Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  14. WG–James Marshall, 6.8.1800 (Abinger, Dep. c. 214).

  15. The event was reported in the Annual Register for 1803 (February). The significance of Aldini’s experiments was more sceptically assessed in the Edinburgh Review, III, 1803, pp. 193–8. Aldini was then the Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Bologna University. In the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons, there is a handwritten account by a witness to Aldini’s experiments on frogs, rabbits and a mastiff in 1802 (275 .h. 17). Aldini’s own account, in General Views of the Application of Galvanism to medical purposes principally in cases of suspended animation (1819), describes another experiment made by a colleague on 5 July 1804 on a drowned boy, resulting in a violent expulsion of bodily fluids (water, saliva, shit); an allusion to the fact that his galvanic piles were on sale in Leicester Square suggests that a certain amount of home-experimenting went on.

  16. ‘You are placed in the situation I longed to occupy at the commencement of my public life,’ Carlisle wrote to the anatomist Richard Owen on 12 March 1834. Carlisle provided many notes to Owen for the influential series of thirty lectures on generation and anatomy which he delivered that year to an audience which included Charles Darwin, just returned from his travels on HMS Beagle.

  * Mary did not read St Leon until her teens, when Gabor’s combination of nobility and malevolence struck her sufficiently for her to draw on his nature and situation for Frankenstein’s creature.

  † One sister married the musician and composer, Muzio Clementi; another married the astrologer and watercolourist, John Varley.

  ‡ This may have been the school briefly undertaken by Eliza Fenwick as one of her increasingly desperate ways to earn money. She only found six pupils and the project was rapidly abandoned.

  § Some confusion surrounds the grave-site. The willows supposedly planted beside it had disappeared or died by 1816; on 5 March 1834, Godwin noted in his journal that one N. Smith and his daughter’s publisher Edward Moxon called on him with regard to ‘monument, MWG’. Perhaps the earlier grave had been defaced during a period when Wollstonecraft’s name was connected with scandal; this could have been a note for a substitute to be erected. It is also possible that Moxon was arranging the installation of the first public monument erected to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A SHARED LIFE

  1801–1807

  ‘[Mrs Clairmont] became certainly towards him a meritorious wife; though towards others I doubt both her sincerity and her integrity.’

  Henrv Crabb Robinson1

  THE GODWIN FAMILY ACQUIRED A NEW NEIGHBOUR IN THE Polygon in 1801. Writing Godwin’s biography in the 1870s, Kegan Paul related that Mr Godwin often liked to sit on the balcony outside his window on pleasant evenings. He was startled but not displeased when the new tenant of No. 27 asked if she had the honour of beholding the immortal author of Political Justice. A later version of his first encounter with Mary Jane Clairmont added the detail that, on every subsequent occasion that Godwin walked into the garden of No. 29, Mrs Clairmont would hurry into the garden of No. 27, ‘and walk up and down clasping her hands and saying to herself, “You great Being, how I adore you!”’2

  However the connection came about, Godwin was quickly enslaved. ‘Meet Mrs Clairmont,’ he noted on 5 May 1801. Three weeks later, Fanny and Mary, now seven and almost four, were taken to make friends with the Clairmont children, five-year-old Charles and three-year-old Jane. On 6 July, the two families set off to Lambeth for a performance of Puss in Boots at Astley’s Theatre. A week later, Godwin recorded the progress of his new relationship with an ‘x’ of uncharacteristic curvaceousness: ‘x’, in Godwin’s journal, signified sexual activity. In December, trapped again by an unexpected pregnancy, Godwin went secretively to church in distant Shoreditch for a second marriage; the baby, born the following June, did not survive.

  Godwin already knew Mary Jane for a fibber when he agreed to undergo two marriage services in the same day The first register presented her as she seemed to be, the widowed Mrs Clairmont; the second named her as a spinster, Mary Jane Vial. A third register entry, made after the birth of William Godwin in 1803, declared Mrs Godwin to have been born a Devereux.

  Prodigious detective work has uncovered some of the elusive lady’s tracks.3 Born to Pierre de Vial and his first wife in Exeter, Mary Jane ran away to join her father’s relations in France when still a child (possibly in rebellion against his second marriage). Her accounts to Godwin of this exploit – which he greatly admired – and of the elegance to which she became accustomed in France, were close to the truth. The story of her subsequent marriage to Mr Clairmont was a fantasy. There may never have been a Mr Clairmont in her life; there was certainly no husband. Charles, born in 1795, was the son of a Swiss merchant, Charles de Gaulis, who lived with her in Bristol and died in Silesia the following year. Jane was the daughter of a second relationship which appears also to have ended in desertion, followed by penury and incarceration in a debtors’ prison.* By May 1801, however, the resilient ‘Mrs Clairmont’ had raised enough money, probably by translation work, to take a house in the Polygon.

  Godwin had hidden his courtship from his friends; perhaps he sensed that they would disapprove. Tactless, gossip-loving and habitually untruthful, Mary Jane struck most of them as a poor substitute for Mary Wollstonecraft. Eliza Fenwick, lured into indiscretion, grew bitter when Godwin reprimanded her for scandalmongering. She had only done as his wife wished, she defended herself; her grovelling letter restored an uneasy peace.4 Eliza disliked Mary Jane for making trouble; Lamb hated the woman who had robbed his friend of dignity. This ‘widow with green spectacles’ had made poor Godwin as foolish as Malvolio, all smiles, bows and wriggles, he noted with disgust in November 1801, a month before the marriage.5 ‘Mrs [Godwin] grows every day in disfavour with God and man,’ he wrote to a friend eight years later. ‘I will be buried with this inscription over me: – “Here lies C.L. the woman-hater” – I mean that hated one woman.’6 He jeered at Mary Jane’s big bottom, he mocked her as ‘the bad baby’ for her tantrums and he cursed her as ‘that d—d Mrs Godwin’ and ‘a damn’d infernal bitch’ when, blissfully unaware of his feelings, she came unasked to his home and triggered one of his sister’s bad spells by staying too late.7 Mary Lamb shared his views, telling Hazlitt’s wife on one occasion that Mrs Godwin reminded her of the spiteful sister in the fairy story, ‘Toads and Diamonds’.8

  These were not the only enemies Mary Jane made. Henry Crabb Robinson, conceding her merits as a wife, doubted ‘her integrity and truthfulness towards others’.9 (When he met the authoress Anna Jameson in the late 1830s, Robinson found it hard to trust her simply because her face reminded him of Mary Jane’s.) James Marshall, evicted from his place at Godwin’s fireside, took away shocking memories of a woman whose temper was both ‘undisciplined and uncontrolled’; the businessman Francis Place bore this out with an allusion to ‘the infernal devil to whom he [Godwin] was married’.10

  Robinson had at least noted that Mary Jane was a good wife; other sources show a generous, warm-hearted woman. The American Aaron Burr, the disgraced former vice-president, found Mrs Godwin both ‘pleasant and amiable’ when he was living as an almost friendless fugitive in London in 1808, gratefully dependent on the Godwin family for hospitality and financial aid.11 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s young wife Harriet, although she later changed her mind, was positively enthusiastic. ‘There is a very great sweetness marked in her countenance,’ she noted after their first meeting in 1812; Mrs Godwin impressed her as ‘a woman of very great magnanimity and independence of character’.12 Old Ann Godwin, meeting her new daughter-in-law for the first time when the couple paid a visit to Norfolk in the autumn of 1803, was also pleasantly impressed by Mary Jane’s ‘many amiable qualities’. The couple seemed well-suited, ‘in such helth and so happy in consulting to make each other so which is butiful in a married state’.13

  Mary Jane was a troublemaker and a liar; she was not a fool. A skille
d translator (her version of The Swiss Family Robinson was for many years the standard text), she was knowledgeable, amusing and well-read. Her book about Herne Bay written late in life, is as full of humour as it is of apt quotations.14 Her care of the children is borne out by Aaron Burr’s comments on the neat and pleasing appearance of ‘les goddesses’, as he skittishly termed Fanny, Mary and Jane. We have a glimpse of her as a good housekeeper and affectionate wife in a letter written when Godwin was away from home in September 1805. This, she wrote, was how she dreamed of his return:

  our bedroom nicely cleaned, the furniture put up, have fancied your arrival at seven, your stepping into more than half our bed, the kind embrace, the cup of coffee all ready, the refreshing slumber for an hour, the broken day, the fete of walking with you to town and idling all the day with you … My dearest love …15

  There can be no doubt that Mary Jane often drove her studious husband to distraction. She would bounce out of the house in a rage, announcing her intention of never returning. She would grumble incessantly about the fact that they lived in London and not in the country where, she was convinced, she would find true happiness. She made much of the fact that she had been brought up to expect a ladylike existence. She nagged Godwin to see less of Lamb, Coleridge, Humphry Davy and Carlisle, and more of her own French emigré friends. She wanted control. Man ‘has his wife to read him lectures, and rap his knuckles’, Godwin noted after thirty years of marriage.16 But he loved his voluptuous, energetic wife. In a touching letter written in 1812 and proudly cited by his stepdaughter as proof of his devotion, he praised Mary Jane’s courage and cheerfulness, regretted the financial difficulties for which he held himself responsible and wondered if she had not deserved to become ‘something much better than my wife’.17

  *

  There is an intriguing gap in the treasure-trove of family papers relating to Mary Godwin’s early life. Until 1814 and her impetuous departure from home, not a scrap of a letter or note has survived either from or to her, a fact which becomes even more startling when we know that she was away for the best part of three years, during which Godwin’s journal shows that he was in regular correspondence with his daughter. Something, plainly, has been hidden from us, but why and by whom? Did Mary or her nineteenth-century archivists want to obliterate a period in which she angered her father by refusing to show proper deference to his second wife?† Not knowing what the letters contained, we can only conjecture, but it is difficult to think of another reason why they should have disappeared.

  In the autobiography Mary never wrote, she would certainly have drawn a sharp line across her childhood at the end of the year 1801, when Godwins second marriage threatened what Mary later described as ‘my excessive and romantic attachment to my father’.18

  Many changes followed Mary Jane’s arrival at No. 29. James Marshall, who had been living at the Polygon, was evicted to nearby lodgings; Louisa Jones, Marguerite Fournée and the nursemaid were replaced by a Miss Hooley, a young housemaid called Betsey, a governess, Maria Smith, and Mr Burton, a daily tutor. Fanny, grateful to be spared an attempt in 1805 by her Wollstonecraft aunts to have her sent away to boarding-school, adapted quietly to the new regime. Having begun life as such a rosy, romping child, she had pined since her mother’s death. Charles Clairmont’s comment that it would be sure to rain on Fanny’s birthday gives us a taste of her sad nature; Jane, a bouncy little extrovert, found her gloominess oppressive. Mrs Godwin, doing her best to cheer the girl up, sometimes took her along on visits to friends in the country.

  Fanny was docile; Mary, fiercely protective of her relationship with her father, was not. Jane, comically opposite in appearance with her dark curly hair and almost black eyes, remembered the awe she had felt of Mary’s cleverness, of her pale skin, intense hazel eyes and – her crowning glory – a nimbus of red-gold hair, fine as a filigree web. Jane gave in to what Godwin disapprovingly called ‘baby-sullenness’ when she failed to achieve quick results in her lessons; Mary’s quiet perseverance showed her up. A little annoyed that Mary should always be seen as the more talented child – both she and Fanny showed a precocious gift for drawing – Mrs Godwin had tutors employed to teach Jane how to sing and play the piano. Envious of the interest shown in Mary by visitors disposed to see her as an infant prodigy, the offspring of a remarkable union, Jane was encouraged to take pride in her Swiss connections and to believe that she was connected to the English peerage on her father’s side. The spirit of rivalry was strong. Mary, invited to be on loving terms with her stepmother, kept as cool a distance as it is possible for a small proud girl to maintain.

  In later years, Mrs Godwin lamented all the trouble she took to give the girls a ladylike education. Sunday services, attended at the local Anglican church in Somers Town and later at St Paul’s, were followed by tests to make sure that the children had listened carefully to the sermons. (This was Godwin’s province, although it is unlikely that he, as a non-believer, accompanied them to church.) Meals – nobody ever disputed the fact that Mrs Godwin was an excellent cook – were never discussed. Beds were hard – Mary could not bear to sleep on a soft mattress in later life – while clothing was plain and neat.

  The paucity of references to outings in Godwin’s diary does not mean there were none without him. There were picnics on Hampstead Heath, outings to tea-gardens, visits to the jolly entertainments which were a part of all London children’s lives. (A circus at the Lyceum, for example, offered ‘Tight-Rope Dancing by the Child of Promise and Signor Saxoni’, ‘Horsemanship Unrivalled by the Celebrated Little Devil’ and ‘The Egg Hornpipe, over twelve eggs, by Mr Robinson blindfolded’.) On Mary’s eleventh birthday, she was taken to Westminster Abbey, to admire a bedraggled display of royal waxworks in Abbot Islip’s Chapel, along with the abbot in his winding sheet. Madame Tussaud’s two hundred effigies, agreeably combining the gory with the sedate, were on view in the Strand; travelling shows of the kind trundled around by Mrs Jarley in The Old Curiosity Shop were set up wherever there was space for a booth.

  Visits to artists’ studios, including Turner’s in Harley Street, were Godwin’s ruse for firing the children’s imaginations; his daughter probably took more pleasure in visiting the Exeter Exchange where, for the huge price of half a crown, real lions and tigers could be stared at and, when prodded, made to roar. On rainy days, armed with brushes and pans of colour, Jane and Mary taught baby William – Godwin’s only son was born in 1803 – to read by painting over the syllables in tiny paper-bound books of the kind typified by Eliza Fenwick’s Mary and Her Cat (1804).

  *

  Livelier works than poor, hard-working Mrs Fenwick’s had already begun to issue from the Godwin household. Publishing his first children’s book in 1803 under the pseudonym of William Scolfield, Godwin made his preface into an attack on the ‘modern improvers [who] have left out of their system that most essential branch of human nature the imagination’. Imagination, Godwin argued, ‘is the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound morality must be erected’. How, he wished to know, could any child be expected to feel interest in stories which had no giants, or dragons or fairies, in which the young were always good and the old always demure and rational?19

  The book in question was the first volume of Bible Stories, later renamed Sacred Histories. Written in the direct and appealing style which marked all Godwin’s works for children, it presented the Old and New Testament as a series of historical tales. The illustrations (the first showed a maternal-looking angel hovering over the head of a forlorn young lady) must have greatly appealed to motherless Mary; her affection for the stories is borne out by one she later wrote herself, in which she described the boy-hero sobbing over just such tales.20

  Encouraged by the book’s success and by his children’s enthusiasm, Godwin followed it in 1805 with a retelling of Aesop’s fables. The Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (the author this time was one ‘Edward Baldwin’) argued once again that children learned best from lively, imaginativ
e storytelling. Moral conclusions tacked on by earlier writers were replaced by affectionate hints to his own family. ‘The Boys and the Frogs’ was used as a warning to ‘my dear Charles’ to be kind to animals, while ‘The Country Maid and her Milk Pail’ gave a gentle reproach to his daughter. ‘You are sometimes thoughtless now; but I am sure you will cure yourself soon, and when you are sixteen or twenty, will be the most considerate creature in the world.’ Mary’s fondness for the book is borne out by the many allusions in her novels to Godwin’s reworking of the story of the two jars, in which the fragile china jar saves herself in a stormy sea by refusing help from her brass sister. Independence, Godwin taught her, is always admirable.

  The Fables is a delightful work, still readable today. Ignorant of its true authorship, the Anti-Jacobin joined the British Critic in praising Baldwin’s book as the best available version of Aesop.

  Godwin was in tune with the times. Despite a vigorous rearguard action being fought by Mrs Sarah Trimmer and her cronies to defend children against the dangerous influence of imaginative writing, the first years of the nineteenth century marked an upsurge in nursery rhymes and fanciful tales. Both Mary Wollstonecraft’s old friend William Roscoe and Catherine Dorset (whose novelist sister Charlotte Smith was a close friend of both the Godwins) were producing a mass of charming story-poems, with titles such as The Butterfly’s Ball, The Grasshopper’s Feast and The Lion’s Masquerade. Their illustrator, young William Mulready, had become one of Godwin’s protégés; their publisher was Benjamin Tabart, Mrs Godwin’s most regular employer in her freelance writing career.

  In other circumstances, Mary Jane might have followed Eliza Fenwick and a mass of other hard-up, well-educated women and tried to set up a school. With a husband who so evidently enjoyed writing for children and whose ambitious project to write a history of England as substantial as Hume’s would never feed and clothe a growing family, Mrs Godwin persuaded him to consider starting a children’s bookshop of their own. Children’s books would provide a steady and much needed source of income; among other worries, they needed to find money for Charles’s school bills at Charterhouse. (Christ’s Hospital, where education was free and excellent, had turned him down.)