Pecksie and the Elf: Did the Shelleys Couple Romantically?

On the manuscript of Frankenstein are two comments by P. B. Shelley which have become infamous. Writing quickly, Mary Shelley had left off the first syllable of 'enigmatic' and ended up with 'igmmatic' (she was prone to double the letter 'm' while her husband had an ie/ei problem with words like 'viel' and 'thier'). Later she confused Roger Bacon with Francis Bacon. He scribbled 'o you pretty Pecksie' beside the first and 'no sweet Pecksie—twas friar Bacon the discoverer of gunpowder.' E. B. Murray described these corrections as 'endearing'. 'Pecksie', the name of the industrious bird in Mrs Sherwood's The History of the Robins, was P. B. Shelley's pet-name for Mary Shelley. Anne Mellor, however, disagreed: they 'demonstrate that he did not regard his wife altogether seriously as an author [. . .] her deference to his superior mind was intrinsic to the dynamics of their marriage, a marriage in which the husband played the dominant role'. An infantilizing experience it must have been for Mary Shelley to have had her petty errors corrected as if she was a child. Whether, however, a young woman who at nineteen could read Tacitus in the original would have felt intimidated by this may be doubted, especially one who called her spouse her 'Sweet Elf'. Between Pecksie and Elf, in terms of diminution, there is, prima facie, little to choose, any more than there is between the protagonists in the Valentine's Day newspaper advertisements where Snuggle Bum pledges love to Fluffkins. Intimate pet-names are almost invariably embarrassing to read. We do not know enough about the contexts in which these arose, whether they pleased or annoyed at the time, whether 'Pecksie' and 'Elf' were pleasant banterings or counters in underground hostilities. It would seem wise to suspend judgement and use them as evidence neither of an unproblematically equal relationship nor of one in which Mary Shelley was subordinated. This apparently trivial circumstance exemplifies a problem with the Shelleys. We know too much about them and not enough. So much evidence has been destroyed, yet enough remains for speculation and judgement. As a result, we let our imaginations piece out the whole for the part, and arrive at tenacious conceptions about their relationship which can neither be verified nor falsified. And this is particularly true of their relationship as lovers. The title of this essay asks both whether the literary collaboration of the Shelleys could be said to be a Romantic one and whether they were passionate sentimental lovers. The second sense of 'coupling' is an apparently unpromising starting point for useful critical discussion. Not only does one risk straining the tolerance of those who are at best dubious about any sort of biographical criticism, but the subject has been thoroughly gone over in the past. There does not seem to be any general theory of creativity or of male-female dominance that could possibly emerge from such an examination. There is no necessary connection between the Shelleys sitting together at night, each with a little table and pen and ink, and their subsequent intimacies—or non-intimacies—and the separation of tittle-tattle about their sex lives from interpretation and evaluation of their work is arguably a truly valuable achievement of twentieth-century criticism. Now here I come with this catch-penny title, ready, as it were, to reverse these gains and send us all back to square one. Yet given the importance attached by both Shelleys to 'love' as a principle which ought to rule the world, and to sexual relations as the outward and visible sign of this principle, the question 'Did they couple Romantically?' has …