Looking back to a row of figures waving from the shore, to a white house lying between bare mountains and an ever-widening expanse of water, cold silver in the low March sunlight, Mary held the images in her mind. They had all, as the friendly diarist cousin noted, been ‘very sorry-like to part’.19 And now she could hardly see them. It would be surprising if she did not shed a few tears. The kindly and unassuming Baxter household had become closer to her idea of a real home than her father’s house of trade, oozing with the scent of lost opportunities, haunted by the threatening presence of creditors at the door. And what, she must have wondered, was her future there to be? A day job at the counter and nights spent writing whatever her father supposed would sell best on his list? The prospect was not cheerful for a girl of sixteen. Perhaps she took some comfort from Robert Baxter’s hints of a marriage proposal to come.
Notes
1. From MWS’s Preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
2. MWS and PBS–W.T. Baxter, 30.12.1817. Here she assured Baxter that his daughter’s ‘are not below me in station’. For information on the Baxters, I am much indebted to the present head of the family, Normaile Baxter.
3. WG–MWS, 10.10.1821 (Abinger, Dep. c. 524).
4. The description of Isabella and the observation on her similarity to Shelley derive from a book by her grandson, James Stuart, Reminiscences (1911).
5. Charles Clairmont (hereafter Ch.C)–MWS, 18.9.1822 (CC, 1).
6. Stuart, Reminiscences, see note 4, above.
7. See note 1, above.
8. Ibid.
9. Elizabeth Hitchener’s view is reported on 4 August 1812 in Harriet Shelley’s letter to her Irish friend Catherine Nugent: Harriet’s letters to Catherine Nugent are given in chronologically placed footnotes to PBSL, 1.
10. HS–Catherine Nugent, [?] October 1812.
11. Francis Place–WG (BL Mss 35, 145 f.44).
12. This was quoted angrily back to Fanny in a letter from Shelley, 10.12.1812 (PBSL, 1).
13. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974; Penguin Books, 1987), p. 172.
14. HS–Catherine Nugent, 16.1.1813; she made her allusion to Mrs Godwin on 22 June 1813.
15. The anecdote about Lamb is given in Forfar’s Pastime Papers by the Reverend John Stirton (Forfar, 1917), pp. 98–9; see also Dundee Advertiser, 7.9.1897, reproducing Christina (Christy) Baxter’s recollections.
16. Marshall, MWS, 1, pp. 30–4. Marshall, whose biography was published in 1889, is probably a more reliable source than Christy in her long interview about her connection to Mary, given eight years later. Marshall’s account may give a more accurate reflection of Mary’s own recollections, as given to Lady Shelley, with whom Florence Marshall was in close contact. I have failed to discover the whereabouts, if it still exists, of the diary Christy Baxter kept in 1812–13.
17. William Hazlitt, Conversations of Northcote (1830). Northcote and his sister were among Godwins closest friends.
18. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria (1798), ch. 7. It is not clear when Mary first read her mother’s novel but it is reasonable to suppose that the Baxters had copies of her work.
19. Diary, quoted in A.H. Millar, ‘Some Unpublished Facts’, Dundee Advertiser, 2.12.1911.
* Estranged from her husband since 1805, Margaret Mountcashell had left him and her children to live with her compatriot, George Tighe, father of her three-year-old daughter, Laurette. She visited Skinner Street in 1812 to collect a young female servant, Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Parker, whom she took to Pisa in 1814. In the light of what was to happen to Mary, it is worth noting how kindly disposed the Godwins were towards anybody else whose behaviour flouted the conventions: Aaron Burr, Lady Mountcashell and Amelia Curran were all well received.
† Named Percy Bysshe Shelley after his grandfather, the first baronet (Sir Bysshe bought his title in 1806, when his grandson was thirteen), the poet was known as Bysshe only to his family and, seemingly, Hogg. Others called him ‘Percy’ or ‘Shelley’.
‡ This was Coleridge’s unexpected success, Remorse; the entire Godwin family attended the premiere at Drury Lane and thrilled to the great sorcery scene in Act 3.
§ The marriage would also have been deemed illegal by Anglicans, but not an excommunicable offence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LOVE AND CONFUSION
1814
1814. March 31. The Allied Armies, with the Emperors of Russia and Austria, together with the king of Prussia at their head, enter Paris – dethrone Bonaparte – liberate the Pope – proclaim the restoration of the Bourbons, in unison with the French people – avow civil and religious freedom – and announce peace and harmony to the whole world. June 30: Peace proclaimed at London with its usual formalities amidst the acclamations of an immense multitude.
Contemporary diarist, quoted in Edmund Blunden, Shelley1
THESE WERE THE GREAT EVENTS OF THE SUMMER OF 1814. A DISTANT relation of Percy Shelley’s with rather different political views joyfully recorded the fêting of the new French king on his visit to London. Subsequent festivities were held in honour of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia. The good old days of despotism were back, it seemed, with a vengeance. With peace established, a nation starved of continental travel took to the roads in a rush for the ports and boats to France where the innkeepers, prudently trebling their rates, awaited them with open arms. Booksellers, over the next few years, did a roaring trade in travel books.
Mary, exhausted from her week-long sea journey, reached London the night before Paris surrendered to the allies and two days before the formal deposing of Napoleon. The Godwins went out with the rest of the city to see it grandly illuminated to honour the return to Europe of legitimate rule, but there were no private celebrations at Skinner Street. While less extravagantly despondent than Byron and Hazlitt, Godwin had shared their high hopes of Napoleon’s reform plans for Europe. As a staunch anti-monarchist, he anticipated a return to the bad old ways with Bourbon rulers being supported and manipulated by venal churchmen.
The city was in a state of euphoria; 41 Skinner Street was, by contrast, as gloomy as a sepulchre. It took only a few days for Mary to discover the reason: Shelley, she gathered, stood alone between her family and the debtors’ prison down the street.
Shelley, since he first wrote to Godwin in the spring of 1812, had been obtaining loans in a way seemingly devised to cause the maximum of damage to the Sussex estate which his family saw as a sacred heritage and which Shelley himself saw only as a source of funding for philanthropic activities. By taking out post-obit (post-death) loans, he had found a way to obtain large interest-free sums of money. Creditors were happy to provide the money he wanted if he would promise to return up to four times the amount of the loan after the deaths of Sir Bysshe, his grandfather, and of his father Timothy Timothy was sixty-one in 1814 and Sir Bysshe was eighty-three; the creditors, never suspecting what old bones Shelley’s father would make, were delighted with the bargains they had struck. Poor Mary, in the long-distant future, would be threatened with ruin by Shelley’s impractical transactions in these early years.
The level of Shelley’s borrowing had escalated rapidly after the summer of 1813 when he turned twenty-one, but none of the money had yet found its way to Skinner Street, to Godwin’s considerable gloom. In March, however, a post-obit bond for £8,000 had been auctioned to obtain a credit of £2,500. This, so Godwin understood from his young friend, would be a gift to himself. The moneylenders, however, refused to hand over a penny until everything was legally underwritten. What, for example, if Shelley predeceased his children? He had married Harriet in Scotland. Was it certain that his offspring would have legitimate status under English law? As bastards, they would have no responsibility for their father’s debts. This, from the lenders’ point of view, was far from satisfactory.
The moneylenders’ conditions, rather than a renewed passion for his wife, forced Shelley to obtain a marriage licence on 22 March 1814. Godwin, who had already been helpful
ly investigating ways to insure Shelley’s life – in case he predeceased his father – was there to see that all was in order. The following day, the Shelleys were married for a second time in a Church of England ceremony. Perhaps Harriet, pregnant with their second child, saw this as a cementing of their love; it seems unlikely. A month later, Mrs de Boinville casually informed a friend that Shelley was ‘again a widower’. This suggests that the couple were already leading separate lives.2
Shelley was still unknown to Mary, unless they had briefly met at the dinner in 1812; everything she knew was gleaned from the letters which Godwin had read out in the early days, and from accounts supplied by the rest of the family. Shelley was rumoured to be spending most of his time at Mrs de Boinville’s home near Windsor and to be studying Italian with her daughter, Thomas Turners wife. Cornelia was emancipated, intelligent and attractive. Turner was often away. The Godwin girls must have wondered if there was something in it. Perhaps they felt sorry for Shelley He was so kind, so impulsive, so good-hearted; it was sad that Harriet should be spending such a lot of time with her elder sister, Eliza Westbrook, when she knew that her husband found Eliza’s company detestable. If he was looking elsewhere, the blame surely lay with his wife.
The most careful sifting of the available evidence cannot bring us close to what was going on in Shelley’s mind during the early months of 1814, but there is little doubt that his thoughts were confused. Harriet had already disappointed him by refusing to fall in love with Hogg as his poem, ‘Thy look of love’ had urged her to do the previous year. Fanny felt that he was attracted to her and became so moody and disturbed that Mrs Godwin packed her off for a long holiday in Wales on 23 May; impressionable Jane must have felt something more than sisterly affection for a young man who took the trouble to visit her boarding-school at Walham Green and who sought her company for long evening walks, even if he only did so because he was afraid to walk alone. (Shelley suffered from an enduring belief – we could call it a persecution complex – that he was being pursued by malevolent strangers, ready to spring out of the darkness and set about him.)
Everything points away from a happy marriage and yet, in June, Shelley was still planning to return with Harriet to the house in Wales. Unless we accept, first, that Shelley, after reading Godwin, had lost any belief that marriage entailed a mutually exclusive relationship,* and, secondly, that he was nearer to the edge of insanity than he had ever been before in his volatile career, nothing makes sense. Shelley, in 1814, was reinventing himself every month as a different character. The people he knew had also to be reinvented, to accommodate each new perception of events. His emotions were like a tinderbox, waiting for the match. Cornelia started a flame; Mary Godwin set the box on fire.
The first recorded meeting between Shelley and Mary was on 5 May. Godwin’s journal shows that Shelley visited Skinner Street at least seven times before the end of the month. Since Mary often worked downstairs in the shop, there was ample opportunity for them to get to know each other. On 8 June – Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a barrister, was able to establish the precise date from a case which he had been attending – the two young men called at Skinner Street in search of Godwin. The philosopher was not at home; Hogg’s account conveys the overwrought state of Shelley’s mind when he tells us that Shelley repeatedly asked him where Godwin was, although Hogg can have had no idea.
I did not know, and, to say the truth, I did not care. He continued his uneasy promenade; and I stood reading the names of old English authors on the backs of the venerable volumes [they were waiting in Godwin’s study], when the door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called, ‘Shelley!’ A thrilling voice answered, ‘Mary!’ and he darted out of the room.
But not before Hogg had caught a glimpse of a tartan-frocked and very young lady, ‘fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look’.
Shelley left the room to talk to her for a moment and then announced that there was no point in waiting. Godwin was out. Questioned as to who she was – a daughter of William Godwin? – Shelley gave the secret of his excitement away with the answer. Not only of Godwin, he told Hogg: ‘The daughter of Godwin and Mary.’4 The awed tone, if we can trust Hogg’s memory, and the nervousness of Shelley’s manner, combine to suggest that he was already deeply smitten, as much by the thought of Mary’s glorious parentage as by the girl herself. An additional reason for his nervousness that day can be surmised from the fact that young Robert Baxter had just arrived in London. Baxter spent three days at Skinner Street, during which it seems likely that he proposed and was dismissed.
The frequency of Shelley’s visits to Skinner Street in June must have been occasioned by his growing interest in Mary. Godwin, enmeshed in his financial concerns, was oblivious to what was going on. Jane, who later represented herself as a passive and credulous girl, a little in awe of her quiet, strong-willed stepsister, was enrolled as a useful ally as the romance developed. When Shelley and Mary walked out together, they took care to invite Jane to join them. Sometimes, as the summer heat grew, the three of them waited for the evenings to bring a little cool before they strolled down the street and into Charterhouse Square where, an observant gardener subsequently told Mrs Godwin, her daughter had walked alone up and down the paths while ‘the fair young lady’ and the young gentleman sat whispering in an arbour. Shelley took lodgings in Hatton Garden, just round the corner from Skinner Street. His only London friends were Hogg and young Thomas Hookham of the publishing and library firm, fashionably established in Bond Street.† Nothing could have seemed more natural, especially as a near neighbour, than that he should treat the Godwins’ home as his own.
Writing a long explanatory letter to Hogg on 4 October, Shelley later tried to create a logical chain of events and to put his behaviour in the best light. It was when he was staying at Bracknell with the de Boinvilles, he explained, that he had realized that there was more to life than the ‘cultivating’ of Harriet. The more civilized company of Cornelia Turner had opened his eyes; he had felt something like love. Instantly, his feelings for Harriet had turned to physical disgust. He felt ‘as if a dead & living body had been linked together in loathsome & horrible communion’. No mention was made of Harriet’s having been unfaithful, although this would later become Shelley’s chief defence against charges of deserting his pregnant wife. Walking almost forty miles from Bracknell to make a secret call on his mother at Field Place while his father was away, he thought himself into such an excited mood that he almost believed Cornelia was already his. ‡ But Cornelia was unavailable.5
Shelley’s letter then proceeded to the subject of Mary, and to explaining her effect on him. As a lover’s portrait, it is rather odd. He had, Shelley said, been unable to resist Mary’s persuasive and sometimes pathetic smile, or the ‘wildness and sublimity of her feelings’, revealed only in gestures and looks. She was ‘not incapable of ardent indignation and hatred’, as he must have discovered as soon as he mentioned her stepmother. It was her intellect which had most attracted him, he told Hogg, and which left him dazzled, ‘far surpassed [by her] in originality, in genuine elevation & magnificence …’ But a despicable superstitious ritual kept him chained to the wife he no longer loved.
It was, in Shelley’s account, Mary who took the initiative. Mary’s own version suggests that his behaviour prepared the ground. On the evening of 26 June, Jane and she accompanied him to Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave at St Pancras. Jane made a tactful retreat. It was then, Mary remembered, that Shelley ‘oppened, at first with the confidence of friendship, & then with the ardour of love, his whole heart to me’.6 Encouraged by her sympathetic manner, Shelley let his imagination loose on the past. Mary was given a vivid account of his unhappy Eton schooldays and of how Timothy Shelley, troubled by his son’s increasingly erratic behaviour, had taken advice about having him dispatched to a private madhouse. (Shelley had a habit of converting his father’s threats into acts; it seems unlikely that Sir Timothy would have taken such drast
ic measures.) He told her of his early obsession with magic, with death and with chemical experiments, material which would find its way into her creation of Victor Frankenstein.
Questioned by Mary about his marriage, Shelley hinted that Harriet had been unfaithful and even that the new baby might not be his. There is no reason to suppose that he had any reason to suspect Harriet; the first written mention of her supposed unfaithfulness appears over a year later and the source of the allegation was not Shelley but a gossipy friend of Godwin’s. But Shelley, when excited, was capable of saying whatever came into his head. It is quite possible that he told Mary any lies necessary to win her sympathy. What matters is that Mary believed him. Godwin had brought her up to suppose that honourable men always told the truth.
Mary, by the age of sixteen, had absorbed the most inspiringly progressive aspects of her parents’ beliefs, while discounting the revisions Godwin had made in his later writings. Like Shelley, she thrilled to the boldness of her father’s role as a challenger of convention. Like him, she preferred to forget that Godwin’s 1805 Preface to Fleetwood had painstakingly rejected the idea that he wanted man to ‘supersede and trample upon the institutions of the country in which he lives’. The chief institution he had in mind was marriage. To his daughter, Shelley’s marriage offered a challenge to act boldly in the name of love and Political Justice. She wanted to fulfil her destiny, to show herself as the true heir to her parents. Isabella had defied the Church to marry the man she loved; she would be bolder still. Shelley seemed hesitant; compared to him, Mary glowed like a young priestess, aflame and certain in her grasp of the situation. Her understanding, Shelley told Hogg,
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