Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  4. Rambles, p. 76, letter dated 18.6.1840.

  5. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, XI, November 1844, pp. 729–40.

  6. Sunday Times, 25.8.1844, p. 2.

  7. MWS–CC, 11.9.1843.

  8. MWS–CC, 20.9.1843.

  9. Ibid. Mary wrote here of trying homoeopathy or cold-water cures.

  10. MWS–CC, 7.10.1843.

  11. MWS–Marianna Hammond, 22.1.1844.

  12. As noted in CC, 2, p. 608, quoting the note made by, E.A. Silsbee in the 1870s (Silsbee, box 7, file 2).

  13. EJT–CC, 27.11.1869 (Pforzheimer).

  14. JWH–CC, 4.9.1843 (BL, Ashley 5036).

  15. CC–MWS, 28.1–11.2.1844.

  16. MWS–CC, 23.1.1844.

  17. MWS–CC, 16.2.1844.

  18. MWS–Joseph Severn, 15.12.1843.

  19. The editor of Mary Shelley’s letters (Bennett, MWSL, 3, p. 108, n. 2) and her most recent biographer (Sunstein, R&R, p. 363) identify Martini’s painting as The Adulteress brought before Christ, purchased on a date prior to 1855 by the Scottish collector Archibald MacLellan, and subsequently presented by him to the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museums. Identified as a Giorgione by 1864, this is a work of great importance. Its background has been extensively researched and discussed. No provenance details connect it to Count Martini or to a sale in 1844. The likelihood of its being Martini’s Titian’ on the same subject is ruled out by its size. According to Mary’s letter to Joseph Severn of 15 December 1843, Martini’s painting measured 11 feet by 5 feet. The Glasgow Giorgione was at one point trimmed by 4 inches. (A precise copy of the untrimmed original by another artist, Cariani, hangs beside it.) Before trimming, the Giorgione measured 7 feet 10 inches by 4 feet 6 inches. It seems unlikely that the painting which Count Martini brought to England was authentic. The original work, as Mary observed in her letter to Severn, would have been worth ‘several thousand pounds’. Martini’s circumstances remained straitened. (I am indebted to Hugh Stevenson and his colleagues at the Glasgow Art Gallery for information and advice regarding the Giorgione painting in their collection.)

  20. MWS–CC, 19.4.1844.

  * It would be intriguing to know if Mary helped to start this particular hare. William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places (1840) is the first in print to make the connection between Shelley and the Sidneys of Penshurst Place; the Monthly Chronicle picked up the connection in reviewing Howitt’s book in February 1840. Three months later, a writer for the Cambridge University Magazine produced an essay on ‘The Poets of England who have Died Young’, in which Shelley and Sidney were again linked and compared. Shelley himself was sufficiently proud of the connection to have called one of his best-known pieces of prose The Defence of Poetry after his distant ancestor’s A Defence of Poesie. A Shelley family tree shows that he was in fact connected to Sidney twice over, through both his mother’s and his father’s side of the family.

  † Even then, however, Mary had not been eager to publish the fact that she was not a married woman. The Preface to the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour announces that we will be following the adventures of the author, her husband and her sister. Shelley was Mary’s husband in 1817, when the work was published; he had certainly not been her husband during their travels in 1814 and 1816, and Claire was not her sister.

  ‡ One of Claire’s recorded beliefs was that Allegra did not die and that a goat’s body had been substituted for her in the coffin sent to England.12 Trelawny, her equal in the art of imaginative reconstruction, was outraged by such claims. Writing to her on 27 November 1869, he threatened to find an old nun at the convent who could be taught to impersonate Allegra, if that was what she wanted, and ‘she should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein’, he added, falling into the usual error of transposing the maker for his creature.13

  § Jane Hogg had apologized to Claire in September 1843 for ‘having wronged you, by an unworthy suspicion’, planted by a friend she now discredited.14 This apology had evidently not healed the breach. Perhaps Jane had heard from Mary about Claire’s new Italian friends and had taken the opportunity to manufacture a little gossip about Miss Clairmont.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  BLACKMAIL AND FORGERY

  1844–1846

  ‘“Preserve always a habit of giving (but still with discretion), however little, as a habit not to be lost. The first thing is justice. Whatever one gives ought to be from what one would otherwise spend, not from what one wd. otherwise pay. To spend little & give much, is the highest glory a man can aspire to.”’

  Mary Shelley, Journal, 2 October 1844*

  THANKING MARY AT THE END OF 1844 FOR THE RECEIPT OF HIS legacy, complete with the interest that had accrued since Shelley’s death in 1822, Jefferson Hogg apologized for the fact that, being less rich than Lord Byron, he could not afford the luxury of forgoing it. Brightly, he offered his congratulations to ‘the Baronet-Boy’ who, he imagined, would enjoy living in style at Field Place.1

  Hogg’s clumsy geniality had never seemed so misplaced as in the month when, after a dutiful half-year, Mary finally put away the black-bordered stationery she had been using in deference to the late Sir Timothy Shelley. Percy, not she, had been invited to the funeral; if the Sussex estate workers looked favourably on the pink, awkward young man in whose hands their future lay, it was in hope of a change for the better. Sir Timothy’s obituary in – where else? – the Gentleman’s Magazine had praised him as a benefactor and friend of the agricultural labourer.2 This was true of his early life; in later years, embittered by the prospect of being compelled by the law of entail to leave his house and estate to a daughter-in-law he detested and a grandson he scarcely knew, Sir Timothy had ceased to take any interest in maintenance. The farm buildings were dilapidated; the tenants were anxious for improvements which had not been made; Field Place itself, although pleasant in design, had grown shabby, damp and sad.

  It was a ‘desperate’ house, dull in its position, dull in every way, Mary lamented to Claire after paying a brief courtesy visit there in June. Hellen, the only one of her three sisters-in-law who took some interest in Percy, had been civil; Lady Shelley soon impressed her as ‘an active fidgetty old soul clever to boot’, her mind fixed on seeing that she received everything to which the will entitled her, and more.3 Pilfold, Thomas Medwin’s lawyer brother, was unexpectedly friendly, offering to do what he could to help the woefully underinformed heirs. The Beauclerks’ family solicitor also offered his advice, but Mary, perhaps for reasons of discretion in a gossipy country neighbourhood, decided not to involve him in her worries.

  Both Mary and Percy were relieved to learn that Lady Shelley was in no immediate hurry to move out of her home. (She bought herself a new house in Berkshire in October.) Percy fancied the idea of living at Castle Goring, the gigantic mansion his great-grandfather had built near Worthing on the South Coast: ‘There is nothing I should like better,’ Mary told Claire at the end of the year, although she recognized that her son would need a rich wife to subsidize his life there.4 For herself, she thought of building a little cottage in the forest of Balcombe which formed part of their shared inheritance. For the present, however, they stayed on at Putney and did their best to calm Claire’s suspicions that they were, in their new-found grandeur, planning to exclude her from their lives and prevent her from receiving the £12,000 due to her under Shelley’s bequest.† Her demands grew shrill. When was she going to be allowed to visit Field Place? Why did they keep finding excuses to keep her away from Putney? She did not believe Mary’s claim that there was no room; she was insulted to be offered rooms over a stationer’s shop in the High Street. Suggestions that she should take opiates or try mesmerism for her ‘turn of life’ did nothing to improve her mood.

  Money presented a graver worry than Claire’s fretful accusations. Sir Timothy, just as Mary had feared, had left them only what the law of entail compelled, and it was barely enough for them to survive. An income of somewhere between three and five thousand pounds a year fro
m the estate sounded handsome until she understood the fact that their debts would swallow it all at a gulp. Furthermore, the ‘incumbrances’, Mary grimly wrote to Claire, amounted to nearly £50,000, all of which must be settled directly; to raise the sum they would be obliged to borrow or take out a mortgage on the estate. Shelley’s bequests required £6,000 to be given to Ianthe and a further £22,500 to be divided between Claire, Hogg, Hunt and Peacock. And, as Mary needed no reminding, she was now due to repay Lady Shelley the £13,000 provided, under pressure, for her own and Percy’s maintenance. In these circumstances, the best she could do for her widowed sister-in-law, Emily Godwin, was a promise of £50 a year. A less principled woman might have raised the delicate question of Claire’s right to £12,000, since half this sum had been intended to benefit Allegra. Mary never made mention of it.

  The mid-1840s, the years of agricultural depression, were not the ideal period in which to inherit a run-down, debt-ridden country estate. Advised by the Shelleys’ lawyer and by Peacock’s kindly friend, Walter Coulson, Mary watched her dreams of comfortable security dwindle into a mere attempt to survive. Even the weather was against them; the torrential rain of 1845 wiped out the crops as effectively as the drought of the following summer. The tenant farmers were unable to keep up their rents, let alone to tolerate a rise; the estate’s income shrank to £1,500 in the year 1845. Lady Shelley did not help matters by removing everything bar the fireplace grates, when she left for a more agreeable home near Hungerford in Berkshire. Her conduct, Mary lamented to Claire on 27 October, ‘is grasping & mean beyond expression’. Lady Shelley had already been bequeathed the furniture, the linen, the plate and the silver, reducing Mary and Percy’s inheritance to little more than the bricks and mortar, now crumbling, of which Field Place was built. The house was in too shabby a state to raise more than £60 a year from the incoming tenant; insult was added to injury when he demanded compensation for the extensive improvements he had been forced to make to render the house habitable. Percy’s fantasies of castle life had to be abandoned. Sold at the end of 1845 to the resident lessee, Castle Goring raised £11,250, of which half was instantly swallowed up by one of Shelley’s ancient debts.

  How much did Percy shoulder of their new responsibilities? Not, although his mother would never admit it, as much as she had hoped. Among his positive contributions, only one comes to mind: in the autumn of 1844, Percy commissioned Joseph Severn to represent his father composing Prometheus Unbound in the ruined Baths of Caracalla. But it was Mary who produced the Curran portrait for Severn to work from and Mary who had to correct a nose which was ‘anything but right’; Percy, according to Severn, had been perfectly satisfied.

  Writing to a biographer who was planning to discuss the lives, among others, of Shelley and Byron, Mary described her son as ‘guiless’ and ‘unworldly’; to Claire, she praised him as ‘always cheerful – always occupied, he is the dearest darling in the world – the sheet anchor of my life’.5 The image was apt enough; in no respect did Percy resemble his father so much as in his passion for boats, if only for the liberty they gave him to float free of cares and commitments; these were left in his mother’s charge. She apologized for the parties he forgot to attend; she sought advice from Monckton Milnes on his duties as a country squire; she held her tongue when he splashed out on a new yacht which turned out to be worth half its purchase price. But when Percy, in the autumn of 1845, announced that he was going to read conveyancing law out of sheer boredom, even his mother grew a little exasperated. ‘In short,’ she told Claire on 25 September, ‘his income not being enough to permit him to yacht or to indulge in careless expenditure he feels unoccupied’; loyally, she added that the law would doubtless be good preparation for a political career in the Tory party.

  Percy’s political ambitions seem to have had more to do with his mother’s hopes than his own inclinations. Writing to Milnes in the autumn of 1844, Mary told him that her son had always had ‘a great ambition to sit in Parliament’ and took his advice about whether Percy might ‘come in for Horsham without a contest, in which case I shall urge him to it’.6 It would not have taken Percy much effort to discover that the only other contestant for the seat was extremely unpopular in the area, but he let himself be put off by the expense of organizing a campaign. In the autumn of the following year, Mary tried again. ‘If I can only see him in parliament all will go well,’ she told Claire on I December, while candidly acknowledging that a parliamentary career would expand Percy’s social life. Percy was supposed to be consulting the Duke of Norfolk, the leading local landowner, about his prospects of election; nothing came of it. In 1846, the subject was raised again. Her son’s ally this time was Aubrey Beauclerk, who advised him not to risk money on the campaign. The funds which had been set aside for electioneering were used for something much dearer to the young man’s heart than campaigning, a new boat.

  Percy’s behaviour the following year, 1847, makes one rather glad that he did not become a politician. The Reform Act of 1832 had brought no change to the notoriously corrupt Horsham seat; tenants here still voted as their landlord commanded. Appealed to by the local agents for the Whig candidate to allow his tenants ‘permission to vote as they please’, Percy gave his own vote to the Tory, and forced his tenants to do likewise. The Tory, Sir John Jervis, was subsequently unseated for buying votes.7

  Mary and Percy became landowners at a time when the agricultural economy was threatened not only by bad harvests and a general recession, but by the mooted repeal of the antiquated Corn Laws of 1815. The Corn Laws ensured that home-grown wheat was kept at a price advantageous to the growers, but impossibly high for the working man. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Prime Minister, was farsighted enough to support a repeal and the import of cheaper foreign corn; not so, the Tory squires. They, together with Whig landowners headed by the Duke of Norfolk, opposed Peel’s arguments. In December 1845, Peel was forced to choose between bowing to their will or offering his resignation. Honourably, he chose to resign.

  Where did Mary stand? In principle, she supported the moves towards a repeal. Writing to Claire in the month Peel resigned, she condemned the Duke of Norfolk for his notorious speech recommending a pinch of curry powder in hot water as the labourer’s best way of warming an empty stomach.8 A few days later, she was ready to predict national agitation if the country aristocrats had their way. ‘Our Landlords are much to blame,’ she wrote, but she was well enough acquainted with them now to recognize the possibility that repeal would ruin them. Why, she sensibly asked, should the repeal not be balanced by a reduction in land tax?

  With regard to Ireland in the bleak period after the Great Famine, Mary was less reasonable. Writing to a friend abroad in the spring of 1847, she complained that England had troubles enough of her own without having to send, so she had heard, a million pounds a month to ‘people who, in the hopes of money from this country, can scarcely be induced to sow seed for next harvest’.9 This was an ungenerous attitude, whilst her reasons for supporting repeal in 1845 were hardly altruistic. At a time when she was urging Percy to stand for election at Horsham, a repeal would free him from having to take a stand on the thorny topic of the Corn Laws, which ‘form so difficult a bit for a candidate’ – especially, although she did not say so, for one who was so slow and inarticulate as her son.

  ‘I am married to Percy,’ Mary wrote to Claire in 1847. Certainly, there were striking echoes of her relationship with Shelley. She, as Trelawny had noticed, had always held the purse-strings, run the household, fought off slander. Widowhood had strengthened her sense of control as she decided what should and should not be set in public view. Perhaps, in his amiable readiness to be governed, Percy was adapting himself to his mother’s need. Certainly, as she continued to find herself patronized by her husband’s relations and cut by such social veterans as Lord Dillon’s widow, Percy’s stocky and reliable presence was a comfort.

  ‘I am so entirely exiled from the good society of my own country on account of the o
utset of my life that I can care for nothing but the opinion of a few near & dear friends – & of my own conscience,’ she had written to Claire on 20 September 1843, in the year before Sir Timothy’s death. It was an unpleasant surprise to discover that she was still, by some, considered a disreputable woman. Lady Dillon, living respectably at her late husband’s home in Oxfordshire, probably remembered Mrs Shelley as part of the gang of peculiar young women, Mary Diana Dods, Eliza Rennie and Isabel Robinson, with whom Lord Dillon had made friends at William Kitchiner’s home. One of them, Eliza Rennie, was thought by many to have been his mistress. Mary, as a part of this group, would not have been a person to whom Lady Dillon felt any need to be polite. Trying in her letters to Claire to hide her hurt feelings, Mary laughed off similar insults as mere ‘pieces of impertinence’. In low moments, however, such behaviour was enough to tempt her to forsake society and bury herself in rural seclusion.

  Social acceptance mattered less for her own sake than for Percy’s. She longed for him to marry; she dreaded his choosing an unsuitable wife. He had, she noted on a visit to Horace Smith’s family at Brighton in the autumn of 1845, shown an almost lively interest in the Smiths’ sprightly little daughter, Rosalind. Very nice too, Mary told Claire: ‘she is a good little thing – & I could not oppose it – but I cannot wish the match.’ Two days later, she wrote again. ‘I wish I could find a wife for him … he is so right minded – he ought to be happy’10 And so he would be, but, as Mary’s comment shows, only when his choice won her approval.

  *

  Percy had kept a careful distance from his mother’s Italian friends. Awareness of his disapproval may explain why Gatteschi, visiting London shortly after the death of Sir Timothy Shelley, stayed not at White Cottage but with Alexander Knox. Mary’s enthusiasm for the handsome young patriot was undiminished. ‘I grieve very much you do not get on better with him –’ she reproached Claire on 10 September; ‘for the more I see of him the more I esteem his character; which seems to me singularly frank, confiding & true – this is praise for any one – for an Italian very great.’ Making what was to be her last journal entry on 2 October, a few weeks after Gatteschi’s departure, Mary copied out a favourite passage from one of Edmund Burke’s letters. The subject was the importance of generosity: ‘To spend little & give much,’ she reminded herself, ‘is the highest glory a man can aspire to.’