Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  What began as curiosity becomes obsession when you find yourself walking the streets of London in a daze. There are no paving stones beneath your feet, no cars, no office blocks. You hear the clatter of iron wheels, smell the horsedung, see, in a sudden swish of black silk and the glimpse of a shawl, Mary and Claire hurrying down a narrow street towards the carriage where Shelley is waiting, in 1814, to lead them to adventures such as these two impatient, headstrong young women have only read about in novels.

  PART I

  A Motherless Child

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE AGE OF PROMETHEUS

  1789–1800

  ’Twas in truth an hour

  Of universal ferment; mildest men

  Were agitated; and commotions, strife

  Of passions and opinions, filled the walls

  Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.

  The soil of common life, was, at that time,

  Too hot to tread upon …

  Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book IX

  ONLY SEVEN PRISONERS WERE AVAILABLE FOR RELEASE WHEN THE citizens of Paris marched on the Bastille, but numbers were irrelevant. A symbol of power had been demolished. Thomas Paine, an Englishman, arranged for the key of the old fortress to be delivered to President Washington in the United States as a token of the inspiration which American independence had offered to Europe. ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good,’ Paine declared two years later in The Rights of Man: this was the spirit in which liberal-minded Englishmen and women prepared to greet the new and honourable age of the republic in 1789. Among them, although they had not yet met, were Mary Shelley’s parents, the philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the architect of modern feminism.

  We talk of a Romantic period. To those who lived in it, these years marked a return to the civic virtues and high ideals of the Roman republic. The time had come, they believed, in which aristocrats and commoners could unite to make a new and better world. Louis XVI was praised in England for the readiness with which he accepted his country’s need to reform. Life, for all who sought change, had never seemed more full of promise.

  Everything modern, as the century entered its last decade, endorsed the mood of hope and expectation. Up and down the country, the inventions of chemists and electricians were being observed and discussed. The painting in which Joseph Wright showed a homely family watching the death of a bird in the vacuum created by an air pump, no novelty by 1789, caught the spirit of an age more accurately than the artists whose feathery landscapes depicted a countryside free of factories and smokestacks. The first electric chimes, producing mysterious music through an electric pulse from charged metal points, offered a popular climax to science lectures. Fulminating rods presented spectators with an entrancing display of light dancing in glass funnels when they were struck by charged rotating balls. The chemist Joseph Priestley had devised an electric machine capable of exploding a glass sphere.

  Prometheus, so the story went, was a god, a Titan who took clay from the plain of Boeotia and from it, moulded man. The secret of creation seemed only a leap away from the grasp of chemists and physicists at the end of the eighteenth century when the Italian anatomist and physician Luigi Galvani deduced the existence of ‘animal electricity’ (as opposed to the ‘natural’ electricity generated by machines or lightning) from the contraction of a dead frog’s moist muscles when placed in contact with two different metals. Galvani’s conclusions were published in 1791 and were hotly defended, after his death in 1798, by his cousin Giovanni Aldini, whose speciality was the animation of corpses, both animal and human, by the application of electric currents.

  Alessandro Volta, a Fellow of the Royal Society who generously coined the name ‘galvanism’ for his friend’s ‘beautiful and most surprising discoveries’, challenged ‘animal electricity’ with his ‘contact theory’, leading to the invention of the voltaic ‘pile’, a primitive electric battery, described by Volta to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, in March 1800. Asked to referee Volta’s paper for publication by the Society, William Godwin’s close friends, the physicist William Nicholson and the distinguished chemist and surgeon Anthony Carlisle, were able – within weeks – to construct a pile and, by decomposing water into oxygen and hydrogen when an electric current was passed through water, to discover the principle of electrolysis.

  If Volta was the father of the electric cell and the volt named after him, so Galvani’s ‘animal electricity’ revealed, by a process of deduction, that nerves were not, as Descartes and his contemporaries had supposed, water pipes, but electrical conductors. The image of a being electrified or galvanized into life was born, some twenty years before Frankenstein’s Creature, in the cabinets, laboratories and dissecting rooms where William Godwin’s friends experimented, noted, and discussed their discoveries.

  The dream of progress captured the imagination of the country. Novelists, poets and philosophers drew on James Watt’s patented steam engine for their powerful images of wheels and chains. Travellers in the new mail coaches compared notes on the speed of their journeys and were ready to risk death from pneumonia for a night-ride on the roof above the heads of the pounding horses. Sea captains risked a more lingering death in the pack-ice of the Arctic seas as they searched for a passage which would link England to India. In 1781, William Herschel identified Uranus and connected England to the heavens by naming the planet for the king, Georgium Sidus, George’s Star. Essayists of the 1790s invoked the name of Uranus’ grandson, Prometheus, as a model, not a warning to overreachers. All, now, seemed possible.

  The first suggestion that too much progress could be a dangerous thing was heard in November 1790, when Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France offered a seductive defence of the king’s right to sit in his palace and the lord in his enclosed park. This, Burke argued, was how society was meant to be; equality was a futile dream. His friends found it hard to fathom why the man who had championed the rights of American colonists should be so appalled by France’s bold act of emulation, but Burke was haunted by the memory of bloody revolution in London, when a wave of anti-Catholic feeling led to the Gordon Riots of 1780, to the looting of houses and burning of chapels by an uncontrolled mob. Later, Burke would be seen as a prophet; in 1790, he seemed out of step, at least with advanced opinion. Mary Wollstonecraft, then aged thirty and having just settled her younger sisters as teachers in a Putney school, was one of the first to snatch up her pen and write an emotional response. A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published anonymously at the end of the year. The author’s identity was not a well-kept secret.*

  In 1791, a nine-hundred-strong group of revolutionists felt confident enough to celebrate Bastille Day in London with a dinner and a song which united political change to the latest scientific discoveries.

  Fill high the animating glass

  And let the electric ruby pass

  From hand to hand, from soul to soul:

  Who shall the energy controul

  Exalted, pure, refined,

  The Health of Humankind!1

  The English revolutionaries of 1791 hailed science as a symbol of change. To the government and the less educated, it had become a threat. A similar dinner in Birmingham was broken up on the same day by an organized mob. The Meeting House of which Joseph Priestley was the minister was set alight; so, tragically, were the great scientist’s library and his laboratory. Thomas Paine had just published the first part of The Rights of Man in opposition to Burke’s warnings of the birth in France of a ‘political monster’ which would end by devouring its creators. Remembered as the man whose writings had helped to stir up revolution in America, Paine was now advised to leave England for his personal safety.

  In 1792, the French abolished the monarchy and put their king on trial. Mary Wollstonecraft, established as a leader of the New Philosophy with her second political publication, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, followed Paine to Paris in support of tha
t feverishly brilliant group of revolution-minded orators, the Girondists.

  Meanwhile in England in 1793, only a month after the execution of Louis XVI, and in a climate of increasing panic and the savage repression of all pro-revolutionary activity, William Godwin published one of the most influential books of the decade. An Enquiry concerning the Nature of Political Justice was a copious, orderly and determinedly rational argument for justice in a society of equals. Marriage, organized religion and centralized government were among the author’s prime targets; his first edition gave implicit approval to events across the Channel by praising new political institutions if they taught men to cherish feelings of equality and independence.2 As Mary Wollstonecraft’s work established her as the mother of modern feminism, so William Godwin’s Political Justice earned this peace-loving and unrevolutionary man his reputation as the father of anarchism. France had already declared war on England, but the thirty-seven-year-old author managed to place a copy of his brave book in the French ambassador’s hands three days before the diplomat was ordered to leave the country.

  Despite the fact that Political Justice urged Britain to follow the French example, Godwin escaped prosecution. Paine’s work had cost an accessible sixpence. At £1 16s., Pitt’s government doubted that Godwin’s would find enough readers to threaten the constitution.3 The government had misjudged the public’s enthusiasm for change. The first edition of Political Justice sold over three thousand copies in quarto, the large size, alone. In radical circles, Godwin’s book made him the philosopher king; Wordsworth spoke for many when he told a young lawyer to throw away his chemistry books and read Godwin on the doctrine of necessity.

  Although Godwin was never prosecuted or imprisoned his friends were not so fortunate. In 1794, with the country committed to what was optimistically anticipated as a short war against France – in fact there would be no enduring peace for another twenty years – the government stepped up repressive measures by suspending habeas corpus. Imprisonment was now possible without trial. Godwin’s remarkable novel about obsession, guilt and pursuit, Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, was published that year, but without the Preface in which the author denounced the government’s abuse of its powers; the publisher did not dare print it. In the autumn of 1794, Godwin published a pamphlet setting out the constitutional reasons why the government should not condemn thirteen of his friends and associates to death for demanding parliamentary reform. Bravely, he risked imprisonment by publicly linking himself to the accused, appearing every day at the infamous October ‘Treason Trials’ where Sir Thomas Lawrence one day sketched him in court, sitting shoulder to shoulder with one of the charged men, his friend the playwright Thomas Holcroft.4 Writing to Joseph Gerrald, another victim of the government’s new policies, on the eve of his trial in Edinburgh at the beginning of the year, Godwin urged the accused man to stand his ground with neither bitterness nor fear. With courage and calmness, he wrote, they could still ‘shake the pillars of the vaults of heaven’. A steadfast attitude would, he was convinced, lead the court to an honourable verdict: ‘The jury, the world will feel your value, if you show yourself such a man … You represent us all.’5

  Godwin’s cogently reasoned pamphlet secured acquittal or a dropping of charges against most of the defendants at the Treason Trials, but Gerrald was not so lucky. Found guilty of sedition, he was transported to New South Wales the following year. Godwin, one of Gerrald’s most regular visitors in his months at Newgate prison, did not reproach himself for having urged Gerrald to stand firm. Guilt formed no part of his philosophy. It was unlikely, in any case, that a not-guilty plea would have rescued Gerrald from conviction.

  An attack on George III’s carriage in the autumn of 1795 offered further proof to the government that the radical vipers in England’s bosom must be strangled. Two emergency bills were introduced for the purpose of suppressing all political meetings and controversial publications. Godwin’s response, an eighty-six-page anonymous pamphlet, defended freedom of speech, but not in a way that was likely to please his radical friends. Opposing the government’s draconian measures, he also warned the debating societies that they were becoming dangerously close to the French Jacobins in their reckless language and incitations to violence. Reasoned discussion leading to gradual change was the course which Godwin proposed. He never veered from it.

  The two ‘Gagging Acts’ of 1796 marked an end to free speech and a free press. There would be no revolution in England. But William Godwin had become a hero to everybody who shared his belief that conditions, and man himself, could be altered and improved by the unfettered exercise of reason, that prison sentences were worse than useless, that the government was a ‘brute engine’ designed to crush, not to enlighten and assist. ‘No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ William Hazlitt wrote almost thirty years later in The Spirit of the Age. Compared to Godwin, he wrote, Paine had seemed a fool, Burke a ‘flashy sophist’. The Hazlitt and Godwin families had been close Norfolk neighbours and friends, but there was no special pleading in the younger man’s observation. ‘Truth, moral truth’ had been revealed in Godwin’s work, he wrote; the eight books which comprised Political Justice were recognized as ‘the oracles of thought’.6

  *

  Recognition had been slow to come, although Godwin had always been seen as a star in his own family circle. Born in 1756, he was the seventh child of thirteen born from a paternal line of dissenting ministers, Dissenters being that large group of Protestants whose refusal to conform to Church of England practices debarred them from civil rights and education at Oxford and Cambridge. He was a precocious boy, and an earnest one. At home, he delighted the family with sermons delivered from a kitchen chair in a borrowed wig; walking across the fields to his first school with a small friend, he decided one day to lock him in the Meeting House and to pray over him after terrifying the child with visions of damnation culled from the grim collection of Calvinist texts in John Godwin’s study.

  Death made Godwin a youthful stoic. At least four of his twelve siblings died in infancy or as young children.† One, in a horrifying incident which he never forgot, drowned in the horsepond at Guestwick in Norfolk where he lived from the age of four. Sent off from the crowded little house on long visits to a childless female cousin, William shared her bed and was lulled to sleep nightly with a warning to prepare himself for his end. ‘This lesson made a long and deep impression on my mind,’ Godwin wrote. Explaining his affection for the grim old lady, he inadvertently disclosed that it was a love born of desolation. ‘There is nothing,’ he observed, ‘that the human heart more irresistibly seeks than an object to which to attach itself.’7

  If Godwin’s later views on education were unusually liberal and kindly, it was partly the result of his own unhappy experiences. He was only eleven years old when he was sent off to be the sole pupil of Norfolk’s finest teacher. Samuel Newton was a Norwich minister who preached of the devil with enthusiasm and threatened the rod at every opportunity. The pleasure which he took in using it, Godwin recalled, was that of a butcher who, having retired, will still travel miles to savour the slaughter of an ox. Ordered to maintain silence about his chastisement, Godwin consoled himself with long hours in Mr Newton’s library. Here, having had a dour home education based on the Bible and numerous edifying works on the pleasures of the grave, he devoured the novels of Richardson, Smollett and Fielding, and a series of tomes on ancient history which fired a lifelong passion for the causes of liberty and public virtue. By the end of three years, he was well-read, well-whipped and, despite Newton’s best endeavours, confident to the point of arrogance.

  Mr Godwin Senior died in 1772. His widow, anxious to do what was best for her clever son, the one most likely to provide support to an indigent family, took him to London the following year to be educated at a dissenting academy. Rejected by Newton’s old college of Homerton, the seventeen-y
ear-old youth was accepted at Hoxton, where he spent the next five years. Here, for the first time, Godwin breathed the fresh air of liberalism. Hoxton was considered by many to be the best academic institution in England. Free inquiry was encouraged; pupils were urged to examine both sides of every question. Locke, whose works were still banned at Oxford, was revered at Hoxton; Godwin, brought up by his Calvinist father to believe in original sin, learned that a child is made by what it learns and how it learns. From his principal tutor, Andrew Kippis, he acquired the stimulating idea which lies at the heart of Political Justice: man is born free and has no obligation to submit to the will of a government unless he judges that will to be imposed for the good of all. ‘We dissent,’ Kippis wrote, ‘because we deny the right of any body of men, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to impose human tests, creeds, or articles; and because we think it our duty, not to submit to any such authority, but to protest against it, as a violation of our essential liberty to judge and act for ourselves in matters of religion.’8 This, to a young man who recognized the injustice of a system which refused Dissenters employment in any job which required the taking of an oath, while forcing them to establish their own academies, registers and burial grounds, was intoxicating stuff.