Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  § If, that is, Shelley got Claire pregnant in 1815. It remains a possible explanation for her being sent to as remote a spot as could be found after a period of intimacy with Shelley and a sudden breakdown in her relationship with Mary. Against this speculation, it has to be acknowledged that no allusion was ever made to a miscarried or aborted child, or none that has survived. This was during the period of Mary’s ‘lost’ journal.

  ¶ Mary and Shelley were sufficiently familiar with electrical demonstrations and experiments to have been conscious of this. It is possible although far from certain that their interest had drawn them to visit the electrical scientist Andrew Crosse when they were living near him in Devon in 1815. Crosse had by that time rigged up his Somerset ballroom at Fyne Court as a gigantic laboratory with conductors, saucers of crystals, fifty leyden jars and 1,800 feet of copper wire coming in through the windows. Crosse delighted in showing his laboratory to visitors.16

  || Mary, in her 1831 Preface, was careful to say that she was alluding not to what Dr Darwin had really done, but to ‘what was then spoken of as having been done by him’. Darwin had, in his first note to The Temple of Nature, described a paste of flour and water in which ‘the animalcules called eels’ increased and enlarged, even when placed in a sealed glass phial. He also noted that these ‘vorticella’ appeared to come to life after being dried. Mary rejected this as a direct source of inspiration: ‘Not thus, after all, would life be given.’

  ** This was also the summer in which Byron wrote ‘Darkness’. When, nine years later, Mary began work on The Last Man, a novel which conveys a terrifying impression of the end of the world, she may have been partly inspired by Byron’s memorably powerful vision of emptiness, when ‘The bright sun was extinguished and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air’.26

  †† Galignani’s Messenger, the newspaper for travellers abroad, carried summaries of the Times reports. This was the form in which the news reached readers at Geneva.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DISTRESSING EVENTS

  1816

  ‘Give me a garden & absentia Clariae and I will thank my love for many favours.’

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley, 5 December 1816

  CLAIRE’S CONDITION WAS ALREADY BECOMING APPARENT WHEN the trio left Geneva at the beginning of September. Any idea of returning to Bishopsgate was ruled out by the distressing news that the bailiffs had swooped after they had left the house and sequestered the possessions they had casually left there, expecting Peacock to protect their interests. A decision was taken that, while Shelley went to London to obtain the money due to him from his father, and to give Byron’s manuscripts to his publisher, the girls would find discreet lodgings in Bath. The Godwins must be kept in the dark; they were all agreed on that. Better and more prudent to tell them Claire was in poor health and that Bath had been recommended as a suitable place for recovery. Duplicity could, in such circumstances, be argued into a form of kindness.

  Claire had already been dumped once, when she was unceremoniously dispatched to Lynmouth the previous year; even Mary reluctantly had to agree that she could not be abandoned now, when they had already committed themselves to caring for her and Byron’s unborn child. It was hard to bear. For three months, Mary had known a state of perfect happiness, living in a landscape which enchanted her, among company which had been more stimulating and exciting than any she could remember. Now, she must put all this behind her and live in dull seclusion in a fashionable town where she knew nobody and nobody knew her. That, of course, was the precise reason for going there; but the cause, the lovesick, ungrateful and self-willed cause, was her stepsister.

  There were times when Mary wished Claire to the other end of the earth. Find them a house near mountains and water, just like Geneva, she pleaded with Shelley as he searched for their next home; promise that Claire would not share it with them; was it so much to ask? Sadly for Mary, it was a wish Shelley had no inclination to grant. Claire had made herself his responsibility when she joined them on their honeymoon elopement. Rejected by Byron and with a child on the way, she was more his charge than ever before. Whatever Mary might feel, Shelley remained deeply attached to her stepsister, and she to him. With the sweet conciliatory manner which had in it no more flexibility than a rod of iron, Shelley listened and refused to budge. Claire would stay with them for as long as he, and she, wished. In the meantime, Mary had a duty to care for her which he expected her to fulfil.

  The lodgings Mary found in Bath were at 5 Abbey Churchyard, next to the Pump Room. If it was not quite as grand as living in the great sweep of Royal Crescent, it was certainly not secluded; nor were the rooms a little higher up the hill on New Bond Street, to which Claire moved as her confinement approached. Here, they were in the thick of things, able to stroll on Milsom Street among the visiting families of admirals and baronets whose arrivals were regularly proclaimed in the Bath Chronicle.

  With no chaperone to escort her to the Assembly Rooms, where prettily ribboned and flounced dresses, peach kid half-boots and elegant wreaths were de rigueur for young ladies of fashion, Mary occupied herself by taking drawing lessons and attending a course of scientific lectures being given at Bath’s Literary and Philosophical Society Rooms. Perhaps she ventured to the Theatre Royal, where Sheridan, one of her father’s closest friends, was being posthumously honoured by performances of The Rivals and The School for Scandal.

  Neither drawing lessons, lectures nor work on her novel compensated for Shelley’s absence. She had been in Bath for a week before he suggested that she should come to Peacock’s family home near Marlow and help them in the search for a new house. Mary left on the next morning’s coach, arriving at Maidenhead on 19 September. Claire, sullen at being left in charge of ‘Itty Babe’ William and his Swiss nurse Elise, comforted herself with bossy reminders; Mary must be sure to buy Shelley a greatcoat and not to overwalk him.

  Her warnings were unnecessary. Shelley, despite his frail appearance, could walk all day without any sign of fatigue or feeling the cold; it was Mary who was hard-pressed to keep up as Peacock, who had lived in the Marlow area most of his life, rushed them around all his favourite beauty spots. Like Shelley, Mary was enchanted by the combination of monastic ruins, riverside woods and quiet villages. As rural as they could wish, Marlow was also less than a day’s walk from London.

  There was not much warmth of feeling yet between Mary and Thomas Peacock; she was too aware of his loyal affection for Harriet Shelley to feel comfortable with him. But it was a relief to be away from Claire and her endless harping on the subject of Byron and his reluctance to answer her letters. At Marlow, when old Mrs Peacock had retired to bed with her candle, the conversation was more intensely political, more alive.

  There was much to discuss. At Bath, young ladies prattled about balls, bonnets and the best way to show off their bosoms; the rest of the country was seething with dissatisfaction. The Corn Laws, prohibiting the import of foreign corn until home-grown wheat reached 80 shillings a quarter, had provided the situation for an explosion with the first bad harvest. Now that it had come, following the dreadful summer of 1816, the price of corn and, consequently, bread, had soared. The poor, unable to buy the staple of their diet, starved. On one occasion that autumn, Mary noted, they met a family who stood, crying from hunger, in the street; Shelley, predictably, was quick to provide. The Spa Fields meeting in London, triggering an intensely repressive course of action from a frightened government, was only a few weeks away. In September and October, working men were already gathering into clubs which, guided by the energetic spirit of Cobbett’s Political Register and his ‘Twopenny Trash’ pamphlets, would decide what course of action to take. Shelley, describing the situation in a long letter to Byron, believed that swift and radical reforms were the only solution, a view which Mary probably shared. To her, as much as to Shelley, it seemed that they wer
e living in very ugly times. Peacock took refuge in mockery; his companions were incapable of such detachment.

  Shelley went back to Bath with Mary on 25 September. His thoughts still on Marlow, he sent off a long and friendly letter to Byron, painting an alluring picture of their household as an exile’s haven. They were, he wrote, ‘well and content. Clare is writing to you at this instant. Mary is reading over the fire; our cat and kitten are sleeping under the sofa; and little Willy is just gone to sleep.’ All that was missing, when they settled in their new home, was a visit from their noble friend.1 But Byron, cutting a merry swathe across the Continent on his way to Venice, had no plans to come home and no inclination whatsoever to live under the same roof as the pregnant and ever-hopeful Miss Clairmont. The person who could really have benefited from such tender invitations, poor Fanny, received none. Later, too late, Mary was overcome with guilt.

  Perhaps it was Fanny’s innately melancholy nature which caused them all to overlook the evidence of her growing despair. On 26 September, answering a (lost) account from Mary of life in Bath (how wonderful to be so calm, so studious and so contented, Fanny wistfully wrote), she told them that Eliza Bishop and Everina Wollstonecraft, with whom she had been hoping to travel back to Dublin to work as a teacher or governess, had left without her. She mentioned, too, that the aunts had ‘entirely lost their little income from Primrose Street’. These were a group of shabby tenanted houses in a run-down area of London which Godwin had become involved with handling after his first wife’s death. The sisters may have felt that Godwin had mismanaged the rents or treated them inappropriately, but that was no reason to abandon Fanny. More probably, although Fanny did not say so, the fact that she had maintained close contact with Shelley and Mary had prejudiced Eliza and Everina against employing their niece in a school.

  A week later, Fanny wrote again; ‘stupid letter from F,’ Mary irritably noted on 4 October. What annoyed her in particular was the firmness with which Fanny denied that she had ever, as Shelley reported, described Mrs Godwin as spreading scandal and pursuing them ‘“like a hound after foxes’”. This, Fanny wrote, was a ‘glaring falsehood’ and she would not allow herself to be made its author. If there was gossip about them, the fault lay with Harriet, who had been telling stories during her summer visit to Mrs de Boinville, and with Mary herself:

  You are very careless and are for ever leaving your letters about[.] English servants like nothing so much as scandal and gosip – but this you know as well as I – and this is the origin of the stories that are told – And this you chuse to fasten upon mamma …

  Fanny followed this vigorous scolding with a reproach to Shelley for letting Godwin down. (Shelley had informed Godwin that, having received less than £300 himself after his debts against the family estate were cleared, he could neither lend a similar sum nor commit himself to negotiating future loans.) To Fanny, the situation was clear-cut; Shelley had promised to help and now he must do so or give more precise reasons for his refusal. To do anything less was to cause ‘papa’ unnecessary emotional distress. It was, she added with passionate underlinings, ‘of the utmost consequence for his own and the world’s sake that he [Godwin] should finish his novel and is it not your and Shelley’s duty to consider these things?’ Fanny shared Godwin’s belief that the worthy have an absolute right to be supported by those who have the worth to give. Like Godwin, she found it hard to grasp how little was actually available.2

  Mary, who did not like to be chided, sent a prompt reply (both this and Fanny’s response of 8 October have been lost). But she was not, as yet, alarmed. Life at Bath, now that Shelley was sharing it with her, was proving quite congenial. They walked about the city together, admiring its honey-coloured stone and the glimpses of the enclosing hills which she was attempting to draw for her teacher, Mr West. In the evenings, as Shelley read her a translation of Cervantes, she was tenderly struck by the resemblance between her beloved and Don Quixote, that most romantic of idealists. Shelley in turn was amused and charmed when, aware of the plot of Lucian’s Golden Ass, Mary playfully speculated that their cat’s fondness for roses might metamorphose her into a feline lady.

  Fanny’s letter of 8 October was recorded in Mary’s journal without comment. This was the day on which Fanny left Skinner Street and wrote to Godwin from Bristol that she planned to ‘depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove’. Horrified by the implication, Godwin took the next coach to Bristol. Finding no trace of Fanny, he went on to Bath and spent an anxious night there – he made no contact with his family – before returning, empty of news, to London. On 9 October, Mary also received a ‘very alarming’ letter from Fanny. Claire, many years later, remembered how quickly Shelley reacted: he ‘jumped up thrust his hand in [his] hair – I must be off.’3 The girls were still sitting up at two in the morning when he returned from Bristol. He, too, had found nothing.

  A second day of hunting was equally unproductive; on 11 October, following a tip, Shelley took the coach from Bristol to Swansea, the local port for boats crossing to Dublin. On 12 October, he came back to the anxious girls at Bath. The news, which he probably gathered from a report in the Cambrian that day, was, as Mary miserably noted in her journal, the ‘worst possible’. Fanny had taken great pains to disguise her identity, but the article left no room for doubt.

  On 9 October, the day after writing to Mary, Fanny had reached Swansea and paid for a room at an inn called the Mackworth Arms. Before swallowing a bottle of laudanum, she had written a note to explain that she intended to close the existence ‘of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare’. The signature had been burnt off. The newspaper article mentioned that the dead young lady’s stays were embroidered with the initials ‘MW’, and that her few possessions included a little gold Swiss watch. The stays were Mary Wollstonecraft’s; the watch was the gift Mary and Shelley had found for Fanny in Geneva that summer.4

  The precise reasons for Fanny’s suicide have never been clear. Godwin, talking to his old friend Maria Gisborne about it in 1820, dated her unhappiness from the elopement. He appeared to think that Fanny had been in love with Shelley, and that it was only a sense of duty which kept her at Skinner Street.5 This shifted the responsibility away from himself and his wife; it may not have been far short of the truth. A poem which Shelley wrote only a few months after Fanny’s death points in the same direction. Published by Mary without comment, it has always been supposed to allude to his last meeting with her half-sister.

  Her voice did quiver as we parted,

  Yet knew I not that heart was broken

  From which it came, and I departed

  Heeding not the word then spoken.

  Misery – O Misery,

  This world is all too wide for thee.

  It may be that Fanny, who had not been told the truth about Claire’s situation, hoped to join the younger members of the family at Bath and that she put this idea to Shelley at their brief meeting in London. His prudent reluctance to agree (Fanny could not be trusted to keep Claire’s pregnancy a secret from the Godwins) might have seemed a woundingly cold rejection to Fanny’s sensitive nature, but an insufficient reason to kill herself. The simplest and saddest explanation is that Fanny felt, as her last note suggests, that she had become a burden to her family. Her aunts were newly impoverished; the Godwins were penniless; so, it seemed, was Shelley. Whom could she expect to care for her? What option, to a young woman who had inherited all of her mother’s depressive tendencies and none of her spirit and drive, was open but an obscure death?

  On 13 October, Godwin wrote Mary his first letter since her elopement. ‘I cannot but thank you for your strong expression of sympathy,’ he wrote. His chief concern was that she should do nothing to attract publicity. ‘Go not to Swansea,’ he warned; ‘disturb not the silent dead; do nothing to destroy the obscurity she so much desired.’6 The tone was
cold; the thinking was wise. Suicide was a criminal act, but Fanny had not been identified in the newspaper article and was unlikely to be, so long as they all kept away from Swansea. Her body would lie in an unmarked grave, but any grave was better than a suicide’s burial at a lonely crossroads. With discretion, her name and theirs could be preserved from any further scandal. Discretion was maintained: Charles Clairmont, ten months later, still did not know that Fanny was dead. Friends of the Godwins who asked about Fanny were told that she had died of a fever on the way to Dublin.

  Claire, fretting over her own future and Byron’s evident reluctance to play any part in it, shed no tears. She had never much cared for Fanny, and did not mind saying as much. Mary’s journal was reticent as ever, owning only that the news had given her ‘a miserable day’ and that she had put on mourning clothes. Writing to Shelley from Bath on 17 December, however, at a time when a suitable new home near Marlow had finally been located, she regretted that poor Fanny could not have held on to life a little longer, ‘for my house would then have been a proper assylum for her – Ah my best love,’ she went on, ‘to you do I owe every joy every perfection that I may enjoy or boast of – Love me, sweet, for ever – But I {do} not mean — I hardly know what I mean I am so much agitated.’

  This sudden outburst sounds as though Mary recognized the same suicidal tendency in her own nature and saw Shelley as having rescued her from Fanny’s fate. They were both Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters; it was easier for Mary than for Claire to understand the course Fanny had chosen, and to blame herself. She knew how deep Fanny’s feelings were for Shelley. ‘It is only poets that are eternal benefactors of their fellow creatures – & the real ones never fail of giving us the highest degree of pleasure we are capable of,’ Fanny had written to her shortly before her death: ‘they are in my oppinion nature & art united – & as such never failing.’7 But Shelley and Mary had failed her. Claire, not Fanny, had been their chosen companion. As Mary brooded over the nature of her outcast creature, endowing him with the sensibilities of the loving but unloved outsider, Fanny was much in her thoughts.