She dined constantly now with Gee and her husband at his parents’ home in the Strand, where she admired John Martin’s magnificent Belshazzar’s Feast, the best buy, Sir John Paul liked to say, that he had ever made. She met other members of the large Paul family; she listened with rapture when they invited Gabriele Rossetti, the father of Christina, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, to come and improvise for them in the Italian style, reminding her of the time she had travelled to Lucca to see the great Sgricci perform. Wishing to please rather than to seek comfort in religion, Mary began going to church with the Pauls, attending the twelfth-century church of the Knights Templar, tucked away among the rambling Inns of Court above the Thames. The Master of the Temple, Christopher Benson, was not, which must have relieved her, one of the new charismatic school of preachers; she could sit through his reasoned, elegant sermons without annoyance. The Temple Church was not then famous for the quality of its music, however: the squawks of the two ladies who comprised the choir made sorry listening for a woman who had heard Novellos playing at the Portuguese Chapel in South Street. Mary started bringing Percy to the Sunday services; she hoped that Gee would carry reports back to Sussex which would reach Sir Timothy’s ears. Anything was worth trying where Percy’s future was concerned. He was, she told Trelawny in March, growing very like Shelley; in the same letter, she casually informed him that her friend Gee Paul was dining with the Shelleys at Field Place that week.
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Little Thomas Moore, jotting down rude comments about Mary’s gatherings in his journal, especially when he had not been the centre of attention, was insufficiently observant to be struck by the careful exclusiveness of her guest list. Courtly, handsome Lord Dillon was only kept away by ill health as his long-suffering wife nursed him at their great house in Oxfordshire, but Mary asked neither the poor, slightly raffish ladies like Charlotte Figge whom she had met through Mary Diana Dods, nor debt-ridden John Howard Payne. William Godwin saw his sister only at Gower Place or in private; holding a large party the week before Charles Clairmont and his family returned to Vienna, Mary sent them no invitation. She was ready to help Hogg try to find a publisher for his new novel, but he and Jane were not asked to Somerset Street. Establishing a new circle of friends, Mary seemed anxious to keep away anybody who might gossip about her past.
To those who had listened to Jane Hogg’s stories about Mrs Shelley, it was intriguing to hear that she had emerged from her retirement. The writer Anna Jameson encouraged her friend Maria Jane Jewsbury to get herself an introduction through Richard Rothwell. Miss Jewsbury’s sister Geraldine added a request to Maria’s letter, asking for a little sample of Shelley’s signature. Admirers of Shelley were always welcomed by Mary; on 18 June, Mrs Jameson was rewarded with a lengthy account of Maria’s impressions.
Miss Jewsbury had been fascinated: ‘bewitching’ was the word she chose before commenting that Mary’s combination of ‘buoyancy and depth’ made her a likely model for Beatrice in Shelley’s The Cenci. She had liked Mary’s ‘kind and playful’ manner. She was surprised and intrigued by the quality we see least of in Mary’s journals and letters, an unforced gaiety, ‘simple – natural – and like Spring full of sweetness’. Significantly, Maria ended her account by assuring Anna that Mrs Shelley ‘is not one to sit with and think ill of, even on authority’.5 Stories had obviously reached this group of literary women; what ‘authority’ did Miss Jewsbury have in mind and what had she heard? Perhaps caution prevailed; no evidence exists of a friendship with Mary having been established before Maria married the Reverend William Fletcher in 1832 and went with him to India, where she died.
Mary’s correspondence and journals for 1830–1 show how at ease she felt in this new way of life. The Pauls took her to the opening night of the opera season and invited her to evenings of charades (‘tableaux vivants’) performed at their home. She heard the singer Davide, much admired by her in Italy, giving his first English performances. She went to the races at Royal Ascot with young Julia Robinson. She raved over the brilliance of Paganini, for one of whose sell-out performances the ever-obliging John Howard Payne had provided her with seats, and decided that she could spend the rest of her life listening to his violin: ‘Nothing was ever so sublime.’6 She sat, thanks to her friendship with the Beauclerks, in the Duke of Norfolk’s private row of seats for the coronation of William IV that September, and smothered a grin as she noticed an empty inkwell being tipped for the new king to scratch his signature, and how silly Lord Brougham looked with a coronet perched on his wig.
She should have been happy. Only her continuing financial worries and her own disposition to melancholy prevented her from being so. Writing to Trelawny between 22 and 25 March 1831, she told him that she was ‘sinking at last’ under the difficulties of her ‘wretched’ life. Three days later, however, she made a note that she wanted to mark this period as having been ‘peculiarly happy’, though for no reason she could define. Contentment, she wrote sadly, ‘seems to me the dearest blessing of heaven – Yet I cannot command it – it is more various than a lover’s moods less controulable than the wind.’ In her journal for May, the month in which she sat for Rothwell, she wrote of languor and illness; on 9 September, she followed a miserable outpouring in verse (‘Alas I weep my life away / And spend my heart in useless sorrow …’) with an optimistic Spanish quotation which might be translated as ‘Where one door closes, another one opens.’ True, her hopes of placing Percy at a public school that summer were being blocked by Sir Timothy and his lawyer, but this was not enough to explain such violent extremes of emotion. More likely, Mary was telling the truth when she wrote of personal content as something which seemed to come and go at whim, ‘without any special cause’. This, as her father sometimes reminded her, was the Wollstonecraft nature; she could do nothing to overcome it.
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Compensation for the loss of the Hares to Florence in the autumn of 1830 was provided by the discovery of new and equally kind friends. Mary appears to have met Lincoln and Leicester Stanhope through either the Pauls or the Beauclerks; the part they had played in raising money for the Greek cause and, briefly, in Byron’s life (Leicester Stanhope had joined him at Missolonghi and brought his remains back to England) linked them to another of her circle, John Bowring. Mary’s particular friend became Leicester’s madonna-faced wife, Elizabeth, detested by Tom Moore as an intellectual, a ‘Blue’. Mrs Stanhope was not so solemn as Moore supposed: ‘Write to me like a good girl – & get a very nice set of Beaus for me to flirt with when you give a party or I will flirt with – I won’t tell you who,’ Mary teased her in 1833.7
Mary had moved far from her life as an outcast during the first years back in England, although the sense of a social gap remained, preserved by her own painful pride. Godwin, blithely indifferent to social niceties, went on a regular basis to the big, noisy gatherings at the home of Elizabeth Stanhope’s hospitable mother, Mrs Somerville Wood, where the old lady held forth about her guests from the point of view of their ‘phrenology’.¶ Mary, mortified at having to turn up at the door in a hackney or on foot, preferred to stay away unless she could arrive in style.
In order not to antagonize her new friends, Mary also had to learn to curb her temper. That she was easily roused to anger we know from Hunt’s firsthand comments on his experience of it in Italy. Occasional evidence of it slips out, showing a side to her nature of which the Pauls and Beauclerks remained unaware. Pressing for a meeting with Charles Ollier, who often acted as her go-between in publishing negotiations, Mary tartly inquired, on 28 December 1830, if ‘your tiresome silence is not occasioned by your being dead’.
Trelawny, too, was given cause to remember that he had once thought Mary quite as prone to ill humour and tantrums as himself Writing to him over 22–25 March 1831, she seemed to drop a strong hint that she might consider marrying him. ‘I do not think that I shall either marry or die this year,’ she told him, ‘– whatever may happen next – as it is only spring you have some
time before you.’ Was she joking or not? She was in the process of editing and selling his manuscript; cautiously, Trelawny answered that he would not wonder ‘if fate, without our choice, united us’.8 ‘Mary Shelley shall be written on my tomb,’ she wrote back.9 Excellent, Trelawny wrote with relief, claiming that nothing in her letter had pleased him so much as this statement and rashly adding that he, too, took pride in his name. Back came a furious letter, rejecting something he had not, in fact, offered. ‘My name will never be Trelawny,’ Mary declared; he belonged ‘to womenkind in general – & Mary Shelley will never be yours.’10 He took care after this to avoid both flattery and innuendo.
Ungrateful though he became in later years, Trelawny was much in debt to Mary for her hard work in the autumn of 1830 as the unpaid editor of and agent to his flamboyant naval memoirs. Having told her not to edit, only to add appropriate chapter mottoes from Shelley, Byron and Keats, he was infuriated to be criticized for saying that polygamy was ‘not only lawful, but meritorious’, and for allowing a bluff sailor to turn down a party of eager, stark naked ladies by telling them that ‘I’d rather splice myself to a bit of rotten junk.’11 ‘I, your partial friend, strongly object to [such] coarseness, now wholly out of date,’ Mary told him. Booksellers would not like it; no lady would read such stuff. She would, if he allowed it, act as his censor: ‘Without this yielding on your part I shall experience great difficulty in disposing of your work.’12
Trelawny had not forgotten how Mary had denied him the chance to write about Shelley; back he flung at her in a petulant rage. So she wished to castrate his work as she had done Byron’s Don Juan? Well, everybody he knew wished she had left Don Juan alone.|| Lady Burghersh, his friend in Florence, ‘aristocratic and proud as a queen’, had not objected to his frank and nautical style; why should Mary be so prim? If the book must be edited, let it be by a man, Horace Smith, if need be. Five hundred pounds was the least he expected her to get for his three volumes. But he added that still, whatever she might think of him, ‘you every day become dearer to me’13 – as she very well might, for the efforts she was making on his behalf.
If Mary had been sharp on the subject of marriage, she made up for it by the saintliness of her patience with Trelawny in his new, and nervous, role as an author. The chapter mottoes were supplied and no awkward questions raised about truth. She found him a publisher in Colburn and Bentley’s thriving firm and got him the best price she could, £300 with a further £100 for a second edition. Bulwer, Disraeli and Moore might be able to command £100 for a long article, but this was still twice what she had been paid for her own last work. With no thanks from Trelawny, who had wanted it to be called ‘Treloen’, or, failing that, ‘A Man’s Life’, she even found him a title. Adventures of a Younger Son would catch the public interest, she assured him: the hardship of younger sons was much discussed in England.
Trelawny’s pleas for anonymous publication were a sham, as they both knew but never acknowledged to each other. He had insisted the publishers be told that the author was a close friend of Shelley and Byron; they had only known one privateer. Every review identified him. The publisher advertised the book as written by an intimate friend of Byron’s; the mottoes provided by Mary helped to strengthen his claims to have been the devoted friend, not only of Shelley but of Keats, a poet he had never met.
Gee Paul had done her best to help close the gap between Mary and the Shelleys. Lunching at Field Place, she had been presented with a gold sovereign to be passed on to young Percy who, directed by Mary, sent a letter of effusive thanks to his dear, generous grandpapa. Sir Timothy, nevertheless, continued to oppose Mary’s requests for meetings, and to question that a public school would benefit the boy. ‘Not noticed by his own family … the forming of friends at school is of importance to him,’ she explained via the lawyer in May 1831, but to no avail.
Visiting Gee Paul at her home three months later, Mary could not help noticing that another visitor, Sir Francis Vincent, seemed disagreeably familiar with her friend. ‘I do not like him – he is mauvais ton,’ Mary noted in her journal. Dining with Gee’s parents-in-law that autumn, she was puzzled by their evasive manner. In November, she learnt the truth. Gee was suspected of conducting an affair with Vincent, a married man himself; she was being evicted from her home to live in a secluded village south of London. ‘Poor Gee is sent to Norwood – her child torn away – cast away & deserted,’ Mary wrote with horror. ‘My first impulse is to befriend a woman – I will do her all the good I can.’14** Mary spent much of the next two months consoling her friend before agreeing to witness the act of separation. On 9 February 1832, Gee left Norwood for Ardglass, the bleak Irish castle which her brother Aubrey had inherited that month on the death of his grandfather, William Ogilvie.††
Sir Timothy Shelley, already irritated with Gee for interfering in his private affairs, took the worst view of her. Pointedly regretting that Mary had made such an unfortunate attachment, he urged her to move out of London, away from such contaminating company. Gee’s parents-in-law, however, were shocked by their son’s harsh rectitude and touched by Mary’s loyalty to her friend. Already warmly attached to her, they now went out of their way to include Mary in their family circle and to do everything they could to make her life pleasant.
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It is from Matthew Arnold and Thackeray’s daughter that we have the famous anecdote of Mary being advised by the successful young actress and authoress Fanny Kemble to send Percy to a school where he would learn to think for himself, and of Mary’s reply: ‘Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!’15
Mary had seen Fanny Kemble on stage; she did not meet her until shortly before Percy went to university. The story is, nevertheless, true to her wish to give her son a conventional education. Faced with Sir Timothy’s indifference, she was determined to prove Percy worthy of his inheritance. He seemed such a fine and good boy to her; her letters to Whitton express sad bewilderment that any child should be made to feel so unwanted.
In January 1832, however, Mary had a piece of good fortune. Whitton, who had never tried to help her, retired from old age – he died that summer – and his place was taken by a more open-minded lawyer, John Gregson. Mary had, for some months, been begging for a small increase in her allowance and for a decision about Percy’s future; in March, after meeting Gregson, she told him that she had taken action. Percy was due to leave Dr Slater’s Academy at the end of the summer. She had enrolled him at Harrow. Benjamin Kennedy, the undermaster with whom Percy was to be lodged since the Headmaster’s house had no room, kept thirty boarders. It was a relief to Mary to learn that only two of them were able to exercise the right to use new boys as their fags, or unpaid servants. It was a comfort, too, to know that Sir John and Lady Paul had a cottage nearby, from which they would be able to keep a kindly eye on her son.
Sir Timothy, while expressing no satisfaction at the arrangement, consented to raise her allowance to meet the school costs, estimated by Mary to be no more than £150 a year. Claire, however, was struck only by what seemed to her Mary’s continuing and unhealthy obsession with Byron. To send Percy to his old school? Where Allegra had been buried? It was beyond belief, she wrote from Pisa, where she was now teaching from Mrs Mason’s home:
I shudder from head to foot when I think of your boldness in sending him there. I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew … I hope nothing will happen to Percy – but the year, the school itself that you have chosen and the ashes that lie near it, and the hauntings of my own mind, all seem to announce the approach of the consummation which I dread.16
‘Cholera in Sunderland,’ Godwin neatly noted in his journal on 31 October 1831; this was the disease which gave rise to Claire’s dark presentiments. It spread down from Sunderland during the winter and into the spring of 1832; by the summer, newspapers were urging city-dwellers to move out of densely populated areas. Mary – trying to supply ideas for her father�
�s new novel, Deloraine, urging John Murray to help him while supplying information for the new multi-volume edition of Byron’s works, revising a story which Claire wanted her to submit to one of the magazines – had at first no time for precautions. In August, however, more concerned for Percy’s welfare than her own, she took him down to spend the rest of the summer by the sea, at sleepy, hilly little Sandgate on the Kent coast.
She had always enjoyed the company of girls she could treat as substitute daughters. She was initially pleased and even flattered when Trelawny sent a honeyed note in May asking her to take charge of his eldest daughter Julia until she could accompany Lady Dorothea Campbell to Italy Julia came to Sandgate, and here Trelawny joined them.
The reunion was not comfortable. Mary had difficulty in disguising her impatience with Julia, a petulant and demanding featherbrain of eighteen to whom unfashionable Sandgate seemed the worst form of exile, not much improved by the presence of the father she hardly knew. Trelawny, who took lodgings nearby, was in stridently revolutionary mood, roaring for reform and liberty when Mary only wanted peace and leisure. Listening to him misquoting Shakespeare and haranguing her on the dreariness of her life, Mary wistfully compared him to Percy. ‘I cannot tell you how much cleverer & more companiable he was than my present companion,’ she wrote to Mrs Gisborne.17 Percy at twelve was a reclusive boy, although essentially steady and affectionate. Trelawny’s strangeness was of a different, more troubling kind: there was nothing behind the performance. He is ‘destroyed by being nothing –’ she wrote acutely in her journal, ‘destroyed by envy and internal dissatisfaction’.18 It did not occur to her that much of Trelawny’s discomfort was due to the fact that he had, by now, embraced the fantasy of himself as Shelley’s lifelong friend and champion. This was not a role he could easily play with Shelley’s widow.
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