Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The journal shows another side of Mary’s nature, tart, sharp-tongued, impatient. ‘[T]alk about going away & as usual settle nothing,’ she noted on 15 October; three days later, Shelley and Claire sit up and ‘for a wonder do not frighten themselves’. Hookham calls on 20 October: ‘that man comes strictly under the appellation of a prig.’ Shelley’s wife is suspected of causing trouble at Skinner Street on 27 October: ‘she is a detestable woman.’ On 9 November, when they moved to new lodgings in Nelson Square, down on the damp flats south of the Thames and in sight of the reedy wastes of Lambeth Marsh, Mary noted that Claire had become gloomy: ‘she is very sullen with Shelley – well never mind my love we are happy.’

  The increasing number of irritable entries after this date could be ascribed to pregnancy and ill health; the Claire factor should not be overlooked. There had been a moment, shortly after the move to Nelson Square, when it seemed as if they might be rid of her; she came back after just two days at Skinner Street; since then, Shelley had attached her to him as closely as a pet dog. Mary could not express her thoughts about Claire too openly in a shared diary; her anger vented itself in more general observations. Hookham was now a ‘nasty little man’. The extravagantly imaginative novels by Charles Brockden Brown in which Shelley delighted were ‘very stupid’. Fanny was being ‘slavish’ in her obedience to the Skinner Street rules. She had been obliged to endure Claire’s ‘nonsense’ about Hogg who, having come to terms with Shelley’s new lifestyle, was becoming quite a regular visitor to Nelson Square. This was the time when, having failed to recruit Harriet, Shelley began planning an alternative commune, in which sexual freedom would be practised. The members were to be Mary and Hogg, Claire and himself. Mary would demonstrate her liberated spirit by dividing her favours between the two young men.

  Hogg and Shelley had been friends since Oxford, where Hogg had been fascinated by Shelley’s oddity, his avid, perpetual consumption of books, his passion for chemical experiments, his violent hatred of convention and, above all, of religious convention. They had been jointly expelled from the university, not for their collaboration on The Necessity of Atheism, but for their stubborn refusal to deny their authorship when offered this alternative by the Master and Fellows of University College.

  Superficially, the young men made an unlikely couple. Shelley, gangling and elegantly dishevelled (he seldom wore a hat, left his shirt unbuttoned and washed his shock of curls by dousing his head in a bucket of cold water), came from a prosperous and public-spirited family which could trace its lineage back beyond Sir Philip Sidney to John Shelley of Michelgrove, who died in 1526. Hogg, noisy, awkward and heavy-featured, came from a solid legal family in the north. His own career at the bar was well chosen by a man who told Peacock in 1817 that his chief ambition was to know ‘all cases in Law & all words and authors in Greek …’24 Aggressive, excitable and physically unattractive – Mary herself commented in 1836 on his unfortunate appearance – Hogg was also capable of the reticence of a prodded mollusc; even Shelley, trying to describe him to Maria Gisborne, admitted that he was a hard man to know.

  I cannot express

  His virtues, – though I know that they are great,

  Because he locks, then barricades the gate

  Within which they inhabit;–25

  Richard Holmes, in his biography of Shelley, speculated a homosexual aspect to the relationship between the two young men. This is hard to substantiate; it is more helpful to see a form of emulation in Hogg’s sexual advances first to Elizabeth Shelley, the sister who most resembled her brother, and then, when he was sharing lodgings in York in the autumn of 1811 with the Shelleys, to Harriet. Shelley, while insisting that he was not jealous, had defended his wife’s right to say no. Hogg’s gauche persistence led to a stand-off; a widening rift in the two young men’s political views continued to keep them apart.

  In the weeks after their return from Europe, shortly after a second examination of James Lawrence’s account of free love among the Nairs, Mary and Shelley read Hogg’s slight work of fiction, Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, published under a pseudonym by the Hookhams the previous year. Alexy, tall, thin and with an unusually small round head, shared more than his looks with Shelley. More surprising, given that Hogg had written the book long before he set eyes on Mary Godwin, was the pleasing description of the girl, also called Mary, with whom the dashing prince eventually falls in love. Alexy’s Mary is under average height, simply dressed and auburn-haired. She has a forehead ‘high and arched, of a degree of whiteness unparalleled’.26 Mary Godwin was small, plainly dressed and her hair was reddish-gold. Everybody who saw her commented on the unusual pallor of her complexion and on her high, intellectual forehead. Did Hogg, they wondered, have the gift of foresight?

  They enjoyed the book; Shelley, praising it in an unsigned review at the end of the year, drew flattering comparisons with the work of the celebrated eighteenth-century dramatist, Vittorio Alfieri, whose memoirs they had just read and admired.27 On 4 October, Shelley sent Hogg the long letter already mentioned, in which he justified his desertion of Harriet and described his new-found happiness. On 14 November, Hogg was invited to call at Nelson Square. He was noted by Shelley to have been ‘pleased’ with Mary. The two of them had talked ‘on very interesting subjects’.

  Claire returned from her short stay at Skinner Street the following day; on 16 November, while she and Shelley went ‘hopping about the town’, Hogg visited Mary alone. Four days later, he earned her scorn by making ‘a sad bungle’ of a debate on the subject of virtue.

  Harriet, as even her most loyal supporters acknowledged, was no intellectual; with Mary, Hogg confronted a mind well trained to match him in debate. His interest showed in the regularity of his visits; Mary began to apply herself seriously to the task of making Hogg a worthy companion for them. It was hard work. On 27 November, she was infuriated by his conventional attitude, noting that ‘he is sadly perverted and I begin to lose hope’; two days later, she defeated him in a debate on free will and necessity: ‘he quite wrong but quite puzzled – his arguments are very weak.’ On 4 December, she felt she liked him better but still regarded him as ‘un enfant perdu’; on 8 December, he was ‘more sincere’. She had ‘odd’ dreams about him that night. ‘I like him better each time,’ she wrote on 24 December. Slow in mind though he sometimes seemed, Hogg’s heavy, combative style may have reminded her of similar discussions with her father in happier days; Shelley, by contrast, was like a dragonfly, dazzling in movement, erratic in flight.

  Mary’s comments on Hogg were made in the journal which she and Shelley shared. She was writing not only to record her own feelings but to show Shelley that she was taking the friendship seriously. Shelley showed his approval by the tenderness of his own entries. He wrote of ‘delightful’ talks with her. She was ‘the sweet Maie’, when she slept, and ‘the poor Maie’ when she became sufficiently ill for William Lawrence, the surgeon, to be called to Nelson Square. He had opposed Hogg’s attempt to have a sexual relationship with Harriet because Harriet herself had been distressed. Mary was ready to share his enlightened views. Shelley probably egged her on by telling her how much less liberated Harriet had been. ‘I like him [Hogg] better each time,’ suggests more resolve than enthusiasm, but she was clearly trying hard.

  On New Year’s Day, Hogg wrote a love letter to Mary and enclosed with it a gift, approvingly noted in the journal by Shelley. Hogg’s side of the correspondence has disappeared, but Mary’s reply suggests that she was thrown by this sudden development. ‘You love me you say,’ she wrote back;

  I wish I could return it with the passion you deserve … But you know Hogg that we have known each other for so short a time and I did not think about love – so that I think that that also will come in time & then we shall be happier I do think than the angels who sing for ever or even the lovers of Janes world of perfection.28

  Claire Clairmont, years later, remembered that Mary had been a hapless pawn, trapped between Shelley�
�s vision and Hogg’s desire; Mary, she recalled, had wept bitterly over the prospect of having to sleep with Hogg, as Harriet had wept before her. But Mary does not sound like a victim and she was not writing to crush Hogg’s hopes, only to postpone things. Her next letter, written three days later, struck a flirtatious note; he must be sure to come when she was alone: ‘still I do not wish to persuade you to do that which you ought not.’

  She wrote to him as ‘Alexy’; she sent, at his request, a ringletted lock of hair; she coaxed him to go with her again and again to gaze at the statue of a beautiful female philosopher, Theoclea or Themistoclea, on exhibition among a display of military memorials. This was coquettish behaviour. Her letters were still telling Hogg that she could not contemplate a sexual relationship, not even with Shelley, until after the baby was born. Writing to him on 24 January, she took care to remain ambiguous about what she might choose to permit when she was a mother. Hogg would have needed all his legal skills to unravel just what he was being promised. All that was clear from Mary’s letter was that everything was to be done out of their shared devotion to Shelley.

  I who love him so tenderly & entirely whose life hangs on the beam of his eye and whose whole soul is entirely wrapt up in him – you who have so sincere a friendship for him to make him happy – no we need not try to do that for every thing we do will make him that without exertion …29

  Mary was going to great pains to spell out the fact that Shelley would always have first place in her heart, but it is hard not to conclude that she was discussing a sexual relationship with Hogg. Her letter ended with an assurance that she was writing ‘to one, one loves’ and wished ‘Good dreams to my Alexy’. She may have cried in private, as Claire claimed; she did, nevertheless, share Shelley’s views on free love. They had read about the Nair kingdom together; they admired Godwin’s original attack on mutually exclusive relationships. Mary may not, in the end, have slept with Hogg; that does not mean she lacked the will, if not the wish, to do so.

  *

  Shelley’s dissolute old grandfather, Sir Bysshe, died early in the New Year of 1815. Hurrying down to Field Place to learn the terms of the will, Shelley decided to make his visit the occasion of an outing for Claire. This was seen as an act of gross impertinence; Sir Timothy refused to let him into the house. Shelley, as Mary gleefully recorded in the journal, responded by sitting on the doorstep with her copy of Milton’s Comus ostentatiously opened to show her name on the flyleaf She also noted that Shelley would receive the income from £100,000 on his father’s death if he agreed to the provisions of the entail.

  Claire and Shelley spent at least one night together at an inn before returning to lodgings with Mary in the bright new suburb of Hans Town (modern Knightsbridge), on the western fringes of London. The landlady was made suspicious by their erratic comings and goings and by Hogg’s habit of staying overnight; on 8 February, Shelley and Claire found alternative rooms down the street. Mary gratefully noted that Hogg had used his holiday, an Ash Wednesday, to help her pack up for the move. They had a long talk, perhaps about Shelley’s decision to gain instant credit and an annual allowance by selling his father a part of the legacy which had been omitted from the tightly controlled entail.† Godwin, who still viewed his own future as dependent on the Shelley estate, had been anxious to offer advice. They received what Shelley described as an ‘equivocal but kind’ letter from him the day before the move. Mary could easily perceive the reason for his sudden wish to be agreeable. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was now heavily pregnant and that she had not spoken to her father for almost six months.

  The 1815 journal is full of intriguing deletions and gaps. Just enough remains of the next fortnight to show that, while up to the thrill of reading the newly married Lord Byron’s romantic Lara – ‘the finest of Lord B’s poems,’ Shelley noted – they were all in poor health. His insistence on a vegetarian diet may have been a contributing factor; turnips, potatoes, cabbage and carrots were the only vegetables easily available during the winter months. Mary’s baby, expected in late April, was born prematurely on 22 February. The doctor who arrived just too late for the delivery granted the infant little chance of survival. Shelley urged Fanny to visit and try to console Mary. It tells us much about the complicated way in which life was being conducted that the Godwins chose that night to sleep away from Skinner Street, enabling Fanny to do the same without their official knowledge. When Charles Clairmont also arrived to offer Mary his congratulations, he brought along a gift of baby linen from his mother to Mary. Godwin’s journal noted the young people’s absence. All was known; nothing was said.

  On 2 March, Claire, Shelley, Mary and the baby moved across London again, to Arabella Row, close to where John Nash was laying out plans for a king’s palace on the site of old Buckingham House. This was a cheerful area and the rooms were more spacious, large enough, if they could afford to buy one, to accommodate the piano with which Claire, a gifted singer and player, could entertain them in the evenings when they tired of reading. Here, as Hogg’s legal holidays approached, they planned to put their communal life into practice and defeat the absurdity of social conventions. ‘We shall see you tonight and soon always – which is a very happy thing,’ Mary told Hogg on the eve of the move.30

  Four days later, she wrote again. It was a short letter.

  My dearest Hogg my baby is dead – will you come to me as soon as you can – I wish to see you – It was perfectly well when I went to bed – I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it – it was dead then but we did not find that out till morning – from its appearance it evedently died of convulsions –

  Will you come – you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk – for I am no longer a mother now.31

  Mary suffered acutely from the loss of her child. Claire was frightened enough by her mood to send for Fanny. But Fanny did not come and Claire took the full brunt of her stepsister’s untargeted misery. Any idea of a commune which included Claire was abruptly dropped. On 11 March, Mary bitterly noted that their situation was hopeless because Claire would not go and live at Skinner Street: ‘then our house is the only remaining place – I see plainly – what is to be done –’ The next day, a Sunday, she recorded a quiet morning, ‘& happy for Clary does not get up till 4’. Two days later, she talked to Shelley about the need to get Claire out of their home: ‘the prospect appears to me more dismall than ever – not the least hope – this is indeed hard to bear.’

  Hogg did his best to divert her in his clumsy way. Mary was taken to the menagerie at Exeter Change in the Strand which she had visited as a child and where she now saw a lynx, a panther, a hyena and a lion whose roar could be heard as far away as Holborn. Her feelings were often revealed by notes on an apparently unconnected subject: the sadness she expressed when the lion died two months later sprang directly from her own bereavement.

  Infant mortality was tragically high in the nineteenth century; social historians invite us to suppose that parents felt their losses to a lesser degree then than we would today. But Mary felt deeply, and with reason. She had grown up believing that her own birth had killed a woman brimming with vitality; to bear and rear a child was the best recompense she could offer to herself and to the Fates to whom her journal sometimes darkly alluded. Instead, she now bore the sense of a double murder; not only had she killed her mother but she had allowed her own baby girl to die. The fault, in both cases, was felt to be hers.

  The journal shows that Mary was haunted by the sense that her baby’s death could somehow have been prevented. Perhaps she had been reading the curious account published in the 1814 Edinburgh Review of how Henry Cline, the doctor who had first attended her, had miraculously restored life to a sailor who had lain in a coma for seven months.32‡ On 19 March, Mary thought that her own seven-month baby had come to life again, ‘that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived …’ The following nigh
t, she had the same agonizing experience, of the dream which delusively fulfils a secret wish.

  In this miserable state of mind, and with Shelley suffering from an illness which would later in 1815 be diagnosed (wrongly) as a rapid consumption, it is not surprising that Mary lost her enthusiasm – it may never have been so great as Shelley’s – for carrying on their experiment in modern living. The journal becomes bleak and critical, although never of Hogg. Even the important news of Shelley’s victory in the Chancery suit was merely noted on 20 April as ‘L[ord]. C[hancellor] decides in S’s favour’, as an afternote to the fact that she had gone to sleep early.

  *

  Given her black mood, it was a happy thing for Mary when Shelley decided on 25 April to carry her off for a few days to the Windmill Inn at Salt Hill, near – and now encompassed by – Slough. His reasons were not particularly romantic – the creditors were still pursuing him – but Salt Hill was a famously pretty spot, adored by travellers; the letters which Mary wrote from there to Hogg are almost featherbrained with glee. They bear no relation to the sad, terse entries she had been making in the journal. Apologizing in decidedly saucy tones for having deprived Hogg of her company, Mary babbled like a brook about the prettiness of the inn, the greenness of the fields, the joy of an escape from London. Alone with Shelley for the first time since their elopement, and at a reassuring distance from her unlovely admirer, Mary was ready to flirt with the best of them. Hogg must have imagined that he was about to be granted the favours which were always held temptingly just out of his reach: