Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  ‘I can, I do, live in solitude, I can act independently of the opinion of others; but the expression of that opinion if it be in opposition to mine shakes my nature to its foundations. I differed from L[ord] B[yron] entirely,’ she confided to Jane Williams, ‘but I literally writhed under the idea that one so near me should advise me to a mode of conduct which appeared little short of madness & nothing short of death.’ Byron had not taken in Mary Shelley’s point in Frankenstein: to create and not to nurture one’s creature is nothing short of monstrous. It was hard to go alone yet retain Mary’s degree of sensitivity. Godwin indeed reproached her, saying ‘you are a Wollstonecraft’; but this reproach of mother and daughter could take a different colour. These resourceful natures who don’t lose their sensitivities pose the possibility of an improved breed over hardened people who seek power.

  Generosity was another trait. Mary sent Claire £12 when the two went separate ways after Shelley’s death, even though Mary’s own situation at the end of 1822 was equally threatened by the scandals of the past eight years. In contrast, Jane Williams wheedled sums of money from Claire, while shunning contact. As an Englishwoman who had left her husband for a lover, Jane Williams had lived amongst the outcasts in Pisa, but did not take on their character. She betrayed Mary’s friendship, perpetuating the myth of a cold wife, despite Mary’s confidence to her a year after Shelley’s death: ‘I cannot live without loving and being loved, without sympathy; if this is denied to me, I must die. Would that the hour were come.’ Though Mary Shelley had more reserve than her mother, there is the same depth of feeling–the voice is the same. The myth of coldness fused with slander of Mary Shelley as social climber, betrayer of her radical inheritance. ‘I have ever defended women when oppressed,’ she protested. It was not so in every instance: she had been blind to Shelley’s first wife, Harriet; she had not encouraged him to visit the children of that marriage; and she had been unfeeling to Fanny, left to bear the domestic tyrannies of their stepmother. Yet during her lonely years back in England, Mary Shelley did indeed befriend women like Caroline Norton, who fought the law that deprived separated wives of the right to their children. She also proposed to her publisher a history of women or a book on the lives of celebrated women.

  Margaret Mason too confirmed the formative sway of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ‘mind appeared more noble & her understanding more cultivated than any others I had known’. Her Advice to Young Mothers ‘by a Grandmother’(1823) might be said to complete the work Wollstonecraft had outlined at the time she died. Mrs Mason invented a gentle form of paediatric practice long before paediatrics was established as a branch of medicine. Much illness, she thought, was the result of neglect in childhood. No sign of trouble in a child should be thought trifling; it was dangerous for children to exercise a stiff upper lip. Clearly, Advice did not reach British boarding-schools like the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge whose repressive ethos killed off two coughing Brontë girls in 1825. Advice predicts a future when preventative medicine should be the pre-eminent treatment.

  The far-sightedness of its cures is most apparent in what it has to say about mental health. Mrs Mason recognised that a child’s state of mind affects physical health. No punishment, she says, should make a child feel contemptible: ‘Teach a being to despise himself, and prepare the mind for the reception of every vice.’ She forbids adults to lock children in the dark. ‘Terror is a sensation against which they should be protected with the greatest care: the injuries done by fear, to the physical and moral health, are incalculable.’ At the same time, courage should be the first quality to be cultivated, in girls as much as boys. Advice rejects the notion ‘that all women have a right to be cowards. This opinion is extremely injurious to the health of young girls, who would often try to conquer their fears, if they were not taught to believe it a thing impossible, and that they even appear more amiable as helpless than as independent beings.’ Older girls must be relieved of ‘the tortures of fashion’. Mrs Mason deplores constricted or down-sized constructions of womanhood. Attempts to produce excessive smallness were more likely to produce the ‘ugliness’ of bad health. Many handsome women, she insists, have broad hips.

  Mrs Mason gave her royalties to Claire. What she wanted was recognition, as when Vaccà and other doctors praised her medical stance. ‘A woman of good sense, who studies that book will want no physician for her children,’ Vaccà said, and added, ‘there is a great deal in this book of which many physicians are ignorant’.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Mason agreed, ‘–for it is impossible for any man to know all those little things which a mother who watches her children carefully can observe.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ Vaccà said. ‘I mean the medical part of the book. None but a medical man could be perfectly aware of the merit of that part of the book which treats of diseases.’

  In 1825–6 she corresponded about Advice with George Parkman of Boston who sent doctor-to-doctor comments: ‘here’s my variation on your remedy…I’d try…’ and so on. As a young Harvard graduate, Dr Parkman had accompanied Joel Barlow when he had sailed for France in 1811 as US Ambassador. There, Parkman had studied mental illness in women, under the aged Pinel at the Salpêtrière. He had returned to Boston determined to introduce optimism about recovery and a similar humane mildness in the mental hospital he established (now merged with Massachusetts General Hospital). His colleagues, he tells Mrs Mason, shunned him for opposing their lucrative links with drugstores. (And later, a fellow-physician went so far as to murder him.) He questioned the doses doctors, in their ignorance, administered, and his letters concur with Mrs Mason that doctors’ intervention too often denied the body’s capacity to heal itself. In this way, Advice opened up a dialogue with a world that had cast her out.

  ‘Vesuvius’ subsided early in Tighe’s relations with Margaret Mason. He regarded Wollstonecraft’s ideas of equality as suitable only for a small percentage of the upper class. Sex should be moderate: an ‘emission’ once a week sufficed. It was an urge to be curtailed as long as possible, and when it had to happen, offered no more than physical relief. He didn’t share Margaret’s exalted views of Italy. To Tighe, it was as small-minded, as given to social pretension, as any other country. No radical, he believed with Margaret they had been at fault in cutting loose from the laws of their society.

  Tighe remained an exile who tried to put down roots in his adopted country. He composed travel pieces suitably embellished with Latin tags, and embarked on a year-by-year history of Pisa. But his favourite occupation was growing potatoes, reminiscent of Ireland. Though he was scientific and wished his variety of potato to advance agriculture in Italy, he blinded himself to the Italian habit of feeding patate to animals. His family nicknamed him ‘Tatty’. Increasingly reclusive, Tatty lived on his own floor of their rented house, and his scaled-down needs made him think his retired way of living must suit them all.

  Though Tatty was fond of his daughters, their mother became uneasy about her will leaving all she had to him. She feared his absorption with potatoes might lead him to discount what was due to their daughters if she should die–as her continued ill health seemed to threaten. She therefore took two steps.

  In April 1818 she revealed her real identity to Laurette and Nerina, and related how Mary Wollstonecraft had changed her. It was a sombre declaration: she blamed herself for her marriage, and said that she had deserved to suffer as she did. Tight-lipped about the loss of her Mount Cashell children, she warned the girls, then aged nine and three, they must expect nothing from their grand relations. After the death of Mount Cashell in 1822 she was free to marry Tighe, but though she did need to legitimise their daughters, it was more urgent to secure them financially. In 1823, she inherited £6000 on the death of her mother. There are further indications that she was not as cut off as she gave out. She retained ties with her second son, Robert Mount Cashell; with her sister Diana who lived in Florence; and with her cosmopolite brother, John King. Then, in 1824, she contacted he
r eldest daughter, Helena, who had married Richard Robinson of Rokeby Hall, County Louth, in 1813.

  Before Margaret married Tighe, granting him legal authority over their children and all she owned, she took her second decisive step. On 15 June 1824 she made a new will in her real name as the Dowager Countess of Mount Cashell, leaving everything she owned to ‘my excellent and beloved daughter Helena’ in trust for ‘two young friends’ of the Countess who were residing with her at Pisa in Tuscany. The Countess made this bequest, ‘relying on my beloved daughter the said Helena Eleanor Robinson to act in this matter as she knows I should wish her to do’. The will was witnessed by the Honourable John Harcourt King, who resided in Paris. The ‘young friends’ were, of course, her illegitimate daughters and Helena’s half-sisters, Laurette and Nerina. The will proves that Margaret had complete trust in her thirty-year-old-daughter. A stray scrap amongst the Tighe papers records the expenses of a twenty-day journey that Helena, her husband and two little girls, together with governess and servants, undertook from Paris to Pisa. Advice, the previous year, had called its author ‘a Grandmother’ but this grandmother had never seen her grandchildren. Now she met them. Behind the bare statements of £120 for two carriages with stops in Turin and Genoa, is this dramatic meeting with a daughter who had been eleven years old when she parted from her mother in Dresden nearly twenty years before. When mother and daughter evade the bias of the law, which kept money as far as possible in male hands and punished the illegitimate, they move united in the underworld of The Wrongs of Woman.

  In Margaret Mason’s anonymous novel, The Sisters of Nansfield (1824), an outcast mother, Mrs Maynard, has two daughters called Harriet and Fanny who grow up aware they have noble relations who will not recognise them. Harriet is an indolent beauty who elopes–disastrously–with a nobleman, while Fanny is a brown girl whose animated and intelligent expression makes her more attractive as a person. Sensitive Fanny is a comfort to her mother and attached to home. Why did Margaret Mason call the sisters ‘Harriet’ and ‘Fanny’, the names of the two young women lost to the post-Wollstonecraft milieu? In her Lady Mount Cashell days, Margaret had met Fanny Imlay on her visits to the Godwins, and she could well have met Harriet Shelley there in 1812. Odder, even, is that the characters and to some extent the fates of the fictional sisters forecast those of Laurette and Nerina who were at the time fifteen and nine.

  By the age of eighteen, Laurette was bored. She was a beauty. The elaborate coils of her high-piled hair recall the abundant tresses of her grandmother, Lady Kingsborough, and her runaway aunt, Lady Mary. She was a fashionplate with sloping shoulders and balloon sleeves tapering to a tiny, belted waist in the style of the magazines that, at this time, captivated the Brontë children. A portrait of Laurette bears an ominous similarity to the languid ladies of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, who wait around for Byronic poseurs to spoil their lives.

  In 1827 the Tighe family was living at Villa Archinto in the suburb of San Michele degli Scalzi. It was an unsuitable place for girls reaching marriageable age. Tighe and his wife, on their separate floors, were quarrelling over the future of Laurette and Nerina. At this point Mrs Mason (as she continued to be called–though now married to Tighe) made the most crucial of her decisions relating to her daughters. She must take them back to Pisa, leaving Tatty in the suburb. Since Tatty opposed this move, she would use all her own income to dress and present them well. They had to mix in society if they were to marry.

  Accordingly, back in Pisa, Mrs Mason founded a society of her own. Her new home, an apartment in the large and handsome Casa Lupi (known affectionately as the Cave of Wolves), became the venue for an Accademia di Lunatici consisting of forty-six members, including the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi who stayed for six months a few streets away in the Via della Faggiola. Other members were his friend Giovanni Rosini, Giuseppe Giusti, and a Frenchwoman, Sophie Vaccà (Dr Vaccà’s wife). The Lunatici met every fortnight on Mondays (Moon days, appropriate to loonies). The name may have revived a theatrical Lunatica Accademia that had flourished in Pisa during the first half of the seventeenth century. Mrs Mason’s Lunatici had an altogether more secret character at a time when Tuscany was ruled by the Austrian Archduke. ‘Madness’, as with Hamlet, was a cover for deviance. Each member adopted the name of a constellation, and received a certificate of membership with the motto: ‘se non son matti, non ce ne volemo’ (if you aren’t mad we don’t want you). Ostensibly, it was a literary society, consisting mainly of students from the University of Pisa, but the secrecy may have had a political vein. Several of the Lunatici–poet Angelica Palli, Francesco Guerrazzi, Antonio Mordini and Ferdinando Zannetti–went on to become political activists for the unification of Italy after 1848: links in a revolutionary chain from Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution, to Margaret Mount Cashell and the Irish Rising, to the Risorgimento.

  In 1832 when Claire returned to Pisa, she was invited to live with Mrs Mason, who had moved into the Via della Faggiola in the centre of town. ‘Nothing can equal Mrs. Mason’s kindness to me,’ she told Mary Shelley. ‘Hers is the only house except my mother’s, in which all my life I have ever felt at home. With her I am as her child.’ Claire was delighted to find a like character in seventeen-year-old Nerina, who ‘will walk by herself and think for herself’. Together, Claire and Nerina were ‘as wild as March hares’, scoffing at men and love. Laurette’s fashionable style had attracted a princely rogue, while Nerina was more suited to the subversive lunatici. She was darker and slighter than her sister, a playful talker, who pretended to moan over her education in languages and literature, since it would prevent her marrying ‘some blackbeard of an Italian’ in search of a sewing wife.

  Claire continued to teach long hours, serving ‘the tyrants’, the English Bennets, from nine in the morning. At ten each night she returned to the Tighes, ‘a singular family–of the females of which it may truly be said, they form among their species, an oasis in the grand desert of society’. After many depleting years, Claire at last grew ‘fat and ruddy’. Mrs Mason, she felt, ‘understands me so completely–I have no need to disguise my sentiments, to barricade myself up in silence as I do almost with every body for fear they should see what passes in my mind and hate me for it because it does not resemble what passes in theirs’.

  In 1834 Nerina, aged eighteen, married a member of the Lunatici, Bartolomeo Cini, a law student of literary, political and scientific tastes from a papermaking family in San Marcello Pistoiese. ‘Meo’ was a good man whom everyone, including Claire, loved and trusted. He had a thin, sensitive face, with a large nose and delicate but firm lips. Nerina’s aunt Diana came to help at the birth of her first child Margharita. Nerina’s descendants lived in San Marcello, generation after generation. In the summer of 2001, my husband drove us through a blinding rainstorm up the perilously winding road of the Apennines, to meet Nerina’s present-day descendant Andrea Dazzi and his wife Cristina in their book-filled rooms. A woman in her nineties entered with quiet dignity, Signor Dazzi’s mother, Nerina’s great-granddaughter, born Cini in 1909. Her eyes were so pale a blue they were almost white. Lady Mount Cashell’s eyes, as Godwin described them to his friend Marshall in 1800. Was it fancy or did Giovanna Dazzi look like the earliest portrait of Margaret King in her mid-teens? The rambling old house has been divided, but tucked away, doors open on a nineteenth-century library–untouched, intact–for Cristina Dazzi has refused to sell it off. There, still, are the Irish books of Lady Mount Cashell, her manuscripts and the love letters of ‘Laura’ and ‘Vesuvius’.

  In 1834, Tighe, distancing himself further from Lady Mount Cashell, required her to resume that name. She died at the age of sixty-four the following year. A portrait painted by her sister Diana, not long before her death, shows her level eyes and fresh complexion under the bonnet of an old woman–her persona in Advice. On her lap she holds the manuscript of ‘The Chieftains of Erin’, one of her unpublished novels: a rather tedious tale of Ireland in the age of the E
lizabethan invaders. Her Cini son-in-law remembered her as Irish, with her amor della patria and her talk of oppressi compatriotti.

  Her practical benevolence recalls George Eliot’s tribute to the unrecorded work of nineteenth-century women. Half the good in the world, George Eliot says, comes from those who lie in unvisited graves. This pupil and disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft lies in the English graveyard at Livorno, which she’d visited in 1803 with Lord Mount Cashell. The graveyard, off the Via Verdi, has been closed for a century and a half: the key turns in the rusty lock and the old iron gates open into an expatriate past. The ground is covered by the leaves of many winters, and the steady blue sky looks down through the pines on those who died far from home. At the back, two pediments have fallen from a large table-tombstone, with weeds growing between exposed stones. Much of the marble is stripped, but the inscription is still intact:

  HERE LIE THE REMAINS

  OF MARGARET JANE

  COUNTESS OF MOUNT CASHELL

  BORN A.D. 1773

  DIED 29 JANUARY 1835

  By her side is Tighe’s matching tombstone, their estrangement engraved in the fact that she was not buried as ‘Mrs Tighe’ but in her former identity as the wife of Mount Cashell. Though she lived the second half of her life in obscurity–her name absent from the many editions and translations of her Advice–her influence on childcare was widely disseminated. One of her readers was an Italian expatriate in London, Gabriele Rossetti, who bought a copy to guide him with his children, Dante, William, Michael and Christina.