stayed with them) moved back to Wales’.Footnote ²⁸⁴ Biographers have neglected the fact that Hitchener later attached to The Weald of Sussex a long note about Tremadoc, which begins by describing the route into the town via the Aber-Glasllyn gorge, ‘some of the most striking scenery in Wales’:

In the interplay of singularity and vastness (‘a solitary goat’, ‘this extraordinary pass’), in the way the prose draws the mind’s ‘eye’ to the limits of vision, in its clipped clauses that trace the gorge’s ‘circuitous windings’, and in its description of the lone ‘traveller’ engulfed by the ‘astonishing’ Burkean character of the Welsh sublime, we can see Hitchener in a new light – as an occasional but accomplished Romantic travel writer. It is a measure of the quality of the description that it inspired G. N. Wright’s account of the Aberglaslyn gorge (‘Here the traveller finds himself immured within a chasm of rifted rocks’) in Scenes in North Wales (1833).Footnote ²⁸⁶ The passage places Hitchener, too, within a tradition of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers – such as Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (whose unpublished ‘Journal of a Tour in Wales’ dates to 1774), Mary Morgan (A Tour to Milford Haven, 1791), Mary Robinson (Memoirs, 1801), and Elizabeth Isabella Spence (Summer Excursions, 1809) – whose work bears witness to the landscapes and settlements of Wales.Footnote ²⁸⁷ Thrale’s account of looking up to Snowdon from Llyn Padarn foreshadows Hitchener’s response to the rocky scenery of North Wales:

What we find in Hitchener’s and Thrale’s writing is not the ‘domesticated’ vision that, as Mellor argues, displaces the ‘epistemological’ foundation of the Romantic masculine sublime.Footnote ²⁸⁹ Rather, it is what we might call a ‘practical sublime’ that is also present in women’s writing of the period, in which an appreciation for what Thrale calls the ‘triumphs of Art’ – products of human ‘ingenuity’ of which the copper mills are a symbol – exists alongside an awed responsiveness to the wonders ‘of nature’.Footnote ²⁹⁰ As Harriet Guest has observed, in her Letters Written During a Short Residence (1796) Wollstonecraft ‘counterbalanced her appreciation of sublime wilderness with a more practical admiration for well-cultivated fields and was confident that towns were essential to the modern way of life’ – ‘I trace the progress of the world’s improvement’, Wollstonecraft writes in Letter XIX.Footnote ²⁹¹ Hitchener’s travel writing shares Thrale’s and Wollstonecraft’s practical concern for what she calls in The Weald ‘Culture’s progressive power’, and she deploys the same terms as Thrale when celebrating Tremadoc as a town formed at the confluence of ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’:Footnote ²⁹²

The embankment served for Hitchener as an emblem of her own Godwinian vision of human perfectibility, advancement, and ingenuity. Madocks saved ‘many valuable lives’ by removing ‘the dangerous passage across the sands’ described by Richard Colt Hoare in 1810.Footnote ²⁹⁴ He generated new communities, de-monopolised property ownership, dissolved social boundaries, and enabled ‘advantageous communication’ between people, counties, and nations (since one of his aims was to create a new route between Wales and Ireland). In addition to her prose note, Hitchener offers a sixty-four-line blank-verse poem which attests to her aptitude for writing tragic verse that soothes itself with a final vision of hope. The poem paints an apocalyptic scene on the ‘treacherous sands’ of the Traeth-Mawr:

‘With a pitying eye’ Snowdon howls a ‘melancholy dirge’.Footnote ²⁹⁶ Nobody had discovered the means to prevent these tragedies, Hitchener goes on to lament, until Madocks,

The internal rhyming of ‘woe’ with ‘glowing’ enacts in miniature a quasi-divine intervention. Madocks’s project replenishes ‘the watery waste’ of the Traeth-Mawr with ‘Flowers, fruits, and herbage’ while turning the ‘dwellings of Mankind’ into a republican ‘second Eden’, ‘Where Man in social sympathy unites’.Footnote ²⁹⁸ Nothing of this makes Tremadoc sound like a place Hitchener visited fleetingly and unthinkingly, or where she spent a miserable few weeks in limbo while the Shelleys gave her the cold shoulder. On the contrary, she expresses an enduring admiration for a place that epitomises what is possible when the ‘Art’ of human ingenuity and the ‘voice’ of human sympathy unite with nature’s beauty. Recovering Hitchener’s writing enables us to find her in Wales for the first time.

(E. H. congé)

It was late September 1812 when Hitchener and the Shelleys left Tremadoc for London. ‘Shelley had many reasons for wishing to go to London’, claims Jones, ‘his desire to see Godwin and Hookham and to get rid of Miss Hitchener were […] powerful motives’.Footnote ²⁹⁹ But Shelley did not ‘rid’ himself of her quickly. Hitchener and the Shelleys occupied rooms at Lewis’s Hotel on St James’s Street for over a month.Footnote ³⁰⁰ On an unknown date in October, Harriet wrote to Catherne Nugent expressing her ‘pleasure’ at ‘seeing’ Godwin ‘daily’, before adding: ‘Percy, Bessey, and Eliza desire to be remembered most affectionately to you’ – which is a convincing show of togetherness.Footnote ³⁰¹ Some of Hitchener’s and the Shelleys’ activities can be tracked via Godwin’s diary. On 4 October: ‘Shelleys arrive: Shelleys, E Hitchener & Hammond [a wealthy supporter of Godwin’s] dine’; 5 October: ‘Call on […] E Hitchener’; 11 October: ‘E Hitchener & E Westbrook dine’;14 October: ‘Shelleys & E Hitchener dine’; 23 October: ‘2 Shelleys dine; adv. E Hitchener’; 5 November: ‘2 Shelleys & E Hitchener dine’.Footnote ³⁰² Two conclusions can be deduced from these entries: first, that Hitchener and the Shelleys remained on at least civil terms until early November; and second, that Godwin, who called on Hitchener independently and distinguished her from the ‘Shelleys’, likely considered her an autonomous woman with whom he felt intellectually compatible – not a third wheel who was ‘still hanging on’.Footnote ³⁰³ At some point in the lead up to 8 November, the relationship between Hitchener and the Shelleys deteriorated irreversibly. Hitchener had spent almost four months in the company of Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza, and Godwin confirmed her immanent expulsion by entering in his diary ‘Call on E Westbrook (E. H. congé)’.Footnote ³⁰⁴

How did Hitchener’s ostracism inspire the demonic characterisations from which her reputation has never recovered? Unluckily for Hitchener, Hogg, towards whom Shelley’s animosity had softened since the events of the previous autumn, arrived at Lewis’s Hotel on the day of her departure, giving him licence to write an account that sealed Hitchener’s biographical fate. In a highly stylised set piece that could pass for a scene in a comedy of manners, Hogg depicts Eliza and Hitchener squabbling in St James’s Park:

According to Hogg, Eliza then chastised him for talking to Hitchener at all: ‘How could you talk to that nasty creature so much? […] Why did you encourage her? Harriet will be seriously displeased with you’.Footnote ³⁰⁶ Hogg mocked the way that Hitchener was initially ‘hailed’ by Shelley ‘with a kind of angelic salutation’.Footnote ³⁰⁷ But now, perhaps anachronistically (since it would be weeks later when Shelley would first deploy the term ‘Brown Demon’ in a letter), or because the nickname had already taken root in the Shelley group, Hogg recasts Hitchener as the rebellious Devil in a mock-epic war in Heaven:

Later that day there was a last supper, after which Hogg ventured to ask Hitchener again about ‘the Rights of Women’, whereupon the ‘Goddess of Reason’ lectured to the group ‘with fluency and animation’.Footnote ³⁰⁹ Shelley, rising from his seat while ‘looking enthusiastic’, was glared down by Harriet and Eliza with ‘manifest displeasure, as a person holding treasonable communications with a public enemy’.Footnote ³¹⁰ Then Hitchener departed: ‘At the appointed hour a coach was called, and the Defender of the Faith and of her sex took her leave’ – ‘the whole party believed that they were very happy’.Footnote ³¹¹ Hogg, for all the relish with which he documents the break-up, claims not to have participated ‘in their joy’ since Hitchener seemed to him ‘a fair average specimen of a schoolmistress’.Footnote ³¹² This is doubtless a hammed-up version of what really happened. But it is interesting that, on Hogg’s account, it was Eliza and Harriet more than Shelley who chased Hitchener out.

A damaging consequence for Hitchener of having her life written through somebody else’s is that her biographical identity is largely formed and put on trial in absentia. It is difficult to find the reality of someone who is no longer present in the life of the primary biographical subject. Once banished from Shelley’s circle around 11 November 1812, Hitchener is ushered offstage. But the Shelleys kept on talking about her, and their unsavoury comments took on an enduring life of their own, which has become the accepted biography of Elizabeth Hitchener. A letter from Harriet to Catherine Nugent of 14 November 1812 strips Hitchener of the virtues she possessed as Shelley’s soul sister. Harriet accuses Hitchener, amongst other things, of faking her republican values, a line that Virginia Woolf later amplified when declaring that Hitchener ‘was not, as Shelley was eager to assure her, a Deist and a Republican’Footnote ³¹³ – and yet we know that Hannah Adams instilled those values in Hitchener years before she first encountered Shelley. Harriet’s letter is our first official introduction to the despised Hitchener:

A handful of biographers have brought Harriet’s account under scrutiny. Hogg conjectures that Eliza slyly ‘worked upon’ Harriet’s lurking insecurities to turn her against her husband’s ‘former favourite’; and Cameron picks up Hogg’s hint when suggesting that Eliza fabricated the story about Hitchener’s desire to wrench Shelley away from Harriet.Footnote ³¹⁵ Dowden only tentatively sides against Hitchener: ‘Probably Miss Hitchener, through indiscreet speeches, had a share in bringing her fate upon herself’.Footnote ³¹⁶ Others have added fuel to Harriet’s fire by speculating that Hitchener was a woman of devilish sexuality who (says Todd) ‘proved insufficiently “intellectual” for [Shelley’s] taste, too much infatuated with himself, perhaps too sexually demanding’,Footnote ³¹⁷ and that she ‘likely’ made Shelley a ‘frank physical offer’, as Holmes puts it.Footnote ³¹⁸ If such a scenario did occur, why must Hitchener have been the instigator? Shelley, after all, had poured out admiration for her in his letters. He was happy to spend time alone with Hitchener on Lynmouth’s sands, and it was he who spoke of marriage as ‘an evil of immense and extensive magnitude’.Footnote ³¹⁹

For Peck, Hitchener’s interest in Shelley was always about the money: ‘If I were asked to state what I believe chiefly drew Elizabeth Hitchener to Shelley, I should answer without hesitation: his prospects. […] she leaves the Shelleys […] only after a pension of £100 per annum has been guaranteed to her. Shelley was gullible, and the scheming schoolmistress knew it’.Footnote ³²⁰ But the negotiation of a pension offers little evidence of a long-standing masterplan to exploit Shelley financially. Hitchener made a point of turning down a portion of Shelley’s pending inheritance and paid a heavy price for signing up to his utopian schemes: she had forsaken ‘all everything’Footnote ³²¹ – her school, income, and reputation, a life free from surveillance and the fear of arrest – with no prospect of family wealth bailing her out. Her anxiety would have been sharpened by the knowledge that her elder brother William Henry Hitchener had been declared bankrupt in 1805 and then again in 1810. (His occupation was recorded as ‘Warehouseman, Dealer and Chapman’ and then as ‘Linen-Draper’.)Footnote ³²² In his own reflection on the matter, Shelley offers a hodgepodge of spitefulness, embarrassment, intransigence, guilt, sympathy, and wrath:

Shelley went on to admit that ‘certainly she is embarrassed and poor, and we, being in some degree the cause, we ought to obviate it’Footnote ³²⁴ – though there is no proof that the annuity was ever paid. Some evidence exists that in March 1813 Hitchener wrote to John Williams, a mutual acquaintance of hers and Shelley’s, threatening to bring Shelley’s mistreatment of her to light. Williams tipped Shelley off, who responded indignantly: ‘she is a woman of desperate views & dreadful passion but of cool & undeviating revenge […] I laughed heartily at her day of retribution’.Footnote ³²⁵ Citing this evidence alone, Denis Florence MacCarthy, one of Shelley’s Victorian biographers, concocted a theory related to Shelley’s much-discussed claim that two assassination attempts were made on him during a stormy night at Tan-yr-allt on 26 February 1813,Footnote ³²⁶ over three months on from Hitchener’s departure. Shelley suspected the local quarry owner, Robert Leeson, who he had offended.Footnote ³²⁷ MacCarthy proposes that it was either Hitchener or her father, seeking the first unpaid instalment of the stipend, that employed the ‘agent’ who fired shots at Shelley.Footnote ³²⁸ It is true that Thomas Wise reported hearing from Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Shelley’s second wife Mary, that Shelley supposedly believed Hitchener had ‘endeavoured to poison Harriet’.Footnote ³²⁹ But the possibility that Hitchener tried to murder him, too, appears never to have crossed Shelley’s mind, and the assassination attempt might well have happened partially or entirely in his own head. These speculations, whether originating with Shelley or his biographers, epitomise the culture of blame that has formed around Hitchener as the public enemy of Shelley scholarship. We keep finding her lost in a haze of extravagant guesswork.

The Brown Demon

Whatever happened between Hitchener and Shelley, by the end of 1812 ‘she was no longer his angel’, as Daniel J. MacDonald observes.Footnote ³³⁰ Shelley’s bitter mock-romantic mode (‘all the woes […] that heroine ever suffered!’) and Harriet’s wealthy-saviour trope (‘We thought it a thousand pities that such a mind as hers appeared to be should be left in a place like that …’) are signs that the smear campaign was underway. The campaign sank so low as to befoul Hitchener’s politics, her class, and her hygiene and appearance – with lasting consequences for her reputation, career, and legacy. In a letter of 26 January 1812, Shelley had remarked upon the ‘sleekness’ of Hitchener’s ‘skin’ and the ‘symmetry’ of her ‘form’.Footnote ³³¹ Those qualities, as well as the youthfulness to which Harriet alluded, have mysteriously disappeared: her complexion is ‘pocked and ravaged’ says one modern biographer, without providing evidence, and Shelley is ‘acutely aware of her ugliness’, remarks another.Footnote ³³² Hogg claimed that on the day of Hitchener’s departure Eliza whispered to him: ‘If you only knew how filthy dirty she is, you would not come near her!’Footnote ³³³ Then, in his oft-quoted letter to Hogg of 3 December 1812, Shelley unleashes his vicious tirade against ‘The Brown Demon’ – the ‘invidious name’, as William Michael Rossetti termed it, with which Hitchener would come forever to be associated in Shelley biographies:Footnote ³³⁴

Shelley turns Hitchener from bomb-proof blue to brown, thereby transforming her into an image of political and racial otherness that endures in Jeaffreson’s unpleasant description of the ‘brown-skinned intruder’ and Dowden’s depiction of ‘her complexion dark as that of a foreigner of the south’.Footnote ³³⁶ Shelley reactivates his ‘primæval prejudice’Footnote ³³⁷ against her class by reducing her to a ‘beast’; he accuses the woman whose letters came to him like ‘angels sent from heaven’ of bearing an unfathomable Hellishness;Footnote ³³⁸ and he diagnoses her as ‘hermaphroditical’, an insult that both maligns her appearance and (tapping into a pejorative contemporary idiom) brings into disrepute the learnedness and political ardour that drew Shelley to Hitchener in the first place.Footnote ³³⁹

As Victoria F. Russell has recently demonstrated, the ‘hermaphroditic image of abandoned femininity was used increasingly to discredit female radicals’ from the 1790s onwards.Footnote ³⁴⁰ In a poem of 1798 entitled The Unsex’d Females, the Anglican writer Richard Polwhele took aim at a progressive ‘band’ of women, including Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Hays, and Helen Maria Williams, who he accused of ‘despising Nature’s law’ and ‘modest Virtue’, causing him to ‘shudder at the new unpictur’d scene, | Where unsex’d woman vaunts the imperious mien’.Footnote ³⁴¹ The image persisted well into the nineteenth century. An 1838 article in The Ladies’ Companion by the Rev. Henry F. Harrington warned the women of America about the dangers of female progress by dismissing Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and Harriet Martineau as ‘only semi-women, mental hermaphrodites’.Footnote ³⁴² Shelley’s ‘hermaphroditical beast’ insult was therefore thrown from the right, so to speak, borrowed from a cache of conservative slurs against educated radical women, and it exerted influence on Hogg’s lasting account of Hitchener’s appearance:

Having conceded that Hitchener was ‘stigmatised’ as ‘androgynous’ by Shelley,Footnote ³⁴⁴ Hogg fortifies the stigmatisation: he goes on to call Hitchener ‘the bearded preceptress’, and describes wisdom flowing ‘in a gentle, continuous stream from her bearded lips’.Footnote ³⁴⁵ This ‘typically Dickensian portrait’ in Hogg’s formative biography produces an unfortunate domino effect.Footnote ³⁴⁶ A few decades later Jeaffreson portrays Hitchener as ‘this tall, thin, rather bony, somewhat masculine, slightly bearded, perceptibly moustached, all too swarthy, far too loquacious young woman’;Footnote ³⁴⁷ and André Maurois’s bizarre fictionalised biography of Shelley has Hitchener as ‘a big, bony, masculine woman, dark-skinned, and with traces of a beard’.Footnote ³⁴⁸ Influential modern biographers have recast Hogg’s words to describe Hitchener as ‘a bony, masculine figure, with a shadow of facial hair above her lip’, ‘masculine with a hint of a mustache’, and ‘mannish’.Footnote ³⁴⁹ By prefixing these remarks with ‘Hogg […] says’ and ‘Hogg disliked Elizabeth Hitchener, portraying her … ’, they are careful not to endorse their own renditions. But the fact that the details have persisted shows how the Shelley circle’s vexed, prejudiced words have authored lasting facets of Hitchener’s biography. Whether she had facial hair does not matter. Yet just because it may not be possible to find the real image of Hitchener beyond the Shelleys’ and Hogg’s depictions of her, we should not resign ourselves to seeing her through their glowering eyes, and the gaze of Shelley’s biographers, only. At play in Hogg’s portrait of Hitchener, too, are cultural associations inherited from early modern England which align beardedness with diabolism and moral transgression. When Banquo addresses the witches in Macbeth with the words ‘You should be women, | And yet your beards forbid me to interpret | That you are so’, he expresses bewilderment at a physical indeterminacy that engenders in Macbeth himself a ‘fear’ of the witches’ demonic capability.Footnote ³⁵⁰ The ‘moral aberration’ which was, as Brett D. Hirsch has shown,Footnote ³⁵¹ associated with the female beard could also be sexual, since hair growth on a woman’s face was thought to symbolise ‘the sexual deviance of the bawd’.Footnote ³⁵² It is this web of associations, as well as the accompanying feelings of confusion and apprehension, that shapes the disparaging portrayals of the ‘hermaphroditic’ radicals of the 1790s and subsequently of Hitchener herself. Polwhele’s poem makes biting reference to Wollstonecraft’s ‘licentious love’ for Gilbert Imlay, and in the same spirit Joseph Gibbons Merle (as we will see in the next section) accused Hitchener of being ‘a disciple of infidelity’.Footnote ³⁵³ The radical ‘unsex’d female’ is paradoxically sexually transgressive. But since no written mention was ever made of Hitchener’s facial hair until Hogg published his Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858) over four decades on from her acrimonious break-up with the Shelleys, this raises the question of which grew first: the suspicions regarding Hitchener’s deviant sexuality or her diabolical beard?

One of the most unreasonable ideas about Hitchener to have gained traction is that she never really existed in the first place – or, to be more precise, that the radical, learned Elizabeth Hitchener, the youthful, animated conversationalist with celebrated teacherly abilities, as opposed to the awkward, bearded, assassin-hiring, poison-wielding, filthy-dirty demonic Elizabeth Hitchener, was never anything but a fantasy-figure invented by Shelley’s mind, a total fiction – ‘his heroine of a daydream’, ‘another of Shelley’s self-made idols’, ‘the creation of his imagination’.Footnote ³⁵⁴ ‘Miss Hitchener had to pay the penalty of being – as she undoubtedly was – an illusion’, wrote Olwen Ward Campbell.Footnote ³⁵⁵ But to concede that Shelley idealised Hitchener in the correspondence is not to accept that no worthy version of her ever lived. Even modern biographers have persevered with the idea that Hitchener was in essence an impressive fantasy. Bieri suggests that when Shelley diagnoses the delusive ‘illusions’ that vitalized Hogg’s desire for his sister Elizabeth – ‘You loved a being, an idea in your mind which had no real existence’ – he is really talking ‘unwittingly’ about his own ‘love’ for Hitchener.Footnote ³⁵⁶ Wroe describes a ‘thin, spinsterish, gushing schoolmistress’ in whom Shelley confided everything until ‘the fit passed’, as though the brilliant Hitchener was the hallucinatory symptom of an extended seizure.Footnote ³⁵⁷ As recently as 2019, Worthen’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley recycled the familiar story: ‘Elizabeth Hitchener was transformed, in [Shelley’s] letters, from the rather gauche, disappointed, intellectually stumbling woman she seems to have been, into a considerable intellectual’.Footnote ³⁵⁸ Where are these uncharitable pictures of the untransformed Hitchener coming from? Not from Hitchener’s letters, which possess a nimble and self-questioning intelligence, nor from the grateful parents of her pupils, nor from the Shelley who met her in Cuckfield or the Harriet who welcomed her to Lynmouth. Rather, in toned-down ways, they are coming from the cruel and embarrassed post-fracas Shelley, a seething Harriet, an Eliza full of malice, the remorseless caricaturist Hogg, who as retrospective storyteller is relishing and embellishing the soap-opera drama of it all, and from a succession of scholars and biographers who, instead of taking the heat out of the situation, have wilfully or inadvertently kept it hot enough for the demon to live on.

A Spirit of Inquiry

Critics and biographers have recapitulated these dubious narratives about Hitchener. They have given much less time to her published verse, all of which dates from after her friendship with Shelley. It is difficult to find much record of Hitchener’s poetry – The Fire-side Bagatelle (1818), The Weald of Sussex (1822), and the posthumous Enigmas, Historical and Geographical (1834) – in literary history. The few critics who have discussed Hitchener as a poet have tended to belittle her, an attitude inaugurated by Medwin:

Medwin does not let his ignorance of Hitchener, or her poetry, get in the way of his humiliating anecdote about Shelley mocking an upstart ‘poetess’. Despite the fact that serious doubts have been raised concerning Medwin’s reliabilityFootnote ³⁷¹ – and the absence of any evidence that Hitchener ever wrote such a line – the anecdote has been repeated by numerous critics, Virginia Woolf among them, who never quote any of Hitchener’s published poetry.Footnote ³⁷² Hitchener’s best-known line of verse is one she may never have written. The attitude of those who have gained some knowledge of her poetry has been only a bit more appreciative, and is summed up by the concluding sentences of Reiman’s introduction to a facsimile of Hitchener’s first two publications:

Hitchener’s ‘work’ exists only in relation to Shelley, less as an achievement than an example. Finding what is valuable and distinctive in Hitchener’s verse means freeing her from comparisons with ‘one of the great poets of the age’, by contextualising her work within the traditions in which it places itself. Hitchener’s published work emerged some years after her connection with Shelley, and in it we find her ‘occupy[ing] a place in literary history’ predicated upon two types of poetry with an interest in place: the educational enigma and the panoramic blank verse poem.

Puzzles in verse for younger readers enjoyed a boom in the long eighteenth century. Donelle Ruwe has shown that such ‘utilitarian literature’ was the mainstay of children’s publishers’ catalogues, but, aside from brief mentions of Mr Woodhouse’s riddles in Austen’s Emma (pub. 1815, title page 1816), among modern critics ‘the overtly pedagogical poem is in the doghouse’.Footnote ³⁷⁴ The wider genre of children’s didactic poetry was still, to an extent, predicated on the moral teaching central to works such as Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs (1715), but its more progressive potential was marked by the Edgeworths’ Practical Education (1798), which was itself part of a burgeoning related field of educational theory written and co-written by women.Footnote ³⁷⁵ History was becoming a popular didactic poetic subject, as Elizabeth Rowse’s Outlines of English History (1808), with its ninety pages of tetrameter couplets taking younger readers from the Romans to George III, attests. Popular volumes of verse enigmas published before Hitchener’s The Fire-side Bagatelle (1818) tended to be historical in subject and included Anne Ritson’s Classical Enigmas (1811, five editions up to 1815) and Exercises for the Memory (1813), and Marianne Curties’s Classical Pastime (1813). (Christina Rossetti’s enigmas for the Marshall’s Ladies Daily Remembrancer: For 1850 indicate that the form remained popular with female poets and readers long into the century.) These works educate young readers by quizzing them on the major events and sites of Classical history through acrostic puzzles. Here is Curties’ enigma entitled ‘Ω’:

The stanzas are answered ‘Lucretia’, ‘Elysium’, and ‘Omphale’, the solution being the fifth sign of the zodiac ‘Leo’. Such puzzles follow an impulse in pedagogical poetry – identified by Heather Glen – ‘to conventionalize and rationalize more ambiguous modes of awareness, such as could be found in the traditional proverb, into straightforward, easily understandable lessons’.Footnote ³⁷⁷

Although Hitchener is part of this tradition of pedagogical poetry by educated women, her enigmas are more sophisticated and more cryptic:

This enigma invites us to add the first three letters of ‘Doric’ to ‘Chester’, to make Dorchester, where (some legends claim) the Saxon Queen Elfrida orchestrated the death of her son Edward in 978 CE. The form is replicated in all fifty-five of the enigmas, in which sestets rhyming ababcc display riddles based on the syllabic parts of county towns. The grandiloquence of the idiom is softened by the personal voice – ‘my first […] My next’ – that guides young readers towards the solution. Hitchener is very much a teacher-poet. Her tone reveals her enjoying her craft as might a crossword setter, while the content of this enigma illustrates in miniature the intellectual range of the Fire-side Bagatelle, moving as it does from Ancient Greece to Roman Britain to Saxon England to the solution that is a modern English town. Hitchener asks more of her young readers as they work through the book. Her mode is instructive – ‘To find my first, a letter you must change’ (17) – and playful – in that on occasions old lexical forms must be used to solve the enigma (‘My first, if we its derivation trace, | Had letter more’ (21)). Hitchener encourages readers to play with words and their constituent parts, and asks them to perform the kind of lateral thinking that (at least in theory) has become standard practice in the modern classroom.

While such works may seem frivolous – as Hitchener’s title suggests – how children learned factual information, and whether some children needed to learn factual information at all, were contested subjects in the period. Enigmas and educational literature more generally were genres dominated by women like Hitchener and Curties who had a background in teaching.Footnote ³⁷⁸ As we have seen, Hitchener’s education at Adams’ Girls’ School was wide-ranging. She had benefitted from an intellectual education achieved through classroom study and private reading – one which taught more than useful skills to both sexes regardless of class – as part of the developments in Rational Dissenting education propagated by schoolteacher-authors such as Barbauld, More, and Wollstonecraft. The tradition, with its roots in Elizabeth Montagu’s Bluestocking advocacy for female education,Footnote ³⁷⁹ argued for literacy as a means of personal and societal improvement, and challenged the infantilising naturalist pedagogies of Rousseau’s influential Émile ou de l’éducation (1762).Footnote ³⁸⁰ Both the methods Hitchener was taught and the puzzle books she later produced contradict Rousseau’s attempt to reform learning in the second book of Émile:

Hitchener believed that children need facts, but the range and intimacy of her enigmas is in part an attempt to curb the monotony and ineffectiveness of rote learning. These efforts place Hitchener in an English tradition of factual literature for children developed by Wollstonecraft and carried into the nineteenth century by Godwin’s Juvenile Library (1805–1825). In works published by the Juvenile Library, especially those on classical myth and national history, an emphasis was placed on the idea that, as Pamela Clemit puts it, ‘individuals should learn to think and act independently so as to develop their capacity to govern themselves in all areas of life’.Footnote ³⁸² Hitchener’s enigmas – in their ability to test both the problem-solving capabilities and the knowledge ancient and modern of young minds – are Godwinian in character, and she and Godwin may have discussed such modes of learning when they dined together in July, October, and November 1812.

The radical strand that distinguishes Hitchener’s approach from Ritson and Curties is apparent from the prefatory materials to her Enigmas. In the ‘Advertisement’ to her Exercises, Ritson presents her ambition to follow the Horatian concept of utile et dulce – ‘[that] the Enigmas may not only amuse, but at the same time convey some information to those who peruse them’Footnote ³⁸³ – but Hitchener’s ‘Preface’ is more pointed:

Hitchener follows an eighteenth-century tradition by identifying her book as a ‘little work’. When the phrase is deployed by women writers – as it is in the preface to Anna Seward’s Louisa (1784), Elizabeth Keir’s Interesting Memoirs (1785), Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796), Augusta Stuart’s Ludovico’s Tale (1808), and Julia Smith’s The Prison of Montauban (1810) – the semi-ironic affectation of modesty participates in a subtle critique of what Angela Keane has called the ‘symbolic order’.Footnote ³⁸⁵ As might be expected, Hitchener also alludes to Wollstonecraft, who can be heard in her wish to ‘excite […] a spirit of inquiry’: one of the best-known paragraphs of Letters Written During a Short Residence (1796) begins, ‘This spirit of inquiry is the characteristic of the present century…’.Footnote ³⁸⁶ The second part of the preface is less coy, since Hitchener admits to overruling Johnson, the etymological authority of the age, whenever she knows better. Hitchener then presents the reader with a ‘Dedicatory Ode affectionately addressed to some amiable young friends’. In a break with convention, these ‘amiable young friends’ are female (‘What tho’, dear Girls, my Muse is rude; | Yet oft it you delights’). Later in the ode, there is an equally unexpected appeal to sorority before fraternity (‘Perchance it may some hours amuse | Of sisters, brothers dear’).Footnote ³⁸⁷ Like the enigmas they preface, these introductory materials present an author assured enough to challenge the conventions she works within. When judged within their salient contexts – as puzzles in verse for children, as educational literature, and as Romantic-period women’s writing – Hitchener’s enigmas stand as contributions to Radical Dissenting and feminist pedagogical literature that wear and share their learning lightly.

In This Weald

Hitchener carried the assurance of the Bagatelle into her most ambitious published work: The Weald of Sussex (1822) (Figure 5). Despite not once quoting the poem, Dowden suggests that The Weald ‘proves’ that Hitchener is ‘not a poet’.Footnote ³⁸⁸ The argument that follows contests that claim. It demonstrates The Weald’s intelligent response to questions of place, history, and contemporary social ills. While the Bagatelle shows young readers the history and geography of England’s principal towns, The Weald returns to the locations of Hitchener’s own youth, to places she is ‘prompted to introduce […] from the attachment of the heart which unites us to the scenes of our childhood’.Footnote ³⁸⁹ Hitchener begins with a justification for the poem based on own her disconnectedness from expertise (‘the Author’s being unacquainted with those who are best informed of the topography of the County’ (ii)) and rejects literary preferment at the opening of the prefatory ‘Apologetic Stanzas’ (‘Yes, little volume, yes unshielded go, | Without the sanction of patrician name’ (v)). This independence is sustained in the poem proper, which refuses to bow to conventional thinking on faith, gender, and politics. In formal terms, The Weald conforms to readerly expectations of long discursive and topographical poems in the period: in its scrupulously regular blank verse, in its epigrams from male canonical authorities (including Byron, Milton and Shakespeare), and in its quantity of learned notes which rival Southey’s Roderick (1814) in meticulousness of detail.

Figure 5

Elizabeth Hitchener, The Weald of Sussex title page (1822).

Hitchener’s notes come at the end and take up about a third of the volume. Written in an age when explanatory appendices to long poems became more expansive, the notes to The Weald range from half a page to five pages in length, and occasionally include rigorous, if sometimes exhausting, notes within notes. The notes alone display a wealth of understanding that defies Reiman’s faint praise of Hitchener as ‘an intelligent, decently educated, and well-read female school teacher’. Many receive ballast from weighty Roman (Suetonius, Seneca, Tacitus) and English (Camden, Blackstone, Gibbon) authorities, but Hitchener employs an esoteric range of additional sources. The style lies somewhere between the locally-sourced digressions on the history of place recognisable from Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), and the more cosmopolitan references found in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18). For the former, Hitchener blends her own knowledge of what she calls, in the poem’s first phrase, ‘My native Downs’, with quotations from some quite obscure local accounts of history such as William Lambard’s The Perambulation of Kent (1576), William Somner’s The Antiquities of Canterbury (1640), and Paul Dunvan’s Ancient and Modern History of Lewes (1795). For the latter, Hitchener shows her knowledge of contemporary travel-writing, including Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales (1778–81) and J. B. Savigny and Alexander Correard’s Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal (1818), and of risqué French philosophical literature, with lengthy quotations from Jean de la Bruyère Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle (1688) and Henri-Joseph Dulaurens’s Le Compère Mathieu (1766). The depth of reading in which Hitchener anchors The Weald signals the poem’s intellectual ambition. To understand a place, the notes imply, you need to know its cultural and political history. It is human activity that turns a ‘desert rude’ into a ‘scene most fair’ (22).

Finding Hitchener is partly a matter of locating her geographically, and above all else Hitchener is a poet of Sussex. The poem proper begins on Ditchling Beacon (Figure 6), the highest point in east Sussex, with a prospect from which Hitchener surveys time as well as space (‘Enchanted by the pleasing sight, wrapt thought | The effect of human labor contemplates, | Which, in this scene has wrought such wondrous change’ (2)). She expounds an eclectic range of subjects: Britain’s early settlement by Romans, Vikings, and Saxons, while hinting at the nation’s current imperial exploits (‘chiefly colonists from other climes, | Strangers to Albion’s every green recess’ (17)); the English adoption of the Interpretatio germanica for names of the week; and the etymological changes in the place’s name (from ‘Coid Andred’ to ‘Lucus Andates’ to ‘Andradswald’ to ‘Weald’). She offers a portrait of Thomas Otway (the Weald’s most famous literary product), rejects the Church and sectarianism and remembers the diversity of Jesus’s disciples (‘Since Christ then chose Men of such different shades, | With a variety so strongly marked, | This surely should a striking lesson teach’ (56)),Footnote ³⁹⁰ delivers a tirade against war, and finally looks out over the Weald and the future of England.

Figure 6

Will Bowers, ‘View over the Weald from Ditchling Beacon’ (2025).

The idea that a panoramic prospect allows the narrator to peer into history had been part of the poetic tradition since Cooper’s Hill (1642), in which John Denham uses the view over Windsor ‘to recount those several Kings, to whom | It gave a Cradle, or to whom a Tombe’.Footnote ³⁹¹ More recently, the power of a panorama to prompt historical and visionary thought had been exemplified by Charlotte Smith – who like Hitchener had benefitted from a formal education – in her blank verse Sussex poems The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807). The former is written from ‘an Eminence on one of those Downs, which afford to the South a View of the Sea; to the North of the Weald of Sussex’,Footnote ³⁹² and the latter from a prospect twenty miles south-east of Ditchling Beacon, where ‘Contemplation here, | High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit, | And bid recording Memory unfold | Her scroll voluminous’.Footnote ³⁹³ Given Hitchener was resident in Sussex when both poems were published, it is likely she knew these works and placed The Weald in dialogue with them. But reading these lines about Smith’s ‘native hills’ is quite different from reading Hitchener on the same ground:

Smith is a poet, in Jacqueline Labbe’s words, ‘defined by her sorrows, paralyzed by their evocation’.Footnote ³⁹⁴ Nature’s present delights cannot diminish personal trauma nor dispel ‘dark retrospect’ on the human condition. In contrast, Hitchener’s is a predominantly impersonal vision of a future progressive connection between man and nature among the same ‘native hills’. The Weald might take the vantage point of The Emigrants, but Hitchener does not share Smith’s wish to remove herself from the peopled land, her ‘sigh for some lone cottage, deep embowered’ (1. 42), nor her anxiety and pessimism about the political present. When Hitchener’s poem considers the present – human rights and social ills in the light of the Sussex scene before her – there is a discernible confidence, directness, and clarity in her verse. In a glance to ‘yonder vale’ the inhabitants of which ‘bear | Keen poverty and its attendant ills’ (43), Hitchener encourages charity to the hungry without preaching or moralising:

Hitchener neatly lays out her case across the first three lines by virtue of impersonal and logical statements, before turning to a more direct second-person address which makes its point through alliterative incipits (‘Bound […] Bear’) and anaphora. In this voice of reasonable appeal – with fewer inversions and a conversational yet urgent tone – and in the range of subjects about which she hopes to reform our thinking, Hitchener is closer to the easy immediacy of Cowper’s blank verse in The Task (1785) than the grander efforts of Smith. But the digressive mode of the Weald, Cowperian in tone and range, is resolutely radical in purpose. As Hitchener admits in mock-apologetic terms, ‘Forgive ye pious, that my mind inquires, | Appeals to reason, for what you would say, | Religion shows, and Holy writ contains’ (48).

In The Weald, Hitchener’s inquiring mind is willing to accuse the culprits for the poverty she sees (as the repeated ‘ye who’ in the lines above suggests). Attempts to expose power to truth run through the poem. This voice of appeal – which exercises Hitchener’s ‘practical political virtue in degenerate times’ – is at its most effective in the extended discussion of soldiery that concludes the section against war.Footnote ³⁹⁵ Hitchener criticises those in military service for their neglect of an ethical contract (one who ‘oft forgets the social tie | Forgets the powerful duties of the man’ (74)), before focusing on the individual:

The indefinite article introduces the soldier in the abstract, but his servitude is brought to life by successive taut vignettes of disfigurement. Although Hitchener observes these soldiers within the history of ‘European slaves’ – among Ancient Spartans and Medieval Lords – her imagery has a modern significance. The literature of the Atlantic trade had been transfixed by bodies of enslaved people since at least since James Grainger’s description of ‘their flesh’ in Book 4 of The Sugar Cane (1764), in lines that Cristobal Silva suggests are ‘so insistently corporeal in their vision that they abject the African body’.Footnote ³⁹⁶ Hitchener’s masterstroke is to transpose on to her soldier an abolitionist diction of constraint and degradation of the enslaved body in place of Grainger’s voyeurism. The rhetoric of The Weald is rooted in abolitionist disgust at a practice that allows man to ‘traffic, gage, and span, | And buy the muscles and the bones of man’.Footnote ³⁹⁷ The force and the originality of this section come from its ability to sustain an angry critique of soldiery and its violent purpose, while also eliciting some, but not total, concern for a soldier’s experience. Hitchener’s balanced sympathies are apparent when she moves from the body of an active soldier to the mind of one discharged, who

This is a description of what would now be called post-traumatic stress, and in its focus on the mind and conscience after war it makes universal the plight of Wordsworth’s discharged solider, who emits ‘murmuring sounds, as if of pain | Or some uneasy thought’.Footnote ³⁹⁸ What to do with the thousands of soldiers after the mass demobilisation of the army that followed the Napoleonic Wars was a common question in the public sphere, but Hitchener’s draws attention to those mental ‘scars that silent speak | Telling the tale that hastens to the grave’ (81).Footnote ³⁹⁹ The internal tortures are again conceived corporeally, as an ‘arm […] imbrued’ and a body scarred, to create a totalising portrait of conflict’s horrific aftermath from a poet who lived for most of her life in a nation at war. Philip Shaw, in his study of Romantic literary accounts of war, asks ‘why is it that images of the body in pain are so elusive in this period?’Footnote ⁴⁰⁰ Hitchener’s impassioned diatribe provides just such an image: it puts corporeal and mental suffering at the centre of a pacifist argument that not only shows the pain of ‘mangled limbs’ (81) but a traumatic mental aftermath in which ‘the reeking plain | Of slaughtered thousands, rise before’ the soldier’s ‘sight’ (78).

Given Hitchener’s own persecution at the hands of the Shelleys, it is unsurprising that the poem addresses the causes and symptoms of what Hitchener calls ‘civil discord fierce’. But The Weald is no jeremiad. Throughout the poem, Hitchener argues for ‘Culture’s progressive power’ (86) in her attempts to answer in the affirmative a question posed early in the poem: ‘Can man, weak man, the creature of a day, | Thus change, in twice nine centuries, Nature’s face?’ (22). While acknowledging the damage wrought by war and nascent global capitalism (‘which grateful Commerce wafts, from shores | Of either Ind’ (23)), Hitchener lays out a progressive vision:

Clarity arises from conviction. Hitchener guides her reader with imperatives to ‘Turn’ and ‘See’ the signs of social progress in a mode befitting of a practical visionary verse devoid of the conditional mays, mights, and coulds that characterise Shelley’s prophetic poetry. The Weald is at its most impressive when it shares the mind-enlarging purpose of Hitchener’s enigmas. As the poem moves from prospect to the prospective, it delivers a pedagogical vision of ‘improvement’ rooted in Hitchener’s experiences of being educated and teaching ‘in this Weald’. In these stately moments The Weald aspires to be a georgic, but this is a georgic which advocates for the kind of improvement Hitchener found in William Madock’s embankment scheme at Tremadoc, refusing to resign itself entirely to the ‘complaint’ against ‘social and economic ills’ that characterises both Smith’s blank verse and the wider Georgic genre in the Romantic period.Footnote ⁴⁰¹ Hitchener offers another enthusiastic invocation of the people and geography of the Weald through time in the final lines of the poem, dedicated to ‘those residing now amid its shades’, who

Hitchener’s focus is again on the relation of humans to the earth they inhabit. Although the title leads us to expect a poem of place, The Weald conceives of ‘bequests’ quite differently from other Romantic landscape poems. Wordsworth wrote a letter to Charles James Fox discussing his poem ‘Michael’ in the context of ‘proprietors of small estates which have descended to them from their ancestors’ for whom ‘their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings’.Footnote ⁴⁰² But Hitchener’s Weald is a place where natural rights rather than ‘individual Acres’ or tracts of land are bequeathed ancestrally and received adoringly. The definition of this autochthonous bequest in the poem’s last two lines affords a microcosm of The Weald’s range and hybridity: radical rhetoric established by the ‘birth right of a man’, with its overtones of both Paine and the French National Assembly’s declaration of August 1789, rubs up against the defiance of Horace’s first epistle (te responsare superbae | liberum et erectum),Footnote ⁴⁰³ and the Biblical quotation in the last phrase, taken from a passage in Genesis promising future growth.Footnote ⁴⁰⁴ Hitchener’s way of blending these traditionally antagonistic intellectual systems provides an impressive conclusion to a new kind of panoramic poem that is nourished by a variety of genres – topographical poetry, meditative blank verse, and georgic – whilst refusing to settle into one. The dubious biographical record obscures Hitchener from us, but there is one way in which the struggle to find her reflects her own accomplishment, since her most significant poetic achievement resists easy definition.