Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  ‡ One wonders how Mary knew about this very private note. Had Teresa proudly revealed the inscription to Mary, or had Mary, perhaps, acted as her translator? Byron had written it in English, which Teresa did not speak.

  § This was a long article on Shelley which Hunt had sent John Bowring at the Westminster Review in 1825. Inaccurate in some details about Shelley and worrying in its allusions to Claire, the article had also distressed Mary by its slighting references to herself. This, from a man she had come to think of as one of her most loyal friends, was a shock: ‘you have a feeling, I had almost said a prejudice against me,’ she wrote to Hunt on 8 April 1825. Typically, a letter begun in great indignation ended with assurances of her affection: ‘I long to hear from you – & am more tenderly attached to you & yours than you imagine – love me a little & make Marianne love me …’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PRIVATE MATTERS

  1824–1827

  ‘I happen, as has always been my fate, to have formed intimate friendships with those who are great of soul, generous, and incapable of valuing money except for the good it may do – and these very people are all even poorer than myself, is it not hard?’

  Mary Shelley to E.J. Trelawny 4 March 1827

  BY THE TIME SHE MOVED TO KENTISH TOWN MARY WAS AWARE that Jefferson Hogg had become very attached to her pretty friend. Jane still showed no sign of returning his feelings. She seemed, if anything, rather distressed by Hogg’s affection; Mary was ready to sympathize.

  Hogg had, it was true, made a good living for himself as a lawyer; he was, as Mary knew, conscientious about providing for some of the less successful members of his family. She nevertheless found him a cold, peculiar man. Their friendship had remained awkward ever since the curious period when, as a seventeen-year-old girl, she had allowed Hogg to pursue her because Shelley seemed to wish it. The relationship had become close enough for her to turn to Hogg for comfort after the loss of her first baby girl. ‘My dearest Hogg my baby is dead – will you come to me as soon as you can,’ she had begged him then; and Hogg had, in his awkward way, tried to console her. That time was long past; even by 1817, she had disliked him enough to dread the occasions of his visits. By 1824, she was prepared to regard him as a useful source of legal advice and a kind, if unworthy, admirer of her friend. She had no idea that Jane had already confided to him all her choicest titbits about Mary’s cruel coldness to Shelley; she would have been astonished to know that the two of them were planning to set up home together as soon as a decent period of time had elapsed.

  At Kentish Town, much to Mary’s satisfaction, her lodgings at 5 Bartholomew Place were only a few minutes’ walk from those Jane had already taken in Mortimer Terrace; the two young women were in and out of each other’s homes almost every day in the summer of 1824. Still, nothing about the relationship with Hogg attracted suspicion. He was seen as Jane’s slightly pathetic suitor, an object for their shared amusement. When one August day, Jane tearfully said that he had upset her with an unpleasant letter, Mary hurried to her defence. ‘I think,’ she told Hogg, that ‘with your great understanding you might contrive to please instead of to annoy “the fair one” – and to make her smile instead of frown … do not I entreat you add to her annoyances.’1 She reminded him that he had a history of worshipping certain ladies and then sulking if they tried to throw off their ‘Hogg-bestowed sovereignty’. Well, it was time for him to change his ways – and where, while she remembered, were the letters from Shelley which he had promised to show her?

  Hogg must have had a rapid consultation with Jane. He sent Mary a half-hearted apology, and no reference to the letters from Shelley. His tone was found wanting: ‘if … I cannot obtain the courtesy of your species I will cut their acquaintance for ever,’ Mary snapped back.2 Perhaps this was too rude; she mollified him with a safe account of the ways she and Jane had been amusing themselves. She had gone to the opera and had been thrilled by the intense eyes and passionate acting of the celebrated Milanese soprano, Giuditta Pasta, in the part of Romeo. Then Jane and she had gone ‘two or three times’ to Der Freischütz, the new opera by Weber which had, with its dramatic stage effects and its gloriously creepy scene in the wolf’s glen, been an instant success; suitably enough, it was being performed at the theatre where Frankenstein had been staged the previous year. ‘We liked the music & the incantation scene would have made Shelley scream with delight,’ she told Hogg, and listed ‘flapping owls – ravens, hopping toads, queer reptiles – fiery serpents skeleton huntsmen and burning bushes’ as part of the evening’s treats.

  Hogg’s reassurances and Jane’s deceiving reticence had the desired effect; by the autumn of 1824, Mary was ready to make plans for the time when she and Jane might return to Italy, away from the damp embrace of an English November. As the year ended, however, she sank into a deep depression. ‘Well did your mother prophecy that I should find England intolerable,’ she wrote to Mrs Kenney’s daughter, Louisa Holcroft, on 6 January 1825, in a letter wistfully recalling Louisa’s visit to London the previous summer. In the closing pages of her fourth journal the same month, Mary unleashed her feelings with a violence which reminds us of how deep the relation was between the raging, outcast creature of her first novel and its creator’s darkest, most hidden self ‘I know now why I am an outcast – So be it! I wd. not for worlds do other than I do, & yet – I make not her happiness,’ she wrote on 30 January after what had evidently been a painful scene with Jane. But, whereas her creature vented its rage in acts of violence, Mary could only lacerate herself. ‘I am a fool –’ she wrote in this same journal entry:

  poverty stricken – deformed squinting lame – bald – all every thing – it is quite just that I should be ejected from the sight of man – what a pity that they don’t put an end to me at once.

  I thought I had gained a great deal in learning the cause of my expulsion – I have merely gained a loss – the bitter loss of sympathy & love for my fellow creatures –3

  The torment of discovering Jane’s preference for Hogg has been suggested as the cause of this outburst. It seems more likely that the young women had quarrelled about Mary’s low spirits, or about her possessiveness. A whole year later, in the spring of 1826, Mary was still telling Claire how troublesome it was for poor Jane to be ‘teazed’ by Hogg. Jane was, by December 1826, prepared to risk telling Claire that she had found a kind admirer, identified only as ‘Blue-Bag’.* Claire’s response was not encouraging: ‘Blue-Bag may be a friend to you, but he can never be a lover,’ she wrote back from Moscow that month: ‘a happy attachment that has seen its end leaves a void that nothing can fill up …’4 This, as Jane was well aware, was a view which Mary shared. Uneasily, she continued to lead a double life.

  In January 1825, Mary was miserable about everything. Jane was irritated by her; she couldn’t write; she was short of money; it was always raining. Spring, as always, lifted her spirits. They rose still higher when she heard that Hogg was planning to spend the summer in Italy. Glad to be rid of him, Mary nevertheless took care to provide all the help she could give. Keats’s friend Joseph Severn, the British consul at Rome, was one among many who received a letter urging him to be kind to Mr Hogg, he being a friend of Hunt’s, of Shelley’s, ‘and many others of your circle in England’.5 Hogg left and Mary blossomed as Jane settled into grateful dependence on her friendship.

  ‘Affection for my sweet friend quieted my heart,’ Mary noted in an undated journal entry for the summer of 1825. To Leigh Hunt, who was on his way back from Italy to a Highgate cottage large enough to house his eight children, she confessed that ‘the hope & consolation of my life is the society of Mrs W[illiams]. To her, for better or worse, I am wedded.’6 ‘Neddy’, Dina and Percy played together in the baking fields of hay; the young mothers went on visits to the Novellos, to the Lambs and, when they returned, the Hunts. Supplied with as many free tickets as Mary cared to request from her ‘amabilissimo cavaliere’, kind John Howard Payne, they went in tireless pursuit
of ‘that desperate coquette the opera’7 and of every role that the great Edmund Kean was ready to offer them. ‘Kean! Yes truly – fire & water for him,’ Mary wrote excitedly to Payne. ‘… what will he play? Sir G[iles] O[verreach] – Othello – Hamlet – of these I am sure …’8 Acting as each other’s chaperones, the young women were up to anything, chattering loudly in Italian as they masqueraded as foreigners in the pit, and giggling when they caught the eye of a handsome Spaniard who tried to follow them home. ‘This divine summer has had a most beneficial effect on my spirits,’ Mary wrote happily to John Bowring on 31 October. Jane and she had just spent ten days together at Windsor, revisiting the lanes and fields which Mary remembered from her months with Shelley at Bishopsgate and enjoying ‘the finest band in the world’ every morning as the royal pipes and flutes rehearsed on the terrace at Windsor.

  Mary described herself as wedded to Jane; should we conclude that she had entered, or sought, a sexual partnership? A saucy reference in one of her letters of 1827 to Jane about their sexual parts (‘our pretty N— the word is too wrong I must not write it’) is the only, and by itself, unconvincing evidence we have that the relationship could have been sexual. What it conveys more plausibly is that she was trying to use the same language as her friend. Jane, as Mary noted elsewhere, had no reservation about discussing physically intimate details. In a letter to Hunt of 27 June 1825, in the same paragraph which described her as ‘wedded to Jane’, Mary wrote that she looked forward to telling him of ‘one or two things which will I think surprize and perhaps move you – move you at least to excuse a little what you do not approve’. Was she hinting that her love for Jane was not platonic? The possibility cannot be ruled out. It is more likely that Mary was intending to tell Hunt about her friend Miss Dods. Miss Dods was a lesbian and both Jane and Mary had been seeing a good deal of her that year; this should not lead us to conclude that their own relationship was sexual although it was undeniably intense.

  In the meantime, Mary was still being pursued by her own loyal suitor, the provider of all those opera and theatre tickets for herself and Jane. John Howard Payne had admired Mary since their first meeting in the autumn of 1823; his generosity and his readiness to act as an escort to the two young ladies on their long journeys to the Novellos’ home at Shacklewell had made him an indispensable part of their life. Godwin liked him; young William was devoted to him; the Lambs thought him splendid. Alone or in company, Payne was reliably cheerful, amusing, unthreatening and kind. Sometimes, it was true, he seemed to be growing a bit sentimental, but it only required a mild reproach, a little reminder of her widowed state, for him to make an embarrassed retreat.

  Payne was a patient suitor, but he could not wait for ever. In May 1825, he wistfully told her that she was never out of his thoughts. ‘You are perpetually in my presence, and if I close my eyes you are still there, and if I cross my arms over them and try to wave you away, still you will not be gone.’9 Mary’s reply gracefully dismissed the compliment and asked him to be less extreme. ‘I truly know how entirely Your imagination creates the admired as well as the admiration –’ she told him, ‘But do not I entreat you frighten me by any more interpretations.’10 Towards the end of the month, he pretended to be hurt by her lively interest in everything he could tell her about his friend Washington Irving, who was spending the summer in Paris. So much, Payne jovially wrote, for her fidelity to him! ‘Is ice a non-conductor?’11 His bewilderment is understandable, for Mary’s letters continued to switch between reproaches (‘A part of your present note is very Wrong – very wrong indeed,’ on 31 May) and tender invitations to him to come and dine with her at her father’s new home in Gower Place (‘It is, I think, 20 years since we met,’ on 15 June). What was he to understand?

  On 25 June 1825, walking Mary home to Kentish Town from a supper with the Godwins, Payne plucked up the courage to declare his feelings. Unluckily for him, he had picked the place and almost the day on which Mary, in the summer of 1814, had declared her love to Shelley.

  Mary was in a difficult position. She liked Payne; she had come to depend on his generosity in providing Jane and herself with the chance to see every play, opera and concert that interested them. She did not want to lose this useful friendship, but she had no intention of marrying him. Payne was, as she knew, a romantic man; like a princess in a fairy-tale, she decided to give him a quest. What would really please her, she told him, was the chance to get to know Washington Irving. She had been enchanted by the American essayist’s handsome, sensitive face when she saw him at John Gilbert Newton’s studio; she had read all his popular works with enthusiasm; she had been allowed to see some of his letters to Payne. This, she gently told her suitor, was the way to please her; Payne was left to conclude that she did not return his love. Her next letter, written on 28 June, supposed that he was ‘gay & hopeful’ again and wished that he would be as good to himself as he was to other people. Responding the following day, Payne announced that he would put off seeing her until his ‘fever’ had passed. As regards Irving, he added, ‘be assured I will act the hero in this business.’

  Payne’s heroism took an odd form. Joining Irving in Paris towards the end of the summer, he presented him with a bundle of all the letters Mary had written to him. ‘I do not ask you to fall in love,’ he wrote in a covering letter of explanation; he added that Mary was, in any case, ‘too much out of society to enable you to do so’.12 This was not what Mary had asked him to do; she had indeed nervously begged Payne to be discreet and not, above all, to make her ‘appear ridiculous to one whom I like & esteem’.13 ‘Read Mrs Shelleys correspondence before going to bed,’ Irving wrote in his notebook on the night he was handed her letters.14 That was all he did do. He remained courteous and helpful to Godwin, whose work he admired; he showed no interest in pursuing his daughter.

  It seems clear that, although Mary’s interest in a friendship with Irving was genuine, she introduced his name chiefly as a way of keeping John Payne at a distance. By November, the subject had become an embarrassment to her and she was tired of Payne’s jokes about being a marriage-broker. ‘You must really come to an end of bantering me on that subject [Irving] – because after all it is all a mistake,’ she told Payne on 29 November 1825. She added, mysteriously, that she could tell him ‘a fact or two that would astonish you’ to prove it. It is not clear that she told either Payne or Leigh Hunt, to whom she had also dropped mysterious hints of something that would ‘surprize’ him, just what those astonishing facts were. Most likely, they related to Miss Mary Diana Dods.

  *

  Mary had had her first encounter with this unusual lady in the spring of 1822 when she read and admired a collection of verse dramas which Byron had just been sent by his publisher: ‘they are works of considerable talent,’ Mary had told Thomas Medwin on 12 April, although she thought them greatly inferior to Byron’s own works on the same subject. The author of these Dramas of the Ancient World was one David Lindsay. By the beginning of 1825, Mary knew that David Lindsay was one of several pseudonyms used by a strange, ardent young Scotswoman with a background which, gradually revealed, had the romance of a gothic novel. David Lindsay and Mary Diana Dods were one and the same.

  We do not know how Miss Dods and Mary Shelley met, or even when. The most likely explanation is that they were introduced at the home of Dr William Kitchiner, at whose evening parties Mary was often present after September 1824. (This is the month in which Kitchiner’s name first appeared in Godwin’s journal; Mary’s letters make no reference to him at all.)

  William Kitchiner seems, like the Novello family, to have been born to be used by George Cruikshank for one of his Dickens illustrations. Cruikshank did, in fact, sketch one of the doctor’s Wednesday dinners, an all-male occasion devoted to the important subject of digestion. A thin, angular man whose usual costume was a long, black, shiny coat, gaiters and a hat as flat as a parson’s, Kitchiner had made his name in 1817 with Apicius Redivivus or Cook’s Oracle, a bizarre collection of
dishes with such daunting names as Kitchiner’s Peristaltic Persuaders. (‘Never affront the stomach!’ was the doctor’s favourite saying.) Opening his large house in Warren Street, just off the New Road, to mixed gatherings every Tuesday night, Kitchiner hung a sign by the door to remind his guests to ‘Come at seven; go at eleven’. His guests included a large number of humorists; one of them sportingly changed the sign to read, ‘go it at eleven’.

  Mary had been made acutely conscious of her scandalous reputation in her first year at Kentish Town. Few people, other than the hospitable Novellos and the Lambs, were prepared to have her in their homes. Dr Kitchiner, however, was splendidly indifferent to social disgrace. Having inherited a fortune at the age of nineteen from a father who started life carrying coal on the London docks, he had since then lived as he pleased. He was not married to Elizabeth Friend, his mistress since 1804; his son was given the challenging experience of going to Charterhouse and on to Cambridge as their illegitimate child. He was not, in fact, a man who cared much what people thought of him. A few liked him well; regular attendants of his evenings included actors (Charles Kemble, Charles Mathews), journalists (the practical joker Theodore Hook and William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette), architects (John Soane), and the celebrated tenor, John Braham. Samuel Rogers, a poet living very comfortably on his income from the family bank, was another occasional visitor to Warren Street.

  The only available source we have for Mary’s visits to Kitchiner’s home are two garrulous articles, both of which were written many years later, by Eliza Rennie, daughter of John the great engineer. From Miss Rennie’s descriptions, it is clear that this is where Mary first made friends, not only with the curious Miss Dods, but with the flirtatious and, by general agreement, astonishingly handsome Lord Dillon. Leigh Hunt, who met the literary lord elsewhere, rather liked him: he was, he wrote, ‘a cavalier of the old school’.15 Lord Dillon was reputed to be Eliza Rennie’s lover; it didn’t stop him trying to thaw Mary’s air of cool reserve. He sent her his long and dreadful poem, Eccelino da Romano, the Tyrant of Padua, as a mark of esteem and tried to draw her out. She looked so sly, he told her; how was he supposed to put together such wild, imaginative novels as she wrote with such a quiet manner? ‘I should have thought you … outpouring[,] enthusiastic, rather indiscreet, and even extravagant,’ he wrote; ‘but you are cool, quiet, feminine to the last degree.’16 Mary liked talking to Lord Dillon about Italy, where he had lived for ten years, but she refused to be drawn into a correspondence, or whatever else he may have had in mind as a diversion from his marriage.