On which, like one in trance upborne,
Secure o’er rocks and waves I sweep,
Rejoicing like a cloud of morn.
Now ’tis the breath of summer night,
Which when the starry waters sleep,
Round western isles, with incense-blossoms bright,
Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.7
A love poem? Claire certainly thought so. Read in its entirety, Shelley’s lovely lyric sounds more like a powerfully emotional response to the effect of her voice on a man whose imagination turned reality to shadow. That view of matters was not necessarily of much solace to Mary.
Shelley, not his wife, was the main focus of interest for the visitors to Albion House in the summer of 1817. His friends wrote, as they would of a saint, of his good deeds among the wretchedly paid lace-makers whose fine and difficult work was the chief source of local employment. On one occasion, it was remembered, he gave his shoes away and walked home barefoot. The villagers, coming to Albion House on Saturdays for the regular allowance Mary and he had set aside for them, thought Mr Shelley a perfect gentleman. The local landowners kept their distance from a man mad enough to buy crawfish from the vendors who hawked them through the streets, only to ensure that these delicacies were carefully returned to the river. Word probably got around that Shelley’s companion on these outings was not his wife, but ‘a dear female friend’, who must surely have been Claire.8 Invitations were not extended to the Shelleys by the squires to whom the unfortunate poor of Marlow appeared only as potential fomenters of revolution.9
Everybody had memories of Shelley; Mary appears only in occasional sideways glimpses, like a figure turned half away from view in a Dutch interior. The Hunts’ eldest boy Thornton remembered Mrs Shelley as untidy, distracted and cross during their summer at Albion House; others had reason to be struck by Mary’s kindness. It is not clear whether it was she or Shelley or both who decided that they should take in a local child called Polly Rose. We hear of Shelley playing games with Polly, setting her on a table beside Claire and dashing its caster-wheels up and down the length of the room. Sent off to work for the Hunts in their new Marylebone home, Polly was given a memento, the flowered plate from which Shelley often ate his supper of bread and raisins. She kept the plate. But it was Mary, Polly remembered fifty years later, who always used to tuck her into bed at Albion House, who told her what they had been talking about downstairs and always asked what she thought about the subject.10 When thoughtless Marianne Hunt left for London without giving a present to Milly Shields, a local girl who had been employed to help Elise Duvillard care for William and Alba, Mary was the one who worried about finding a nice gown to give to Milly and ‘a little note with it from Marianne that it may appear to come from her’.11 Elise was promised gifts of clothes for Aimée, the little illegitimate daughter she had chosen to leave behind in Switzerland in her family’s care. Always tender towards children, Mary worried over the young Hunts in her letters: ‘Adieu little babes,’ she warned; ‘– take care not to loose one another in the streets for fear one of you should be kidnapped but take hold of one another’s hands & walk pretty.’12
On 13 May, after a month of patient transcription, Mary noted that she had finished copying out her novel. Now five months pregnant, she might have felt ready to rest; instead, she promptly began the task of rewriting and correcting the entries in the journal she and Shelley had kept on their runaway trip in 1814. The ‘unpresuming’ small volume was bulked out by adding edited versions of the two long letters which she had written from Geneva to Fanny in 1816; Shelley contributed two of the ‘travel letters’ he had written to Peacock and – the unadvertised jewel of the volume – his poem, ‘Mont Blanc’. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour came out in November, jointly published by the Hookhams and by Hunt’s friend, Charles Ollier, a man with a keen sympathy for the Shelleys’ political views. Knowledgeable acquaintances praised the unnamed author; a patronizing review in Blackwood’s Magazine the following spring complimented her for ‘prattling’ with such charm. The book did not offer much competition to the forthright and exuberant Lady Morgan’s France, published the same year;§ in 1820, Ollier told Shelley that there were no profits from which to pay the printer. Ninety-two unbound copies were still in stock when Ollier went out of business in 1823. Shelley, in 1817, did his best to stir up sales by confessing their co-authorship to an inquisitive Thomas Moore. As a man who could always be counted on to spread gossip, Moore was also entrusted with the news that Mary had another little literary surprise coming along. It is more likely that Shelley was referring to Frankenstein than to the new baby which was due to arrive in late August.
Mary would have done well in modern times. The prospect of raising children while managing a career would not have daunted her. In 1817, between writing, helping to supervise little William and running a large new house crammed to bursting point with visitors, she put herself through a gruelling reading course in Roman history while she searched for her next subject. She was still only nineteen.
Leigh Hunt had only one complaint to make about Mary: she was too earnest for her own good. She was clever; he knew that. Hunt vastly preferred Mary when she suppressed her gleaming intelligence. He liked to see her listening, not talking (‘yon nymph of the sideways looks’);13 he was delighted on a visit to the theatre when her gravity dissolved into sudden giggles at Launcelot Gobbo’s slapstick humour. A family friend, the playwright James Kenney, had been struck by Mary’s new-found beauty when he met her in February that year;14 Hunt, however, could not quite rid himself of a feeling of chilly awe. The Mary he described sitting in a box at the opera as ‘a sedate faced young lady … with her great tablet of a forehead, and her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown’ sounds grimly intellectual.15 Still, the tribute was gracefully intended, carrying a hint of slandered innocence in the striking contrast between white flesh and crimson gown.
The portrait Mary herself treasured from the happy summer at Marlow was drawn by Shelley in his dedication to ‘Laon and Cythna’, shortly to be retitled The Revolt of Islam. Here, tenderly addressing her as his queen, his friend, his twin, ‘thou Child of love and light’, he honoured her as the source of his inspiration, muse and prophetess. All the humiliation and loneliness Mary had endured became worth the pain when she read these lines.
And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak:
Time may interpret to his silent years.
Yet in the paleness of thy thoughtful cheek,
And in the light thine ample forehead wears,
And in thy sweetest smiles, and in thy tears,
And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy
Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears:
And through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see
A lamp of vestal fire burning internally.
They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child.
I wonder not – for One then left this earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory; still her fame
Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild
Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim
The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name.16
References to sweet smiles and gentle speech may jar on modern ears, but who could object to the admiring deference Shelley showed to Mary’s intelligence, her wisdom, her right to inspire her own generation with the brave originality her parents had offered theirs? Mary, here, becomes the force of redeeming love, light in darkness. This, for the rest of her life, would be an image from which to draw strength and reassurance. It is curious that, praising the character of the young soothsayer in Valperga, Mary’s next published novel, Shelley failed to see how close Beatrice was to his own celebration of his wife as muse and prophetess. In creating Beatrice, Mary made his
image her own.
*
It was not until Mary was staying at Skinner Street at the end of May that she finally allowed her father to see the manuscript of Frankenstein. The dedication to himself – along with Shelley’s Preface – was still missing. Even so, Godwin must have been struck by how forcefully and imaginatively Mary had clothed and reshaped his own ideas. ‘Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked … divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations – malevolence and selfishness.’ The words are Shelley’s, in a draft for an unsigned review with which he planned to draw attention to the published book.17 The philosophy, promoted that year by his daughter and his son-in-law in two wholly different works, was Godwin’s.
These were not good times for controversial works and the manufacture of a creature from human parts without divine assistance was highly controversial. John Murray expressed keen interest in the novel, cautiously presented by Shelley as his own work; he debated, and turned it down. Charles Ollier, Shelley’s own new publisher, had either already rejected it or was still hesitating at the end of August when Frankenstein was finally taken on by the old firm of Lackingtons, which now dealt mainly in cheap books. Five hundred copies would be published in the late winter or early spring with a third of the net profits going to Mary, who retained the copyright. The author, by a convention of the time, would remain anonymous. This was unfortunate for Mary: with her husband writing the Preface, references to his ‘friend’ seemed a thin disguise for the fact that he had written the novel himself.
Five hundred was a small run, even for those times, and the offer was not handsome, but honour had been satisfied. Shelley had advised on and contributed to Mary’s first mature work and he, not her father, had succeeded in selling it. He had replaced Godwin as her mentor. Frankenstein was their literary child.
*
Marianne Hunt’s sister, Bessy Kent, together with her small tribe of nephews and nieces, followed the Hunts back to London in July. Little Alba remained, as planned, at Albion House but without any pretence being made that she was a member of the departed family. Instead, she was now exposed for the first time as Claire’s fatherless child. Scandal was the inevitable consequence. The village of Marlow would probably have taken any oddity in the ménage in its stride. The problem lay with the local squirearchy and their circle, watchful and disapproving: ‘country town friends are not very agreable,’ Mary wrote with feeling that autumn.18 Rather desperately, Shelley wrote to explain the difficulty to Byron. Should they farm the little girl out with two suitable ladies until he came to England? Could he understand that they had, although fond, become ‘somewhat embarrassed’ about her?19
Alba was an enchanting child. Mary, who nicknamed her ‘the little commodore’ for her lively stare and stocky stance, was sometimes haunted by the thought that this was how Fanny must have appeared to their mother at much the same age: ‘I never see her [Alba] without thinking of the expressions in my Mother’s letters concerning Fanny‚’ she admitted to Shelley. ‘– If a mother’s eyes were not partial she seemed like this Alba – she mentions her intelligent eyes & great vivacity. But this is a melancholy subject.’20 The embarrassment this pretty little girl now caused the Shelleys was considerable. To anybody who knew how intimately Claire had shared Shelley’s life for the past three years, there could be little doubt of Alba’s paternity. Even Godwin, when he and his wife were finally let into the secret, at once assumed that Shelley was the father of pretty little ‘Miss Auburn’. (Godwin’s private view of Shelley can be clearly seen in his absolute lack of surprise that his son-in-law should have behaved in such a way.) But Byron, while ready to acknowledge that he had a responsibility and even an inclination to play some role, was otherwise engaged on a Venetian love-affair. He had no plans either to visit England in the immediate future, or to offer help. The Shelleys were, for the first time, made aware of their friend’s ruthlessness. He was neither grateful, interested nor conscience-stricken. If they wanted him to take Alba into his home at this early stage in her life, they would have to do the travelling themselves.
This, as a beautiful summer turned into a premature autumn, became an increasingly attractive notion. Albion House, so cool and shady on a hot June day, grew damp and cold. The books in the magnificent new library sprouted mildew; Shelley, already exhausted by the taxing work of producing a long and difficult poem in a relatively short period, was warned by William Lawrence that he needed to stop work and give himself the benefit of a healthy climate. Italy was recommended.
News came at the beginning of August that the Lord Chancellor (Lord Eldon was described ten years later in the anonymously written Biographical Keepsake as a man of ‘mean and cruel intolerance’) had ruled decisively in favour of the Westbrooks; Ianthe and Charles were to be placed with a clergyman nominated by Harriet’s father.¶ Might Lord Eldon go further and prosecute the author of Queen Mab under the blasphemy laws, or seek to take away their beloved ‘Willmouse’? Even baby Clara, born at the beginning of September and named for her aunt, might be at risk. Apprehensive before, Shelley now sensed additional reason to place his remaining children beyond reach of the law; in Italy, they would be safer. Mary, frightened by Lawrence’s diagnosis of Shelley’s health and eager for any plan which would get the dear little ‘Commodore’ out of her home, was ready to assent. ‘But are we rich enough to enjoy ourselves when there[?]’ she wondered.21
William Baxter of Dundee, impoverished but kindly and cheerful as ever, was paying a visit to the Shelleys when Clara was born on 2 September. On another visit later in the month (Mr Baxter ‘has taken a prodigious fancy to us’, Mary reported to Shelley with transparent pleasure22 ), he mentioned that David Booth was proving an ‘illtempered and jealous’ husband to her dear Isabella. ‘Mr B. thinks that she half repents her marriage – so she is to [be] another victim of that ceremony,’ Mary announced to Shelley, who had fled to London with Claire, in an attempt to escape the duns who were again on his heels.23 The lease on the Booths’ fine house at Newburgh was being sold, Mary had heard; Christy, Isabella’s elder sister, was living hugger-mugger with them; it all sounded very depressing.
Drawing encouragement from Mr Baxter’s friendly manner, Mary began laying plans to coax her dear ‘Izy’ to liberate herself. It must be cautiously managed, or Mr Booth would grow jealous. First, she invited Christy Baxter to come on a visit, an invitation which was briskly declined. Shelley, told by his doctor to attempt nothing too strenuously imaginative, was coaxed by his wife into beginning Rosalind and Helen, a poem which – faintly – suggested Isabella in Rosalind and Mary in Helen, set against a dreamily evoked Scottish background recalled from Italy.
Shelley may have agreed to write a work in which he showed little interest – he went on with it, reluctantly, the following year – out of a sense that Mary was going through a particularly unhappy period. Part of her sadness stemmed from disappointment over Isabella. On 3 October, William Baxter had been ready to urge his daughter to challenge Mr Booth’s hostility to Shelley, a man he had never met. It was time, he wrote, to recognize Mary’s husband as a man who combined genius and amiability with ‘truly republican frugality and plainness of manners’. Of course Isabella should come and join them: ‘you could not do better …’24 By the end of the year, however, Baxter had changed his mind. The Shelleys were suddenly informed that they were too grand for the company of any of the Baxter girls; they were equally baffled to learn that Shelley’s ‘freedom of thought and action’ were now regarded as a threat to a married woman.25
Baxter was almost certainly acting under direction from his stronger-willed son-in-law. Booth had been in London at the end of November. Claire, as far as a shocked Booth could see, was not only in London but living with Shelley. Certainly, they were sharing a lodging, and not, he imagined, simply to save money. By January, Booth had seen and heard enough to reach severe conclusions. The Shelleys had ‘strenuously resisted’ the notion of marriage
, he told his wife; ‘Miss Auburn’ [Alba] was Shelley’s child; he and the mother brazenly lived in the same rooms in London while Mary stayed in the country. This was no company for a respectable woman.26 So advised by her father and husband, Isabella was in no position to disobey.
This was a blow, but Mary had other reasons for depression. Clara’s birth, attended by the local doctor, was followed by a long period of exhaustion. Mary fretted over her inability to produce enough milk to feed the baby which, following her mother’s precepts, she was determined to do herself. She worried, as the mists gathered around Albion House, about Willmouse, for ‘the poor little fellow is very susceptible of cold’.27 She was made unhappy by ‘an unamiable letter from Godwin about his wife’s visits’, noted in Mary’s journal on 19 September. Mrs Godwin was, it seems, annoyed that her husband went to Marlow without her. Mary took rather childish revenge by telling Shelley to give Godwin her love but not his wife, for ‘I do not love her’, and by deciding that she would certainly not ask Mrs Godwin for the eight yards of stout Welsh flannel from which she intended to make warm winter underclothing for herself and little William.
Further evidence of Mary’s low spirits appears in the way she now turned against their friends. The Hunts, Shelley heard from her letter of 24 September, had been thoroughly selfish, going off on a walk without warning when she, so long confined to the house by childbirth, had been eager to go with them. Perhaps the Hunts went to get away from a bad-tempered hostess. Peacock came in every day, Mary went on, ‘uninvited to drink his bottle – I have not seen him – he morally disgusts me –’ On the subject of Alba and the need to remove her, she became almost hysterical. Her departure ‘ought not to be delayed’, she told Shelley on 28 September and added, in case he had missed the point, that ‘she should join her father with all possible speed.’ Two days later, she reminded him that Alba’s going ‘must not be delayed’. On 2 October, infuriated by Shelley’s silence on the subject, she wrote that she would have no peace ‘until she is on her way to Italy – Yet you say nothing of all this – in fact your letter tells me nothing.’ A fortnight later, Shelley was alerted to her terror that Byron might suddenly disappear: ‘He may change his mind – or go to Greece – or to the devil and then what happens.’ In the meantime, ‘I think Alba’s remaining here exceedingly dangerous.’28
Mary Shelley Page 28
