I'm interrupting my "Clutching My Pearls" series for some exciting Shelley news!

The Journal of the Keats-Shelley Association for 2019, which came out this month, features an article by Donatella Sisti, which tells of her interesting discovery relating to the "Neapolitan Mystery."  I used this mysterious episode in the life of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in my novella and in my Mansfield Trilogy, so I was very excited to hear this article and couldn't wait to read it! I assume that the full article is available only to subscribers to the Keats-Shelley journal, or to people with library access, but there is a link here. ​

  So Percy Bysshe Shelley either fathered or adopted a little girl in Naples in the winter of 1818/1819. We don't know if his wife Mary Shelley knew about this child, or how much she knew, but historians agree she could not have been the mother of the baby. My earlier posts will give a recap of the questions that linger around this child, who died before her second birthday.
   She was christened "Elena Adelaide Shelley" and she was evidently placed with a working-class Neapolitan family. She didn't live with the Shelleys and they were not in Naples when she died.
    An enterprising scholar and Shelley enthusiast, Donatella Sisti, searched the national archives of Naples to see if she could find anything that would shed further light on the mystery. She had the name of the midwife from the birth certificate and the names of some working-class Neapolitans who served as witnesses for the death certificate. Sisti searched for these names in the archives, including the police reports, of the time but found nothing.
   She then turned to the actual neighbourhood where Elena Adelaide lived. Aware that Naples would have had church parish records in addition to government archives, Sisti  located the relevant church archives for the area--and found the burial certificate of Elena Adelaide. Her burial was conducted by the priests of the Church of Santi Francesco e Matteo (St. Francis of Assisi). How exciting to uncover this long-hidden document!

  Sisti reports that the parish records gives the mother's name as "Maria Getwin," yet another variation on the mother's name, which appears to be an approximation of "Godwin," Mary Shelley's maiden name.
  The death certificate gives her age as consistent with the date her birth certificate was applied for, not the date on which she was supposedly born, which was December 27 (the older blog posts discuss this discrepancy).
     Another question that intrigues me is, if the little girl died on June 10th, which seems incontrovertible, why did Shelley, who lived to the north of Naples at that time, still think she was merely ill in July? How long did it take for the bad news to reach him? 
    And was it a mere coincidence, that the "superlative rascal," Paolo Foggi, was ramping up his blackmail efforts at the exact same time? Did Foggi learn of Elena Adelaide's death before Shelley? 
   There is, as Sisti notes, no grave, no plaque, no place for people to leave a flower in Elena Adelaide's memory. Her bones are collected together with the bones of other children in a common ossuary.
    I think that Sisti's discovery helps to settle the controversy of the mother's name in the birth, baptismal and death certificate. It is spelled differently in every instance, for example as "Padurin" and "Gebuin."  Some, including me, have surmised that the mother's name was not given as "Godwin," others have argued that the variations are erroneous transcribings of "Godwin." I think this burial certificate naming the mother as "Maria Getwin" tilts the argument toward "Godwin." 
​    It would be useful to know if listing the mother's maiden name, even if she was married, was routine in documents of this kind. ​
     Shelley, his wife Mary, her sister Claire and their servants were all travelling around Italy, to Milan, Pisa, and Livorno, in the spring of 1818. They spent the summer at Bagni di Lucca, a spa town in Tuscany. If the child was born sometime during the winter of 1818/19, then she was conceived in May or June 1818. If Shelley was the father, as he claimed on the birth certificate, then the mother was also at one of those places before going to Naples.
​       I tell a fictional version of the Neapolitan mystery in my novella, Shelley and the Unknown Lady. A briefer version also appears in A Different Kind of Woman, the last novel in my Mansfield Trilogy.
       Congratulations to Donatelli Sisti for uncovering this document and adding to Elena Adelaide's story!
       
       I'll go back to clutching my pearls over Jane Austen in my next post.

I had some thoughts about the new sculpture commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft. It started as a Twitter post, then it got too long and I thought, nah, Facebook post, then it got longer and I thought, nah, blog post, and then it got longer and it became a published article! You can read it here: 

Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Folks today who love Jane Austen are eager to find ways to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century. Further, for some people, reinventing Jane Austen appears to be part of a larger effort to jettison and disavow the past. Click here for the first in the series.  

   As mentioned in a previous post, it was a matter of Church of England doctrine that salvation, that is, eternal life in heaven, was only possible through faith in Jesus Christ.   If the heathens and savages didn't hear about the gospel, they had no chance of being saved. That's why the hero in the novel A Middy of the [Anti] Slave Squadron, mentioned in my previous post, prays that God will have mercy on the poor heathen African princess who died for him. 
   Since no-one was proposing that colonists should vacate the premises forthwith and return the conquered territory to the original inhabitants, it began more and more to appear that the best solution for the problem of the conflict between the Old World and the New was to assimilate, civilize and Christianize the aboriginals. 
  William Wilberforce, the great abolitionist, also supported the cause of spreading the gospel through India and Africa. Not everyone agreed, but it was a widely popular cause and it went hand-in-hand with the abolition movement. 

 But SPCK had a rival, the The Bible Society. In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Dr. Helena Kelly suggests that Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park might be named after Rev. Henry Norris, an outspoken foe of The Bible Society which was sponsored by Evangelicals and Dissenters, not Anglicans. Kelly thinks naming her villain "Norris" might be a hint that Austen favoured the evangelical Bible Society over the Anglican SPCK. But if that is so, then it is even more likely that Austen believed the gospel should be propagated to the ends of the earth, and heathens should be converted and saved.
   In defense of missionaries, I'd like to briefly add that from the beginning, missionary work was about more than saving souls.  Missionaries​ built schools and hospitals. My parents served as Methodist missionaries for five years in Korea, after the Korean War. My father taught library science and my mother taught English and took care of war orphans. ​

   In A Marriage of Attachment, the second book in my Mansfield Trilogy, William Price helps rescue Africans from slaving ships as part of the British Navy's West African Squadron. Click here for more about my books.

Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the first in the series.  

  In Austen’s time, indigenous peoples were routinely referred to as “savages,” while Englishmen and Europeans were “civilized.” This requires a lot of qualification, though. Alongside the depiction of natives as cruel and primitive, as in the Declaration of Independence's "merciless Indian savages," there was a widespread notion of the ‘Noble Savage,” whose principles were uncorrupted by modern decadence, and who was naturally virtuous.

  ​   Novels and books that featured indigenous peoples such as Lydia: or FIlial Piety, The Savage, and the Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Tsonnonthouan, were actually devices for criticizing contemporary society.  Cannassetego visits England and is shocked to see British colliers coming up out of a mine. He asks "how is this a Land of Freedom, or how is it reconcilable in justice, that Creatures born in the same land, of the same frame, and endowed with the same faculties, should be doomed to this inhuman labour, while others live at Ease?"
   Piomingo, "a warrior of the Muscogulgee nation," (but in fact a nom de plume for an American writer), lectures: "Among the savages of America age is universally respected. All unite to honour the face of the old man whenever he appears, whether his blanket be old or new, his pipe plain or ornamented with silver. But among the civilized Americans, I have always seen age, particularly if it exhibited any appearance of poverty or infirmity, neglected or insulted... If the old man be possessed of any property, it is a hundred to one but some finely polished and highly civilized young Christian will observe, 'Damn the old codger; I wish he was in hell, and I had his money.'"
​ The French diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand wrote a popular novel, Atala, about a mixed-race Christian girl who saves the man she loves from being executed by her tribe. "She was uniformly beautiful; in her visage could be seen unknown degrees of virtue and passion, whose appeal was irresistible. To this she joined more tender graces; extreme sensitivity, combined with a profound melancholy, breathed in her eyes; her smile was heavenly. " She is also doomed.
  Pocahontas-like heroines had a mortality rate equivalent to sopranos in Italian opera. These native maidens were as susceptible to untimely death as they were to the charms of European men. This convention continued up through the last century: Ama, an African princess, dies after rescuing the hero in the 1911 boy's adventure tale A Middy of the [Anti] Slave Squadron. The hero prays  "earnestly that God would have mercy upon the soul of the simple, unsophisticated, savage maiden who had lost her life while helping me to save my own." In the original Star Trek series, an episode finds Captain Kirk suffering from amnesia on an away trip. He amazes the natives by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then marries a lovely native priestess, who suffers along with him when her fellow tribesmen pelt him with stones. She dies, of course.   
   As Robbie Richardson, an historian and member of the Mi'kmaw tribe, notes, "the noble primitives who do appear in literature" are seldom ordinary tribespeople but "are often meant to be kings, queens, princes, and so forth." Where there was interracial romance, the native partner had to be well-born, at least. And preferably dead before the final chapter.
​    (Canessetego and Yarico, who do not cross the racial courtship line, and are merely a sub-plot in the novel in which they appear, and they get a happy ending. They marry, and "mutual bliss reigned during their lives.")
   These native romances existed alongside reality. Jane Austen's contemporaries were fully aware that colonial expansion was destroying the traditional lives of aboriginal peoples and that imported diseases were killing them wholesale.

    Even those who did not put much stock in the myth of the noble savage, who regarded savages as, well, savages, were not entirely dismissive of them and their way of life. They were curious about them. And they also acknowledged that they had skills and abilities. English writers of this era, so far as I can see, did not all believe that savages were inferior in intellect to Englishmen. In a book of natural history written for children, a teacher explains "The intellectual powers of a savage, though capable of receiving the same impressions as a man of science, are, from want of education, confined to a very few objects [such as skill in hunting], on these he bestows his whole attention, and consequently attains a great deal of perfection in the things that belong to them." 
  Commentators also pointed out that Europeans should not hold themselves out as being superior in all respects. Adam Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759):  "Some of the savage nations in North America tie four boards round the heads of their children, and thus squeeze them, while the bones are tender and gristly, into a form that is almost perfectly square. Europeans are astonished at the absurd barbarity of this practice, to which some missionaries have imputed the singular stupidity of those nations among whom it prevails. But when they condemn those savages, they do not reflect that the ladies in Europe had, till within these very few years, been endeavouring, for near a century past, to squeeze the beautiful roundness of their natural shape into a square form of the same kind."

   Noble Savages and other disclaimers aside, it remains a fact that the word "savages" was used in a matter-of-fact fashion to refer to people who lived in a "barbarous" state without the benefit of civilization, and "savage" was also used as a pejorative to describe poor behaviour. In a real-life situation, working-class men who swarmed a public fair in England in 1812 were described as savages and the meaning of the word is explicit. The incident was reported thusly: “The females... were treated with the greatest indignity... This weaker part of the crowd, in fact, seemed to be, on this occasion, the principal object of persecution, or, as the savages who attacked them were pleased to call it, of fun.”
    (The women who were assaulted, the "weaker part," that is, the weaker sex, are referred to as "females" and not "ladies." That is because they were working-class women, not ladies. A young girl who was not a lady was referred to as a "young person." ​)

    But what about Austen? Austen used the word "savage" only once in her six novels, in Pride & Prejudice, ("Every savage can dance") but she did use the term "barbarous" more frequently. Austen also used the terms "civil" and "civility." What does she find "civil," and what does she find "barbarous"?

Next post:  A State of utter barbarism.

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