Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Her spirits did not improve. ‘I do not remember ever having been so completely miserable as I am tonight,’ she wrote to herself on 14 May 1824. It had rained for weeks on end; Percy fretted at being kept indoors all day. She could not get on with her novel. She felt she had lost all her imaginative powers; without them, how was she to survive? The next day, she learned that Byron had died, not on a battlefield, but on a bed of fever and excessive bloodletting out in the sad malarial marsh town of Missolonghi. ‘This then was the “coming event” that cast its shadow on my last night’s miserable thoughts,’ she wrote, astonished by her strange gift of presentiment: ‘Albe – the dear capricious fascinating Albe has left this desart world.’ Brooding on the deaths of all the people she had loved, she hated herself for surviving them: ‘Why am I doomed to live on seeing all expire before me? God grant I may die young.’ Byron’s little meannesses were forgotten as she mourned the loss of ‘that resplendent Spirit, whom I loved …’ Looking at what she had just written, Mary hastily crossed out the words ‘whom I loved’. She could only admit to having loved one man, even in the privacy of her journal: ‘whose departure leaves the earth still darker as midnight,’ she wrote instead.

  A month later, the weather had changed. Walking out into the warm scented hayfields around Kentish Town and back to her lodgings near Coram’s Fields in the shadows of dusk, she passed the neglected churchyard of St Pancras. ‘Such, my loved Shelley now ten years ago – at this season – did we first meet – & these were the very scenes … My own love – we shall meet again,’ she wrote on 8 June. Her spirits had lifted again; she had made a decision. She would put more distance between herself and her father’s home. She would take herself away from the city in which she was constantly oppressed by her poverty and lack of friends. She would follow Jane’s example and settle in quiet Kentish Town, among the fields and trees she loved. She would take care of Jane – and Jane would learn to return her love.

  I shall again feel the enthusiastic glow of composition … feel the winged ideas arise, & enjoy the delight of expressing them – study & occupation will be a pleasure not a task – & this I shall owe to sight & companionship of trees & meadows flowers & sunshine –

  England I charge thee dress thyself in smiles for my sake – I will celebrate thee, O England, and cast a glory on thy name …

  Notes

  1. MWS–Louisa Holcroft, 2.10.1823.

  2. These details are given in advertisement form at the back of an 1823 reprint of The Parent’s Offering, also by Mrs Barnard (BL 12806r3). Mrs Fenwick’s new story, priced at is. 6d. was The Mouse Trap.

  3. Lady Caroline Lamb–WG, September 1823 (Godwin, 2, p. 285). She had been taking Godwin’s literary advice for some months on her novel, Ada Reisz (1823).

  4. WG, Will, 12.2.1827 (Pforzheimer). He stipulated that the portrait of himself by Northcote must eventually pass to his grandson, but left it first to his wife.

  5. MWS–LH, 9–11.9.1823.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Theatrical Observer, 9.8.1823.

  8. The combination of humour and terror has remained strong in Frankenstein productions. Dracula, which had its first stage reading at the Lyceum, was later combined with the Frankenstein story in a 1971 film and in The Rocky Horror Show (1973). Neither of these stories would have achieved their extraordinary grip on popular imagination without the help of the theatre (in Frankenstein’s case) and of the cinema (in Dracula’s).

  9. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 2nd Series, 16.3.1824.

  10. MWS–LH, 9–11.9.1823.

  11. WG–MWS, 27.2.1824 (S&M, 4, p. 1016a–c). He also noted writing this letter in his diary. Godwin’s words hurt, but Mary had already sensed her failure: ‘my labours are futile,’ she wrote in her journal on 30 January 1824; ‘– how differently did I commence an undertaking with my loved Shelley to criticize and encourage me as I advanced – I can in no way reconcile myself to my solitude.’

  12. WG–Henry Colburn, 23.12.1823 (V&A, Forster archive).

  13. MWS (anonymous), ‘Rome in the First and Nineteenth Centuries’, New Monthly Magazine, March 1824.

  14. MWS (anonymous), ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’, London Magazine, April 1824.

  15. MWS (anonymous), ‘A Visit to Brighton’, London Magazine, XVI, December 1826.

  16. MWS–JW, 7.8.1827.

  17. MWS–LH, 20.10–3.11.1827.

  18. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diaries, 16.11.1823 and 22.12.1824 (Dr Williams’ Library).

  19. Ibid., 8.4.1838.

  20. MWS–LH, 18.9.1823.

  21. MWSJ, 3.9.1824. It is not certain that it was Procter who paid these ‘long tho rare visits’ but since Beddoes was in Italy that summer, Mary would hardly have questioned his reasons for not visiting her. Beddoes had been given the commission of bringing back Amelia Curran’s portrait of Shelley. He did not fulfil it: two years later, William Millar, in his Biographical Sketches of British Characters Recently Deceased, regretted that there was still no known portrait of Shelley.

  22. Examiner, 13.6.1824, p. 370; Edinburgh Review, XI, 24.7.1824, p. 499; Literary Gazette, 17.7.1824, p. 452. The last of these gives a rare hint of the way gossip was spreading about Mary’s having been an unloving wife; the writer of this review had evidently heard something to make him question the sincerity of her grief.

  23. Payne was first mentioned by Godwin in an 1817 letter to one of his young protégés, James Ogilvie; he was at Godwin’s home on 25 August, 26 September, 5, 12 and 26 November 1823.

  24. John Howard Payne (hereafter JHP)–Henry Harris, 3.5.1817 (Payne Notebooks, 1815–1817, Houghton Library, Mass., Ms Am. 1972).

  25. JHP–MWS, 1825, in The Romance of Mary W. Shelley, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving (The Bibliophile Society, Boston, 1907), pp. 28–31.

  26. MWS–TJH, 3.10.1824.

  27. Isabella Baxter Booth–MWS, 1.11.1823 (Abinger, Dep. b. 211/2(a)); MWS–LH, 9–11.9.1823. Isabella spent some time living apart from her husband, but by 1828 they were both in London and Isabella hoped to travel abroad with Mary, the trip Shelley had planned for her in 1817. She remained deeply unhappy: ‘I glide here and there like a restless ghost,’ she told Mary on 24.6.1828 (Abinger, Dep. b. 211/2(a)). Mary’s occasional letters to her are affectionate, loyal and concerned. They are never in the passionate key of those written to the women she loved.

  28. LH–Vincent Novello, 24.7.1823 (Brotherton Collection, Leeds (Novello Cowden Clarke Papers)).

  29. MWS–MH, 13.6–18.6.1824.

  30. The description given here is compiled from published letters written by Mary to the Hunts in October and November 1823.

  31. MWS–Mary Sabilla Novello, 27.12.1824.

  32. MWS–LH, 25.10 and 3.11.1823.

  33. MWS, The Last Man (1826), 3, vii.

  34. Mary and Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878), pp. 37 and 41–2. These entries were written by Mary, who was named not for Mary Shelley but for Mary Lamb, who taught her Latin when she was a child. Her husband also recalled the raptures which Edward Holmes, Vincent Novello’s devoted pupil, went into about the young widows. ‘He used to be unmercifully rallied about his enamoured fantasies with regard to both …’ (ibid., pp. 39–40).

  35. MWSJ, 18.1.1824.

  * A rash of poems, novels and paintings on this subject, including John Martin’s first 1826 sketch for The Last Man (1849), may also have been inspired by rumours that the plague of cholera which broke out in Bengal in 1817 was steadily advancing towards Europe. It reached Sunderland in the north of England in 1831 and London in January 1832. Most major cities in England were affected by a disease which thrived best in the poorest areas. The epidemic had shrunk to a handful of cases by the summer of 1832, partly as a result of fierce sanitary regulations. One of its last victims was Mary’s half-brother William. It was as a consequence of the 1832 cholera epidemic that the massive task of reforming London’s drainage system began.

  † Read, the landlord at Skinner Street, came to an arrangem
ent with Godwin in November 1823 which allowed him to settle, for the time being, with a part payment of the £430 he now owed.

  ‡ Hartley, a lost soul after being expelled in 1820 from his Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, had last seen his father in July 1822 when he borrowed some money and then failed to keep a second appointment with him. Coleridge later learned that he had gone back to Ambleside, where he became a lonely schoolmaster, received by nobody because of his drinking habits. Ironically, one of the causes of Hartley’s despair had been the discovery that his own schemes for a great poem on the subject of Prometheus had already been realized by Shelley, a poet for whom he shared his father’s deep admiration. Hartley abandoned his project after reading Shelley’s poem, probably in late 1821.

  § Cooke’s offstage creation was originally a concession to religious spectators, who would not have tolerated a showing on stage of the work of God.

  ¶ This was probably a publicity stunt arranged by S.A. Arnold, who owned the Lyceum, also called the English Opera House, during this period.

  || Interestingly, Mary never considered the option of using her maiden name.

  ** The fault seems to have lain less with Payne than with the theatre-managers who exploited his financial naivety: ‘the initials of the Little Theatre Royal Drury Lane have answers to the words Treachery, Roguery, Damnation and Liars,’ he wrote to one of these affable villains who had done him out of £54.24

  †† Jane Williams was always referred to as a widow by Mary and her friends. In fact, as she and Hogg, her suitor, were aware, her husband Mr Johnson was alive, undivorced, and in London.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  LITERARY MATTERS

  1824–1829

  ‘Moore breakfasted with me on Sunday – we talked of past times – of Shelley & Ld Byron. He was very agreable – & I never felt myself so perfectly at my ease with anyone … He seems to understand & to like me. This is a new and unexpected pleasure.’

  Mary Shelley, Journal, 2 July 1827

  ‘THUS HAS PERISHED, IN THE FLOWER OF HIS AGE, IN THE NOBLEST of causes, one of the greatest poets England has ever produced,’ the Morning Chronicle intoned in May 1824, reporting that Prince Mavrocordato had commanded funeral ceremonies to be conducted in all the churches of Greece.1 Death came at a good moment for Byron; the image of martyr could be superimposed on that of libertine exile. It was of little consequence to obituary-makers that he had not died on a battlefield.

  Trelawny was among the first into the gold mine thus opened to those who could claim even the slightest friendship with Byron. Writing to Mary on 30 April from Missolonghi, he unblushingly presented himself as Byron’s daily companion of the past four years – he had been with Byron for just twenty months.2 He wanted her help in getting his own account published by John Hunt in the Examiner. Modesty was not Trelawny’s forte and he was eager to show that he, not Byron, had been the hero of the hour in Greece.

  Mary knew her friend too well to take his claims seriously – a month earlier, she had teasingly informed him that his theatrical posturing reminded her of seeing Edmund Kean on stage, although ‘Greek dress – pistols – Suliotes & woodcock shooting are more in your way’.3 She let his assertions pass; Trelawny’s account was published as he had wished, although in extract form. For the article she intended to write on Byron herself, Mary wanted a more reliable source. Commiserating with Teresa Guiccioli on a sorrow which – Mary warned her – time would only deepen, she asked for precise details. ‘When was the last time that dear Byron wrote to you? Was he ill at that time? Be assured that anything that you send me, any copy of his letters, will be sacred to me; in asking for these monuments of his final moments I am moved by the true affection that I feel for him.’4 She was still pressing Teresa for these ‘monuments’ a year later, although no longer on her own behalf.

  Byron’s remains reached London three months after the reports of his death. On 9 July, Mary visited the black-draped parlour of Sir Edward Knatchbull’s home in Great George Street where four Greek vases containing Byron’s remains kept guard over a coffin richly mantled in figured crimson velvet. His servants, Lega Zambelli and William Fletcher, were there to greet her; Fletcher offered the startling news that Byron’s last words had been of Claire. (It is more likely that Byron was remembering his much loved friend, Lord Clare.) Three days later, standing at the front window of her new lodgings with Mrs Bartlett at 5 Bartholomew Place, Kentish Town, Mary watched Byron’s hearse roll past at the beginning of its long journey north to Newstead. Deep in writing The Last Man (she was at the beginning of the second volume now and reading up background works on Constantinople for the setting), she was struck by the thought that this was ‘his last journey to the last seat of his ancestors’.5 The same grim correspondence between life and fiction had been in her mind on 16 May, when she wrote to Teresa of ‘a new law of nature’ condemning them all to an early death (‘e moriremo tutti giovani’).

  *

  A mile north of the last London stage at Battle Bridge (now King’s Cross), Kentish Town stood among nursery gardens and hayfields at the side of a road only a little grander than a cart-track. Prettily situated below the woods and hills of Highgate, the village remained secluded. Jane Williams had fled there a few months earlier, in part because she needed a discreet location for her developing relationship with Hogg, in part for family reasons. ‘Poor thing,’ Mary had written indignantly to Leigh Hunt in September 1823: ‘she is much persecuted by Edward’s [step]Mother Who to save her own credit spreads false reports about her as much as she can. She even called on Mrs Godwin to warn her that I ought not to know her … England is no place for Jane’6 She still had no idea of Jane’s attachment to Hogg; she saw only that Hogg was clumsily paying court.

  Mary’s own reasons for joining Jane were both honourable and selfish. She cast herself as the protector of a defenceless woman who was, like herself, reliant on a disapproving family to provide for her after Edward’s death. This was her way of compensating for the past. Shelley had turned to Jane, as she now sadly recognized, because he lacked sympathy from her; by caring for Jane, she would be doing as Shelley would have wished. Selfishly, she relied on Jane’s more cheerful nature to dispel her own sadness. ‘You know my Janey’s cheerful – gay & contented temper,’ she wrote to Hunt on 12 August 1826: ‘I cannot be sorrowful while with her … I cannot express to you the extreme gratitude I feel towards this darling girl, for the power she has over me of influencing me to happiness.’

  Mary had other reasons for going to Kentish Town. Further away from the Godwins’ home, it enabled her to cut her visits there down to a meal once a week. There was a good local school for little Percy and fields in which, as she happily noticed, he was ready to trot or fly his kite all day. And, by firmly declaring that she and Jane lived for each other, she could keep unwelcome suitors at a distance. John Howard Payne had become assiduous by the summer of 1824; John Chalk Claris, a recently widowed poet who wrote under the name of Arthur Brooke, was hinting an interest in matrimony. Mary liked Brooke for having written an impassioned elegy after Shelley’s death, but had no wish to encourage his romantic hopes. His suggestion that she visit him at Dover was crushed: ‘my bitterest enemy could hardly desire for me a greater punishment than a visit to the sea-side,’ Mary told him on 13 July. She had already found comfort ‘in the society of a beloved friend who lives near me’.

  Jane was not quite the loving friend that Mary supposed her to be; what is remarkable is that she succeeded so well in masking her feelings of resentment. They were partly prompted by envy. Mary had written a book which had been turned into a play; she had a father who, however impecunious, seemed to know everybody of literary significance; she had the prospect, when Sir Timothy died, of becoming rich. In the summer of 1824, following Byron’s death, she became important for another reason. She had been with him at Geneva, Venice and Pisa. She had read his memoirs; she had transcribed much of his work. Her husband had become one of Byron’s intim
ate circle. No woman, with the exception of Teresa Guiccioli, was more necessary to Byron’s would-be biographers than Mrs Shelley. Jane had scarcely known him.

  Two applicants made their approaches within days of Byron’s burial. The first, writing from Italy, was Thomas Medwin. Using the ingratiating tone which she remembered with mistrust, he paid tribute to Mary’s superior knowledge of their dear late friend. What a tragedy that Byron’s memoirs had been destroyed!* Now that these were gone, friends had begged him to set down his own records of the many intimate conversations he had enjoyed with Lord Byron. But of course, if Mary intended to produce a book herself, he would set his aside, forget the trouble he had taken, the money he had been promised. He could guarantee a glowing portrait of Shelley – and all the discretion a widow might require.7

  Medwin’s letter reached Bartholomew Place the morning after Thomas Moore, accompanied by their mutual friend James Kenney, had taken breakfast with Mary and requested her help with his own projected life of Byron. Deploying all of his considerable charm (‘I never felt myself so perfectly at my ease with anyone,’ Mary noted some time later8), Moore explained that there were parts of the book which could only be written if she helped him. The exchange was not to be one-sided. She wished to meet Washington Irving? Nothing could be more easily arranged. An excited Mary was escorted to the studio where the American author was posing for a portrait by his compatriot, John Gilbert Newton. She saw for herself the lean, attractive face, the deep-set eyes and noble forehead; he spoke, to her delight, of his admiration for Lord Byron. (Irving was sufficiently under Byron’s spell to rent Newstead Abbey for a few weeks and to hunt down old retainers who had worked there in the past.) Mary was girlishly thrilled; here, she thought, was a man worth loving. Moore had granted her wish so easily; with the support he seemed so ready to give, she could enter the literary world which was currently keeping her at a distance. Shelley would approve of her helping this friendly, sociable man; had he not read a poem of Moore’s to her at one of their first meetings?