Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Lord Dillon was not the only person to be intrigued by the contrast between the modest, appealing figure of Mary and the imaginative achievements of Frankenstein and The Last Man. His friend Eliza Rennie saw an almost doll-like sweetness of appearance in ‘the gentle, feminine, lady-like Mrs Percy Bysshe Shelley, looking the very image of Miss O’Neill’s portraits, which she greatly resembles, with her long fair silken ringlets …’17 Rennie’s comparison was felicitous or well-informed; Eliza O’Neill was the beautiful young actress whom Shelley had wanted to play the part of Beatrice in his ill-starred verse drama, The Cenci.

  Lord Dillon was mildly eccentric, preferring to slum it at Warren Street than to be waited on at Ditchley Park, his splendid new home in Oxfordshire. His oddity paled beside the colourful history and bizarre appearance of Miss Dods. She is not identified by name in Eliza Rennie’s accounts, but there is no doubt whom she was describing. Rennie presents her, not kindly, as looking like ‘some one of the masculine gender’ who has ‘indulged in the masquerade freak of feminine habiliments’; her dark curly hair is said to be cut short, like a man’s; her habitual costume is a straight white closely pleated shift worn under a tight green jacket. Her face is described as pale and drawn by suffering; this, Rennie hints, was connected to a severe physical malformation, ‘the existence of some organic disease aiding this materially’. This was the curious young woman who became, at some point in the winter of 1824, one of Mary Shelley’s closest friends and one whom Rennie went on to praise for ‘the charm and fascination of her manner’ and ‘the extraordinary talent which her conversation … displayed’.18

  Miss Dods’s story was unhappy enough to intrigue and move a woman who was always attracted by tales of oppression and hardship. One of two illegitimate daughters of a Scottish earl, Mary Diana had been brought up in splendour and then, in 1814, briskly evicted on a pitiful allowance when her father married a girl slightly younger than his daughters. Douglases by birth, Lord Morton’s daughters received his meagre financial support on the firm understanding that they would keep their distance and say nothing about their parentage. Georgiana, the elder child, married a Captain Carter whose early death left her struggling to support two young children; Mary Diana had, since 1821, been trying to keep both her sister and herself by giving lessons and by writing for anybody prepared to accept her work.

  Although physically unappealing, Miss Dods held out to Mary the attraction of intelligence and of a life strangely parallel to her own. Both women were dependent on wealthy and unsympathetic men who were anxious to disguise any connection to them; both were struggling hard to make a living by writing; both, at the time they met, were in desperate need of affection and reassurance. We do not know exactly what Mary’s feelings were for Miss Dods; we do know that she herself inspired feelings of passionate attachment. Miss Dods’s first (undated) letters address her as ‘my Pretty’ and ‘Miene Liebling’; a gap of five days before they meet is described as a source of intense pain to her devoted friend. One of the letters is simply signed, ‘thine – D—’.19 Writing – as David Lindsay – to the Scottish publisher William Blackwood towards the end of 1825, Miss Dods praised Mary, ‘who is indeed a fine creature’, for her combination of ‘a very powerful mind, and with the most gentle feminine manner and appearance that you can possibly imagine’.20 Mary returned the favour the following year, when Miss Dods was away in France, by doing her best to sell ‘David Lyndsay’s’ latest work to her own publisher, Henry Colburn, while announcing ‘his’ intended translation of a German drama.21 It is likely that Mary was thinking of the Dods sisters and their friend, Charlotte Figge, when she wrote with feeling to Edward Trelawny of having 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.’22

  Mary Shelley remained much too deeply attached to Jane Williams during their years at Kentish Town for it to be likely that she embarked on a sexual relationship with Mary Diana Dods. There may, however, have been rumours. In the autumn of 1825, Mary wrote to Mrs Mason at Pisa, complaining that her stepmother had insisted on being introduced to all her friends and on accompanying her to parties.23 This sounds like anxious concern, rather than a wish on Mrs Godwin’s part to broaden her social horizons. Godwin’s laconic journal provides no clues; he had little contact with Kitchiner’s circle and none with Miss Dods, although he saw enough of Mary for Mrs Godwin to grumble that he loved his daughter better than his wife. (Nonsense, Godwin responded wearily: ‘You are very wrong in saying I do not want your society … I see her perhaps twice a week.’24)

  Mary’s letters and journal strongly suggest that, intrigued by and fond though she became of poor Mary Diana, her mind was wholly occupied by Jane. Jane was her chosen intimate, her constant companion to operas and plays in the summer of 1825; Jane was on hand to comfort and help when little Percy was taken ill with measles that autumn; Jane was feeling affectionate enough in the spring of 1826, when Hogg was still away, to plan to spend two months with her at Calais. In June, in high spirits, the two young women repeated their bold experiment of going to the theatre alone, in the pit. Jane thought she saw their attentive admirer, the Spaniard; ‘he saw not us,’ Mary assured Payne, who was again summering in Paris. They had behaved impeccably, ‘correct to a miracle’.25 She was full of good cheer. She had seen and heard her adored Madame Pasta again. She had received the good news that Colburn had not only taken the second volume of her father’s History of the Commonwealth, but had paid him in advance for two more. She had sold a short story to one of the lucrative new souvenir annuals and had given herself the considerable satisfaction of sending the Examiner a passionate defence of Europe’s last great castrato singer, Giovanni-Battista Velluti. The audience had, according to Mary, been enchanted; the critics had winced at the spectacle of a man in his fifties shrilling like a choirboy.26

  Miss Dods and her problems faded from Mary’s mind as she planned her summer with Jane. Calais was abandoned in favour of a month at Brighton. Bubbling with happiness, Mary wrote off to Leigh Hunt about Sompting, the pretty Sussex village to which they had removed from the fashionable seaside town. She extolled Jane’s perfection. ‘She is in truth my all,’ she told Hunt on 12 August, ‘my sole delight – the dear azure sky from which I – a sea of bitterness beneath – catch alien hues & shine reflecting her loveliness.’ It was, she admitted, an ‘excessive feeling’, but she pleaded with him to understand it, for ‘I live to all good & pleasure only through her’.

  Jane, still quietly planning when it would be safe to begin her new life with Hogg, was unnerved by such devotion. Mary clung too hard. It frightened her. She drew back. ‘I have lived to hear her thank God that it [the holiday] is over,’ Mary bleakly noted on 5 September. Her letters that autumn were, for the most part, sombre. She grew low-spirited enough to become plaintive about John Howard Payne’s lack of visits.

  It is not clear how much Jane had revealed of her plans in the autumn of 1826. By the spring of 1827, she was pregnant and ready to set up home with her lover. Writing to Trelawny on 4 March, Mary tersely announced that her friend’s fortunes ‘are about to conclude – differently from mine’. A month later, she struggled to find appropriate words of approval – and failed miserably. Hogg was ‘a man of honour’, she wrote; nobody could make him happier than Jane. His opinions were liberal, he appeared to be constant and ‘if she is happy with him now, she will be so always’. It was fortunate that he had enough money for Jane to ‘display her taste and elegance in the way she, best likes’.27 Try how she would, her letter reeked of bitterness. She knew by now that Hogg and Jane had been conducting a sexual relationship since his return from Italy, and possibly before his departure. It was hard to suppress the feeling that she had been deceived.

  The early summer of 1827 must have been one of the most wretched periods of Mary’s life. She had lost Jane, and to a man she despised. She wa
s desperately short of money, thanks to Sir Timothy’s capricious forgetfulness. In order to pay her rent at Kentish Town, she was obliged to borrow from Hogg, which must have been humiliating, and from Claire, which must have been worse. Comfort, however, was at hand: she had an opportunity to play guardian angel to a young woman whose situation seemed even more desolate than her own. In May 1827, Mary handed in her notice to Mrs Bartlett at Bartholomew Place. After lingering for another two months, she left London for Sompting, on the South Coast, the secluded village where she and Jane Williams had stayed the previous summer.

  Travelling with Mary on the coach were Percy and little Mary Hunt, on whom Mary had taken pity one day in the Kentish Town stage when Marianne began scolding her daughter. It was in Mary’s mind to make use of the child as a companion for Percy, since she did not anticipate having much time to spare for maternal duties. Their other companion in the coach was a young woman with a baby girl. This was Isabel Robinson, not yet twenty, whose affection and beauty had mesmerized Mary from the first time they met.

  Isabel’s family had already urged Mary to treat their house at Paddington as her own home; there was now every chance that Isabel herself would be ejected from it when her father discovered the fact that she had given birth to an illegitimate child. In planning the future of this young woman, Mary had been working hand in glove with her friend, Miss Dods. Jane Hogg knew what they were planning. All that little Percy and Mary Hunt had been told was that they must take care always to address the lady in the coach as Mrs Douglas.

  Notes

  1. MWS–TJH, 30.8.1824.

  2. MWS–TJH, 3.10.1824.

  3. MWSJ, 30.1.1825.

  4. CC–JW, December 1826 (CC, 1).

  5. MWS–Joseph Severn, n.d. (see Appendix 2). I am indebted to William St Clair for drawing this to my attention.

  6. MWS–LH, 27.6.1825.

  7. MWS–JHP, 15.6.1825.

  8. Ibid.

  9. The Romance of Mary W. Shelley, etc., op. cit., pp. 34–5.

  10. MWS–JHP, ?4.5.1825.

  11. The Romance, p. 51.

  12. JHP–Washington Irving, 16.8.1825 (The Romance, pp. 18–19).

  13. MWS–JHP, 29.7.1825.

  14. Washington Irving, 16.8.1825: Journals and Notebooks, 3, ed. Walter A. Reichart (University of Wisconsin, 1969–70), p. 510; MWS–JHP, 28.6.1826, 29.6.1825.

  15. Hunt, Autobiography, ed. Roger Ingpen (1903), 2, p. 51.

  16. Viscount Dillon–MWS, 18.3.1829 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516).

  17. Eliza Rennie Walker, ‘An Evening at Dr Kitchiner’s’, Friendships Offering (1842), pp. 243–9.

  18. Eliza Rennie, Traits of Character; Being Twenty–Five Years of Literary and Personal Recollections (1860), 2, pp. 207–8.

  19. Mary Diana Dods–MWS, n.d., but all letters are addressed to Bartholomew Place or Terrace, which dates the letters to before the summer of 1827 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516/11).

  20. ‘David Lindsay’–William Blackwood, November–December 1825 (Blackwood Papers, National Library of Scotland).

  21. MWS–Henry Colburn, 30.10.1826.

  22. MWS–EJT, 4.3.1827.

  23. As rephrased in Mrs Mason–MWS, 13.11.1825 (Abinger, Dep. c. 517).

  24. WG–MJG, 6.4.1826, quoted in Godwin, 2, pp. 296–7.

  25. MWS–JHP, 11.6.1826.

  26. MWS’s first letter about Velluti was published in the Examiner, 11.6.1826, under the name ‘Anglo-Italicus’; her second was not published.

  27. MWS–EJT, 8.4.1827. (Leigh Hunt added to this letter.)

  * ‘Blue-Bag’ might have been an allusion either to the blue satchels in which lawyers like Hogg carried their papers, or to his pale face. Blue bags of limewash were the commonest way of whitening walls.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A CURIOUS MARRIAGE

  1827–1828

  ‘Our lives are the embodyings of quiet – our only peep at the world is when we take the children to bathe at Worthing … Not one man have we seen, except an ugly Guardsman one day, who appeared as dropt from the clouds – & vanished like a meteor. For the rest I read a little Greek, write walk – work – and the days fly …

  I am glad to hear Doddy talks of visiting us soon – Isabel [is] delighted with her promises of going abroad … I wait for my September money … Every blessing attend you – Jeff is included in that prayer now of course – Isabel says Amen …’

  Mary Shelley to Jane Williams Hogg, Sompting, 22 August 1827

  MARY HAD KNOWN ISABEL ROBINSON AND HER FAMILY SINCE, AT the latest, the beginning of 1827. Joshua, Isabel’s father, was a cultured man who had made his money out of property development and got out just before the economic crisis of 1825. By then, he had settled with his large brood of children in Park Place, Paddington. Although local records do not reveal the year in which Rosetta Robinson died, it seems likely that he was already a widower. His house, which was always called Park Cottage, although it occupied the site of four small homes, backed on to a nursery garden at the north end of Park Place, away from the little old church of St Mary’s by Paddington Green and close to the designated route for a new commercial canal. Just to the east, lying beside the road from London to Kilburn and Edgware, was Devonshire Place, where a pregnant Jane, now to be known to the world as ‘Mrs Hogg’, joined her lover as his common law wife in September, after a summer spent together in pokier rooms nearby. Later, they made a permanent home in the area, at Maida Place.

  Paddington in the 1820s was, despite its proximity to London, a sleepy, semi-rural community. People who groaned at the thought of trailing to Kentish Town from Battle Bridge – as squalid in those days as the renamed Kings Cross area is today – were happy to take a coach from Oxford Street or Tyburn Corner (Marble Arch) for the pleasure of attending one of Mr Robinson’s lively, all-male dinners. Conversation at a Park Cottage evening, according to one of the guests, was of ‘poetry, philosophy, economy, politics and sometimes religion, but nothing in the way of disputation’. The same guest, Mary’s literary friend Cyrus Redding, thought Robinson’s evenings were ‘the most agreeable I ever remember’.1 Lord Dillon and Thomas Moore, flirtatious men who had fond memories of Robinson’s daughters, ‘the Paddington nymphs’, and their coaxing ways, shared his view.

  The Robinsons, like Eliza Rennie, are elusive figures in contemporary accounts, overshadowed by their famous friends. They can often only be identified by a passing reference to an evening at a charming home in Paddington or to the behaviour of a singularly minxish girl at one of Dr Kitchiner’s soirées. This was Mary’s friend Isabel, as she was when Mary first knew her in 1826. Below her, and still in their early teens, were Julia, Louisa and Rosa. Ranging from seven-year-old Percy Shelley’s age down almost to the cradle were Julian, Charles, Ellen and Eliza. Two older sons were employed and living elsewhere when Mary came into the Robinson family circle.

  Isabel, a black-eyed girl with short dark curling hair, had already become a regular guest at Dr Kitchiner’s evenings. It was on one of these visits that she had met both Mary Shelley and Mary Diana Dods. Her affair with the American journalist William Grenville Graham had recently been ended by him, leaving Isabel pregnant. Her daughter Adeline was born at some point before June 1827; more probably, late in 1826. It is possible that Isabel accompanied Mary Diana Dods on a visit to France in 1826 in order to give birth to the child without the knowledge of her family. If so, she brought the baby back with her to London. By the time that Mary met her, Isabel had farmed the baby out at a secret address and was contemplating the fact that circumstances might oblige her to abandon it.

  Let in on Isabel’s secret and concerned by her increasing thinness and nervousness, her female friends took counsel together. Isabel’s plan to run off and live in secrecy, alone with her baby in Highgate, seemed to them impractical and unlikely to improve her health. Instead, they concocted a plan to take her and her child out of London for the summer to rest until she was well enough to travel abroad. It had been decided that she shoul
d move to France with the baby. Her escort was to be Miss Dods.2

  *

  Mary Shelley had not yet left London on 13 July, when she received one of the cruellest shocks of her life. ‘My friend has proved false & treacherous!’ she wrote in her journal: Isabel Robinson had just opened her eyes to the stories that Jane Hogg had been telling behind her back for the past four years. In normal circumstances, Mary would have demanded an explanation but Jane, as she knew, was suffering acutely in her third pregnancy. That, at least, was the excuse Mary gave herself for saying nothing; a direct confrontation, threatening severance from a woman who had and who still did mean so much to her, was probably more than she could face. She did not hate Jane; she found it impossible to believe that she had behaved with such duplicity. Mary’s letters to her became, if anything, more tender and affectionate after Isabel’s disclosures.

  ‘Doddy’, as she was affectionately known, went up to Scotland in July after learning that her father, the Earl of Morton, had died following a short illness. She hoped, being of an optimistic nature, that he might have made a generous provision which would allow her to live in comfort with Isabel and her baby. Mary, comfortably settled into lodgings at Sompting in Sussex with Isabel, baby Adeline, Percy and little Mary Hunt, suppressed her misery about Jane Hogg’s faithlessness as she sent off cheerful descriptions of her rural life. ‘We are here calm & I trust contented,’ she reported on 28 July. They were waiting anxiously for the news of Lord Morton’s will. Neither Doddy nor Isabel seemed to object to the Hunts’ daughter having joined them. Worthing, the nearest seaside resort, was dire, full of simpering young ladies in straw poke bonnets and fluttering green crêpe veils. Still, it was delightful to be out of London; perhaps, Mary wrote, she would settle for good in a cottage in the country. Whitton, the lawyer, had indicated that Sir Timothy would approve.