Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The second piece of news concerned her friend Augusta Goring. ‘Mrs Goring has returned to New Street,’ Mary had written to Aubrey Beauclerk’s brother George in March 1838. This was news which gave her pleasure, not because she thought Mrs Goring’s marriage happy, but because she felt it to be preferable to the alternative. ‘I rejoice at her return,’ she wrote, ‘for I think under all the circumstances a separation would have caused her great misery.’ On 10 March, she wrote to Augusta, urging her to be ‘as kind as you can to Mr Goring’. A few months later, Mrs Goring left home again and went to live south of the Thames, in the isolated village of Barnes. It took a little while for Mary to discover the reasons behind both this decision and the choice of location. It was Trelawny who had introduced Mary to Mrs Goring in 1836; Trelawny, in the summer of 1838, was living in Putney at one of the several houses there owned by his rich radical friend, Temple Leader. His home was barely five minutes’ walk up the hill from Mrs Goring’s new lodgings at ‘the Farm’. A year later, Augusta Goring gave birth to Trelawny’s son, Edgar.

  A sad undated little note from Augusta to Mary, regretting that they will not be able to meet and regretting the loss of her ‘kind [ ] sympathizing friend’ suggests that she understood the consequences of her behaviour. Trelawny declined to be so meek. With an odd mixture of defiance and desperation, he wrote off to Claire Clairmont on 17 August 1838, urging her to come and share Mrs Goring’s emancipation, living ‘free as the winds’. His fury with Mary for abandoning her friend showed up in the lines which followed. She ‘is the blab of blabs’, he wrote of the woman whose father he had helped to bury only two years earlier: ‘– she lives on hogs wash – what utter failures most people are!’38 The word ‘blab’ makes one wonder if Mary had been careless in talking about Mrs Goring’s new life. Mary was not above gossip.

  Signs of a rift had been in the air for some time. One could say that they had begun when Mary refused Trelawny the right to publish a life of Shelley. They had certainly been apparent in his attempt to bully her into publishing her father’s life and in the scorn which he never hesitated to pour on her choice of friends, although he himself had never been averse to the pleasures of high society. The crux may have been Mary’s refusal to admire the radical party to which he was now affiliated, and her unwillingness to contribute to an article on the rights of women which he wrote in 1838, when he was anxious to justify Augusta Goring’s desertion of her husband.

  We cannot know what Trelawny may have written or said to Mary during the summer when Augusta Goring decided to make her new life with him. Whatever it may have been, it hurt. A long and passionate outburst in her journal, written on 21 October 1838 from her home at Park Street, seems to have been directly prompted by Trelawny’s gibes, for she alluded in it to ‘the universal abuse of T—’ as a prime source of discomfort and unhappiness. Most probably, he had been goading her on the tender subject of her duty, as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, to speak out publicly in the cause of his new hobby-horse, women’s suffrage, and, as Shelley’s widow, in the cause of political reform. Attacking her, Trelawny could vent the discomfort and unease he must have felt about Augusta.

  He struck a tender spot. For the first time and over many pages, Mary embarked on a long examination of what she was and what she might have been expected to become. ‘I was nursed and fed with a love of glory‚’ she wrote. ‘To be something great and good was a precept given me by my father: Shelley reiterated it.’ With encouragement, she was ready to believe, she might have become what they had wished, ‘… but Shelley died & I was alone – my father from age & domestic circumstances & other things could not me faire valoir – none else noticed me.’

  Solitude, poverty and shyness had prevented her from becoming the public figure she might have been; she certainly could not now imagine herself lending support to the radicals: ‘rude, envious & insolent – I wish to have nothing to do with them.’ Was there, then, another platform on which she could make a stand? She doubted it: ‘I have not argumentative powers,’ she wrote, remembering Fanny Wright’s dogmatic energy.

  I see things pretty clearly, but cannot demonstrate them … I am far from making up my mind. I beleive that we are sent here to educate ourselves & that self denial & disappointment & self controul are a part of our education – that it is not by taking away all restraining law that our improvement is to be achieved – & though many things need great amendment – I can by no means go so far as my friends would have me.

  Stung by accusations of ‘worldliness’ which we may again assume had come from Trelawny, Mary angrily rejected them: ‘I never crouched to society‚’ she wrote, ‘never sought it unworthily.’ True, she had not written on the rights of women, but she had given them her support, ‘befriended women when oppressed – at every risk I have defended & supported victims to the social system – But I do not make a boast … and so I am still reviled for being worldly … If I write the above‚’ she concluded, ‘it is that those who love me may hereafter know that I am not all to blame – nor merit the heavy accusations cast on me for not putting myself forward – I cannot do that – it is against my nature – as well cast me from a precipice & rail at me for not flying.’

  Her sincerity is not in doubt. Neither is her pain as she alludes to the misery she felt at discovering how Jane Hogg had betrayed her trust: it is only when she goes on to produce this as her justification for entering society, ‘to divert my mind from the anguish inflicted by a friend’, that the reader begins to feel a little uncomfortable. Disillusion might serve as a reason for a few months of socializing, but ten years later? The note of truth seems to be rung more clearly when Mary declares, with forgivable rage, that she hates those who oppress her, that she is writing out of irritation and that there are ‘some’, for which we may silently insert the name Trelawny, ‘whom I would gladly never see more’.

  Unkindly, the reader feels compelled to pose another question at the end of this tirade. Why, after presenting herself as the champion of oppressed women and knowing, as she did, that Mrs Goring’s marriage had been a wretched one, did Mary find it beyond her to make a journey across London to visit a woman who had, for two years, been one of her closest friends? She had no difficulty in going to Putney to stay with her friend Mrs Leicester Stanhope: Barnes was equally accessible.

  Trelawny’s attacks were churlish and spiteful; they were not wholly unjustified. He was, presumably, much in love with Augusta Goring at this time; to see her cut off by Mary Shelley, the woman who had never stopped telling him how cruel society could be and who now seemed to have found herself a secure place in it, must have aroused feelings of indignation bordering on disgust. Mary had turned her former friend into her enemy.

  Notes

  1. Falkner, 3 vols. (Saunders & Otley, 1837), 1, ix. A two-volume edition was published by the same firm in the same year, without alterations to the text.

  2. Crook & Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody. See chapter 14, note 25, above.

  3. The Revd A.C.H. Morrison–MWS, 27.3.1836 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516).

  4. Doran Swade and Simon Schaffer contribute fascinating essays on Babbage and his salon in the 1830s to Cultural Babbage, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (Faber, 1996). It is likely that Mary, even if she did not visit Babbage, knew of his invention and had heard of the Silver Lady from her father, who had regular meetings with Babbage at this period.

  5. MWS, ‘The Invisible Girl’ (1833), CTS, p. 196.

  6. Falkner, 1, v.

  7. The Age, 2.4.1837, p. 106.

  8. MWS–EJT, 14.5.1836.

  9. MWS–TJH, 18.1–2.4.1836.

  10. MWS–TLP, 6.6.1836.

  11. Moore, Journals, 5, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden (University of Delaware Press, 1984–9). The mention of Rogers’s piece of gossip was recorded on the same date, 21 May 1836.

  12. Emily Eden, 4.1.1834, Durham University Library (Grey Mss).

  13. MWS–EJT, 26.1.1837.

  14. The Hon. Mrs George [
Caroline] Norton–MWS, 5.1.(1837] (Abinger, Dep. c. 538).

  15. Caroline Norton–MWS, 29.?9.[1837] (Abinger, Dep. c. 538).

  16. Caroline Norton–MWS, n.d. (Abinger, Dep. c. 538).

  17. MWS–Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, February–March 1837.

  18. CC–MWS, 19.10.1836.

  19. MWS–EJT, 3.1.1837.

  20. MWS–EJT, 26.1.1837.

  21. WG, ‘The Genius of Christianity Unveiled’, Works, 7, ed. Mark Philp (Pickering & Chatto, 1993), p. 239.

  22. The Abinger collection, Dep. c. 606/1–5 contains Mary’s editorial notes; Dep. b. 226/11 contains her edited version of Godwin’s autobiography; Dep. c. 532/8 contains more of her notes towards a biography of her parents. On 18 December 1837, Harriet de Boinville asked her to help Francisco Solano Constancio prepare a brief memoir of Godwin, which she probably did. It appeared as by Constancio et Z in Biographie Universelle, XVII, pp. 40–2. (See CC, 2, p. 364 for a fuller account of these details.)

  23. MWS–MG, 11.6.1835. Here, Mary told Maria Gisborne that Jane Williams Hogg and Godwin had mocked her praises of Mary’s poetry and that they thought nothing of her personal favourite, ‘The Dirge’, which she here copied out for Mrs Gisborne to read.

  24. CC–MWS, 30.10.1840. MWS to [?unidentified] (Abinger, Dep. c. 606/4), published in Lives of the Great Romantics, 1, ed. Pamela Clemit (Pickering & Chatto, 1999), p. 95. Dr Bruce Barker–Benfield, Senior Assistant Librarian at the Bodleian, feels that this, the traditional explanation for the letter, ‘doesn’t seem unreasonable’ (letter to author, 30.7.1999).

  25. MWS–LH, December 1837–March 1838 (date conjectured by Professor Bennett in MWSL, 2).

  26. Lives of the most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France, 2 vols., The Cabinet of Biography, ed. the Revd Dionysius Lardner (1838–9).

  27. Ibid., 1, p. 327.

  28. Ibid., 1, p. 97.

  29. EJT–CC, 23.3.1836.

  30. Charles Sumner, Memoir and Letters, ed. Edward L. Pierce (Boston, 1893), 2‚ P. 21.

  31. See Appendix 3. Since the exhibition opened in April 1840, the latter part of the previous year seems a reasonable date. Paintings for the Summer Exhibition were seldom accepted unless of very recent date. They were always on sale. Mary’s, presumably, failed to sell and was presented to her by Rothwell at the end of the summer.

  32. Morning Chronicle, 8.5.1840.

  33. MWS–Benjamin Disraeli, 15.11–7.12.1837 (date conjectured by Betty T. Bennett in MWSL, 2).

  34. MWS–Lady Morgan, December 1837–March 1839, dated by the fact that she wrote her letter from her home at Park Street (MWSL, 2).

  35. MWS–LH, December 1837–March 1838.

  36. Samuel Rogers–MWS, letters of 1838–44 and n.d. (Abinger, Dep. c. 768).

  37. See Appendix 2.

  38. The reference to Mrs Goring was omitted from the published text in H. Buxton Forman’s edition of Trelawny’s letters. Letters from Augusta Goring to Mary Shelley in 1837 and n.d. are at the Bodleian (Abinger, Dep. c. 510).

  * If, as one Shelley authority has suggested, Percy’s father had contracted syphilis in his university days, Mary may well have feared the same consequence overtaking her son.2

  † Huge and hideous, Millbank Penitentiary stood on the present site of the Tate Gallery from 1820 to 1890. Caroline’s misspelling suggests a mischievous pun on the maiden name of Byron’s widow, notorious in the 1830s for her sanctimonious tale-telling.

  ‡ A seventh article, on Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford in 1811, was published by the New Monthly Magazine in May 1833.

  § She seems however to have been working on it still in 1840, since Claire wrote to her that year and urged her to stop: ‘Do not think of writing the memoirs – you must on no account use your mind – health is everything.’ A letter from Mary in the Abinger collection at the Bodleian Library, dated 6 May 1840, explains to an unidentified addressee that her work ‘is not complete & ready for the press, not that there is anything to add – but there are many letters to be reconsidered – all that is here is not to be published – although the exceptions are few.’ Shelley’s letters had already been published by this date; the obvious conclusion to be drawn is that Mary was still working on her father’s life.24

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  REPARATION AND RENEWAL

  1838–1840

  ‘Irritability of disposition is indeed my great great fault. In the hour of struggle & action it disappears – but in inaction & solitude it frets me unworthily. Want of animal spirits & liveliness & strength to talk & amuse has been my great drawback in life both in society & alone. The great thing is I am unequal – If in favourable circumstances & drawn out I am good company sometimes & am told I am formed for society – but the cloud comes again …’

  Mary Shelley, Journal, 21 October 1838

  MARY’S RECURRING DEPRESSIONS SUGGEST ILLNESS, AND SHE WAS living at a time when the condition was neither fully understood nor curable. As she entered middle age, they were becoming more pronounced.

  Many of the contradictions in Mary Shelley’s behaviour, her sudden impulses towards and away from society, her yearning to be in the centre of London, followed by sudden moves away from it, her ability to write in the best of spirits on one day and as though death would be welcome on the next, can be explained by her depressive nature. But nothing distressed her more than to be drawn back into the past.

  Sir Timothy was no friend to her. He had, as recently as 1834, been demanding that she guarantee his wife three years of peace at Field Place after his death, instead of entering the property which would rightfully belong to her and her son. He had ordered her to dismiss Hogg as her occasional legal representative, on the grounds that he was not a respectable man. (This, presumably, related to Sir Timothy’s belated discovery that Hogg lived with a woman who was not by law his wife.) He had, however unconsciously, done Mary a favour in prohibiting her from publishing her husband’s works. Every time Mary began reading Shelley’s poems or his letters, the old spectre of remorse was conjured up once more. To read Shelley’s works was to be reminded of her coldness and lack of love, and of the horror of poor Harriet Shelley’s suicide, for which she blamed herself. ‘Poor Harriet,’ Mary wrote on 12 February 1839, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.’

  The time had come, however, when even Sir Timothy could not protect Mary from her strong sense of duty to the dead. In 1834, she had rejected an approach by Charles Lamb’s son-in-law, Edward Moxon, for permission to publish Shelley’s works. Her explanation then had been that, while believing she held the copyright through her husband’s will in all his writings, she was still forbidden to do anything about them. In the summer of 1838, Moxon approached her again. By this time, at least five pirated editions of Shelley’s works were in circulation. His reputation stood high; there was no longer any good reason for Sir Timothy to sustain his objections. She obtained his consent for Moxon, Tennyson’s publisher, to undertake the task of producing an official four-volume collection of the works, with her editorial control and assistance. Moxon was prepared to pay £500 for the privilege, enough for Mary to move out of London again, to a house in Putney. Sir Timothy’s insistence that there should still be no biography was, perhaps, a relief to his daughter-in-law; she, for her own reasons, did not want to invite the public into the murkier corners of Shelley’s life.

  There was a difficulty here. Moxon was ready to buy Mary’s copyrights, but he was a good businessman. Many of the poems had been in print for years; to give them an additional value, he wanted Mary to provide background material. What, without breaking her promise to Sir Timothy, was she to do? Her solution was to turn back to the biographical notes she had intended to accompany her father’s works. By writing extended notes of this kind to Shelley’s poems and prose-works, she could provide just as much information as she chose while seeming to comply with her father-in-law’s wishes. Dividing her material chronologically –
‘Poems of 1820’, ‘Poems of 1821’ – she could easily gloss over any aspects of Shelley’s life which she wished to suppress.

  The energy which Mary brought to the enormous undertaking – the collection of Shelley’s poetry was immediately followed by his selected prose and letters and a revised second edition – was remarkable. (She was still working on the two volumes of French Lives until the spring of 1839.) Many of the poems had been circulated in a defective form; correcting them, she was forced to work from Shelley’s untidy, faded notebooks. The writing was sometimes indecipherable, or made so by water damage; her mistakes often originated from a difficulty with the original text. The notebooks did not run in order; she herself had to decide on the chronology and choose whether or not to include a poem which seemed incomplete, as though Shelley had already decided against it. She also had to exercise her own judgment in cases where, she was fairly sure, a deletion or alteration had been intended. Above all, she had to write the notes, amounting to the length of a brief biography and forcing her to confront a past full of tormenting memories. To anyone less determined and industrious, the task might have seemed insuperable; astonishingly, Mary had managed to complete the manuscript for the collected poems, with notes, by the end of the half year in which she began work.

  It was her intention to present Shelley in the best possible light. She nailed her colours to the mast in the introductory note. ‘This is not the time to relate the truth; and I should reject any colouring of the truth‚’ she wrote in the Preface. Since the whole truth was not to be told, compromises could be made. Claire and Allegra were not mentioned; Shelley was referred to in the singular on every occasion until the date of their marriage. Epipsychidion was included, but with no explanatory note; this was one of the poems which Mary noted in her journal that she would gladly have left out. Convinced that Shelley’s claim to immortality would depend on his lyrical voice, she used the notes to minimize his political zeal and to stress his unworldliness, his philanthropy, his delicate health.