Mary seldom discussed her writing in her letters; even in her journals, she would only occasionally allow herself to comment on an unusually high or low moment: ‘write’ was the usual terse record. Glimpses of Mary collecting material or finding inspiration come to us sideways. In 1824, she had been describing the scenery at Bishopsgate, but she wanted to provide a description of Windsor Castle and it had been made difficult because of the massive reconstruction of its silhouette which was then being undertaken; visits were prohibited. In 1825, Mary went back to confirm her details: she had hoped, she playfully told John Howard Payne, to have the additional treat of seeing George IV, ‘my liege lord his sacred Majesty’, strolling on the terrace:
one old fat footman commiserated our fate mightily when we asked for the last time whether his Majesty was expected & told him that it was our last chance – ‘I am quite sorry, ladies – I am sure his Majesty would have been glad to see you – he is always glad to see & be seen by ladies.’22
And if he had, she giggled on another occasion, she had every expectation that ‘his most sacred Majesty would be en-netted … a coronation was the smallest thing in prospect.’23
*
Writing The Last Man was a welcome distraction, not only from her own financial worries, but from those of her father who, in the spring of 1825, was finally driven into bankruptcy and forced to give up bookselling. It had not, as she knew, been his fault; 1825 was a year of financial crisis, of which a major cause had been the recent surge in large bank loans, followed by the Bank of England’s decision temporarily to suspend the discount facilities previously granted to substantial borrowers. Seventy banks went out of business; many of the grand plans for the rebuilding of London were temporarily abandoned, including those of Thomas Cubitt for Belgravia on the marshes. Not even Godwin could hope that friends would rescue him at such a time.
After several humiliating days of attendance at the Guildhall, he and his wife moved to a smaller, cheaper home, so badly maintained that the inside of the windows froze over in winter. It was in Gower Place, close to the newly cleared site for London’s first university. Mary spent the first night with them, helping to arrange the furniture and unpack the crates of books. The business through which for the past twenty years Godwin had been quietly influencing the minds of the young, John Keats among them, was gone at last. ‘That over, nothing will be left him but his pen & me,’ Mary ruefully noted to Leigh Hunt on 8 April, but neither now nor in the future did she ever question or seem to resent her father’s dependence on her. She would nevertheless remember this as the unhappiest year since her return to England.
The first chapters of The Last Man went off to the printer’s in November 1825, while Mary was still completing her fair copy. On 1 January 1826, Godwin informed the publisher Henry Colburn that the final pages were in hand. Perhaps, he saw similarities to his own work in Mary’s technique of interspersing lyrical domestic passages with scenes of extraordinary imaginative vigour. Perhaps, he knew that a good sale for Mary meant a little money for himself; certainly, Godwin made himself into the novel’s most eager advocate. Colburn was urged to pay particular attention to the Introduction, in which Mary explained that the novel had been developed and enlarged from some mysterious pages recovered from the cave of the Sibyl at Naples in 1818. (The date pointed knowing readers towards the time of her own residence there, just as the mention of 2092 was meant to remind readers of the date of Shelley’s birth.) The Introduction ‘is in my opinion, if I am not partial,’ wrote Godwin (who was), ‘a chef d’oeuvre, explaining in the most fortuitous way how the work came to exist. I own I had no anticipation how it was to be done, & thought (like a blockhead) that this part must be a botch, instead of being, as it is, one of the great ornaments of the performance.’24
Subsequent letters fired off from Gower Place to the publisher received tepid replies. Colburn was uncomfortable with the book’s futuristic setting; he feared that the theme and the title were already overworked. He referred to Mercier’s L’An 2440, a remarkably prophetic work – it described revolution at Versailles and the downfall of a king – written in 1772; the book had been translated into English early in the nineteenth century. He must also have been tempted to mention the recently published poems by Thomas Campbell and by Mary’s young friend Thomas Lovell Beddoes; both were entitled ‘The Last Man’. Pressed by Godwin, he reluctantly offered £300. The average sum paid by John Murray to an established author of a three-volume novel in 1825–6 was £500; Colburn was paying as little to Mary as he could get away with.
His fears were borne out. The reviews were bad. Most of them pointed out that it was strange to find hackneys and postchaises being employed in an age of intercontinental air-travel; this was the mildest of their objections. ‘The Last Man is an elaborate piece of gloomy folly – bad enough to read – horrible to write,’ declared the London Magazine, to which Mary was a contributor;25 the Monthly Review condemned ‘the offspring of a diseased imagination and of a most polluted taste’.26 An apparently flattering notice in the Morning Chronicle, claiming that Mrs Shelley had outdone all previous writers in her ‘romance’, was planted by Colburn himself.
‘I do not wonder that Mrs Shelley did not succeed with her Last Man,’ Hazlitt noted in an essay the following year, referring to the fact that her apocalyptic theme had seemed only to echo every other publication of the time.27 This was kinder than some of Hazlitt’s recent comments on Shelley; Mary bore no grudge against a man who now resembled one of the plague victims of her novel. ‘I never was so shocked in all my life,’ she told Marianne Hunt after meeting Hazlitt one day in the street: ‘… but for his voice & smile I shd not have known him – his smile brought tears into my eyes …’28
The critics’ venom had not harmed the novel’s sales so much as Hazlitt imagined, but their reception was hostile enough to make Mary hesitant about embarking on another major work. Instead, after reading newspaper reports of a two-hundred-year-old corpse which had been miraculously revived, she wrote a light-hearted account of the ancient gentleman’s imagined response to modern times in a short story, ‘Roger Dodsworth, the Reanimated Englishman’. It was a pleasant change from projecting herself into the future; the notion of animating a corpse had some appeal for the author of Frankenstein. Washington Irving’s tale of Rip Van Winkle may have contributed something to the tale of a man lost in a modern age; the story’s sly mockery of George IV was Mary’s own contribution. The original Mr Dodsworth was said to have died in Charles I’s reign; she decided to present his modern rescuer and interlocutor as an ardent Hanoverian. ‘The king, God bless him,’ Dodsworth’s cheerful redeemer announces,
‘spares immense sums from his privy purse for the relief of his subjects, and his example has been imitated by all the aristocracy and wealth of England.’
‘The King!’ emphatically ejaculates Mr Dodsworth.
‘Yes, sir,’ emphatically rejoins his preserver; ‘the king, and I am happy to say that the prejudices that so unhappily and unwarrantably possessed the English people with regard to his Majesty are now, with a few’ (with added severity) ‘and I may say contemptible exceptions, exchanged for dutiful love and such reverence as his talents, virtues, and paternal care deserve.’29
Mary sent her story off to Cyrus Redding, editor of the New Monthly Magazine, but he felt uneasy about publishing a piece which ridiculed the king’s extravagance at a time when the country was in the grip of a financial crisis. By 1863, however, he felt safe enough. The story was published with Redding’s explanation that he had ‘lost’ it shortly after Mary’s submission.
Hostile reactions to The Last Man had an inevitable effect on a young woman too poor to ignore the requirements of fashion. Gothic fantasy, in which her novel had been rich, was on the wane; instead, she began researching the background for a more conventional work. The subject was the royal impostor, Perkin Warbeck, whose curious history she had first encountered in the child’s History of England published by her fat
her in 1809. Godwin, impressed by his daughter’s scholarship and diligence, was full of encouragement and praise; the critics were respectful when the book appeared in 1830. (Colburn and his new partner, Richard Bentley, were the publishers.) Few people have read their way through The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck; fewer still would argue that a long, laborious chronicle filled with unconvincing characters and turgid dialogue amounted to more than a waste of Mary’s imaginative gift. The most interesting thing about it is that the author, directly after displaying the sparkle and wit of ‘Roger Dodsworth’, could have written a work so grimly lacking in humour.
*
Mary, as Peacock pointed out on her behalf to Sir Timothy and his representative, signed The Last Man as ‘By the author of “Frankenstein”’. Reviewers had not been so scrupulous; Mary was punished with a further suspension of her allowance for, even if unwittingly, setting the Shelley name before the public. In the autumn of 1826, however, eleven-year-old Charles Shelley died of tuberculosis, causing Sir Timothy to review his plans for the estate. Percy, his only remaining grandson, was now his heir; Mary was graciously informed that she might have custody of her own son and a modest increase in her allowance to £250 a year. Sir Timothy then showed his usual concern for Mary’s welfare by neglecting to pay her any maintenance at all until late the following year, by which time she had been reduced to begging what she could get from Jefferson Hogg and even, humiliatingly, from Claire’s pittance as a governess.
Mary had never known Charles, born during the autumn of 1814. His death, while undoubtedly convenient, reminded her of the shattering blow dealt to Shelley in 1817 when Lord Eldon had denied him custody of Ianthe and Charles. ‘I curse thee by a parent’s outraged love, / By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,’ Shelley had written in ‘To the Lord Chancellor’, a poem which she readily copied for friends, although she had not dared to publish it. Among the many Christmas annuals for which she began to write in the mid-twenties as a way of unobtrusively promoting Shelley’s poetry while earning a living for herself, one was titled The Biographical Keepsake. The savagery of a contribution on Lord Eldon to this book so strikingly reflects Mary’s – and Shelley’s – attitude as to suggest that she was the anonymous author:
many of England’s most deserving people have suffered by his intolerable delays and doubts … we can never forget a thousand proofs of his mean and cruel intolerance … whenever it shall please the disposer of all events to remove him from the world, the nation will respire with still greater freedom.30
Sir Timothy’s punitive attitude had by this time given Mary a terror of seeing her name in print; every time the words ‘Mrs Shelley’ appeared, she could be sure that her allowance would be withheld until she begged forgiveness. ‘There is nothing I shrink from more fearfully than publicity,’ she told Trelawny when he wrote to her in the spring of 1829, requesting her assistance with a life of Shelley. It was not just his book, she explained; it was the way the critics might write about it: ‘each critique, each mention of your work, might drag me forward … Shelley’s life must be written – I hope one day to do it myself, but it must not be published now.’ Instead, seeking to mollify him, she suggested that he settle for some ‘tribute of praise’ in the autobiography which he was writing, a project of which she wholeheartedly approved.31
Trelawny, rightly convinced that Mary had been supplying Moore with letters and anecdotes, was enraged by her response. He would have been even angrier to learn that Mary was again providing just the kind of help he wanted to somebody else. Cyrus Redding, her friendly editor at the New Monthly Magazine, had undertaken to write a brief life of Shelley for a book to be published in France by Galignani in 1829 as The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Mary herself recognized the importance of an edition of the poems which would promote Shelley’s name, and in such company. Her willingness to help with the memoir was, in part, a reaction against the latest account of her relationship with Shelley. Leigh Hunt, publishing his own recollections of Byron in 1828, had decided to follow Medwin’s gloss on Shelley’s second marriage. Once again, readers were led to assume that her relationship with Shelley had only begun after Harriet’s death; no mention was made of the period during which she lost her first baby and gave birth to William. Mary, who had seen part of Hunt’s book in 1825 and had begged him to give a truthful account of her first years with Shelley, was mortified.§
Redding, not Trelawny, was the beneficiary of her anger. Amelia Curran’s portrait of Shelley, now back in Mary’s possession, was loaned to him, allowing readers to see at last what the free-loving atheistical Mr Shelley had looked like. Mary made it clear that she wanted to write the memoir herself; denied the opportunity, she supervised and corrected Redding’s manuscript. The style was not to her taste, but the words said what she wanted, which was a change: ‘I see no positive assertion in it that was untrue,’ she told Redding.32 The date of her elopement was clearly established; no reader could misinterpret the indication that she and Shelley had lived together before marrying. This was as she, not others, wished it to be.
Given that the Redding memoir was published in 1829, at a time when Mary was still struggling hard to make friends, her determination to tell the truth was admirable. She wanted the world to know that she had lived in unwedded bliss. She wanted to publicize the fact that Shelley had left Harriet for her. She insisted that the marriage had not been their choice, but her father’s. All of these statements were immensely damaging to a young woman who was trying to make a pleasant social life for herself. The Redding memoir makes it clear that, much though Mary wanted to be accepted, she wanted even more to be accepted on her own terms.
Equally striking is the fact that the Redding memoir presented Mary, at her own wish, neither as Shelley’s wife nor as Godwin’s daughter. She was introduced, at her own insistence, as ‘Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin, daughter of the celebrated authoress of the Rights of Woman’. This, as we will see, was Mary’s way of saying that she now preferred to see herself in a female context, as a woman who preferred the company of women and who, lovingly but not always wisely, preferred to put her trust in her own sex. ‘Ten years ago I was so ready to give myself away –’ she told Trelawny on 12 October 1835, – ‘… & being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women.’
Among men, scandal was always only a venomous whisper away from the name of a young widow with a disreputable history; among women, she could laugh, flirt and be at ease. Women spoke of her mother with a tenderness and reverence which never failed to move her; women, especially helpless women, could provide an outlet for the love she longed to bestow.
Notes
1. Morning Chronicle, 15.5.1824.
2. EJT–MWS, 30.4.1824 (S&M, 4, pp. 1006–9). Colonel Leicester Stanhope received a similar claim, written two days earlier.
3. MWS–EJT, 22.3.1824.
4. MWS–TG, 16.5.1824, trans. Ricki B. Herzfeld (MWSL, 1). Mary’s article, sent to the London Magazine, was not published.
5. MWS–EJT, 28.7.1824.
6. MWS–LH, 9–11.9.1823.
7. Thomas Medwin–MWS, 10.7.1824, in Ernest J. Lovell, Jr, Captain Medwin: Friend of Byron and Shelley (Austin, Texas, 1962), pp. 160–70.
8. MWSJ, 2.7.1827.
9. MWS–EJT, see note 5.
10. MWS–John Cam Hobhouse, 18.11.1824.
11. This copy is in the Athenaeum Library, London.
12. CC–MWS, 15.3.1836. The novel of which Claire had heard was Falkner (1837). It is not known whether Claire discovered a resemblance to Byron in the complex and passionate Rupert Falkner.
13. MWS–TG, 10.12.1827.
14. An extract from this letter, dated 1829, appeared first in Teresa Guiccioli’s unpublished ‘La Vie de Lord Byron en Italie’ (see Chapter 21, note 51).
15. The particular source of Teresa Guiccioli’s ire was the poem ‘Lines on a Hindoo Air’ which is always published as Byron’s. The proof she demanded was a copy of it in his handwriting (TG–J
ohn Murray, December 1832). Since Moore’s book was already published, the Countess’s concern relates either to the three-volume edition of 1833 or to the seventeen-volume edition of Byron’s works which Murray began publishing in 1832.
16. TG–John Murray, October 1832 (Murray).
17. R. Glynn Grills, Mary Shelley: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 200–5.
18. Ibid. (TM–MWS, 24.1.1830).
19. MWS, The Last Man, 1, vi.
20. MWSJ, 8.6.1824.
21. Ibid., 30.1.1825.
22. MWS–JHP, 27.9.1825.
23. MWS–JHP, 29.11.1825.
24. WG–Henry Colburn, 7.1.1826 (V&A, Forster archive).
25. London Magazine, IV, March 1826, p. 422.
26. Monthly Review, March 1826, pp. 333–5.
27. William Hazlitt, ‘Essay on a Sundial’, New Monthly Magazine, October 1827. This sentence was published for the first time since 1827 in Hazlitt, Selected Essays, ed. Duncan Wu (Pickering & Chatto, 1998).
28. MWS–MH, 10.10.1824.
29. MWS, ‘Roger Dodsworth, the Reanimated Englishman’, CTS.
30. The Biographical Keepsake (1827), p. 226.
31. MWS–EJT, April 1829.
32. MWS–Cyrus Redding, September–November? 1829.
* The memoirs had been thrown on the fire in John Murray’s drawing-room on 17 May, supposedly at the behest of Byron’s sister, Augusta Leigh, but more certainly on the instructions of John Cam Hobhouse, one of Byron’s executors.
† Moore had never bothered to read the memoirs which Byron gave him when he visited Venice in the autumn of 1819. Mary had seen them a year earlier.
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