Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  A little guiltily, Mary compared her own new-found serenity to the wretchedness of poor Jeremiah Ratcliffe, bewildered, friendless and mad: not all private asylums were as civilized as those in which Mary Lamb had allowed herself to be confined from time to time. ‘Poor R—’ she wrote. ‘… God restore him. God & good angels guard us!’

  At peace with herself as she reflected on all that she had done for Shelley in the past two years, Mary toyed with the idea that her labours might have been influenced by the benevolent spirits of the dead. ‘Such surely,’ she mused, ‘gather round one on such an evening, & make part of that atmosphere of love, so hushed, so soft, on which the soul reposes & is blessed.’14

  Notes

  1. Notes on Poems of 1822 (PW).

  2. MWSJ, 12.2.1839.

  3. MWS–TJH, 11.2.1839.

  4. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diaries, 4.3.1839 (Dr Williams’ Library).

  5. MWS–LH, 10.10.1839.

  6. MWS–LH, 15.11.1839.

  7. William Johnstone, The Table Talker, or Brief Essays on Society and Literature (1840), 2, pp. 274–9.

  8. MWS–LH, 3.2.1840.

  9. MWS–LH, 27.2.1840.

  10. Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. Roger Ingpen, 2 vols. (E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1903), ch. 25.

  11. MWS–LH, 12.3.1840.

  12. Lewes, signed as G.H.L., Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1841), XXI, pp. 374–6; Westminster Review (1841), 35, pp. 303–44.

  13. MWS–LH, 23.12.1839.

  14. MWSJ, 1.6.1840.

  * The widespread awareness of Mary’s omissions suggests that complete versions were already known to the authors of these critical reviews.

  † Another hostile review, on which Mary made no comment, appeared in The Table Talker, or Brief Essays on Society and Literature (1840). Here, Mary was criticized for having allowed her own infatuation with Shelley to interfere with her editorial task, and for having produced an incoherent and disappointing collection of the prose.7

  ‡ Queen Victoria shared her view; writing his autobiography some years later, Hunt proudly remembered that the Queen saw the play four times and then requested it to be privately performed for her again at Windsor.10

  ¶ Lewes’s interest in Shelley had drawn him to the family of Leigh Hunt; he and Thornton, Hunt’s eldest son, edited the Leader together and used its pages to promote Shelley’s reputation. Refused permission to continue work on his biography, he used some of the material in two lengthy essays, published in 1841 in the Penny Cyclopaedia and the Westminster Review.12 Lewes later became the partner of Marian Evans (George Eliot). His enthusiasm for Shelley never diminished.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CONTINENTAL RAMBLES

  1840–1844

  ‘I had thought such ecstacy as that in which I now was lapped dead to me for ever; but the sun of Italy has thawed the frozen stream – the cup of life again sparkles to the brim.’

  Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844)1

  THE POSITIONS OF THE STEPSISTERS HAD BEEN REVERSED. CLAIRE, as her mother became increasingly incapacitated, went to share the rooms to which Mrs Godwin had moved in shabby Golden Square. Here, the eighteenth-century homes of dead aristocrats had recently come to life again as boarding-houses for the musicians who earned just enough in theatre orchestras to cover rent, meals and cigars. Dickens, taking the square as a setting for Ralph Nickleby’s home, wrote of a mournful statue standing guard over a wilderness of shrubs, of swarthy gentlemen smoking at the open windows, of singers from the Opera chorus practising their airs over tinny pianos. It was a world into which Mary had managed never quite to fall, and she stayed away. ‘I never see Claire,’ she wrote in March 1840 as she began preparing for her continental tour. But Claire’s ability to sting her conscience had not diminished. Her health was terrible, she announced that autumn. Her mind was in danger of going. Her whole day was spent rushing from one side of London to the other giving lessons, from Knightsbridge to Richmond. ‘That vile Omnibus takes two hours to get to Richmond and the same to come back and so with giving my lessons I am never at home before seven – I get no dinner – nothing within my lips from eight in the morning till seven at night – then the rain fog and cold of this month – I am nearly done for …’2

  Claire had been saying that she was done for almost as long as Mary could remember. Still, the contrast in their present lives was undeniable. ‘My birthday – I have felt particularly happy & in good spirits today,’ Mary wrote in her journal on 30 August, two months into her holiday. After joining Percy’s undergraduate friends, George Defell and Julian, the youngest of Joshua Robinson’s sons, at Paris (Robert Leslie Ellis, a brilliant young mathematician, met up with them at a later stage), they had travelled with Mary’s maid across France to Coblenz. In 1814, hurrying home with empty pockets from their jaunt to Switzerland, she, Shelley and Claire had travelled north up the Rhine; in 1840, the tourists went south.

  Germany had not charmed Mary when she was sixteen; she liked the landscape better now, but the fact that none of the party spoke the language was a drawback. Lack of comprehension had the merit of drawing the companions closer together; at Baden-Baden, however, Mary’s age was marked by their disparate reactions. She had not been feeling well during the long journey; the spa’s gentle valley offered an invitation to rest. Nothing, to Percy and his friends, could have seemed duller; and nothing, when she reflected on her eagerness to get to Italy, odder to Mary herself than this inclination to dally in a genteel resort when she loved travelling so much. She was, as she readily admitted to herself, looking for excuses to distract the boys from their choice of Lake Como, notorious for squalls and shipwrecks, as the ideal spot in which to settle and revise for their finals. Percy, to his mother’s dismay, was already talking of buying a boat there; the past seemed doomed to repeat itself. Her love for Percy was never stronger than when she feared to lose him.

  The return to Italy was something she had been imagining and planning for years. Initially, however, the experience was traumatic. She was happy to be praised by the young men for the ease with which she spoke the language; she was startled by the pain, ‘amounting almost to agony’, which the sight of ordinary objects, window-curtains, the washstand in an inn bedroom, could provoke. The pain was in their familiarity; she felt as if time had pulled her back. She was twenty again, on the brink of life; but the twenty-year-old stood in the shoes of a middle-aged woman whose head had begun, sometimes, to throb so violently that she stood paralysed, or found herself racked by convulsive shudders. She had known illness before, but this was something new and frightening. Work on the collected edition of her husband’s works had affected her health, but these new symptoms marked the onset of meningioma, a disease of the brain which would, eleven years later, destroy her.

  Como, despite Mary’s initial terror of a sailing accident on the lake, calmed her spirits. She looked nostalgically at the Villa Pliniana which she and Shelley had once planned to share with Byron, took out her embroidery, chatted to their fellow guests at the lakeside hotel and wrote a long account of their travels to her aunt Everina Wollstonecraft in her Pentonville lodgings. It was an act of kindness to a crippled old lady whose only journey out of England had been across the Irish Sea; it was also a practical way of recording material for use if she ever wrote another book.

  Sitting on the shore at sunset like one of the wistful Gulnares and Rosabellas whose portraits adorned the ladies’ annuals, Mary thought about Aubrey Beauclerk, ‘his sorrows – his passionate love – his struggles – & how hemmed in & impotent are our powers of sympathy & communication – tears rushed into my eyes.’ It was presumably a letter from Aubrey that she was hoping to receive when she made a further private note on the same August day. The mail boat had arrived at the hotel, bringing nothing for her: ‘Niente.’3

  Invitations came from Laura Galloni, Mrs Mason’s elder daughter, to visit Venice, where her disagreeable husband was in
the French consulate. The prospect of seeing Laura again was tempting, but shortage of money ruled out this extension of the trip. At Milan, much to Mary’s distress, Percy left her to return to Cambridge for his finals. Alone with her maid, she decided to pay a return visit, to Geneva, and from there went on slowly by the diligence coach to Paris. Here Aubrey’s brother Charles had put his apartment on the elegant rue de la Paix at her service.

  Paris had been on Mary’s agenda from the first moment of planning an escape from England. Her old friends Lord and Lady Canterbury were there;* Lamartine, an admirer of Shelley’s poetry, made arrangements to call on her; Sainte-Beuve, a new acquaintance, was easy and affable. She kept her thoughts to herself after meeting Byron’s friend Scrope Davies, who had taken the gentleman’s way out of paying his bills in 1820 by moving to France. Later, Mary told Claire that Harriet de Boinville and her large family had been no more than civil, but a warm letter written to Mrs de Boinville shortly after the visit dwelling on the ‘happy hours’ spent with them all – ‘I should so like to see you all again’ – does not suggest that they had been unwelcoming.4

  Friendliest of all was Rogers’s friend, Richard Monckton Milnes, who was staying in splendour at the Hôtel Meurice. Mary praised his third collection of – not very good – poems; Milnes returned the compliment by making himself her sightseeing companion, showing his comparative youth – he was just thirty – by his eagerness to walk when she preferred to be driven. Visiting art collections, watching, with some sympathy, as King Louis Philippe burst into tears while describing to the hastily convened Chamber of Deputies how an armed man had fired at the royal carriage in the Tuileries, shivering amid the well-muffled crowd gathered outside Les Invalides to see Napoleon’s corpse being given a state funeral twenty years after his death, Mary whiled away the time, putting off her return to smoky, fog-drenched London.

  ‘I was not well in Paris – the detestable climate did not agree with me,’ she wrote to Milnes’s clever lawyer friend, Abraham Hayward, on 14 January 1841. She did not know him well enough to reveal more. A cruel shock had been waiting for her in Paris, delivered with apparent insouciance in a letter from Claire.

  The Robinsons had asked her to visit them at Kew, Claire wrote on 30 October. It turned out that they had a piece of news to deliver: Rosa Robinson was going to marry Aubrey Beauclerk. Why such a pretty girl should settle for a gloomy middle-aged widower, Claire could not begin to imagine. Still, she brightly rattled on, his children would have a new mother, Rosa would have money, something the Robinson girls had always lacked, and Mary would be able to stop worrying about them. ‘All your acquaintances are glad that you will no longer have to maintain any body but yourself and Percy, though they honour you for the generosity with which you have ever acted towards them.’

  It is hard to guess how much Claire knew; but the letter has a slightly artificial tone, as though she was willing Mary to accept the situation with a graceful smile. ‘All your acquaintances are glad’: how, faced with that, could Mary do anything but meekly assent? Rosa was attractive and, like all the Robinson girls, amusing; why should Aubrey have preferred to unite himself to a low-spirited widow of forty-three? How could she have imagined that he was anything more than grateful for her friendship and sympathy after Ida’s tragic death?

  Worse news lay ahead. The following year, and again with seeming casualness, Claire reported another choice morsel. Julia, Mary’s favourite of the Robinson sisters, was now saying that their friendship with her had been the ruin of her family; Mary’s own dreadful reputation had, according to Julia, wrecked their chances of social success.5

  On 26 February 1841, back in London, Mary made a long wretched entry in her journal. ‘I gave all the treasure of my heart; all was accepted readily – & more & more asked – & when more I could not give – behold me betrayed, deserted; fearfully betrayed so that I wd rather die than any of them more’ – she broke off in mid-sentence, overcome by her feelings. These were the last words of her own to be written in the journals she had begun with Shelley in 1814, in the summer of their elopement.

  The hurt was greater when she remembered all that she had done for the Robinsons. When young Charles had decided to seek his fortune in Australia in the summer of 1839, she had written to Elizabeth Berry, her Wollstonecraft cousin who lived in New South Wales and who, as the wife of a wealthy businessman and landowner, might be able to help him.† She had asked Julia and Rosa to every party she had given, introduced them to every new friend she found, shared her life with them, denied them, so far as she knew, nothing. And yet three sisters, Isabel, Rosa and Julia, had all in their different ways betrayed her.

  Mary remained, to her credit, on affectionate terms with Aubrey and Rosa, with Julian, her son’s close friend, and with Charles, who returned to England in 1846, after failing to make his way in Australia. Julia’s spite continued to sting her as painfully as salt on an open wound. Writing to Claire on 16 August 1842, she claimed that it was she who had ‘burst away’ from the clinging Robinsons ‘– & they could not forgive me’. On 1 October, still smarting, she told Claire that Julia’s gossip ‘utterly prevents my ever associating with her again on terms of friendship – poor thing – what benefit can she see in covering the truth with false tinsel – one cannot guess – but it is nature with some people.’ Percy had ‘rather a prejudice against her’, she added, but this was by the by.

  *

  There was not much comfort to be taken from the poky new rooms Mary found in 1841 opposite her former lodgings in Park Street, presumably because she wished to keep a good address. (Mayfair, in a period when massive building development caused areas to rise and fall faster than a lady’s fashion-conscious waistline, held its own.) Nor could she take much pride in the fact that Percy had scraped through his exams at the lowly level of a ‘pass’. Sir Timothy, who remained ‘excessively well’, was the only and unexpected source of pleasure, when he announced in February that he intended to mark his grandson’s twenty-first birthday by presenting him with a personal annual gift of £400 a year.

  The news enabled mother and son to contemplate making another journey to the Continent, a prospect which raised Mary’s spirits. Wistfully, she dreamed of visiting Egypt, or Sicily, or even Greece, where her old friend Prince Mavrocordato was, for a brief period, Prime Minister. Escape, she fancied, might be a form of renewal, a return to a period which was bathed in a radiant afterglow, as if it had been all happiness: ‘what days might pass,’ she wrote wistfully in her last, long journal entry of 26 February 1841; ‘what hours flow on, radiant with good spirits – teeming with glowing images … Then I might live – as once I lived – hoping – loving – aspiring enjoying –’

  In the meantime, while Aunt Everina was still able to enjoy a visit and an occasional outing, old Mary Jane Godwin declined, lingered, and finally expired in June. ‘Poor Mrs Godwin!’ Mary decorously wrote to her cousin Elizabeth in Australia. ‘It seemed strange that so restless a spirit could be hushed, & all that remained pent up in a grave.’7 It was the most, without being hypocritical, that she could bring herself to say to a relation who had no knowledge of her feelings about her stepmother.

  Claire, thankful to be released from filial duties, returned to Paris and, helped by the gift of £100 from Mary, announced that she would be staying there. Her reluctance to hand over the letter-filled writing-desk which had passed to her mother after Godwin’s death should have given Mary a hint that Claire was a good deal more interested in the history of the family, where it touched upon herself, than she pretended. As time went on, Claire became an obsessive hoarder of correspondence. Mary’s letters, however hard she begged for them to be burned, were squirrelled away; Mrs Godwin’s were taken out and subjected to copious rewriting for the benefit of posterity.

  Mary had moved house once again, to lodgings in Half Moon Street, off Piccadilly, just before her stepmother’s death. She was spending a wet summer in North Wales when she read the accounts of Moxon’s tri
al for blasphemy following the publication of Queen Mab in Mary’s 1839 collected edition. Sergeant Noon Talfourd’s speech, in which he movingly argued that the poem represented a stage in the development of Shelley’s essentially Christian outlook, had not convinced the jury, but though found guilty, the publisher was subjected to no further penalty and the bolder second edition of the Poetical Works remained on sale. It was not, however, with the idea of further publication that Mary now quietly set about retrieving the most potentially explosive of her husband’s letters. She had already obtained a loan of all the Gisborne correspondence from their housekeeper in Plymouth. Shelley had been writing to Southey, she knew, in the dangerous year of Elena Adelaide’s arrival; Margaret Mason had been one of his chief confidantes; the letters to her father, tucked away in the missing writing-desk, revealed how she and Shelley had defied him in 1814. Protection, not publication, was her aim.

  The effects of a twenty-first birthday were wonderful to behold. Timothy Shelley had already announced his financial acknowledgment of the event. Ianthe Shelley, now Mrs Esdaile, invited her young half-brother to spend a fortnight in Somerset in the spring of 1842, an experience which he endured with resignation. (Claire heard from Mary that he had found the Esdailes ‘kind & good – but somewhat underbred & not a little bigotted & over pious’.8) The Shelleys, not to be outdone, issued invitations to Field Place. Percy, much to Mary’s relief, was given a warm welcome by his grandfather; his aunt Hellen, a more temperamental character, flew into a rage when she suspected Percy first of usurping herself and her sister in their father’s affections, and then of insufficient gratitude for the social introductions she was good enough to offer. Ianthe had warned Percy that all the Shelleys had dreadful tempers, Mary confided to Claire; still, it was a pity that he was so reluctant to belong to the ‘“World” – I wish indeed that he did take pleasure in good society – but being angry & scolding him violently will not render it more pleasing to him.’9