The Romantic poets Shelley and Byron, especially Shelley, were also taken up with the plight of the poor in England and Ireland, but they led with their hearts, not their heads. As Paul Johnson demonstrated in his scathing biography in the book, Intellectuals, Shelley was an utterly self-indulgent man-child of colossal ego. Shelley wrote grandiose manifestos on the human condition, such as his youthful poem Queen Mab, and he believed that everyone would read it and see that he was right. He would take up a cause, such as Irish emancipation, with passionate enthusiasm and outrage, and then grow bored or frustrated and move on to some other cause, which, not coincidentally, was also how he treated the women in his life.
He was also a consummate hypocrite, in that, as his disillusioned friend Lord Lynnon points out, he left trails of debts behind him, and his inability to pay his rent, his servants and his bills, was one reason why he moved about so frequently. His modern counterpart is the celebrity who lectures the public on global warming while traipsing around the planet on private jets and luxury yachts.
Shelley was a champion of “free love;” and thought that marriage was a form of tyranny. However, in the days before birth control, penicillin, and state-enforced child support laws, “free love” was a very bad idea for women, something to bear in mind when revisionist feminists focus solely on the restrictive and oppressive aspects of the Patriarchy. Mary Wollstonecraft’s experiment with free love was disastrous for her, personally as well as professionally, and her illegitimate daughter committed suicide.
As Shelley’s women experienced first-hand, the social consequences for women of the era who were separated or divorced or otherwise “fallen” were extremely severe. Edmund is too kind-hearted to visit that fate upon his wife Mary. As well, at that time, men had default custody of the children of the marriage—the wife had no rights in law—which is why Mary Crawford Bertram was afraid of telling Edmund he had a son.
Stoke Newington, where Mrs. Butters lived, was also where James Stephen and other prominent abolitionists lived. Another neighbourhood known for abolitionists and reformers was Clapham. William Wilberforce’s followers were known as “The Clapham Sect” and “Clapham Saints.”
Lord Delingpole never learned why the pockets of the billiard table at Mansfield Park were stuffed with curtain rings, but readers of Mansfield Park will know why.
The only reference in Mansfield Park to Fanny’s brother John is that he “was a clerk in a public office in London.” When I researched “public office,” I discovered that it was another term for police offices, which were a fairly new innovation for the time. So I was able to place Fanny’s brother John in the maritime police office which is still in existence at the banks of the River Thames, in Wapping. The office was founded by John Harriott, who wrote his memoirs, which are available online.
Having placed John in Wapping during this time period, there was no way I could overlook the Ratcliffe Highway murders, which gripped all of England in the winter of 1811. Thomas DeQuincy wrote about the fear they caused even in far-away Lake Country. They created a moral panic, a “what-is-this-world-coming-to” reaction, as mass murders still do today. You can read more about the murders in The Maul and the Pear Tree, by P. D. James and Thomas A. Critchley, or watch the first episode of the mini-series, A Very British Murder, with historian Lucy Worsley, for more details. The initials “JP” were not immediately noticed on the murder weapon, and it is not known who found the initials. The supposed murderer was buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart.
For information about the career, married life, and religious views of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval I am indebted to: The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval by David C. Hanrahan, and Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister, by Andro Linklater. The trial transcript itself is available at the Old Bailey trial website and other contemporary accounts are available through Google Books.
It’s extraordinary that the assassin, John Bellingham first took his landlady and her son to look at some paintings, and then to a lace-shop, then hastened down to Parliament and shot the prime minister. Linklater theorizes that he had an accomplice, or a financial backer, some representative of the dissatisfied merchant class, who pulled Bellingham’s strings. Perhaps Bellingham retrieved his pistols at the lace shop, or perhaps, as Linklater theorizes, he received a payment. There is no proof, however, and Bellingham always insisted that he acted alone; he was thoroughly and repeatedly questioned on that point, after his arrest. On the other hand, as Linklater points out, he seemed to have an undocumented source of money during his stay in London.
The activities and movements of John Bellingham prior to his assassination of Prime Minister Perceval—with the exception of course, of his interactions with William Gibson and Fanny Price—as well as many of his speeches, are taken from the public record, and Andro Linklater’s book.
Mary Bellingham, the wife of John Bellingham, was a milliner. (I wished to avoid confusion with the other Mary of this book, so I changed her name to Eliza.) She didn’t move to London in the months preceding her husband’s assassination of Perceval although she was greatly alarmed by his mental state and
