Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The sense of their shared contribution to Fanny’s death brought Mary and Shelley very close to each other. Living quietly at Abbey Churchyard, with only Mary’s drawing lessons and an occasional troubling visit from the bailiffs to disturb their routine, they concentrated on Mary’s novel.

  Frankenstein is a great work because we can read what we will from it. It has the resilience, the elasticity and the power of a myth. Writers and critics have, since Mary’s death, uncovered more ways of interpreting it than the young author can ever have dreamed of; biographically, it is important to notice how close the Creature’s plight was, not only to Fanny, but to Mary’s perception of herself. Her life, with the exception of their happy summer at Geneva, had become cruelly solitary. Her friends behaved as though she was dead; it had taken Fanny’s suicide to produce a letter, one of cold instruction, from her father. She, like her creature, was unfairly condemned, judged not for what she was, but for how appearances made her seem. The fact that she was not married to Shelley did not make her wicked, any more than the Creature’s unnatural birth and bizarre appearance made him evil.

  If Mary’s outcast creature reflected her passionate indignation about prejudgments made of the moral and intellectual status of non-Europeans, in particular African and West Indian slaves, he is also her thoughtful response to Shelley’s Alastor, in which the narrator had embarked on a dangerous quest in graveyards and charnel houses to discover the secret of life, ‘of what we are’. Mary’s creature warns of the dangers inherent in scientific experiment without due thought for the results. Both Mary and Shelley were avid and intelligent readers of her father’s novels; Frankenstein’s allusions to his ‘unhallowed’ pursuits refer back to St Leon, while Mary’s presentation of the Creature as the alter ego of his pursuer is in the tradition of both Caleb Williams and Fleetwood.* In his desolation, the Creature also seems to look back to Mary Wollstonecraft’s haunting image in her Scandinavian travel book of herself as misery incarnate, condemned to the homeless life of the wandering Jew. It was a book which her daughter knew almost by heart.

  Collaboration on a project adds ‘zest and vivacity’, Mary wrote many years later.8 She, in 1816, was the writer, putting down her daily composition in good plain language which Shelley later worked over to produce an imposing rhetorical flourish. Their readings and discussions were joint. Bath was well supplied with libraries, offering travel books to add authenticity to Robert Walton’s voyage, and Humphry Davy’s lucid accounts of chemical experiments for her to work into Victor Frankenstein’s scientific education. (Mary did not feel entirely at ease in this field; one of the surprises of Frankenstein is its paucity of scientific detail.)

  More importantly for the book’s theme and narrative, Shelley began reading Paradise Lost to her. Mary was already familiar with Milton’s great work; it was these readings that led her to connect the Creature to Lucifer, the fallen angel. The difference, in the Creature’s case, is that his translation into a force of evil is directly influenced by his education. Instinctively benevolent, he learns from the history of mankind to murder and to be cunning in his crimes. Again and again, Mary reiterated the notion, one dear to her father’s heart, that man is a social animal, civilized by the knowledge that he is part of a group which shares the same needs. Against it, she set her own belief that it is from this supposedly civilized body that the Creature discovers its potential for evil.

  It is impossible to judge how much of Mary’s sympathy for the rejected, excluded Creature was drawn from her undying rage against Mrs Godwin as the usurper who took her mother’s place and exiled her from her father’s affections. This is a tempting reading of the story, but it draws us away from the earnestness of her intentions. Mary was Godwin’s admiring daughter. Like him, she used sensational material for serious ends.

  Frankenstein can easily be turned into a biographer’s sandpit, but Mary’s story of promethean ambition, of rejection, the denial of love, and the danger of judging by appearances, was intended to carry the weight of a social message. What may have begun as an extension of the story of an Arctic explorer, or as a gothic tale for fireside thrills, was developed as a vehicle for ideas and social criticism. But when, in later life, she spoke of creature and book in one breath as ‘my hideous progeny’ and invited it to ‘go forth and prosper’, she was aware that dramatized versions had already drained its life-fluid while hugely increasing its fame. Frankenstein, as performed on stage, became a spooky comic melodrama while the Creature, seized on by political cartoonists, became a symbol of danger, subversiveness and menace. By 1831, when she wished her new edition commercial prosperity, her serious intentions had, like the Creature in the novel’s closing words, been ‘borne away … lost in darkness and distance’.

  *

  Shelley shared in Mary’s pleasure at the discovery of her talent. He noted her progress in their jointly kept journal; he praised it in his letters. Now, with the shadow of Fanny’s death on their shoulders, it was more important than ever that he should prove to Godwin how well Mary had chosen; how he, as much as her father, could bring her gift to fruition.

  Mary’s journal for the weeks following Fanny’s death shows a quiet and intensely studious life, blighted only by money worries and by her increasing impatience with Claire. It is possible that the appearance of three crescent moon symbols in the journal at this time recorded disagreements with her stepsister; the moons appear beside references to the bailiff’s visits, however, and these provide an equally plausible source for coded comment. Shelley, who was fond of Claire, was reading and writing in the journal; it seems unlikely that Mary would have made such an overt record of her own hostility when the two of them were working in close and happy collaboration on her book.

  At the beginning of December, when Shelley was still searching for a suitable house near Marlow, they were thrown into great excitement by the news that Shelley’s poetry had at last found a champion. His admirer was Leigh Hunt, the radical editor and theatre critic to whom Shelley had given financial help when he was still enduring his two-year prison sentence for having, with his brother John, libelled the Prince Regent in their jointly owned paper.

  On 1 December, the Examiner drew attention to Shelley’s newly published volume of poetry and proclaimed him ‘a very striking and original thinker’. Shelley sent off his thanks eight days later with a description of himself as ‘an outcast from human society’ whose intentions had been misunderstood. Using a voice strikingly similar to that given to Mary’s creature in Frankenstein, he told Hunt that, with a few benevolent exceptions, ‘all else abhor & avoid me’. He, plainly, longed for friendship; Godwin would have been enraged to learn that Hunt, shortly after this, was enriched by a handsome anonymous donation. Shelley’s letters hinted that more would be forthcoming, both from Shelley himself, and from Byron. It was the beginning of a lasting friendship which would be a heavy drain on the pockets of both Shelley and Mary over the years.

  Mary, writing tenderly to her ‘Sweet Elf … a winged Elf … my airy Elf’ at the beginning of December, still dreamed of life in a lakeside home, surrounded by mountains, and with Claire at a good distance from it, when Shelley went home-hunting again with Peacock.9 He was also trying to discover the whereabouts of Harriet who, after spending the summer quietly at home with her family, had disappeared from sight. The house in Marlow which he finally chose, and rented for twenty years, was a handsome and substantial one, big enough, if that was the thought stirring in his mind as he searched for his wife, to provide accommodation for Harriet and his older children as well as for Claire and her now imminent baby. Mary promptly began drawing up plans for the decoration. They expected to move in the spring, after boarding with the Peacocks while renovations were carried out.

  Shelley was back at Bath on 14 December, after a meeting with Leigh Hunt. The following day, a letter came from his friend Thomas Hookham, whom he had asked to undertake a search for Harriet. The contents were shocking. A body, found in the Serpentine, h
ad been identified as that of Harriet Smith. This, it appeared, was the name under which Harriet Shelley had been living since early September at lodgings near her family’s home in Chapel Street. A newspaper report published in The Times on 12 December declared that Miss Smith had been missing for six weeks and that she had been ‘far advanced in pregnancy’. Her husband was alleged to have been abroad; it was assumed that she had been seduced in his absence.

  It is just possible that the unborn child was Shelley’s. No record exists for the period when he was in London, prior to the journey to Geneva. Did he, seeking to comfort Harriet at a time when he was leaving the country for an undetermined period, make love to her? It is not much less likely than the generally accepted view, that Harriet had an affair with an officer and when he was called abroad, returned to live with her family until her condition became noticeable. Claire, in her old age, insisted that this had been the case, but her memory was unreliable and her source of information was probably Shelley himself. Henry Crabb Robinson, talking to Basil Montagu, the lawyer and friend of the Godwins who agreed to help Shelley in his fight to obtain custody of Harriet’s children, made one careful note in his diary. Shelley, when giving Montagu all the available evidence, had never said that he was not the father of this last baby. Robinson told Montagu that Mrs Godwin had given him to understand that the baby was the result of an ill-judged affair. Montagu was as familiar as Robinson with Mrs Godwin’s propensity for telling lies. Montagu ‘thinks it improbable’, Robinson drily noted.10

  Even if this was, shockingly, the true case, Mary knew nothing of it. She was with Shelley when Hookham’s letter arrived. Shelley left for London at once. On 16 December, he sent her a long, semi-hysterical letter, in which he laid the responsibility for Harriet’s tragic end on her sister, Eliza Westbrook. Clinging to the fact that Harriet had taken the name ‘Smith’, he claimed that she had been

  driven from her father’s house, & descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself. – There can be no question that the beastly viper her sister, unable to gain profit from her connexion with me – has secured to herself the fortune of the old man – who is now dying – by the murder of this poor creature.11

  Why Eliza should have been responsible, if these were indeed the circumstances he believed to have led up to Harriet’s suicide, it was beyond even Shelley to explain. Everyone, he told Mary, shared his view that the Westbrooks were ‘detestable’ and that he had been the model of uprightness and liberality in his treatment of his wife. Shelley badly needed to clear himself of blame. More specifically, he needed to throw as unfavourable a light as possible on Harriet’s family, if he was to obtain custody of his children in a Chancery case.

  The casualness of his reference to Ianthe and Charles Shelley (‘The children I have not yet got’) suggests that he and Mary must have already discussed their future. Almost equally casual was the proposal of marriage which followed. The lawyers said that a marriage would strengthen their case, he told her. It would, he did not wish to deny, be a great benefit if she would agree. He counted on her to be a ‘dear and tender’ mother to Charles and Ianthe, as she already was to their own baby William.

  Mary’s answer, written immediately, is a testimony to her essential kindness and trustfulness. Unable to understand the need for a Chancery suit, she wanted him to find the children, ‘those darling treasures that are yours’, and bring them to her at once. Only at the end of the letter, while pretending that she was quoting Claire, did she express a little apprehension about these ‘dear children whom I love so tenderly’. Would William, as the youngest child, now cease to be the favourite? He will ‘lose his pre-eminence and be helped third at table – as his aunt Claire is continually reminding him,’ she wrote. She made no response to his allegations against the Westbrooks beyond agreeing that Eliza was indeed ‘miserable and odious’; perhaps she knew Shelley’s ways well enough to ignore them. As to the marriage, she insisted only that if it took place, ‘it must be in London’. A Bath wedding might attract unwelcome local comment on their previously unmarried state; a marriage in London could more easily be attended by her father. This was an event which would, she knew, give him pleasure. ‘I long to hear about Godwin,’ she wrote at the end of her letter.12

  Shortly after this, Mary travelled up to London, staying with their new friend Leigh Hunt and his family. On 28 December, by which time the marriage plans had been settled, her father called on her; the following day, she and Shelley were invited to dine at Skinner Street. They were married in the city, in the presence of Mr and Mrs Godwin, at the handsome Wren church of St Mildred’s, Bread Street, on 30 December. Mary, while indifferent enough to write the wrong date for the wedding in her diary, took sedate pleasure in signing herself ‘Mary W. Shelley’, with a charming little flourish to the final ‘y’, when she wrote to Byron on 13 January, to give him the news of baby Alba’s safe birth.13 (Alba was a pleasant pun on the name ‘Albe’ which they gave Byron from the ‘LB’ they called him in the journal; in Alba’s dawn, Albe was born again.) Shelley, anxious to console Claire for the fact that she had been temporarily abandoned in Bath and that they were legitimizing their own union while she looked a lost reputation squarely in the face, mocked the marriage as insignificant. Seeking to amuse her, he reported on the ludicrous satisfaction of the Godwins. Mary’s father, in particular, had been so ‘studiously flattering’, so polished in his attentions, so hospitable in his manner, that they were almost back in the devoted master-pupil relationship of earlier times.14

  ‘A marriage takes place on the 29th,’ was how Mary chose to record the wedding in her journal.† It must have given her some pleasure to be back in her adored father’s favour. Harriet’s death, while tragic, had served her well. The only clouds in sight hung over the future of Claire and her baby, the outcome for Shelley of the struggle to obtain custody of his older children, and the fate of her old friends the Baxters. One family in many to have been hit by the economic crisis, the Baxters, together with David and Isabella Booth, had been ruined.

  Godwin, no longer the man who had championed the right of a woman not to marry, but a father who had suffered acutely from seeing his daughter act according to his long-rejected principles, was in a state as near to jubilation as a man of his sober habits could achieve. His brother Hull, who had sent a ham and a turkey for the wedding feast from the Norfolk farm, was grandly informed that Mary had married the eldest son of a baronet. She might even become rich – not that her father cared about that, of course; he could confidently predict that she would be ‘respectable, virtuous and contented’. Godwin decided to spare his brother the knowledge that Mary had already lived with the baronet’s son for two and a half years and that she had just become pregnant for the third time.15

  It is easy to understand why Godwin should have wanted to gloss over the details of Mary’s relationship. It is less easy to condone the active part which he and his wife took in spreading scandal about poor, dead Harriet Shelley in order to defend Mary’s reputation now that she was herself a married woman with a fine future before her.

  On 11 January 1817, a month after the identification of Harriet’s body, an excited Shelley told Mary that the suit for his children had just been strengthened. Godwin had given him good news: ‘he has evidence that Harriet was unfaithful to me four months before I left England with you.’16‡ Godwin’s source was Thomas Hill, the loquacious editor of the Monthly Mirror. On the strength of further ‘evidence’ from Hill in May, Godwin fired off a letter to W.T. Baxter, telling him that Harriet ‘had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation’ and that his source was an ‘unquestionable authority wholly unconnected with Shelley’. Tommy Hill now claimed that Harriet had been ‘guilty of repeated acts of levity’; he described her as having ‘lately lived in open connection with a Colonel Maxwell. Peace be to her shade,’ Godwin piously added before telling Baxter that Fanny had rece
ntly died of ‘an inflammatory fever’.17

  This was the letter which, when quoted to Jane Shelley in 1884, did most to confirm Mary’s daughter-in-law in her view of Harriet as a promiscuous woman from whom Shelley had been fortunate to escape into Mary’s consoling arms.18 This was the view Jane Shelley had long dedicated herself to promoting, for Mary’s sake.

  Would Mary have been grateful? Probably not. Writing her journal on 12 February 1839, at a time when Hogg had reproached her for omitting Shelley’s dedication of Queen Mab to Harriet in her edition of his works, Mary was overwhelmed with guilt about the past. ‘Poor Harriet,’ she wrote, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.’

  Jane Shelley, reading Mary’s journal as she prepared her mother-in-law’s papers for controlled publication in the 1880s, paused over this passage, decided it would do Mary’s reputation more harm than good, and promptly cancelled it.19

  Notes

  1. PBS–Byron, 29.9.1816.

  2. FI–MWG, 3.10.1816 (CC, 1).

  3. Claire, in the 1870s, recalled having been a witness to this scene, but Claire’s memory was notoriously unreliable (CC, 1, p. 86). Claire’s account is in Silsbee (box 7, folder 2).