Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Now notwithstanding your ill humour which would not allow you to write to me yesterday night – I expect a very long letter tomorrow & a very kind forgiving one too or I will never speak to you again.

  Well Jefferson take care of yourself and be good – the Pecksie will soon be back all the better for her Dormouseish jaunt & remember nothing take away from my Maiëishness.

  For Maië girls are Maië girls

  Wherever they’re found

  In Air or in Water

  or In the ground.33

  Mary signed herself off as his affectionate Dormouse, this being one of the pet names chosen by Shelley to represent her various aspects. (Pecksie, a virtuous chick in The Robins, a children’s story by Mrs Trimmer, was good and dutiful; Maië was wild and free; the Dormouse, naturally, loved to sleep and live in the country.)

  Mary’s happiness – it was probably during this visit that William, born the following January, was conceived – did not survive the return to London. Four pages torn out of the joint diary cover a dark period during which she, Shelley and Claire stayed together at lodgings in Marchmont Street, off Brunswick Square. ‘Remember the first Spring at Mrs Harbottles,’ Mary reminded Claire five years later in a letter intended to prove that spring had always been a bad time for them: Mrs Harbottle had been their landlady at Marchmont Street.34 Shelley, returning alone to ‘my antient lodgings’ in 1816, told a correspondent that the Marchmont Street rooms were haunted by ‘the ghosts of old remembrances, all of whom contrive to make some reproach to which there is no reply’.35

  Who were these reproachful ghosts? Is it possible that Shelley’s relationship with Claire had become sexual on their visit to Sussex, and that an unwelcome pregnancy was disclosed at Marchmont Buildings? Was Mr Godwin in the right when, after seeing Mary and Shelley together in the Strand one day in March, he told Charles Clairmont that it was a pity such a beautiful young man could be so wicked?36

  If this was the case, and at least one relationship in the free-loving commune had thus gone beyond the stage of theorizing, a few jigsaw pieces fall into place. Mary’s feelings of hostility towards Claire became increasingly strident, while Shelley took refuge in the Stoics, reading Seneca ‘every day & all day’. On 10 May, two days after Mrs Knapp, the Godwins’ former landlady, had rejected an appeal by both Shelley and Mary to take Claire in as her lodger, Mary went and had a long talk with James Marshall, the friend she looked on almost as a father.

  On 12 May, Mary’s journal entries approached a climax of barely repressed anger. Now, it was beyond her even to write her stepsister’s name. Shelley had gone out with ‘his friend’ in the morning, and with ‘the lady’ in the-afternoon. In the evening, he had the chance to ‘indulge in’ – a phrase which she then crossed out – a last talk with ‘his friend’. The first thing Mary noted for the next day was: ‘Claire goes.’

  She went, and early, but Shelley went with her. When he left the house again after breakfast, together with Charles Clairmont, Mary began to suspect that they had cooked up a plan to join Claire and abandon her. Shelley was still absent when Hogg called late in the afternoon. She went to look for him in the nearby streets. She came back anxious, and alone. At half-past six, Shelley returned: ‘the business is finished,’ Mary wrote thankfully. Her next undated entry announced the start of a new journal ‘with our regeneration’. The observation could be construed as referring to a life free of money worries. More plausibly, it celebrated the advent of a life without Claire.

  Claire’s departure from London coincided precisely with the end of the first stage of negotiations between Shelley and his father, via their respective solicitors. Sir Timothy agreed to pay off his son’s debts, to buy back the post-obit bonds, and to provide him with a handsome allowance of £1,000 a year. Harriet was granted £200 against past expenses and promised a further £200 a year, payable quarterly from Shelley’s own annuity. (Having once told Harriet that he, Mary and Claire were able to survive on four pounds a week, Shelley thought this very handsome.) Godwin was still waiting for the balance of the money promised to him in 1814. A little dishonestly, Shelley told his father that Godwin was owed £1,200 and then kept back £200 for his own use. Since Godwin happened to be facing a lawsuit for just £200, he felt greatly injured by this. Mary Jane, writing to Mrs Mason on 28 July, told her that Godwin had thanked his benefactor, but in terms of ‘freezing coldness’. He continued, in accordance with their informal agreement, to demand the unpaid sum as his right. It is necessary, although hard, to keep reminding ourselves that Shelley had promised the older man – Godwin was now fifty-nine – his unreserved support. Godwin knew the details of the will. He could see for himself the wealth to which he believed Shelley had access.

  A part of the sum which Shelley kept back was used to pay the cost of transporting Claire to Lynmouth, the remote and pretty north Devon village where Shelley and Harriet had once lived, and of covering her needs. A young and possibly pregnant Londoner would not have been expected to settle into absolute solitude, so far from home, for an unspecified length of time. If Claire was, like Shelley and Harriet, being lodged at Mrs Blackmore’s cottage, she would need to pay for her board and food, and to be provided with a maid.§ If she was pregnant, there would be additional costs.

  Mary’s relief at being rid of her stepsister was matched by Claire’s joy at having escaped. Writing to Fanny after a fortnight in Devon, Claire told her that she was thankful to be living quietly after ‘so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion & hatred …’37 This is usually read as an allusion to Skinner Street. It is much more likely that Claire was referring to the household from which she had recently been ejected and to which Mary sincerely hoped she would never return.

  Notes

  1. The first date given for Mrs Godwin’s letter was 7 August. This is made most unlikely by the fact that Lady Mountcashell was with the Godwins on that day. Edward Dowden, printing extracts from her letters in an appendix to his biography of Shelley, noted that Mrs Godwin’s next letter refers to another sent on 14 August, in which she has given details of the elopement. The various dates offered in Claire’s copies of her mother’s letters remain puzzling; so does Mrs Godwin’s source of information for the runaways’ purchase of a donkey in Paris. Her daughter, presumably, had made contact.

  2. WG–John Taylor, 27.8.1814, in The Elopement of Shelley and Mary as related by William Godwin, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1911).

  3. PBS–HS, 15[14].9.1814.

  4. PBS–HS, 3.10.1814.

  5. PBS–HS, 5.10.1814.

  6. MWG, MWSJ, 6.12.1814.

  7. I have used the text of Lodore (1835) edited by Lisa Vargo (Broadview, 1998). Elements of Shelley’s character can be found here in Henry Derham, Edward Villiers and Horatio Saville; Mary drew on herself for aspects of Fanny Derham, Ethel Villiers and Ethel’s mother, Cornelia Lodore.

  8. Lodore, p. 339.

  9. Ibid., p. 337.

  10. PBS–MWG, 4.11.1814.

  11. PBS’s entry in the shared journal, Friday, 7.10.1814.

  12. Ibid., 14.10.1814.

  13. CCJ, 14.10.1814.

  14. PBS–MWG, 24.10.1814.

  15. MWG–PBS, 28.10.1814 (MWSL, 1).

  16. MWS–CC, 10.7.1845 (MWSL, 3).

  17. MWG, MWSJ, 28.10.1814.

  18. MWG–PBS, 28.10.1814.

  19. See St Clair, G&S, ch. 29, or the earlier biographies by Roger Ingpen (1917) and Newman Ivey White (1947) for detailed accounts of Godwin and Shelley’s financial transactions.

  20. MWG–PBS, 3.11.1814.

  21. MWG–PBS, 28.10.1814.

  22. PBS–MWG, 27.10.1814.

  23. Ibid.

  24. TJH–Thomas Love Peacock (hereafter TLP), 8.9.1817, in Shelley and His Circle, 5, ed. Donald H. Reiman (1973), p. 284.

  25. PBS, ‘Letter to Mrs Gisborne’, 1819.

  26. T.J. Hogg, Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, translated from the original Latin mss. under the immediate inspection of the prin
ce, by John Brown, Esq. (T. & E.T. Hookham, 1813; Folio Society, 1952), p. 131.

  27. Anonymous nine-page review, convincingly identified by Edward Dowden in his Life of Shelley (1888) as by PBS: Critical Review, VI, 6 (December 1814).

  28. MWG–TJH, 1.1.1815.

  29. MWG–TJH, 24.1.1815.

  30. MWG–TJH, 2.3.1815.

  31. MWG–TJH, 6.3.1815.

  32. Cline’s achievement is mentioned in a review of An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr Hunter’s Theory of Life, being the subject of the first Two Anatomical Lectures, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons of London by John Abernethy, FRS, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the College, in Edinburgh Review‚ XXIII, 1814, p. 385.

  33. MWG–TJH, 25.4.1815.

  34. MWS and PBS–CC, 20.3.1822.

  35. PBS–Byron, 11.9.1816.

  36. MWG, MWSJ, 23.3.1815, as reported by Charles Clairmont.

  37. CC–Fanny Imlay (hereafter FI), 28.5.1815 (CC, 1).

  * Mrs Godwin did lasting damage to Mary in this quarter; Mrs Mason always showed a marked preference for Jane, who was first presented to her as the innocent victim of Shelley’s plans.

  † Sir Bysshe’s will had been designed to keep the estate intact for future generations. Strangely, he and the lawyers had overlooked his own inheritance from his brother Sir John Shelley and it was his own interest in this part of the legacy which Shelley wanted to sell his father in exchange for instant cash and an allowance. A settlement was agreed in April 1815; the possibility of a further disposition of the estate was examined in a separate Chancery case the following year.

  ‡ The doctor had made an incision into the patient’s skull with a trepan, a small circular saw.

  § Mrs Godwin claimed that Claire was sent to a Mrs Bicknell, a widow at Lynmouth. Shelley’s former home there has two possible locations; a Mrs Blackmore still owned land there in the 1840s. The rate books for earlier years were unfortunately destroyed in 1980. (I am grateful to Mr John Travis of Lynmouth for his information on these points.)

  CHAPTER TEN

  RETREAT FROM LONDON

  1815–1816

  ‘We ought not to be absent any longer indeed we ought not – I am not happy at it … in fine either you must come back, or I must come to you directly …’

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley, 27 July 1815

  LITTLE CORRESPONDENCE SURVIVES FROM THE MONTHS AFTER Claire’s abrupt transportation to north Devon. Mary’s second journal, covering the period between May 1815 and July of the following summer, has also been lost. If Claire believed herself to be pregnant by Shelley, these disappearances may not be accidental.

  We do, however, have the booklist which Mary maintained with methodical care. She read voraciously and over a wide range; gothic novels are noted alongside travel books, philosophy, history, the classics and, as always, the books written by her father and mother. Many of these books were read with Shelley; just before Claire’s departure, they had been studying The Faerie Queene, where they found a name which suited Shelley’s necessarily elusive life remarkably well. She was his Maië-girl, his dutiful Pecksie, his home-loving Dormouse. He in turn now became Mary’s ‘sweet Elf: one of the last random entries in the 1814–15 journal in Shelley’s hand reads: ‘The Maie & her Elfin Knight.’ The Faerie Queene may also have helped to sow one of the seeds for Frankenstein: in Book II (canto x, Stanza 70) of Spenser’s poem, Mary read that ‘Prometheus did create / A man, of many parts from beasts derived’. Frankenstein ‘tortured the living animal’ to assemble the limbs for his Creature.

  Distance failed to keep Claire out of their lives. She was, at first, grateful to have been found such a charming retreat. Popular with artists and poets in the years of war with France when British cliffs and gorges had to satisfy their thirst for the grandeur of the Alps, Lynmouth was unusually picturesque. Fanny was sent a rapturous account of Claire’s pretty cottage, of plunging waterfalls and awe-inspiring mountains. Soon, however, she grew lonely. Shelley, besieged with letters, began laying plans for a visit.

  Devon’s remoteness made it attractive to a scandal-haunted couple expecting their second child. Mary was becoming increasingly miserable at her father’s refusal to see or even to communicate with her. Hogg was busy at the bar; Peacock was planning to move with his mother back to their old home near Egham in Surrey. It would, they thought, be pleasant to settle near Peacock one day; in the meantime, they settled for a holiday at Torquay. Lynmouth, situated on Devon’s north coast, was often misty and damp, not a good climate for a man who believed he might die of consumption. But Torquay lay on the sunny southern side of the county. Contemporary guidebooks extolled the little town’s health-giving air, only equalled, so they claimed, by the reviving breezes of Clifton. The fact that Clifton was the Shelleys’ next stop suggests that health concerns were helping to dictate their movements. Mary, terrified of losing her second child, was anxious to take good care of herself; Shelley, more than she, may have been attracted by the thought that they would be only a day’s drive from Claire, although there is no evidence that any visits were made to her. They left London for Devon sometime before June.

  Torquay in 1815 was a modest bathing resort which, like many such places, had been arrested in a semi-developed state by the Napoleonic wars. John Rennie’s stone quays had been built; the local abbey of Torre had been gentrified for comfortable occupation by an old local family, the Carys. A half-finished terrace of white stucco houses hinted at a prosperous future, but grass sprouted between the paving stones outside the front doors. Members of the public were invited to climb a winding path to view Woodbine Cottage, the picturesque retreat of a Mrs Johnes of Herefordshire. Mary and Shelley probably lodged in the terrace below it, overlooking the broad blue crescent of Torbay.

  Torquay was in the news that summer, but not because a runaway couple had taken up residence there. Captain Maitland of the Bellerophon, one of the warhorses of Nelson’s fleet, sailed back from France to Torbay with Napoleon as his voluntary passenger; the fallen emperor had decided to entrust himself to the British government as likely to be the most merciful of his enemies. The Devon locals, and the crew, were charmed by him, by his compliments on the view – quite like Porto Ferrajo at Elba, he was heard to remark – and his willingness to display himself on deck. Strong sympathy was felt when he was taken off to Plymouth in preparation for his exile to St Helena.*

  Mary chose Torquay for the setting of a simple children’s story, Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot, written five years later when she was living in Italy. Describing the cottage where Maurice finds a home, Mary lovingly placed it under a bower of trees, at the foot of one of the red cliffs which buttress this part of the coast. A flowery bank rises by the cottage walls; a daisy-scattered green spreads beyond the door. The picture is sweetly conventional, but the loving precision of detail suggests that Mary’s memories were happy ones. As at Salt Hill, she could revel in having Shelley to herself; together, they again read Fleetwood, their favourite among Godwin’s novels. (Shortly before leaving London, they had read his most recent work, a study of Milton’s nephews in which Godwin aired his unchanged republican views. No longer seen as a dangerous influence, he won some friendly notices.)

  Fleetwood had led them to Lucerne and Lake Uri; now it seemed to point them towards North Wales, and the wild landscape in which Godwin had set the opening chapters. On 22 June, Shelley wrote to his old friend John Williams at Tremadoc, to ask if he knew of a house near the Caernarvon coast which they could take as tenants. Williams was well used to Shelley’s vacillations; the following week, he heard that they were planning to rent a house near Windsor, located for them by Peacock.

  What happened next is a mystery. On 30 June, Shelley told Williams that he was leaving Torquay the following day to look at the Windsor house. Four weeks later, Mary, writing from Clifton, on the Avon Gorge, addressed an agitated letter to his London lodgings in Marchmont Street: ‘We have been now a lon
g time separated,’ she reminded him. He had not found a house. Even if he did not wish her to join him, she intended to do so, ‘for I am quite sick of passing day after day in this hopeless way’.1

  The cause of her worry became apparent in the next paragraph. She had written to Claire at Lynmouth several times and had no answer – was Claire, perhaps, with him in London? Not daring to accuse, she suggested that Claire might have learned his whereabouts and decided to join him of her own accord: ‘it would not in the least surprise me … that she should have taken some such freak –’

  Pregnant and without friends in a town she had never visited, always conscious of the ease with which Shelley had abandoned Harriet the previous year, Mary was frantic. All her self-control was gone. She veered from scolding – how could he forget that the next day was the anniversary of their elopement, and not wish her to join him for his birthday on 4 August? – to wistful hints of how wild and Maiëish she planned to be when they next met. All their pet nicknames were invoked to coax him into a response. Finally, she became abject: ‘do not be angry dear love – Your Pecksie is a good girl & is quite well now again – except a headache when she waits so anxiously for her loves letters – dearest best Shelley pray come to me – pray pray do not stay away from me.’2