Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  4. The Cambrian, 12.10.1816, reprinted in CC, 1, p. 87.

  5. Maria Gisborne, Journal, 9.7.1820, Maria Gisborne and Edward Williams: Shelley’s Friends, Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 39 (hereafter Shelley’s Friends).

  6. WG–MWG, 13.10.1816 (Dowden, Shelley, 2, p. 58).

  7. FI–MWG, 3.10.1816 (CC, 1).

  8. MWS–Leigh Hunt (hereafter LH), 14.12.1838.

  9. MWG–PBS, 5.12.1816.

  10. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diaries, 17.11.1817 (Dr Williams’ Library, Gordon Square, London).

  11. PBS–MWG, 16.12.1816.

  12. MWG–PBS, 17.12.1816.

  13. As can be seen in the original letter in the Murray archive.

  14. PBS–CC, 30.12.1816.

  15. Quoted by St Clair in G&S, p. 417.

  16. PBS–MWS, 11.1.1817.

  17. WG–W.T. Baxter, 12.5.1817 (Pforzheimer).

  18. Edward Dowden–Lady Shelley (hereafter JS), 12.5.1884 (Abinger, Dep. c. 769/3, fols. 36V–44r).

  19. Lady Shelley’s zealously protective attitude towards her parents-in-law is discussed in greater detail in the final chapter.

  * This theme was also employed in Mandeville‚ the novel which Godwin was writing while she wrote Frankenstein; it is possible that Mary saw this work in manuscript before its publication late in 1817.

  † The entry is confusing. Mary entered it as having been written on 16 December, the day after she recorded the news of Harriet’s suicide. The 16th of December was the date on the letter in which Shelley urged her to consider marriage as a benefit to him.

  ‡ Godwin had altered his views on free love, but Shelley’s eagerness to discover evidence of infidelity is strikingly out of keeping with the beliefs he had advocated and followed until this date.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AT ALBION HOUSE

  1817–1818

  ‘Adieu – Be not angry with us for being such new friends – for I like you too well to wish you to forget me – or to be other than I am.

  Affectionately Yours Marina’

  Mary Shelley to Leigh and Marianne Hunt, 5 March 1817

  THE GODWINS STILL BELIEVED – OR PRETENDED TO BELIEVE – THAT Claire was in Bath for health reasons. It was in everyone’s interests that this fiction should be maintained. On 1 January 1817, the newly married Shelleys returned to comfort and reassure the nervous expectant mother as the time of her confinement approached. Alba was born twelve days later; Shelley, his thoughts wholly occupied by the struggle to obtain his older children, had already hurried back to London to hear the Lord Chancellor’s decision.

  Mary, after living with Shelley for over two years, was becoming adept at shuttling between her own studies and looking after her vague, excitable husband. Besides reading The Statesman’s Manual (Coleridge’s recently published religious meditations), Milton’s Comus and Smollett’s Roderick Random, she found time in January to work on her novel and study Latin. She even remembered to ask Leigh Hunt’s wife Marianne if she could kindly obtain Mr Shelley’s washing from him and have it laundered: ‘Mr Shelley’s thoughtlessness must be my excuse.’1

  To Shelley, less concerned with dirty shirts than by the troubling news that Harriet’s father and sister were submitting religious objections to his claim on little Ianthe and Charles, Mary sent a long and loving letter on 17 January. He had been gone a week. ‘Never before have you been so long away‚’ she forgetfully lamented; ‘– it is very melancholy.’ He must be sure not to sit up too late, ‘especially when you are so fagged all day’. He must be very careful about how he answered a letter which Claire had just written. ‘Be kind but make no promises & above all do not say a word that may imply any responsibility on your part for her future actions.’ She was worried about this, ‘for you are warmhearted [ ] & indeed sweetest very indiscreet.’ She sent reports of William, their ‘Blue Eyes [who] gets dearer & sweeter every day – he jumps about like a little squirrel – and stares at the baby with his great eyes.’

  Perhaps Shelley had already admitted his greatest terror, that the Lord Chancellor might not stop at depriving him of the custody of his older children. Certainly, their own little boy was much in Mary’s thoughts. ‘My William’s birthday,’ she noted on 24 January, the day that Shelley’s case was to be heard in London. ‘How many chances have occurred during his little years – May the ensueing one be more peaceful and my William’s star be a fortunate one to rule the decision of this day – alas! I fear it will be put off – and the influence of the star pass away.’ She ended the entry by noting that she had gone out for a walk with ‘my sweet babe’.

  The case was not an easy one to decide. The Westbrooks had made it clear that they wished to retain guardianship of the children. They strongly opposed their being placed in the care of an atheist who until now had shown little interest in them and had ‘unlawfully’ cohabited with a woman who was not his wife. Eliza, Harriet’s sister, produced a letter in which Shelley recklessly alluded to Mary as ‘the lady whose union with me you may excusably regard as the cause of your sister’s ruin’.2 The case was, disappointingly, adjourned until 27 March. ‘An unhappy day,’ Mary wrote on 25 January, the day after the postponement was announced. ‘I receive bad news & determine to go up to London.’ She still found time to read parts of Sidney’s Arcadia and of Southey’s translation of Amadis of Gaul that morning, before leaving William to the care of their Swiss nanny, Elise. ‘I wish Blue Eyes was with me,’ she wrote wistfully four days later, but William remained at Bath until Claire was judged well enough to bring him to London.

  It was almost two years since Mary had spent any length of time in the city. Holborn, never uplifting, seemed grimmer and sadder than ever after the war, awash with begging children and disabled soldiers. Muddy-wheeled carriages clattered their iron wheels along the narrow streets; poorly dressed crowds shuffled and staggered around the local gin-shops. All that was missing was a recorder, but Hogarth had been dead for fifty years and Dickens was only five years old. The house at Skinner Street seemed always to be full of Mrs Godwin’s relations.

  Shelley, anxiously preparing evidence for the March case, spent most of his days and several nights with his new ally, Leigh Hunt.* Mary, after a ‘disagreeable’ conversation with her stepmother on 2 February, decided that it would be better for all concerned if they both stayed with the Hunts at their crowded household in the Vale of Health, seeing the Godwins only for meals. ‘Sup with G[odwin] & have a pleasant conversation with him‚’ she noted before moving out on 7 February.

  *

  Named to disguise its earlier history as a malarial marsh, the Vale of Health lay below the steep hills of Hampstead and Highgate, a mile or so north of Mary’s childhood home at the Polygon. Claire, judged fit to travel by 19 February, took rooms nearby with her baby while William and his nurse joined the Hunts. A plot was being hatched regarding Claire; the kindly Hunts had agreed to take Alba into their own house in due course and pass her off as a cousin’s child. Later in the year, when they made a visit to the house Shelley had taken at Marlow, Alba could be brought along and unobtrusively ‘adopted’ by the Shelleys and Claire. The Godwins, who were still unaware that a child had been born, could continue to be deceived and awkward questions about Alba’s parentage might be avoided.

  Shelley and Mary were delighted by their hospitable hosts. Age – Hunt was thirteen years older than Mary – was no barrier. Marianne was a large, warm-hearted sculptress and painter whose way of keeping her children in order was to pop them on high stools as her models; the star of the house, glorious in his silken dressing-gown, was her olive-skinned, dark-haired husband. Dickens’s Harold Skimpole, created in the early 1850s, did cruel justice to Hunt’s shiftless charm in later years, but none to the handsome lover of culture, justice and beauty to whom Mary felt so drawn in 1817. The first to publish and call attention to young John Keats and one of the few to recognize Shelley’s genius in his lifetime, Hunt would, be
fore the year was out, be ridiculed by sections of the press as a leader of ‘the Cockney school’, supposedly composed of poets too badly bred and educated to understand the words they used – or so the privileged gentlemen who reviewed their work for the periodicals liked to claim.

  Hunt, however arch and sentimental in his poetry, was better read than most of his critics. Byron thought his poems dreadful; Mary, sharing her husband’s admiration of Hunt’s bold treatment of an incestuous theme in The Story of Rimini (1816), showed less discrimination when, on 1 February, she reverently copied out the mawkish lines Hunt had written a year earlier, when his eldest son Thornton was dangerously ill.

  Ah! first-born of thy mother,

  When life & hope were new,

  Kind playmate of thy brother,

  Thy sister, father too;3

  and so on. Perhaps Mary’s enthusiasm sprang from sympathy, as she remembered her own lost Clara. Happily, Thornton survived. A bright, observant child, he was less taken by Mary than by her husband, whose gift for telling fantastic stories, playing games and behaving, in short, as though he and little Thornton were just of an age, made him easier to love. Mary, while more reserved, found it hard to resist his father’s light-hearted manner. ‘[Y]ou shall never be serious when you wish to be merry’, she promised Hunt on 5 March and added a confession: ‘to tell a little truth I do not like Peacock a millionth part so well as I do you.’ She ended by asking him not to hold it against them that they were ‘such new friends – for I like you too well to wish you to forget me’. The letter was signed ‘Marina’, punning on the similarity between her own name and that of Hunt’s wife. They had already exchanged locks of hair.

  Godwin, an enthusiastic theatregoer, had never much cared for music. One of the most valuable services which Hunt, a fine singer himself, performed for Mary was to introduce her to the music of Mozart. ‘H Mrs H & I go to the opera – Figaro – I am very much pleased,’ Mary wrote in her journal for 1 February; for ‘very much pleased’, we should read ‘enthralled’. Mozart became an enduring passion; music, during the darkest periods of her life, offered unfailing consolation.

  There were many musical outings and evenings of song in the Hunts’ parlour to while away a damp February. Sometimes, they made up parties for bracing walks across the frosty fields to Caen Wood, and up to Highgate where Coleridge, under supervision as a housemate in Dr Gillman’s quiet, well-ordered home, was ready to talk for as long – and longer – than any guests could wish, on the firm understanding that there were to be absolutely no interruptions to the flow. On days too rainy for excursions, they sat around Hunt’s study fire and talked politics. Godwin, greatly though Shelley still revered his work, was a figure of the past; Hunt and his Examiner offered a vigorous challenge to the present. Recharged by his friend’s faith in political campaigning, Shelley began preparing a plea for parliamentary reform.

  Pregnant for the third time – her second daughter would be born at the end of the summer – Mary looked on this ebullient, child-filled home as paradise. Nobody here treated her as a pariah; the Hunts’ friends were as easy and welcoming as themselves. A touch of snobbery rather than poetic rivalry may have coloured the lukewarm courtesies Shelley and she extended to young John Keats, but Mary was delighted to meet the Globe’s Cornish editor, Walter Coulson, a man who combined encyclopaedic knowledge with a gift for deadpan mimicry. She was disconcerted to be introduced to the stockbroker-poet Horace Smith who, four years earlier, had merrily and publicly consigned her father to the whirlpool of Lethe in Horace in London, his second popular collection of satirical verse.† She could not be cross with him. A passionate radical with a sweet smile and an unfailingly open purse for needy friends, Smith rapidly became one of the Shelleys’ most trusted confidants and supporters. Sitting with these new friends at Hunt’s fireside while Marianne worked on painting silhouettes and the children clamoured for stories, Mary was, for the first time since her visit to the Baxters in Scotland, given a taste of happy family life. Only an occasional tiff when Hunt grew overattentive to Bessy Kent, his snappish, good-looking sister-in-law, gave her pause for reflection. Poor Marianne; Mary knew how she must feel. Was this not just the delicate situation between Shelley, herself and Claire?

  *

  Mary left for Marlow at the beginning of March. The renovation of Albion House was supervised, as they had planned, from Thomas Peacock’s home nearby. This was to be her first proper home and Shelley pandered to his wife’s wish for an elegance she had never known. Too poor to resolve Godwin’s unending financial problems, he still managed to spend – on credit – well over a thousand pounds on upholstery, curtains and furnishings.

  Their new home stood on West Street, away from the village and close to the rickety old wooden bridge which linked Great Marlow to the wooded Berkshire hills. Only faintly resembling the low-roomed and rather poky cottages which occupy the site today, Albion House was a handsome building, its long Georgian sash windows looking back on to a garden shaded by firs and cedars and out to a broad swathe of more open land beyond. There were five big bedrooms and, towards the river, a stable; the main feature was a splendid library, big enough for a ballroom and, Mary boasted to the Hunts, ‘very fit for the luxurious literati’.4 Lord Elgin’s removals from the Parthenon, which were on the point of being put on display as a national treasure at the British Museum, had fired the country with a new enthusiasm for the art of the ancient world. Two full-sized statues, of Venus and Apollo, were purchased and installed as the library’s guardians. Love and poetry would be Shelley and Mary’s household gods.

  Playful though the tone of Mary’s letters was as she boasted of their new-found grandeur to the Hunts, an occasional patch of darkness reminds us that she was still at work on the last chapters of Frankenstein when she went to Marlow. Writing to Hunt on the anniversary of her first child’s death, she confessed that she had just been troubled by a strange dream, ‘of the dead being alive’. Perhaps, in the month when Shelley’s custody case was being decided,‡ she dreamed of Harriet rising from the river bed to reproach the living.5 Perhaps, nearing completion of her intensely imaginative work, she was living more in than out of it, seeing the Creature as he returns, seemingly from the dead, to brood over his creator’s corpse. Certainly, in those last few weeks of sustained endeavour, it must have become almost impossible for her to distinguish between the worlds of dream and daylight.

  Claire, travelling alone, was the first to join them at Albion House. Godwin, following hard on her heels for a genial four days of boat trips, riverside strolls and carriage drives at the beginning of April, returned to Skinner Street just before the arrival of his stepdaughter’s pretty, dark-haired baby at Marlow. Alba was, as arranged, artfully submerged in a rowdy tribe of little Hunts; nobody questioned her parentage.

  If Mary had been in raptures over the pleasure of living with the Hunts, her new friends were happy to return the compliment – and to stay rather longer. They had just spent a blissful day, dining, talking, wining and walking, Hunt wrote to his friend the composer and organist Vincent Novello in mid-April while Marianne diligently scrubbed the grubby patina off Apollo and Venus. And now:

  I am writing this letter, seated on a turfy mound in my friend’s garden, a little place with a rustic seat in it, shrouded and covered with trees, with a delightful field of sheep on one side, a white cottage among the leaves … and the haymakers mowing and singing in the fields behind me 6

  Half a mile away, sitting in the riverside ruins of Medmenham Abbey, Shelley was painting a very different picture. His long conversations with Hunt that winter had fired his sense of the poet as the unlegislated champion of justice. ‘Laon and Cythna’, the poem he threw himself into finishing before the end of summer, was his attack on a ruthless government. Prudently though he had located the poem’s events in a distant country, Shelley’s attack on contemporary England was impossible to misread. So, to all who knew Godwin’s reputation, was his significance as the sage, the
hermit who urges young Laon to carry forward the teachings he himself had offered to an earlier age. Driving Shelley on was the sense of personal injustice; the government which oppressed a starving nation was a magnified version of the cold legal figures who had deprived him of two of his children.

  Writing in the woods or in his boat, Shelley became familiar in Marlow as a slender, stooping figure who often wandered home with flowers trailing over his hair and a carpet of briars stuck to a long, shabby brown coat, a kindly distributor of shillings, blankets – and sometimes of his wife’s clothes – to the local poor. Dinner did not wait for him: Mary had grown used to the eccentric ways of a man who seemed happy to live on whatever could be munched as he walked along, book in hand. Later, when the oil-lamps had been lit and the children were asleep, she watched him slip quietly through the open doors of the drawing-room where Claire was singing to her own accompaniment. (The new cabinet piano was Shelley’s gift to her, a credit purchase made through the Hunts from a friend of the Novello family. The seventy-five guineas it cost had still not been paid off four years later.)

  Shelley’s haunting ‘My thoughts arise and fade in solitude’ was written to be sung as a duet to music from Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito; it was probably first performed by Hunt and Claire at Marlow. The more intimate lines of ‘To Constantia, Singing’ were anonymously published the following year. Shelley wrote it for Claire who, in her old age, chose to claim that Constantia was among her given names.

  I have no life, Constantia, now, but thee,

  Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song

  Flows on, and fills all things with melody. –

  Now is thy voice a tempest swift and strong,