§ Conversations on Chemistry was the book which first sparked young Michael Faraday’s interest in the subject which became his vocation.
¶ The street’s name suggests, misleadingly, a connection to the meat market of nearby Smithfield. It had in fact been named after an Alderman Skinner who had encouraged the streets development.
CHAPTER FIVE
TENSIONS
1807–1812
‘I believe she has nothing of what is commonly called vices, and that she has considerable talent …’
William Godwin to William Thomas Baxter, 8 June 1812
THE HOUSE ON THE CORNER OF SKINNER STREET, UNINHABITED FOR six years, seemed as rickety and shabby when Mary arrived shortly before her tenth birthday as it would do seven years later to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, when he caught a brief glimpse there of the girl with whom his friend Shelley was in love. Staring across the deep valley of the Fleet river to Holborn Hill, 41 Skinner Street stood in earshot both of the Saracen’s Head coaching inn, where Nicholas Nickleby came to be interviewed for a teaching post at Dotheboys Hall, and of the deep bell of St Sepulchre’s which used to toll the condemned to Tyburn and which still, by tradition, rang out the curfew every evening at dusk. An uglier sound was the nightly screaming of animals being slaughtered in candlelit abattoirs under Smithfield. It is easy to imagine how horrified an impressionable child like Mary must have been as she learned to connect the sounds of the night to the bloody carcases hanging outside the double row of butchers’ shops in their nearest shopping street, the old Fleet Market. Is this where we should look for the nightmarish image in Frankenstein of Victor torturing ‘the living animal’ as he gathered body parts from which to assemble his creature?
Holborn was crowded with butchers and booksellers, but it was above all the area of prisons. In 1806, Godwin had bailed his old friend, the physicist William Nicholson, out of the Fleet fifteen times; now, poor John Fenwick had taken up residence there while his wife worked all week for the Godwins and did hack-work on Sundays. At Bridewell, little had changed since Hogarth used it as a setting for The Rake’s Progress; at Newgate, women prisoners were packed into spaces as narrow as paupers’ graves. Public hangings, escalating to unprecedented numbers between 1800 and 1820, drew large, excited crowds; twenty-eight people were crushed to death while viewing a double execution at New Drop, just outside the Old Bailey, early in 1807; the coming and going of the crowds was audible to the girls at Skinner Street, poring over their lesson-books in the schoolroom on the second floor. Below, Godwin paced or wrote in his semicircular library, surrounded by one of the finest collections of books in the country* and overlooked by Opie’s glowing portrait of his first wife while her successor kept shop with Mrs Fenwick on the ground floor. Only when the doors and windows were tightly shut was it almost possible to forget the sordid nature of the area in which they had chosen to live.
Jane Clairmont, forever recalling her early life in shining contrast to the hard and bitter struggle for survival which came later, bathed Skinner Street in a euphoric glow, blotting out the turbulence and insecurity of a life governed by Godwin’s increasingly precarious financial juggling as he borrowed beyond his means to support the new business, and by Mrs Godwin’s unpredictable moods and her violent temper. Jane and Charles were slapped or whipped when they crossed her; Mary did not forget how her stepmother had dragged her from under a parlour sofa in 1806 when she and Jane hid there to listen to Coleridge giving a spellbinding recital of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. These moments had faded from Jane’s mind. Commenting in 1871 on a letter in which Shelley had described Skinner Street as a grim, melancholy place, she described it as the happiest of homes, a hive of enjoyable activity. Shelley was presented here as the serpent destroyer of a child’s Eden (the italics are mine).
Skinner Street was dull to him, but to all others it was a lively and cheerful life that had been led there till he entered it. All the family worked hard, learning and studying: we all took the liveliest interest in the great questions of the day – common topics, gossiping, scandal, found no entrance in our circle …1
Aaron Burr’s journal bears out this account. Jefferson’s former vice-president, having narrowly escaped a charge of treason in 1807, spent five years engaged in cloak-and-dagger schemes in Europe – one of his wildest plans was for Napoleon to invade the United States. In 1811, Burr had run out of money and friends; living in a single room at a secret location, he was so poor that he had to sell his watch to buy coals. The Godwins were almost the only people in London who helped him at this grim time. To him, as to Amelia Curran, the lively and sexually emancipated daughter of Godwin’s friend, the Irish barrister, 41 Skinner Street was a haven of kindness and hospitality.†
In 1808, Burr noted only that Mary bore little resemblance to her famous mother; by 1811, she had become one of ‘les goddesses’, the three flirtatious nymphs who brightened his loneliness with invitations to take tea in their schoolroom at the top of the house and teasingly reminded him of his age by calling him ‘Gamp’. On one occasion, when the girls were all in high excitement at going to a ball – the occasion being celebrated was the wedding of Godwin’s protégé Thomas Turner to a girl of part-Creole background, Cornelia de Boinville – Burr used his small reserves to buy them elegant stockings. Too embarrassed to present such a personal gift in front of Mrs Godwin, however, he went home with the hosiery still in his pocket.
On another occasion, Burr, a practised orator, was asked to judge the skills of the goddesses’ eight-year-old brother William as he addressed them from an improvised pulpit in the schoolroom. William’s subject was ‘The Influence of Government on the Character of the People’; Burr was not surprised to learn that clever Mary had written it. Following the lecture and tea, Burr was treated to a display of singing and dancing. In an entry which briskly encapsulates the three girls’ characters, Burr noted that Mary wrote the speech, Fanny made the tea, and Jane spoiled it by an overdose of tea-leaves. The cameo is charming, and yet we can’t help noticing the absence of Godwin from an occasion so lovingly designed to please and impress. William’s speech was, after all, a replication of Godwin’s own precocious kitchen sermons, of which his daughter had evidently heard stories.
Burr’s journal of those dark months in England is full of affectionate records of the time he spent at Skinner Street, and of the Godwins’ kindness;2 they not only fed him and refused to accept repayment of their loans, but secured his passage home. Through Burr’s lonely eyes, we see Fanny, Mary and Jane as a spirited, confident trio, coaxing him to join them upstairs instead of playing whist with his hosts, begging him to escort them to an evening with the Hopwood girls, the artistic daughters of a self-taught engraver living in Somers Town. (Hannah Hopwood was Mary’s closest friend at this period of her life.) Together, they went to the theatre, celebrated the Godwins’ wedding anniversary, and the unexpected success of Eliza Fenwick’s daughter as a Drury Lane actress. On one occasion, when Burr’s spirits were especially low, Godwin took Mary and Jane on a surprise visit to his lonely room. ‘That family really does love me,’ Burr gratefully noted.
Engrossed by his own problems, Burr was nevertheless aware of the Godwins’ precarious situation. Generous though they were, he understood that they were in difficulties. ‘Some finance affair,’ he noted vaguely. Mary’s appearance worried him. She ‘has not the air of strong health’, he wrote on 21 December 1811.
Burr’s concern was not misplaced. Mary Jane, more practical than her husband in many ways, insisted on taking the children and herself out of the city every summer when the nearby cattle-market buzzed with flies, breeding in the bloody gutters and spreading the danger of disease. Her own daughter went to Miss Pettman’s (or Petman’s) boarding-school at Ramsgate in the summer of 1808; the whole brood were packed off to join the Hopwoods in Somers Town in the summer of 1809.‡ These were protective measures, but Mary’s health was sufficiently poor for her to be sent away for much longer periods, for hal
f a year to Ramsgate in 1811 and then, between 1812 and 1814, for the better part of two years to Scotland.
Mary was thirteen when her hand and then the whole of one arm first erupted in an acute attack of eczema. (Scrofula, or tuberculosis, was mentioned, but only in a letter her stepmother wrote much later.)4 Henry Cline, an eminent young surgeon – his father confusingly bore the same name and followed the same profession – whom Godwin consulted on the advice of Anthony Carlisle, recommended sea bathing and the application of several poultices each day. Mary was taken with eight-year-old William to Ramsgate by her stepmother in the summer of 1811 and examined by a local doctor. His report was reassuring, but Mary’s condition was severe; Mrs Godwin wrote home to express her hope that ‘our poor girl will escape the dreadful evil we apprehended’.5
Mary’s condition did not improve after her six-month stay in Ramsgate, where she was an isolated and unhappy boarding-school lodger. It had vanished by the time she returned in 1814 from two long stays in Scotland, where she lived in an affectionate, uncritical household. It is difficult not to construe the illness as psychosomatic, particularly when we know that her father also suffered acutely from eczema in times of stress. Conjectures have to be made in the absence of letters, but it seems clear that the move to Skinner Street marked the beginning of what Mary called ‘my girlish troubles’ and that these manifested themselves in a physical condition. The phrase comes from a letter Mary wrote in her twenties. ‘And I am threatened with a return of my girlish troubles,’ she confided to a friend. ‘If I go back to my father’s house – I know the person I have to deal with; all at first will be velvet – then thorns will come up –’6 The person in question was, of course, her stepmother.
Mary’s resentment had been fierce from the start. Mary Jane had been the instigator behind their move into the city from a semi-rural home which the little girl had loved, not least for its link to the mother she revered. She had pushed Godwin into a business which was beginning, by 1810, to look financially disastrous. Inadmissible but probably contributing to Mary’s feelings of aversion, was the sensuality which Godwin found so attractive in his wife. Mary preferred to see her stepmother as a source of distress. ‘I detest Mrs Godwin. She plagues my father out of his life,’ she told Shelley in 1814.7 This was not a true report. Godwin’s letters show that he often remonstrated with Mary Jane over her lack of self-control, but not that he felt plagued or harassed by her exuberant volatility. He, a middle-aged husband, could usually judge when his wife was acting up; her own children, although not fond, were familiar with their mother’s moods. To Mary, always drawing a silent contrast between this noisy, demonstrative intruder and the lovely speaking looks of her own mother as Opie had painted her, everything about the second Mrs Godwin was odious. The fact that her feelings were neither rational nor well-founded – Mrs Godwin’s letters show her as a hot-tempered but well-meaning stepmother – did not make them easier to bear.
The relationship between Mary and her father became increasingly tense after the move to Skinner Street, and her hostility to Mrs Godwin was probably a major reason for this. Trying to please, Mary was conscious of always falling short of his expectations. ‘His strictness was undeviating …’ she remembered painfully in her unfinished life of Godwin. ‘He was too minute in his censures, too grave and severe.’8 And indeed he was. Leaving home for Ramsgate, Mary was coldly informed, via her stepmother, that she still stood a chance of becoming a wise and even happy woman, ‘in spite of unfavourable appearances’.9 Increasingly, Godwin made harsh comparisons between gentle Fanny, who never caused any trouble with his wife, and stubborn, glowering Mary. She is ‘singularly bold’ and ‘somewhat imperious’, he told Mrs Fordham, the lady who wanted to know whether Mary Wollstonecraft’s educational principles were being applied to his children.10 He was, however, ready to acknowledge that Mary was a diligent student, ‘almost invincible’ in her determination to master every subject she encountered. A shrewder man would have recognized this intense application as an appeal for the approval he hurtfully withheld.
Godwin’s remoteness was caused, in part, by factors of which Mary was only dimly aware. The move to Holborn had opened a new and unhappy period in his life. Old Ann Godwin died in 1808; Mary Jane was wistfully – and comically – invited to step into her place as his new ‘mamma’, a role which added to her authority in the household. The death of the playwright Thomas Holcroft, one of Godwin’s closest friends despite some bitter quarrels, came next, followed, at the end of 1809, by that of the publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson’s heirs called in his loans, including some £800 which he had, at various times, given to Godwin. When the bankruptcy of another of Godwin’s friendly creditors was followed by a demand for the immediate return of an outstanding £500 loan, he had no funds to meet it. The assistance of the radical businessman Francis Place in 1810 clarified the situation and pointed to a way forward, but Godwin remained mired in debt.
The new loan arranged by Place had still not been made when Mary went to Ramsgate. An essay on the importance of marking burial sites, followed by a grim autobiographical fragment on the uselessness of expecting anything more rewarding than a quiet death, suggests how depressed Godwin had become. In such a mood, Mary’s difficult behaviour (of which we have evidence in his reference to its ‘unfavourable appearances’) was simply an additional irritation. When Henry Cline suggested sending her off to spend six months by the sea, Godwin saw a way of easing at least one source of tension in the household. It was Mary Jane, the supposedly cruel stepmother, who agonized over whether they were doing the right thing in abandoning a sickly thirteen-year-old for six months; Godwin showed no such concern. Cline had suggested six months, he reminded his anxious wife, and ‘to this recommendation we both assented. It shall be so, if it can.’11
Defeated, Mary Jane had a few last anxious words with Miss Pettman, the good-natured mistress of the school in Ramsgate where Mary was to remain from late May to December 1811. The child must be taken seabathing as often as possible and inspected by doctors as often as needs be. The poultices on her arm must be applied and changed at regular intervals. If necessary, she was to be allowed to make use of her sling. Godwin was informed by his wife that Mary was now ‘decisively better’; reference to the fact that she had been spotted making ‘involuntary’ movements of the affected arm raises the interesting possibility that Mary Jane suspected Mary of exaggerating her illness.12§ Having settled her stepdaughter at the school, she went back to London and to a ferocious confrontation with her husband. The cause of the quarrel is not known, but it was sufficiently violent for Mary Jane to spend the rest of the summer staying with friends in Baker Street.
*
Mary’s stepbrother, Charles, making a ten-day visit to Ramsgate in late May at the end of his summer term at Charterhouse, was delighted by the chance to stroll along the cliffs and through fields of waving barley after sitting in a stuffy schoolroom and before being sent out to work (Godwin apprenticed him to a Mr Tate in the publishing business as soon as he returned to London). Mary, left in the care of Miss Pettman when her stepmother took young William back to London in June, felt exiled and desolate. She made no friends; the sense that she was being punished was increased by her father’s conspicuous detachment: she received just one letter a month, as noted in his journal.
Without records, we have no notion whether she went to the weekly tea-parties at the Ramsgate Assembly Room or whether it troubled her to know that she was at the town’s least smart school. ‘All the fashionable embellishments of the fair’ were taught to pupils of Mrs Saffery’s and Mrs Grant’s select seminaries, as described in contemporary town guides; Mrs Pettman’s poky establishment on the winding high street was not deemed worthy of mention. Among her many seaside trips in later life, Mary never returned to Ramsgate. To her, the pretty little town – it had been embellished and improved in the popular Nash style by a female architect, Mary Gosling – was associated with feelings of rejection and lonelines
s. Her health, despite Mrs Godwin’s cheerful predictions, did not improve there; Burr’s concerned note on Mary’s fragile appearance was made shortly after her return to London at the end of 1811 in a winter so cold that the Thames had frozen over.
Even Godwin may have recognized that six months was a long term of banishment for a girl who had just turned fourteen. Charles Clairmont, looked on by Godwin as heir to the bookselling business, had been sent off to learn the trade at Constable’s in Edinburgh during Mary’s absence, but a treat was arranged for the rest of the family to celebrate her return, an outing to the theatre to see The Winter’s Tale.
More serious educational treats followed. Godwin had been advertising his friend Coleridge’s new course of lectures on Shakespeare at the speaker’s request. In January, Mary and her best friend Hannah Hopwood were taken to the last four of the series, delivered at the Corporation Hall in Fetter Lane. Godwin was disappointed by Coleridge’s rambling delivery; if the attention of Mary and Hannah strayed, the cause was forgivable. Lord Byron, already notorious for his excoriating poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), was present in the audience.¶ The young peer’s mass of curly hair, strikingly pale face and noticeable limp secured the attention which he was so fond of pretending he disliked. Childe Harold launched him into the grandest literary drawing-rooms of London a few weeks later.
Scott, not Byron, was the poet of the moment; at fourteen, Mary and Hannah were just the age to swoon over The Lady of the Lake (1810) with its enthralling pages of notes on superstition and second sight, and to chant noble Marmion’s last words as he died for England on Flodden’s field:
Last of my race, on battle plain
That shout shall ne’er be heard again.13
Mary Shelley Page 10
