Percy replied in passionate prose: “My beloved Mary, I know not whether these transient meetings produce not as much pain as pleasure . . . I will not forget the sweet moments when I saw your eyes—the divine rapture of the few and fleeting kisses . . . Mary, love, we must be united. I will not part from you again after Saturday night.” Yet on the very same day, he appealed to Harriet, “I cannot raise money soon enough—unless you can effect something I must go to Prison & all our hopes of independence be finished.”
Mary had continued to believe that Godwin would become reconciled toward her elopement. She recalled the description her father wrote of her mother in the Memoirs—that she remained stoic in the face of criticism over her relationship with Imlay. But Godwin’s shunning continued. Mary spent hours at her mother’s grave, now her favorite place for reading and writing. She sometimes blamed her stepmother for her father’s hostility. “She plagues my father out of his life,” Mary wrote to Percy on October 28 (while he was hiding at Peacock’s), “. . . do you not hate her my love?” Her father’s rejection only made Mary more dependent on Shelley. “Press me to you and hug your own Mary to your heart,” she pleaded, “perhaps she will one day have a father till then be every thing to me love—& indeed I will be a good girl and never vex you any more.”
Mary’s health suffered as her pregnancy proceeded. (“Mary is unwell” appears in her journal more than once.) Nonetheless, Mary and Percy established a rigorous schedule of reading and writing, which they would stick to whenever possible for the rest of their lives. In the morning they did their reading and writing separately. After the midday meal came the shopping, sightseeing, and housework. They read together in the evenings, unless, as was sometimes the case when Shelley was not hiding, they went to a play, an opera, or a lecture.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, awareness of scientific discoveries had filtered down from a small educated elite to the general population. Public reading and lectures about exciting new developments by such famous scientists of the day as Humphry Davy drew large crowds. Electricity and magnetism were among the much-discussed topics of the day. Speculation—sometimes informed, sometimes imaginative—about the possibilities of science fueled both hopes of progress as well as fears that science might be a danger.
Mary noted in her journal for December 28, 1814, that she and Percy went to Garnerin’s theater to hear a lecture on electricity. Preceding the lecture was a display of “phantasmagoria,” a kind of magic lantern show that Mary would later have reason to recall. The speaker that night was thirty-year-old Andrew Crosse, who had devised a variety of instruments for experimenting with electricity. These instruments were located at his home in Somerset, and were too cumbersome to be transported. Nonetheless, he described how he had captured electricity during a thunderstorm, à la Franklin, and conducted it through wires into his laboratory, where he preserved it in Leyden jars. Some of Crosse’s claims were clearly exaggerated; for example, he claimed that when he passed electricity through a stone, living insects emerged from it. But Mary, who had received little education in science from her father, was fascinated. The connection between electricity and the generation of life was not lost on her.
In November, Thomas Jefferson Hogg reappeared in Shelley’s life, bringing desperately needed financial help. Since their Oxford days, Hogg had been emotionally dependent on Shelley and always wooed Shelley’s female companions; it was almost as though he could strengthen his relationship with Shelley by sharing his women. Shelley, seeing an opportunity to expand the circle of people living out his radical philosophy, had invited Hogg to visit, curious to see if a bond would form between him and Mary. Afterward, Shelley noted in the mutual journal for Mary to read, “He was pleased with Mary.— this was the test by which I had previously determined to judge his character.” Shelley tacitly encouraged Mary to sleep with his friend, often taking Clara Jane for walks so the other two could be alone. Mary resisted the pressure; she seems to have befriended Hogg only to please Shelley. At first she noted in her journal that Hogg was intellectually inferior: “. . . get into an argument about virtue in which Hogg makes a sad bungle,” she wrote, adding, “quite muddle[d] on the point I perceive.” A few days later, she argued with him about free will and wrote, “he quite wrong but quite puzzled—his arguments are very weak.” Hogg’s greatest virtue was persistence; he doggedly paid court to Mary much as he had done earlier to Harriet Westbrook and, even earlier, to Shelley’s sister Elizabeth. Mary adroitly used her pregnancy to avoid physical intimacy.
Was Shelley’s attempt to bring Mary and Hogg together intended to serve as an excuse for him to enjoy Clara Jane? Given the pages missing from the journals of the principals at crucial times, it is impossible to say. Shelley may have been motivated more by his utopian idea of establishing a free-love commune than by sheer physical attraction to Clara Jane, but it is clear that after this time, Mary saw her stepsister in a new light. Henceforth, she regarded Clara Jane as a threat.
In November, when Clara Jane was spending much time with Percy, she announced that henceforth she wished to be known only as Clara—later she would choose the name Claire (which is how we will refer to her from this point). The name change was possibly a declaration of independence, but it would have escaped none of the threesome that Claire is the name of the lively dark friend of the lovers in Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise, one of Shelley’s favorite books. He described it as “an overflowing . . . of sublimest genius, and more than human sensibility,” and Claire may well have adopted the name to bring herself closer to him.
Mary felt that her pregnancy and resulting health problems should have prompted Shelley’s sympathy, but in fact they probably made her less sexually attractive, and Shelley never believed in exclusive relationships. There were also, of course, two women expecting babies fathered by Shelley. Harriet’s impending delivery was another source of anxiety for Mary, even though Harriet herself had no illusions that the event would win back her husband. She wrote to a friend on November 20: “Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on.” The child, a boy, was born prematurely November 30, and named Charles Bysshe. Harriet described Shelley’s reaction: “As to his tenderness for me, none remains. He said he was glad it was a boy, because he would make money cheaper. You see how that noble soul is debased. Money now, and not philosophy, is the grand spring of his actions.”
Mary’s attitude toward Harriet had been cruel; she had accepted all Shelley’s rationalizations for leaving his wife. After the birth of Harriet’s son, a note of worry enters Mary’s journal, as she now seems uncertain that Percy will remain faithful to her. On December 6th she jotted down,
Very unwell.— Clary & Shelley walk out as usual to heaps of places . . . a letter from Hookham to say that Harriet has been brought to bed of a son and heir. S[helley] writes a number of circular letters on this event which ought to be ushered in with ringing of bells, etc. for it is the son of hiswife. Hogg comes in the evening . . . a letter from Harriet confirming the news in a letter from adeserted wife & telling us that he has been born a week.
Mary believed Shelley’s story that he and Harriet had separated by mutual agreement—hence her sarcasm about the “deserted wife.” Just as she could read Shelley’s comments in their mutual journal, so this one was there for him to notice.
As Shelley spent more time with Claire, Mary in turn began to welcome Hogg’s company. She wrote eleven platonic but coquettish love letters to him in the early months of 1815. “You love me you say —” she wrote on New Year’s Day, “I wish I could return it with the passion you deserve.” On January 24, calling him “Alexy,” after the sensuous hero of Hogg’s recently published novel (a hero obviously based on Shelley, who was the only person to review the book), she said, “I hope it will cheer your solitude to find this letter from me that you may read & kiss before you go to sleep. . . . I know how much how te
nderly you love me and I rejoice to think that I am capable of constituting your happiness.” But there is no reason to believe that Mary consummated the relationship with Hogg or that she was ever in love with him. Indeed she seems to have wanted to like him more than she actually did. She left no doubt that Shelley was her one true love.
As Mary’s pregnancy advanced, it grew ever more troublesome. She suffered from bleeding and had to stay in bed for much of the time. That gave rise to one of Shelley’s nicknames for her: the “Dormouse.” (He also called her “Maie” and “Pecksie,” the latter a name from a children’s book; she sometimes used it to refer to herself in letters to Hogg and Shelley.) Mary must have been frightened, for she was only seventeen and must have remembered the tragic outcome of her own birth. Nonetheless, Shelley, like Mary’s father, seemed incapable of responding to her emotional needs. By January Shelley was turning more and more of his attention to Claire, who took Mary’s place on their daily walks. Mary let her annoyance show in her journal entries: one read, “Very ill all day. S and J. out all day hopping about the town.”
The Godwins had long suspected what Mary now perceived: Claire too was smitten with Percy and used her freaky moments to help arouse his interest in her. The two shared a tendency to emotional excess and Shelley enjoyed his role as her intellectual mentor. It is quite possible that during the winter of 1814-15, Shelley and Claire became lovers. Percy had always been in favor of free love on principle. Mary obviously hoped that, following his betrayal of Harriet, it would remain a principle rather than a reality, but Claire later described Shelley as “the Man whom I have loved, and from whom I have suffered much.”
One piece of good news, from their standpoint, was the death of Percy’s grandfather Sir Bysshe on January 6, 1815. He divided his estate between his son and oldest male heirs. This enabled Percy to get one thousand pounds a year, of which one-fifth went to Harriet and the children. Learning of these events, Godwin promptly broke his frosty silence and asked Shelley to make good on his earlier promise to settle the older man’s debts. Percy did send a generous sum of money but it was insufficient to bring about a permanent solution to Godwin’s financial difficulties.
Shelley went to the family estate at Field Place for the reading of the will and took Claire with him, leaving Mary in London, with Hogg a frequent visitor. How frequent were his visits, and how passionate, is impossible to know, for all the pages in Mary’s journal for this period, from January 14 to January 29, have been removed. After Shelley and Claire returned, Mary noted in the journal that Hogg now sometimes slept overnight at the apartment. Nothing was said, in the pages that remain, about her having sex with him, but in her condition it would have been improbable.
Mary gave birth to a baby girl on February 22, 1815, going into labor so suddenly that the infant arrived before the doctor. The night of the birth, Hogg stayed at the Shelleys’, making himself as useful as he could and remaining through the next day. While Mary was still weak and in bed, Shelley complained of ill health (as he would each time Mary gave birth) and Claire took him several times to visit a doctor. The delivery had been an easy one because the baby was two months premature. Dr. John Clarke, the same physician who had attended Mary’s own mother after her birth (and killed her with his ignorance of sanitary measures), told Mary that the child could not survive. But Mary refused to accept defeat: she put her baby to her breast and tried to suckle it. In two days it took milk and Mary nursed it, hoping that she could keep it alive.
For some reason, Shelley even chose this time to make another of their numerous changes in residence. Though they had just moved on February 8, Shelley found a place he liked better, requiring them to relocate on March 2. Mary had to carry her eight-day-old baby to their new home. Hogg continued to visit, spending all day with Mary on March 5, for Percy and Claire were again out. On the following day, Mary’s journal begins, “find my baby dead,” followed by a long dash. The night before, she had looked in on the infant, and found it sleeping in its crib. It had lived just eleven days, the same length of time Mary’s mother had survived after Mary’s birth. In both instances, Mary had been the survivor.
Significantly, Mary turned to Hogg for support. “My dearest Hogg,” she wrote him, “my baby is dead—will you come as soon as you can? I wish to see you . . . you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now.” Shelley again was showing his obsession with breasts, and was further concerned (with himself) because a doctor had told him that he was dying of tuberculosis, a diagnosis that proved to be erroneous.
The death of her baby haunted Mary, and Percy’s attitude hurt her deeply. Though never named, the infant had lived long enough for Mary to form a real attachment to her. After its death, Mary often daydreamed of her little girl, frequently referring to these thoughts in her journal. Almost every day, Shelley and Claire left the house, leaving Mary to her lonely grief. She asked herself if she could ever have another child. Could she be a mother and nurture another life? Could she create life and not death in those she loved? Was she a monster?
On Sunday, March 19, a vision came to Mary as she slept: “my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived—I awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day—not in good spirits.” In her depression, she wanted life to be as Shelley had led her to think it could be: that wishing for things made them true. Mary heard a story that the doctor who had attended her had earlier revived a sailor who had been comatose for seven months—in effect, bringing him back to life. Could that really be done? Could he, somehow, do it for her dead child?
Mary roused herself enough to bring a different order to her life. She began to demand that Claire leave the household. “I see plainly—what is to be done,” Mary wrote. The others at first resisted. Claire said she could never return to the Godwins at Skinner Street, and Percy protested that he and Mary bore a responsibility for Claire since it was they who were responsible for her predicament. This time, however, Mary persisted. If Claire could not go to Skinner Street, then she must move somewhere else.
The decision was delayed, as usual. When feelers were put out to the Godwins, they declared they no longer wanted to take Claire back, explaining that the scandal was hurting Fanny’s chances of obtaining a teaching post in a school that her aunts ran in Dublin. Shelley agreed to take financial responsibility for Claire—as well as to “form her mind” (one of the few responsibilities in his life that he would live up to). But Claire continued to live with the couple as Mary seethed.
In mid-April, Shelley and Mary suddenly went by themselves to stay at an inn at Salt Hill in Buckinghamshire, in the Thames valley northwest of London. It may have been intended as a holiday, but there is evidence that Shelley was dodging his creditors again. Several pages have been ripped out of Mary’s journal during this period, covering all the time she spent with Shelley at Salt Hill. It seems very likely that she became pregnant on this trip. The security of Shelley all to herself at last completely changed her mood. In the four letters she wrote to Hogg during that time—urging him to come and join them—the bereaved mother was gone, and the coquette returned: “I am no doubt a very naughty Dormouse [here a drawing of a dormouse] but indeed you must forgive me. . . . Do you mean to come down to us—I suppose not Prince Prudent well as you please but remember I should be very happy to see you.”
After three days, they returned to London, where Hogg had found them (yet again!) new lodgings, with room for him to stay there as well. To Mary’s annoyance, Claire had moved in ahead of them. The degree of hostility in the household must have been high, for Shelley began reading the calming works of the Stoic philosopher Seneca to escape from the chaos around him. On May 12 Mary wrote icily in her journal that Shelley had gone out with “his friend” in the morning and “the lady” in the afternoon. In the evening he had a last talk with “his friend.” All these are references to Claire.
The next day, the first thing Mary wrote was “Clary goes.” That day’s entry was the last in this volume of her journals. Though there were blank pages left to write on, Mary finished the book with, “I begin a new journal with our regeneration.” However, the next volume has been lost, and we have only the letters written by her and Shelley to determine what happened between then and July of the following year, 1816. By that time, though Mary had hoped otherwise, her brief period of exclusivity with Shelley would be over.
Claire had gone to stay in Lynmouth, a village in Devon on the west coast of England. A friend of hers lived there, and Shelley paid for Claire’s expenses. On the day of her departure, he escorted her to the place where she was to board a carriage, and when he did not return till late in the day, Mary became “very anxious,” no doubt feeling that even now Shelley might choose Claire over her. Claire, on her part, felt relief at escaping the friction that had developed among the threesome. She wrote to her other stepsister, Fanny, from Lynmouth: “I am perfectly happy—After so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion & hatred you will hardly believe how enraptured I am with this dear little quiet spot.”
Lynmouth would prove to be too boring a place for Claire, who loved excitement, but for eight months Mary was free of her. The threesome became a twosome. Mary knew that she was again pregnant and Shelley constantly complained of his health, so they too spent much of the summer away from London, often staying in seacoast towns such as Clifton and Torquay. The resort village of Torquay was filled with visitors that summer, for Napoleon was temporarily held there aboard a British warship; tourists could see him walking the deck. To Mary and Percy, like many others, Napoleon’s presence marked the disappointing end of a long period of idealism that the French Revolution had sparked, for even though Napoleon was more despot than liberator, his downfall signaled the restoration of a monarchy in France.
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