Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Mary listened to her father. The following year, offered £600 by Moxon for the works and life of Shelley, she began preparing to defy her father-in-law’s ban. Quietly, she resumed the task of retrieving her husband’s letters of which, in many cases, she possessed only the copies made at the time they were written. Asking Mrs Gisborne for any in her possession, she promised to be the most tactful of censors. ‘You know how I shrink from all private detail for the public … everything private could be omitted,’ wrote the woman who extolled truth, ‘absolute and unshakable’, as the ‘foundation of our assertions’ in her 1837 life of Camoens.18 Did she already know, one wonders, of the letter to the Gisbornes which Shelley had written in the last month of his life, describing the misery of his marriage? Was it this which she intended to omit? Or was she thinking of the history of little Elena Adelaide and of the fact that Shelley had enlisted the Gisbornes’ assistance in sending funds to Naples for the adopted child’s support? There was, understandably, a world of difference between publishing such details in letters and in hinting at them, as Mary had recently done, in fiction.*

  The last wry joke of Godwin’s remarkable career was a good one. One of his official duties was the maintaining of the fire-fighting equipment kept at New Palace Yard. Whatever this equipment may have been and whatever its condition, it proved completely inadequate against the conflagration which smouldered into life on the evening of 16 October 1834, possibly owing to the indoor burning of the old wooden ‘tallies’ once used to record parliamentary expenses. Godwin, who had been at the theatre, was home again when the fire broke out, but there was never a chance to bring the raging furnace under control as it roared through the timbered buildings of Parliament. ‘We saw it here from its commencement blazing like a Volcano – it was dreadful to see,’ Mary told Maria Gisborne on 17 November; small Harrovians yelled with excitement, thinking all London was going up in flames. But, while the Manners-Suttons’ residence was razed to the ground, Godwin’s snug home escaped untouched; rebuilding rather than the fire itself compelled him to move to nearby quarters the following year.

  Mary’s main worry now was not the Godwins, but the difficulty of keeping Percy in the style to which she was determined he should become accustomed. She could not even afford the tailcoat which, fifteen years old, rather thinner and sporting a small moustache, he had ordered without consulting her for his arrival in the Third Remove of the Fifth Form. Embarrassed, she begged Peacock to write to the tailor on her behalf, assuring him that the money would be paid if only the coat could be ready for the first day of term. ‘I will do my best to arrange this better hereafter, meanwhile pray assist me on this occassion,’ she begged him.19

  Ill health and money worries kept Mary low in 1835. Her unhappiness was reflected in the efforts of Maria Gisborne and even Claire to rally her, telling her how good a writer she was and that her reward would surely come soon. It had certainly not come yet. Lodore, for reasons which have never been entirely clear, was kept back by the publishers until 1835. More warmly received than any previous work, the novel earned her just £100 with £50 more promised if it sold over 700 copies. It did, but Mary was still waiting for her £50 in March 1837. In the meantime, she stoically continued work on the Lardner Lives, seeking the advice of Polidori’s brother-in-law Gabriele Rossetti for her study of Alfieri, thanking Bowring for helping her to find research books.

  Writing to Mrs Gisborne from Harrow on 11 June 1835, Mary fretted because Percy was playing with some friends, out of her sight. She dreaded the thought that Teresa Guiccioli, visiting England, might cause talk by paying her a visit. Castigating herself for a lack of energy and determination, she was even ready to propose that all women were ‘wanting in the higher grades of intellect’. In moral feelings, however, she allowed them to be superior to men. Not, she added bitterly, that Jane Hogg would ever allow her to be capable of such feelings; an insensible wife fitted Mrs Hogg’s view of Shelley as an injured husband far too well. She felt, she added miserably, ‘as one buried alive’.

  This letter was written when Mary was on the verge of a nervous collapse, brought on by unrelieved solitude and overwork. The following month, she sent a desperate appeal for help to Jane Hogg. ‘Come to me immediately as you love me,’ she wrote. ‘… Come – My only Friend Come – to the deserted one – I am too ill to write more.’20 Alarmed by the fact that Mary had taken the trouble and expense to send a cab for her conveyance all the way from Harrow to the Hoggs’ home at Maida Place, Jane obliged. Spending some weeks at Harrow, she nursed the invalid back to health and spirits. It was a reparation for her past behaviour, and was recognized as such. Jane, for all her faults, was always reliable in times of illness, when she showed herself a tender and unselfish nurse.

  By September, when Trelawny was back in England and ungratefully blaming Mary for the fact that his book had been republished with neither permission nor payment, she was convalescing at Dover, steeling herself to start work on the Spanish Lives. She had become cheerful enough again to tease her old friend about his famously fickle heart; in America, he had devoted himself to Fanny Kemble; back in London, he succumbed to the voluptuous charms and witty tongue of Caroline Norton. Mrs Norton is said to have ‘a stony heart withal’, Mary told Maria Gisborne on 13 October: ‘– so I hope she will make him pay for his numerous coquetries with our sex …’ By November, she had returned to Harrow and was preparing to embark not only on the Lives but perhaps, as she told Mrs Gisborne, another novel, but only because ‘I want money to get away from here’. The novel had, however, already begun to take shape; a few sentences later, Mary told her friend that it made her happy to hear how affectionate and attentive Mr Gisborne always was to his wife; she intended her new work to display her own view of ‘fidelity as the first of human virtues’.21

  Mr Gisborne, such a model of fidelity to his wife for almost forty years, died in January 1836; ‘you must indeed let me hear often of you, if not from you,’ Mary wrote to the widow on 4 March, knowing Maria’s hatred of writing. She herself seemed barely to have stopped that winter; the novel which she had casually referred to in the previous October as a project was now half-finished and she had been busy making arrangements for Percy to go to a private tutor rather than see out his last year at Harrow.

  But Mrs Gisborne, bereft, followed her husband after a few months. Mrs Mason had died the previous year; the two women had scarcely known each other but both had played an important part in carrying the memory of Mary Wollstonecraft into the next generation. Claire had taken inspiration for her own work with young girls from Margaret Mason’s tales of her bold and delightful governess; Maria Gisborne had done more than anybody else to bring Mary Shelley into contact with the mother she had never known and whose place, for the first weeks of her life, she had lovingly filled.

  Mary had already moved with Percy to London, in preparation for sending him to his new tutor, when news came from her stepmother on 2 April that Godwin had been laid low by a chronic catarrhal cough, which was now accompanied by fever. Mary hurried to New Palace Yard. The two women kept vigil by the eighty-year-old philosopher’s bed for the next five nights, nodding their encouragement when he occasionally roused himself to express hopes of a speedy recovery. ‘What I then went through – watching alone his dying hours!’ Mary wrote in June in the journal she had abandoned for over a year. Even now, she could not bear to acknowledge her stepmother’s conscientious care; if we had only Mary’s diary for evidence, Mrs Godwin’s presence in the house would be undetectable.

  Godwin died on the evening of 7 April. He had asked to be buried as near as possible to Mary Wollstonecraft at shabby old St Pancras, downgraded to a chapel-of-ease since the arrival of its grander namesake at the north end of the Duke of Bedford’s estate. Trelawny had been Godwin’s last visitor; remembering his businesslike arrangements for Shelley’s cremation and burial, Mary turned to him once more. ‘Could you go with the Undertaker to fix on the spot,’ she asked on 10 April, adding an a
pology for trespassing on the kindness of ‘the best & most constant of friends’.

  Trelawny did his work; the grave was duly opened and Godwin was laid in a coffin above that of his first wife in the presence of a select few, including his sixteen-year-old grandson.† ‘I have lost my dear darling Father,’ Mary bleakly noted in her journal in June; in the same entry, she expressed her wondering admiration for the calm and cheerful temperament which had sustained him to the end. ‘But I! O my God – what a lot is mine.’ Godwin, the Gisbornes and Mrs Mason were dead, Percy had gone to a tutor in Warwickshire, and Jane Hogg was absorbed in caring for her baby daughter, an experience which Mary had been ready to tell Mrs Gisborne that she envied her friend, ‘even to bitterness’. Claire expressed no inclination to return to England; Charles and his family were also settled abroad. It was not hard to see where the responsibility for the woman Mary had spent a lifetime hating, her own stepmother, was about to fall.

  Notes

  1. CC–MWS, 26.10.1832 (CC, 1).

  2. Paraphrased from Claire’s letters to MWS, 1832–4.

  3. MWSJ, 2.12.1834.

  4. MWS–MG, 30.10.1834.

  5. See H.J. Torre, Recollections of School Days at Harrow, 1831–1836 (1890).

  6. MWS–MG, 17.7.1834.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. MWS–MG, 19.8.1834.

  10. MWSJ, 23.11.1833.

  11. WG, Deloraine, 3 vols. (1833), 1, v.

  12. MWS–Charles Ollier, 10.6.1834.

  13. Lodore, 3 vols. (Richard Bentley, 1835), 2, iv.

  14. MWS–MG, 17.7.1834.

  15. MWS–John Bowring, 3.10.1835.

  16. MWS–LH, 3.2.1835.

  17. W. Cooke–WG, 5.12.1834 (Godwin, 2, p. 323).

  18. MWS–MG, 9.2.1835.

  19. MWS–TLP, 13.1.1835.

  20. MWS–JWH, June–July 1835 (as dated by Bennett, MWSL‚ 2, p. 249).

  21. MWS–MG, 8.11.1835.

  * Lodore offers one more possible solution to the mystery surrounding that child; Clorinda, a fiery and beautiful Neapolitan, dies in childbirth at the inn at Gaeta where Percy had been conceived in 1819. Did Mary, perhaps, fuse two events and allude here to a young Neapolitan woman whose child Shelley had impetuously decided to adopt after her death?

  † A puzzling entry in Godwin’s journal for 5 March 1834 reads: ‘(Monument, MWG)’. MWG clearly refers to his first wife and not his daughter, who appears as MWS on the same page. Some alteration to the monument in the churchyard of St Pancras was evidently contemplated and, possibly, carried out. Conceivably, Godwin at the same time was making plans for his own burial.

  PART V

  Keeper of the Shrine

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PROBLEMS OF REPUTATION

  1836–1838

  ‘Her lively sense of duty was perhaps her chief peculiarity.’

  Mary Shelley, Falkner (1837)1

  ATTACHED THOUGH MARY WAS TO THE IDEA THAT SHE POSSESSED prophetic powers, she had not foreseen her father’s death when in March 1836 she and Percy moved from Harrow to dingy lodgings on the north side of Regent’s Park. Far from it. Having made her plans for Percy to go to Warwickshire the following month, she had been intending to meet her friends the Hares at Brussels, where two of that large and affectionate tribe of Joshua Robinson’s daughters were still enjoying themselves after a year abroad. Eight years had passed without Mary’s having left England; with Percy safely wrapped in rural solitude, she could lay aside the writing of Falkner, and enjoy a little fun. This, until her father’s death, had been her scheme for the summer.

  Mary’s reasons for sending Percy to be tutored by the vicar of Stoneleigh had not been entirely straightforward. Home-boarding caused him social difficulties at school, she told John Gregson, the Shelleys’ lawyer, but she also felt that a strapping sixteen-year-old boy should be in a man’s company, not his mother’s, and at a safe distance from the dangers of London. Percy’s sexual development was evidently beginning to discomfort her. Sex was a troubling issue for a widowed mother and Mary felt ill-equipped to deal with the practical business of keeping her son out of danger. In 1837, Trelawny, that genial Lothario, was requested to give young Percy advice on how to keep himself free of disease; travelling with Percy in Europe three years later, Mary was still fretting about the awful consequences of a ‘love scrape’.*

  If Percy had begun to develop virile impulses at sixteen, he kept silent about them. Quiet, affectionate and once more depressing stout, he continued his gentle progress through life as if his ambition was to glide to its end without ruffling its surface. Reporting on his first term in Warwickshire, his tutor praised his steadiness; in his spare time, apparently, he was enjoying William Paley’s popular work, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity,3 in which the author proffered his famous explanation of a world designed as if by a blind watchmaker. Mary was not noticeably displeased.

  But he must have looked forward to the pleasures of a month in the city before he left for Warwickshire. London had plenty of sights for a boy to enjoy and Percy was, despite his mother’s worries, not very mature. (‘He is quite a child still – full of theatres & balloons & music,’ Mary reported to Trelawny on 3 January 1837.) A tall trio of stuffed giraffes peered down the staircase of the old British Museum; the Strand was a clutter of waxwork and freak shows; an extraordinary jumble of mechanical inventions was on permanent display at the Adelaide Gallery. Charles Babbage was among Godwin’s vast circle of friends; perhaps Mary took her son to the reception rooms at his house in Marylebone where the partly assembled ‘Difference Engine’ had been put on display in the hope of attracting financial support for this advanced form of calculating machine. More to Percy’s taste, no doubt, was the curious silver toy on show in another of Babbage’s rooms. A mechanical lady on whose finger perched a bird which flapped its wings and opened its beak, it amused visitors who found the workings of the Difference Engine beyond their understanding.4

  Whatever treats Percy and Mary had been sharing in their first week together in London, Godwin’s sudden death in April put an end to them. She had spoken for years as though she stood alone; now, for the first time, it was so. It was impossible to see garrulous old Mrs Godwin as the head of the family; her future rested in Mary’s hands.

  Mary’s feelings towards her stepmother had not softened with time. However unconsciously, they found their way into her work. In ‘The Invisible Girl’, one of her most intriguing and underrated stories, written for The Keepsake of 1833, she had painted a savage portrait of ‘the odious Mrs Bambridge’, a widow who, ‘having succeeded in killing her husband and children with the effects of her vile temper, came, like a harpy, greedy for her prey, under her brother’s roof’.5 Just so, in Mary’s uncompromising memory, had Mary Jane Clairmont descended on Godwin and his daughter, to make a misery of their lives.

  Falkner, the novel which she began planning in 1835 and wrote intermittently throughout 1836, became a vehicle for the secret thoughts she dared allow to the surface only in the fictions or when seeming to comment on impersonal matters as in the Lives. Elizabeth Raby, while devoid of the imagination on which Mary prided herself, is immediately linked to her creator by the fact that she first appears, aged about six, weeping by her mother’s grave, as Mary had wept by the tomb at St Pancras. Fidelity was the novel’s theme; Elizabeth’s loyalty is to Falkner, the man with a dark secret who rears her as his child. Mrs Godwin had been quick to discover and make much of the excessive love Mary felt for her father; here, this same love was flaunted. ‘Falkner felt a half remorse at the too great pleasure he derived from her [Elizabeth’s] society; while hers was a sort of rapturous, thrilling adoration, that dreamt not of the necessity of a check, and luxuriated in its boundless excess.’6

  Elizabeth’s fidelity is echoed in that of her lover, Gerard Neville, set on uncovering the crime which has covered his dead mother’s name with disgrace. Did Mary cast Percy as Gerard, dreamin
g of the day when he would clear her own name of notoriety? Certainly she gave herself the pleasure of castigating the Shelleys again in her portrait of Gerard’s father as an unpleasant, pompous baronet and in showing Elizabeth’s relations as a family of religious fanatics who are obsessed with the protection of their family name. Following popular convention, Mary underscored the villainy or virtue of her characters by their settings. Neville’s unpleasant father lives in splendour, close to the poverty-stricken town of Ravenglass; the selfish Rabys inhabit an old Gothic hall which represents their own outdated feudalism. Neville’s kindly sister, by contrast, lives at Fairlight, in the tranquil landscape of which Mary had fond memories from her stay at Hastings in 1828.

  Writing at great speed, Mary believed this would be her best novel, but she lacked the health or energy to revise it with her usual care. Published by a minor firm at the beginning of 1837, it was judged principally on the merits of Falkner, the main character. The Examiner scolded Mary for showing sympathy to the crimes of adultery and murder. Several reviewers thought the novel too morbid. None, surprisingly, commented on the hasty inaccuracy of the quotations which lavishly sprinkled the text and headed the chapters. Only The Age was ready to claim it to be Mary’s finest work, worthy in every way of the author of Frankenstein.7 This, in a period when writers were unblushingly ready to puff each other’s work, was hardly a triumphant reception and the novel was faintly praised among her friends. Mary had already begun to think that she preferred the pleasures of nonfiction; she showed no regret in announcing Falkner as her last novel.