Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  was made clear by a spirit that sees into the truth of things, & affections preserved pure & sacred from the corrupting contamination of vulgar superstitions. No expressions can convey the remotest conception of the manner in which she dispelled my delusions. The sublime & rapturous moment when she confessed herself mine, who had so long been her’s in secret cannot be painted to mortal imaginations …7

  Subsequent references by Shelley to the following day, 27 June, as having been his true birthday (he was born on 4 August), suggest that this was the day on which he and Mary first made love. The discreet north-eastern corner of St Pancras churchyard would have seemed an appropriate setting, as if Mary Wollstonecraft were presiding over their union. Her grave was conveniently shaded by willows.

  The danger of allocating responsibility too confidently can be shown by quoting from three separate accounts of this celebrated episode in literary history. Harriet, writing a bitter letter to her Irish friend Catherine Nugent in November 1814, had no doubts:

  Mary was determined to seduce him. She is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying of love for him.8

  Jane Shelley, telling the story almost as she had heard it in the 1840s from Mary, her mother-in-law, made it seem impossible for any woman to have resisted Shelley’s anguished appeal. Her account, published in 1859, added a twist of its own by killing off Harriet in order to present Mary, at their first meeting, as the angelic comforter of an unhappy widower. Mary, in this version, did nothing more than agree to become Shelley’s second wife.

  Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past – how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enroll his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own.9

  Finally, for the purpose of contrast, we have an account given by William Michael Rossetti, a poetry-loving Victorian who rightly suspected Jane Shelley of a cover-up. Rossetti restored Harriet to life and showed Mary acting as she had been taught to do by her parents’ writings and example. To a man living at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, there was no shame in love without wedding rings.

  [T]here is no evidence at all that Mary did anything reprehensible with a view to supplanting Harriett, and securing Shelley to herself. When he sought her love, she freely and warmly gave it; and in so doing, she again acted strictly within the scope of her own code of right.10

  This was not Godwin’s view. On 6 July, having been coolly informed that he could expect only half the £2,500 which he regarded as already his, he learned that the rest of the money would be required to support Shelley in the new life he intended to live abroad with Mary. If Shelley tried to enlist his sympathy by pointing out that the hero of Fleetwood had eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl, Godwin probably responded by drawing his attention to the words of the Preface. Whatever he might have said once in Political Justice, he did not, in 1816, regard marriage as an evil monopoly: had he not married twice himself? Shelley refused to listen. Coolly invited to give support and even to provide a list of travel-contacts, Godwin refused to comply. It took him two days to summon up the energy to discuss the matter with his daughter, an event bleakly recorded as ‘Talk’ in his diary.

  Harriet, already alarmed by what struck her as an unusually long silence – four days – from her husband, was summoned to a meeting in London the following week and informed of recent developments. She must have behaved with considerable dignity; on 14 July, Shelley thanked her for her understanding, assured her of his enduring brotherly friendship and hoped that she might come to appreciate Mary’s sufferings, and ‘the tyranny which is exercised upon her’.11 The tyranny was, presumably, Mrs Godwin’s wish to use her as a shop-assistant. Harriet cannot have forgotten that it was just this knightly sense of mission which had led Shelley, in the summer of 1811, to rescue her from the oppression of boarding-school. At the time of their elopement she had been the age Mary was now. At nineteen, poor Harriet was ready to admit to Catherine Nugent that she felt thoroughly over the hill, worn out by the never-ending drama of life with Shelley.12 But she had no wish to be deserted. Having made a show of accepting defeat with grace, she struck back.

  The next two days were taken up with a flurry of visits between the Godwins and the Shelleys. Harriet and Shelley called at Skinner Street together on 15 July. They were coldly informed that Godwin was not at home, but he paid a call on Harriet later the same day. It seems that Godwin promised to do his best for her; his intentions were reinforced the following day, when Cornelia Turner arrived at Skinner Street to talk about her own friendship with Shelley. A visit from Cornelia’s mother on 18 July led Godwin to advise Thomas Turner to remove his wife from harm’s way. She was sent to join her husband in Devon the following month and never saw Shelley again. Later accounts by Mrs Godwin and Jane Clairmont indicate that Mary was given a stern dressing-down, after which she promised Harriet not to interfere with her marriage. Shelley agreed to stay out of Skinner Street; reassured, Godwin wrote letters to Lady Mountcashell, who was about to leave London for Italy, and to the author Helen Maria Williams, a warm friend and admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft’s who had lived in France for many years. It is just possible that, knowing Shelley planned to travel abroad, Godwin was writing letters of introduction. It is more likely that he was making arrangements to place his daughter in homes where she could be protected from an ardent suitor. Both Miss Williams and Lady Mountcashell were forceful characters; both would gladly have done Godwin a favour.

  Godwin’s record shows a tranquil third week of July. Somewhat astonishingly, he and Shelley saw each other almost every day, presumably to discuss their financial arrangements, while Mary took up residence in the schoolroom at the top of the house. Godwin supposed that all was under control. He was unaware that Jane Clairmont was helping to smuggle love letters in and out of Skinner Street. Among the packets which were surreptitiously conveyed to the schoolroom were two books. One was of particular significance.

  Shelley’s brief ‘A Refutation of Deism’, which was published anonymously earlier in the year, arrived with Mary’s name handsomely printed on its calf binding.13 The second book, inscribed to ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’, was a copy of Queen Mab. The poem had been dedicated to Harriet; Shelley undid the tribute with a few suggestive lines which alluded to a woman who deserted her beloved in a time of need. Mary did not find it difficult to interpret their meaning. She was being asked to honour their oath of love. And so she would.

  Tiny printed hands – these appear in all early editions of the book – highlighted the notes to Queen Mab in which Shelley presented the propositions to which he attached most importance. Following them carefully, and registering that these notes included long quotations from, among others, the writings of her father, Mary could see her lover as Godwin’s intellectual heir. But Shelley was more extreme than Godwin had ever wished to be. Monarchy, here, was yoked to gold and murder as one of the ‘hateful sons of Heaven’, while religion was presented as a cheat, the daughter of Falsehood. Christ’s return from death was made to sound as unremarkable as that of the drowned persons who were often successfully resuscitated by the Royal Humane Society. The only difference, in Shelley’s view, was that the RHS did their work without passing it off as a miracle.

  The hand-signalled note which Mary examined most carefully concerned love, sex and marriage. Here again, she found Shelley carrying on the work her parents had begun before she was born. Marriage, he wrote, should continue only so long as there was mutual love; so much for Harriet. Ideally, marriage would be abolished and, along with it, the notion of enduring relationships. ‘Love is free,’ he wrote: ‘to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.’


  *

  Mary’s own copy of Queen Mab offers the first clear evidence we have of her passionate and intense nature. She read it when their love seemed doomed; on the endpapers, she let another poet express her feelings of despair. ‘To Thyrza’ had been Lord Byron’s lament for the loss of someone dear to him. ‘Ours too,’ Mary noted enthusiastically after copying Byron’s reference to ‘The glance that none saw beside’. Byron’s poem alluded to a sacred pledge; the words which Mary added here echoed both the sense of loss and of commitment:

  … what shall I write that I love the author beyond all powers of expression and that I am parted from him.

  Dearest and only love by that love we have promised to each other although I may not be your[s] I can never be another[s] But I am thine exclusively thine – by the kiss of love … I have pledged myself to thee and sacred is the gift –14

  The word ‘sacred’ recurs three times in Mary’s entry on the endpapers; the last presents her lover as the ‘sacred vision’ to whom she was willing to dedicate herself. Confined to her lonely schoolroom with only Jane to solace her, Mary contemplated a future of solitary devotion.

  Mrs Godwin related the next episode of the drama in retrospect to Lady Mountcashell. Showing her usual blithe disregard for the facts and eager to emphasize her own creditable role, she enlarged the time scheme, spreading what may have taken place in two or three days to cover two weeks.

  On an unspecified date after Mary’s interview with her father, Shelley dashed into Skinner Street with a wild look. Followed by Mrs Godwin (her husband was out of the house), he rushed upstairs to the schoolroom; she ran after him. Having been pushed aside ‘with extreme violence’, or so she claimed, Mrs Godwin burst in to find Shelley urging his beloved to swallow a bottle of laudanum before he shot himself – he produced a small pistol – and so ensured that they were united in death. Jane burst into screams, Mary turned ‘pale as a ghost’ and James Marshall, who had been waiting downstairs to dine with Godwin, hurried in to plead for calm. Mary, ‘tears streaming down her cheeks’, begged Shelley to go home and promised eternal fidelity if he would only be reasonable. Shelley did as asked, but left the laudanum behind. (This, at a time when laudanum was easily available over the counter, need not mean that he intended Mary to take it.)15

  Shortly afterwards, almost certainly less than the week given in Mrs Godwin’s account, the Skinner Street household was woken by a midnight visit from Shelley’s landlord, bringing the news that his lodger had taken an overdose of laudanum. Hurrying around the corner to the Hatton Garden lodging, they found the patient already in the care of a local doctor.§ Mrs Godwin stayed with him all the following day, after which they called in Mrs de Boinville, who slowly nursed him back to health. It was during this period, in Jane’s recollection, that the bookshop porter became engaged as a carrier of love notes.

  Certain details can be slotted into this sensational episode. Godwin’s journal, which records no substantial break in his conversations and meetings with Shelley, shows that he had a talk with Jane on 22 July. Since the word ‘talk’ always meant serious discussion in Godwin’s diary, it may mark the point at which his stepdaughter, sternly reprimanded, stopped carrying messages.

  On 25 July, Godwin wrote a letter of earnest appeal to Shelley. ‘You entered my home on 19 June,’ he wrote, conferring an importance on this date that remains puzzling, for Shelley had been in and out of Skinner Street all that month, and said nothing about Mary to her father until 6 July. Godwin acknowledged that the next week of visits had been irreproachable. ‘I trusted to your principles.’ Shelley’s feelings for Mary were derided as ‘caprice and a momentary impulse over every impulse that is dear to the honest heart’. He went on to praise Harriet as ‘an innocent and meritorious wife’ before begging Shelley to spare ‘the fair and spotless fame of my young child … I could not believe that you wd. enter my house under the name of benefactor, to leave behind an endless poison to corrode my soul. I would as soon have credited that the stars would fall from Heav’n for my destruction …’16 Moving though Godwin’s words were, it is hard for us – and was no doubt hard for Shelley – to forget that he was at the same time hotly pursuing his young ‘benefactor’ for the sum of approximately £2,500 which he believed he had been promised.

  No record exists of the final days of secret planning. It is not clear whether it was Shelley, or Mary, or even Jane who proposed that they start a new life abroad. Jane’s involvement is made probable by the fact that they intended to cross France, now open again to foreign travellers, and to settle at Uri in Switzerland, which Jane looked on as the home of the Clairmonts, and therefore herself. Much has been made of the fact that she was taken along for her skill in speaking French, but Shelley already knew the language well enough to have quoted extensively from Holbach’s Système de la Nature, in the original, in the notes to Queen Mab. A double rescue from the supposedly tyrannous supervision of Mrs Godwin, together with his taste for forming communes, was reason enough for Jane’s inclusion in the plan. Mary, heavily in her stepsister’s debt for her work as chaperone, letter-carrier and general accomplice, is unlikely to have raised objections. She may not have known that Shelley intended his pregnant wife to join them as a sister of the commune at a slightly later date.17

  Mary had already packed a small box with her first writings, her letters from Shelley, her father and her closest friends. She also, strangely, packed a letter from Harriet, asking Mary to persuade Shelley to come back to her. Shortly after four in the morning on 28 July, Shelley sent word that the chaise was waiting for them at the end of his street. Mary, at the last moment, became uncertain. She went to his rooms, then ran back to Skinner Street. A letter of farewell was written and propped on Godwin’s dressing-table. At just after five, unobtrusively dressed in black silk gowns, the two young girls tiptoed down the stairs and out along the silent street to the corner of Hatton Garden: ‘she was in my arms – we were safe,’ Shelley wrote with his usual sense of drama.18

  The strain and – possibly – the first stages of pregnancy made a poor traveller of Mary. Stops had to be made at every stage on the road to Dover so that she could rest. Shelley, convinced that they were being pursued, hired four horses at Dartford to increase their speed; the journey, nevertheless, took almost twelve hours.

  They left Dover shortly before dusk in a hired fisherman’s boat manned by two sailors. Just before dawn, a thunder squall struck the boat and a heavy, rolling sea swept in, almost capsizing them. Shelley prepared himself to die while Mary, mute with terror, leaned against his shaking knees. The squall subsided, however, and she even managed to sleep a little as a steady wind blew them towards the Calais shore. To Shelley, wide-eyed and watchful, a bright omen for their future seemed to appear as the sun rose slowly up, streaking the sky above the wide wet sands with light.

  *

  The news of their flight was, to the Godwins, devastating. In one impulsive moment, Mary and Jane had undone all the careful years of securing their good reputations and preparing them for respectable marriages. Writing to Lady Mountcashell in November, Mrs Godwin lamented having tried to make ladies of such an ungrateful pair. Better, she now felt, to have brought them up ‘on an inferior footing as befitted our poverty they would never have attracted Mr S’s attention and they might now be safe at home …’19

  She had no hope of influencing Mary, but Jane might still be persuaded to listen to the voice of common sense. If she, at least, could be brought back from Calais, all was not lost. Travelling all night and crossing the Channel by day, an exhausted Mrs Godwin reached France on the evening after the runaways. Shelley and his companions, resting in the best rooms Dessein’s celebrated hotel at Calais could offer, were informed that a fat lady had arrived and was calling for her daughter. Jane spent that night in her mother’s room and probably swore that she had been abducted against her will; this was how Mrs Godwin would always tell the story. By the morning, Jane was ready to go home. It says much for
Shelley’s powers of persuasion that it took him only one brief discussion to change her mind. Strolling along the harbour front later that day, Shelley had the satisfaction of seeing their persecutor making her way heavily down to the Dover boat. Tyranny had been vanquished!

  Charles Clairmont was given the task of passing the news on to Fanny and summoning her home from Wales. Godwin was offered a grim distraction. Another of his young disciples, one Procter Patrickson, a Cambridge student, had been showing worrying signs of depression. Godwin had sent him a little money, promising more, with a recommendation to read Seneca. Patrickson had then spent a weekend at Skinner Street and was told that no more money could be given to him for the time being. On 8 August Patrickson went back to Cambridge and shot himself. On the same day, ten-year-old William Godwin, unable to bear the gloomy house and its domestic traumas any longer, ran away from home. The fact that he was found two days later, unharmed, did not lessen the anguish of the two days during which Godwin and his wife appeared to have lost three of their family at a stroke.

  Shelley, who had burst into their lives like a comet, had presided over the devastation of all their hopes. He had given far less financial help than he had promised. He had wrecked the reputations, the ‘spotless fame’ of their daughters. Harriet, whom they did their best to reassure, passed on the wounding gossip that Godwin had finally raised money for his business by selling two children to Shelley for £1,500.

  Notes

  1. Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story (1946), p. 113, quoting an unidentified contemporary annalist.