Mary Shelley
Page 48
Mrs Godwin, whose reproaches and intrusive questions Mary had been dreading, was unexpectedly amiable and sympathetic. Godwin, milder and slower than when she had last seen him, busied himself with arranging entertainments, a visit to the Tower, a day’s outing down the river to Richmond where Marianne Hunt’s young brother Tom, a future star of Drury Lane, was treading the boards. Amelia Curran, making one of her long visits to London, was asked to dine; Charles and Mary Lamb came, bursting with pride in their pretty adopted daughter Emma Isola and a home of their own at last on the banks of New River in Islington. Life was being kinder to the Lambs than the Godwins; Mary had not needed confining for two years; Charles’s regular contributions as Elia to the London Magazine had won him literary celebrity. Having known Mary Shelley since her childhood, they urged her to call as often as she could find time to make the journey. It is unlikely that they made much reference to her loss; Lamb, always capricious in his likes and dislikes, had never cared for Shelley.
Better placed than most to give Mary a clear account of her father’s situation, Lamb was unable to be reassuring. Godwin had moved into his new premises at 195 The Strand on 26 June 1822, still hoping that Shelley would send financial help. On 23 December 1822, his former landlord at Skinner Street obtained another charge against him, for £373 6s. 8d. Only £220 had been raised from friendly supporters by July 1823, of which £100 had already been spent. Charles Lamb was among the signers of a new appeal which endeavoured to raise funds for Godwin by public subscription, arguing the importance of allowing him to continue work on his massive History of the Commonwealth unimpeded by financial worries. Other signatories included William Lamb, John Murray, Sir James Mackintosh, Henry Crabb Robinson and Lord Dudley. Godwin, while assuring his friends that no financial troubles would prevent him from continuing work on his book, was a very worried man at the time of his daughter’s return to England. He was still being pursued for the arrears of his rent on Skinner Street and, for all the professed affection of aristocratic admirers like Lady Caroline Lamb (Lady Caroline sent scrawled invitations to her home at Brocket Hall and asked kindly for accounts of Mr Godwin’s ‘interesting and beautiful’ daughter3), most were readier to pay tributes than open their purses.
Everybody now spoke warmly of Godwin; none could afford to indulge his continual need of financial support.† To Mary, who had learned something but not all of this from her father’s letters, it was clear that she would have to start finding ways to earn enough to keep him as well as herself. Who could tell? Perhaps Sir Timothy’s attitude would soften when he saw the journey she had made. She and her father were to see his lawyer on 3 September: she remained hopeful.
Usually reserved, the sixty-seven-year-old Godwin made no secret of his delight in having Mary home again. She was, he told her fondly, the only member of the family he could depend on now; when he drew up a new will in 1827, he made sure that Mary, due to inherit both the Opie portrait of her mother and the Northcote painting of himself which had always hung opposite it, should also have control over his literary estate.4 Mary, not his amiable, hare-brained son William, was to be the curator of his reputation. Mary would know what to keep and what to burn.
Mary’s twenty-year-old half-brother had already won her sympathy when Godwin brusquely dismissed him in one of his letters as ‘no smiler’; with an uncertain future, a volatile, exhausting mother and a father whose high expectations could never be satisfied, it was hard to imagine that William had much to laugh about. Since they had last met, she was pleased to discover, he had become interested in music and the theatre, and in writing. Having recently become a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, he was hoping to review for the Opera Glass, a new venture by his American friend, the actor and playwright John Howard Payne.
While sharing her father’s view of William’s unsteadiness, Mary liked his warmth and laughed at his puppyish enthusiasm, the way he rushed at new projects and teased his father as ‘the old gentleman’, an expression which she also irreverently adopted behind Godwin’s back. Others complained that young William was a noisy oaf; Mary found him responsive and kind. She often coaxed him to come with her on walks to the wooded slopes around Caen Wood and Highgate village where Coleridge sat sadly behind Dr Gillman’s curtains, wondering what he had done to drive his son Hartley, Mary’s old playmate, to refuse ever to see him again.‡ Perhaps they discussed Shelley’s magnificent translations from Faust: Coleridge had been planning such an undertaking since 1814, the year of Mary’s elopement. Perhaps, having read and admired Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, he talked with his visitor about his own plans for a lecture on the myth of Prometheus, which he gave to the newly formed Royal Society of Literature the following year. Mary must have been happy to see him again; her memories of Coleridge stretched back beyond the days when she and Claire had hidden under a sofa to hear him recite ‘The Ancient Mariner’.
*
Mary’s first London excursion, accompanied by William, her father and a distressingly haggard Jane Williams, was to see Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, now in its fourth week of performances at the Lyceum, just down the road from Godwin’s new home. By late August Presumption, which lasted, with music, for approximately an hour, had been shifted from first to third place in the evening’s entertainment, but Mary was still able to sense a ‘breathless eagerness in the audience’ as lightning flashes and thunder rolls announced that T.P. Cooke as the ‘Creature’ was ready to spring out on them from the concealed laboratory at the top of a narrow stage staircase.”5§ The cheap seats in the pit were only half-filled, but nobody left until the drama ended, a sure sign of success in the days when regular theatregoers seldom stayed for more than an act.
And so, when she had expected to be buried in oblivion, ‘lo & behold! I found myself famous,’ Mary told Hunt after watching this high-pitched travesty of her novel.6 But this was a time when she would have preferred obscurity. The talk in London was still of her having run away with Shelley and her sister to live in an incestuous commune at Geneva with Lord Byron and Shelley sharing the young women’s favours. The last thing Mary needed was the news that placard-bearers had been marching through London, urging playgoers not to attend ‘the monstrous Drama, founded on the improper work called “Frankenstein” … This subject is pregnant with mischief.’7¶
Appropriated for the stage, Mary’s novel thrived. By the end of 1823, five versions of the story had appeared in London, often at raucous theatres like the Royal Coburg (the Old Vic). There were two revivals in 1824. In 1826, T.P. Cooke crossed the Channel to play the Creature once again in a new French version. From then on, hardly a year passed without some adaptation of Frankenstein, usually farcical, never serious, being performed.8 Mary made nothing from this pillaging of her work; playwrights were under no obligation to hand over money for their use of a book. The Frankenstein dramatizations scarcely acknowledged her existence as the original author; they guaranteed, nevertheless, an enduring connection between her small, ladylike personage and fiction’s most celebrated monster. This, more than her treasured friendship with Byron, her life with Shelley, or her celebrated parentage, became the basis of her future fame.
Richard Brinsley Peake’s stage production of 1823 marked the birth of a myth. That the monster and his maker had entered the popular imagination was clearly indicated the following year when George Canning, the Foreign Secretary, addressing the House of Commons on the question of emancipation, suggested that freeing rebel West Indian slaves ‘would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance’.9 Mary was pleased to have her book alluded to in Parliament by a politician she admired; Canning had, however, misread her intentions. She intended her creature to act as a warning against unsocial behaviour: do as you would be done by was the Godwinian message she meant to convey. Canning’s allusion was part of an argument against freedom. Treat the slaves well, Canning argued, and see the horrors they will do. By 1830, the Creature was be
ing referred to as Frankenstein; by 1840, it had evolved into a symbol for anything perceived as dangerous and out of control. A Punch cartoon of 1843 showed a ferocious apelike figure, clearly bent on damaging anything or anyone crossing its path. The caption was ‘The Irish Frankenstein’.
Godwin’s publication in July 1823 of a new edition of his daughter’s novel, clearly identifying her for the first time as the author, was well-timed. Not only did the book reach a new audience, of playgoers, but it would provide her with a valuable byline, ‘The author of Frankenstein’, under which to write without contravening her father-in-law’s ban on public use of his family name.|| And writing, as Mary rapidly understood, was going to be crucial for her survival.
It was always in Sir Timothy’s power to salvage Mary’s reputation. By giving her a reasonable allowance, by publicly acknowledging her as his daughter-in-law, by inviting her into his home, he could help her to be seen as the kind of lady on whom one’s sister or daughter might call without fear of scandal.
Sir Timothy took the opposite course. Mary’s fond supposition that little Percy would win the affection of his grandparents was misplaced; Percy was the child of a union which the Shelleys had condemned and continued to deplore. To show an interest in Percy was equivalent to expressing approval of his mother, the woman who, in their eyes, had lured Shelley away from his young and pregnant wife and, they did not doubt, encouraged him to pour his future inheritance into her father’s open hands. Percy was of interest to his Shelley grandparents only if he could be separated from his mother.
Their attitude was not immediately apparent. On 3 September, Mary and Godwin went to call on William Whitton, the Shelleys’ family lawyer. Presented with a sum of £100 for ner immediate expenses and promised £100 a year on Percy’s behalf, Mary’s hopes rose. More, she imagined, would follow. Her sacrifice, in coming back to England from the sunny Italy she was already missing, was going to be recognized and rewarded. Whitton’s response, she wrote cheerfully to Hunt, ‘relieved me from a load of anxieties – I hesitated no longer to quit the Strand …’10
Shortly after moving into lodgings close to James Marshall’s home overlooking Coram’s Fields to the north of Holborn, she was brutally disillusioned. She did not know that Whitton had in fact urged Sir Timothy to grant her no personal allowance; she did, by the end of November, know that she was to receive a meagre £200 a year on which to live – £100 for herself, £100 for Percy, to be repaid, with interest, to the estate at the time of Sir Timothy’s death. She would receive this allowance only if she remained in England and made no attempt to bring Shelley’s name into the public eye. She was not to publish his work, nor was she to use his name in her own writings. There would be no family meetings, no correspondence, no pretence of affection. The allowance was ungenerous; the prohibitions were unkind. Cruellest of all, to a young woman whose long association with Shelley had, as Godwin once poignantly put it, deprived her of her ‘spotless fame’, was the Shelleys’ decision to exclude her from their family, to treat her as a figure of disgrace.
Mary was already a social outcast. Mrs Gisborne, visiting London in 1820, had only dared to tell one member of her husband’s family, the open-minded Emma Clementi, that she knew and even liked the Shelleys. In August 1823, the month Mary returned to England, Marianne Hunt’s sister, Elizabeth Kent, was berated in the Monthly Magazine (1 August 1823) for having dared to quote lines by Shelley in her book on the care of pot plants, Flora Domestica. The reproach was renewed in October by the Eclectic Review, with references to ‘the atheist Shelley’. John Chalk Claris (‘Arthur Brooke’), a poet who had been imprudent enough to write an elegy on Shelley’s death, had been castigated by reviewers in the Literary Gazette (September 1822), the Country Literary Chronicle (October 1822), the Monthly Review (November 1822), the Gentleman’s Magazine (December 1822) and the Monthly Censor (January 1823). Mary, as Shelley’s widow, was assumed to share his deplorable views. The chilling behaviour of his parents did nothing to make her life easier.
Mary saw her mother-in-law as her principal enemy in the family. Her instinct may have been correct. Sir Timothy, when he did finally agree to meet his grandson in 1827, seemed genuinely affected by the sight of a small, shy, well-scrubbed boy who bore a marked resemblance to his father. Shaken, he continued to resist Mary’s attempts to arrange a meeting for herself; perhaps, having heard from Whitton that she was a gentle, well-spoken young woman, he feared her effect on his feelings. He was not, by nature, a hard-hearted man. When his second daughter, another Mary, caused scandal in 1827 by leaving her husband and children to have a child with another – somewhat disreputable – man, Sir Timothy stood by her. So did his wife. But Mary Shelley was not of their blood. They had no interest in protecting her reputation. They owed her nothing but their anger.
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Godwin, however short of money, had refused to waste time on writing articles and reviews since his early years as a hard-working journalist. Mary could see no alternative, although she longed to unrein her imagination on a novel and – Shelley’s wish – a tragic drama. Godwin threw cold water on this second plan; shown the play she had written or sketched out in the months after her return to London, he was lethally candid. ‘Your personages are mere abstractions, the lines & points of a mathematical diagram, & not men and women,’ he told her. ‘… It is laziness, my dear Mary, that makes you wish to be a dramatist.’11 She did not make a second attempt, nor did she forget Godwin’s brutal words.
In October 1823, she had begun work on a piece about ghosts for the prestigious London Magazine, one of the few journals which had not published disparaging reviews of her husband’s work. She drew on the spectral tales she had read at Geneva in 1816, and on others which she had heard from the Chevalier Mengaldo at Venice and which she had recorded in her journal during the terrible days following Clara Shelley’s death there. On 13 December, Godwin wrote a discreet letter to the resourceful young publisher and magazine proprietor Henry Colburn, for whom he was writing his enormous History of the Commonwealth. Would Mr Colburn be interested in letting Mary ‘try her powers’ for him in the New Monthly Magazine, and at what rate? Did Mr Colburn have any particular subjects to suit her interests?12 His approach was successful; Mary’s submission of a piece on ancient and modern Rome the following month began a relationship which would eventually lead to Colburn’s publication of The Last Man in 1826.13
Properly supported by the Shelleys, it is unlikely that Mary would ever have undertaken the short stories for ladies’ annuals which she dutifully produced over the next sixteen years. Valuable to biographers and critics for their personal content, her contributions are for the most part wordy and pedestrian. Occasionally, like sun on steel, Mary’s wit glints through. ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’, a story anonymously published in the London Magazine the year after her return, has the brio of a Peacock novella; here, tongue firmly in her cheek, Mary parodied her husband’s predilection for rescuing pretty girls from their boarding-schools. Emilia Viviani, thinly disguised as ‘Clorinda’, is portrayed as a giddy flirt who teaches her suitors how to bribe her keeper with rum bottles and boasts of drugging the Mother Superior with opium cakes. Shelley, represented as an impressionable young English artist, is contriving a daring rescue mission to save his heroine from a planned marriage when a rival discloses that the wedding has already taken place, with no noticeable resistance from the bride.14
Here, and in a travel sketch, ‘A Visit to Brighton’, published two years later after a disappointing month in George IV’s favourite resort, Mary demonstrated a gift for humorous writing which shrewder editors would have encouraged her to develop. What, she asked, were the beauties of Leman or Como when compared to the English seaside? ‘Lovers of nature! Enthusiasts, who delight to drink deep joy from the various shapes and changes of earth and sky, behold me at Brighton! Was this the retreat of our pleasure-loving prince? the asylum of fashion? the resort of nobles? – this!’ Mockingly, she went on to show herse
lf in pursuit of Brighton’s only park: ‘twigs, meant for trees, stand about: as for a real tree, an inhabitant of Brighton is as ignorant of its shape and material, as a Venetian of that of a horse.’15
Mary’s capacity for laughter, often gleamingly apparent in her letters, was one of her most attractive qualities. Leigh Hunt had never forgotten her breaking down in giggles at the slapstick scenes in The Merchant of Venice. Writing to Jane Williams in 1827, she looked back on summer evenings when they strolled home from expeditions to friends, laughing ‘as if we were kittens in clover’.16 Surrounded by friends, as she explained almost apologetically to Leigh Hunt, ‘I easily forget myself – & at first carried away soon get beyond & carry with me the spirit of the company’.17 She loved to enjoy herself; she was worried that if she did so people would consider her unfeeling. Alone with Jane, and perhaps with her jolly half-brother William, she was not afraid to be frivolous.
Mary’s public persona remained severe and wan, that of a widow dedicated to the care of her father, her child and the posthumous reputation of her husband. This was the side of her which Henry Crabb Robinson, visiting Godwin’s home one evening in November 1823, recorded in his journal. Mrs Shelley was noted to have looked elegant, sickly and young. (Mrs Godwin gushingly told her she looked no more than sixteen.) He could not believe such a fragile girl was the author of Frankenstein, a work which he still only knew by hearsay. Meeting her again the following year and still reeling from the poisonous gossip Mrs Hoppner had poured into his ears in Florence that summer, Robinson decided that Mrs Hoppner must be mistaken: Mrs Shelley still seemed withdrawn, but she was an interesting and charming woman.18 He never saw the wicked, spicy side of Mary’s nature; the curb was always on under her stepmother’s roof.