Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  One reason why Godwin had meant to be a bachelor was that he could not support a family through writing. When he remarried he had four children to maintain, and then there were five, for in March 1803 little William was born. It became necessary to find new means. Back in 1800–1 Godwin had been amongst the contributors to a high-flying publication for children called The Juvenile Library, a cross between an encyclopaedia and a magazine, specialising in moral philosophy, botany, geography and the manners of nations, ancient and modern languages, mathematics, scientific experiment, and biography. Included were lives of intellectual women like Margaret Roper (daughter of Sir Thomas More); Katherine Parr (who entered into the theological debates of her age and published devotional books in the 1540s); and Mme Dacier, a translator of Greek and Latin classics in the time of Louis XIV. Peacock, De Quincey and Holman Hunt, then schoolboys, were amongst the monthly prizewinners; also, a number of girls, in nearly every subject. Godwin and his wife set up their own Juvenile Library, a publishing firm for children’s books, in 1805. In 1807 the family moved from the salubrious air of the Polygon, on the outskirts of London, to a corner site in the centre of the City, occupying four floors above their bookshop at 41 Skinner Street. It was the right home for Margaret Mount Cashell’s Stories, published anonymously in December of that year.

  There is a drawing in Godwin’s Fables Ancient and Modern, where Aesop holds up an explanatory forefinger to two little girls. When Godwin tested his storytelling powers on Fanny (eleven), Charles (ten), Mary (eight), and Jane (seven), he found that Aesop’s moral came too abruptly. The children would ask, ‘What happened then?’ So Godwin (under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin) expands the fable. He also adds fables of his own. In December 1805 the Anti-Jacobin recommends this book–if it had only known–by the enemy. A bust of Godwin’s Aesop went up above the door of the shop in Skinner Street, where beasts went lowing and snorting to their end at the Smithfield Market, and crowds rushed by to view public hangings at Newgate Prison–unlikely readers for the Godwins’ fine list which included Godwin’s Life of Lady Jane Grey (1806), the model of a learned girl who at the age of twelve knew eight languages; Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807); and an English grammar by William Hazlitt (1810). Mrs Fenwick, who had assisted with the delivery of little Mary and nursed her dying mother, contributed Lessons for Children, which taught the rudiments of humanity in manners and morals. Mary Jane Godwin did the first English translation of The [Swiss] Family Robinson (1814), wrote (anonymously) Dramas for Children; and there was a performance version of Beauty and the Beast in verse, accompanied by Beauty’s Song set to music. Margaret Mount Cashell’s reading-books were popular.

  Amongst the most successful publications were several schoolbooks by Godwin: histories of England, Greece and Rome. He believed that history should raise questions, not provide answers, and that the true aim of education was not rules and imitation but to stimulate a pupil to reach beyond the limits of his lessons. The respected schoolmasterish author called Baldwin was able to get away with more emphasis on republican virtues than was customary at the time. In his English Dictionary the word ‘revolution’ is defined as ‘things returning to their just state’. The bookshop also carried stationery, maps, games and gifts, including a series of shilling booklets.

  One of these was by Mary Godwin, a prodigy at the age of eight in 1805. She took up a current song about the adventures of an absurdly mistaken John Bull in France. Addressing the French in English, he takes their ‘Je n’ entends pas’ to be information about a grandee called Nongtongpaw. So pervasive does this grandee appear that John Bull begins to doubt the French Revolution. The hilarious quatrains of Mounseer Nongtongpaw dramatise, in effect, why the word ‘insular’ entered the English language at this time.

  When Fanny was eleven, the Wollstonecraft sisters proposed to take her over. Godwin refused. Fanny was his–a charge Mary Wollstonecraft had left him. She was known as Fanny Godwin, though the French registration of her birth had recorded her surname as Imlay. It might have been a prudent move to send Fanny for a visit at this time, when the Wollstonecrafts reached out to her, but the coolness between the sisters and Godwin remained. The effect of Godwin’s Memoirs had been to taint the name of Wollstonecraft and this, the sisters feared, might undermine their Dublin schools. To start schools had been risky–Johnson had shaken his head–but they did survive: Everina had a boarding-school for girls and Bess had a day-school for boys. Whatever lessons were to be learnt from the failure at Newington Green, they had learnt them. They had to make their way with no help beyond the sisterly support they always gave each other.

  Another attempt to benefit Fanny came when Joseph Johnson died in 1809. His will left fifteen-year-old Fanny £200, which Godwin was to give her to pay his debt to Johnson. Fanny was not given this bequest. Though the Godwins worked hard, their press was never solvent. There was no capital; the whole venture was based on loans, and under pressure from his wife to keep it going Godwin turned into an inveterate borrower. The need to scrounge what he could on the strength of a past reputation constricted somewhat the character of a thinker who had once opened himself to the ‘heart’. A need for £3000 was in the air when, in 1812, an apparent solution appeared in the shape of a young poet who was heir to a great fortune.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley was the grandson of an American named Bysshe who presents another prototype of Gatsby. Bysshe had been no one in New Jersey. Then he migrated to England, grew rich, sent his son to Oxford and his grandson to Eton. Percy Shelley was at Eton in the heyday of Dr Keate, known as ‘Flogger’. The boys were worse, and from 1804 to 1810 Percy Shelley was bullied for his oddity and gentleness. During this period, Bysshe became Sir Bysshe. Part of his gains had been to elope with two heiresses (while he kept a mistress with four children, one of whom was also called Bysshe). His grandson, Percy, expelled from Oxford for atheism, eloped at a very young age with a Jewish schoolgirl, Harriet Westbrook, and married her. Too late, he caught up with Mary Wollstonecraft’s rationale against marriage. Like her, he detested political oppression and was a non-violent revolutionary who believed change must be gradual to be secure. He was a convert to Political Justice, and at the age of twenty approached Godwin with the awe of a disciple. He also had an eye to Fanny as Wollstonecraft’s daughter.

  In July 1812, before they met, Shelley invited Fanny to join him and Harriet in a rented cottage at Lynmouth in Devon. Godwin forbade it. He said he did not know a man until he had seen his face.

  Shelley was puzzled: surely Godwin knew him through his ideas and letters? But Godwin would not budge.

  When, at length, Shelley and Harriet arrived to dine at Skinner Street on 4 October, the two younger girls were away, and it was Fanny, a dark young woman of eighteen with long brown hair, who found herself drawn out by a poet’s regard. Harriet set down their first impressions:

  There is one of the daughters of that dear Mary Wolstoncroft living with [Godwin]. She is…very plain, but very sensible. The beauty of her mind fully overbalances the plainness of her countenance. There is another daughter…who is now in Scotland. She is very like her mother, whose picture hangs up in his study. She must have been a most lovely woman. Her countenance speaks her a woman who would dare to think and act for herself.

  For the next six weeks there was daily contact with Shelley–the Godwins saw almost no one else. Their new friend was tall and stooped with long legs, narrow chest and shoulders, a prominent blue-veined brow and dishevelled light locks. His head was all front–straight behind–and his face and features small. Even his brow, though striking in a ‘marble’ way, wasn’t broad like Godwin’s. He spoke in a high tenor that seemed to come from the back of his head, like a child’s. This strange creature had grown up surrounded by five sisters, and would often try to reconstitute a female court. He was sensitive to women–as well as susceptible. ‘Then it was Fanny Imlay he loved’, her stepsister reported later. She thought he loved ‘as women love’, and she beli
eved that ‘Fanny loved Shelley’.

  Fanny was taken aback when Shelley, always restless, took off for Wales on 13 November. It was ungrateful not to say goodbye, she said in her direct way; she still had some questions to put to him, though she was not sure if this was proper.

  Shelley replied on 10 December 1812: ‘So you do not know whether it is proper to write to me. Now, one of the most conspicuous considerations that arise from such a topic is–who & what am I? I am one of those formidable & long clawed animals called a man.’

  He could assure Fanny that he was a tame representative of the species, lived on vegetables, ‘& never bit since I was born’. As such, he adds, ‘I venture to intrude myself on your attention.’

  His attentiveness reflects a different Fanny from the plain girl. Others saw her as upright and generous yet ‘odd in her manners and opinions’–a girl with ‘nothing’ of her mother in her. Though Fanny may have continued to look like Imlay, she was, in truth, much like her mother in the honesty and independence of her opinions, her domestic affections and acute feelings. Jane joked that the hero of The Man of Feeling (leading the cult of sensibility forty years before) would have made a perfect husband for Fanny. Her tender-hearted and hopeless attempts at keeping the peace provided some amusement for the younger children.

  At a guess–it can only be a guess–Mary and Jane were jealous of her closeness to the woman of the portrait, the icon of the household. After all, it was Fanny whom Mary Wollstonecraft had adored unreservedly, who was praised for her bloom and intelligence, who had slept in her mother’s arms, and whose pulses of imaginative sympathy had been cultivated in accord with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Wollstonecraft had worried that it might unfit this sensitised child for her future life, but it had reassured her that Fanny–‘gay as a lark’ as they set sail for unknown lands far north–took so naturally to humane training. It was Fanny to whom Mary Wollstonecraft had clung for comfort when Imlay left, and to whom she had hastened on her return journey from Norway. ‘At Gothenburg I shall embrace my Fannikin,’ she had written to the father of her ‘babe’. ‘I never saw a calf bounding in a meadow, that did not remind me of my little frolicker. A calf, you say. Yes; but a capital one, I own.’ All this was in print in the prized relics of her Travels and Letters to Imlay.

  ‘Les Goddesses’, the three girls were called by Aaron Burr, who came to visit, the American who had read the Rights of Woman through the night and wished his daughter, Theodosia, to benefit. When a stranger asked Godwin if he was bringing up Wollstonecraft’s daughters according to her teachings, Godwin was too truthful not to admit that he had ceded control to his second wife, who was ‘not exclusively a follower’. He and Mrs Godwin lacked ‘leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice’. Although Godwin retained a special bond with Fanny, he was caught up in the slog of a failing business, and allowed Mrs Godwin to sideline the willing girl as her helper. Here, Godwin appears to forget that Fanny had already taken the imprint of Wollstonecraft’s teachings–the compassion, the directness–an inward shape none could change.

  Formally, the girls were set apart from dutiful Charles Clairmont, who was sent for six years to Charterhouse, a London school for boys. Les Goddesses were taught largely at home–not necessarily a disadvantage with its publications, its political debate, and visitors like the Lambs and Coleridge. Godwin took them to Coleridge’s lectures at the Royal Institution. Mary Godwin wrote later: ‘There is a peculiarity in the education of a daughter brought up by a father only, which tends to develop early a thousand of those portions of mind, which are folded up, and often destroyed, under mere feminine tuition.’ Jane and Mary had alternate spells at boarding-schools, and then in 1812–13 Mary joined the household of Godwin’s friend Baxter in Dundee.

  Fanny stayed at home, an unrescued Cinderella at the mercy of Mrs Godwin’s temper–‘the bad baby’, the Lambs called her. Someone–it sounds like Mrs Godwin–told Fanny that others wore themselves out working to keep her. Godwin’s catalepsy came back; Fanny watched him anxiously. Henry Reveley, a playmate in childhood, recalled that this ‘amiable and loving little girl’ was pitted with smallpox. It may not have been much, since to children any blemish looms large, but, if true, it would have been impossible to shield a girl. At some point Fanny began to suffer from depression. She apologised to her sister Mary for her ‘torpor’, with resolutions to transform her ‘faults’. ‘So young in life & so melancholy’–Jane shook her head over Fanny. Without looks, dowry or feminine wiles, Fanny had small chance of marriage. The brutal economics of Jane Austen demonstrate the alternatives for young women of that generation. They are visible in Emma in the misery of the polished pianist Jane Fairfax who is due to become a governess, and in The Watsons a girl unable to contain her tears when her brother reproaches her as ‘a weight upon your family’. Fanny’s charity status, compounded by her ‘torpor’, licensed the similar reproach.

  Godwin’s answer to the enquiry about Wollstonecraft’s daughters reflects the partisan atmosphere that had settled on a household where every child, bar Fanny, had a blood tie to one parent. Godwin pictures Mary–‘my own daughter’–as ‘bold’, ‘imperious’, ‘invincible’ in her perseverance, and Fanny’s superior in her appetite for knowledge. Fanny is ‘somewhat given to indolence’–hardly recognisable here as the lark-like child whose intelligence had intensified Mary Wollstonecraft’s love for her. Godwin sees a subdued girl who is quiet, unshowy, observant, and disposed to follow her own thoughts. Though he wasn’t asked about looks, he again puts forward his own daughter. She is ‘very pretty’, compared with Fanny who, he allows, is ‘in general prepossessing’. Godwin boasted to Shelley that Mary was like her mother. Actually, Mary’s pallor, high forehead, and long, elegant nose resembled her father’s; and this resemblance would become more pronounced in her forties in the moon-pale Rothwell portrait with the smoothed and parted hair of the Victorian period. But a miniature in her teens, angled to mirror her mother in the Opie portrait, does show the likeness at that time: the same heavily dented upper lip, curled at the left corner, the marked brows, the whisps of hair clustering on the forehead. Her grey eyes are dreamier than her mother’s, her lips thinner, and she’s more delicate, with fine, nut-brown hair that spun about and tangled as she turned her head.

  In the spring of 1814, les Goddesses were all three at home when Shelley returned to Skinner Street. He came this time without his wife, who was in Bath. On 23 May, Fanny–just twenty–was sent off for the summer to Pentredevy, near Swansea. This fact gets passed over, but could be important. Until then, Fanny almost never left home–partly reluctance to leave what home she had; partly the legacy of her mother’s protectiveness towards ‘Papa’–in his fits of sleep–as spelt out in Wollstonecraft’s ‘Lessons’; and partly acquiescence in the lack of plans for her. So why Wales just now? One purpose was to meet her Wollstonecraft aunts who were to come over from Ireland, but that would hardly have occupied the whole summer. Another possible reason lies in a set of notebooks in the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The notebooks belonged to a Shelley enthusiast, Captain Edward Augustus Silsbee, who elicited Jane’s remarkably acute and detailed recollections in old age. She recalled that when her mother, Mrs Godwin, thought that ‘Shelley was in love with [Fanny] or might be’, she sent Fanny away. Jane was not always reliable, but this sounds plausible, given Shelley’s worship of Wollstonecraft and willingness to discern her in Fanny. Whatever the truth, Fanny’s absence that June and July had life-changing repercussions for all three girls. Jane also recalled Shelley’s telling Mary that his wife Harriet no longer loved him and that the child she was carrying was not his.

  The more Mary loathed ‘Mamma’, the more she took ‘pride & delight’ in her real mother. At sixteen, it became Mary’s habit to commune with her in St Pancras churchyard. On the plain table-tombstone, beneath the willows Godwin had planted, the girl saw the same name as her own:

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN />
  Author of

  A VINDICATION

  OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN:

  Born 27 April, 1759:

  Died 10 September, 1797.

  Shelley, meeting her there on Sunday 26 June, embraced this imaginative inheritance. ‘I would unite/ With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light,’ he said in his secret self. Mary would recall ‘that churchyard, with its sacred tomb, was the spot where first love shone in your dear eyes’. She was to be his ‘spirit’s mate’, a channel of inspiration from a mother whose life and fame seemed to clothe this daughter in a ‘radiance’ that shone also from the shelter of her father’s own ‘immortal name’. This girl with her great white tablet of a forehead was beautiful and free as, calmly, she confessed her love, ready to break conventions for his sake. He thought she had ‘the subtlest & most exquisitely fashioned intelligence’, and told her that ‘among women there is no equal mind to yours’. Poor Harriet could not compete.

  ‘I am in want of stockings, hanks, and Mrs W[ollstonecraft]’s posthumous works,’ Shelley let Harriet know soon after he left her. Stockings and handkerchiefs were sent. Wollstonecraft’s works Harriet retained.

  His passion was for Mary’s aura as Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Harriet protested.

  ‘It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion,’ he told her. Shelley expected his pregnant wife to condone his abandonment as the action of a higher being. ‘I murmur not if you feel incapable of compassion & love for the object & sharer of my passion.’