Allegra Byron - Convent Education

Convent Education

Shelley, who visited the toddler Allegra while she was being boarded with a family chosen by Byron, objected to the child's living arrangements over the years, though he had initially approved of Claire Clairmont's plan to relinquish her to her father. During the summer of 1819, Allegra stayed with four different families and was abandoned by her nursemaid. Byron sent her to stay for long periods with his friend, British consul Richard Belgrave Hoppner, but Hoppner's wife didn't like Allegra and sent her to stay with three other families in as many months. Though he'd originally agreed to permit Claire to visit their daughter, Byron reneged on the agreement. Shelley often tried to persuade Byron to let Claire see her daughter and they thought of ways to regain custody of her. Claire was alarmed by reports in 1820 that her daughter had suffered a malarial-type fever and that Byron had moved her to warm Ravenna at the height of the summer. Claire wrote that Allegra must be moved to a more healthy climate if she was to survive and pleaded with Byron to send their daughter to her in Bagni di Lucca, a town with a cool mountain climate. However, Byron didn't want to send Allegra back to be raised in the Shelley household, where he was sure she'd grow ill from eating a vegetarian diet and would be taught atheism. He pointed out that all of the other children in the Shelley household had died. The Shelleys' first three children had all died young. Byron believed the rumors that a fourth child, Elena Adelaide Shelley, was Claire's daughter by Shelley and Allegra's half-sister. Elena died in a foster home in 1820 at age seventeen months. "Have they raised one?" Byron wrote in a letter to a friend in the fall of 1820.

Shelley wrote to his wife Mary that Allegra looked pale and quiet when he saw her in 1818. When he saw her again in 1821 at the Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo, when she was four, he again felt she looked pale and delicate and was infuriated by the Roman Catholic education she was receiving, though he had initially told Byron he approved of her being sent to a convent. "(Besides) Paradise & angels ... she has a prodigious list of saints—and is always talking of the Bambino ... The idea of bringing up so sweet a creature in the midst of such trash till Sixteen!" he wrote." However, though Shelley thought the little girl was more serious and contemplative than he remembered, he said she had not lost her "excessive vivacity." After five months in the convent school, her behavior had also improved; she obeyed the nuns readily and was well-disciplined, though Shelley didn't think the nuns had been too severe with her. The child asked Shelley to "tell her mother she wanted a kiss and a gold dress and would he please beg her Papa and Mammina to visit her." Allegra no longer had any real memory of Claire, but had grown attached to "her Mammina," Byron's mistress Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, who had mothered her. Teresa gave the little girl her own childhood toys and played with her when she spent weeks recovering from a childhood illness.

Claire Clairmont had always opposed Byron's decision to send her daughter to the convent in March 1821. Shortly afterwards, she wrote him a furious, condemnatory letter accusing him of breaking his promise that their daughter would never be apart from one of her parents. She felt that the physical conditions in convents were unhealthy and the education provided was poor and was responsible for "the state of ignorance & profligacy of Italian women, all pupils of Convents. They are bad wives & most unnatural mothers, licentious & ignorant they are the dishonour & unhappiness of society ... This step will procure to you an innumerable addition of enemies & of blame." In March 1822, she dreamed up a plot to kidnap her daughter from the convent and asked Shelley to forge a letter of permission from Byron. Shelley refused.

Byron had arranged for Allegra to be educated in the convent precisely because he, unlike his former lover Claire, thought favorably of the manners and attitudes of Italian women who had received convent educations. He disapproved of what he called Claire's "loose morals" and "Bedlam behavior" and didn't want her to influence Allegra. He also believed that his daughter, given her illegitimacy, would have a far better chance of marrying well in Italy than she would in England. A Roman Catholic girl with a suitable dowry, raised in a convent, would have a decent chance of marrying into high Italian society. He wanted the child to become a Roman Catholic, which he viewed as the "best religion." "If Claire thinks that she shall ever interfere with the child's morals or education, she mistakes; she never shall," wrote Byron in a letter to Richard Belgrave Hoppner in September 1820. "The girl shall be a Christian and a married woman, if possible." Her mother could see Allegra, he added, only with the "proper restrictions." Byron wrote to Hoppner in March 1821 that Allegra would receive better care in the convent than she would with him. His mistress, Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, had a happy experience at the convent boarding school where she had lived from the age of five, and had also persuaded Byron that a convent school would be the best place for Allegra. He also viewed the convent as the safest place for her with revolution brewing in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Allegra was doted on by the nuns at the convent, who called her "Allegrina," and was visited once by Teresa's relatives. Probably with considerable assistance from the nuns, four-year-old Allegra wrote her father a letter in Italian from the convent, dated 21 September 1821, asking him to visit her:

My dear Papa. It being fair-time, I should like so much a visit from my Papa as I have many wishes to satisfy. Won't you come to please your Allegrina who loves you so?

The abbess of the convent included her own note inviting Byron to come to see Allegra before he left for Pisa and assuring him "how much she is loved." On the back of this letter, Byron wrote: "Sincere enough, but not very flattering - for she wants to see me because 'it is the fair' to get some paternal Gingerbread - I suppose." Byron never responded to Allegra's letter or visited the child during the thirteen months she was in the convent.