Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Her mother, in her painful correspondence with Gilbert Imlay, had never written a more heart-rending letter. It was effective; Mary and Shelley were reunited and settled in their new home at Bishopsgate on the edge of Windsor Park by the end of that week.

  *

  In London, having settled Mary at Clifton, Shelley had been visiting William Lawrence, the eminent surgeon who had advised Mary on her health since 1812. Lawrence, a handsome ambitious man then in his mid-thirties, was of a different cast of mind to his young patients. He considered, for example, that it was entirely rational to derive Africans from monkeys, and to see them as something less than human, showing ‘an almost entire want of … elevated sentiments, manly virtues, and moral feelings’.3 The linking of Africans to monkeys was not unusual at that time; Lawrence was a man of his times in deducing that Africans were morally deficient. He showed more sense as a physician; Shelley was told to forget all about consumption and his imminent death. Two months later, Shelley told Hogg that, thanks to Lawrence, he had never felt better.

  The alienated condition of black people must have preyed on Mary’s mind during her lonely weeks at Clifton, forming a significant contribution to the social intention behind the celebrated Creature she brought to life in Frankenstein the following year. Made fashionable in the years when its neighbour, Bristol, had thrived on the slave trade, Clifton had fallen on hard times through the failure of its hot well to draw customers away from Bath, through the national collapse of development plans at the beginning of the century, through the falling price of sugar and through the official end to traffic in slaves after the Abolition Act of 1807.† But abolition did not mean that slavery in England had been wholly eradicated; a slave was identified as part of the estate of one Thomas Armstrong of Dalston in 1822 and the use of slaves in the domestic environment lasted well into the nineteenth century. Individual slaves were being rescued from such situations as late as 1843, although slavery had reached a formal end with the Emancipation Act of 1833. Walking, as all Clifton ladies did when they went shopping or promenading, down the shabby hill of unfinished terraces and half-built crescents into elegant, slightly raffish Bristol, Mary found herself in a world where it would have been impossible to ignore the presence of a black population with recent and bitter memories.

  Her interest in their situation cannot be doubted. One of Godwin’s closest friends, John Thelwall, had been among the London Corresponding Society members who spoke out against slavery in the 1790s when Manhood Suffrage and the Freedom of Slaves were the twin planks on which the Society stood; Godwin had devoted a whole section to the subject in his first draft of Political Justice. Shelley and Mary shared Godwin’s views. They refused to eat sugar because it came from West Indian plantations, a principled decision at which Peacock poked kindly fun in Melincourt, his second novel.

  In October 1814, at a time when French slavers were seeking to renew their trading rights – 806 petitions of protest were delivered to the House of Commons – Shelley had drawn Mary’s attention to a long letter in The Times on the terrible conditions of the slaver caravans in Africa. He knew she would share his feelings: ‘See where I have marked with ink,’ he wrote, ‘and stifle your horror and indignation until we meet.’4 Two months later, they read Mungo Park’s account of his travels in Africa in 1795–7.5 This work, published in 1799, had shocked the nation at the time; Mary was disgusted by Park’s argument that European traders were doing nothing discreditable, since a third of the country had been enslaved before their arrival. ‘Read and finish Mungo Park’s travels,’ Mary noted: ‘they are very interesting & if the man was not so prejudiced they would be a thousand times more so.’6 Two months later, she read a study of the West Indian slave trade by Bryan Edwards.

  Edwards was a reasonably liberal man, but here, as with William Lawrence, Mary encountered the view of a non-white as inferior, belonging to a different species: the African, in particular, was connected to monkeys by both descent and behaviour. Turning from Edwards’s book, Mary could see black men being worked on Bristol Quay; she could hear the callously pragmatic views of those who had owned and now technically employed them. Surrounded by troubling evidence that abolition had brought little change of attitude to this part of England, Mary was provided with a new element of the story she began to write the following summer. In the nameless Creature, whose yellow skin, black hair and giant limbs allowed her to combine contemporary perceptions of the Eastern ‘lascars’ with the African and West Indian, she examined the plight of a seemingly non-human being, judged by his looks to be incapable of moral feelings or elevated sentiments. This was surgeon Lawrence’s view; it was shared by many of the good people of Clifton and Bristol and, indeed, by many churchmen and politicians of the time.

  *

  If Mary’s guess about her stepsister’s presence in London was correct, her visit had been brief; she was at Lynmouth on 4 August, Shelley’s birthday, when Mary rejoined him. This was probably the period Claire remembered most poignantly in 1835, when she described her stay in Devon as a time of exile and wretched loneliness.7 Her spirits were not improved by a September letter from her charming and good-hearted brother Charles, in which he described the enjoyable time he was having staying at Shelley and Mary’s new home near Windsor. The possibility of Claire’s joining them was never raised; in October, she went to Ireland with her brother for a short time, when he was expecting to help open a distillery in Wexford. By the end of the year, however, both the Clairmonts were jobless and back in London.

  A house without Claire in it was always a happier one for Mary. What they lost in musical entertainment, without Claire to play the piano and sing to them, they gained in peace. At Bishopsgate, living in a two-storey house of red brick, Mary had a garden for the first time since childhood days at the Polygon, a small staff to perform the domestic tasks which she never relished, and splendid views. Surrounded by abbeys, or their attractive ruins, they were next to the celebrated Cooper’s Hill, one of the most admired prospect points in southern England. Beyond the house windows, a view across wild Bishopsgate Heath stretched all the way to the shadowy paths of Chapel Wood and the great artificial lake of Virginia Water. Old Windsor was a mile away across the meadows. This was where, as Mary must have known, her father had come in 1801 to attend the funeral of a lady for whom he had considerable affection and some respect, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, the poet, novelist and actress who had saved herself from prison for debt by becoming mistress to the Prince of Wales, until he dropped her. Following her death, Mrs Robinson’s cottage and tomb had become quite popular with tourists.

  Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting the area in 1780 when she was employed as a widow’s companion, had been entranced by it; so now was her daughter. In her novel The Last Man (1826), Mary borrowed the name ‘Perdita’ for one of her characters and recreated the setting with great tenderness. Perdita’s cottage, ‘a humble dwelling’, has often been taken for a description of her own home.‡

  Shelley and Mary saw little, if anything, of their neighbours in the large, prosperous hillside houses which, encircling Englefield Heath, presided over the landscape; their companions were Hogg, when he could escape from his legal work, Charles Clairmont, guiltily abandoning his adored stepfather to the volatile moods of Mrs Godwin, and Peacock. Tactfully, perhaps, Peacock took Charles off on the all-day walks which were his own favourite summer pastime, while Mary studied or gardened and Shelley began work on Alastor, his first long poem since Queen Mab. Gathered together at the Bishopsgate house in the evenings, they discussed the return of the French monarchy, quarrelled about vegetarianism, with which Peacock had no sympathy, and agreed on the pernicious nature of the government. They decided, one lovely August night, to take inspiration from one of Peacock’s poems, ‘The Genius of the Thames’, and row a boat up to the river’s source. They set off the following day.

  For Mary, loving the lap of water but dreading the violence of the sea, this must have been an idyllic trip. Sadly, we
have no letters or journal notes to turn to for her sensations; imagination must fill the gap. Carefully bonneted and with a travelling case under her seat, she left the rowing and manoeuvres through an endless chain of locks to her companions, while she gazed across the smoothness of the river’s breadth to pretty old houses buried behind high banks of purple loosestrife and golden water-irises, to church towers and meadows, the fast flicker of a current pulling towards a watermill, tiny heron-guarded islets, clumps of flowering rushes, patient fishermen, slow barges, England at peace.

  At Oxford, they left the boat to visit Shelley’s former rooms and to look at the college quads and the suite of venerable rooms which housed the Bodleian Library (Charles, describing it all to Claire, grew very Shelleyan and disdainful about the folly and corruption of a university which expelled those who dared to tell the truth.) Wandering at twilight through the high grass of Lechlade churchyard, Shelley found the setting for one of his gentlest early poems. ‘Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild / And terrorless as this serenest night …’ he wrote in ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard’.

  Elated by a sense of following the movements of the mind itself in the turns and twists of the river, Shelley wanted the journey to go on for ever. Why stop at the source of the Thames? Why not go on, by means of the canals, for a two-thousand-mile tour of Britain? Even Charles was a little shaken by this proposal, which was defeated by increasingly shallow water and by a thirsty herd of cattle which blocked their progress at Cricklade. Worn out – all four of them were obliged to get out and drag the boat through a mire of rushes at one point – they turned towards home. Peacock, who relived the trip in a couple of nostalgic chapters of Crotchet Castle, was especially pleased with himself for having bullied Shelley into eating three whole chops on the journey Ten days of physical exercise rather than a single carnivorous lapse brought striking results. ‘We have all felt the good effects of this jaunt,’ Charles told Claire, ‘but in Shelley the change is quite remarkable; he has now the ruddy healthy complexion of the Autumn upon his countenance, & he is twice as fat as he used to be.’8

  Peacock’s novels, most of which were written between the Bishopsgate summer and his engagement in 1819 as a clerk at the East India House, perfectly capture the balance in Shelley and Mary’s household between unconscious comedy and high earnestness. The Misfortunes of Elphin includes, in a chapter on ‘The Education of Taliesin’, a sardonic account of life on post-obits which makes one wish that the author had tried harder to restrain Shelley’s financial dealings; Melincourt, the novel which Shelley, Mary and Byron all thought his best, reminds us again of how deeply committed they were to opposing the slave trade. Best known for Lord Haut-Ton, a chivalrous orang-outang in whom Peacock poked fun at Lord Monboddo’s belief in a lost simian civilization and at an orang-outang’s favourable prospects as a parliamentary candidate, Melincourt offers us a taste of the principled discussions held around the Bishopsgate dining-table.

  Mr Forester proceeded: ‘If every individual in this kingdom, who is truly and conscientiously an enemy to the slave-trade, would subject himself to so very trivial a privation as abstinence from colonial produce, I consider that a mortal blow would be immediately struck at the roots of that iniquitous system.’9

  Contradicted, Mr Forester makes a passionate and Shelleyan argument for the importance of individual example. Mr Forester is Peacock’s most unequivocal presentation of the Shelleyan attitude. He was not always able to keep a straight face about Shelley’s fancies: Peacock’s later memoirs include stories of Shelley jumping into a ditch to hide from invisible bailiffs, and announcing that Mr Williams of Tremadoc had brought news to Bishopsgate of a fiendish new plot by Sir Timothy to have him placed in an asylum. In 1814, however, Mr Forester’s attitude was one which Peacock endorsed.

  The atmosphere of intellectual debate was one in which Mary had thrived under her father’s roof and she was an active participant in the discussions. As classicists, however, the men outranked her. Naturally studious, she worked at remedying the deficiency. While Shelley, lying out under the great oaks of Windsor, began work on Alastor, Mary applied herself to Latin exercises. Writing to Hogg at the end of September, Shelley told him that her progress was ‘such as to satisfy my best expectations’.10 The tone is that of a tutor: was he consciously taking over the role of Godwin in her life? A month later, he wrote to offer personal liability to one of Godwin’s most persistent creditors, for a sum of £200 or £250. Since this was approximately the sum which had been withheld from his payment to Godwin earlier in the summer, Shelley may have hoped that his obligations, fiscal and educational, had now been met.

  Mary took great pride in Alastor, the first poem of any length which Shelley had written since meeting her. Reverence and gratitude, not lust and dreams of escape, were at the heart of the poem according to her interpretation. Here, she would tell readers of the first collected edition of Shelley’s poems in 1839, they would find ‘the outpouring of his own emotions … softened by the recent anticipation of death’.11 It was all most characteristic; descriptions of the forest scenery and of the majesty of nature were peculiarly fine.

  The enthusiasm Mary showed for the first major poem written since Shelley and she had been together is understandable. It becomes heroic when we look more closely at the poem. Hearing that a writer for the Eclectic Review had objected to one passage in the poem as profane, she declared that ‘the world must be going mad’, or so an equally indignant Claire Clairmont reported to a friend.12 The reviewer had taken offence at a startlingly bold presentation of sexual climax. It represented the poet’s surrender to his muse.

  He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled

  His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet

  Her panting bosom: … she drew back a while,

  Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,

  With frantic gesture and short breathless cry

  Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.

  Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night

  Involved and swallowed up the vision …13

  Mary was no prude. She praised the poem and defended the passage. She chose not to comment on the fact that the river voyage of the poem represents a restless, driven flight. (The word ‘fled’ recurs five times between lines 345 and 365.) Privately, as a faithful copyist and devoted reader, she must have wondered what Alastor was telling her about the domestic plans of her elfin knight, however contented he might appear.

  *

  Mary’s second child was born on 24 January 1816. They called him William, after his grandfather. Shelley, writing to Godwin the following day, conveyed the news with the pointed comment that it would no doubt please Fanny and Mrs Godwin to know that the confinement had been favourable, and that the baby was well. Somebody else – Mary? – told him the baby’s name: ‘William, nepos,’ Godwin noted in his diary, in an entry that defies any attempt to interpret his feelings.

  The relationship between the two households had not improved; money, as before, was the primary reason, cloaking the fathomless bitterness of Godwin’s sense that Shelley had knowingly and wilfully destroyed his daughter’s good reputation. In July, when Mary was at Clifton, Godwin had been relatively cheerful, urging Fanny and Mrs Godwin, who were holidaying outside London, to share his relief that the burden of debt was about to be lifted. The autumn, however, had heralded a new wave of hungry creditors and he looked to Shelley to keep them off.

  Shelley, as he wearily and repeatedly explained, was in no position to help. By March 1816, a test legal case had shown that the terms of Sir Bysshe’s will could not be tampered with in the way that both he and his father had hoped. Sir Timothy had agreed to pay some more, but not all, of his debts and to continue his annuity of £1,000 a year, of which £200 would, as promised, be used for annual payments to Harriet.§ Neither Godwin nor his chosen go-between, the agreeable but somewhat inept Thomas Turner, were able to grasp the fact that Shelley was no longer in a position to a
ct as his benefactor or even to fulfil any past promises which Godwin might now regard as debts. The most he could do was to offer an untruthful assurance that he would not leave the country, despite his wish to hide Mary and himself ‘from that contempt which we so unjustly endure’.14

  Shelley’s letters of explanation had been models of courtesy until now, especially given the cold rudeness of Godwin’s responses. On 6 March, however, Godwin went too far. He indicated that he was at last ready, not to condone, but to forgive. Forgiveness, in this case, was not good enough. Shelley, tried beyond his limits by Godwin’s pompous phrases, sent an explosive reply. Could Godwin not see how his own behaviour had helped to destroy the reputation of ‘a young family, innocent and benevolent and united’ and who, thanks partly to Godwin’s ostentatious disapproval, were now ranked with ‘prostitutes and seducers’? Why, if Godwin was so high-minded, was he still ready to communicate with a man he apparently abhorred, for the sake of obtaining money? Do not talk of forgiveness again to me,’ Shelley wrote, ‘for my blood boils in my veins, and my gall rises against all that bears the human form, when I think of what I, their benefactor and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt from you and from all mankind.’15 There was little use in taking the high ground against a man who knew that he was in the right: ‘torture cannot wring from me an approbation of the act that separated us,’ Godwin wrote back in language worthy of one of his fictional heroes.16

  Fanny dutifully copied this letter out for her father; Mary was doubtless shown it by her angry lover. The pain which Shelley and Godwin wreaked on these two girls in seeking each to establish moral superiority is easily imagined.

  By May, Godwin’s worst fears had been confirmed; his golden goose was about to fly away. Rashly, Shelley endeavoured to pacify him with the promise that he would receive £300 during the course of the summer. In the meantime, he announced from Dover, Mary and he were about to leave England, perhaps for ever, travelling first to Geneva. No reason was given for their chosen destination. Neither, oddly, was there any mention of the fact that Claire was to accompany them, although gossip quickly brought news to Skinner Street that Shelley was repeating his exploit of 1814 and running off to the Continent with, not one young lady, but two.