Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  In September, Godwin extended his routine summer holiday to inspect the household himself, only to find that the Shelleys had abruptly left their rose-shrouded hillside cottage for an undisclosed destination. Shelley’s allegedly subversive activities – which included sending rousing messages out to sea in wine bottles and distributing a pamphlet entitled Declaration of Rights in the local town – had been reported by suspicious government agents in the Lynmouth area. Godwin, unaware of this reason for flight, knew only that he had made a long and arduous journey for nothing.

  The hunger for benevolent activity which raged in Shelley like a fever took him from the west of England to the north coast of Wales. Here, at Tremadoc, the new town which a wealthy philanthropist had created and named after himself, an ambitious project to salvage some four thousand acres from the sea and to safeguard it and the town by a gigantic embankment was endangered by engineering mishaps and lack of financial support; Shelley, loyally supported by Eliza Hitchener and by his pretty, easily influenced young wife, threw himself into raising both money – he gave £100 himself, although he was desperately short of money – and a local labour force to rebuild the embankment. It was the hope of raising funds for the Welsh land scheme, together with the wish to meet Godwin, which finally brought the Shelleys and Eliza Hitchener back to London in October 1812, the month before Mary’s first return from Dundee.

  Harriet and Shelley had been puzzled by Miss Hitchener’s cool accounts of their elderly hero. By October, however, they had lost respect for her views and on 8 November she was sent packing, with the promise of £100 a year to comfort her for having been insufficiently republican and excessively affectionate towards Shelley. Their beloved ‘Portia’ was now recast, in one of Shelley’s frighteningly sudden changes of mood, as ‘the brown demon’.

  Now, writing to a friend she had made on their visit to Ireland, Harriet offered Catherine Nugent an ecstatic account of the household at Skinner Street. Miss Hitchener had described Godwin as cold. Harriet, on the contrary, found his manner ‘so soft and pleasing that I defy even an enemy to be displeased with him. We have the pleasure of seeing him daily, and upon his account we determine to settle near London.’ Eliza’s judgment had been too hastily formed; Mr Godwin was ‘quite a family man’. William seemed an ‘extremely clever’ little boy, while nineteen-year-old Fanny was granted a beauty of mind which ‘fully overbalances the plainness of her countenance’. (We have touching evidence in this remark of the vanity and superficial judgment of Harriet, a simple but extremely pretty girl.) Jane Clairmont was reported to be living at a French boarding-school on the other side of London. They had admired John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft and were intrigued to be told that Mary Godwin was ‘very much like her mother’. Mrs Godwin, too, running the bookshop entirely by herself, impressed Harriet as a woman of admirable courage and independence. ‘Oh, if you could see them all tomorrow,’ she exclaimed. ‘I am going to stay all day with them. G[odwin] … has given up everything for the sake of our society. It gives me so much pleasure to sit and look at him.’ He was, she enthused, just like a bust of Socrates.10

  At fifty-seven, Godwin looked less like Socrates than one of the old-fashioned line of Dissenters from which both he and William Hazlitt descended. Short, thickset and solemn-faced, with a fair skin and a generous expanse of bald forehead above the thin, unusually long nose which his daughter inherited, he certainly bore no resemblance to the fiery apostle of Shelley’s imaginings. But Shelley was as delighted as Harriet by the philosopher and his family, by their indulgent attitude, and by their friends. They had a brief encounter with Mary Wollstonecraft’s former pupil, Lady Mountcashell, for whom Shelley formed a warm admiration.* An expedition for the purpose of exploding fireworks on Guy Fawkes night with William Junior and a small friend, introduced him to the congenial household of John Newton, a vegetarian Zoroastrian, and to Newton’s clever and elegant sister-in-law, Harriet de Boinville.

  Shelley’s quarrel was with his father, Timothy. At twenty, he was still young enough to miss the agreeable company of his mother, Elizabeth Pilfold, a woman whose lively, spirited letters suggest that it was from her Shelley had inherited the playful and most charming side of his nature. Mrs Newton and Harriet de Boinville were old enough to become substitute maternal figures and, with their attractive combination of languor and republican zeal, to exert a potent influence. Comparing his sweet but simple wife to Cornelia Turner, Harriet’s good-looking and well-educated daughter, now married to Godwin’s protégé, Shelley felt the first twinge of uncertainty about his impulsive elopement. Harriet shone in the provincial society of Lynmouth and Tremadoc; she seemed merely young and a little foolish when placed in more sophisticated company.

  Harriet was more at ease in Skinner Street. A cynic might wonder at Godwin’s sudden addiction to the company of a cheerful and frank but unremarkable girl, and to a young man whose poetic taste seemed as troublingly immature as his plans to reform the world. (When, in December 1812, he first read the privately printed Queen Mab, in which Shelley laid into the government, marriage and Christianity with breathtaking ferocity, Godwin was unimpressed.) His kindness was spurred by an increasingly urgent need for the money he had been promised. Godwin’s financial position had worsened as the year went on. In November, Francis Place bluntly told him that, unless he succeeded in obtaining a ‘very large sum’ from his wealthy young friend, ‘all would be lost’.11

  The Shelleys were dining at Skinner Street on 11 November, the day after Mary arrived from Dundee with Christy, the eldest of Baxter’s unmarried daughters. William Lawrence, the surgeon who had examined Mary just before she left for Scotland, was also present, probably to assess her progress. Christy, many years later, remembered that Shelley had been very attentive to a young wife with a beautiful pink-and-white complexion. She herself had been much struck by Mrs Shelley’s purple satin dress. Thomas Love Peacock later insisted that Harriet had always been ‘simplex munditiis’ (elegant in simplicity), but her clothes created quite a stir among the plainly dressed Godwins; Fanny enraged Shelley a few days later by innocently commenting that his wife seemed ‘a fine lady’.12

  The dinner at Skinner Street is usually thought to have been the occasion of Mary’s first meeting with Shelley; if so, it is strange that neither of them ever alluded to it. It is likely that Mary stayed upstairs, recovering from the long sea-journey. Christy, a sharp-eyed observer, was on hand to tell her about their dinner-guest, a stooping, carelessly dressed young man with a high white forehead, a mop of brown curls and eyes which were blue, intense and startlingly prominent. Imaginative Jane, newly returned from her boarding-school on the other side of London, might have produced a description closer to one offered for that year by Shelley’s friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg:

  Bysshe† looked, as he always looked, wild, intellectual, unearthly; like a spirit that has just descended from the sky; like a demon risen at that moment out of the ground.13

  In volatility of temperament, if not in brains, Harriet and her husband were well-matched. Two days after dining at Skinner Street, they rushed back to Wales without a word of farewell. Here, Shelley dutifully followed Godwin’s suggestions for reading history, a subject he considered a waste of time, but he ceased to answer letters and avoided Godwin’s company on his occasional visits to London. Harriet, confiding in her Irish friend Miss Nugent in January 1813, now expressed violent dislike for Mrs Godwin, scorn for their friend Amelia Curran (‘a coquette, the most abominable thing in the world’), and anger at Godwin both for trying to persuade Shelley to join the politically languid Whigs, and for expecting ‘such universal homage from all persons younger than himself, that it is very disagreeable to be in company with him on that account’.14

  The reasons for this sudden change of attitude are unclear. Godwin may have become too pressing in his demands for the money which Shelley now wanted to use to benefit the people of Tremadoc. The acquaintanceship was not resumed until a fortnight before t
he birth of Shelley and Harriet’s daughter Ianthe, at the end of June 1813; by then, Mary had returned to Dundee.

  *

  Duty, not choice, had dictated that Christy should accompany Mary to London; Mary’s lack of affection for Isabella’s dour elder sister can be gauged by a slightly unkind trick which she played on her shortly after their arrival. On 8 December 1812, the entire family went to supper with Charles and Mary Lamb. Charles, Mary warned, was very forward with ladies; Christy must watch out, for he would be sure to kiss her when they first met. Instead, to Christy’s mortification, she received scarcely a nod of acknowledgment from a man who, as Mary knew, was ill-at-ease with female strangers.15

  Godwin’s terse diary entries and Christy’s vague recollections as a very old lady are all the account we have of Mary’s seven-month stay in London. Christy remembered that she shared a room with Mary and that Jane had been extremely pretty, with a round face, small features and curly hair. The girls had plenty of liberty, breakfasting on their own and supping when they pleased. Mrs Godwin was kind but not always truthful; Mr Godwin had made a special favourite of their guest. (There is something a little sad in Christy’s wistful recollections; she so wanted to believe that Godwin and Lamb had been enchanted by her and that Mary had preferred her to Isabella.) Debate had always been encouraged at Skinner Street; Christy remembered how, on one occasion, she and Fanny had defended the right of women to be purely domestic against Mary’s and Jane’s Wollstonecraft-based argument that they should have outside interests and activities.16 Less convincingly, she remembered that Fanny, at nineteen, still believed herself to be Godwin’s daughter. A note Godwin himself made of an ‘explanation’ given to Fanny in 1806 when she was nearly twelve contradicts Christy’s statement. The fact that Fanny’s birth was not discussed with an inquisitive guest need not mean that the truth was unknown to her.

  Despite the overshadowing worry of Godwin’s finances and the misfortune of a fire in the bookshop shortly after Mary and Christy’s arrival, there were plenty of expeditions and social engagements to entertain a shy Scottish girl. At home, they were called on by fiery, witty John Curran (whose imagined incivility had once caused Mary Jane to threaten a separation), by gentle James Marshall and by Charles Lamb (whose private opinion of Mary Jane had not softened); affection for Godwin had evidently caused some truces to be called with his wife. Writing home, Christy could boast that she had been taken to the first night of a fine play with all the grand literary folk of the city in the audience‡ and that she had been introduced to the Irish poet Thomas Moore and the essayist William Hazlitt. The great Scottish artist David Wilkie had gone with them to view paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

  Jealous of the respectful interest which adults always showed in Mary, Christy must have been considerably piqued when they visited Reynolds’s former pupil, irreligious, gossip-loving old James Northcote, who painted the finest picture we have of William Godwin, and who in his conversations with Hazlitt spoke tenderly of Mary as ‘Beauty’s daughter’.17 Mary, Christy was forced to realize, was regarded with something like reverence down in London. She seemed to accept it as her right when, admired for her beautiful complexion and finespun cloud of hair, she was told that she had been born under a lucky star, that comet which blazed so auspiciously just before her birth.

  The most interesting of the many visitors to Skinner Street during this period, and one whom both Mary and Christy met on several occasions, was Robert Owen. A grave, strong-featured man in his early forties, Owen came to seek Godwin’s views at a time when, having ably combined commercial success with social reform at his wife’s family factory at Lanark, near Glasgow, he was planning a new partnership with the old legal reformer, Jeremy Bentham, and the Quaker William Allen. Bentham and Allen had agreed to buy out his former partners and to seek only five per cent return on their capital investment, in order to give Owen a freer hand with his experiment in perfectibility.

  Owen and Godwin had much to debate. Godwin still believed that men are capable of improving themselves by acting as individuals in co-operation for the general good; Owen took the more authoritarian view that men can be improved by the circumstances in which they are placed. By giving his workforce of semi-destitute people proper schooling, housing and rules of behaviour, they had been led, he argued, to a better understanding of citizenship. Owen was often at Skinner Street during Mary’s six months in London. She must have taken pride in seeing her father, not as a despised and needy bookseller, borrowing wherever he could smell money, but as a revered adviser, standing at the centre of a world which looked to a better future for mankind. Years later, she became a close friend of Owen’s son.

  Mary had eagerly resumed her old friendship with the Hopwood family; when she went back to Dundee in the summer of 1813, she persuaded Godwin to let Hannah go with her. All the Baxter girls were enthusiastic amateur painters; Hannah, Mary must have successfully argued, could pay for her keep by giving lessons. Mary’s love of Scotland, apparent in her nostalgic 1831 Preface to Frankenstein and her enduring passion for mountain landscapes, is also borne out by the fact that she begged to be allowed to extend her stay there this time to ten months. A more personal reason was her deep attachment to Isabella, whose life was undergoing a surprising change.

  David Booth came south to London in January 1814 for what would seem, from the regularity of his appearance in Godwin’s diary, to have been the express purpose of seeing Mary’s father. Lack of records has made it impossible to establish the precise date on which Booth’s wife Margaret, a long-term invalid, died; did he come to London to ask Godwin for his daughter’s hand? We know that she and Isabella had been frequent visitors to his home, that he relished their company, and that both were spirited and intelligent enough to attract this brilliant and demanding man.

  If this was the case, Booth timed his visit badly. Godwin, in the early winter of 1814, was almost out of his mind with anxiety about the money which Shelley seemed ready to bestow on Tremadoc and on Leigh Hunt, the radical editor imprisoned in 1813 on a charge of insulting the Prince Regent in his paper, the Examiner, but never on his chosen mentor. If a proposal was indeed Booth’s mission, and it is hard to guess what else could have brought him down from Fife for two weeks in the middle of a viciously cold winter, it was an unrewarding one.

  If Booth did raise the suggestion, perhaps without Mary’s knowledge, it was rejected. Returning to Scotland, he proposed to his late wife’s youngest sister, Isabella – and was accepted. Socially, both he and the Baxters paid a high price for the match. The Glassite Church, unable to tolerate marriage to a wife’s sister, pronounced the sentence of excommunication on both Baxter and the man who now became his son-in-law for the second time.§ To be excommunicated was to be exiled; none of their fellow Glassites were permitted to maintain more than the barest contact with them after this.

  William Thomas Baxter was not rich enough to support the popular notion that Booth married his daughters for their fortunes. There is little doubt that he was in awe of his brilliant son-in-law. Booth was a man who appeared always to achieve his ambitions; Baxter, kind, weak and thoroughly decent, adored by his children, complied with his wishes. Isabella would become the mistress of a fine house, and the wife of a man who would never crush her own bright intelligence; standing together, Baxter imagined they could survive the disgrace of public humiliation.

  To Mary, such a bold flouting of convention became a definition of love; if Isabella, the girl she most admired and wished to emulate, could break the rules, then so could she. Reading Maria, the novel on which Mary Wollstonecraft had been working at the time of her death, she read what sounded like an appeal to stretch her own wings:

  Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice, or enter into my reasoning: I would then, with fond anxiety, lead you very early in life to form your grand principle of action, to save you from the vain regret of having, through irresolution, let the springtide of existence pass away, unimproved,
unenjoyed. Gain experience – ah! gain it – while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness; it includes your utility, by a different path.18

  An opportunity to gain experience was close at hand. Mary, a blooming sixteen-year-old no longer troubled by her afflicted arm, was remembered by her Scottish friends for her clear bright skin, her large hazel eyes and the crowning glory of her astonishing hair. Robert Baxter, a shy seventeen-year-old visiting home from the Edinburgh firm where he worked with Charles Clairmont, fell in love with her serene smile and the slanting sideways glances which fascinated all Mary’s male admirers. It became part of the Baxter family’s unhappy history that Robert wanted to make Mary his wife and followed her back to London with that intention. Mary, unfortunately for him, met someone else.

  On 15 and 16 March, unusually, Godwin recorded having written both to Baxter and to his daughter; the fact that Mary travelled home four days later suggests that her father had ordered her return. Almost two years after she first set foot in Scotland, she said goodbye to the family who had made her one of themselves. Among the sensible wool gowns and shawls needed to keep out the bitter cold of a Scottish winter on the East Coast, she took back to London a brightly checked tartan dress, of the kind that a Walter Scott heroine would be proud to wear.

  Sunday March 20 1814. I went out to the Cottage in the forenoon [the diarist was a distant Baxter relative] to see Mary Godwin shipped for London – I understood she would be away by twelve, but the vessel did not sail [until?] two. The day cleared and we wandered about all the adjoining grounds. The vessel (old Wishart) at length came out, and about three o’clock the boat came ashore and took her on board from the Bottle Works.