by Paula Byrne
Not a word, my dear Friend, to enquire after my poor head! which not only narrowly escaped destruction; but has been these ten days almost frantic with torture! On the day of your departure my coachman, probably mistaking me for a truss of Hay, in lifting me out of the slanting room where I slept, forgot the low roof, or rather penthouse; and threw me with considerable violence, so high in his arms, that the top of my head absolutely cracked the ceiling.
She joked that the fact that the ceiling was made of plaster probably saved her life:
Had the adversary my brain encountered, been nearer of its own quality, (of wood or of lead,) I had never lived to write this letter, but lath and plaster were destined to be divided between us, and though I was stunned at the moment, I found my giddiness remain – during several succeeding days. But, to be serious, – I have really escaped a fractured skull; and though the application of Leeches considerably relieved me, my head is still – almost as tender as my heart – both I fear want strength – to bear the ills of life, Philosophically.11
Comic as it is, this letter is a sober reminder of the fact that she had to be carried everywhere, including in and out of bed.
Though for several days her ‘poor head’ suffered terribly from the effect of what she wittily called ‘my late trial of its thickness’, she still managed to pen a magnificent letter to Jane Porter contrasting the fickleness and malice of society – the world she had known in her youth – to the support network of ‘a small but brilliant circle’ of like-minded friends.
Coleridge was much on her mind at this time and it may be that her image of such a circle was inspired by his famous scheme to gather a small group of liberty-loving and literary-minded young men and women in a ‘pantisocratic’ commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the new world. For Mary, Englefield Cottage was just such a place, but much closer to home – on the banks of the Thames and a mere stone’s throw from the world she had lost:
I am grown a perfect misanthrope; and almost determined never again to mingle with the gay and busy world. After all, my lovely friend, the common routine of society is so full of thorns, and so bestowed with weeds, that the reflecting traveller finds only an augmentation of disgust, with his exercise of labour. Oh! Heavens! If a select society could be formed, – a little colony of mental powers, a world of talents, drawn into a small but brilliant circle, – what a splendid sunshine would it display; and how deeply in gloom around it throw all the uninteresting vapid scenery of human life! Visionary idea! It can never be! The malignant Spirit of Contention, – the Demons Envy Calumny, and Vanity, led on by the imp Caprice, and the phantom Imagination, would interrupt the harmony of souls; and, even while they enjoyed a fancied Heaven, would convince them, that their sphere was still terrestrial. Lovely and highly-gifted as you are, you will mix in the gay mazes of society, but for a time; for your soul is to [sic] finely organised, your head too sensitive, to enjoy for a long period the artificial Beings you will meet with, the Society which will present itself, – led by the ignis fatuus fashion, but no less fascinating than deceptive.12
Here Mary is projecting onto Jane Porter her own path from the fascinating but deceptive world of the ‘gay mazes’ of high society to the ‘small but brilliant circle’ of the ‘little colony of mental powers’ in which she now felt secure yet somehow confined.
From mid-September to mid-October, her health was so poor that she believed she would soon die. She wrote her last surviving letter to Jane Porter:
Near a month confined to my bed, and every day expecting to prove that ‘there is another, and a better world’ – I have scarcely strength to thank you for your kind enquiries. My illness has indeed been so perilous, that I believe little hopes were entertained of my recovery. When my daughter received your letter I was in a state too terrible to describe! – one blister on my shoulders, another on my head, – which with perpetual bleedings, with the lancet as well as with leeches, have so reduced me that I am a mere spectre. My disease lay cheifly [sic] on my head, – an intermitting fever on the brain, – attended with other symptoms of the most alarming nature …
I write against the orders of my Physician. – But I could not resist my desire to thank you. I am still so feeble, that the smallest fatigue overwhelms me.
God bless you, and bless all that are dear to you.
yours most truly Mary Robinson
P.S. I hope our friend Thomas is perfectly recovered.
God knows when I shall be ‘myself again’, – I have but too much reason to believe, that my sojourn on this Earth, will shortly terminate. My daughter trusts that my illness will plead an apology for her silence.13
This letter was written six weeks before Mary’s forty-third birthday. Sixteen years and thousands of pages of literary production after the vicious caricature following her accident, Perdita is now truly ‘on her last legs’. Yet her good manners and her concern for others still shine through: her own physical disintegration does not stop her from enquiring after the health of ‘our friend Thomas’.
The other person Mary was in correspondence with at this time was her friend William Godwin. They quarrelled and exchanged a batch of impassioned letters. Mary and Godwin, both known to be forthright and candid almost to a fault, tested the limits of their friendship over the last days in August, as her health deteriorated. They had probably always had a tempestuous relationship and were used to speaking their minds freely. Mary’s letters to Godwin provide another close insight into her state of mind in those final months before her death. For Godwin, there is no mask of politeness, no jokey account of her bodily misadventures, only an uncompromising frankness and startling self-revelation.
It is impossible to recover the precise circumstances of the quarrel, but it seems to have originated with Godwin requiring some form of ‘security’ for a loan of money to Mary (possibly the £63 that got her out of custody). She objected to his tone in asking this: ‘on the one hand you press your point with the utmost earnestness, as if it was of the last moment, and at the same time tell me that what you ask is of no consequence, a something that can not in the end signify’.14 He also seems to have accused her of neglecting old friends for new.
Godwin replied with a letter accusing Mary of being ‘capricious’. Though plagued with an ‘excruciating head-ache’, she retaliated with a long letter to her ‘dear Philosopher’ written ‘in the warmth of feelings …[which] bespoke the language of my heart’. She began by recalling the joy she had felt on first meeting him four years before: ‘I met you as a tutor of the mind, and I never expected to find you, an associate of the soul.’ But she accused Godwin of taking pleasure in ‘humbling her vanity’ in company, of not esteeming her and her ‘humble Talents’. She also accused him of hypocrisy: ‘You love Sincerity, my dear Philosopher, and yet you are not pleased, when, even in womanish resentment, I have dared to be Sincere. Would you not despise a servile, fawning Hypocrite? … I am not capricious: new associates do not charm me from those that I have ever loved.’
The letter then becomes an essay on her own philosophy of life, a kind of personalized version of Godwin’s theory of the perfectibility of society: ‘I have been a wanderer in search of something, approaching to my idea of a perfect being.’ But she has felt disappointed in this quest and badly let down by the important men in her life: ‘If I am vain, – if I appear to be trifling, I have to thank the world for its foolish, fond indulgence; I have to reproach such men as Sheridan and Fox, for having professed, more than I had strength of mind to credit, without some little portion of self love.’ Mary’s problem, she tells Godwin, is her unflagging honesty: ‘I cannot, I never could dissemble.’ She knows that she wears her heart on her sleeve and this has proved fatal in some circumstances: ‘Had I been an artificial creature – I might have been in wealth and vulgar estimation, a creature to be envied!’
This letter, in sharp contrast to the carefully crafted self-presentation of the Memoirs, reveals a woman who has delved into her own cha
racter and past, and has no illusions about herself: ‘the impetuosity of my temper, the irritability of my feelings; – the proud energy of my soul, placed a barrier between me and Fortune, which has thrown a gloom on every hour of my existence’. She asks him to visit her in her ‘hovel’, though requesting him not to bring his little daughter (the future Mary Shelley), for fear of upsetting her shattered nerves: ‘I am indeed too irritable, as well as too feeble, to bear the smallest fatigue, and I confess that my anxieties are so poignant, my fears are so easily awakened, my mind so bewildered by vexation, and my heart so oppressed by sorrows, that nothing which is not calm and soothing to the senses, – can delight me.’ It may be that this admonition was the result of the strain of having had Eliza Fenwick and her young daughter staying for the previous weeks in the little cottage.
Mary tells Godwin that she is ‘strongly impressed with a presentiment, that my days are nearly numbered’, but that she is happier, ‘more tranquil, more gay, than when I dreaded a long life of suffering’. She had a right to be irritable, given the depth of her ill health, but the letter still shows great charm and warmth. She thanks Godwin for introducing her to his friend James Marshall: ‘To you, my dear cross cross Philosopher, I am indeed indebted for the introduction to this excellent mortal! – and I thank you, thank you, most sincerely. Come and accept the olive branch – if you think I ever acted, or felt, in any degree, with hostility towards you.’15
It seems, however, that Godwin wrote an angry and equally honest letter in return. He spoke of her ‘alternate kindness and Indifference’, her ‘cold heart’ and ‘deceitful face’, her inconstancy in friendship – a charge that she found particularly painful. ‘How unjust, how severe are your reproaches!’ she replied, reiterating that impetuosity and frankness were her hallmarks: ‘I have ever been disposed to speak my sentiments, too freely. What I dislike, I condemn – what I love, I idolize.’ She suggested that the accusation of inconstancy in friendship was hypocritical, given how he had taken her up but then neglected her after his marriage to Wollstonecraft. What appears to have caused her most distress was his accusation that she was unjustly discontented, despite possessing youth, beauty, and literary fame:
You accuse me of cherishing a discontented Spirit! Alas! Had even your Philosophy been so tried – Had you been, in the spring and bloom of Youth frost-nipped by sickness and consigned to a premature old age, hurled from the most flattering prospect of delight and Fortune, to contemplate a long and dreary perspective, which only the Grave could terminate, would not your Spirit, like my own, be weary of its journey? You say that I have ‘Youth and beauty’, Ah! philosopher, how surely do I feel that both are vanished! You tell me that I have ‘Literary Fame!’ How comes it then that I am abused, neglected, – unhonoured, – unrewarded.
Say no more that I am unjustly discontented. Tell me, no more, that I have the means of being Happy. Those, alone, who witnessed my early years of Hope, are capable of sympathizing in my present hours of pain and disappointment! You see me but a wreck, and the little love of life, which I now profess, is scarcely worth preserving. Adieu – my dear Philosopher, adieu. P.S. My adored and affectionate secondself, desires me to present her compliments. When will you honour our cottage with a visit?16
‘Secondself’ is a lovely phrase for her daughter and namesake. A few days later, Godwin went down to Englefield Green to make his peace. He stayed the night, though Mary was once again upset when he left in the morning before breakfast.
Mary wrote to him again, thanking him for the visit and apologizing for her refusal to receive his ‘clever’ friend John Philpot Curran. She told Godwin that her poverty and pride prevented her from inviting strangers into her cottage, and she was piqued by Curran’s admission that he did not think it worth making a journey of 17 miles out from central London merely in order to visit Mary: ‘I know that I am not of sufficient importance to command attention: – but I am too high-souled to court it … I cannot therefore condescend to receive, as an honour, that, which by my long intercourse with the first talents in the world, – in the society of the most enlightened men, I have been familiarized to enjoy.’ She also expressed her chagrin at another social slight when one of Godwin’s friends refused to be introduced to her on the roadside: ‘I was placed in so awkward a situation Yesterday while waiting in the High road, and as he did not then desire to be presented to me. I now cannot suffer it.’17
The truth was that Mary was feeling highly insecure about strangers or even acquaintances seeing the miserable condition to which she had been reduced. Later in September, she confessed to James Marshall that she had scarcely enough money to put food on the table:
I am hourly indulging a Misanthropic Spirit which takes from me the love of Society, and you will see that in a very short time, I shall seclude myself wholly – from the World, a solitary shadow of my former self. I am too poor to have [the] honour of receiving my friends hospitably; and I know by experience, that they will not chearfully partake of the scanty fare which fortune now affords me. I shall therefore resign myself to Solitary [Economy] and lament that the ‘feast of Reason’ will not always produce ‘the flow of Soul’. I begin to hate the World! I feel no sensation but that of disgust – I enjoy no pleasure, but that of looking back on past felicity. I have outlived health, youth and happiness – then welcome Solitude, and ‘musing melancholy’.18
She also admitted that her cherished ‘small circle of society’ was dwindling, and that she was faced with increasing loneliness and despair:
I esteem you: – I esteem Mr Godwin. I know that you are my friend: – I think that he is, but I despair of finding the number, of such friends, multiplied; and therefore I am resolved to bid the busy scenes of life farewell for ever. Here, then, am I friend: – the solitary Recluse, the world-hating – thought cherishing – alien from everything worldly! If such a being can afford you pleasure by her society, Come – Come – as often as you have a day to throw away and pass it at our cottage. My head is so very bad that I can scarcely see the paper.
She thanked Marshall for the present of birds he had brought for their supper and also told him that an anonymous donor was leaving her baskets of apples and other fruits.
Godwin sent her a present in October, and she wrote thanking him, in a very feeble state and ‘so depressed in spirit’:
The exertion of speaking almost destroys me; and I feel, still more strongly, the fatigue of thinking. I certainly cannot long resist the pressure of sickness exerted with the weight of never-ending sorrows! If you were to see me you would not, by any personal feature, know me: – but, if I know myself, my mind is unaltered, and my Esteem for you Undiminished. I dare not write any more – my head becomes giddy and my hand refuses the office of guiding my pen – God bless you – Dear Sir.19
She was still writing for the Morning Post, though the pressure to turn in regular copy weighed heavily upon her. Her relationship with Stuart suffered, as her daughter explained in the continuation of the Memoirs: ‘She yet continued, though with difficulty, and many intervals, her literary avocations. When necessitated by pain and languor to limit her exertions, her unfeeling employers accused her of negligence. This inconsideration, though she seldom complained, affected her spirits, and preyed upon her heart.’
Maria Elizabeth also hinted rather mysteriously that her mother treated ‘with just indignation those offers of service which required the sacrifice of her integrity’.20 She was prolific as ever and wrote some of her best poems in these final months, including ‘London Summer’s Morning’* and ‘Harvest Home’, which reveals that, though primarily a city poet, she could also bring her political awareness to the pastoral tradition:
On the plain
The freckled gleaner gathers the scant sheaf,
And looks, with many a sigh, on the tythe heap
Of the proud, pamper’d pastor!21
These provocative lines were censored out of the poem when it was later reprinted in the popular miscellany T
he Every-Day Book.22
The Morning Post provided Mary with subject matter as well as printing her poems. In October, it carried reports of the discovery of a feral child, the ‘Wild Boy of Aveyron’: ‘He lived on potatoes, chestnuts and acorns … His features are regular, but without expression; every part of his body is covered with scars; these scars attest the cruelty of the persons by whom, it is presumed, he has been abandoned; or, perhaps, they are attributable only to the dangers of a solitary existence, at a tender age, and in a rude tract of country.’23 The story of the wild child fed into the age’s fascination with the return to nature and Rousseau’s idea of the ‘noble savage’. Mary promptly turned the newspaper reports into a narrative poem, written in a vigorous rhythm analogous to that of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.
Mary’s chronic ill health meant that she would never visit Coleridge in the Lake District. There was an exchange of poems instead.
Coleridge wrote to Daniel Stuart in early October: ‘It grieves me to hear of poor Mrs Robinson’s illness.’ With the letter he enclosed ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’, a poem mostly written by Wordsworth but touched up by Coleridge. Published in the Morning Post, it described ‘Sappho’ – obviously Mary – as ‘the fairest Face on Earth’.24
A poem by Wordsworth called ‘The Solitude of Binnorie’ was published in the Morning Post a week later, with a prefatory note explaining that it owed its metre to Mary’s ‘Haunted Beach’, which had appeared some months before:
Sir,
It would be unpardonable in the author of the following lines, if he omitted to acknowledge that the metre (with the exception of the burthen) is borrowed from ‘The Haunted Beach of Mrs ROBINSON;’ a most exquisite Poem, first given to the public, if I recollect aright, in your paper, and since re-published in the second volume of Mr SOUTHEY’S Annual Anthology. This acknowledgement will not appear superfluous to those who have felt the bewitching effect of that absolutely original stanza in the original Poem, and who call to mind that the invention of a metre has so widely diffused the name of Sappho, and almost constitutes the present celebrity of Alcaeus.25