Clara Mary Jane Clairmont

The Journals of Claire Clairmont

Ed. Mary Kingston Stocking with the assistance of David McCambridge. Harvard University Press, 1968.

Sunday Oct 2nd [1814]. We all go to a Pond past Primrose Hill and make Paper Boats and sail them...
Wednesday Oct 5th. Go with Mary and Shelley to Primrose Hill Pond and sail fire Boats - Return to Dinner...

Claire, Byron's future mistress, was then aged 16 and still known as Jane or Clara. Mary, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was six months older. Already pregnant with her first child, the future author of Frankenstein would become Mary Shelley two years later. The trio moved around from one lodging to another in the Kentish Town area as Shelley dodged the bailiffs. He was then 22, but still 'had a passion for sailing paper boats' according to his friend, the poet Thomas Love Peacock, who accompanied the boaters.

We came on a pool of water, which Shelley would not part from till he had rigged out a flotilla from any unfortunate letters he happened to have in his pocket

In his Memoirs of Shelley (ed. Howard Mills; Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970) Peacock describes a walk over Bagshot Heath. The Croydon Canal, the Serpentine, Virginia Water and 'a pool on a heath above Bracknell' provided other opportunities, but the Primrose Hill pond is not mentioned. There seem to have been several of them at that time; the last remaining one disappeared in 1902 when it was filled in with soil. Eight years after the fire boats recorded by Claire, Shelley was drowned off the coast of Italy when his yacht sank in a storm. His friends made a funeral pyre on a beach and consigned his body to the flames.