Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  In the late afternoons, distinguished men and women flocked to pay him tribute. Many of Godwin’s visitors were eager to meet Wollstonecraft’s children, particularly Mary, who, as the daughter of two such intellectual heavyweights, seemed destined for fame. She had grown used to hearing a hush when she entered the room, an intake of breath, as though she were a great dignitary; they pointed to her fine reddish hair, her large light eyes—how like her mother, they said—how wonderful the first Mary had been, how wise and brave, how loving; a genius and a beautiful woman, too. Surely, her daughter would follow in her footsteps.

  Brown-haired and scarred by a bout with chicken pox, Fanny receded into the background during these events. She knew that she came second to Mary. When Godwin married Wollstonecraft, he had adopted Fanny, who was the daughter of Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s previous lover. Godwin loved Fanny, but he adored his “own” daughter, describing Mary as “quick,” “pretty,” and “considerably superior” to Fanny, who was “slow” and “prone to indolence.” If anyone had pointed this out to him—his obvious favoritism—he would have said he was simply stating the truth; all evidence pointed to little Mary’s superiority, an observation that had the added benefit of demonstrating his own superiority over Imlay. To his credit, Godwin had never judged Wollstonecraft for her affair, but he was not above being jealous of the passion she had felt for Imlay.

  Mary Wollstonecraft, pregnant with Mary Godwin, portrait by John Opie, 1797. (illustration ill.3)

  Godwin’s infatuation notwithstanding, young Mary did strike others as an unusual child. Delicate, with pale, almost unearthly skin, coppery curls, enormous eyes, and a tiny mouth, she had entered the world in such a tragic fashion that sorrow trailed behind her like the train of a wedding dress. When visitors talked to her, they were impressed by what seemed to be her preternatural intelligence. George Taylor, one of Godwin’s fans, called on the widower twice during the first year of Mary’s life. On the first visit, although he enjoyed playing with baby Mary, he did not notice anything out of the ordinary. It was on his second visit that he was startled when it seemed the nine-month-old “knew me instantly and stretched out her arms.” How could she have remembered him?

  One of Mary’s particular devotees was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who first visited the Polygon in the winter of 1799 when he was twenty-seven years old and Mary was two. An admirer of Godwin, but even more so of Wollstonecraft, the young poet was lonely, estranged from his wife and living apart from his own family. When he came to dinner, he stayed long past the girls’ bedtime, keeping the Godwins up late with his stories.

  To the girls, he was like a magical creature from Mother Goose. With a dimpled chin, a pudgy face, long messy hair, bushy eyebrows, and astonishingly red lips, Coleridge was a spellbinding storyteller. Even the pedantic Godwin was content to sit and listen to him.

  Engraving of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by William Say (1840), based on James Northcote’s portrait of the poet as a young man in 1804, around the time that Mary first knew him. (illustration ill.4)

  Coleridge, though, was startled by the stillness of his audience. Godwin had trained his daughters to be perfectly behaved in company—too well behaved, Coleridge thought. Even Mary, who was far more free-spirited than her sister, could be silent for hours in the presence of guests, hardly even fidgeting. Later, Mary would say that though her father loved her, he was a stern taskmaster and rarely affectionate. In one of her fictional portraits of a father and daughter based on her own relationship with Godwin, she wrote:

  [My father] never caressed me; if ever he stroked my head or drew me on his knee, I felt a mingled alarm and delight difficult to describe. Yet, strange to say, my father loved me almost to idolatry; and I knew this and repaid his affection with enthusiastic fondness, notwithstanding his reserve and my awe.

  Godwin’s coldness was harming his daughters, Coleridge thought. Fanny and Mary should be more like his own little boy, three-year-old Hartley, who was rarely quiet and never still. He rode the wind like a bird, Coleridge said, “using the air of the breezes as skipping-ropes.” Initially, Godwin was impressed by the proud father’s description of this young free spirit, but he changed his mind when he actually met Hartley, who, as Coleridge remembered it, “gave the philosopher such a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin [as Hartley called him] in huge pain lectured [Coleridge’s wife] on his boisterousness.”

  However, Godwin had enough respect for the poet to allow his friend to try to enliven his daughters. Although Coleridge was the author of somber poems such as Dejection: An Ode and The Ancient Mariner, he liked jokes of all kinds and had a vast repertoire of tricks. He loved ghost stories and knew quantities of nursery rhymes. “I pun, conundrumize, listen and dance,” he once said to a friend. He made his fingers gallop like horses or “fly like stags pursued by the staghounds”—a trick he immortalized in a letter to Wordsworth in which he tells his fellow poet how to make his hands do “the hop, trot and gallop” of hexameter lines.

  Few could resist Coleridge’s charm, and Fanny and Mary were no exception. The poet was a thrilling departure from anyone they had ever met. When he sat in their front parlor, anything might happen: a witch might tumble down the chimney; a specter might float by. When he spilled wine on the carpet, instead of frowning as he did when the girls made such mistakes, Godwin actually laughed. Although some physical ailment always troubled the poet—his head ached, his throat was sore, his eye was infected, his stomach churned—these ailments did not stop him from devoting himself to the Godwin girls.

  Tapping into his enormous capacity to be fascinated, Coleridge bestowed on the girls—even Mary, who could barely remember her first visit with the great poet—the feeling that they were delightful and their ideas worth listening to. He called them forward, and although Fanny resisted, Mary loved the sensation of coming out from behind a curtain, of being pushed onstage in a house where her father ruled supreme. For her, and all the Godwins, it was a sad day when Coleridge left to rejoin his family in the Lake Country in 1802. But within a few weeks, Mary and Fanny settled back into the comforts of the nursery and their quiet routine, and it was only Godwin who continued to suffer. Restless and lonely, he wanted to remarry, to find a wife to share his life, his bed, and the burden of raising children. Coleridge had made it clear to him that his daughters needed more than he could provide. They needed a mother’s touch.

  CHAPTER 2

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE EARLY YEARS

  [ 1759–1774 ]

  Wollstonecraft’s childhood could not have been more different from her daughter’s. Far from being the favorite, Wollstonecraft was the invisible second child in a family of seven. While Godwin was controlled and predictable, Wollstonecraft’s father was hot-blooded and capricious. An alcoholic who squandered his family’s money, Edward Wollstonecraft brutalized his wife and children. Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, was so browbeaten that she did little to defend her sons and daughters. The only child she had much use for was her firstborn, Ned. When she gave birth to Mary on April 27, 1759, Elizabeth packed her new daughter off to a wet nurse instead of breast-feeding as she had with her son. This meant missing all of Mary’s firsts—tooth, smile, step—but such was the custom of the era, and breast-feeding Ned had been the exception, not the norm. Later in life Mary would criticize this practice, writing, “[A mother’s] parental affection…scarcely deserves the name, when it does not lead her to suckle her children.”

  When one-year-old Mary rejoined her family after she was weaned, it soon became clear that, in one of those ironic twists of genetics and family legacy, Mary, who hated her father’s brutality, was more like him than like her weak-willed mother. She shared Edward’s ferocious temper and his hatred of restrictions. She fought with her big brother when he tried to bully her, resisted her mother’s rules, and began a lifelong insurgency against her father, using the very tools he had passed on to her: rage, stubbornness, and a deeply rooted sense of being entitled to a better
life.

  The first four years of Mary’s life were spent in an undistinguished house on Primrose Street, near modern-day Liverpool Street Station. Primrose Street has long since vanished, but during Mary’s childhood it twisted through the center of the ancient market town of Spitalfields. Huddled to the east of the city walls on the site of an ancient Roman cemetery, this village was polluted by the stench that emanated from the enormous vats of urine used in the nearby tanning factories, and it was one of the most violent, class-riven neighborhoods in eighteenth-century London. Although some Spitalfields residents, including Mary’s grandfather, had amassed substantial fortunes and lived in fine homes on Fournier Street or the newly built Spital Square, the majority of its inhabitants made their living from trade or manufacture: merchants, tanners, salesmen, weavers, wig and mantua makers, porters and street vendors, and those who preyed on them: thieves, beggars, and prostitutes. Crowded, noisy, and filthy, this East End outpost was not the sort of place for a person with genteel aspirations such as Mary’s father.

  Four years is not long enough to make much of an impression, especially at the outset of life, but it was the Spitalfields way of looking at things, the Spitalfields jaundice, passed down by way of her father, that would sensitize young Mary to the base injustices the poor suffered at the hands of the wealthy. The Wollstonecrafts had more money than most Spitalfields residents, but this did not ease their resentment of the upper classes. Like many people lower down on the social ladder, Edward Wollstonecraft was an expert on the rungs above, where he believed he deserved to be, unlike the lucky devils who were already there, lapping up all the cream. This unfair existence, these laws of class and economics, were the source of an abiding Wollstonecraft grudge against the world, an attitude Mary absorbed before she could even speak.

  Edward’s father, Edward Senior, had started out as a silk weaver, working his way up to become the owner of a profitable silk business. He resented the aristocrats who bought his gloves, gowns, and cravats even though they had made him rich, and he was not alone. Spitalfields silk weavers were famous for their hatred of the upper classes. Radicals preached on the street corners, stirring up tempers already unsettled by long hours, tedious labor, not enough to eat, and too much gin: The poor were downtrodden. Cheap foreign silk came straight from the devil. Free trade would ruin the world. If someone were foolish enough to walk down Primrose Street wearing French silk, the weavers would slash it to shreds; they rioted and staged so many protests that protesting became a way of life, a badge of identity. In 1765, when Mary was six years old, the weavers, in an attempt to stop the importation of silk from France, forced the House of Lords to adjourn with their threats of violence. They also attacked the Duke of Bedford’s house and tried to pull down the walls, accusing the duke of accepting bribes to promote trade with the French. The Spitalfields message was clear: Upper classes beware! Aristocrats toe the line! No one was safe from the weavers’ wrath, no matter how highly born.

  Although Edward Senior and his son were by no means radicals, they shared the grievances of the rioting weavers: How was it fair that the gentry resided in grand houses near Westminster while they, the Wollstonecrafts, lived near the tanneries? Furthermore, why did nobles get to drink brandies, flirt with ladies, gamble fortunes away, enjoy elegant parties, race fine horses, and feast on oysters while Wollstonecrafts worked long hours cutting silk gloves and setting up their looms?

  But whereas the weavers wanted to force the government to change trade policies, the Wollstonecraft men simply wanted to get rich. Soured by Spitalfields and endowed with more than his share of grandiosity, Mary’s grandfather spent his final years trying to join the ranks of the enemy, styling himself a gentleman and pushing his son to shake off the grime of the silk trade. Indeed, if the Wollstonecraft men held any potentially revolutionary belief it was this: social classes were mutable; you could change your place in society if you made a lot of money, married the right person, or moved to the right neighborhood, opportunities unheard of a hundred years earlier but that had come into being thanks to the burgeoning industrial revolution.

  Motivated by his belief that he was just as good as anyone else, Mary’s grandfather looked for a new home for his son’s family that would place them squarely in middle-class circles, and in 1763, he found it, “an old mansion, with a court-yard before it” in Epping, on the edge of Epping Forest, about fifteen miles northeast of London, more than a day’s journey from Spitalfields. Here, there would be no more stitching handkerchiefs, no more waiting on customers. Edward Junior could present himself as a gentleman farmer instead of a weaver’s son. His grandchildren would be able to mingle with the better sort.

  Epping was like paradise after the squalor of London. There were woods, ponds, swamps, and fields to play in, and Mary spent as much time outside as she could, daydreaming and exploring. Out of sight of both parents, Mary, who “despised dolls,” climbed the ancient beech trees and stared up at the clouds for hours, finding inspiration and exhilaration in the natural world—a discovery that would stand her in good stead in years to come. Always, she was careful to avoid seven-year-old Ned—the “deputy tyrant of the house,” as Mary called him. Almost everything Ned did was objectionable. He tortured insects and small animals, as well as his younger, weaker siblings; not only four-year-old Mary, but also two-year-old Henry, who had joined them while they were in Spitalfields, and even the new baby, Eliza, who arrived shortly after the move to Epping. This was his birthright, their mother felt, and so she never reprimanded him, giving him free rein to punish anyone who crossed him.

  After a year in Epping, Edward moved the family into the village to be near a pub, the Sun and Whalebone, where he could more readily indulge his drinking habit. Already a volatile man, Edward became frighteningly unpredictable under the influence of alcohol. Sometimes he was loving—extravagantly so, Mary said—but he had a “quick and impetuous temper.” He would hug his wife and kiss his children, then overturn the table or hit the nearest child, perhaps because the cat had knocked something over, or rain had blown in an open window. One awful day, for no apparent reason, he hanged the family dog. The irrational nature of this act made it all the more horrific. For the rest of her life, Mary would hate the sound of a dog crying, as it brought back what she called the “agony” of her childhood. At night, he terrorized Elizabeth, raping her and beating her so painfully she could not stifle her screams. Her terrible wordless outcries swept through the thin walls of their house straight into Mary’s room, where she lay chafing against her mother’s helplessness as well as her own. Finally, when she was a teenager, she rebelled, setting up camp outside her mother’s door, waiting for her father to come home so she could stop him from crossing the threshold. But her efforts to save Elizabeth only made matters worse. Edward pushed her out of the way and Elizabeth accused Mary of inflaming her father’s rage, but Mary did not stop trying. Night after night, she took up her post.

  In 1765, when Mary was six years old, Edward Senior died, leaving his son £10,000. This was Edward Junior’s opportunity to improve the family’s fortunes and provide his daughters with a dowry, but instead of investing in a business he knew something about, or at the very least saving for the future, Edward moved his family to an expensive estate near Barking, a market town eight miles east of London. This new home, far grander than he could afford, suited his inflated sense of what the world owed him. In Barking, he and Elizabeth whiled away their time dining with other wealthy families and making occasional visits to the city, where Elizabeth could shop and Edward could join the gentlemen who tip-tapped down Primrose Street with their white-knobbed canes.

  For a little girl, the Barking countryside was even more welcoming than Epping’s. The meadows were dotted with sheep and cattle. The hills were gentle. The Roding River had many moods, quiet and stormy but never menacing. Mary would wander alone for hours, easing her loneliness by peopling the countryside with invisible friends. To the south lay the Marshes, where she wo
uld “gaze on the moon, and ramble through the gloomy path, observing the various shapes the clouds assumed, and listen to the sea that was not far distant.”

  In 1768, when Mary was nine, Edward’s money finally gave out. To avoid paying the landlord, he fled north with his family to Walkington, a tiny village more than three miles from the closest town, Beverley, in the East Riding. The rents were much lower here than in the south. Few families wanted to live in such a remote area, as the land was unforgiving and the people notoriously insular.

  The Wollstonecraft brood now included three-year-old Everina, as well as a new baby, James, to whom Elizabeth paid little attention. As always, Ned remained her favorite, but Mary, desperate for her mother’s affection, strove to be helpful. She looked after James, Henry, Eliza, and Everina while her mother rested. However, instead of being grateful, Elizabeth devised severe punishments for Mary, as though she were trying to convince herself and her eldest daughter that she had some measure of power. For minor infractions, she forced Mary to sit by the fireside for three or four hours “without daring to utter a word.” In later life, Mary wrote that if she had been disciplined for doing something wrong, she would have accepted it. What she hated was her mother’s injustice; Elizabeth’s punishments were inconsistent and contradictory. She enforced restraint in the most trivial matters and unconditional submission to orders from all her children, except Ned. Mary did not stop hoping for tenderness, though. Sometimes she would try to tell her mother little secrets, hoping for a soft reply, but her mother only pushed her away.

  For the next two and a half years, Edward Wollstonecraft attempted to farm in the North Country, but it was difficult for anyone to eke out a living in this inhospitable part of the world, let alone Edward, who lacked both the will and the expertise. When the crops failed and the sheep sickened, Edward drank to cope with his despair. Trapped in the family’s small cottage, it was difficult for the children to escape from their father’s moods. Mary said, “the whole house was expected to fly, at the word of command.” As the family’s fortunes shrank, Edward’s behavior worsened. Finally, in the summer of 1770—immediately after Elizabeth had her last child, Charles—Edward gave up the Walkington farm and moved the family to nearby Beverley.