After getting a loan of sixty pounds from a banker whom Shelley had earlier called an “idiot” and a “fool” in his journal, Shelley bought an ass to carry their baggage, for they intended to walk to Switzerland. In this plan too, can be seen Shelley’s cracked recklessness. Though Mary’s health was frail, Shelley thought nothing of asking her to take a 250-mile journey on foot. Moreover, people warned them that the countryside could be dangerous, for ex-soldiers of Napoleon’s defeated army sometimes preyed on unwary travelers. The trio would also discover that lodgings outside the major cities were usually primitive and filthy.
As they proceeded southeast from Paris, they saw the terrible conditions that two decades of war had brought to France. They passed through ruined villages with houses reduced to charred rubble. They heard horror stories of families killed by invading Cossack soldiers, tales that they often recalled when night fell before they reached a town where they could find lodging. As a result, they slept in places, as Shelley wrote, where the “beds were infinitely detestable.” At one inn, their room had “four-footed enemies,” or rats. Clara Jane complained that she could not sleep because she felt their cold paws on her face. When a man sharing the room asked Clara Jane to sleep with him, she moved to Mary and Percy’s bed. On another night, Clara Jane—who kept her own journal—recalled that the beds were “so dreadfully dirty we . . . slept all night on chairs round the kitchen fire.”
On the first day of the journey, the ass had proved unreliable; they sold it at a loss and bought a mule. Mary and Clara Jane took turns riding on the mule’s back, but then Shelley, clumsy as always, sprained his ankle, so at Troyes they sold the animal and hired an open carriage with a driver. All the while, their funds dwindled at an alarming pace. When a rainstorm drenched the travelers, they had to stop at an inn and go to bed almost at once, for the women’s dresses had to be hung up to dry and they had no other clothes.
Soon Shelley hatched another idea: he wrote Harriet inviting her to join them—as a friend, not a wife. (He may have expected her to bring money.) As bizarre as this offer seems, it was consistent with Godwin’s Political Justice theories. Shelley’s lack of sensitivity to Harriet’s feelings was astonishing, but so was that of Mary, who in the flush of romantic love had little sympathy for her rival. Harriet, demoted to platonic friendship, not surprisingly turned down the offer.
At times, the journals reveal a few blissful moments. On August 14, Shelley wrote, “We rest at Vendeuvre two hours. We walk in a wood belonging to a neighboring chateau, & sleep under its shade. The moss was so soft, the murmur of the wind in the leaves was sweeter than Aeolian music . . . we forgot that we were in France or in the world for a time.” As they stopped to rest at a mountain stream, Percy took off his clothes and jumped into the water, asking Mary to strip down and bathe with him. Though an overcropping of the river bank offered them some privacy, Mary shyly refused, protesting that it would be indecent and that she had no towel. Shelley, in the spirit of nature, offered to bring her leaves that she could use to dry herself, but she would not be persuaded. Clara Jane, recalling the incident in her journal, said that the carriage driver, a witness to the scene, gave Shelley a look that implied “he thought he was rather crazy.”
On August 19, the travelers’ spirits rose as they entered Switzerland. The majesty of the Alps impressed Mary; she would describe this magnificent scenery in Frankenstein. Clara Jane was particularly happy because she believed she was coming to the land of her ancestors, still suspecting that her father had been a Swiss. She noted that “the moment we passed from France to Switzerland—the Cottages & people (as if by magic) became almost instantaneously clean & hospitable.” Their new Swiss carriage driver told her the difference was “because we have no king to fear!”
Swiss independence was in fact the reason that the travelers had come here. They were heading for Lake Lucerne where, in the town of Uri, William Tell had led the Swiss fight for self-determination. It was, not by coincidence, also the setting for Godwin’s 1805 novel Fleetwood. That book’s hero looked to establish a community to escape the materialism of the world, and Shelley and Mary likewise dreamed of settling there and attracting like-thinking friends and relatives to join them. One of these later arrivals, Mary hoped, would be Godwin himself.
But grandiose plans require money, and the next day Shelley was off to find a friendly banker. When he returned with a large canvas bag filled with silver coins, Mary and Clara Jane were encouraged, but Shelley knew it was not as much as it seemed. He wrote that the money was “like the white & flying cloud of noon that is gone before one can say Jack Robinson.”
They next headed for Brunnen, where Shelley took a six-month lease on a two-room house. Mary and Shelley read the Roman author Tacitus to each other, and Shelley began writing a planned novel, The Assassins, that was never finished. Clara Jane, after reading King Lear, Shakespeare’s play in which an old king’s daughters betray him, may have seen a parallel with her own situation. She had a nightmare that apparently woke the others; this was the beginning of what Mary, with asperity, called “Jane’s horrors.”
Only two days after moving in, Shelley calculated that they had just enough money to return to England, and suddenly declared they must set off at once. Clara Jane, understandably, found this bizarre, but faithful Mary didn’t question Shelley when he’d made up his mind.
Thus on Mary’s seventeenth birthday, August 30, she found herself nearly penniless and traveling with a married man and her stepsister in a boat down the Rhine. Shelley had determined that this would be the fastest and cheapest way home; now, at least, they didn’t have to walk. As they headed downstream, Shelley read aloud to Mary passages from her mother’s book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, which Mary would use as a model for her own travelogue of this journey. She found the scenery along the river gorgeous, but not so the German peasants who were their fellow passengers. She wrote of them in her journal, “our only wish was to absolutely anihilate such uncleansable animals. . . . Twere easier for god to make entirely new men than attempt to purify such monsters as these.”
Making new men may thus have been on Mary’s mind when they reached the town of Gernsheim in the afternoon of September 2. For some reason, the operator of the boat insisted on staying there until the moon rose. That gave Mary and Percy three hours to explore the area. They saw nothing they thought worthy of mention in their journal, which they still kept jointly. However, they must certainly have seen one of the most notable sights in the vicinity: the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, whose twin towers dominated the landscape. Shelley was somewhat fluent in German, and they may have heard the local legends of a man named Konrad Dippel. Son of a Lutheran minister, Dippel was born at the castle in 1673 when it served as a hospital in wartime. He became a physician, dabbled in alchemy, and was accused of robbing graveyards to obtain cadavers for his experiments. According to local legends, Dippel believed that he could bring dead bodies back to life by injecting them with a special formula he had invented. Darker versions of the tale said he had made a pact with the devil to attain immortality. Reportedly he predicted he would live to the age of 135, but died under mysterious circumstances—poison was suspected—in 1734.
Neither the castle nor the local legend inspired Mary to write anything at that point, but as the boat continued on its way, a seed had been planted in her mind. The travelers continued to read widely: Lord Byron had passed this way during his trip abroad and described the Rhine banks in the second canto of Childe Harold. Mary noted that “We read these verses with delight, as they conjured before us these lovely scenes with the truth and vividness of painting, and with the exquisite addition of glowing language and a warm imagination.” It tells much about the couple that they enjoyed reading about the scenes around them as much as seeing them firsthand.
On September 8, they reached Rotterdam, where they faced an emergency: all their money had been spent. Shelley, however, still had silver in hi
s tongue: he persuaded a ship’s captain to take them to England on the strength of Shelley’s promise to borrow enough on the other side to pay for the trip. The crossing was a rough one, and they passed the time by writing. Shelley’s unfinished The Assassins has survived, but the two stories begun by the women have not: Mary’s story was called, tantalizingly, “Hate,” and Clara Jane’s, “The Ideot.”
They landed at Gravesend on September 13, having been away from England for exactly forty-two days. During that time they had slept in forty-one different places—the rented house in Switzerland was the only place they occupied for two consecutive nights. Mary had discovered that life with Shelley would require her to be ready to follow wherever his whims took him. Now, in England, she would learn more about the differences between the real world and Shelley’s.
Their first problem was their debt to the captain who had brought them from Holland. Shelley found a boatman who agreed to take him and the two women up the Thames to London. (“Delightful row up the River,” Clara Jane recorded blissfully.) There, he hired a carriage and went from place to place trying desperately to borrow money. Only Shelley would have had the nerve to do what came next: he stopped at the home of Harriet’s father, where his estranged wife, pregnant with Shelley’s child, was staying. Mary, also pregnant with Shelley’s child, waited in front of the house in the carriage with Clara Jane for two hours. It is a tribute to Shelley’s power of persuasiveness that he emerged with a loan. The boatman, who had been with them all this time, took his cut and promised to pay the ship captain, clearly a trusting man.
Funds partially replenished, the threesome took rooms at a hotel and began trying to re-establish their old relationships. Shelley wrote a series of letters to Harriet, who apparently at the urging of her father, asked Shelley to make a financial settlement with her. Shelley’s letters to her show that he still hoped to persuade her to join him and Mary, writing at one point, “Consider how far you would desire your future life to be placed within the influence of my superintending mind,” and challenged her: “Are you above the world & to what extent?” She was no longer as far above the world as he. Her letters of reply are lost, but there is no doubt that she turned him down.
The Godwins also remained stonily unreconciled, though Mary and Clara Jane wrote them letters of entreaty. One night Charles, Clara Jane’s half-brother, came to tell them that his parents had told the other children to have nothing to do with any of the runaways, and that they had discussed plans to send Jane to a convent. Another time, Shelley ran after Mrs. Godwin and Fanny in the street, but they refused to speak to him. After a similar incident, Godwin wrote in his journal that he had seen Percy in the street, but cut him dead, adding regretfully, “But he is so beautiful.”
Though Godwin would not speak to Shelley, he did send him letters, in which the philosopher showed devotion to one of his principles, as expressed in Political Justice, which Mary was rereading: all wealth is held in common, and it is the rich man’s duty to help his poor brethren. In particular, the rich Percy Shelley should be held to his promise to financially assist poor Godwin. Shelley had given him more than 1,100 pounds just before eloping with Mary in July, but it was clear nothing would ever be enough.
Shelley was willing to do his part; the trouble with Godwin’s equation was that Shelley was only potentially rich. In actuality, his father had again cut off his allowance, and Shelley had been immediately hounded by creditors when he returned to London. He and the two young women continually moved from place to place to keep one step ahead of bill collectors and bailiffs armed with arrest warrants. By law, such warrants could not be served on the Sabbath, so Mary and Percy often looked forward to Sundays, the one day a week when they could walk together outside. It was a hectic life, and Mary wrote in her journal, “Here are we three persons always going about, & never getting anything. Good God, how wretched!!!!!”
Mary was also feeling lonely. She wrote to her closest friend, Isabella Baxter, now married in Scotland, and received in return only a cold letter from Isabella’s husband (twenty-nine years older than she was), who had forbidden his wife to communicate with now-disgraced Mary. Mary was discovering that donning her mother’s mantle carried a high price. The world was not filled with people like the admirers of Wollstonecraft who had once visited the Godwin home. Mary became as notorious and derided as her mother had been. Having a discreet affair was acceptable; running off with a man who was deserting his pregnant wife and a daughter was quite another.
Some of Shelley’s friends did come to visit, among them his publisher Thomas Hookham and the faithful Thomas Peacock. Peacock often accompanied the trio to ponds in London parks, where they would make paper boats, set them on fire, and send them out into the water. At home Shelley read aloud to the two women The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and resumed his scientific experiments. There always seemed to be enough money to buy books, and the journals are filled with titles that they read at this time. Shelley started to teach Greek to Mary, part of the advanced education he planned for her.
On October 4, Shelley wrote Hogg, whom he had not seen in three years, bringing him up to date with a long account of his meeting and eloping with Mary. A note of triumph is evident in the letter: “Let it suffice to you, who are my friend to know & to rejoice that she is mine: that at length I possess the inalienable treasure, that I sought & that I have found.” Shelley saw their relationship in terms of what it did for him. “How wonderfully I am changed!” he wrote Hogg. “Not a disembodied spirit can have undergone a stranger revolution! I never knew until now that contentment was any thing but a word denoting an unmeaning abstraction. I never before felt the integrity of my nature, its various dependencies, & learned to consider myself as an whole accurately united rather than an assemblage of inconsistent & discordant portions.”
The letter to Hogg may have been prompted by a revival of Shelley’s plans for a commune. On September 30, he had discussed “liberating” two of his sisters, who were in boarding school in Hackney, a borough of London. On the night of October 7, when Mary had gone to bed early, Shelley and Clara Jane sat up late discussing what Clara Jane called “an Association of philosophical people,” including his sisters Elizabeth and Hellen. Awakening memories of childhood may have induced Shelley to try to frighten Clara Jane, as he had often done to his sisters. According to her, “the conversation turned upon those unaccountable & mysterious feelings about supernatural things that we are sometimes subject to.” Shelley gave her a strange look with his large, penetrating blue eyes. He got the desired effect. “How horribly you look . . . take your eyes off!” Clara Jane cried.
She ran upstairs to bed, but the frightening impression persisted, and worked on her nerves. She placed her candle on a set of drawers and noticed that her pillow lay in the middle of her bed. For a moment, she glanced out the window, and when she turned back to the bed, the pillow was no longer there. It now lay on a chair. “I stood thinking for two moments,” Clara Jane wrote. “Was it possible that I had deluded myself so far as to place it there myself & then forget the action? This was not likely.” She ran downstairs. Shelley wrote that “Her countenance was distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay . . . Her eyes were wide & starting: drawn almost from their sockets . . . as if they had been newly inserted in ghastly sport in the sockets of a lifeless head.”
Clara Jane told him the story of the pillow and the two of them sat by the fire “engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries.” Shelley read aloud from a novel Hogg had written, and then one of his own poems, and Clara Jane seemed to calm down. Toward dawn, however, she told Shelley he was giving her the same frightening look that he had earlier. He hid his face with his hands, he writes, but Clara Jane went into convulsions, shrieking and writhing on the floor. Shelley took her upstairs to Mary, who soothed her until Clara Jane finally slept. In the morning they looked in her room and found the pillow on the chair.
Mary, who by now had discovered she w
as pregnant, was somewhat annoyed that all this fuss had resulted over the placement of a pillow. Shelley didn’t improve her mood two nights later when he began to read Clara Jane passages from Abbé Barruel’s book about the mysterious Illuminati, causing her another sleepless night. Clara Jane, as even her mother said, had a somewhat hysterical nature and Shelley could not stop himself from taking advantage of it. Mary, on the other hand, suspected that Clara Jane actually enjoyed the attention her fits of hysteria brought her, and on October 14, the two stepsisters had an argument. Clara Jane wrote in her diary, “How hateful it is to quarrel—to say a thousand unkind things—meaning none—things produced by the bitterness of disappointment!” But that night she walked in her sleep again, and after listening to her groaning in the hallway for two hours, Shelley brought her once more to a less-than-thrilled Mary to calm her down.
Shelley tried to patch things up between the sisters. He wrote in the mutual journal, knowing Mary would read it: “Converse with Jane; her mind unsettled; her character unformed; occasion of hope from some instances of softness and feelings; she is not exactly insensible to concessions.” A few nights later, Mary made her own contribution to the journal: “Shelley and Jane sit up and for a wonder do not frighten themselves.”
There were threats beyond the imaginary. Godwin sent his friend James Marshall to persuade Clara Jane to return home, but Shelley advised her not to. Shelley received a letter from Hogg that he felt was cold and unfriendly. On top of everything else, the bill collectors were getting too close for comfort, and at times Shelley was forced to hide in Peacock’s rooms, leaving the two women by themselves. Mary sometimes met him secretly at coffeehouses, and of course they sent letters to each other. Wrote Mary: “in the morning I look for you and when I awake I turn to look on you—dearest Shelley you are solitary and uncomfortable. Why cannot I be with you to cheer you and to press you to my heart . . . when shall we be free from fear of treachery?”
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