Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  It was, she told Moxon, her intention that these books should be light and entertaining, in the style of the little travel book she had published in 1817, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. It was in this spirit that she dedicated her new works to the now ageing Samuel Rogers, whose own pilgrimage through Italy in verse, shrewdly shored up by Turner’s engravings, had been phenomenally successful in the late 1820s, treading lightly on politics and heavily wherever there was a picturesque scene which Turner could represent. But the Preface acknowledged a change of direction. Here, Mary paid tribute to Lady Morgan, whose outspoken hostility to Italy’s subjection either to Austria or the Vatican had earned her a place on the papal list of prohibited books: she had even been accorded the peculiar honour of having her Italy burned in the great piazza at Turin. The fury with which her younger friend now attacked Austria as the corrupt and tyrannous gaoler of a country yearning for freedom was stoked by her feelings for Gatteschi. Mary had always stood against the Austrians; she had never before done so with such warmth.

  Dissatisfied with her work when she had finished writing, Mary insisted that all the best parts of her second book – she dismissed the first as worthless – had been given to her by Gatteschi. It was, it is true, her political stance rather than her travel-writing skills which won the respect of reviewers, although a primitive few questioned the right of a woman to have a political attitude.2 As striking to the modern reader is the homage these books paid to her mother.

  It is hard to believe that the tribute was unconscious. Describing her journey to Norway on Imlay’s behalf, Mary Wollstonecroft had emphasized the fact that she was a mother, travelling with a young child.3 This, unusually among travel writers of the 1840s, was the role which Mary Shelley adopted. Where she differed from her mother was in representing herself as a figure of respectability; possibly, she stressed this aspect because she was for the first time writing not as ‘the author of “Frankenstein”’ but as ‘Mrs Shelley’, the name she had regained when she edited her husband’s works. No longer the scandalous Miss Godwin on whose experiences abroad the Six Weeks’ Tour† had been based, ‘Mrs Shelley’ was a devoted middle-aged lady, revisiting scenes of the past with her son. There was a little egotism in her supposition that the reader would instantly understand all her mournful allusions to the significance these scenes held for her; there was none in her graceful allusions to the mother she knew only through her writings. Godwin, memorably, had described his wife at the time she was in love with Imlay as seeming like a serpent grown brilliant and sleek again with the sloughing of its skin; so Mary, in the first pages of her book, described the shedding of outworn thoughts as her mind arrayed itself ‘in a vesture all gay in fresh and glossy hues’.4 Like her mother, she was happy to contemplate ‘the immeasurable goodness of our Maker’, a sentiment which would have caused Shelley and her father to recoil. Like her mother, she described the joy of losing herself in a landscape, of seeking out, in solitude, the enduring beauty of hills, and lakes, and sky. All that she lacked was the spontaneity, the directness and sad passion which made Mary Wollstonecraft’s book so memorable.

  Only one of the many enthusiastic reviewers of Rambles in Germany and Italy made the connection and found the daughter deficient.5 Most praised the volumes as entertaining, thoughtful and eminently readable. Some thought that she alluded too often to her unhappy past; the Sunday Times was more sympathetic in describing the book as ‘a glimpse into the interior of a heart’.6 Her view of Italy’s situation was generally commended. Few of the reviewers spared much comment for her pages on painting and sculpture. In fact, her belief that artists had a right to represent love in all forms, both sacred and profane, was near to Shelley’s; her enthusiasm for Greek sculpture brought her intriguingly close to the attitude of John Ruskin, whose first volume of Modern Painters was also published in 1843.

  *

  The London lodgings which Percy had found for them during her August in Paris proved wholly unsuitable. Shortage of money and a renewed aversion to living in the city took Mary back to sleepy, peaceful Putney, now as delightful to her as Leigh Hunt’s Chelsea had become to him. The rent for their new home, White Cottage, lying on the west side of the village towards Barnes, was ‘odiously expensive’, Mary told Claire in September 1843 (although Layton House had cost her even more), and there was no room for entertaining. The benefits were a garden and easy access to the Thames for journeys into London – and Percy’s boating. Having decided to move elsewhere as soon as something cheaper became available, Mary grew too fond of her perch between the lively river and the quiet country estates to quit it until circumstances compelled.

  Her main concerns, as she began work on the Rambles, were not for herself. Kindly, given the way she had been set aside, she commiserated with Aubrey Beauclerk on the death of his eldest daughter by Ida. Gatteschi’s letters harrowed her with tales of his poverty; surely, she wrote to Claire, they could pay a governess to pretend to be in need of Italian lessons? Claire’s own letters were alarming. Full of dark hints and frantic appeals for Mary’s return, they sounded as though she had become emotionally entangled. Was a marriage about to take place, Mary asked? Was she being reckless? Had somebody duped her? ‘A person alone is always a victim unless strictly on the defensive,’ she wrote, never guessing how painfully apt the advice would soon prove to her own situation.7 Yes, she wanted to visit Paris again, but only if she could live quite on her own and not be imprisoned by her stepsister’s demands and expectations. ‘I am sadly & savagely independant … I must be thoroughly independant,’ she wrote and went on to explain that it was only to guard against the ‘defect’ of her own character that she had reluctantly allowed Joshua Robinson’s daughters to live with her from time to time as a ‘necessity’.8

  Perhaps Mary was growing elaborate merely to escape making the simple admission that she did not like Claire well enough to share a home with her; still, the confession that she had needed company because of the ‘defect’ in her character is intriguing. Mary’s letters often now complained of eye fatigue, pains in ‘my luckless head’ and feelings of weariness and depression;9 had she taken the Robinsons and, occasionally, Jane Hogg into her home as a way of ensuring that she did not harm herself? Was she sufficiently aware of her mother’s suicide attempts to have been frightened that despair might lead her into the same irrational course? In her letters, she says that ‘self-violence’ was abhorrent to her, which tells us, at least, that the subject was in her thoughts.

  Certainly, it now seemed to Mary that she had allowed herself to be bullied by Claire while she was in Paris. If she returned, she said firmly, she would do as she wished, spend much of her time with her old friend Mrs Hare and have no questions asked about her private life. She had seldom asserted herself with such sternness.

  Percy’s indolence continued to trouble her. She liked his loyalty to Henry Hunt and Jane Hogg’s Dina, now married and expecting their second child; she welcomed the visits of his friends to White Cottage. But what was to be the future of a young man who still had no money, who cared nothing for society and whose only occupations were boating and playing the piano? (The trumpet which he had taken up on their second tour abroad had been abandoned as abruptly as the flute before it; Mary had recently acquired a cottage piano for his amusement.) ‘I cannot leave him here any time alone,’ she told Claire as further entreaties came for her return to Paris.10 Why, one wonders? Why, when Mary was so fierce about her own need for independence, could she allow none to a steady young man of almost twenty-four? In another letter about Percy, probably written at this time, she expressed anxiety about his fondness for skulking about on his own at night, as if he were a thief or a murderer: ‘Percy is waiting for Moonlight,’ she told Marianne Hunt. ‘I do not like his walks alone on dark nights – He has no finery about him.’ She alluded, not to Percy’s lack of smart clothes, but to the lack of refinement in such behaviour.

  The difficulty was solved when Percy received another invitation t
o stay with his half-sister Ianthe during December 1843. Consenting, after all her insistence on an independent life, to stay at Claire’s lodgings, Mary made a short Christmas visit to Paris.

  No marriage was in the offing, despite Claire’s hints, but Mary was horrified by her stepsister’s state of mind. ‘I have serious apprehensions for poor Claire unless she can be rouzed to change the air and scene,’ she confided on her return to Marianna Hammond, an ex-governess from the Mason household who had become warmly attached to both women. ‘Her health is deplorable – her spirits worse …’11 Paranoia was the word she would have used, had it been in her vocabulary In the summer, Claire had been obsessed by the idea that the de Boinville family had taken against her; now, she was convinced that one of her Russian acquaintances was spying on her. From 1843 on, there was seldom a period in Claire’s life when she was not oppressed by the sense that she was surrounded by enemies. This mild form of mental derangement even led her to believe, towards the end of her life, that Allegra was still alive and that this fact had been kept from her.‡

  There was no madness in Claire’s new, and harsh, perception of Jane Williams Hogg. Claire had always been loyal to Jane, while maintaining an affectionate relationship with Dina, her daughter. Now, for reasons which are unclear, her feelings had grown hostile.§ Percy had better be careful, she warned Mary in a long, savage letter; Jane would turn her dangerous tongue against him at the least opportunity, ‘get up a little calumny to deteriorate his merit’. She had done it to Mary and now she had done the same to Claire. ‘Could I do what is just,’ Claire wrote, ‘I would have a board stuck up before Mrs Hogg’s door, warning anyone who cared for their happiness to have nothing to do with her.’ Jane could have all she wanted written on this board, tributes to her beauty, her grace, her generosity, ‘and whatever other splendours she would like to have to adorn her, only I would add, that this consummation of excellence has and ever will bring mental ruin to every one she approaches. This is my candid opinion of her.’15

  Mary, never forgetting how viciously Jane had once slandered her, was ready to agree. Shocked by Jane’s harshness to Dina, she had kept her own distance from Mrs Hogg: ‘she had better things about her once,’ she wrote to Claire and advised her to take the attitude of Dante towards people in Limbo: ‘Speak not of them ma guarda e passa.’16 In Jane’s place, she offered herself to her stepsister as a friend in whom to trust.17

  Claire had turned against the Italian colony, an attitude which Mary put down to her disturbed state of mind. For herself, she remained passionately committed to helping them. ‘I have no money,’ she told Claire on 23 January 1844 when she could scarcely afford to do more than entertain an occasional friend of Percy’s. But Gatteschi had convinced her that his own need was greater than hers; it was in the hope of assisting him that Mary rashly involved herself in trying to sell what now appears to have been a forged painting.

  Gatteschi’s only source of income, other than herself, was young Count Martini, who retained him on a pittance, being short of funds himself. Martini, during Mary’s first visit to Paris in August 1843, told her that he owned and wanted to sell a celebrated painting by Titian. The painting was in Milan, but he showed her an engraving. Mary was sufficiently impressed to promise her assistance. ‘Do you know the picture of Titian – the “Woman taken in Adultery” – did you ever see it?’ she wrote from Paris to Joseph Severn, who was helping to form a collection to be displayed at London’s new National Gallery. Referring to the print of this picture which had been engraved by Faustino Anderloni, she asked if the original was not worth a great deal? It could, if interest was expressed, be brought to England – what did he think?18 Severn, not surprisingly, thought that such a work would be of considerable interest.

  Late in February 1844, Count Martini arrived in England as Mary’s guest. The picture arrived separately by steamer. Its sale would, if it fetched the sum anticipated, solve all Gatteschi’s difficulties. Martini, enriched himself, would be able to support him while the National Gallery benefited from a splendid addition to its collection.

  Mary’s letters make no further reference to Martini’s painting. Gatteschi and Guitera continued to solicit her financial assistance; by the autumn of 1845, Count Martini was a ruined man. The likelihood is that the Titian was a forgery and that, as such, it found no purchaser.19 The story would not, in the 1840s, have been an unusual one. A consequence of the creation of a new national art collection in London was that a large number of forgeries and, in particular, forgeries of Titians, were offered to it. Many were shipped in from the Continent at the time that Martini’s picture arrived from Milan.

  The silence of Mary’s letters on the subject suggests that she knew the painting had failed to find a purchaser; her role, had it been sold, was significant enough for some comment to have been made, either by Claire or herself. Nothing was said. Most probably, she was aware that the painting had been identified as a fake.

  This should have alerted Mary to the fact that she was keeping dangerous company. Instead, writing to Claire on 19 April 1844, she told her that Gatteschi was so wretchedly short of money that some had needed to be found at once: ‘Nothing could I do except send some of what we have in hand – & Percy has complied & helped me in the most Angelic manner – God preserve him!’20 Such help would not have been required if Martini’s painting had realized the thousands they had anticipated.

  *

  Mary, as much as Gatteschi, was perilously close to destitution, partly as a result of her reckless generosity. Sixty pounds a year for the rent of White Cottage was more than she could afford; she was committed to giving the Hunt family regular assistance with their own rent; there were servants to be paid, Percy’s friends to be entertained and the Italians clamouring as pathetically as a nest of unfed chicks. Sending Claire a loan of five pounds was, she wearily noted, doing the impossible for her only because the impossible had been requested.

  Help was in sight from a bereavement which both Mary and Claire had come to believe would never be permitted to transform their lives. (Claire had even, with Mary’s approval, taken out a life insurance policy on Percy in case her nephew predeceased his grandfather.) But the ninety-year-old Sir Timothy was ill again. He had risen from his deathbed before now, but the lawyers reported that this time his end was sure. By 20 April, Mary was confident enough of it to send word to Leigh Hunt that, while she and Percy were happy to continue their support after the will was disclosed, they would not immediately be able to produce the £2,000 bequeathed to him by Shelley. Twenty years ago, all had seemed possible, but Sir Timothy had outlived her gloomiest expectations. She herself would first have to repay to the estate, with all the accrued interest, the full cost of Percy’s schooling and every penny she herself had been grudgingly allowed: ‘In fact,’ she nervously confessed, ‘I scarcely know how our affairs will be.’ Claire also needed warning that she might have to wait some time for her legacy; to Hogg, Mary expressed an uneasy conviction that Lady Shelley and her surviving son, John, would try to ensure that all other beneficiaries received as little as possible.

  She had scarcely completed her letter when the news came. ‘Poor Sir Tim is gone at last,’ she wrote incredulously to Claire on 25 April. She could be glad that his death had been painless; she could not grieve for a flinty old man who had relentlessly opposed every timid overture, who had fought to suppress his son’s work, and who had remained convinced until his death that it was Mary herself who had worked to fuel Shelley’s contempt for his father and for his inheritance. This had been the one certainty on which Sir Timothy had based his twenty-year refusal to meet his daughter-in-law; the battle did not end with his death. In 1834, the baronet had drawn up a will which ensured that every penny of his personal fortune went to his wife, his daughters and to his second legitimate son, John. Mary and Percy, as Shelley’s widow and son, would now inherit the property which would have been his, but only because the entail left no possibility for alternative arrangement
s.

  Mary was not yet aware of the unforgiving nature of her father-in-law’s will, although her expectations were not high. Two things, however, were certain and consoling. Her son was now a baronet and she, as Mrs Shelley of Field Place, would at last cease to be an outcast. With good, steady Percy at her side, Mary allowed herself to dream of a tranquil future for them both, of a pleasant country estate like Exbury, of an affectionate daughter-in-law to give her the grandchildren she craved, and above all, of the peace which, nearing fifty and in increasingly frail health, she felt most ready to enjoy. They would help the needy, care for their friends, be good landlords; they would be all, in short, that Shelley might have wished. The dull enduring ache of remorse could at last be assuaged.

  Notes

  1. MWS–CC, 30.8.1843.

  2. Jeanne Moskal, editor of the Rambles (Pickering & Chatto, 1996), provides an excellent summary in MWS, Selected Works, 8, pp. 49–56. Professor Jean de Palacio’s observations and summarized reviews in Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre (Paris, 1969) are indispensable.

  3. Fanny, ‘my Fannikin’, ‘my little frolicker’, was left at Gothenburg near the Swedish-Norwegian border while Mary Wollstonecraft undertook the most dangerous part of her journey. Compare Letter 16, in which she speaks of ‘my babe, who may never experience a father’s care and tenderness’, with Mary Shelley, in Rambles, 1, Letter VI, fretting over the possible loss of her son in a sailing accident: ‘A tragedy has darkened my life: I endeavour, in vain, to cast aside the fears which are its offspring; they haunt me perpetually, and make too large and too sad a portion of my daily life.’