Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Mary remembered Marmion’s dying words twelve years later when she decided that the last man would be a subject worthy of a novel.

  If Charles was envied for being in Edinburgh, when Scotland was all the rage, Mary, Jane and Fanny, often accompanied by Hannah, had plenty to entertain them in London. The marriage of Godwin’s protégé Thomas Turner to the strikingly beautiful Cornelia de Boinville had opened new doors. Godwin was already on friendly terms with Cornelia’s uncle, John Frank Newton, a keen vegetarian who published a book on the subject in 1811, The Return to Nature, or A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen. Newton and his wife, Cornelia’s namesake, favoured a modern regime for their own children, who were encouraged to wear only a light garment in summer months and no hats or stockings, a practice which the Godwin tribe may have been happy to adopt when they were away from home.||

  Mrs Newton and Cornelia’s mother enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle supported by their income from slave plantations in the West Indies. Wealthy though the women were, they were enthusiastic republicans. Cornelia’s own mother, Harriet de Boinville, owner of a home in Pimlico and a country house at Bracknell, near Windsor, had married one of the Marquis de Lafayette’s aides-de-camp when he was sent to England on a diplomatic mission in 1789; at the time Mary knew her, de Boinville and his young son were away from home in Napoleon’s army. Perhaps Mary, Jane and Fanny rather envied Cornelia a glamorous mother who looked remarkably young, spoke French and Italian as easily as English and flaunted her views by tying a broad red sash around her slender waist. It must have been hard not to draw unfavourable comparisons with dumpy Mrs Godwin in her green-tinted spectacles and drab black velvet gown.

  Visiting the Newtons and the de Boinvilles, Mary heard for the first time about the happy, sexually uninhibited life of the mythical Nairs, lovingly described in an eccentric work by Mrs de Boinville’s friend, James (‘the Chevalier’) Lawrence. The Nairs, Mrs de Boinville airily explained, acted according to the principles of Mary Wollstonecraft’s most celebrated work; this was just how Mary’s mother would have wished life to be. Mary, at fourteen, must have been wide-eyed with surprise at the news that people could behave in such a way and be praised for it, even if they were living in faraway India. The more lovers a lady took, the more powerful her sense of liberation, Mrs de Boinville explained. It is not clear whether she practised what she preached.

  Outings to these progressive households provided relief from a sense of strain at home. Besieged by creditors, Godwin had nightmares of following John Fenwick into the debtors’ prison, too close to Skinner Street for easy sleep, if he could not secure a new loan. He was not in the mood to reassure his wife that the fine ladies who visited the shop did not, as she angrily claimed, regard her as a common tradeswoman. If Mary Jane found the experience unpleasant, she could send one of the girls down to serve in her place. Mrs Godwin did so and Lady Mountcashell, who took a lively interest in the upbringing of the Godwin girls, was later informed that young Mary had discharged the business of the shop with the prudent steadiness of a man of forty.14

  Mary was unhappy; Jane was restless; Fanny, as always, kept her thoughts to herself. Godwin, closeted in his study, was too obsessed by his financial problems to notice the storm which was brewing under his roof. So out of touch was he with the situation that he complimented himself on the satisfactory way in which his educational methods appeared to be bearing fruit. ‘I have again and again been hopeless concerning the children …’ he wrote complacently to a new friend in March 1812:

  Seeds of intellect and knowledge, seeds of moral judgment and conduct, I have sown, but the soil for a long time seemed ‘ungrateful to the tiller’s care’. It was not so. The happiest operations were going on quietly and unobserved, and at the moment when it was of the utmost importance, they unfolded themselves to the delight of every beholder.15

  *

  The friend to whom Godwin sent this glowing account in March was Percy Shelley and it was a wish to impress that caused him to boast of his success as an educator to this new disciple and potential provider of financial assistance. Shelley, aged nineteen, had eloped the previous August with Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a prosperous and fashionable coffeehouse-owner,** five months after being sent down from University College, Oxford, for printing heresies in a pamphlet flamboyantly titled The Necessity of Atheism. His father, while none too happy about this, had been made much angrier when his expelled son announced that he was not interested in being the heir to a handsome estate in Sussex, a baronetcy, and the castle built by his grandfather, preferring to settle for an annual allowance with no strings attached. His contempt for Timothy Shelley dated back to 1807 when young Percy, then a schoolboy at Eton, heard reports of the corrupt electioneering methods which had helped his father to re-election as MP for East Shoreham.

  The Shelley family’s grandest friend and neighbour, the Duke of Norfolk, had invited the boy up to his Cumberland estate in December 1811, in the hope of making him see sense. A brief rapprochement ended when Shelley was found to have been posting secret communications to Hellen, one of his younger sisters, urging her to support him. He had already accused his mother of an adulterous relationship with a music-master; this was the last straw. Summarily banished from the family circle, Shelley was in need of a new father-figure. Visiting the poet Robert Southey after his short stay with the Duke of Norfolk, Shelley thought his wish had been granted. Southey told him that his recently discovered hero, William Godwin, author of Political Justice, was not, as he supposed, dead, but running a bookshop in London.

  Shelley had already dispatched two letters to Godwin even before he rashly tried to enlist the sympathy of his little schoolgirl sister. In the first, written on 3 January, he presented himself as an ardent Godwinian, eager to learn and to be of use. Godwin had a long experience of confused, excitable young men who wanted to be his protégés; he asked for more clarification. The second letter, written on 10 January, was far more promising; here, Shelley presented himself not as a protégé but as a potential patron. Godwin’s replies grew noticeably warmer. ‘You cannot imagine how much all the females of my family, Mrs. G. and three daughters, are interested in your letters and your history,’ he informed his still unseen friend on 14 March.16 By July, he could tell Shelley that all the ladies thrilled to the sight of ‘the well-known hand’ on a letter and that they were ‘on the tiptoe’ to know his latest news.17 If Shelley wanted a father-figure, Godwin was happy to play that role to a young man whose generosity might yet be the saving of the bookshop and his honour.

  To Mary, Jane and Fanny, their father’s new correspondent sounded like the hero of a romance. Everything they knew about him derived from Shelley’s own letters and, in particular, from the long account he had provided on 10 January. Here, convincing himself as he wrote that what he said was nothing less than the truth, Shelley converted the life of an indulged and privileged youth into the stuff of fiction. Cruelly treated by his father, ‘a man of fortune in Sussex’, and at school, he had taken refuge in studying old books about chemistry and magic ‘with an enthusiasm of wonder, almost amounting to belief’.18 He had written two novels while still at Eton, and had been almost expelled for trying to act on the principles of Political Justice. (This was a Shelleyan exaggeration; he had only recently read the book for the first time.) He had, since his union to a woman of similar views, been threatened with the prospect of serving in a distant regiment and of seeing his entailed inheritance bestowed on his younger brother. Omitted from Shelley’s account as tedious and unnecessary were the facts that his father, Timothy, had been perfectly tolerant and kindly in the period leading up to his son’s expulsion from Oxford, that he had supported Shelley’s first literary endeavours and that his response to the expulsion had been to suggest a tour of Greece. The only person opposed to Shelley’s right to his inheritance was the Shelleys’ lawyer, William Whitton, whose own interests are easily perceived when we learn that his daughter was involved with Timothy Shelle
y’s older, illegitimate son.

  The girls, like their father, knew only what Shelley chose to tell them. To Fanny, Mary and Jane, it was a tale of injustice and high courage. Their grumbles were forgotten; all they longed for was to meet this thrillingly intense young man. The romance was not diminished by the news that his recent marriage had been undertaken as a means of saving Miss Westbrook from ‘domestic oppressions’ (actually, the misery of boarding-school, from which the sixteen-year-old Harriet had begged Shelley to rescue her). They were all invited to come and stay, as soon as a house could be found, in the wilds of Wales, a location Shelley had chosen out of admiration for Godwin’s novel, Fleetwood (1805).19 In the meantime, however, the Shelleys were off to Ireland, where they intended to forward the cause of Catholic emancipation by whatever methods proved most effective.

  The girls were enthralled; Godwins own feelings about Shelley were mixed. It was gratifying to be heaped with terms of esteem and reverence at a time when his name attracted little but abuse. The mention of a handsome inheritance was of considerable interest to a man deep in debt. He was not, however, happy about Shelley’s assumption that the first edition of Political Justice represented his present way of thinking. The book had been heavily revised since then and an author, in the early nineteenth century, was judged by whichever edition of his work had appeared most recently. But Shelley, as his excited letters revealed, had taken the first edition for his Bible. The Godwin he admired was the man who had welcomed revolution, opposed marriage, advocated a form of free love based on a system of equal rights. Godwin still believed – and this was of great significance to his relationship with Shelley – that money belonged to the man who had most need of it and that it should be taken with no sense of gratitude. In almost every other respect, he had modified his views. Having found a cause, however, Shelley was not inclined to hold fire. Whether Godwin liked it or not, he had found a champion.

  Godwin wanted not a champion, but a financial patron. He had, for many years, been on the receiving end of the philanthropy of such wealthy benefactors as young Thomas Wedgwood. Wedgwood had believed, as did Godwin himself, that money belonged to those who could be of most benefit to the world and that it was the duty of the rich to provide for such men. But now Wedgwood was prematurely dead and the patience of Godwin’s other patrons had reached its limit with a man who gave away their money as casually as he solicited it. Shelley had stated in his first letter that he wished to make himself ‘useful’ by a friendship with Godwin, in his second, that he was heir to a substantial fortune, and in his fourth, that he wanted to present the philosopher’s family with a house when he was of age. (He was now nineteen.) ‘Philanthropy,’ he added airily, ‘is confined to no spot. Adieu!’20

  On 30 March, Godwin took the plunge and wrote that he was ready to look on Shelley ‘as a lasting friend, who, according to the course of nature, may contribute to the comforts of my closing days’. He could not have stated his expectations more clearly; Shelley had been chosen as the man to save the Godwin family from financial disgrace. Unfortunately, the letter went astray until June, leaving Godwin on tenterhooks about the kind of commitment his disciple might be prepared to make. Opening the letter at last, Shelley responded with a flourish which reminds us how disturbingly out of touch with reality he was at this time. There was a streak of lunacy in the family and Shelley, in the years between 1811 and 1815, behaved with an irresponsibility and a carelessness of other people’s feelings that came close to madness. ‘I should regard it as my greatest glory, should I be judged worthy to solace your declining years,’ he grandly announced; ‘it is a pleasure the realization of which I anticipate with confident hopes and which it shall be my study to deserve.’21

  It sounded magnificent. To Godwin, this profession amounted to a contract. Shelley was now, as far as he was concerned, subject to a lifelong agreement to underwrite his debts and provide for his security. This, in the world of Political Justice, was how things were meant to be.

  *

  Godwin remained worried about his daughter. Her condition had not improved since her return from Ramsgate; in March, the month in which he described to Shelley the delight of a father in seeing the unfolding of a child’s talents, Godwin went to consult Henry Cline about her progress. Cline recommended sending her away again, preferably to another seaside resort.

  Godwin had, since 1802, established a lively friendship with a remarkable Scotsman called David Booth. A grammarian, brewer and sometime schoolmaster living in Forfarshire, Booth could have had a hand in arranging Charles Clairmont’s position at Constable’s publishing firm in Edinburgh; his young brother-in-law Robert Baxter also worked for Constable. It may have been Booth who came up with the proposal that Mary should visit the Baxter family near Dundee, just across the Tay from his own home. Godwin already knew Booth’s father-in-law, William Thomas Baxter, although not well; the two men had met in London in 1801. Baxter’s response to the suggestion was heart-warming; any daughter of William Godwin’s was welcome at his home for as long as she wished. An initial visit of five months was agreed on, although Godwin insisted that the first two or three weeks should be considered as a trial. If the scheme worked, he offered to house the eldest of the Baxter daughters at Skinner Street for a similar period when Mary returned.

  One thing which Godwin did know about both Baxter and Booth concerned their religious beliefs. These are of some significance. Godwin had spent the unhappiest part of his early life in the Norwich home of Samuel Newton. Newton was a member of the small sect known as Sandemanians after Robert Sandeman, their founder. Sandeman, a Scot, based his beliefs around the teachings of his father-in-law, John Glas; both Baxter and Booth were Glassites. It would be shocking to suppose that Godwin actively wished Mary to experience some of the misery he had known; more reasonably, we can note that dissenting families maintained very tight links in the early nineteenth century, when they were still debarred from the educational and civil rights open to conventional worshippers.†† The Glassites, like the Sandemanians, practised community of goods and opposed the accumulation of wealth by individuals; Newton’s beliefs had formed the cornerstone of Godwin’s own philosophy He may have chosen the Baxter family for Mary out of a wish to see her follow in his footsteps.

  This explains his choice of the Baxters, but not the fact that he was so willing to part with his only daughter so soon after having sent her away to Ramsgate for six months. His reasons have to remain a matter of speculation. Perhaps, he was concerned only for her health (he sought a second opinion on his daughter from a brilliant young doctor called William Lawrence, then at the start of his medical career); perhaps, he disliked the way she was being turned into a shopgirl; perhaps, we may dimly surmise, Mary Jane was eager to see the back of her strong-willed and aggressive stepdaughter, if she was properly cared for. It is even possible, at a time when Godwin’s own future was uncertain, that he wanted to settle Mary where she might be able to make an alternative life for herself. She would be near to Charles; she would be in the landscape of Burns and Scott, which would please her; she would have all the sea air she could wish for, and she would have Baxter’s brood of daughters for company.

  On 7 June, Fanny, Jane and Godwin – but not his wife – accompanied a wan and apprehensive Mary down to the docks and on to the Osnaburgh. The boat journey to and from Ramsgate had taught her that she was a poor sailor; the voyage to Dundee usually took six days. Cline had, however, insisted that the sea air would do her good. Godwin hovered for an hour. He mentioned Baxter’s name to the captain in the hope of securing a little special attention for his daughter; searching the passengers for a friendly face, he singled out a pleasant-looking lady who, a mother herself, was happy to act as chaperone. Out of sight of the docks, the lady left Mary to fend for herself. Miserable, seasick and terrified of being robbed, she tucked the notes she had been given for her support carefully inside her stays. This presented no obstacle to the pickpockets on board the boat; ‘the first
money I ever had, was so carried, and lost,’ Mary remembered years later, when urged to bring money into France by the same method.22 She arrived in Dundee peagreen and without a penny to her name, a humiliating experience for a proud young girl.

  Back at Skinner Street, Godwin solaced himself by writing a long letter to Baxter, an explanation of his daughter’s character and the way he wished her to be treated. He began by admitting to ‘a thousand anxieties’ at having consigned a sickly fourteen-year-old girl to a shipful of strangers. He was rightly afraid she would arrive in Scotland ‘more dead than alive’.

  Godwin had remained a fervent believer in sincerity; he frankly admitted that he did not fully understand his daughter’s nature. She, like him, suffered from the fault of excessive reserve. He knew she was talented; he was sure she had no vices and little taste for frivolity. She would be happier enjoying the Scottish landscape than social engagements. Her once ‘invincible’ perseverance had slackened of late; Baxter was warned that she would need to be ‘excited to industry’. He was especially anxious that her ‘habits and conceptions’ should not be indulged:

  When I say all this, I hope you will be aware that I do not desire that she should be treated with extraordinary attention, or that any one of your family should put themselves in the smallest degree out of their way on her account. I am anxious that she should be brought up (in this respect) like a philosopher, even like a cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character.23

  It is, despite the affectionate opening, a letter of frightening detachment. Reading it, good-natured William Baxter must have wondered whether Godwin was thinking of his daughter or planning a new essay on educational methods.

  Notes

  1. CC–Edward John Trelawny (hereafter EJT), April 1871 (CC, 2).