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

by Charlotte Gordon

  In the 1770s, this market town boasted about five thousand inhabitants, positively metropolitan after the small farming communities Mary had lived in since she was four. Everything seemed strange and sophisticated. It was a shock for her to discover, years later, how much less there was to the town than she had imagined. But at age eleven she felt she had landed in some deliciously foreign place, as exotic as Rome or Paris. There were stores for everything: hats, shoes, linens, saddles, woven goods, wallpaper, gold jewelry, cheese, gloves, glassware, umbrellas. She was used to eating country fare—rough brown bread, eggs, apples, and occasionally beef, lamb, or pork, when Edward slaughtered a pig or bought meat from a neighbor. In Beverley, the shops sold foods that Mary had never tasted—cinnamon, oranges, saffron, cumin, chocolate, and spun sugar cakes. The London newspapers arrived by coach. There was a circulating library and fancy dress balls. Plays were put on in the local theater.

  Convinced that he would soon earn back the wealth he had lost, Edward managed to persuade a naïve landlord to rent him a two-story brick house with handsome doors, sash windows, and classical moldings located in one of the most expensive parts of town, Wednesday Market. Perhaps if the landlord had realized that Edward’s moneymaking schemes consisted largely of betting on horses at the nearby racetrack, he might have hesitated, but Edward’s bluster convinced him, and the Wollstonecrafts were soon installed in elegant lodgings. On market day, Mary could smell oysters frying, taste a cup of cider, admire the bookshops, and compare the prices of ribbons. Farmers, flower girls, pie men, milkmaids, and traders peddled their wares. Cows lowed. Horses got loose. Drovers penned lambs and geese. Merchants hammered up booths. Gypsies swallowed fire, silhouettists sketched profiles, silk awnings fluttered like medieval banners. Over everything, chilling and inspiring, rose the limestone towers of the ancient Beverley Minster, not quite a cathedral. Inside, when the sun shone through the clerestory windows, she could admire the carvings, which had been paid for by the donations of a musicians’ guild: miniature men and women playing perfectly carved little instruments, a cat fiddling for some admiring mice, a puffing dragon, and a blacksmith putting horseshoes on a goose, or trying to.

  At home, Elizabeth retired to the sick chamber, brooding over her disappointments, cataloging Edward’s sins, and complaining about her household burdens. Ned had left home for a law apprenticeship in London. But Henry, Eliza, Everina, James, and baby Charles depended on Mary to darn their socks, butter their toast, hug them, and defend them against Edward. In their eyes, she seemed like a grown-up, even though, at eleven, she was only a few years older.

  To Mary, the most exciting part of the move was the opportunity to go to school. They had all learned to read at home, but she was hungry for more education. On the first morning of school, Henry and James trotted off to the Beverley Grammar School to learn history, mathematics, and Latin. But when Mary, Eliza, and Everina arrived at the local girls’ school, they found that their curriculum would be limited to needlework and simple addition.

  Mary fumed. The list of what they were not learning went on forever: Latin, Greek, French, German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, logic, mathematics. Then there were her schoolmates. With indignation she later recalled how the girls played “jokes and hoyden tricks” on her. Local dialect sailed right over her head: if it was raining out, the Yorkshire children would say it was “siling down”; a “buffit” was a small stool; a drunk person was “Cat Hawed.” They called their lunches “lowances.” To their Beverley classmates, the Wollstonecrafts—gawky, earnest Mary and her odd little sisters—were easy targets. The two younger girls barely spoke, and the older one spoke too much. Clearly, this Mary Wollstonecraft did not care about being a proper young lady. Didn’t she know that too much education could hurt your chances to make a good marriage? Her schoolmates’ taunts echoed the opinions of the time: “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret,” said one father, instructing his daughters not to frighten away their suitors. The noted intellectual Lady Mary Wortley Montagu advised her talented granddaughter to hide her mathematical prowess “with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness.”

  Fortunately, there was one girl who did not laugh at the Wollstonecrafts and even seemed to respect Mary’s eccentricity. Jane Arden was a year older than Mary. She was serious and well read, and Mary set her sights on winning Jane’s affection. At Beverley Minster, Mary plumped herself down in the pew next to Jane. She went to the Ardens’ house for meals, tagged behind Jane in the afternoons after school, and before long had extracted confessions of friendship from her beloved. One can almost feel sorry for Jane. How could she have realized what this relationship would entail? There were spats, arguments, jealous negotiations, apologies, love declarations, and long tear-streaked missives. Mary did not want to share Jane with other girls. Jane should love her most. If Jane sat next to someone else in church, Mary’s heart cracked. “If I did not love you I should not write so,” she exclaimed:

  I have formed romantic notions of friendship.…I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none.—I own your behaviour is more according to the opinion of the world, but I would break such narrow bounds.—I will give you reasons for what I say;—since Miss C—— has been here you have behaved in the coolest manner.—I once hoped our friendship was built on a permanent foundation:—.

  In letter after letter, Mary laid out her requirements: Jane must single her out. Jane must not favor other girls, even out-of-town guests. “Love and jealousy are twins,” Mary declared when the two girls debated the rules of their friendship. She fought with Jane’s friend Miss R. and would not say she was sorry. When Jane did not try to soothe her ruffled feelings, she refused to go to the theater with the other girls, choosing to stay home and sulk. She resolved to end things with Jane but could not stand the thought of losing her friend, confessing, “I spent part of the night in tears.…I cannot bear a slight from those I love.”

  Mary also adored Jane’s father. A self-appointed ambassador of the Enlightenment, John Arden, a Catholic apostate, spread the gospel of science, earning a substantial living by lecturing on electricity, gravitation, magnetism, and optics. It had become fashionable to have at least a smattering of knowledge about science and philosophy. But in this era, when there were no strict rules about what constituted scientific or philosophical investigations, scientists and showmen were interchangeable. Eager crowds, untroubled by the mix of the alchemical and chemical, the astrological and astronomical, the philosophic and the superstitious, paid high prices to see demonstrations and experiments.

  Jane’s father was a more rigorous scientist than the charlatans who dominated the lecture circuit, and he took an interest in his daughter’s earnest friend, including her in the lessons he gave his children, teaching her to peer into microscopes and point a telescope up into the sky. Mary did not discover any planets, but she did find her own capacious curiosity. Astronomy was teaching her to view the quest for knowledge differently. If three hundred years earlier everyone thought the sun revolved around the earth, what other misconceptions might there be? What might be discovered today?

  Already, Mary’s restlessness was taking a different form from that of her father and grandfather. Like them, she was ambitious and discontented, but she understood something they did not: that education was the key to her future. Schooling would be her way out of the degradation and violence that characterized her family. And so, when the Ardens suggested she read thick, difficult volumes such as Dryden’s restoration era stage play The Conquest of Granada and Goldsmith’s satirical account of English manners Letters from a Citizen of the World (1760–61), she leapt at the opportunity. With each book she read, she could create more distance between herself and her parents.

  For all of the trials Mary put her through, Jane remained loyal to her prickly friend. On clear afternoons, the girls strolled on the Westwood, common land on which cows grazed at the edge of
the town. They went to dances and concerts at the assembly rooms and whispered about the flirtations they saw. “The oddest mortal that ever existed has become one of Miss C——’s suitors,” Jane wrote Mary, who delighted in this kind of gossipy information and wrote Jane back to say, “Her over-giddiness, and his over-graveness must be superlatively ridiculous;—in short you must allow me to laugh.” Mary was making up for lost time. After years of living in the country, with only her family for company, she threw herself enthusiastically into the social whirl. With Jane at her side, she attended many parties, delighting in the novelty of meeting so many new people. She was also discovering her own social abilities. People were drawn to her warmth, and she was adept at the quick banter and witty exchanges that were the currency of such gatherings.

  In 1774, Mary’s father announced he had found a fresh business opportunity in Hoxton, a depressing village north of London, notorious for its three lunatic asylums. Fifteen-year-old Mary would have to leave Jane behind—a rude shock, as after so many moves she had been lulled into thinking that Beverley would be her home forever. However, her father had lost so much money at the track he could no longer even pretend to afford Wednesday Market. To Mary’s shame, the neighbors had predicted her family’s ruin. She complained to Jane that they “did not scruple to prognosticate the ruin of the whole family, and the way he [her father] went on, justified them.”

  The Wollstonecrafts moved in the winter, when Hoxton was at its least appealing. London’s lunatics were housed in the crumbling remains of the village’s Tudor estates, and there were also several workhouses for the poor. On bleak afternoons, Mary walked the rutted streets, appalled at what she saw. Beggars were bad enough, but to watch the insane, she said, was to contemplate “the most terrific of ruins—that of a human soul.” Decay, insanity, imprisonment: Mary would set her last book, Maria, in an asylum. “Melancholy and imbecility marked the features of the poor wretches who strayed along the walks,” she said later, remembering her years there.

  Not all of Mary’s neighbors were lunatics, however. Dissenters from the Church of England, barred from attending other universities, flocked here, founding their own college, Hoxton Academy, now part of New College London. Hoxton students were taught the radical principle that human beings were naturally good and had the right to be free. This was the opposite teaching from that of the Church of England, which held that human beings were sinners and needed strict rules and authoritarian governments to contain their evil impulses. One Hoxton student drank in these ideas so eagerly that when he left the Academy, he would devote the rest of his life to the fight for freedom. His name was William Godwin, and twenty years later, he would marry Mary Wollstonecraft.

  But while her future husband was immersed in the ideas that would shape his life’s work, Mary was consumed by domestic duties. Indeed, few circumstances better illustrate the divide between middle-class men and women in the eighteenth century than the Hoxton days of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. They lived only a few hundred yards apart, but their lives could not have been more different: she, tending to her siblings and preoccupied with the running of the household; he, bent over his books, studying political philosophy and conjugating Latin verbs. Both wanted to march into the ring, fists raised against injustice, but while Godwin would have many opportunities as a well-educated young man, Mary was supposed to serve her family. Women could not participate in the era’s debates even as minor contributors, let alone as serious combatants.

  Even the reform-minded men at Hoxton Academy agreed with the principle that women belonged in the home. They promoted revolution, corresponded with angry colonials in America and radicals in France, fought against slavery and religious intolerance, debunked tyranny, argued against despotism, and prayed for the dispersal of irrational beliefs, but not once did they advocate for women’s independence or promote the idea that women should be allowed to argue for their beliefs in public. For all that they had been trained to protest injustice, they failed to notice the chains that bound their mothers, daughters, and wives.

  While Hoxton was Godwin’s launching pad, it could never be Mary’s. Even as his horizons were expanding, hers were shrinking. Once again, her only companions were her sisters and brothers, although the boys would leave soon enough. The world was theirs to conquer.

  CHAPTER 3

  MARY GODWIN: CHILDHOOD AND A NEW FAMILY

  [ 1801–1812 ]

  Mary Godwin’s first tragedy was the death of her mother, the second was the marriage of her father to a plump thirty-five-year-old named Mary-Jane Clairmont who had moved next door in 1801. The mother of two small children, Mary-Jane was eager to find a husband. To preserve her respectability, she claimed to be a widow, but in reality she had never been married, and her children each had a different father. She had run away from England as a teenager to live with her French cousins and had spent most of her adult life abroad. Now that she was home again, she wanted the security of marriage and was elated to find an eligible widower conveniently nearby. Undeterred by trivialities such as Godwin’s unappealing appearance—he was short, with a long sloping nose—she planned her approach carefully, reading as much of his great work, Political Justice, as she could stand and learning his habits. This last step was not hard. Godwin, averse to spontaneity in all its various forms, adhered to routine with the devotion of a medieval monk.

  Their first meeting occurred on a May evening, shortly after she moved in. As was his custom, Godwin emerged onto the second-floor balcony to enjoy the spring air. Mary-Jane bustled into her garden and called up to her neighbor: “Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?” Godwin, who was famously susceptible to flattery, smiled gracefully and acknowledged that yes, he was indeed William Godwin. Mary-Jane clasped her hands and breathed, “You great Being, how I adore you!”

  Engraving of William Godwin, based on the painting by James Northcote (1802). Godwin sat for this portrait in July 1801, two months after he met Mary-Jane and right before Mary turned four. He felt it captured his essence better than any other portrait and had it hung in his home, where it remained until his death. (illustration ill.5)

  For Godwin, this was a pleasant change from the hostility he had faced ever since he had fallen into disrepute for his radical political views in 1798. Once renowned as the intellectual leader of the reform movement with the publication of Political Justice in 1791, Godwin argued that all government should be abolished, since by its very nature, government infringed on mankind’s natural rights. This bold attack on civil authority inspired reformers to push for dramatic political change. Liberals praised Godwin’s daring philosophy. However, by the end of the decade, the political winds had shifted. To most English people, the chaos and bloodshed of the French Revolution made security, safety, and order seem far more important than liberty. Godwin, along with other radicals, now seemed like troublemakers, and, even worse, “French”—one of the worst insults one could levy at a politician or intellectual. In 1798, Godwin had made matters worse by publishing a memoir of Wollstonecraft after her death, exposing her sexual escapades to the public. Roundly condemned, Godwin lost many of his fans. Now only old radicals and young Romantics like Coleridge came to visit him.

  To his credit, Godwin refused to renounce his views, holding to them in defiance of the times. But he was lonely. Three long years had passed since Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, and his search for a new wife was not going well. A stickler for the truth, he insisted on announcing not only to his friends but to the women he was courting that no one could match Mary Wollstonecraft’s perfections. As a result, he had faced many rejections, and Mary-Jane’s warmth and persistence were a welcome new development. When he retired inside that first evening, he noted their meeting in his diary, writing “Meet Mrs. Clairmont,” an expansive phrase for a man who summed up enormous life events with lines drawn horizontally across the page (Mary Wollstonecraft’s death), a four-letter abbreviation (“Panc”) for their marriage at old St. Pancras
church, and a series of dots and dashes, as well as French phrases, to denote sexual intimacy.

  During the next few weeks, whenever Godwin stepped outside, Mary-Jane would appear, ready for a walk or a chat on the doorstep. She introduced her own children, Charles, age five, and Jane, age three, to Mary and Fanny. Before long, the families were seeing each other almost every evening. By the beginning of July, they went on outings together: Puss in Boots at Astley’s Theater in Lambeth and picnics in the countryside. In the second week of July, she and Godwin consummated their relationship, an occasion commemorated by Godwin with an X in his diary. It was his first sexual encounter since Wollstonecraft had died.

  Despite the growing intensity of this new relationship, Godwin kept Mary-Jane a secret. He knew that any potential replacement for Wollstonecraft would face hostility from his friends. And Mary-Jane was no paragon. Although she was clever and well read and had a wry sense of humor, she had an ugly temper and made scenes in public whenever she felt slighted, which was often. “Manage and economize your temper,” Godwin admonished her. Do not let yourself be “soured and spoiled.” But Mary-Jane felt that people deserved what she dished out and never attempted to restrain herself.