Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The reason Shelley gave for his departure was that he and Mary wished to escape the painful humiliation of being regarded as immoral. This laid the blame at Godwin’s door; Shelley softened the implicit accusation with a qualified apology.

  But I have been too indignant, I have been unjust to you – forgive me – burn those letters which contain the records of my violence, & believe that however what you erroneously call fame & honour separate us, I shall always feel towards you as the most affectionate of friends.17

  This tribute may have given a little pleasure to Mary, wondering if she would ever see her father again. The comfort for Godwin cannot have been great. Shelley, his one hope of financial support, had vanished, taking the girls with him. And they were bound for the most fashionable of Swiss resorts, where the stories likely to be woven around a blasphemous poet, a baby, and two ladyfriends, sisters to boot, were too awful to contemplate.

  Godwin did not have long to wait before the stories began. His former friend Elizabeth Inchbald spoke for many when she tenderly inquired whether the philosopher had a daughter, or perhaps an adopted daughter, holidaying in Switzerland? She added a cruel hint that gossip was already beginning to circulate: ‘But perhaps before you could have time to inform me, my thirst for the information might possibly be allay’d.’18

  Notes

  1. MWG–PBS, 27.7.1815.

  2. Ibid.

  3. William Lawrence, FRS, had been appointed second professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1815; his inaugural lectures, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, were delivered in March the following year. His Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man were published in 1819. Marilyn Butler, introducing and editing Frankenstein (Oxford World Classics, 1993) has also emphasized the link between Lawrence and the Shelleys; where I see Mary reacting against Lawrence’s views on the Negro as manlike but lacking in man’s feelings, Professor Butler sees in Lawrence’s lectures a source for Mary’s interest in the subject of vitalism. A materialist, Lawrence argued that the divine spark was not required to create moral feelings in man. Butler also points out, interestingly, that in 1815 Lawrence was studying and caring for ‘a monster’, a boy born with part of his brain missing (Butler, Introduction, pp. xli–ii).

  It is reasonable to suppose that, even if Mary and Shelley were not present at Lawrence’s inaugural lectures, they were familiar with their content as a result of their friendship with him. Among the subjects Lawrence discussed in detail was the story of ‘Peter the wild boy’, a mute discovered near Hamelin in 1724 and much discussed as an example of man in his original state; Peter may have contributed something to Frankenstein as well as to Browning’s poem about the children led by a vengeful magic ratcatcher into a mountain near Hamelin. Mary was still consulting and meeting Lawrence in the 1840s.

  4. PBS–MWG, 24.10.1814.

  5. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa performed under the direction and patronage of the African Association, in the years 1795, 1796 and 1797 (1799). Mary could already have heard admiring reports of Park from his friend, Anthony Carlisle.

  6. MWSJ, 14.12.1814.

  7. CC–MWS, 2.6.1835.

  8. Ch.C–CC, 13–20.9.1815.

  9. Thomas Love Peacock, Melincourt (1817), ch. 5.

  10. PBS–TJH, 22.9.1815.

  11. MWS, Note on Alastor, in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839) (hereafter PW).

  12. CC–Byron, 29.9.1816. The review was by Josiah Condor in Eclectic Review (October 1816), p. 132.

  13. PBS, Alastor, lines 182–9.

  14. PBS–WG, 6.3.1816.

  15. Ibid.

  16. WG–PBS, 7.3.1816 (PBSL).

  17. PBS–WG, 3.5.1816.

  18. Sarah Inchbald (‘Mrs Perfection’)–WG, 11.11. 1816 (Abinger, Dep. b. 509).

  * Napoleon arrived at Torbay in July 1815. Mary may still have been there, although Shelley had left.

  † Unofficially, more Africans were carried across the Atlantic after 1807, to serve the coffee and tobacco trade of Cuba and Brazil, than in the whole of the previous century.

  ‡ Mary was also alluding to the rustic home of Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, a play which she had always loved, and which she first saw with her father when she was fifteen years old.

  § The £800 a year on which Shelley expected to live with difficulty or at least without contemplating any further payments to Godwin amounted to £25,600 in real money today.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  STORMS ON THE LAKE

  1816

  ‘“We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to.’

  Mary Shelley, Preface to Frankenstein (1831)

  THE HINT TO GODWIN OF PERMANENT EXILE WAS MISLEADING, and perhaps deliberately so. Peacock, given a retainer to manage their affairs while they were away, was asked to try to obtain the Bishopsgate house for their return. They might, Shelley told him, be away for a year, travelling eastward from Geneva. Still relishing the memory of their journey up the Thames, he intended to voyage by boat, accompanied by Mary and the baby. Mary Wollstonecraft had taken her little daughter Fanny to Sweden, a far more perilous journey, with no ill effect.

  But why had they gone so suddenly, and why were they so set on going to Geneva? Shelley and his party would, of course, have been attracted by Lake Geneva’s reputation as the refuge of the English enlightenment in exile, as the chosen home of Gibbon, Voltaire and Madame de Staël, and as the legendary home of liberty. This was not, however, the explanation for their journey

  *

  In September 1815, Claire had made a brief visit from Lynmouth to Enniscorthy in Ireland. Here Charles Clairmont, with some financial assistance from Shelley, was planning to join a new distillery firm as one of three partners. Shelley, early in 1816, was still promising Charles the necessary capital but, perhaps after receiving a discouraging response from the businessman Francis Place to whom Charles appealed for advice and help in obtaining temporary employment while awaiting the outcome of the Chancery case on the Shelley estate, the distillery scheme was dropped. Charles, whose reluctance to be involved in his stepfather’s bookselling trade had greatly disappointed Godwin, made his way to France and a life free of family responsibilities. Claire, who may at first have returned from Ireland to Lynmouth, was alone in London by January 1816 and paying occasional visits to Skinner Street.* After spending some time in lodgings at Foley Street, Marylebone, she decided to return to the pleasant house in Arabella Row where Mary had lost her baby daughter the previous spring. She made this move at some point in March or, at latest, early April. She told nobody of her whereabouts.

  Vivacious, good-looking and with, as she remembered, a ‘bright colour’, Claire was now almost eighteen. Mary had found love with a poet who, much though Mary and Claire admired him, was far from being a household name. (Shelley, in the spring of 1816, was better known for the scandals he had caused than for the privately printed Queen Mab and the as yet unpublished Alastor.) Byron, famous enough already to think of himself as literature’s Napoleon, was in London and alone, after a stormy estrangement from Annabella Milbanke, his wife of a year; he was rumoured to be living in unconventional intimacy with his married half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Each time Claire walked along Piccadilly, she saw people waiting outside the curtained windows of 13 Piccadilly Terrace for a glimpse of Byron; scandal only added to the fascination.

  Byron also happened to have an influential position on the committee of London’s principal theatre, Drury Lane; Claire, who had already tried her hand at writing a play, decided to approach him. If he could help her to become an actress or a playwright, well and good; if he could be persuaded to take a more personal interest in her, so much the better.

  Later on in life, Claire liked to remember that she had been a timid girl; there was nothing shy about her assault on Byron. Reminiscing in old age to her attentive American visitor, Edward Augustus Silsbee, she claimed that her
landlady’s sister had given them a very proper and formal introduction. The letters tell a different story. Using assumed names and giving herself a hint of the noblewoman by stamping her letters with a pretty seal both Mary and she had been given by Shelley, Claire laid siege until she gained her wish, permission to visit Byron alone at his house some time late in March.2 Conventional interviews were almost as formal as a royal audience, but Claire had the boldness to break away from accepted behaviour, and the confidence to get away with it. Perhaps, as an accomplished pianist with a good voice, she sang some of the haunting lyrics which Byron had recently written to accompany the musician and composer Isaac Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies. However she set about it, the seduction worked; Byron was, briefly, charmed. He read her novella, offered an introduction to the Drury Lane committee and managed to forgive her for sharing the surname of Lady Byron’s former governess, regarded by Byron as a dangerous, trouble-making spy.

  Byron was amusing himself in the brief space of time before he left England for Geneva. Claire, however, was besotted. She told Byron that she had loved him in secret for a year. (She, Shelley and Mary had read Lara the previous spring and they were well-acquainted with the opening cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poem which, already published as if it were a complete work, had made Byron’s name.) She was pitifully aware, as her clamorous, beseeching letters show, that her only chance of retaining his interest was her connection to two people who interested him far more than herself, Shelley and Mary Godwin. Shelley had sent Byron one of the first privately printed copies of Queen Mab; Mary was familiar by her name. Few in Byron’s circles would have been unaware of her existence; gossip had spread reports of her scandalous cohabitation with a married man. The couple’s arrival in London at Shelley’s old lodgings in Marchmont Buildings, where they discussed the possibility of making a second trip to the Continent, gave Claire a flash of inspiration. Byron was determined not to let her follow him and his retinue out to Geneva alone; what if she produced Mary and Shelley as her chaperones? First, however, she had to prepare the ground.

  Claire already knew that Byron admired Godwin and had twice offered him help, giving him an introduction to the publisher John Murray in 1814 and trying, in early 1816, to divert a publisher’s payment to himself into the emptier pockets of Godwin, Coleridge and the Irish playwright and cleric, Charles Maturin, later author of Melmoth the Wanderer.3 Mary’s background rendered her almost as interesting to Byron as he to her: for the past two years she had been devouring his poems. With careful deviousness, Claire set up a meeting. Mary was told only that Lord Byron was being very kind and helpful; Byron was bossily warned to keep quiet about their connection and to see that Mary was received with appropriate respect. ‘I say this,’ Claire added plaintively, ‘because on Thursday Evening I waited nearly a quarter of an hour in your hall, which though I may overlook the disagreeableness – she, who is not in love would not … She is very curious to see you.’4

  Coleridge had visited Piccadilly Terrace a few days earlier.† ‘If you had seen Lord Byron,’ he wrote later, his gratitude for his host’s kindness and encouragement undimmed, ‘you could scarcely disbelieve him – so beautiful a countenance you scarcely ever saw – his teeth so many stationary smiles – his eyes the open portals of the sun – things of light, and for light – and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering …’5

  Mary, small, composed, sedate, hid her feelings better than the gushing Coleridge had probably managed to do. She thanked Byron, we can suppose, for his kindness to her father; she smiled demurely when he praised Queen Mab, which Byron warmly admired. Perhaps, if she was feeling bold, she told him that she had inscribed some lines from ‘To Thyrza’ in her own precious copy, given to her just before she eloped with Shelley. (It is unclear whether Mary ever discovered that Byron’s Thyrza had been a boy.) They might have talked about her father’s friend, John Curran, the gregarious Irish barrister and raconteur for whom Byron’s enthusiasm was far greater than Shelley’s, or of the occasion in 1812 when they had both attended one of Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare. To Byron, who was not enjoying being cold-shouldered by the grand ladies who had fawned on him a year earlier,‡ it was refreshing to meet a girl who bore her own disgrace with such apparent equanimity. Nobody, meeting Mary, could view her as a scarlet woman; she was as remarkable for her self-possession as for her keen, intelligent mind. Only someone who knew her well could guess at the dark imagination operating behind her serene smile and large-eyed gaze.

  It was, for them both, a memorable occasion. ‘Mary is delighted with you as I knew she would be,’ Claire wrote to Byron from Shelley’s lodgings. She went on to tell him – an endearingly transparent ruse – that Mary was continually begging for his address abroad. ‘She perpetually exclaims, “How mild he is! how gentle! So different from what I expected.”’7

  Claire had begun her letter of 21 April by telling Byron that they were waiting for the final news about the disposal of the Shelley estate; of equal importance, in Claire’s overheated mind, was the fact that ‘tomorrow will inform me whether I should be able to offer you that which it has long been the passionate wish of my heart to offer you.’8 Since the relationship had already become sexual – Claire would not otherwise have been so free in her professions of love or so anxious to disguise the nature of their friendship from Mary – ‘that’ appears to have been a child. It was her last chance to cement a fragile alliance; Byron intended to leave England in four days’ time, travelling to Switzerland via the field of Waterloo in a gigantic coach modelled on Napoleon’s. By the time he left, Claire had been granted her wish. She did not know it, but she was pregnant, although not, perhaps, for the first time.§

  Shelley’s party crossed the Channel a week after Byron. Writing from Paris to Geneva in the expectation that Byron would arrive there long before them, Claire gaily announced the approach of ‘“the whole tribe of the Otaheite philosophers”’ – Otaheite, or Tahiti, being the legendary home of free love. Assuming that Byron had called them this in a complimentary spirit, Claire brightly predicted the likelihood of his having an affair with Mary:

  you will I dare say fall in love with her; she is very handsome & very amiable & you will no doubt be blest in your attachment; nothing can afford me such pleasure as to see you happy in any of your attachments. If it should be so I will redouble my attentions to please her; I will do everything she tells me whether it be good or bad for I would not stand low in the affections of the person so beyond blest as to be beloved of you.9

  Poor Claire. Her mistake was to have fallen in love with the devil’s mask which hid a surprisingly old-fashioned Regency dandy. Byron had not intended to flatter them when he mentioned the Otaheites; the idea of living in a commune of free love would have horrified him. The very fact that he was ready to spend time at Geneva, one of the most conventional resorts in Europe, would have given anyone but a Clairmont a hint of Byron’s conservative nature; to Claire, as to Charles, Geneva’s dullness was obscured by the glamour of their own – possibly mythical – Swiss connections.

  They had had a damp time of it on their visit to Switzerland in 1814; the summer of 1816 was proving to be the worst in living memory for England and Western Europe. Writing a rather formal letter to Fanny – she copied it and its successor out for herself with a view to eventual publication – Mary described lashing storms and a terrifying night journey through the mountains; ten men had been required to hold the carriage on course as it lurched and plunged through pelting snow.10

  But Geneva, looking across an inland sea of transparent blue, was bathed in light. Posing as husband, wife and sister in order to obtain their rooms, they settled into the handsome lakeside Hôtel d’Angleterre efficiently run by Monsieur Dejean at Sécheron, a mile from the town. Byron, arriving late at night two weeks later, entered his age as a hundred years in the
hotel register and collapsed into bed. He had barely risen from it before Claire began her assault with the unfortunate mixture of bullying and desperation which marked her pursuit. She had her way; it was, as Byron ungallantly confessed to his half-sister Augusta at the end of the summer, hard to refuse a girl who had travelled eight hundred miles for the pleasure of going to bed with him, especially when he was a little short of admirers.

  Claire was feverish with desire and apprehension; Mary was in a daily trance of pleasure. The mountains which recalled her beloved Scotland were a distant view, domesticated by a foreground of elegant villas and lawns sloping down to ‘the lovely lake, blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams’. Their days followed an agreeably regular pattern, with midday study sessions indoors followed by leisurely strolls in the hotel garden, ‘looking at the rabbits, relieving fallen cockchaffers, and watching the motions of a myriad of lizards …’ At dusk, they sailed across the lake with Mary often bursting out laughing at the pleasure of the journey, or leaning back to watch a pale moon, Shelley’s favourite emblem for her, as they drifted shorewards, back to ‘the delightful scent of flowers and new mown grass, and the chirp of the grasshoppers, and the song of the evening birds’. Little William, who had been showing worrying signs of ill health before they left England, was flourishing again. She had never been happier.11