The study of history as a college subject stems from the dissenting academies. Encouraged by Kippis, Godwin formed an enduring interest in those periods when England had undergone a liberalizing change – the Reformation, the Commonwealth, and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 to which all Dissenters looked back with nostalgia and pride. But Kippis also broadened his pupil’s knowledge of philosophy and the classics. Excelling in Greek and Latin, Godwin acquired a good working knowledge of Italian, French, German and Hebrew. He did not meet Mary Wollstonecraft, although her family were living in Hoxton at that time, but the academy brought him together with James Marshall, a kind, gentle and, although he was almost always poor, invariably generous man who became his lifelong friend.
Mrs Godwin had hoped that her son would follow his father into the church as an independent minister. This, after leaving Hoxton, was the direction he took. But Godwin had become too widely read and too full of questions to please the congregations he briefly led in Suffolk and then Buckinghamshire from 1782 to 1783 before moving to London. One dissatisfied attendant remembered that the young man had preferred ‘coursing’ to giving sermons;9 others at Stowmarket objected to his readiness to offer communion before being ordained. A more certain cause for trouble was the fact that Godwin had come to believe that biblical characters, and Jesus himself, were non-divine historical figures. Not yet an atheist, he was no longer a conventional believer, and too honest to pretend. By the summer of 1783, he had, perhaps under the influence of Andrew Kippis, decided that a teaching career was more congenial than the pulpit.
Godwin’s project for a school never advanced beyond renting a potential home for it at Epsom and placing a single advertisement in an anonymously published pamphlet. The lack of response was not entirely surprising; enthusiasm for his system caused Godwin to over-look all practical details. There was no mention of length of terms, fees, meals or even of a proposed teacher and his qualifications. What the prospectus does reveal is that Godwin already knew the kind of father he wanted to be. Imagination was to be encouraged and developed. Teaching should be a gentle discipline directed to building sympathy between master and pupils. The chief and laudable object would be to form not a prodigy but ‘a reasonable human being’.10 It seems, with such humane ideals, a shame that the project never got beyond its initial stage.
The collapse of the school plan led Godwin to decide to make his living by writing. High-minded dreams were shelved. Lodging wherever he and his friend James Marshall could find cheap rooms in London, Godwin wrote eleven books and enough reviews to fill another dozen over the next eight years. There was nothing to which he would not turn his hand – bad romantic novels for the circulating libraries, plays, biographies and even, on commission, a handsome three-volume history of the peerage.
Despite Godwin’s later reputation as a ruthless and persistent sponge, a perpetual drain on the pockets of his friends, family letters show him to have been both generous and patient. His own needs were simple; all earnings were channelled into helping friends and his less able siblings. Ann Godwin’s letters, written from the Norfolk small-holding she shared with Hull, the eldest of her sons, show how much she depended on William to take care of the family and to deliver news of her other children.
They had not done well for themselves. Two brothers went to sea, where one got into such difficulties that Godwin had to write a letter on his behalf to the ship’s captain, pleading for clemency and invoking the pitiful situation of a widowed mother. Another brother, John, was frequently reported to be on the point of starvation as a clerk in the Temple, although Godwin seems to have done all he could to help. Nathaniel (‘Nattie’) made an unsuccessful attempt to avoid being press-ganged into the navy and was obliged on his return to England to take up work as a journeyman. Joseph, the brother of whom Godwin saw the most, made an unhappy marriage before finding what Godwin reassured their mother was ‘a comfortable place’ as a servant.
Only Hannah, who wrote poetry and had established herself as a London dressmaker with a congenial circle of – in her mothers view – distressingly godless friends, was on an equal social footing with her brother, even to the degree of trying – unsuccessfully – to find him a wife. Godwin showed his respect, much to the annoyance of their mother, by giving Hannah the genteel title of ‘Miss Godwin’ and making no brotherly comments on her Sunday outings with James Marshall. (Sunday, for a respectable girl, was not a day to go dallying with unmarried gentlemen.) ‘Why can’t you call your sister Hannah, as well as you call me … Hon’d Mother,’ old Ann Godwin demanded in a letter written in 1788, when her son was thirty-two; ‘it would be full as agreeable.’ But she softened later in the letter, thanking him for giving five shillings to one of his luckless brothers at a recent meeting.11 Sometimes she repaid his generosity with a comforting gift of a basket of eggs or a goose, sent up to town with the Norfolk carrier.
The real worth of Godwin’s kindness appears still more clearly in his relationship with Thomas Cooper, a cousin who had been left penniless after the death of his father in India. Godwin, in 1788, made up his mind that young Thomas must be properly educated, whatever the cost to himself in time and effort. (He had just been forced to find a cheaper lodging to save money.) Master Cooper was not at the time particularly grateful for having all of Shakespeare’s plays read and explained to him. A furious memorandum has survived in which he wrote out all the insults he imagined Godwin offering behind his back.12 These included the words ‘brute’ and ‘viper’ and, given that the novelist Amelia Alderson once scolded Godwin for calling her a bitch,13 the terms are not beyond belief. It is hard to imagine what Cooper’s feelings were on receiving back a calm explanation that his feelings were irrelevant to their relationship. If the young man became ‘virtuous and respectable’, his mentor would have achieved his purpose. ‘I am contented you should hate me. I desire no gratitude, and no return of favours, I only wish to do you good.’14
Godwin kept his word, supporting Cooper both in his years as a pupil and in his early, unsuccessful attempts to become an actor. He could not escape gratitude. When Cooper eventually became a celebrated thespian, known for his mesmerizing performances in The Iron Chest (the dramatized and hugely popular version of Caleb Williams), he remembered his severe guardian with love, as ‘one of the most pure and benevolent of men’, somebody who had been ‘much more than a common father … he has cherished and instructed me.’15
*
On Sunday, 13 November 1791, Godwin went to the crowded little room near St Paul’s where the publisher Joseph Johnson held fortnightly dinners. He had come to meet a fellow guest, Thomas Paine. Hard at work on his own masterpiece, Political Justice, Godwin was eager to exchange views with the man whose book he had so profoundly admired. But the conversation around Johnson’s table that day was dominated by a contentious auburn-haired woman, no longer young (she was thirty-one), whom the kindly publisher had taken under his wing after her brief career as a governess in Ireland in 1786–7.
Godwin had glanced at and thrown aside Mary Wollstonecraft’s hastily written A Vindication of the Rights of Men. He may have been aware that she was in the throes of preparing a far more important book, one on which it is possible that Paine was advising her. He probably knew nothing at all about the hopeless attachment she had formed to Henry Fuseli, the dapper, irascible and fetishistic Swiss artist, small, white-haired, cat-eyed, who became Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1801 and who had already produced one of the most erotic and influential paintings of the Romantic age, The Nightmare. The scorn which Mary expressed for the convention of marriage at this time may have been partly fuelled by the fact that the middle-aged Fuseli had recently married a seductive and strong-willed young woman blessed, like Mary, with a sumptuous mane of auburn hair. (Fuseli’s paintings show a consistent and erotic fascination with women’s hair.) He was, however, ready to allow Mary to play the role of muse to his genius. She had, in September, moved home to live nearer the Fuselis
; observant friends noticed that she was, for the first time in her life, taking care with her appearance.
All Godwin noticed that Sunday was that Miss Wollstonecraft seemed opinionated, censorious and dully conventional in her religious views: Godwin himself was becoming increasingly attracted to atheism under the influence of his friend, Thomas Holcroft. He was in no state to feel romantic; work on his book was getting him down. He had been feverish the day before Johnson’s dinner and he was ‘costive’ on the following one. In the memoir he later wrote of Mary’s life, he uncomfortably recalled that she and he had been so vociferous in their disagreements at Johnson’s dinner that poor Paine, never much of a talker, had been reduced to occasional interjections. Mary left no record of her own feelings, but the fact that she made no attempt to follow up the meeting is significant. Godwin’s home in north London was only half an hour’s walk from her own, and Mary was quite bold enough to call on a man who interested her. She made no call.
The first indication of interest comes in March 1792 when Godwin made a note in his diary: ‘Story of Mrs Wolstonecraft.’ No name appears by this entry to indicate the source, but the word ‘story’ suggests that it may have been an account of her life. Any one of Mary’s friends might have given him a brief outline of her past; of a precarious, slipshod upbringing in Yorkshire with little schooling and, unlike himself, no religious indoctrination; of the family’s return to Hoxton when she was fifteen and the acquiring of some basic religious tenets from a friendly clergyman; the beginning of an intensely affectionate relationship with a graceful older girl, Fanny Blood; of working as a lady companion in Bath before helping one younger sister, Eliza, escape from an unhappy marriage and coaxing another, Everina, to join them in starting a school at Newington Green, north of London. Here, among a network of Dissenter households, including that of Thomas Rogers (the father of Samuel, who would be Byron’s and Mary Shelley’s friend in later years), Mary Wollstonecraft had more success in finding friends than managing a school. Eliza and Everina progressed from teaching posts in Putney to working as governesses. Mary, having had the miserable experience of seeing her darling Fanny Blood, now a married lady, die in childbirth at Lisbon, went in 1786 as a governess-companion to the grand family of Lord Kingsborough of Mitchelstown in Ireland. She found a lasting admirer and apostle there in one of her pupils, young Margaret King, but the aristocratic mother infuriated her, a feeling which was not concealed and which helped lose her the post. In 1787, she returned to London and found a kind substitute for her feckless father in Joseph Johnson, who published her novel and children’s stories the following year. Johnson failed, however, to prevent her impetuous attempt at a ménage à trois with Fuseli and his young wife.
Mary’s life had, until this point, been hectic and muddled; response to the two Vindications promised a change for the better. By 1792, she was respected, admired and, by many of her circle, greatly loved. Godwin must have known and perhaps read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the book which, although its sales were not large, earned her a place among the most influential writers of the time on education and the role of women. His laconic journal entry, ‘Story of Mrs Wolstonecraft’, tells us only that he was interested enough to listen to some account. He still had time for nothing but the writing of his own book. At the end of 1792, determined to break an association which was bringing her nothing but unhappiness and which was distressing Fuseli’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft left England for France.
When Godwin next met Mary in London four years later she was in the last throes of another deeply humiliating and unhappy love-affair. While living in Paris, she had been introduced to an intelligent, easygoing American entrepreneur called Gilbert Imlay. They became lovers. When some four hundred English citizens living in Paris were peremptorily imprisoned in October 1793, Mary allowed Imlay to offer her the protection of his American citizenship by registering her as his wife. Legally, she remained a spinster; her letters show that she sincerely believed an emotional commitment of a lasting kind had been made by them both.
Strong, loving women have had their hearts broken by worthless men since the beginning of time; few have fought to keep them with such self-lacerating tenacity as Mary. She gave birth to a daughter, Frances, in May 1794; three months later, Imlay returned to England on what Mary assumed would be a brief trip to supervise various business matters.‡ Imlay did not come back. He did, eventually, write urging her to follow him. When Mary, together with her maid and baby, returned to England in the early spring of 1795, her lover had changed his mind. Instead of the family home she had been fondly imagining, furnished lodgings in Charlotte Street were recommended to which Imlay made occasional brief visits during the two months she lived there. For a woman who was still deeply in love it was an unbearable situation, made still more painful by the discovery that Imlay had replaced her with a young actress.
‘Perhaps no human creature ever suffered greater misery, than dyed the whole year 1795, in the life of this incomparable woman …’ Godwin later wrote in a state of forgivable indignation. ‘Why did she thus obstinately cling to an ill-starred unhappy passion? Because it is the very essence of affection, to seek to perpetuate itself.’16
She tried to kill herself Imlay, torn between guilt and impatience, decided to make use of her while offering her a change of scenery and, perhaps, mood. One of his most risky ventures had turned out badly. A ship, bought and secretly dispatched to Gothenburg with the equivalent of half a million pounds stowed in silver bars and plate, had disappeared en route. Imlay’s only hope of compensation lay with the Scandinavian courts. Someone would have to undertake the journey; the apparent helplessness of a good-looking woman, travelling alone, might work to his advantage.
Mary, who took her baby daughter with her, returned from her dangerous four-month mission to Sweden and Norway at the end of September. It is not clear whether the registering of the missing boat at Gothenburg two weeks later, with no mention of its cargo, was the result of her efforts. If so, she had even more cause to feel desperate when she learnt, not from her lover but his servants, that Imlay had found yet another mistress and was planning to live with her. Leaving word of where she was going, Mary hired a boat to row her up the Thames to Putney where, after weighting her pockets with stones, she jumped off the wooden bridge. When Imlay’s carriage arrived, her unconscious body had already been dragged from the water.
This second attempt at suicide frightened Imlay into agreeing that he would, as she wished, try to find a house where they could all, Mary, the baby and his mistress, live together. The house had not yet been chosen when he changed his mind and went on a three-month visit to Paris with his girlfriend. It was during this grim period that Mary, having regained the lyrical, tortured letters she had written to Imlay from Scandinavia, compiled from them the book which Joseph Johnson published as A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. She even, to her everlasting credit, began work on a play in which she tried to turn the tragic circumstances of her love-affair to comic use.17
Mary was still hoping for a reunion with Imlay in January 1796, when she and William Godwin met again at the home of their mutual friend, Mary Hays. Godwin had not been eager for the meeting. In his letter of acceptance to Miss Hays, he observed that he knew how often Mrs Wollstonecraft had given herself the pleasure of deprecating him in public, although he gave away no hint of what her comments had been. Mary, indeed, had a sharp tongue, and Godwin’s tendency to dominate conversations and his dislike of being contradicted might have stuck in her mind from their first unfortunate meeting in 1791. The most he was now willing to promise Miss Hays was that he would treat this ‘enemy’ as fairly as he would a friend.18
Godwin turned forty in 1796. The red crayon drawing which Lawrence made of him and his friend Holcroft two years earlier shows a slight, elegant figure with unpowdered hair above a high forehead. The eyes are open, round and inquiring, the nose thin and long. He is not unattractive, but it comes as a surprise to lear
n that some of the cleverest and best-looking women of the time doted on him. Mary Hays, who was not among the second category, had become so demanding and verbose a correspondent that Godwin’s only resource was to refuse to write back. Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Mary Hays’s novel, reflects this unhappy situation as calm, rational Mr Francis/Godwin advises Emma/Hays to examine the causes for her violent feelings. The playwright Elizabeth Inchbald, fondly remembered by Godwin as ‘a piquante mixture between a lady and a milkmaid’, let him edit her best-known novel, A Simple Story (1791). Godwin admired it and the witty author enough to read the book, and note the fact, five times. Amelia Alderson, a spirited young novelist, dramatist and actress from Norwich Quaker circles, had attended the Treason Trials with Godwin and her father and had a close enough relationship with him for Godwin to carry her slipper in his pocket. Dearest of all to Godwin, it seems, was Maria Reveley, the musical and, by all accounts, enchanting wife of an architect. Educated in Constantinople, where she learnt to ride sidesaddle, and in Rome, where she was taught painting by Angelica Kauffmann, Mrs Reveley had all the virtues of her circle except literary ability and Godwin was deeply attached to her. This relationship had, however, become less intense in recent months, possibly owing to the intervention of Maria’s husband.19
Godwin was not, then, looking for romance when he went to Mary Hays’s house on a cold afternoon early in 1796. He was not even looking forward to meeting the woman Miss Hays thought such a wonder. He returned home in a different, and troubled, state. Mary Hays thought Mrs Imlay had been unusually vivacious; Godwin reached a different conclusion. To him, it seemed painfully clear that the woman he had just met was in a state of considerable anguish. She bore only a faint resemblance to the obstreperous martinet of 1791. Perhaps Miss Hays had told him something of Imlay’s behaviour; certainly, Godwin went to the trouble of obtaining Mary’s latest work. It had a profound effect on him. ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author,’ he wrote later of A Short Residence, ‘this appears to me to be the book.’20
Mary Shelley Page 3
