During this period of his sojourn in London, Shelley was again in some pecuniary difficulties.  Yet he indulged Harriet’s vanity by setting up a carriage, in which they afterwards took a hurried journey to Edinburgh and back.  He narrowly escaped a debtor’s prison through this act of extravagance, and by a somewhat ludicrous mistake Hogg was arrested for the debt due to the coach-maker.  His acquaintances were few and scattered, and he saw nothing of his family.  Gradually, however, he seems to have become a kind of prophet in a coterie of learned ladies.  The views he had propounded in “Queen Mab”, his passionate belief in the perfectibility of man, his vegetarian doctrines, and his readiness to adopt any new nostrum for the amelioration of his race, endeared him to all manners of strange people; nor was he deterred by aristocratic prejudices from frequenting society which proved extremely uncongenial to Hogg, and of which we have accordingly some caustic sketches from his pen.  His chief friends were a Mrs. Boinville, for whom he conceived an enthusiastic admiration, and her daughter Cornelia, married to a vegetarian, Mr. Newton.  In order to be near them he had moved to Pimlico; and his next move, from London to a cottage named High Elms, at Bracknell, in Berkshire, had the same object.  With Godwin and his family he was also on terms of familiar intercourse.  Under the philosopher’s roof in Skinner Street there was now gathered a group of miscellaneous inmates—­Fanny Imlay, the daughter of his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft; Mary, his own daughter by the same marriage; his second wife, and her two children, Claire and Charles Clairmont, the offspring of a previous union.  From this connexion with the Godwin household events of the gravest importance in the future were destined to arise, and already it appears that Fanny Imlay had begun to look with perilous approval on the fascinating poet.  Hogg and Mr. Peacock, the well-known novelist, described by Mrs. Newton as “a cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling,” were his only intimates.

Mrs. Newton’s unfair judgment of Mr. Peacock marks a discord between the two chief elements of Shelley’s present society; and indeed it will appear to a careful student of his biography that Hogg, Peacock, and Harriet, now stood somewhat by themselves and aloof from the inner circle of his associates.  If we regard the Shelleys as the centre of an extended line, we shall find the Westbrook family at one end, the Boinville family at the other, with Hogg and Peacock somewhere in the middle.  Harriet was naturally drawn to the Westbrook extremity, and Shelley to the Boinville.  Peacock had no affinity for either, but a sincere regard for Harriet as well as for her husband; while Hogg was in much the same position, except that he had made friends with Mrs. Newton.  The Godwins, of great importance to Shelley himself, exercised their influence at a distance from the rest.  Frequent change from Bracknell to London and back