Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The speed with which Mary wrote had much to do with other calls on her time in the months after her father’s death. Claire, whom she had been helping to rewrite a short story for one of the Christmas annuals, was whining from Florence that nobody cared for her and that her brave public face concealed a broken heart. ‘Claire always harps upon my desertion of her – as if I could desert one I never clung to – we were never friends,’ Mary wrote with understandable but incautious impatience to Trelawny.8 (Trelawny maintained a steady correspondence with Claire.) But she worked over the story and continued to write sympathetic, cheerful letters to her exasperating stepsister. Learning that the Hoggs were short of money and that Jane was unwell, she passed on a tip from one of Joshua Robinson’s sons, a solicitor, that a new bank was about to open which wanted to employ ‘gentlemen of character & yet who will work’ as their directors.9 When this came to nothing, she tried to persuade Peacock to employ their mutual friend at the India House and, when he resisted, tried again. ‘A gentleman he [Hogg] is in feeling & conduct,’ she kindly urged. Did it matter if his appearance was a little strange if he had integrity and some talent? ‘What say you? Will you reconsider?’10 Peacock declined to do so.

  This letter, written on behalf of a man towards whom Mary’s feelings remained deeply ambivalent, was generous. The energy of her endeavours to raise money for the widowed stepmother she had spent a whole lifetime detesting, was heroic.

  Godwin’s last diary entry noted that he had paid a visit that day to John Corrie Hudson, the sole executor of his will. The day after his death, Mary wrote to Hudson to make arrangements for him to see her stepmother and, presumably, to discuss her future. The outcome of this meeting was hardly satisfactory. Fond though Godwin had been of his wife, the main concern of his will had been with arrangements for his posthumous reputation, a burden he placed in his overworked daughter’s hands. Little thought had been given to his widow’s welfare. Mrs Godwin was obliged to leave their government lodgings to stay with friends and Godwin’s magnificent library was sold to raise money for her immediate needs (it fetched £260). Colburn was ready to offer 350 guineas for publishing Godwin’s correspondence and a memoir, but only on completion. What was needed in the long term was for Godwin’s widow to continue receiving the £300 allowed to her husband from the Royal Bounty by Lord Melbourne, reinstated as Prime Minister since 1835.

  Mary’s best route to Melbourne was through Trelawny’s new friend, Mrs Norton. Beautiful, strong-willed and full of loathing for the husband who made her work like a drudge in order to provide money for his amusements, Mrs Norton was still, in the summer of 1836, very close to both Melbourne and Trelawny. Mary, who knew her only as a handsome presence at Dr Lardner’s parties and as the woman who had not given her any commissions during her editorship of The Keepsake, was not above joining in the gossip which hummed around Mrs Norton’s magnificent shoulders. Tom Moore, visiting her on 21 May, heard an enticing titbit: ‘In talking now of Lord [Melbourne’s] supposed intrigue with Mrs N. Mrs Shelley said significantly—’ but what Mary said we shall never know, because Moore grew uneasy and crossed three lines of gossip out of his diary. Scandal-loving old Samuel Rogers added to the fun that day by telling Moore he had seen Mrs Norton sitting at the theatre between her two lovers.11

  An appeal to Mrs Norton was written and sent off, via Trelawny, together with one of Claire’s most harrowing epistles, probably one which expressed her determination to sacrifice everything for her mother’s sake and to become a London housekeeper. (She had written in this vein to Trelawny the previous year, and had been briskly told not to be so ridiculous, since everybody knew she had never liked her mother.) Mrs Norton, however, did not know Claire’s gift for self-dramatization; the letter roused her sympathy. She agreed to approach the Prime Minister who, after some prevarication, agreed in turn to an ex gratia payment of £300 to Godwin’s widow. It was not a generous concession from a man who had known and admired Godwin all his life and who was fully aware of the family’s financial difficulties. But Melbourne had other matters on his mind than a frightened old lady waiting to be evicted from her home; all his thoughts in the summer of 1836 were focused on escaping from a charge which George Norton was preparing to bring against him for adultery with his wife. If Melbourne was found guilty, his resignation would be a foregone conclusion, and the stability of the new Whig government would be under threat.

  Melbourne, innocent or not, was cleared of the charge. Caroline Norton’s reputation was ruined by it. Nobody believed that she had been innocent; they thought, probably rightly, that Melbourne had been exonerated because of his position. A year or two earlier, lustrous eyed and resplendently uncorseted on her blue satin sofa in Storey’s Gate, Mrs Norton had been the toast of political London, although viewed with suspicion by her own sex. (‘I suppose she is very amusing to people who have not much principle,’ Melbourne’s aristocratic Whig friend, Emily Eden, coldly noted in 1834, perhaps with a touch of jealousy.12 ) Now, deprived of her sons by a law which, for the purposes of inheritance, invariably favoured the father, Mrs Norton moved out of her half-uncle Charles Sheridan’s house into shabby rooms in Spring Street, south of the dusty slopes being flattened for the new Trafalgar Square. Mary Shelley was among the few to seek her out and to offer support during this low period, just as she had done to Gee Paul.

  Ironically, Mary’s own reputation was still, after fourteen years of widowhood, unsavoury enough to make her friendship a mixed blessing; of the older generation, only those who laughed at prudishness, Lady Morgan, Mrs Wood, Samuel Rogers, were ready to entertain her in the years following her father’s death. Writing to Trelawny at the beginning of 1837, Mary reassured him that she would ‘take very good care not to press myself [on Mrs Norton] – I know what her relations think.’13 She may have been discreet about their meetings, but the two women were already engaged in a lively correspondence. At the time when Mary allowed Trelawny to think she was keeping a tactful distance from his friend, she was advising on the pamphlet Mrs Norton was preparing: Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother. Mary, who had never forgotten Sir Timothy’s threats to separate her from Percy, was strong in her opinions on this matter. ‘Perhaps you will not think I have gone far enough,’ Caroline wrote after sending her a draft of the pamphlet.14 Mary, who was, in a more devious way, as outspoken as her fine friend, used her essay on the Italian writer, Alfieri, to express her own view:

  There seems something incomprehensible in a state of society that should admit of the propriety, or rather, enforce the necessity, of a boy of nine being separated from all maternal care, and left to struggle as he might, during the precarious season of childhood and adolescence, without a parent’s eye to watch over his well-being, and administer to his health and happiness.

  Mary’s side of the correspondence has not survived, but Mrs Norton’s responses show that acquaintance rapidly blossomed into a friendship warmed by old connections. (Godwin, a devoted friend to Caroline’s grandfather, the playwright Sheridan, had been one of the few attendants at his pathetically modest funeral and a regular visitor to his grave.) On 7 August 1837, Moore found Mary taking tea with Caroline: ‘poor Mrs N. much changed.’ Alone with Mary, however, Caroline was her lively forceful self. Mary was scolded for foolish pride in trying to pay for a seat at a theatre when she had been Caroline’s invited guest. Worrying over whether she dared take a house in Berkeley Street which had once belonged to a prostitute, she was almost teased into a purchase. She was very silly to worry about the fact that a ‘fie-fie’ had lived there, Caroline affectionately scolded: ‘If you act discreetly and modestly (that is if you paint the rails dark green; and don’t buy a parrot …) … the barrenness of virtue will be apparent and the house will be as good, as if its face was built out of the sorrowful and remorseful bricks of the Milbanke penitentiary.’15†

  Mary’s finances at this time are somewhat baffling. Godwin had left his daughter little beyond his papers and a couple of painting
s; she became anxious whenever her allowance from the Shelleys arrived, as it frequently did, a few weeks late. In January 1837, she was hard up enough to ask Trelawny to lend her £20. Bentley, the publisher of Lodore, was reminded that she had been promised £50 when over 700 copies of the novel had been sold, and that she would be glad to have it. By the spring, however, Mary was in a position to inform Trelawny that ‘I have plenty at present & hope to do well hereafter.’ This suggests that she must have received some unexpected increase in her income. By March, she was living at a good address in South Audley Street; by the late autumn of 1837, having decided against buying the house in Berkeley Street, she had moved to another Mayfair home, 41 Park Street.

  Mary was not, however, sufficiently well-off to subsidize her stepmother. She was still living at South Audley Street when she decided to make another appeal to Lord Melbourne, asking him to consider whether Godwin’s widow did not merit an annual pension. Caroline Norton was happy to act as her adviser. ‘Press not on the politics of Mr Godwin,’ she warned. Mary must learn to grovel if she was to succeed: ‘when I beg,’ Mrs Norton told her, ‘I am a crawling lizard, a humble toad, a brown snake in cold weather.’16 Too honest and independent to relish fawning, Mary managed, nevertheless, to find a tone humble enough for Melbourne to promise support of her request. It was probably as a result of this appeal by Mary that her stepmother was able to settle in the autumn of 1837 at Kentish Town, in a house with a pleasant garden to remind her of old days at the Polygon in Somers Town.

  *

  In the summer of 1836, shortly after her father’s death, Mary began the task of sorting through his papers and preparing herself for the task of writing his life and editing his letters. Posthumous fame, as she knew, had been a matter of great concern to the old man; his will laid on her the burden of securing it. Dutifully, she wrote off to all his correspondents; to Thomas Wedgwood’s surviving brother Josiah, to Hazlitt’s son, to Henry Crabb Robinson and – a figure from the distant past – Godwin’s former ward and relation, Thomas Cooper, long established as a successful actor in America. The responses were courteous; Cooper, a widower, even suggested that Mary should come and join him and his family. Mary’s answer does not indicate whether he was, in fact, inviting her to become his second wife; gracefully, she rejected the invitation. She remained, she told him, dependent on a ‘narrow-minded & niggardly’ father-in-law whose existence compelled her to live in England. ‘While he lives I must remain here … Percy is now seventeen – he is all I could wish – but I would not separate from him for the world … With such a tie you will perceive that a voyage across the Atlantic is beyond the bounds of possibility.’17

  Work on Godwin’s correspondence and the memoir she was writing to accompany it had to be combined with her continuing researches for the Spanish volumes of the Lardner Lives. By the end of the summer of 1836, she was exhausted. Claire, arriving in Paris in October (the family for whom she worked was moving to England), sent an affectionate note scolding her. Of course Mary must not wait in London to receive her: ‘your health is the first thing – for Godsake go directly to the sea … Pray take care of your health – if you knew what an effect your letter with so bad an account of yourself had on me.’ Then Claire gave a lurid account of her own misfortunes, as if Mary’s were, after all, slight. ‘No pen can describe what I have suffered,’ she wrote, and filled a long page with her trials.18 Perhaps it was not only ill health which caused Mary to decide to spend the rest of the year at Brighton, out of Claire’s reach.

  Julia, her favourite of the Robinson girls, kept Mary company until Christmas Eve, and then set off from Brighton for Ardglass Castle to spend a year with Aubrey and Ida Beauclerk, probably in the capacity of governess. The weather became bitterly cold: ‘what snow we have had‚’ Mary wrote to Trelawny on 3 January; ‘hundreds of people have been employed to remove it during the last week.’ She had been watching them carry it down to the beach after piling it up in the streets in glittering pyramids, and now she was shivering at her desk, and missing Julia, ‘the dear entity … you know what a dear thing she is.’

  Mary had little specific reason for sadness. Claire, she could reasonably hope, might now share the burden of Mrs Godwin; Julia was an assiduous correspondent; Percy had arrived at Brighton in high spirits, showing off his skill at playing the flute, wearing a fine new frock coat and chattering happily of his visits to the theatre. Mary detected a new softness: was her son in love? ‘How I dread it,’ she confessed to Trelawny. ‘I hope you will be useful to me when it begins.’19

  Perhaps it was only solitude which preyed on her as she stayed on into February at the increasingly empty resort. Certainly, her mood changed, and violently so. Trelawny, writing to ask why she was taking so long to produce her father’s letters and the memoir, received a furious response.

  Like Claire, Trelawny had a genius for stinging Mary where it hurt. She had already begun to feel oppressed by the responsibility laid on her by her father’s will. Caring for him had been, she wrote to Trelawny, ‘for many a year a burthen pressing me to the earth’. Now, as she contemplated writing his life, all she could see was the damage it would do to her son. ‘This year I have to fight my poor Percy’s battle – to try to get him sent to College without further dilapidation on his ruined prospects – & he has to enter life at College – that this should be undertaken at a moment when a cry was raised against his Mother – & that not on the question of politics but religion, would mar all – I must see him fairly launched, before I commit myself to the fury of the waves.’20

  It comes almost as a relief to hear Mary at last acknowledging the trial it had been to her to support her old father for the last thirteen years of his life. Now dealing, as she would have to in her book, with Godwin’s early opposition to marriage and to orthodox beliefs, views wholly out of fashion in 1837, she was reminded of the damage Godwin’s memoir had wreaked on Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation. That her worries arose not from Godwin’s politics but from his religious views is of particular interest. She must, judging by the agitated tone of her letter, have already read her father’s unexpected and unpublished last work.

  The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, written with all the energy and power of Godwin’s most famous book, flew directly in the face of Mary’s own wistful hopes of an afterlife. ‘What is there behind the curtain?’ her father asked his reader before supplying the candid answer: ‘Probably nothing.’ In a splendid, thundering conclusion, he lambasted a world peopled with fearful, unthinking churchgoers.

  We dare not enquire, we dare not frame propositions, and draw conclusions on the subject. We think it safer to abide in a sort of belief, and to refrain from speculating on so perilous a question. We bow down our faculties in silence, deluding others and deluding ourselves, and subscribing to tenets the most groundless and indefensible.21

  This view was distressing to a woman increasingly anxious to pay lip-service to conventional religion. She was right to suppose that publication would cause difficulties for Percy when he went to university, particularly since his own father had been sent down for having published an atheistical pamphlet. But, although she did not have the courage to admit this to Trelawny, Mary must also have been concerned for the effect that such a book might have on Shelley’s blossoming reputation.

  It remained the case that, while Mary was forbidden by Sir Timothy to publish her husband’s works, to which she held the copyright, there was nothing to prevent anybody else printing and distributing his poems. Several reviewers and essayists had taken the opportunity of discussing his work in order to quote extensively from it; The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published by C. Roscoe in 1830 with the approval and assistance of Leigh Hunt and Mary herself, was in its third edition by 1832. Galignani’s edition, published in Paris in 1829, also continued to sell. In 1832, with the passage of the Reform Bill, came a national change of mood; for the first time since his death, Shelley’s political views became acceptable. His att
acks on the oppressive Tory administration could be seen as admirable, honest and far-sighted. Leigh Hunt, who had feared to publish The Masque of Anarchy in 1819, the year of the poem’s composition, could do so now, and add a preface giving his reasons. Medwin published Shelley items in the Athenaeum and Fraser’s Magazine; Mary, meanwhile, offered her own transcript of Shelley’s ‘Lines on Castlereagh’to Thomas Kelsall, one of the three men who had backed the short-lived publication of Posthumous Poems in 1824; the poem appeared in the Athenaeum in 1832. When Bulwer, as editor of the New Monthly Magazine, expressed his willingness to publish articles about Shelley, Mary put him in touch with Hogg, whose amiable reminiscences of university days also appeared over a period of six months in 1832.

  Shelley’s star continued to rise. Robert Browning’s poem, ‘Pauline’, published in 1833, hailed him as ‘the Sun-Treader’; Thomas Lovell Beddoes offered an admiring tribute in verse. Shelley’s lines to his dead son were widely published in the Christmas annuals of 1834; Ascham published two volumes of the poems in the most widely read of the growing number of pirated editions, while 1835 was marked by respectful accounts of visits to Shelley’s grave in Rome by several admiring young poets. His reputation was further enhanced in 1836 when the death of the much-loved poet, Felicia Hemans, reminded the many who mourned her that Shelley, as a sixteen-year-old, had been one of her first admirers. In 1837, marking another step up the ladder, the late Charles Lamb was reproached for his failure to recognize Shelley’s genius. Lady Blessington’s cooings over a sweet and unworldly poet she had never met did no harm at all. Shelley, by 1837, was widely read and discussed.

  This was gratifying to a woman who had worked ceaselessly, if discreetly, to promote Shelley’s reputation, giving assistance and, where necessary, her own transcripts of the poems to sympathetic editors, while quoting extensively from his work in her novels. But, while she sought recognition for her husband’s work, Mary’s unhappy experiences as a widow and her concern for Percy had made her increasingly anxious to shield all personal details of his life with her from view. She liked Hogg’s articles, not only for their friendly tone, but for tactfully concluding in 1810.‡ She could draw comfort from the Metropolitan (December 1832), in which an anonymous reviewer of The Masque of Anarchy commented that it was better to look at Shelley’s poems than to search for details of his private life. The reviewer’s opinion was not, it seemed, unique; since the publication of Hogg’s articles, there had been no appeals in print for a biography of Shelley.