Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

24. Sir Timothy Shelley–William Whitton, in R. Ingpen, Shelley in England (1917), p. 613, dated to end of 1830.

  25. Account given by John Browne, a Horsham draper (Horsham Museum, HM Mss Cat. No. 813–14).

  26. WG–MWS, 22.7.1830: Godwin, 2, p. 309, but dated in S&M, 4, to 15.4.1830.

  27. As recorded in Lardner’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

  28. MWS–Charles Ollier, January–February 1831.

  29. MWS–John Murray, 4.5.1832.

  30. Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers was finally published by the obscure firm of Frederick Mason in 1834, after being rejected by Murray, Colburn and Lardner. Published in the US the following year, possibly through the support of Washington Irving, it was much admired by Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote an enthusiastic appreciation in the Southern Literary Messenger, 2 (1835), p. 65. An interesting study could be made of the fascination with alchemy, magic and superstition which Mary shared with her father. An obsession with specific and significant dates in her novels clearly relates to this interest. In Frankenstein, for example, dates are used both to draw parallels between the story and the nine-month gap between conception and childbirth, and to allude to the birth of Mary herself. This aspect of Frankenstein has been ably discussed by Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley, op. cit.

  31. Frankenstein (1831 edn), 1, iii.

  32. Ibid., 1, Letter IV.

  33. Ibid., 1, Letter II.

  34. Ibid., 1, Letter IV.

  35. Ibid., 1, Letter IV.

  36. Ibid., 3, vii.

  * Mary made a half-hearted offer at this time to adopt Trelawny’s daughter, but acknowledged that she would be better off in the Italian climate. Claire also expressed an interest in coming to Florence to bring her up, but Trelawny resisted. (Finally, in 1831, aged three, Zella was adopted by the wealthy, affectionate and childless Marchesa Boccella, an Englishwoman from the West Country who had married and settled in Florence.)

  † Sir Timothy was, in difficult circumstances, courageous: ‘he gave them plenty to eat and some good stiff ale to drink. Allowing the stingo time to work the old gentleman then addressed a few words to the men, wishing them well, hoping for better times, etc. and begging to be excused the journey to Horsham … “You shall come,” shouted one of them striking the table with his stick, “you shall come.” Lady Shelley was much alarmed and cried, “Oh! Pray don’t hurt Sir Timothy, I hope you won’t hurt Sir Timothy.” “We won’t hurt he,” they replied, “but we will have our demands.”’25

  ‡ It is also possible that Moore was responsible for Mary’s introduction to Bulwer.

  § Lardner raised the money by giving lectures in the United States and Cuba. Over five years, between 1840 and 1845, his public speaking earned him an impressive £40,000

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ENTERING SOCIETY

  1830–1834

  ‘I have begun a new kind of life somewhat – going a little into society – & forming a variety of acquaintances …’

  Mary Shelley, Journal, 22 January 1830

  TRELAWNY, IN THE MONTHS AFTER SHELLEY’S DEATH, HAD GIVEN Mary a well-intended warning. Of all the people in the world, he told her, she was the most ignorant both of it and of human nature. He was not wrong. She had grown up in the household of a theoretical philosopher, and had spent the next eight years living with an impassioned idealist. She had come home to England determined not to shelter behind lies. She had thought that it was possible to tell the truth about Shelley and herself, to make no pretence that Harriet and he had parted by mutual consent, to publish the fact that she, in 1814, had chosen to live with him and to bear his children. She had innocently supposed that Sir Timothy’s heart would soften, that Jane Williams would be grateful for her love and would return it, and that Shelley’s fame would grow without the necessity for concealing his personal history.

  Six years in England had taught Mary some harsh lessons. Sir Timothy remained obdurate; Jane proved treacherous; Shelley’s reputation was growing, but at the expense of the political poetry in which he had so recklessly combined his hopes for the future with savage attacks on the hypocrites and tyrants of the present. This was not to the public’s taste, any more than was his atheism, or details of his unorthodox domestic life. Mary did not intend to hide the radical side of Shelley for ever, but at the end of the 1820s she was ready to acknowledge the prudence of suppression. Trelawny, censuring her from abroad for her lack of courage and, as she cautiously began to establish new friendships, for being a social climber, was out of tune with the times.

  England entered the Victorian age – with all, both good and bad, that word implies – long before the crowning of an eighteen-year-old girl in 1837. An account of the country’s progress during the seven-year reign of Victoria’s bluff uncle William could sound exciting. The railway era began; young Charles Darwin decided to join the Beagle on its five-year trip of scientific investigation; Ross, in 1831, identified a magnetic site at the North Pole; Michael Faraday discovered the laws of electromagnetic induction, and, with his remarkable ‘difference engine’, Charles Babbage produced the world’s first computer.

  In other respects, England seemed to be moving backwards at a time when all the signs from abroad were of liberty and progress. Mary had hailed these signs with delight. Writing an enthusiastic letter to the Marquis de Lafayette on 11 November 1830 and reminding him of their brief meeting in Paris two years earlier, she offered her hearty congratulations on his part in the ‘sublime achievements’ of the July revolution and on the crowning of a new, republican-spirited king, Louis Philippe. ‘How does every heart in Europe respond to the mighty voice, which spoke in your Metropolis, bidding the world be free,’ she wrote: ‘… one by one the nations will take up the echo and mine will not be the last. May England imitate your France in its moderation and heroism.’ To Fanny Wright, too, she expressed her hopes: ‘Will not our Children live to see a new birth for the world!’1

  ‘Moderation’ is the word to note. This was the autumn in which a mob of agricultural workers had burst into Field Place and demanded Sir Timothy’s support for their cause. Newspapers carried regular reports of burnings and riots; the Quarterly Review warned its Tory readers to prepare for the day when the tricolore would flutter from village steeples. Reform and the promise of enfranchisement of the voiceless middle class headed the agenda of the new Whig government, led by Earl Grey;* the House of Lords, crowded with apprehensive landowners, had no interest in passing a Bill which would give rebel farmworkers the chance to vote against them.

  Shelley, or Shelley as he had been in 1822, would have carried the workers’ banner; so, once, would Mary. By 1830, however, she had grown more guarded; like her father she now placed her faith in gradual measures. Writing to Lafayette, she had expressed the hope for ‘moderation’; writing to Fanny Wright a month later, she accepted the possibility of revolution in England – ‘[o]ur own hapless country’ – but only with extreme reluctance:

  The case seems to stand thus – The people will be redressed – will the Aristocrats sacrifice enough to tranquillize them – if they will not – we must be revolutionized – but they intend now so to do – it remains to be seen whether the people’s claims will augment with the concessions – Our sick feel themselves tottering – they are fully aware of their weakness – long curtailed as to their rents, they humble – How will it all end? None dare even presume to guess.2

  We should not doubt, although Mary’s letters offer scant evidence of her views on the subject, that she welcomed the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832; her letter to Fanny Wright shows that she was sympathetic to the rebellious unemployed, but cautiously so; in a letter written to Dale Owen at the same time, Mary deplored the ‘sick destructiveness’ of the rioters and rick-burners.

  These years of unrest led Mary, increasingly, to become an advocate of slow progress and to oppose the revolutionary measures her husband had espoused. Writing to Maria Gisborne, long settled at Plymouth, on 24 August 1832, sh
e observed that Trelawny ‘is too violent in his politics for me – he is radical à l’outrance …’ It seems likely that Mary herself had already begun to favour the Independents, a significant force in the early 1830s. High-minded democrats, they sought an extended franchise, reduced taxes on the poor, and a new system of national education. They also supported a reduced military presence in Ireland, and the world-wide abolition of Negro slavery These were reforms which Mary could welcome, all the more so as she had, since 1830, become warmly attached to a man who was hoping to go to the House of Commons as an Independent.This was Major Aubrey Beauclerk, a near neighbour of Sir Timothy and Lady Shelley’s in Sussex.3

  While the Lords dragged their heels over the Reform Bill, which threatened to undermine their own comfortable way of life, attitudes to women were changing in a way which would also influence Mary’s conduct. The time when Lady Caroline Lamb could dress up as a pageboy to catch Byron’s attention, when Mary could take pride in living with a married man and bearing his children, were past and regarded by most as best forgotten. The 1830s were years in which only a few reckless women in the middle and upper reaches of English society enjoyed the same sexual freedom as men. Trelawny, returning to London, could boast of his conquests and bawl his contempt for religion and still be asked to dine. Nobody refused to entertain dandyish young Benjamin Disraeli because he was sleeping with Sir Francis Sykes’s wife. Edward Bulwer was not punished with social exile for the multitude of affairs which finally caused his wife Rosina to demand a separation. George Norton, the bullying, abusive husband of the playwright Sheridan’s granddaughter Caroline, could demand divorce on the grounds of an affair which she may never have had, live on his wife’s earnings, claim legacies made to her and obtain custody of her children. A husband could keep a mistress on the side for years and still be granted both his wife’s property and their children if she was foolish enough to be caught sleeping with another man.

  Wives did, of course, have affairs, and several of Mary Shelley’s new friends were among them. What had changed was the need for discretion. London, in the 1830s, shuddered at the boldness of Madame Dudevant for leaving her husband and children in the country to live in Paris, wear trousers, take lovers and – such effrontery! – call herself George Sand. But France had always been decadent, while in England, that wondrous myth, the ‘angel of the house’, pious, charitable, sexless, was taking shape. Mary had little respect for the new Lady Bountiful, evangelical, tremulously sensitive, and dull, but she recognized her power. For the year 1836, the Edinburgh Review appraised a mere six novels among sixty-one religious publications, most of which were specifically addressed to a female audience. Shelley, if he was to gain the admiration of an increasingly devout readership, needed to be purified. And so did his wife.

  Mary’s readiness to pander to the new, uplifting concept of angelic womanhood is apparent in the way she chose to extend her description of Elizabeth Lavenza in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. ‘The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home,’ she wrote now. ‘Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us.’ This was in the new style: Miss Lavenza has become sister to all those Agneses, Ellens and Amelias who never lack a candle or a prayer as they hover in obliging readiness by a penitent’s deathbed.

  Mary had, when she added this passage, gained a precarious foothold in a circle of sociable, good-natured wives willing to ignore her disgraceful past. No saints themselves, they knew the importance of discretion. Warmed by their friendship and eager to do the best she could for Shelley’s reputation and her son’s future, Mary began practising reticence. She was pleased when Hogg, publishing his recollections of Shelley at Oxford in the summer of 1832 at her own suggestion, made no allusion to herself. Hogg, she began to think, might be the man to write a life of Shelley, a task which she had herself begun to dread undertaking. In this respect, at least, she and Sir Timothy were drawing closer. Neither of them now wished for Shelley’s name to be connected with anything which might seem disagreeable. Sir Timothy’s concern, however, remained the reputation of his family name, not his son’s status as a poet. Seventy-seven in the year 1830, he seemed unlikely to change his views.

  *

  Mary tentatively began a new social life in 1829, shortly after she moved into lodgings at 33 Somerset Street, just off Portman Square. Here, she began to be at home to the wide circle of professional literary acquaintances who did not hold her past against her, to her sociable father, and to a few broad-minded women who, sympathizing with her need for friendship and support, admired her intelligence and independent spirit.

  Tom Moore’s journal shows him attending two parties at Mary’s home, on 10 April and 7 June, at which he met, among others, three of the Robinson daughters, Lady Blessington’s sister Mrs Manners-Sutton, the portrait-painter Richard Rothwell, Godwin, a Mrs Coates and Fred Mansel Reynolds. Mary had indeed embarked on a new way of life, although she still found time for quiet evenings at Gower Place with her son and her half-brother, who usually came without his wife. Mary had succeeded also in attracting both Bulwer and Washington Irving to call on her, no mean achievement for a woman who had little to offer beyond her own intelligent company, a cup of tea and some ratafia biscuits carried round by the young maid-of-all-work without whom no London household could survive. (Poor though Mary was, she never had to do her own cooking or washing.)

  Some of these visitors became enduring friends. Lady Mary Shepherd, an eccentric old author, Edward Bulwer and his wife Rosina together with Lord Dudley, one of Godwin’s patrons, came through her father’s wide circle of acquaintance. Bulwer became close enough to be consulted in due course about Percy’s career and about assistance for Godwin. The presence of Theodore Hook, a more rackety character who started writing comic operas with his father when he was only sixteen and who had served a two-year prison sentence for embezzlement, shows that Mary was not narrow-minded about the political views of people she liked: a scurrilous, scandalous exuberant character, Hook had for years been the editor of the violently right-wing – and therefore anti-Whig – Sunday newspaper, John Bull.

  It is not clear how Mary had come to know Lady Blessington’s sister Ellen Manners-Sutton, the warm-hearted, twice-married Irish wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, but this would become a significant friendship. Richard Rothwell’s presence is more intriguing. A startlingly handsome young Irishman (one can’t help but be struck by the wealth of Irish names which crop up in the journals of both Mary and her father), Rothwell was, by 1830, at the height of a fashionable career. Godwin, who was sitting for his own portrait to Pickersgill that summer, made a note on 18 May 1831 that he had been to visit Rothwell’s studio while Mary sat for her portrait. Neither Godwin nor his daughter are likely to have been able to afford the artist’s prices as a painter of the aristocracy; perhaps the young man was sufficiently intrigued to paint her for his own pleasure.4†

  The people who were of most importance to Mary in these long lists of guests were those who seem, at first glance, of least consequence. Among Mary’s acquaintances in the English community at Pisa some eight years earlier had been one Emily Beauclerk, then accompanied by a brood of marriageable daughters. Her husband Charles was a retired politician and son of the notoriously profligate Topham Beauclerk, a friend of Dr Johnson’s. Mrs Beauclerk was the daughter of the Duchess of Leinster by her second marriage to William Ogilvie.‡ Significantly, the Beauclerks’ family home in England was St Leonard’s Lodge in Sussex, where they were near neighbours and friends of the Shelleys of Field Place. Here, then, was a connection through which Mary could hope to reach Sir Timothy without having always to approach him through his fiercely protective lawyer.

  The connections linking the Beauclerks to two other families of Mary’s friends, the Pauls and the Hares, were close but complicated. Mary would, long before 1830, have read and admired Guesses at Truth (1827), a
widely praised collection of essays on philosophy and poetry written by the intelligent fraternal team of Julius and Augustus Hare. The Hares’ third brother Francis, a man known as much for his loquacity as for his wit, his interest in German philosophy and his sallow, mock-lugubrious face, had recently married Anne-Frances Paul whose religious, poetry-writing brother John, a banker, had also just married. His pretty and earnestly philanthropic young bride, Georgiana, was one of the daughters for whom Mrs Beauclerk had been trying so hard to find husbands at Pisa. It was a great loss to Mary when Francis Hare and his wife left England for Italy in September 1830; she was, however, in the same journal entry that lamented their departure, able to record a source of consolation, for ‘an intimacy between me & Georgi[a]na is beginning’.

  Twenty-six-year-old Georgiana or ‘Gee’ Paul was her favourite of the Beauclerk clan, but by April 1831 Mary was already on close terms with her friend’s siblings, including her eldest brother, Aubrey, heir to both the Sussex and the Irish estates, her ‘dear’ married sister, Jane Fitzroy, another sister, Caroline, and two of Gee’s brothers, Charles and George. Mary’s letters make it clear that she was fond of them all and well enough acquainted with their lives to know that Caroline had once been pursued by Edward Trelawny, and that George Beauclerk, still in his mid-twenties, was having an affair with Mrs Wyndham Lewis, an unstoppably vivacious and pretty little woman almost ten years older than himself.§

  Many of Mary’s inner circle of new friends were of a strongly religious bent. This, too, had its uses. Defending her son’s right to be sent to a public school in the summer of 1831, Mary took pride in telling the Shelleys’ lawyer to announce that she would be consulting her friend Mrs Hare’s brother-in-law Julius, who was both a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a clergyman. These were the friends who transformed Mary’s life and who made it possible for her to accept, almost with equanimity, the fact that Jane Hogg was now wrapped up in her domestic life and that Isabel Douglas, meeting her briefly at the end of 1830, was no longer taking the trouble even to be friendly.