Harriet de Boinville (1773–1847) was a British woman who entertained widely in London and Paris. She influenced important writers of her day, including Frances Burney, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Giovanni Ruffini. She welcomed guests of all social classes at her popular salons and befriended destitute refugees. She held progressive views and believed in the benefits of a vegetarian diet.
Early life
Childhood Henriette Collins was the oldest child of John Collins and his wife (name unknown).Constable, Thomas. Memoir of the Reverend Charles A. Chastel de Boinville Compiled from his Journals and His Letters. London: James Nesbit & Co., 1880. Digitized. She was born in 1773 in the British colony of St. Christopher, now St. Kitts and Nevis. Her mother, possibly biracial, is not mentioned in the family memoir. She had two siblings, Cornelia Collins and Alfred Collins. As a child, she became known as Harriet.
In 1785 Harriet’s father bought a half-share for a sugar estate in St. Vincent. Enslaved Africans toiled on his plantation. A medical doctor, Collins wrote a book of recommended treatments for the slaves of his peers: Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies by a Professional Planter (published anonymously in 1803 and now digitized). William Wilberforce recommended this book to other abolitionists.Wilberforce, William. Letter to Henry Manning, October 18, 1809; Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce. London: 1839, vol. 3, p. 481.
Harriet lived in St. Vincent and in England as a child. Her exposure to Europeans’ mistreatment of Africans and indigenous Caribs influenced the egalitarian views she adopted as an adult.
Marriage In the early 1790s in London, Harriet fell in love with Jean Baptiste de Boinville.Constable, Thomas (1880), pp. 10-11. Jean Baptiste was once a wealthy nobleman, with land and property in the south of France, but he had lost everything during the French Revolution. When Harriet's father realized her romantic interest in the penniless French exile, he forbade her from seeing him again.
Harriet and Jean Baptiste eloped to Scotland and were married in 1793 in Gretna Green. When John Collins discovered his daughter had fled, he followed after her and they reconciled. Collins persuaded the couple to marry in England to ensure the legality of any heirs.
A year in St. Vincent, 1796-1797 Harriet de Boinville’s first child was born in 1795 in Willesden, England, in her father’s home. In 1796, she returned to St. Vincent with her husband and their baby daughter Cornelia, a six-week journey and some 5,000 miles. The Second Carib War had just concluded on the island, and tensions remained high between the British colonists, French settlers, enslaved Africans, and the native Caribbeans who inhabited it. Harriet’s son, named John Alfred after her father and brother, was born on the island in 1797.
In the same year, Harriet made the difficult journey back to England with her two small children, husband, and father.
Wartime travels to France Jean Baptiste de Boinville determined, "despite the entreaties of his wife, to seek some means of gaining his own bread and of living independently. . . . M. de Boinville returned to France to get his name struck off the Emigrant list, and found his way thither through Germany."Constable, Thomas (1880), p.14. After many months of separation, Harriet decided to join him in France. She left the English coast at Dover, and took their children, Cornelia and John Alfred, with her. Despite her father’s objections and the illegality of travel between England and France, she crossed the Channel. At Dunkirk the local constabulary detained her under suspicion of being a British spy. To win her release, Jean Baptiste took a coach from Dunkirk to Paris, where he obtained official papers stating that she had permission to enter France.
In Paris Harriet de Boinville celebrated the release of General Lafayette from an Austrian prison by Napoleon’s forces. During Lafayette's imprisonment from 1792 to 1797, she had written letters to try and secure his freedom.Cameron, Kenneth Neill, ed. The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. New York: Collier Books. 1962, p. 245. Her husband’s former commanding officer “ever afterwards entertained toward her feelings of the highest and most friendly respect.”Constable, Thomas (1880), p. 16. Kenneth Neill Cameron states that she and Jean Baptiste were formally presented "to the now-aging veteran of two revolutions.”Cameron, Kenneth (1962), p. 245.
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Harriet de Boinville repeatedly risked her life to cross the channel. On one occasion she was nearly shipwrecked with her young children; on another she was taken prisoner at the Hague, “but the jailer was so fascinated by her beauty, and moved by her sorrows, that he contrived to allow her to make her escape.” To be with her husband she even sailed to France one time on a vessel commanded by smugglers; “rough weather came on, the vessel was driven ashore, and she had to get upon a sailor’s back to land; just then, a huge wave threw them all down, and she had the sorrow of seeing most of her bank-notes floating upon the foaming sea, without any hope of rescuing them."Constable, Thomas (1880), pp. 15-16
Widowed In September 1814, Harriet received word in London of her husband’s death in what is now Vilnius, Poland. He had perished long before on 13 February, 1813. An officer in Napoleon’s Grand Army, Jean Baptiste had participated in the French invasion of Russia and died during the French retreat at the age of fifty-six, as a prisoner of war.Constable, Thomas (1880), p.17.
Widowed at the age of forty, Harriet never remarried. Her grandson in his memoir discussed the “marital vicissitudes" of her nineteen-year wartime marriage characterized by danger and unwanted separations since she was British and her husband was from France, Britain’s enemy.
Harriet de Boinville and Percy Bysshe Shelley became friends in the spring of 1813; she was then a widow but had not heard the news. Shelley wrote to his then wife (Harriet Shelley) on 16 September 1814, "Mrs. Boinville has just received intelligence of her husband’s death. She is considerably affected by this circumstance, so that probably some time will elapse before I see her."Jones, Frederick L., ed. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1: Shelley in England. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1964, letter 261, p. 396. In 1829, seven years after Shelley’s death, Harriet de Boinville reconnected with his second wife, Mary Shelley.
Salons at Bracknell Posthumous biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley describe Harriet de Boinville, the popular host of a salon at Bracknell. Written by Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Thomas Love Peacock, the biographies discuss her informal style of entertaining at her country home outside of London, her vegetable diet, and her guests with whom she debated the merits of William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793).Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: George Rutledge & Sons, 1906; available in Hardpress Classics Edition.Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley with Shelley's Letters to Peacock, ed., H.F.B. Brett-Smith London: Henry Frowde, 1909. Nabu Public Domain Reprint. Hogg mocked Harriet’s hospitality because she welcomed people who worked for a living:The greater part of her associates were odious. I generally found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an eminently philosophical tinker, and several very unsophisticated medical practitioners, or medical students, all of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was, and swore by William Godwin and Political Justice.Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1906).Hogg also made fun of the meatless meals served at Bracknell. “Flesh, fowl, fish, game, never appeared,” he lamented. “The simple fare of the poorest old woman, or the starved labourer, and his children, through a stern iron necessity, was the diet, through free will and deliberate choice of the most refined, elegant, accomplished, intellectual specimens of humanity.”Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1906).
Harriet de Boinville was a vegetarian as was her brother-in-law, John Frank Newton, who also frequented the salons at Bracknell. Shelley adopted a diet of fruits and vegetables and mentioned the Newtons' vegetable-fed children in Queen Mab, A Philosophical Poem: With Notes, published in the spring of 1813.
Percy Bysshe Shelley at Bracknell Twenty-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley met the woman he called Mrs. Boinville in the spring of 1813, the same year that he completed his first major work, Queen Mab.
After a laudanum overdose and a breakdown, precipitated by marital problems, Shelley sought refuge at Bracknell, where he lived in February and March 1814. On 16 March 1814, he wrote Thomas Jefferson Hogg, "I have been staying with Mrs. B for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself. They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life.”Jones, Frederick L., ed., (1964), vol 1, letter 253, p. 383. In a letter to Hogg on 4 October 1814, Shelley called his two months living at Bracknell "probably the happiest of my life: the calmest, the serenest, the most free from care....the presence of Mrs. Boinville and her daughter afforded a strange contrast to my former friendless and deplorable condition."Jones, Frederick L., ed., (1964), vol 1, letter 265, p. 401.
Shelley became infatuated with Harriet de Boinville’s daughter Cornelia Turner, referred to in this fragment of poetry written at Bracknell:Thy dewy looks sink in my breast;
Thy gentle words stir poison there;
Thou has disturbed the only rest
That was the portion of despair!
Subdued to duty’s hard control,
I could have borne my wayward lot:
The chains that bind this ruined soul
Had cankered then—but crushed it not. Harriet de Boinville discovered Shelley’s interest in Cornelia and told him to leave.Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, pp. 268-270.
Harriet Shelley at Bracknell In 1813 Harriet Shelley had often accompanied her husband to Bracknell, as Peacock's biography of him confirmed.Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley with Shelley's Letters to Peacock, (1909). Mrs. Shelley continued to see Harriet de Boinville after her husband ran off to Europe with Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont.
In her husband’s absence, Harriet Shelley “depended a great deal on Mrs. Boinville’s understanding and on going for long walks with her." A distraught and pregnant Harriet Shelley committed suicide in December 1816. She put rocks in her pockets, walked into the Serpentine River and drowned herself.
Only a few weeks before her death, Blunden states that Mrs. Shelley wrote Harriet, "asking for one more walk of the sort and hinting that without it, she would give up. But the country postman failed to deliver the letter punctually. Harriet interpreted Mrs. Boinville's silence with the result that cannot be forgotten.”Blunden, Edward. Shelley: A Life Story. Oxford University Press, 1965.
Mark Twain on Bracknell