Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  2. Aaron Burr, Private Journal, facsimile edition (New York, 1903).

  3. R&R;, ch. 3, p. 47.

  4. MWG–Lady Mountcashell, n.d. (Pforzheimer). This reference appears in a previously unpublished extract from one of Claire’s heavily revised copies of her mother’s letters. It may be connected to the fact that Claire herself was later diagnosed as scrofulous, when the glands in her throat were noticed to have swollen. The fact that Mary was for some time incapable of using her arm certainly suggests something more serious than the eczema for which soothing poultices were applied.

  5. MJG–WG, 10.6.1811 (Abinger, Dep. c. 523).

  6. MWS–Jane Williams (hereafter JW), 10.3.1823 (MWSL, 1).

  7. MWS–Percy Bysshe Shelley (hereafter PBS), 28.10.1814.

  8. MWS, in her notes towards a life of her father, quoted by Kegan Paul, Godwin, 1, pp. 36–7. (The memoir is in the Abinger Papers, Dep. c. 606.)

  9. WG–MWG, 18.5.1811 (Abinger, Dep. c. 523).

  10. WG–Mrs Fordham, 13.11.1811 (Abinger, Dep. b. 214/3).

  11. WG–MJG, 4.6.1811 (Abinger, Dep. c. 523).

  12. MJG–WG, 10.6.1811 (Abinger, Dep. c. 523).

  13. Scott, Marmion (1811), canto vi.

  14. MJG–Lady Mountcashell, 15.11.1814 (abstract by Richard Garnett, Bodleian, Ms Shelley c. 1, fol. 556).

  15. WG–PBS, 30.3.1812, and hereafter, in PBSL. Some of Godwin’s letters to Shelley and copies of them are in the Abinger collection (Dep. c. 524).

  16. WG–PBS, 4.3.1812.

  17. WG–PBS, 4.7.1812.

  18. PBS–WG, 10.1.1812 and 24.2.1812.

  19. PBS–WG, 24.2.1812. Fleetwood grows up in Wales and later meets Ruffigny in Switzerland, which Shelley was eager to visit.

  20. PBS–WG, 26.1.1812.

  21. PBS–WG, 11.6.1812.

  22. MWS–CC, 15.12.1844 (MWSL, 3).

  23. WG–W.T. Baxter, 8.6.1812, in Mrs Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2 vols. (1889), 1, pp. 27–9 (hereafter Marshall, MWS); Shelley and His Circle, 3, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (Harvard University Press 1970)5 PP. 100–2.

  * Godwin was a passionate collector and reader of books all his life. A catalogue made by him of the Skinner Street library in 1817 offers instant contradiction to the notion that Mary, who would have been in and out of that library every day she was at home, was the untutored pupil of Shelley. On the contrary, Godwin’s books would have ensured that Mary was at least as well read as he when they met, deficient only in the knowledge of Greek which she promptly set out to remedy. The books listed in Mary’s journals from 1814 on are always treated as though this was her first reading of them, but Godwin’s library contained many of these volumes and Godwin was a man who believed all books should be read at least twice.

  † Burr’s journal makes several references to Amelia’s affair with a man called Lovett – ‘son ami Lovett’ – and to the fact that Amelia and Lovett visited Skinner Street together.

  ‡ Godwin’s diary entries in the summer of 1809 show that Mary also visited the pretty village of Nutting, or Notting, Hill, past its heyday as a spa and not yet established as a popular centre for girls’ schools. Emily Sunstein believes that she became a weekly boarder with a couple called Corrie (most probably, Corrie Hudson),3 but Godwins diary records several weekday events with Mary during this period. It seems more likely that Mary joined the rest of the children at the Hopwoods’ home, particularly since she was close to their daughter Hannah.

  § Mary Jane’s references to a sling add to the puzzle of what, precisely, Mary was suffering from. Eczema, however bad, does not require a sling, and what was the ‘terrible evil’ which the Godwins had apprehended? Was Mary thought to be suffering from a life-threatening illness or was it an amputation which was being considered?

  ¶ Henry Crabb Robinsons diary noted that Byron was in the audience on 20 January 1812; he was present on at least one other occasion.

  || Shelley’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg in his biography of Shelley gave a memorable but typically exaggerated account of the Newton family as nudists who allowed their children to romp naked among strangers. This detail was corrected by Lady Shelley, Mary’s daughter-in-law, in a handwritten note made in one of her copies of Hogg’s book. Her information derived either from another friend of Shelley’s, Thomas Love Peacock, who knew the de Boinvilles and Newtons quite well, or from Mary herself.

  ** Mr Westbrook also owned a tavern on Cheapside, a fact which was used by some Victorian biographers of Shelley to suggest that Harriet, as the daughter of an innkeeper, might have been overfond of alcohol.

  †† This may also be the explanation for the Godwins’ choice of the obscure Mrs Pettman at Ramsgate. It is possible that the better-known schools at Ramsgate were not open to Jane Clairmont or to Mary Godwin, as members of a dissenting household. It may also have been the case that their fees were too high for the impoverished Godwins.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A GLASSITE HOUSEHOLD

  1812–1814

  Talk with me

  Of that our land, whose wilds and floods,

  Barren and dark although they be,

  Were dearer than these chestnut woods:

  Those heathy paths, that inland stream,

  And the blue mountains, shapes which seem

  Like wrecks of childhood’s sunny dream …

  Shelley, Rosalind and Helen (1819)

  SHELLEY’S POEM, WRITTEN TO PLEASE MARY, LOOKED BACK TO Scotland through the eyes of two young women exiled to Italy. Not among his best, it captures Mary’s wistful memory of a landscape she had loved, although she never again travelled north of London, preferring the gentler climate of southern England. Looking back on her life at Dundee in 1831, when she was describing her formative years as a writer in the Preface to her revised edition of Frankenstein, Mary remembered this as the time when her imagination began to flourish. Others, she wrote, might look at the northern shores of the Tay and think them dreary and blank:

  they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy … It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.1

  Baxter is a celebrated name in Dundee. The main branch of the family made its money in jute and linen, winning the lucrative contract to supply sailcloth to the navy during the Napoleonic wars: Nelson’s Victory was equipped with Baxter cloth. William Thomas Baxter, descending from the family’s junior line, was not among these commercial giants. He prided himself on having given his girls what he thought of as a good European education, but Mary had difficulty later in persuading him that she did not see herself as their social superior.2

  The house into which they welcomed her was comfortable rather than elegant. Misleadingly named ‘The Cottage’, it stood four miles east of the grey, densely steepled city of Dundee at Broughty Ferry, a long, low stretch of land looking out past a tall fifteenth-century castle keep and three rocks called ‘The Graces’ to the shining breadth of the Tay. Dimly visible on the other side was the little alehouse-crammed town of Newburgh; the home of David Booth and his wife Margaret, Baxter’s eldest daughter.

  Among several factors which persuaded Godwin to send Mary to Dundee was a wish to stimulate her interest in politics. He took no active political role himself after writing his great revolutionary work of the 1790s, but a careful reading of his books for children shows that he never missed an opportunity to enlist the radical sympathies of his young readers. Dundee had become famous as a nerve-centre for radicals and revolutionary discussion during the 1790s; in 1812, both Booth and Baxter were still stout Jacobins. Isabella, the daughter who rapidly became Mary’s favourite in the family of four girls and two sons, knew the events of the French Revolution so well that she almost seemed to inhabit the past. Fervent in her loathing of Marat and
Robespierre, she worshipped Charlotte Corday and Madame Manon Roland, who lost her life for her stubborn commitment to the distinction between anarchy and republicanism.

  ‘She is certainly clever,’ Godwin wrote a little grudgingly to Mary in 1821, after meeting her friend.3 Intelligent, beautiful and imaginative, dark-eyed Isabella seemed born to be admired, but the fact that Mary was the daughter of one of the women she most revered put the younger girl on an equal footing. Isabella’s own mother had died in July the previous year; newly bereaved herself, she could dimly guess at the burden of supposing yourself responsible for your mother’s death. Inseparable allies, the two girls shared a love of reading poetry aloud, of the ghostly stories in which Dundee folklore abounded, and of imagining themselves as the characters about whom they read. Interestingly, the only known portrait of Isabella, painted when she was twenty-three, is in fancy dress as Lady Jane Grey, the intellectual prodigy Godwin had wished his daughter to emulate. The portrait also suggests that Isabella bore a startling resemblance to Percy Shelley.4

  Dundee, sacked and plundered during the Civil War, had grown churchified and quietly prosperous in the eighteenth century. The Glassite church, an airy octagonal building dutifully attended by David Booth and the Baxter family, enforced weekly communion, ‘contributions’ or almsgiving and a modest way of life; the exotic-sounding ‘love-feasts’ which broke up long days of biblical readings and discussion consisted of hearty bowls of cabbage soup. Glassites kept themselves apart from other congregations and preserved unanimity by expelling any member who broke their rules, which embraced a mild form of vegetarianism and abstention from any form of gambling.

  It is unlikely that Mary much relished her dutiful hours of attendance at the church or the forced exchange of ‘the kiss of love’ with Glassite elders, but the town itself was full of intriguing twisted alleys, cluttered bookshops and historic sites. Given Isabella’s taste for macabre stories, Mary would have been shown the high mound at the end of Guthrie Street, where women accused of witchcraft had been burned in their scores, and the house in Calendar Close where a notorious witch, Grissell Jaffray, had resided. She would have climbed the Law, the tall cone-shaped hill behind Dundee on which, traditionally, young girls dabbed their cheeks with dew and made romantic wishes for themselves. The squalor of Holborn and the perpetual financial worries of Skinner Street seemed far away as she looked out over the great deforested flanks and bald escarpments of the northern mountains of Forfarshire: the navy’s need for timber in the war years had stripped this area of Scotland almost bare.

  Scottish references in Mary’s novels bear out the claims made later by Christina (‘Christy’ or ‘Kirsty’) Baxter that the family provided Mary with the regular air and exercise her doctors had recommended by taking her on extensive tours of the country. In The Last Man, Mary’s description of Dunkeld includes knowledgeable references to the larch forests which were a new feature of the area in 1812. In Frankenstein, her allusions to the country around Edinburgh, and her decision to send Victor on his journey north via Cupar, St Andrews and the Tay shore, echo at least one long expedition she made with Charles Clairmont, affectionately remembered by him in later life. (‘Do you remember the walk we once took together from [Newburgh?] to St Andrews, & the divine sun-set we saw on the road? … I never see a fine sun-set without my mind’s adverting to it.’5) Mary would certainly have become familiar with the ‘Deil’s Head’ on the wild coast of Arbroath where Scott set some dramatic chapters of The Antiquary. She probably visited handsome Montrose, known then as Scotland’s Venice. It is less likely that Victor Frankenstein’s journey up to the Orkneys reflects personal experience. Such a lengthy expedition would have been a rash one for the Baxters to undertake with a young girl whose health was still unsound. Given that Isabella detested the Highlands and that Mary’s account of the Orkney islands is an unconvincing one, the grounds for imagining Victor’s journey to be based on first-hand knowledge seem slight.

  Among the regular pleasures of Mary’s stay were the visits across the Tay to Newburgh. Barns o’ Woodside, rented by Booth from a relative of the house’s owners, stood in a terraced garden sloping steeply down towards the row of white alehouses which dominated the little shoreside town. Standing at one side of the house was a turreted tower, converted by Booth into a grain store for his brewery venture.

  Mary stayed three times at Newburgh and left a record of her devotion to Isabella on a pane of glass in the shadowy gallery at the back of the house, where the two young girls scratched their initials with a diamond ring. The pane was stolen in the 1970s, but the house, long, grey and full of eccentric features, is as secretive and oddly charming as ever. Isabella was fascinated by her small, sharp-eyed brother-in-law; Booth had a fiercely rational mind, and Mary already knew that he was the only man her father regarded as cleverer than himself. Perhaps Margaret Baxter, an invalid, seemed unworthy of such a brilliant husband; we might wonder what dreams were in the young girls’ minds when they painstakingly set their own names on the house.

  Superstitious locals nicknamed David Booth ‘the devil’ on account of his prodigious and self-acquired learning; to the visitors, he was a kind but capricious host. On one occasion, so Isabella told her grandson, he promised them a view of paradise and then took them down into the bowels of a coalmine, after thoughtfully providing oilskin hats to keep the water from dripping down their necks. ‘For some reason, both Miss Godwin and my grandmother were very irate,’ James Stuart added.6

  Dundee legend claims that Mary began writing Frankenstein when she was living with the Baxters, a story pleasantly enhanced by the fact that Dundonians first saw Boris Karloff’s shambling, hollow-eyed monster at the Royalty Cinema, built on the site of the Baxters’ garden. Mary herself drew a firm line between the writing ‘in a most commonplace style’ which she had attempted before her visit to Scotland, and the inspiration she found in her new surroundings. ‘I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot,’ she wrote in the 1831 Preface to her novel, describing her time at Dundee, ‘but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.’7 She did not have far to seek for inspiration.

  The Baxters’ house looked directly out on the harbour from which the ships bound for the northern seal fisheries and the Arctic sailed out every April from one of Britain’s biggest whaling centres: whale oil was the cheapest effective lubricant available for the city’s rapidly expanding jute industry as well as a major source of lamp fuel throughout Britain. All around the lost area where Mary lived – not even a plaque now marks the site – names like Baffin Street and Whale Lane recall the importance of the trade. Everybody in town came to the shores of Broughty Ferry to see the vessels off. Many, trapped in the treacherous pack-ice which, in Mary’s novel, pinions Walton’s vessel for seven long weeks, never returned; the Rodney, frozen up and lost in 1810, was still being talked about when Mary arrived in Dundee. The ships which reached home, heralded by the stench of blubber, brought with them terrible stories of desolation, and icy mountains, and hunger, and shipboard mutinies, to fire Mary’s imagination and revive her haunted early vision of Coleridge’s death-attended mariner and his journey to ‘the land of mist and snow’, a quotation she put into the mouth of her own adventurous sailor.

  The tale of Frankenstein’s attempt to produce a living creature is enclosed by another story of a man and his promethean ambitions. Robert Walton, steeped in the histories of voyages he has devoured in his uncle’s library, has already made expeditions on Greenland whalers when he decides to go in search of a mythical land beyond the North Pole, ‘a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe’. Beyond this, and connecting Walton’s ambitions to those of Frankenstein’s galvanic experiments, is his hope of discovering a natural source of electricity, ‘the wondrous power which attracts the needle … the secret of the magne
t’. When Walton looks for men to join his expedition, he takes for his lieutenant a man ‘madly desirous of glory’ who has served with him on one of the whaling ships; the fact that this intriguing figure never reappears suggests that he may, with Walton, have belonged to an earlier story.

  The character of Walton, the driving ambition of his quest and the sense of isolation with which it has burdened him, belong to the later development of the novel. But it seems likely that an early version of Frankenstein’s enclosing story began here in Dundee, in the days when Mary remembered sitting under the trees in the garden or on the bleak slopes – probably of the Law – as she spun her thoughts into ‘a succession of imaginary incidents … more fantastic and agreeable than my writings’.8 She may never have written a word about Walton’s expedition down. A powerful story does not need written form to germinate and flourish in the imagination. It is likely that the tale of a journey to the Arctic wastes had already taken shape when, in 1816, her thoughts began to revolve around a novel.

  *

  Letters from Skinner Street kept Mary informed about their new and still unseen friends, the Shelleys. She left for Dundee just before Shelley imprudently declared that it would be his ‘greatest glory’ to solace Godwin’s declining years. A month later, on 14 July, Elizabeth Hitchener, a former schoolmistress with progressive ideas, was invited to stay for a night at Skinner Street on her way to join the Shelleys at Lynmouth in Devon. The invitation, proposed by Shelley himself, had been issued by the Godwins in the hope that their visitor would provide more information about the young couple.

  Tall, bony and black-haired, Miss Hitchener was a Sussex teacher whose radical views had won Shelley’s friendship and admiration. Claimed by him as the ‘sister of my soul’, she had become one of his closest allies since his estrangement from his family. Now, she was boldly risking her own reputation as she set off to live with him and Harriet. It was not at all clear to the Godwins whether their ménage was to be platonic, and Miss Hitchener’s offer to take Fanny along with her on a visit to Lynmouth was rejected. The sense of disapproval, once felt, was matched. Godwin, Miss Hitchener informed the Shelleys, cut a poor figure as a family man, shutting himself up in his study and seeing his son and stepdaughters only at ‘stated hours’.9