Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

Mont Blanc and the surrounding scenery gave her for the first time a happy sense of Shelley’s continuing presence, watching this same landscape. Even so, it was a nightmarish trip. ‘Although I would not risk another night & day’s journey like the last, yet it is pleasant to look back & find that I have done a five day’s work in 24 hours,’ she told the Hunts on 7 August, after being insulted by ‘a wretch’ who had reduced her to tears and being taken ‘really ill at 2 in the morning on a desart road …’ Reaching the Hotel Nelson in Paris on 13 August, she was presented with another of Jane Williams’s frantic entreaties to her to stay out of England. There was more comfort in a visit the following day from the Hunts’ friend, witty, merry Horace Smith, who invited her to come out to his family’s little house at Versailles.

  Mary may already have heard from her father that Frankenstein had been made into a play that summer, on the strength of which Godwin lightly revised his daughter’s book for immediate republication in a new two-volume edition. Mary herself had given so little thought to the novel in recent months that she made a present of an abandoned early revision of her own to one of Trelawny’s friends, a Mrs Thomas who, unusually among the disapproving English community in Genoa, had been prepared to call on her.58 Now, to her amused surprise, she heard from Horace Smith that Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, a dramatization by Richard Brinsley Peake, had come on at the sensation-loving Lyceum.** T.P. Cooke, who had already played the lead at the Lyceum in 1820 in The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles (based on Polidori’s novella), was said to have been so terrifying as a blue-painted Creature ‘as caused the ladies to faint away & a hubbub to ensue’. A few days later, Mary was disappointed to hear that the ladies had not been so very frightened, but that ‘the first appearance of the Monster from F’s laboratory down a staircase had a fine effect … the piece fell off afterwards – though it is having a run.’59†† Passing this news on to the Hunts, Mary could not resist telling them that Don Juan’s shocking new Cantos were having a ‘limited sale’; just for a moment, her own fame seemed to be outshining Byron’s.

  Mary’s long letter to the Hunts during her visit to Versailles was the first since Shelley’s death in which she sounds thoroughly happy and at home. The Smiths were near neighbours at Versailles of an old friend of her father’s, James Kenney. Kenney had, many years ago, married the widow of Thomas Holcroft, another of the Godwin circle. Louisa, Holcroft’s seventeen-year-old daughter, was at home to charm with her blushes and pretty manners. Kenney, a small, cheerful Irishman, was full of the success of his own most recent play at Drury Lane; the house at Versailles bubbled with London gossip, of Charles Lamb’s having become reclusive, of Mary Lamb being the most faultless of ladies, of plays being censored if they had nine ‘damns’ in the performance, thanks to the prudish influence of Theodore Hooke’s Tory-spirited John Bull. Mary heard of Hazlitt meeting his wife in the street just after their divorce and sitting down with her to have a nice slice of boiled pork. She also heard, with interest, that Horace Smith was paid £200 a year for occasional light contributions to the New Monthly Magazine.

  Talking, laughing, discussing plays, Mary was reminded of the best of the old days at Skinner Street. But her spirits sank when the conversation turned to her own future. Godwin was reported to be in good heart and friends had rallied round to help pay the costs of his lawsuit and back rent. His new home was, while not grand, big enough for him to continue to operate as a bookseller, but as for her stepmother, ‘well – pazienza! Kenny did not give a favourable account of William [William Godwin, Jr] either,’ Mary reported to the Hunts: ‘vedremo!’60 She decided not to spend a day more than was necessary under her father’s roof.

  There was a moment at the Smiths’ home when, hearing the opening chords on a harp of a song which Jane often sang when they were in Italy, she had to ask them to stop; it was hard to look cheerful and resolute when the Kenneys warned her that she would be miserable in England. But they were all so good to her, so kind and, knowing little of her life abroad with Shelley, so blessedly unreproachful.

  One comment pleased her above all others during this cheerful interlude; she could not resist passing it on to the Hunts. ‘Mrs K[enney] says that I am grown very like my Mother,’ she told them proudly, ‘especially in Manners – in my way of addressing people – this is the most flattering thing anyone cd say to me. I have tried to please them, & I have hopes that I have succeeded.’61

  Setting out from the Kenneys’ home for Calais, Mary took comfort from their assurances that they would be visiting England before too long. She felt the need of such friends as these as she looked towards the English shore, not as a homecomer, but with the apprehensive eyes of an exile.

  Notes

  1. MWS, ‘The Choice’, dated July 1823 in her journal. Mary left a copy of this poem with the Hunts and asked them to transcribe it for her.

  2. MWS, ‘Life of Shelley’ (Bodleian, Ms Shelley adds. c. 5, fol. 117v, 276–7).

  3. MWS–Thomas Medwin, 29.7.1822.

  4. LH–Elizabeth Kent, 26.9.1822 (Pforzheimer).

  5. See Chapter 20, note 32.

  6. WG–Everina Wollstonecraft, 4.10.1822 (Pforzheimer).

  7. WG–MWS, 6.8.1822 and 9.8.1822 (Abinger, Dep. c. 524).

  8. TLP–MWS, 19.10.22: The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith and C.E.Jones (Halliford edition, Constable, 1934), vol. 8.

  9. Byron–W. Webb, 2.9.1822, BL&J, vol. 10.

  10. Mrs Mason–MWS, n.d. (S&M, 4, p. 922).

  11. Byron–John Murray, 3.8.1822 (BL&J).

  12. MWS–John Murray, c. 26.1.1830.

  13. MWS–Byron, 21.10.1822 (Don Juan, XI, lvi–lxi).

  14. MWS–Byron, 30.3.1823 (Don Juan, XV, xlv).

  15. MWSJ, 19.10.1822.

  16. MWS–MG, 27.8.1822.

  17. MWS–Byron, dated by the arrival of Godwin’s letter, referred to here, on the same date. Mary also omitted to mention that Trelawny’s friend Captain Roberts was a regular visitor; Roberts–MWS, 1.5.1823 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516).

  18. MWSJ, 15.5.1824.

  19. William White, The Calumnies of the ‘Athenaeum’ Journal Exposed (privately printed, 1852), pp. 11–12.

  20. MWS–JW, 15.10.1822.

  21. MWS–TJH, 9.91822.

  22. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846), ch. 5.

  23. Marianne Hunt, Journal, 20.9.1822 and 7.10.1822 (Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome).

  24. EJT–CC, 22.11.1822 (Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1911)).

  25. EJT–MWS, 2.4.1823 (S&M, 4, pp. 930–2).

  26. MWS–CC, 19–20.12.1822.

  27. MWS, ‘Life of Shelley’, p. 281 (see note 2, above).

  28. WG–MWS, 15.11.1822 and 14–18.2.1823 (Abinger, Dep. c. 524).

  29. Ibid.

  30. WG–MWS, 6.5.1823 (S&M, 4, p. 940).

  31. Mrs Mason–MWS, n.d. (S&M, 4, pp. 918–19). Jane Shelley substituted the name of Gisborne for Godwin, but the contents of the letter make it clear that Mrs Mason was referring to the Godwins. The anticipated advance was £400, for ‘when the entire edition is sold’. See also Mrs Mason–MJG, 25.2.1823 (Abinger, Dep. c. 517).

  32. MWS–MG, 3–6.5.1823.

  33. Ibid.

  34. MWS–LH, 3–5.8.1823; Examiner, 2.3.1823.

  35. MWS–Charles Ollier, November–December 1839.

  36. Sir Timothy Shelley–Byron, 6.2.1823, in Doris Langley Moore, Accounts Rendered (John Murray, 1974), pp. 404–5.

  37. See Dr James Bieri, ‘Shelley’s Older Brother’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990). On 17 April 1821, Horace Smith had told Shelley that Whitton’s daughter was on the point of marrying ‘Captain Shelley’. For further details see S.C. Djabri, A. Hughes and J. Knight, The Shelleys of Field Place: The Story of the Family and Their Estates (Horsham Museum Society, 2000), p. 114.

  38. Sir Timothy Shelley–William Whitton, 8.8.1822 (Pforzheimer).

  39. Sir Timothy Shelley–Byron, 6.2.1823.

 
40. MWS–JW, 10.4.1823.

  41. Ibid.

  42. JW–MWS, 27.3.1823.

  43. CC–MWS, 11.4.1849 (CC, 2).

  44. TJH–JW, 10.9.1824 (Abinger, Dep. d. 565, fols. 13r–15r. The letter survives in John Gisborne’s book of copied correspondence to Jane from Mary and Hogg. Jane evidently supplied him with originals.

  45. TJH–JW, 17.4.1823 (Abinger, Dep. c. 211).

  46. LH–Elizabeth Kent, October 1822 (Pforzheimer).

  47. MWS–JW, 30.7.1823.

  48. LH–Vincent Novello, n.d. but evidently written shortly before Mary’s arrival in England (Brotherton Collection, Leeds (Novello Cowden Clarke Papers)).

  49. MWS–JW, 23.7.1823. The details which follow are taken from the same letter.

  50. John Cam Hobhouse, Diary, 1.5.1829 (BL Add. Mss 43744–43765). This was noted after Hunt had published a derogatory portrait of Byron in Lord Byron and His Contemporaries (1828).

  51. MWS–Teresa Guiccioli (hereafter TG), n.d. (quoted in Iris Origo, The Last Attachment (Jonathan Cape and John Murray, 1943; rev. edn 1962)). The following letter was transcribed into French by the Countess Guiccioli for her unpublished seventeen-hundred-page manuscript memoir ‘La Vie de Lord Byron en Italie’ and was written between 2–10.7.1823.

  52. Marchand, Byron, 3, p. 1085.

  53. Ibid., p. 1086.

  54. Mrs Mason–MWS, 19.7.1823 (Abinger, Dep. c. 517/2).

  55. MWS–JW, 23.7.1823.

  56. MWS–MH and LH, 30.7–1.8.1823.

  57. MWS–LH, 3–5.8.1823.

  58. The Thomas revision is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (PML 16799). Mary’s revision was done in December 1818 and shows few points of correspondence with Godwin’s revisions. This suggests that Godwin had not sought permission or suggestions from his daughter for his own alterations. A helpful account of the background is given in Nora Crook’s introduction to her edition of the novel for MWS, Collected Works, 1, p. xcvi. Godwin’s journal notes that the second edition of Frankenstein was published on 11 August 1823.

  Mary’s own revision (Thomas) made Henry Clerval more poetical, more Shelleylike, and intensified the gloom of Frankenstein, as noted in Walton’s letter to his sister of 13 August. The Creature’s non-human aspect was stressed by her addition, in the first description of its appearance, of ‘the contortions that ever and anon convulsed and deformed his unhuman features’.

  59. MWS–LH, 13–14.8 and 18–19.8.1823.

  60. Ibid.

  61. MWS–LH, 18–19.1823.

  * The boat’s contents included clothing, books, Williams’s journal – on which Mary was later to draw for her projected ‘Life of Shelley’ – and the ‘ninety odd crowns’ that Shelley had borrowed from Byron. Byron, as Shelley’s second executor, tactfully neglected to mention that this sum was by rights his; it, too, went to Mary.9

  † Mrs Mason had tried to induce Byron to send money to Claire; Byron initially agreed and then consented to provide it only in the form of a loan to Mary, who could forward it if she wished. Mary, irritated by this suggestion, refused the offer.

  ‡ The only others she kept were of her children, her mother and Shelley.

  § The desk contained only a portion of the Marlow correspondence. Many of the letters were lost or, perhaps, sold after the Shelleys left Albion House in February 1818. Mary had asked Peacock to make the storage arrangements, but some of the packing cases fell into the hands of their landlord who may have sold letters to pay himself for arrears of rent.19 Peacock, however, told Mary (on 15 April 1823) that many loose papers were burned by the landlord’s servants before he himself gained access to Albion House.

  ¶ Mary drew on her historical research for Valperga and, in the character of Despina, gave voice to her own grief. Hunt praised the story, but the reviewer in the Examiner of 29 December 1822 thought – rightly – that the central catastrophe was awkwardly contrived.

  || Whitton’s hopes were limited by the fact that Percy Shelley’s elder son, Charles, had already been installed at Field Place and was being treated as heir to the estate.

  ** This, rather suitably, was where the first staging of Bram Stoker’s Dracula took place later in the century

  †† Cooke’s blue body, together with the Monster’s striking first descent from the laboratory – his creation was never shown – became standard features of all subsequent productions. The tide Presumption shows that the subject was being carefully presented as a moral tale of hubristic endeavour. This did not stop a few stalwarts from protesting – which did the play’s success no harm at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  FAME, OF A KIND

  1823–1824

  ‘Well – first I will tell you journalwise the history of my 16 days in London. I arrived monday the 25th of August – My father & William came for me to the Wharf. I had an excellent passage of 11½ hours … the smoke of our fire was wafted right aft & streamed out behind us [this was Mary’s first steamboat journey] – but wind was of little consequence – the tide was with us – and though the Engine gave a ‘short uneasy motion’ to the vessel, the water was so smooth that no one on board was sick & Persino played about the deck in high glee. I had a very kind reception in the Strand [Godwin’s new home] … the house, though rather dismal, is infinitely better than the Skinner St. one – I resolved not to think of certain things, to take all as a matter of course and thus contrived to keep myself out of the gulph of melancholy, on the edge of which I was & am continually peeping. –

  But lo & behold! I found myself famous!

  Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 9–11 September 1823

  ONLY THE DROPPING OF WAISTLINES AND DEEPENING OF BONNET brims appeared to have marked the five-year gap since Mary’s last visit to Paris. Arriving in London at the end of August 1823, under skies washed white by a piercing east wind, she felt as though she had stepped into a city of the future. Even the accent had changed. The voice of the new London’s streets was loud, flat and full of money.

  George IV, together with his favourite architect, John Nash, had been building almost without pause for the past five years, building for his own glory in a style to prompt imperial comparisons, and building for commerce, with the aim of turning London into one of the world’s leading industrial cities. By 1823, the Regent’s Canal, spanned by forty bridges, had opened the way for cargo barges to slide into the heart of the city; Regent Street now cut a bold swathe from north Marylebone almost to the door of Carlton House; enticing shops under the soaring roof of Nash’s Quadrant in Regent Street formed part of an ambitious thrust away from the old town’s tightly laced Mayfair centre, forcing builders and consumers east, towards the City.

  The smartest money in town was going into expansion and development. The Duke of Wellington had put money into Brunel’s scheme to drive a tunnel under the Thames; Thomas Cubitt was laying the foundations for a series of elegant squares in the five fields of marshland separating Chelsea village from Westminster. In Regent’s Park, Nash had almost completed his vision of an urban Arcadia for the wealthy. The tall chimneys of brick kilns spread their bitter clouds over the hayfields surrounding the villages of Mary’s childhood, Notting Hill, Paddington, Kilburn, Kentish Town.

  Nothing was as her memory had preserved it. Elegant Buckingham House was gone, torn down to give George IV a palace to match his bulk; nearby, a giant Achilles forged from dismantled cannons saluted England’s hero, the Duke of Wellington, in another unfinished monster–home on the site of old Apsley House. Gaslight, as bright as if all London had taken to the stage, streamed down on the muddy streets where linkboys, a mere five years ago, had guided ladies to safety with flaming torches.

  ‘I think I could find my way better on foot to the Coliseum at Rome than hence [her lodgings near Brunswick Square and Coram’s Fields] to Grosvenor Square,’ Mary lamented to young Louisa Holcroft at Versailles;1 in her journal, she noted that she felt like an exile, the last relic of a beloved race returning to a country she no longer knew. The sen
se of being the sole survivor was melancholy and strong; Shelley and Williams were dead; Polidori had committed suicide; Trelawny and Byron were on their way to Greece and, perhaps, to their deaths on a battlefield. Only she was left.

  Struggling to find her way through the crowded streets, she saw London through the eyes of a bewildered tourist. A silk-roped balloon sailed overhead; a hectic sunset turned the city into a panorama by her father’s friend, John Martin. Newly popular – his lurid canvases of The Destruction of Herculaneum (1822) and The Seventh Plague (1823) appealed to the late Georgians’ taste for sensation – Martin had done little more than dramatize the tumbled heaps of stone, the stucco shells and stranded pillars among which his admiring viewers now went about their daily lives.

  The idea for a novel began to form, triggered by Mary’s perception of herself as a stranger in the wreckage of a great city. Martin’s 1823 title gave her an idea, an attractive one to a writer haunted by the sense of her isolation. Frankenstein had been set at the end of the eighteenth century; what if she moved into the future, to the end of time? What if the world’s population had been devastated by a plague of the kind imagined by Martin? How would it be carried? How would people respond? These were the questions she began to examine and turn over during her first weeks in London as the idea for The Last Man, one of her most imaginative and ambitious works, took shape.*

  *

  A two-week residence at the new family home returned Mary firmly to the present. Neither Nash nor his royal master had troubled their minds with schemes for the shabby east end of the cobbled Strand, where Godwin’s new house and business premises squatted in the shadow of St Clement Danes, Samuel Johnson’s favourite local church, among chop houses, printers, engravers and purveyors of curiosities. The recently uncovered skeleton of a mammoth was on show nearby.

  Here, surrounded by the theatrical and literary friends who lived and worked in this lively, crowded, hackney-clattering area, the Godwins were gallantly back at work as proprietors of the Juvenile Library. Their list, as Percy’s mother could hardly fail to observe, included several new children’s books and one older one, reprinted from 1819, by Mrs Caroline Barnard. Its title, The Fisher Boy, or Worth in Humble Life, enabled Mary to guess why Godwin had brusquely rejected Maurice, her own modest tale of a fisher-boy; the two stories even shared Weymouth for a setting.2 With Mrs Barnard already on his list, Godwin would not have wanted another, paler treatment of an almost identical subject. Business came first.