Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The true source of Godwin’s outrage becomes apparent when we look at the section of Mary’s novel which follows the death of Matilda’s father. In the letters she wrote from the Villa Valsovano Mary, agonized by the deaths of her children, had expressed a vehement desire for her own life to end; Godwin had given her good reasons why she should live. Instead, she sent him a novel which flaunted the idea of death the bridegroom, death the comforter, death the debt-collector. ‘I go from this world where he [her father] is no longer and soon I shall meet him in another,’ Matilda declares to her lover:

  Farewell, Woodville, the turf will soon be green on my grave; and the violets will bloom on it. There is my hope and expectation; your’s are in this world; may they be fulfilled.13

  It was the espousing of death, not Matilda’s relationship with her father, which Godwin found so repellent. To a man for whom suicide befitted only the disgraced Roman who failed in his social duties, Matilda’s attitude was weak, cowardly and unworthy of interest, let alone admiration. He could not contemplate offering such a work for publication. When Mary asked for the manuscript to be returned to her keeping, her father refused to comply.14

  *

  News reached the inhabitants of the Villa Valsovano of a massacre in Manchester on 16 August. Over five hundred people had been injured and some fifteen gored or trampled to death by sabre-wielding cavalry attempting to break up a peaceful reform meeting on open ground. Shelley was shocked into responding to ‘Peterloo’ by Hunt’s lurid reports in the Examiner of the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands. The Masque of Anarchy, his rousing attack on the Tory oppressors, was as alive as The Cenci, the drama he dreamed of seeing performed at Covent Garden or Drury Lane, was dead. Hunt, seeing danger for himself as well as Shelley, refused to act as the publisher. One can see why.

  ‘Men of England, heirs of Glory,

  Heroes of unwritten story,

  Nurslings of one mighty Mother,

  Hopes of her, and one another;

  ‘Rise like Lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number,

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you –

  Ye are many – they are few.’15

  Reading these lines makes it hard to understand why Mary, in 1839, felt able to claim in her notes to the poem that Shelley’s revolutionary feelings ‘had faded with early youth’.16 He was, she tried to argue, merely urging the common sense of presenting a united front. It is unlikely that Sidmouth or Castlereagh, both attacked in the poem, would have agreed. Shelley’s call to action could not have been more vehemently made – and it was twice repeated. The poem remained unpublished until after the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832.

  The Villa Valsovano returned to life in early September. Shelley was ablaze again with a sense of poetic mission; Claire’s brother Charles arrived on a visit from Spain, where he too had been making a reckless response to political events in England.17 With two fiery Clairmonts to encourage him, Shelley embarked on a savage portrait of life under a corrupt government. ‘Hell is a city much like London –’ he wrote in Peter Bell the Third before yoking Castlereagh to Cobbett and Canning as ‘caitiff corpses’. Mary was still exorcizing her loss in Matilda; Shelley had shaken off his sadness. They were, after all, about to become parents again.

  ‘Pray how does Jhonny get on* & have you now another [child]?’ Mary asked Leigh Hunt at the end of September. She envied them their brood. ‘… Marianne might well laugh if it were a laughing matter at the recollection of my preachments about having so large a familly when I now say that I wish I had a dozen – any thing but none – or one – a fearful risk on whom all one’s hopes and joy is placed.’18 The baby was due to be born in November and, since their friend Dr Bell, a doctor they trusted, was in Florence, Shelley went with Charles Clairmont on 23 September to look for lodgings. He returned to take Mary there by easy stages. After saying goodbye to the Gisbornes and promising Henry Reveley financial help with his steamboat project, they visited Mrs Mason’s household at Pisa on 1 October before travelling inland to Florence. Mrs Mason, tall, cheerful and calm, was a reassuring figure. They promised to stay in touch.

  ‘Well we are now tolerably settled in our lodgings,’ Mary told Mrs Gisborne on 5 October in a letter which asked for a parcel of books and ‘the very best green tea … at whatever price’ to be sent to Mrs Mason as a present. ‘We talk a great deal about you,’ she wrote wistfully, and added, on Shelley’s behalf, that they longed for news of the steam engine’s progress.

  The lodgings which Shelley had taken for six months were in the narrow Via Valfonde near Santa Maria Novella. Charles may have suggested them; their landlady was the wonderfully named Madame Merveilleux du Plantis, a friend of Mary Jane Godwin’s who had visited Skinner Street earlier in the year.19 Mary thought her featherbrained and bad-tempered; Charles fell promptly in love with her daughter Louisa, a chilly young beauty who thawed enough to go snowballing with Claire one January afternoon. The weather, so the Florentines said, had never been so bitter.

  Pensions changed very little between the Shelleys’ visit and E.M. Forster’s memorable portrait of one in A Room with a View (1908). The Shelleys found themselves supping at a long table with the same agreeable mixture of clerics, painters and impoverished ladies who were making demure excursions to Fiesole when Henry James came there in 1870; when Percy Florence was born on 12 November, after only two hours of labour, Mary was visited and congratulated by the admiring wives of their fellow lodgers. Made miserable by the latest news of Godwin’s lost case,20 she drew comfort from seeing that pretty little Percy’s most striking feature was a nose ‘that promises to be as large as his grandfathers’. His body, she wrote in a moment of rare relief and merriment, was sure to be ‘the quintessence of beauty, entracted [extracted?] from all the Apollos, Bacchus’s, Loves and dawns of the Study [Studii] and the Vatican’.21

  *

  Scandal had dogged the footsteps of Shelley and his two companions ever since they had been spotted with Byron at Geneva by a group of bored tourists. Hints appeared regularly in their letters from Italy of awkward meetings, of turned backs, covert stares. However good the addresses Shelley chose for them, they were never encouraged to join the cliques which welcomed and even gushed over the Ladies Morgan, Blessington and Burghersh. Twenty-eight-year-old Sophia Stacey, the ward of Shelley’s uncle, Frederick Parker, had a hard time persuading a lady companion that no harm could come from calling on her eccentric cousin Bysshe while they were in Florence. This was Miss Stacey’s first journey abroad, and she wanted a little more adventure than Miss Parry-Jones seemed willing to provide. Before objections could be raised, Sophia had found rooms on the Via Valfonde. She intended to enjoy the company of her interesting relations; arriving two days before Percy’s birth, she was in time to suggest his second name.

  Sophia stayed for six weeks, visiting as often as they were willing to see her. It was impossible not to be melted by her eager friendliness. She was ‘lively & unaffected’ and very ‘entousiasmée’ to see Shelley, Mary reported to Mrs Gisborne on 2 December, and added that she had a pretty singing voice – ‘for an english delettanti’. Sophia, whose diary has survived only in extracts, was a little overawed by the seriousness of the Shelleys. He, she decided, was an ‘uomo interessante’ and very romantic. He and Mary were always reading. She even saw little writing-desks and lights prepared for a continuation of study when they retired to bed.22 This did not, her tone suggests, comply with her own idea of a poet’s marriage.

  Visiting the Uffizi galleries with Sophia, Shelley made notes for himself on the statues. The Niobe, which he greatly admired, evoked poor Mary, tenderly nursing her new child while grieving for the ones she had lost. He turned away to eye the voluptuous Venus nearby. ‘Her eyes seem heavy and swimming with pleasure,’ he noted. ‘… The neck is full and swollen as with the respiration of delight …’23 Shelley’s sensual nature – Miss Curran had a hard job turning
that soft and full-lipped mouth into a girlish bow when Mary asked for his portrait to be sent to her – was almost obliterated by the posthumous endeavours of a Victorian age. Here, we have a useful reminder of its existence. A man who could write with such relish of a woman’s look of sexual pleasure was unlikely to be satisfied by taking second place to a baby and a reading desk.

  Mary, after the birth of Percy, engrossed herself in his care and in study. Mrs Gisborne was begged to find books which would help her prepare the background for the historical novel she planned to write. She studied Greek. She fretted over her father’s situation. Politically, she remained close to Shelley, applauding the fiery poems he wrote that autumn, following the news of revolutions in Naples and in Spain with eager interest and sending Mrs Hunt a spirited diatribe against Castlereagh which included the satirical proclamation: ‘“I believe in all plots Cant feigns & creates & will use none but the language of Cant unto my last day – amen!”’24 Sexually, Mary withdrew. Forgetting how recently she had told the Hunts that she longed for a brood of children and envied theirs, she sternly reminded Marianne that ‘a woman is not a field to be continually employed either in bringing forth or enlarging grain’.25

  Her coldness made itself felt. Claire, one bleak February day, pointedly noted that a Greek author had written: ‘A bad wife is like Winter in a house.’26 Shelley, as the Gisbornes began making plans for a long visit to England, begged Maria to stay behind and keep Mary company. Nine months after William’s death, he confided, she remained in a state of mind ‘which if not cut off, cannot but conduct to some fatal end’. He felt that he had lost all power to influence her. She ‘considers me a portion of herself, he told Mrs Gisborne in the same unhappy letter, written in March 1820: she ‘feels no more remorse in torturing me than in torturing her own mind – Could she know a person in every way my equal, and hold close and perpetual communion with him, as a distinct being from herself; as a friend instead of a husband, she would obtain empire over herself.’27

  Mary did not want to exchange Shelley for a platonic companion, as he was here suggesting; she wanted him to get rid of Claire. Ironically, while Shelley begged Mrs Gisborne to stay and solace Mary, Mary herself was begging Maria to stay as a buttress against her stepsister. Tension had been there for some time, but it reached a crisis early in 1820. Perhaps Claire tactlessly compared her own loss of Allegra, about whose life they had heard nothing since the spring of 1819, to the death of Mary’s children. Perhaps Shelley urged his wife to show some of Claire’s vigour and cheerfulness. It is more likely that many minor irritations combined to make Claire’s presence unendurable. Mary, reasonably enough, wanted her husband and child to herself. Failing that, she wanted to ease the tension.

  The person who did most to reduce it was Mrs Mason, their new friend at Pisa. They had stayed in touch with her throughout the autumn. Writing shortly before Percy’s birth to thank Mary for a gift of Frankenstein, Mrs Mason sent back her compliments and added friendly messages from Laurette, the elder of her two small daughters by George Tighe: ‘she is delighted with you all & wanted to know whether “that lady had yet made her child”.’28

  A highly competent mother with a vocational interest in the rearing of children, Margaret Mason was never afraid to offer advice. Mary’s letters revealed her depression; she was warned that melancholy was not good for a nursing mother.29 Shelley was told off for putting his faith in English doctors when he had one of the best in Europe, Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri, on his doorstep at Pisa. Mrs Mason said that Vaccà prescribed the mild climate of his own town as the best cure for the ill health which continued to plague him. (Mary blamed its return on the sixty-hour vigil Shelley had kept by William’s bedside in Rome the previous summer.) On 27 January 1820, the Shelleys and Claire moved dutifully down the Arno to Pisa. Milly Shields, the young nurse from Marlow, had already left and been replaced by a new Swiss nanny. Mrs Mason now briskly advised Mary to find an Italian girl instead.

  Over the next two years, Shelley and Mary and, intermittently, Claire lived in a variety of handsome residences in Pisa. Starting on the north bank of the Lung’Arno, at the Tre Donzelle inn (it stood near to what is now the endearingly old-fashioned Victoria Hotel) then taking rooms on the mezzanine floor of Casa Frassi, they looked between the facing houses into almost uninhabited countryside, where a few Pisan streets trailed away into the flat green fields towards Livorno. Later, living on the south bank, they enjoyed a view across Pisa’s red roofs to the cathedral’s plump dome and the tower’s rakish slant. Beyond them, a long lapping line of blue hills hid Carrara’s marble quarries from view.

  Their quarters were clean; the town seemed drab. Writing to Maria Gisborne in late February to ask about an ‘upper servant’ who might be prepared to iron and help their nurse to care for Percy, Mary begged for a visit in ‘this most ugly town’. She was in bad spirits. Shelley was unwell, ‘and we are all uncomfortable as usual’. Marianne Hunt received a scathing report on the ladies of the town, who dressed in dirty cotton gowns and soiled white satin shoes, their faces hidden by huge poke bonnets of pink silk with bows perched on the points of their chins. The men were ‘fellows with bushy hair – large whiskers, canes in their hands, & a bit of dirty party coloured riband (a symbol of nobility) sticking in their buttonholes that mean to look like the lords of the rabble but who only look like their drivers – The Pisans,’ Mary concluded with a sniff, ‘I dislike more than any of the Italians & none of them are as yet favourites with me.’ Dr Vaccà, ‘a great republican & no Xtian’, was, however, allowed to be ‘very pleasant’.30

  Their first rooms, until they were able to move up to the top floor of Casa Frassi, were uncomfortably crowded at a time when feelings between Mary and Claire were running high. Casa Silva, Mrs Mason’s home on the Via Malagonnella, standing on the far southern side of the town, offered a welcome refuge. Both Mary and Claire became devoted to ten-year-old Laura (Laurette) and her five-year-old sister Nerina. Claire took the little girls out to the carnival masquerades; Mary surely had them in mind when she wrote two mythological dramas, ‘Proserpine’ and ‘Midas’. The first, written in the late spring of 1820, shows her still dejected, brooding over the role of a ‘child of light’ who is condemned to live in darkness and who seems to mock Shelley’s 1817 tribute to a ‘child of love and light’. But ‘Midas’ is playful and even comic; it is nice to think of Mary helping the children rehearse it in the large, well-kept orchard behind their parents’ home.

  Mrs Mason welcomed new company. Her partnership with George Tighe, while courteous and respectful, had lost its fire; Mr Tighe, a reclusive man, spent much of his time out in the orchard experimenting with ways to improve a potato crop, earning himself the nickname ‘Tatty’. Talking to her young visitors, Mrs Mason gave them her views on Irish politics, impressed them with accounts of having dressed as a man to get into medical lectures at an Italian university, and passed on a riveting account of England’s about-to-be crowned Queen Caroline who, visiting Pisa during her six years in Europe, had been seen wearing a man’s boots and even a man’s top hat.

  Mary’s spirits rose a little as she gained some space with their move to the larger top floor of the Casa Frassi in March 1820. Claire began writing a travel book. Her journal never mentioned Mary. Instead, she noted a ‘horrid’ dream about Skinner Street and Godwin having one of his narcoleptic fits. Mary, with uncharacteristic rashness, wrote and begged her father to give up ‘that load of evils’, the bookselling business.31 Godwin indignantly declined to do any such thing: ‘I consider the day on which I entered this business as one of the fortunate days of my life,’ he wrote back.32

  The Gisbornes were off to England for the summer of 1820, partly out of concern for their investments there. Shortly before they left, Shelley visited them in Livorno and disclosed part or all of the story of Elena Adelaide, for whose care he urgently needed to transmit funds to Naples. Planning to keep Mary in the dark, Shelley asked the Gisbornes to correspond with him
on this delicate subject under a false name. It cannot, however, have escaped Mary’s attention that Shelley returned from Livorno looking grim; perhaps the Gisbornes had been unwilling to condone his behaviour or to help. His health, always a useful barometer of Shelley’s mood, immediately declined.

  So, with as much reason, did Claire’s when, after a long and baffling silence, a letter arrived from Mrs Hoppner. It concerned Allegra, whom Claire had been hoping to visit at Ravenna, where the little girl was now living with Byron and his new love, Teresa Guiccioli.

  Mrs Hoppner’s letter was not nice. In it, with apparent nonchalance, she passed on the fact that Byron was unwilling to let Allegra anywhere near the Shelleys. The reasons he gave were that the child would be underfed and without religious training.33 But it was not Byron who provoked Mary’s anger. The Hoppners, she told Maria Gisborne in England on 8 May, ‘have behaved shamefully’.34 Claire, meanwhile, sent a pleading letter to Byron, defending Shelley’s character and professing her own religious faith. Three days later, she drafted a second letter in which, intriguingly, she begged Byron not to listen to the gossip of a servant ‘whom we corrected for his roguery & whom we wd not expose out of delicacy for you’.35 She cancelled the passage and the letter was not sent; it does, however, raise the intriguing possibility that Byron might also have been at risk from Paolo Foggi’s tales. The servant can only have been Paolo; what was this situation which they would not expose out of consideration for Byron?

  The Hoppners’ ‘shameful’ behaviour remains puzzling. Mary may have been referring to a proposal they had put to Claire in April 1819, that Allegra should be adopted by a rich childless widow, a Mrs Vavassour; Claire had turned the decision over to Byron, while reminding him that nobody could be more eager to care for Allegra than herself.36 It is equally possible that Mary’s indignation arose from the fact that the Hoppners had already started spreading rumours about the Naples baby. Elise was in Venice in 1820; her slanders could have begun at any point during this year.