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whom Shelley was most obviously and most intensely attached. Beside William, his other children, whom he often treated with such careless unconcern, sometimes seem like mere domestic appendages. William is the only child who features in his poetry. The happy birth of this son, and the depressing failure of Alastor , also mark one of the main watersheds in Shelley’s creative output.
    For the next twelve months Shelley was to write virtually nothing except one poem of rather less than 150 lines, and a few scattered slight or fragmentary effusions. Of prose essays, pamphlets or speculations, he produced nothing at all. Mary noted that his normal practice of study-reading declined except for a few select classical authors like Aeschylus and Lucretius. Even his private correspondence thinned out, and except for four long descriptive letters to Peacock in the middle of the summer, his letters are concerned almost exclusively with matters of his own inheritance and complicated negotiations to settle Godwin’s apparently bottomless debts. The greatest part of his effort and energy was transferred into his family life, and turned to the minds and faculties of those around him. It is not coincidental that 1816 was a highly creative year for his immediate companions — Peacock completed Headlong Hall and commenced Melincourt ; Mary embarked on the sensational novel that was to make her own literary career at a single stroke; and Lord Byron, after two years of relative inactivity, dabbling in Oriental Tales and marriage, at last took up and completed his Third Canto of Childe Harold and his celebrated bad poem ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’. There is a sense indeed in which the year 1816 almost lost Shelley altogether as a writer, and relegated him to the ranks of the comfortable, domesticated littérateurs , who encourage the glow of creativity in others and are then content to bask in it themselves. This did not happen, because the old core of disturbance was still active, as certain strange occurrences were to show; and events at the end of 1816 threw Shelley mercilessly back into the maelstrom. But it nearly happened.
    The idea of settling down to domesticity, which he had struggled against in the previous summer, and had now, with the birth of his son, tacitly accepted, was also in his own mind connected with an increasingly bitter feeling of social rejection. When he did want to settle down, he found he was unable to. This gradually became clear in the exhausting and acerbic correspondence with Godwin concerning debts which occupied a great deal of Shelley’s time in January, February and March of this year. The question of Shelley’s responsibility for Godwin’s finances was emotionally complicated in the extreme Godwin still persisted in an attitude of unrelenting condemnation of the elopement which had taken place nearly two years before; at the same time he was desperateenough to keep applying for Shelley’s financial aid. His position was further complicated by Mrs Godwin, who felt that her own daughter Claire had been seduced by Shelley with Mary’s tacit connivance. Mary, in turn, felt that Mrs Godwin was forcing her father to be harder towards them than he wished. Both the Godwins thought that not only Mary but also Claire and Fanny had fallen ruinously in love with Shelley. Four years later these attitudes were still basically unchanged, and a mutual friend of both parties, talking at Skinner Street in July 1820, noted in her diary: ‘[Godwin] then expatiated much on the tender maternal affection of Mrs G. for her daughter, and the bitter disappointment of all her hopes in the person to whom she looked for comfort and happiness in the decline of her life; he described her as being of the most irritable disposition possible, and therefore suffering the keenest anguish on account of this misfortune, of which M[ary] is the sole cause, as she pretends; she regards M[ary] as the greatest enemy she has in the world. Mr