Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  2. Mrs de Boinville–T.J. Hogg (hereafter TJH), 18.4.1814, in T.J. Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858), 2 of a projected 4, p. 533.

  3. William Godwin, Political Justice, Book 8, ch. 8, Appendix: ‘Of Co-operation, Cohabitation, and Marriage’.

  4. Hogg, Shelley, 2, p. 538.

  5. PBS–TJH, 4.10.1814.

  6. MWS, ‘Life of Shelley’ (1823?) Bodleian, Ms Shelley adds. c. 5, f. 113V: facsimile and transcript ed. A.M. Weinberg, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 22, pt 2 (1997), pp. 266–87, at pp. 266–7.

  7. PBS–TJH, 4.10.1814.

  8. HS–Catherine Nugent, 20.11.1814 (see Chapter 6, n. 9).

  9. Shelley Memorials, ed. Lady Shelley (1859), p. 68.

  10. W.M. Rossetti, Memoir of Shelley (1886), p. 77.

  11. PBS–HS, 14.7.1814.

  12. HS–Catherine Nugent, 20.10.1813.

  13. Described by Edward Dowden to Richard Garnett, 6.12.1883, in Letters about Shelley, ed. R.S. Garnett (1917), p. 84.

  14. The original book is in the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California (RP 114869).

  15. MJG–Lady Mountcashell. Letter dates from variant copies are 2 September, 16 August and 20 August. For further warnings against believing Mrs Godwin’s letters in the only form we have them, transcribed and then rewritten by Claire, the reader may wish to read the wise words of Professor Marion Kingston Stocking in her edition of the Clairmont correspondence, especially p. 659, n. 19. We can enjoy the liveliness of Mrs Godwin’s letters; we cannot place our faith in them.

  16. Godwin’s letter to Shelley exists only in an extract, cited in a Sotheran’s sale catalogue (1923), cat. 784, no. 841. St Clair (G&S, p. 550) notes that the whereabouts of this letter and an earlier one to Shelley, of 10 July, sold in the same lot, are unknown.

  17. PBS–HS, 13.8.1814. Here he urged her ‘to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm & constant friend

  18. PBS, writing on 2 August 1814 in the journal which he and Mary had decided to keep together on their travels. Godwin’s journal entry starkly records the hour and date of the runaways’ departure.

  19. MJG–Lady Mountcashell, 15.11.1814, in Dowden’s paraphrase, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 (1886), Appendix, pp. 546–8.

  * Shelley remained strongly influenced by Political Justice, in which, in the 1793 edition, Godwin had written: ‘Marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.’3

  † The firm was sufficiently well-known for Hannah More in Florio (1786) to write of a young man: ‘For he, to keep him from the vapours, / Subscribed at Hookham’s, saw the papers.’

  ‡ Frederick L. Jones, in his edition of Shelley’s letters, inserted the name of Mary here as the female in his mind; since Shelley’s next paragraph describes the beginning of his relationship with Mary and dates it to June, after the Field Place walk, the woman seems likely to have been Cornelia, rather than an anticipated Mary.

  § The use of laudanum and the mention of a doctor who lived in Hatton Garden suggest that Shelley had been attended by Joseph Adams, the Hatton Garden physician who supplied Coleridge with laudanum and who, in 1816, recommended him to the care of the Gillmans.

  PART II

  Freedom

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SIX WEEKS IN EUROPE

  1814

  ‘How much is lost by those who pass their lives in cities – They are never visited by those sweet feelings which to recollect alone is heaven … how boundless & terrific would be their surprize if they could suddenly become philosophers & view things in their true & beautiful point of view.’

  The Journals of Claire Clairmont, 17 August 18141

  NOVELTY SHED GLAMOUR OVER EVERYTHING THEY SAW. Looking back over a distance of twelve years as she sat down to review a clutch of travel books, Mary still had a vivid memory of the thrill of her first days in France. The narrow streets of Calais were as thick with English visitors as if they were holidaying at Brighton, but to the young travellers, staring at the ladies of conscious fashion, hair scraped into precarious domes twice the height of their heads, skimpy dresses fluttering from waists which seemed to have taken refuge in their owners’ armpits, much seemed wonderfully and comically foreign.

  [W]e saw with extasy the strange costume of the French women, read with delight our own descriptions in the passport,* looked with curiosity on every plât, fancying that the fried leaves of artichokes were frogs; we saw shepherds in opera-hats, and post-boys in jack-boots; and (pour comble de merveille) heard little boys and girls talk French; it was acting a novel, being an incarnate romance.2

  Memory made everything delightful. Mary had forgotten the heat, baking her until she was ready to faint as their quaint two-wheeled carriage rattled towards the capital across a landscape of broad, shadowless cornfields. Unpacking her few possessions in the gloomy rooms of the Hôtel de Vienne, she had a sudden pang of homesickness. Shelley was called in to peruse and admire the little box of her own writings, of letters from her father and her dear Isabella which she had carried away from Skinner Street. Later, they set out to explore the city; this, after all, was Paris and they were, after a fashion, on their honeymoon.

  That night, Shelley noted in the journal that he and Mary had been ‘too happy to sleep’.3 Making love, discussing poetry, forgetting to eat, they discussed the letter in which – Mary had produced it from her box of writings – poor Harriet had suggested certain phrases which she might use to cool Shelley’s passion. If Mary felt any pity for Shelley’s wife, she chose not to acknowledge it in the journal of which Shelley was, at the beginning, the chief keeper. Perhaps she felt none; she knew, after all, very little of Harriet beyond the accounts which Shelley had given her, and these had not been kind. The fact that Mary had promised to stay away from Shelley did not mean she had to like the angry, tearful young woman to whom she had reluctantly given her word.

  Reverently, Shelley noted down the wisdom of Mary’s observations and the engrossing nature of their conversations. He was still a little in awe of his brilliant prize. ‘I was not before so clearly aware how much of the colouring our own feelings throw upon the liveliest delineations of other minds,’ he noted on 3 August, after Mary had read and offered her own interpretation of ‘some passages from Ld Byron’s poems’. These probably included ‘To Thyrza’, which she had written into the back of the copy of Queen Mab that Shelley had sent her in July.

  Paris disappointed a couple whose imaginations had painted it in revolutionary colours. Frances Shelley, a distant relation by marriage of Shelley’s who visited the French capital the following year, was entranced by the Tuileries gardens, where the orange trees were in blossom and the fountains were a reproach to London’s arid parks; Shelley and Mary thought them formal and dull. Notre Dame was less impressive than they had expected; they had trouble in finding a painting to admire – it seems to have been Nicholas Poussin’s Winter – among the splendid loot Napoleon had assembled at the Louvre. Only the handsome outer ring of boulevards, where chattering crowds and tall trees hung with lamps reminded Frances Shelley of Vauxhall Gardens, were found to be quite elegant and pleasant.

  It was easier for Frances, smart, wealthy and wholly in favour of the restored monarchy, to enjoy the city. She and her husband, like all prudent travellers, had come armed with letters of recommendation to French bankers. Shelley, leaving England in haste, had brought none. Instead of the money which his wealthy radical publishing friend Thomas Hookham had promised to send out, he received a letter reproaching him for irresponsible behaviour. On 4 August, his birthday – ‘I thought it had been the 27th of June,’ he romantically noted, remembering a moonlit evening at St Pancras churchyard – Shelley was forced to go looking for anyone who would pay a few francs for his watch and chain.

  Trailing around the streets of a city where the absence of pavements obliged t
hem to pick their way among the constant press of carriages, beggars and hawkers, and where the primly dressed and bonneted English girls felt embarrassed and out of place among the revealing, clinging gowns of Parisian ladies, they could not be blamed for disliking the city. It was heightened by their sense of isolation. Helen Maria Williams, the republican poetess from whom they had hoped for glorious stories of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life in Paris, was out of town; a pompous Frenchman who bored them to tears with boasts of his patriotic acts, promised them everything and ended by producing nothing but stories. The best Shelley could do was to accept a reluctant loan of £60 from a banker to whom Hookham sent a grudging introduction. (Hookham’s reluctance can be easily understood; not only was he a friend of Godwin’s, but Shelley had coolly instructed him and his brother to look after hapless, abandoned Harriet.)

  Sixty pounds was not a fortune, but Shelley calculated that they could, with care, cover the journey to Switzerland, if they travelled on foot. Early on the morning of 8 August, he and Jane went to market and came back with the ideal travelling companion, a donkey to carry their cases and books. Typically, they forgot to load it with their greatest treasure. The box containing Mary’s manuscripts and letters, including all those that Shelley had written to her that summer, was left behind at the hotel and never recovered. This may be the simple explanation for the puzzling absence of Godwin’s many letters to his daughter in the first sixteen years of her life. It does not explain the disappearance of her replies.

  Shelley and Jane had been fleeced; they were only a few miles out of Paris when the donkey sank down on its knees. Half carrying, half dragging the poor beast to the next village, they traded it in for a mule. The seller drove a hard bargain; travellers, as they had ruefully begun to understand, were a prime target for sharp dealing in a hungry country.

  Slowly, and in increasingly low spirits, they made their way southeast towards Troyes. The heat was relentless; the sun beat down on a grim post-war landscape of burnt-out villages and blank, uncultivated fields. Each long day ended with dread of what kind of night they would pass. Milk and sour bread were sometimes all that was available to eat; at one inn, Jane’s pathetic account of rats scampering over her face and her terror of their lecherous host obliged Shelley and Mary to take her into their bed. Shelley, usually a vigorous and enthusiastic walker, managed to sprain his ankle, forcing him to ride on the mule while the girls, fanning the flies from their black silk travelling dresses, plodded behind him along the dusty, interminable lanes. A week into their pilgrimage, on 13 August, they decided to give up walking; the mule was traded in part exchange for a carriage.

  This was the first day on which Shelley found time to send Harriet an account of the journey. Any guilt he may have felt was absolved by a generous suggestion that she should make her way to Geneva and join them at ‘some sweet retreat’ in the Swiss mountains. Hookham’s friend, Thomas Love Peacock, a coolly witty and erudite classicist who had spent time with them in Wales and had grown very fond of Shelley’s young wife, would advise her on travelling expenses. She was urged not to forget the necessity of bringing various legal documents which he would require.4

  Shelley’s letter was tactless, bizarre and entirely characteristic. There was no thought for Harriet’s feelings at being deserted, or for the fact that she was being invited to travel abroad for the first time, and alone, when she was five months pregnant. Shelley, we may be sure, believed he had Harriet’s own happiness at heart. She would be away from Eliza Westbrook, the sister he had come to regard – for no good reason – as Harriet’s evil genius; his wife in name only, she would be a part of the happy, high-minded group guided by his beloved Mary’s noble mind. Mary was probably shrewd enough to guess that Harriet would never take up such an unappealing offer – and indeed Harriet did not. Shelley asked his wife to address her answer to Neufchatel, but he had no response.

  Flat fields gave way at last to wooded slopes and bubbling streams; Jane, inspired by the approach to Switzerland – her homeland, in her own romantic view – decided that she too would like to keep a diary. Mary had none to lend her. Shelley produced a red leather notebook into which he had already written some Latin and Italian passages, probably while taking language lessons from Cornelia Turner. It is impossible to suppose that Jane, admiring Shelley as she did, ignored his entries; no great linguistic skill was needed to discover their passionate nature. One read as follows:

  Lecto me brachiis tenebat, delicio voluptatis pene deliquo cecidi. Basies mutes vitae reclamabant delecta labia! Timores quiescebat.5

  (He was holding me in his arms in the bed. I almost died of madness and delight. Beloved lips were again seeking mutual kisses of life. He calmed my fears.) Even if Jane had not viewed Shelley in a sexual light until then, a sixteen-year-old girl must have been troubled and excited by words which sounded so seductive. Did they carry some secret message for her? Why had he not torn the pages out?

  Two days after Jane received this ambiguous gift, the girls both took note of an encounter with a lovely child, Marguerite Pascal. Shelley was enchanted by her; only the reluctance of the girl’s father had prevented him from adopting her on the spot. The nonchalance with which the impulse was recorded is disconcerting, but it was not out of keeping with Shelley’s impulsive nature. His sister Hellen remembered how, during a school holiday, Shelley once tried to adopt a pretty little travelling acrobat; in 1811, he had investigated the possibility of obtaining and educating two young girls.6 One of his first projects on their return to England would be to kidnap his sisters from school. Mary did not disapprove; her own mother had fostered a little orphan girl for a brief period and Godwin had acted as the father-figure to a whole row of young men. Firmly believing that a child’s mind was the product of its environment rather than its parentage, she was as willing as Shelley to become a social tutor.

  Marguerite Pascal was not available for the interesting experiment, and the travellers continued on their way, their spirits rising as the Alps began to show white heads on the horizon. Mesdames de Staël and Récamier, making their own pilgrimage to the Alps, had turned back with a sniff at such overrated crags – and because the sun had started to burn their daringly exposed bosoms. Mary and Jane, in their sensible high-necked dresses and with Wordsworth’s raptures all ready for quotation, were appropriately enthralled. ‘Their immensity staggers the imagination,’ Shelley noted on their behalf on 19 August, when the Alps were still some hundred miles away in the distance, ‘& so far surpasses all conception that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they are indeed mountains.’

  Three is an uncomfortable number for a honeymoon; hints of irritation and resentment had begun to surface.7 They were near the Swiss frontier when Mary, looking very sad, raised the subject with her companions of the difficulties always caused by men’s behaviour. Shelley quickly interpreted this as a reproach to him for separating her from her father. Mary denied it and no more was said; Jane noted that Mary had not been entirely truthful. A little further along, Jane made another spiky comment. Shelley had suggested that Mary should bathe naked in a stream – it was screened from view by overhanging bushes – and let him gather leaves to dry her. Mary, according to Jane’s record, grew indignant at the idea of doing anything so improper. The sense that Jane herself would have stripped off and plunged in without a qualm is unmissable. Increasingly confident and obstreperous in her opinions, Jane earned herself a mild rebuke from Shelley. His comments on her character did not please; she noted them down, then mutinously ripped the page out of her diary.

  The Alps did not disappoint; Switzerland did. Shelley’s ardent and frequent readings of Fleetwood had been their chief preparation for the scenery. Although Godwin had never left Britain, careful research enabled him to provide a strikingly vivid and exact account of Lake Uri, the location they had chosen for their future home.

  It was a deep and narrow water, about nine miles in length, and skirted on both sides with rocks uncommon
ly wild and romantic, some perpendicular, some stretching over our heads, and intercepting the view of the upper sky, and clothed for the most part with forests of beech and pine, that extended themselves down to the very edge of the water. The lake was as smooth as crystal, and the arching precipices that inclosed it gave a peculiar solemnity to the. gloom … I thought of William Tell, and the glorious founders of the Swiss liberty; I thought of the simple manners which still prevail in the primitive cantons; I felt as if I were in the wildest and most uninhabited islands of the South Sea.8

  Fed on this and the exotic setting of the Chevalier Lawrence’s accounts of free love among the Indian community of the Nairs, Shelley had felt free to dream, and the girls with him. This was where they would settle to live in communal affection and, if she so wished, permit Harriet to join them for enlightening discussions.

  The reality fell somewhat short. The Swiss, stolid and smiling, showed none of William Tell’s fire; the weather was too bad to allow them to cross the lake; no cottages were available. Instead, they had to make do with some rooms in a large ugly house at Brunnen on Lake Lucerne, from which they could dimly see, through a mist of wind and water, the chapel where Tell had leapt ashore and regained his liberty. Mary and Shelley sat out by the dark water, reading Tacitus and discussing the opening for a novel Shelley wanted to write.9 Jane, sent off to read by herself elsewhere, glowered up at the little mountainside chalets for spoiling the view. Too many people, and too much money, she decided; all were ‘rich contented & happy. A poor beggar is never seen – The people are uninteresting for they are most immoderately stupid & almost ugly to deformity’10 Having expressed her views to her satisfaction, she retired early to bed.