The decision was made. Mary’s response to Medwin has not survived but is unlikely to have been encouraging. Writing to Trelawny at the end of July, Mary firmly steered him away from writing a memoir himself. ‘You have often said that you wished to keep up our friend’s name in the world,’ she wrote, ‘& if you still entertain the same feeling, no way is more obvious than to assist Moore.’9
Medwin’s book was published, however, in the autumn of that year. Hastily assembled anecdotes and five months of journal notes were artfully spun out to convey the impression of a life’s worth of conversations; no uninformed reader would suspect that the author’s knowledge had been gleaned over a few afternoon rides and leisurely evenings at Byron’s billiard table. The potted biography of Shelley which Medwin tacked on as a long footnote was full of inaccuracies, among them the statement that Shelley had married ‘his lovely and amiable wife’ after Harriet’s death, no mention being made of the fact that he had already been living with Mary Godwin for two years.
Knowing how much her early life with Shelley as his unmarried partner had helped to damage her name, Mary still refused to hide or lie about it during her first years back in England. Experience would teach her to become more guarded, but in 1824 Medwin’s clumsy attempt at chivalry infuriated her. Publicly, she made little fuss about the book; privately, she told John Cam Hobhouse, who published a list of corrections in the new Westminster Review, that Medwin’s account of Shelley and herself was ‘one mass of mistakes’ and that the entire book had been ‘a source of great pain to me, & will be of more …’10 Conversations of Lord Byron could not, in fact, have appeared at a worse time for Mary: in response to her publication of Posthumous Poems, Sir Timothy had angrily suspended her allowance. Now, she feared, he would read Medwin’s long note on Shelley and assume she had chosen this artful means of subverting his wishes.
The book could not have come at a better time for Tom Moore. Medwin’s book whetted appetites, while leaving the portrait frustratingly incomplete. Moore liked high society; the poignancy of Mary’s situation was not sufficient to tempt him to make the long trip out to Kentish Town oftener than was necessary By the summer of 1826, however, he had finished his life of Sheridan and was at the stage with Byron where he needed Mary’s help. Of the group who had summered on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, only Mary and Claire Clairmont remained and Claire, now struggling to make a living for herself as a governess in Russia, wanted nothing more than to bury her disreputable past and, in particular, her connection with Byron. Claire would not talk.
But Mary would. She provided Moore with invaluable material; a greedier woman would have made sure she was well recompensed. Mary needed money, but her principles were clear. She would take money for an article, but not when it was based on the life of a famous friend: ‘a new set of worms … grow fat upon the world’s love of tittle tattle – I will not be numbered among them,’ she told Marianne Hunt on 10 October 1824, alluding to Medwin’s forthcoming book. She would take money for selling the copyright to Shelley’s poems, if approached, but this was to protect his work from appearing in pirated editions and to maintain a degree of control. In the present case, however, she was neither the writer nor the relict.
Instead, in 1828, she dropped a hint that she would be glad to write for Moore’s publisher, John Murray, and that she would accept an advance. This was awkward; Murray had already expressed an interest in publishing some of Shelley’s poems, but, having declined Valperga, he had even less enthusiasm for her new project, a novel about Perkin Warbeck. Frankenstein’s success on stage had given her a name, but only as the author of that precocious work. Murray did, however, agree to make a loan of £100; Mary, regarding it as a commission, deluged him with suggestions for books. One was to have been a study of eminent women of the past, including Madame de Staël and Madame Roland. Murray refused to be enticed; Mary proudly insisted on repaying the money She returned it on 12 November 1829: Murray would have none of it. A ledger entry for £100 on 23 December 1829 reads, quite firmly: ‘Moore’s Life of Byron: To cash paid Mrs Shelley (being on the relinquishing of a debt due from Mrs S from cash previously lent) for various contributions.’
The notebook Moore kept while writing Byron’s life makes no reference to Mary’s contribution;11 his journals, however, note her loquacity ‘I can talk with more freedom to him than to anyone almost I ever knew,’ Mary noted with wonder on 2 July 1827 after a long, delightful breakfast, during which she handed Moore her written account of Byron’s memoirs, which she had read at Venice in 1818.† It seems likely that she helped him far more than he was willing to acknowledge. To take one small but striking example: Moore’s life is our only source for Byron’s declaration that he awoke one day and found himself famous. The comment is startlingly close to the exclamation Mary made to Leigh Hunt after viewing Frankenstein on stage in 1823: ‘But lo & behold! I found myself famous!’ Mary may have heard it from Byron himself and passed it on to Moore; she may even have put her own words into his mouth.
One person who had cause for grave anxiety about Mary’s collaboration with Moore was Claire Clairmont. Claire did not trust Mary on the subject of Byron. Reading Mary’s panegyrics of Lord Raymond in her futuristic novel The Last Man, so clearly based on Byron, Claire must have been appalled. Byron was the man who had spurned her love, put her adored child in a convent and left her there to die. She had supposed that Mary shared this view. But Mary, far from exposing Byron as a monster, seemed intent on glorifying his name. When he showed up in her fifth novel, Lodore, Claire could stand it no longer. Hearing that yet another book was planned, she dared hope that it would not contain ‘another Beautified Byron’. ‘I stick to Frankenstein,’ she wrote fiercely,
merely because that vile spirit does not haunt its pages as it does in all your other novels, now as Castruccio, now as Raymond, now as Lodore. Good God, to think that a person of your genius, whose moral tact ought to be proportionately exalted, should think it a task befitting its powers to gild and embellish and pass off as beautiful what was the merest compound of Vanity, folly, and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human Being.12
But this was in the future. In 1830, the year in which Moore’s Life was published, Mary swore that there had been no collaboration, and her stepsister believed her. ‘This is an erroneous supposition of Trelawneys,’ Claire told Jane Williams in February 1830, after hearing of his belief that Mary had been secretly providing Moore with letters and recollections. Mary could not be so treacherous, or so untruthful. Trelawny was right, however. Almost the entire account of Byron’s life at the Villa Diodati had come directly from Mary, the sole survivor now from that summer of 1816, apart from Claire herself. So had the vivid image of Byron crossing the lake singing the Tyrolese song of liberty (as does Lord Raymond in The Last Man).
One episode in particular stands out as Mary’s work. It is the account of a storm which blew up when Shelley and Byron were sailing down the lake together. Shelley’s own letter of the time described how, unable to swim, he felt humiliated by Byron’s readiness to save him – and terrified by the prospect of death. An anonymous account of Byron at sea which had been rushed into print in the year of his death also drew on this episode, showing Shelley as a quaking atheist while Byron serenely confronted his fate. Mary, having read this account, appears to have coolly transferred the roles. In the Moore–Mary version, Shelley is heroically calm: ‘seating himself quietly upon a locker, and grasping the rings at each end firmly in his hands, [he] declared his determination to go down in that position, without a struggle.’ Here, we can see Mary reviewing Shelley’s death, imagining the frame of mind in which she longed to believe he had met those unknowable final moments when the Don Juan sank.
Curiosity as well as Moore’s persuasive manner drove Mary to make prodigious attempts to coax Teresa into joining their alliance. Pietro Gamba had put a bundle of his sister’s letters to Byron in Mary’s safekeeping when he visited England in 1824. Condo
ling with Teresa on Pietro’s premature death of typhoid in 1827, Mary took advantage of the occasion to ask if she might use these to provide Moore with ‘a rough outline’ of the relationship. Were there other letters from Byron? Could she have a copy of the love note he had written in English in Teresa’s Corinne?‡ When Teresa failed to respond, she tried reproaches – ‘povero Moore s’impazienza’ – heavy-handed allusions to her own interest in Roman Catholicism (Teresa was a convent-bred Catholic); and, in desperation, threats.13 Did Teresa know, Mary wondered, that Lady Blessington was preparing a book in which she intended to claim that Byron had been in love with her, not the Countess Guiccioli, when he was living at Genoa?14 Such a claim could easily be disproved by a few devoted lines from Byron to Teresa for inclusion in Moore’s book.
Teresa’s girlish ringlets and dimpling smiles hid a shrewd and determined mind. She had no intention of parting with her most valuable possession. An assortment of documents duly arrived in London, but Mary had to wait until Teresa’s visit to England in 1832 to be allowed a glimpse of the coveted Byron love letters, while returning those of Teresa’s which she had cared for since 1824. This meeting marked the end of a friendship which had never been wholly sincere. Mary was always more intrigued by the spell this pretty but limited girl had cast over Byron than by her character; Teresa did not find Mary’s social circle in London much to her taste. A furious exchange of letters with John Murray suggests that Teresa also believed that Mary had been copying the letters and poems entrusted to her by Pietro Gamba, and that she had been passing them on to the publisher. She ‘had no right to make such a use of them’, Teresa exploded in the autumn of 1832; she ‘was also particularly requested by me of that’.15 Moore’s book, she commented in another indignant note, was so faulty as to be beyond correction.16
Moore’s first impressions of Mary had been pleasing and it was no hardship to him to be friendly while she was useful. They went to Holborn together to see his little son at Charterhouse school. They toured exhibitions and went on long walks during which Mary spoke freely about her friendship with Byron. They visited the studio of Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was painting Moore’s portrait; occasionally they met at the home of a mutual friend, Joshua Robinson, in the village of Paddington. Knowing that a Tom Moore song, warbled out by the man himself, was always a treat for hostesses, Moore would later oblige at the parties which Mary began to give when she was able to move to a smarter, more central address near Portman Square at the close of 1827.17
Moore was charming but vain. He did not like adverse criticism. When Mary was rash enough in a letter, since lost, to offer some objections to the way Moore had treated the delicate subject of Shelley’s atheism in the completed Life, he was furious. ‘It is like a man being scolded by his wife at home besides being bullied abroad,’ he wrote back; he went on to drop an unpleasant hint that she had better stop making trouble. He had found references to Allegra’s upbringing in Byron’s letters to the Hoppners ‘which though important … I don’t think you would like to appear’. Another threat followed, of a more obscure kind: ‘Pray take care of yourself – keep clear of the law – don’t wet your feet, and don’t write criticisms.’18
*
Mary’s work for Moore provided her with one useful literary introduction. John Bowring, Honorary Secretary of the Greek Committee in London and an admirer of Shelley’s work, was willing to let her transcribe his correspondence with Byron for Moore’s Life. A friendship sprang up; exchanges of news on their children suggest that Bowring was one of the few Londoners ready to make the dreary journey out to Kentish Town. As editor of the new Westminster Review, he was also able to offer Mary work. Articles and reviews were Mary’s only means of eking out an allowance for which she was often forced to wait months, although reasons were seldom provided. Her heart was not in this kind of work, however. Some of the happiest entries in her journals are those in which she recorded the sense of imaginative release which came from writing novels. These were the works in which she felt able to ‘pour forth my soul upon paper, feel the winged ideas arise …’
It is hard to think of another of her books, with the exception of Frankenstein, which demonstrates this sense of released, exultant imaginative power, so well as The Last Man. The novel embodies Mary’s sense of herself isolated in a familiar but alien city, the last of a close-knit group. It also aggrandizes the figure of Byron as Lord Raymond. A more striking intention emerges when we look back to Shelley’s last, unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, written during the summer of 1822 at the Villa Magni.
Shelley’s poem had opened with a magnificent but chilling image of Death as a feminine force, riding in her juggernaut over youth and old age, princes and peasants, levelling all. The plague appears in Shelley’s poem, but as ‘the plague of gold and blood’ spread over the world by the greed of despotic rulers. Mary’s novel can be read in part as a deliberate extension of Shelley’s uncompleted work. She even signalled the fact in the sixth chapter of her third volume, putting the words into the mouth of Adrian, the character most closely based on Shelley. ‘I have hung on the wheel of the chariot of plague,’ Adrian exclaims, ‘but she drags me along with it, while, like Jaggernaut, she proceeds crushing out the being of all who strew the high road of life.’ Since Shelley’s poem had used the image of the chariot, a female death-force and life as a highroad, there can be little argument about the connection between the two works. It was no accident; nor was the feverish intensity of the last and most powerful section of The Last Man, which again reflects the pace and follows the direction of Shelley’s speeding chariot. ‘Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea,’ he had written; the novel, which begins at Bishopsgate, in the landscape where Shelley and Mary had made their first home, ends, in a scene of magnificent and terrible desolation, at Rome, where Mary’s son had died, and where Shelley was now buried.
The characters of The Last Man are, as Muriel Spark has observed in a shrewd critical biography of Mary Shelley, little more than types. Raymond is the ultimate Don Juan; Adrian is the Don Quixote of idealists; Lionel Verney, the narrator who represents Mary herself, is the ‘last man’ whose final solitude reflects her own strongly felt identification with Coleridge’s isolated Mariner. The most memorable scenes are those in which the characters become tiny, helpless players in a world governed by nature, in which their boats are lashed by storms, their deaths mocked by towering alpine scenes or by vast indifferent skies. But, thin though the characters seem to us, it is apparent that they were not so to Mary herself.
She wanted, plainly, to win admiration for Adrian. She gives him Shelley’s beliefs, his looks, his habits. It is Adrian who stimulates Verney’s passion for reading, who broadens his interest in politics and who inspires him to become an author. Try as she would, however, Mary could not forget the nightmare side of life with Shelley, the ruthlessness of his irresponsibility: ‘the sensitive and excellent Adrian, loving all, and beloved by all, yet seemed destined not to find the half of himself, which was to complete his happiness,’19 she wrote, acknowledging that his search for happiness with Claire, with Emilia, with Jane, had merely been extensions of his response to her. It was a search which could never be completed, and which caused pain to everybody except the seeker himself. It is Adrian who insists, against Lionel/Mary’s advice, that they must take young Clara, infant child of the heroine, out over a stormy sea to visit her parents’ tombs. Clara and Adrian are drowned, in a scene which reminds us that Mary had never ceased to believe that Shelley was responsible for the death of her own Clara in 1818. Adrian is good, sensitive and high-minded; he is also shown to be selfish, irresponsible and neurotic. What we do not know is how much of this subversion of Adrian’s noble exterior was unconsciously executed.
Examining all ideologies in her novel, Mary seems to have been most attracted to Burke’s idea of an organic society which can be developed and improved only under enlightened guidance. This, at least, is the view she allows Lionel Verney to promote as he
watches his small son go out on to the playing fields of Eton. But before casting Mary as a conservative, repudiating the ideas of both her father and her husband, we need to remind ourselves of the subject of The Last Man. Extinction is the vision Mary offers in her last scene; and here, following Shelley’s last poem, she mocks man’s aspirations. ‘Neither hope nor joy are my pilots – restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on,’ Lionel Verney declares in the last chapter. From the novel’s expansive opening vision of reform, Mary Shelley has narrowed the view to a single figure, whose wish for change is rendered meaningless by his lack of followers. Only the wish remains. Alone, Verney can achieve nothing. The conclusion is as bleak as the cry: ‘Then what is life?’ with which Shelley had ceased work on his last poem.
Settled at Kentish Town, Mary worked on the novel as steadily as her magazine writing would permit between the spring of 1824 and the summer of 1825. She veered – as most writers do – between flashes of ecstasy (‘I feel my powers again – & this is of itself happiness’20 ) in the high summer of 1824, and blind despair (‘all my many pages – future waste paper – surely I am a fool’21 ) at the beginning of 1825. There were times when the boldness of her subject and its range appalled her. She needed to wade through shelves of books on Constantinople and Greece to set the scene for Lord Raymond’s battles and the pilgrimages of his friends; she needed, and persuaded John Cam Hobhouse to obtain for her, permission to watch parliamentary debates to give authenticity to the English political scenes. She worried about the difficulties of describing the plague’s slow spread; she resorted to plundering Trelawny’s vivid letters for accounts of warfare.
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