Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The frequency of Godwin’s perplexing blackouts may have strengthened his readiness to turn to work which was less intellectually rigorous. The word ‘deliquium’ had been frequently noted in his diary since Mary Wollstonecraft’s death; identifiable now as a form of narcolepsy, it had often amused friends who saw the philosopher falling asleep, apparently from boredom, at dinner-tables. In 1800, the fits had seldom lasted for longer than a minute; in July 1803, he was afflicted with severe attacks over three consecutive days. Godwin had eccentric friends by the score to offer faddish cures, including abstention from wine and meat-eating.‡ The most convincing diagnosis, given by Anthony Carlisle, was that the ‘deliquium’ was connected to mental stress.

  Innocent of the pitfalls, Godwin willingly listened to Mary Jane’s arguments for bookselling as a trade which would provide them with a good income while requiring, in her optimistic view, little mental exertion. Not many years earlier, he had reviled booksellers in one of the Enquirer essays as contemptible figures, servile, cringing; now, cheered by the friendliness of his reviews and spurred on by his wife’s enthusiasm, he prepared to become one. His daughter would eventually form the view that this was one of the worst decisions he ever made; Godwin would always maintain that it was one of the best.

  His own name was too notorious for use; their first enterprise, in a lane of grubby curio kiosks off the Tottenham Court Road, was begun in the name of Hodgkins, the man employed to run the shop. Among its first offerings, along with a handsome line in stationery, were two more books by Godwin, each showing children what results perseverance and intelligence could bring. The Looking Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (1805) used the life of William Mulready to fire lazy Charles with zeal for his schoolwork; The Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806) pointed to her uncommon intellectual achievements – they included a sound knowledge of eight languages before the age of twelve – as an inspiration to the girls. Godwin also used this short work to advocate religious tolerance, reminding his readers that not all Roman Catholics shared Queen Mary’s enthusiasm for burning ‘good bishops’ and ‘pious clergymen … merely on account of the sentiments they honestly entertained respecting God and religion’. Married to a Catholic who now supervised his household, Godwin used the final chapter to point out that Catholics too can be ‘an ornament to human nature’. It was a point worth making in the unequal days before Catholic emancipation.

  *

  Kegan Paul, Godwin’s first biographer, was assured by Mary’s son and daughter-in-law that all the Godwins’ income went on educating Charles and Jane, while poor Fanny and Mary learnt nothing but housework. Jane Clairmont’s own recollection that every child in Godwin’s household was expected to be a prodigy was equally fantastic. Festina lente was the often repeated motto of Godwin where his own family were concerned. Asked by an inquisitive lady correspondent, Mrs Fordham, whether he was using his late wife’s educational system, he snapped that he and Mrs Godwin lacked time for novel methods.21 His answer was misleading; everything we know about his daughter’s early years suggests that she was being taught in a way of which her mother would have approved. Writing to another friend, a bookseller, Godwin expressed his dislike for any method which aimed to produce ‘little monsters of curiosity’.

  Armed with a governess, a daily tutor, a French-speaking stepmother and a father whose books were all tried out first at home on the children, Mary was neither pushed nor educationally deprived. In an unpublished extract from a letter to their friend Lady Mountcashell, Mary Jane Godwin assured her that the children had been educated in a most superior manner: ‘Charles knows Latin Greek and French, mathematics and draws well. The girls have been taught by Mr Godwin Roman Greek and English history, French and Italian from masters. Frances and Mary draw very well.’22

  Mary Jane’s claims always have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but there is no doubt that all the children benefited from being trial readers of Godwin’s The Pantheon (1806) and his histories of England (1806) and Rome (1809): ‘Their remark was How easy this is! Why we learn it by heart, almost as fast as we read it!’ he proudly informed readers of The History of England. The Pantheon, dedicated to Charles’s headmaster at Charterhouse and boldly illustrated with pagan deities, two of them stark naked in the first edition, became part of Keats’s travelling library; the little History of England introduced Mary to Oliver Cromwell as a hero, the man who had ‘governed the nation with more vigour and glory than any king that ever sat upon the throne’. The History also fired her enduring interest in the enigmatic figure of Perkin Warbeck, the self-declared Duke of York who had long fascinated her father.23

  Mr Burton and Maria Smith attended to the teaching of geography, mathematics and chemistry; excellent works for girls were being published during this period and, judging by the well-thumbed 1807 copy of Conversations on Chemistry in the present authors collection, they were much enjoyed.§ But it was the books on the list of the Juvenile Library, as it was now called, which most stirred Mary’s imagination. In Mary Lamb’s Mrs Leicester’s School (1808), she could identify with the orphaned child who learned her letters from reading the words on her mother’s gravestone – and probably spotted a portrait of her stepmother in Charles Lamb’s mischievous tale of the wicked witch aunt. Reading Lamb’s version of The Adventures of Ulysses, she travelled to exotic places and absorbed the gruesome scenes which Lamb had refused to delete at Godwin’s request.

  Not all the Juvenile Library projects reached fruition. Coleridge’s sea poem and his proposal for three volumes of historical lives based on Plutarch’s model were abandoned and Wordsworth declined to contribute, but Hazlitt supplied a grammar, while Godwin wrote another and edited three anthologies of poetry.

  Mary Wollstonecraft had convinced him that poetry was an important part of education. The Poetical Class-Book, published in 1810 and probably assembled by Godwin himself, although its preface was written by a London schoolmaster, W.F. Mylius, introduced Mary to excerpts from Paradise Lost, to Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’ and Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’.24 The Junior Class Book, published in 1809 under Mylius’s name, seems also to have been Godwin’s work, so closely do the chosen texts reflect his views on social equality, benevolence and the importance of sincerity It would be rash to underestimate the degree to which Godwin, rather than Shelley, formed his daughter’s social and political views.

  The Library’s most enduring production, with the exception of Mary Jane’s 1814 version of The Swiss Family Robinson, was Mary Lamb’s graceful retelling, with contributions from her brother, of Shakespeare’s plays. The first to be published was The Tempest; its presentation of Shakespeare’s best-known monster anticipates the beautiful, hermaphroditic creature represented in the 1831 frontispiece to Frankenstein. This is the Creature not as his maker perceives him, but as he is entitled by his uncorrupted state to appear:

  ‘O father,’ said Miranda, in a strange surprize, ‘surely that is a spirit. Lord! how it looks about! Believe me, sir, it is a beautiful creature. Is it not a spirit?’

  ‘No, girl,’ answered her father, ‘it eats, and sleeps, and has senses such as we have.’25

  Mary herself was thought at one time to have been the eleven-year-old author of another publication on the Library’s list, a reworking of Charles Dibdin’s genial ‘Mounseer Nongtongpaw’. (The title puns on an Englishman’s mishearing of ‘n’entends pas’.) This was an error; her contribution has now been shown only to have extended to some spirited ideas for extra verses which Godwin proudly forwarded to the author he had employed.26 Mary’s hand has also been detected in The Parent’s Offering; or Tales for Children (1813) and The Prize: or, The Lace Makers of Missenden (1817). Both books appeared with the Library as the works of Caroline Barnard; one reason for seeing her as an alias for Mary Godwin is that she published nothing else, or nothing under this name. But pseudonyms, if we exclude the case of Godwin himself, were not a feature of the Library list. There are references
to a ‘Barnard’ in Godwin’s diary and the fact that the Godwins were in 1813 and 1817 living in the same street as a publisher called John George Barnard who did not have a juvenile list suggests a simple explanation. Why should members of Mr Barnard’s family not have been approached by the publisher who was their nearest neighbour?27

  *

  The first great change in Mary’s early life was marked by the Clairmont family’s invasion of her home. The second was presaged by a spring day in 1807 when Godwin visited a new and rather under-tenanted street on Snow Hill, in the heart of the city’s bookselling area.

  A tall cornerhouse was available for £150 per year. Five storeys high with a front door separating two curving windows, ideal for the display of books, 41 Skinner Street was big enough to house both the family and the business.28¶ Already deep in debt and behind with his rent, Godwin boldly decided to quit the Polygon, close up the Hanway Street shop and borrow again. Mrs Godwin and the girls moved in August; Godwin joined them in November. It is possible that they left: in stages to avoid attracting the attention of the Polygon’s unpaid landlady. Ominously, the move was attended by a savage return of Godwin’s ‘deliquium’.

  For Mary, the departure from pleasant, semi-rural Somers Town, from the view of fields and the northern heights of Finchley, Hampstead, Barnet, from the tranquil churchyard where her mother seemed only to lie asleep under the tall grass, marked the end of childhood.

  Notes

  1. Henry Crabb Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith Morley (1938), 1, p. 235.

  2. Godwin, 2, p. 58. Mary’s son, Sir Percy Shelley, read the proofs and probably supplied this account; her daughter-in-law advised. The description of Mrs Clairmont’s garden monologues comes from Maud Rolleston, Talks with Lady Shelley (1897), P. 35 (hereafter Talks).

  3. Herbert Huscher, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, VIII (1957) and XI (1960). See also G&S, ch. 18 and nn. 27, 28 and 30 to that chapter.

  4. Eliza Fenwick–WG (Abinger, Dep. c. 214), undated but evidently related to John Fenwick’s letter to WG of 24.11.1801 in the same file. Here, Fenwick refers to a row between his wife and Mrs Godwin (hereafter MJG). Later letters from Eliza show that Mrs Godwin’s well-meant bossiness continued to infuriate her.

  5. Charles Lamb (hereafter CL)–John Rickman, 16.9.1801, and hereafter, in The Letters of Charles Lamb to Which are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas (1935), 3 vols.

  6. CL–T. Manning, 29.3.1809.

  7. CL–William Hazlitt, 28.11.1810.

  8. Mary Lamb–Mrs Hazlitt, 7.11.1809.

  9. Crabb Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, 1, p. 235.

  10. Quoted in Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 206 and 235. Locke notes (p. 235) that someone has drawn a blue pencil through Place’s reference to Mrs Godwin.

  11. Aaron Burr–Theodasia Burr, 21.11.1808, in The Correspondence of Aaron Burr and his daughter, Theodasia, ed. Mark van Doren (New York, 1929), p. 264.

  12. Harriet Shelley (hereafter HS)–Catherine Nugent, October 1812, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols., ed. Frederick L. Jones (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964), 1, p. 327 (hereafter PBSL).

  13. Ann Godwin–WG, 15.11.1803 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516/1).

  14. A Picture of the New Town of Herne Bay, By a Lady (John Macrone, 1835), identified by William St Clair as the work of Mrs Godwin, who knew the area well.

  15. MJG–WG, September 1805 (Abinger, Dep. c. 523).

  16. WG, Thoughts on Man (1831): Godwin, Works, 6, ed. Mark Philp (Pickering & Chatto, 1993), pp. 21–3.

  17. WG–MWG, 24.9.1812 (BL, Ashley 3267). Published as Appendix A in volume 2 of Tlie Clairmont Correspondence, 2 vols., ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) (hereafter CC).

  18. MWS–Maria Gisborne (hereafter MG), 30.10–17.11.[1834] as dated in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (hereafter MWSL), 3 vols., ed. Betty T. Bennett (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–8), vol. 2.

  19. WG (as William Scolfield), Bible Stories (Philips, 1803), Preface, reprinted in Godwin, Works, 5, ed. Pamela Clemit (Pickering & Chatto, 1993)‚ P. 312.

  20. MWS, as Mrs Shelley, Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot (1820), unpublished in her lifetime. On 10 October 1821, her father rejected it for the Juvenile Library as unworthy of being expanded to publishable length; Mary herself appears to have given it no further thought. Professor Mario Curreli, Una certa Signora Mason (Edizioni ETS, 1997), p. 31, quoted from the original manuscript which he had read in the Dazzi-Cini archive; Maurice was published the following year with notes and an introduction by Claire Tomalin (Viking).

  21. WG–Mrs Fordham, 13.11.1811 (Abinger, Dep. b. 214/3). This was written when Mary had been five months away from home; Godwin might have been unusually sensitive to any imagined criticism of him as a parent at this time.

  22. MJG–Lady Mountcashell, 15.11.1814 (Pforzheimer). This comes from one of the copies made by Claire Clairmont (hereafter CC) of her mother’s letters, partly printed in previous works but without this section. To those who share my doubts about the stability of Claire’s mental state when she scratched out, rewrote and expanded her mother’s letters, it must remain questionable whether Trelawny, to whom the copy was to be dispatched, was receiving Mrs Godwin’s words or Claire’s.

  23. WG, History of England (Hodgkins, Hanway Street, 1806), p. 114.

  24. The collaboration between W.F. Mylius, of Red Lion Square, and Godwin remains puzzling. This British Library copy is bound in leather as ‘Class Book: Godwin’, but the preface, although unsigned by Mylius, refers to his previous success with the Junior Class Book and to subsequent discussions with other teachers. References to the pleasures of watching a child’s imagination at work sound like Godwin’s. The collection ranges across his whole circle of friends and includes the banker-poet Samuel Rogers, ‘Perdita’ Robinson, Thomas Holcroft, Coleridge, M.G. Lewis, Helen Maria Williams, Erasmus Darwin and Humphry Davy. There is a youthful contribution from Byron. A generous selection of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets are also included; so is an extract from John Ford’s play Warbreck, much admired by Godwin. [?]Philips’s ‘Winter at Copenhagen’ helped feed Mary’s imagination in Frankenstein; it contains striking descriptions of frozen billows, glassy plains and moonlit, ice-locked ravines. Old favourites, Cowper, Thomas and Young, are also given space. The book’s influence on Mary at a formative period would repay further study.

  Anybody interested in tracing Godwin’s publishing career might note that an 1819 edition of Mylius’s School Dictionary of the English Language, published together with Baldwin’s A New Guide to the English Tongue, claimed that 25,000 copies had been sold since the first printing in 1809!

  25. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (1807). These were initially published as separate booklets under Charles’s name.

  26. For a full account, see Emily Sunstein, ‘Young Mary Godwin’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 45, May 1996. The poem is printed as an appendix in MWS, Tlie Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 8, ed. Jeanne Moskal (Pickering & Chatto, 1996) (hereafter Selected Works).

  27. Emily Sunstein, in her biography Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Little, Brown, New York, 1989) (hereafter R&R), was the first to suggest that Mary wrote these two books. I am not convinced. Mrs Barnard writes livelier dialogue and has none of Mary’s interest in descriptive passages. Several critics have been impressed by the fact that The Prize is set near Marlow where Mary herself lived in 1817; the use of the phrase, ‘I must have a little patience’, in Mrs Barnard’s The Parent’s Offering has been thought significant. The context, of somebody waiting to be paid a shilling, is less than persuasive. Finally, the fact that Barnard wrote a story for Godwin called ‘The Fisherboy of Weymouth’ while Mary offered him Maurice, also about a fisherboy who had Weymouth connections, refutes the suggestion that Mrs Barnard was a pseudonym used by Mary.

  28. Skinner Street was then and remained a street
of booksellers and publishers. This is a comprehensive list: John George Barnard, 57 Skinner Street, 1802–24; Bumpus, 23, and then 3 Skinner Street, 1828–33; Sampson Low, 57 Skinner Street, 1837–?; John Major, 17 Skinner Street, 1817–22; George Richmond, 53 Skinner Street, 1849–?; Thomas Sharpe, 15 Skinner Street, 1845–8; Wallis & Son, 42 Skinner Street, 1814–26; William Wilson, 57 Skinner Street, 1840–56. M.J. Godwin’s Juvenile Library was at 41 Skinner Street, next to Wallis & Son, from 1807 to 1825. (Wallis, a publisher of children’s games and jigsaw puzzles, complemented the Juvenile Library rather than offering serious competition.)

  * Jane, whose full name was Clara Mary Jane, is better known today as Claire, the name she chose for herself in the autumn of 1814.

  † It is striking that, although letters to Mary’s stepsister bear references to Mary’s savage temper (see Chapter 21), there are no such indications in the correspondence which passed from Mary to her descendants, much of which was destroyed. It was important for Mary’s posthumous reputation that she should seem calm and reasonable; this was only a partial truth. The few hints we have, from E.J. Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and his son Thornton, and to a degree from Godwin himself, leave no doubt that Mary had a fierce temper, but that she was unusually calm until aroused.

  ‡ The years of war with France, when meat became expensive and wine difficult to obtain, were marked by a rise in water-drinking vegetarianism.