Claire’s grim forebodings were borne out when their half-brother William fell victim to the cholera in September. The old Godwins, recklessly indifferent to the danger to themselves, helped his wife Emily nurse their son through the rapid last stages of the terrible disease. ‘W. dies, half after 5,’ his father noted on 8 September; William was still only twenty-nine. They buried him the following day. Trelawny, always capable of kindness, called on Mr Godwin two days later to offer his sympathy, and stayed for supper.
‘This is a sad blow to us all –’ Mary wrote in her journal before adding, with the sympathy she always felt for widows, ‘Most to his unhappy wife.’ Claire, musing on his death to Jane Hogg, thought William’s chief misfortune had been to lack genius in a family who thought anything less a form of failure.19 She had a point: Godwin and Mary’s idea of a fitting memorial to William was to edit his only and unrevised novel. Transfusion, or The Orphans of Unwalden was published in 1835, but no amount of editing could disguise its mediocrity The best that Godwin could do in his preface was to praise the author as ‘a being of the warmest affections and the most entire generosity of temper’.
*
The unexpectedly high cost of Percy’s public school education compelled Mary to move to Harrow village in the spring of 1833; home-boarders were despised, but she could see no alternative. The loss of her son’s new clothes in a school fire had added to her problems. It was the worst of times for her disagreeable aunt Everina Wollstonecraft to arrive in London from Ireland, clamorous for support in her needy old age now that her sister Eliza was dead and the Dublin school had closed. Hearing from Jane Hogg that Claire, too, was considering a return to England, Mary was vigorously discouraging. Hard though she worked, she could not provide for them all. It came as a small relief to learn that Everina had a niece in Australia whose husband had prospered and who would be ready to help with her support. This was Elizabeth Berry, a cousin with whom Mary now began to correspond.
Godwin, at least, had become less of a burden. Assiduous visits and appeals to Earl Grey, the Prime Minister, were rewarded in the spring of 1833 when the Whig government granted the old man £200 a year and a home near the Manners-Suttons in New Palace Yard in return for a modest official post. Plans were being made to withdraw this sinecure when the Tories, briefly regaining office in the summer of 1834, restored the position and secured it. It is not, perhaps, surprising that Mary became rather fonder of the Tories after this unlooked-for reprieve.
Trelawny, disillusioned with England, departed on the Tally-Ho for America in January 1833, intending never to return. Godwin, who enjoyed Trelawny’s rumbustious company, regretted his departure, fearing he would never see him again; Mary, however, expected him to return ‘with a whole life of new experiences – the tale of a thousand loves – the same, yet ever new –’20
*
January-Feby March April 1833
I am disturbed by Percy’s big bill & resolve on going to Harrow & having him as an home boarder – Trelawny sails to America – Julia & Rosa [Robinson] spend some weeks with me – the aspect of my life is changed – I enjoy myself yet nothing is certain – Percy & I have both had the Influenza in April – dear Lady Paul dies of it – a sad omen for my going to Harrow – were it not for the change that I anticipate.
Godwin’s move to New Palace Yard on 4 May 1833 was marked in his daughter’s journal as the beginning of ‘the only genial spring I ever knew’; writing to Jane Hogg on 5 May, she hinted that her new cheerfulness was due to more than Godwin’s security. ‘It is a great addition to happiness,’ she wrote, ‘to know that there is affection & care for one in one heart, joined to some degree of power to make those things of avail – I hope things will turn out well – I trust they will – that is all I know.’
Putting together the scraps of evidence available from Mary’s letters and journals, it seems that the change she anticipated was a proposal from her friend Gee Paul’s eldest brother, Aubrey. Five years younger than Mary, Major Beauclerk was already the father of two illegitimate children – one by Godwin’s friend, the novelist Lady Charlotte Bury – though his relationship with the mothers had not survived. He had retired on half-pay from the 99th Regiment of Foot and was elected to Parliament as an Independent in November 1832. He presented himself as an abolitionist, in favour of electoral reform and, interestingly for an eldest son and heir to two estates, as an opponent of the laws of primogeniture. His views were therefore of the liberal kind most likely to appeal to Mary, and it would be surprising if her warm support for his sister, in the months when she had been hastily dispatched to Norwood, had not won his admiration, or even love.
Mary, certainly, seems to have believed that her tender feelings were returned. By August 1833, though, she was almost suicidal with grief. The official explanation for her dramatic loss of spirits that summer was a savage return of the influenza which had killed her friend Lady Paul. She convalesced at Putney, where she and Julia Robinson walked furiously, up to fourteen miles a day. Walking did not drive away her wretchedness. Approaching her thirty-sixth birthday, she frightened Claire with gloomy reminders that this had been the age at which her mother had died. Surely, Claire deduced, it must be typhus fever and not just influenza which had produced a gloom as black as that which had followed little William Shelley’s death.
Mary’s hurried and desperate notes in her journal suggest that illness played little part in her anguished state. ‘Dark night shadows the world,’ she wrote in August, and in September, she dilated on ‘frightful calamity’ and ‘unmerited misfortune’. She must already have guessed or been told what was happening, to write in this way. Aubrey, not noted for his fidelity, was engaged to Ida Goring, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a baronet. Ida’s background must have made the betrayal even harder to accept. For all Aubrey’s egalitarian talk, his apparent sympathy and respect for Mary’s difficult position and straitened circumstances, he had ended by choosing a pretty, conventional girl from his own class.
‘I know not what to say, or write,’ she wrote in her private book on 14 November as the memory of Jane Hogg’s betrayal flooded back with all the bitterness of novelty. On 31 December, staying in London with Trelawny’s newly married daughter and drawing faint hope from the news that her octogenarian father-in-law was on his deathbed (he was back on his feet the following year), she received ‘un petit billet pour me tourmenter – c’est tout …’ ‘Je pleures,’ she added in touchingly bad French, ‘je ne sais que faire.’ Back in Harrow on 13 February 1834, she wrote only ‘Farewel.’
Arguments have been made that the initials ‘AB’ in Mary’s journal may shield some other relationship,21 but the fact that she wrote ‘Farewel’ on the very date of Beauclerk’s wedding seems conclusive, as does the fact that she recorded the same date the following year as ‘An anniversary strange & bitter’.‡‡
Aubrey was a member of the circle that included some of her dearest friends. All of them must have been aware, to some extent, of what she had hoped for, and what had taken place. Humiliation increased her sense of being unable to share her feelings, of having to hide away the shock. ‘Loneliness has been the curse of my life,’ she wrote in December 1834. ‘What should I have done if my Imagination had not been my companion? I must have grovelled on the earth – I must have died – O but my dreams my darling sun bright dreams!’22 And her thoughts drifted back to the distant days when she sat in St Pancras churchyard by Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave, wondering what the future held in store.
Notes
1. MWS–Fanny Wright, 30.12.1830.
2. Ibid.
3. Morning Chronicle, 5.11.1832, for a report of Major Beauclerk’s opening address to the electorate as the candidate for East Surrey. He was elected by them on 8 November 1832.
4. See Appendix 3.
5. Maria Jane Jewsbury–Anna Jameson, 18.6.1830, in Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships, ed. Mrs Stewart Erskine (1915).
6. MWSJ, 18.7.1831.
7. MWS�
�Elizabeth Stanhope, 17.5.1833.
8. EJT–MWS, 8.4.1831.
9. MWS–EJT, 14.6.1831.
10. MWS–EJT, 26.7.1831.
11. The manuscript of Adventures of a Younger Son is at the Houghton Library (Cambridge, Mass.), carrying deletions and alterations by Horace Smith, Mary Shelley and possibly Hogg. The criticisms by Mary referred to here are to pages 394–5 of the original manuscript.
12. MWS–EJT, 27.12.1830.
13. EJT–MWS, 19.1.1831.
14. MWSJ, 18.11.1831.
15. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (1888), pp. 205–6. In Arnold’s celebrated essay on Shelley, he quoted Mary as saying: ‘Teach him to think for himself? Oh my God, teach him rather to think like other people.’ Arnold’s essay, a review of Edward Dowden’s The Life of Shelley (1886), was highly supportive of Mary Shelley. Anne Thackeray, Lady Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs (1894), pp. 205–6, gave the mother’s passionate answer as: ‘Ah! No, no, bring him up to think like other people.’
16. CC–MWS, 26.10–8.11.1832 (CC, 1).
17. MWS–MG, 24.8.1832.
18. MWSJ, June–September 1832.
19. CC–JWH, 1.2.1833.
20. MWS–EJT, 11.1.1833.
21. Shelley and His Circle, 6, p. 665.
22. MWSJ, 2.12.1834.
* Charles, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) was a politician of whom both Mary and her father could warmly approve. With Charles Fox, he had been among the Whigs who in 1792, following recent events in France, had demanded parliamentary reform for England. In 1797, the year Mary was born, Grey’s parliamentary Reform Bill was heavily defeated. Between 1815 and 1830, he advised the Whig opposition without playing an active role in Parliament during the long years of Tory rule under Lord Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington and, very briefly, George Canning. In 1830 the new king, William IV, invited him to form a ministry, following division in the Tory party after the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Bill in 1829. Catholic Emancipation had been part of Grey’s vision for a reformed and more egalitarian Britain.
† If this was the case, he must have kept the canvas; Mary had no portrait for an engraver to copy when John Murray approached her on the subject two years later.
‡ The Duchess of Leinster, widow of one of the richest men in Ireland, married her children’s tutor and lived with him long and happily.
§ Mrs Lewis, courted after her husband’s death in 1838 by both Beauclerk and Benjamin Disraeli – for the late Mr Lewis’s fortune as much as for her personal charm – chose to marry Disraeli.
¶ Phrenology was much in fashion. Mary herself wrote of ‘Spurzheim’ and ‘bumps’ in 1830 in a way that suggests she may have allowed Johann Spurzheim to interpret her character by running his hands over her head. In novels, a sudden spate of references to high or massive foreheads, denoting intellect, shows the spreading craze for phrenology in the 1830s and 1840s. This method of measuring character had been established by Spurzheim’s teacher, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828).
|| Mary’s changes had been minimal: Trelawny was bluffing.
** It remains puzzling why Gee should have been sent somewhere so out of the way unless she was pregnant. Mary’s response does not suggest that Gee was innocent, only that she intended to stand by her.
†† The castle went directly to Aubrey, eldest of the Beauclerk sons, since his mother, the daughter of William Ogilvie, also died that month.
‡‡ The initials which seem to identify Beauclerk appear only once in Mary’s journal. ‘I have received one little note from A.B. sole testimonial of his existence –’ she wrote on 8 July 1834. The fact that not a single letter has survived from Aubrey Beauclerk himself to Mary, or from Mary to him, is significant. Aubrey was a prudent destroyer of incriminating correspondence; he may well have asked Mary to perform a similar service for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
RELINQUISHING PLEASURE
1833–1836
‘My heart & soul are bound up in Percy – My race is run – I hope absolutely nothing except that when he shall be older & I a little richer to leave a solitude, very unnatural to any one, & peculiarly disagreable to me. I like society … I enjoy its pleasures … & forget sorrow in amusement – therefore I suppose I am shut up here where it is impossible to forget …’
Mary Shelley, Journal, Harrow, 2 December 1834
CLAIRE CLAIRMONT HAD RETURNED TO PISA BY THE BEGINNING OF 1832, working as a day governess from the home of Mrs Mason, the woman she now looked on as a mother. ‘With her I am as her child,’ she wrote to Mary.1 Mrs Mason had married George Tighe in 1826, three years after her husband’s death, and was as splendid and uncomplaining as ever, although Tighe had become increasingly reclusive and neurotic. Claire, forced outwardly to play the part of a conventional middle-aged spinster for the purposes of her job, was busy with subversive plans for a society of free-loving women who would confer their own names, not those of husbands, on their children. Legitimate children, Claire observed to Mary with her usual tactlessness, could never mean as much to their mothers. How comic that Sir Tim, ‘that undying undyable Sir Tim!’ was back on his feet again after what had sounded to be a fatal illness in the autumn of 1833. Clearly, he had decided to live for as long as possible, just to spite them. So Mary felt wretched? Well, she should try being a governess. Percy was growing fat, was he? So much the better; she had grown so rosy and buxom herself that she wondered if Mary would recognize her. Percy, she dared swear, was going to become a great philosopher, a prince among men. Now, could Mary stop complaining and mind to send her, for a friend, the autographs of all the fine celebrities among whom she lived?2
Out of England, Claire had little grasp of the isolation which preyed on Mary’s spirits after her move to Harrow. The coach journey then from London was famously picturesque, rolling past the handsome new cemetery at Kensal Green through the pretty villages of Harlesden and Willesden and alongside the handsome hillside estate of Mr Gray at Wembley Park. Harrow itself was not inviting and few of Mary’s friends were tempted to travel the eleven miles either by road or packet-boat, Mary’s preferred form of travel. Even Godwin, while lamenting the loss of his daughter, preferred to stay put at New Palace Yard. The Robinsons, who had become almost like a second family to Mary, were settled on the far side of London, having left Paddington when the new Grand Junction Canal transformed it into a noisy goods depot. The girls, it was true, often came to stay with her, but visits were not enough for a woman who wistfully described herself as ‘so social – so sympathizing – so easily pleased – & not displeasing’.3
In the village itself, Mary was starved for company. Fanny Trollope had returned there for a short period and her fourth son, Anthony, was completing his education at Harrow, but Anthony was several years older than Percy, and Mary, after reading Mrs Trollope’s cruelly witty account of the horrors of life with Fanny Wright at Nashoba in her immensely successful Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), had little inclination to resume the friendship. Mrs Trollope’s bête noire, William Cunningham, vicar of Harrow, was equally uncongenial. Author of a best-seller recounting the history of the Church from the point of view of a hassock, Cunningham was also one of the founders of the relentlessly ardent Clapham Sect which Dickens loved to ridicule. Fanny Trollope pilloried Cunningham, recognizably, in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), while her son left a memorable portrait of him as the unctuous Obadiah Slope in Barchester Towers.
Every morning, Mary could hear the rattle of the oyster-cart being wheeled up the hill, carrying not-so-fresh Billingsgate wares, and the giggles of housemaids at the water pump, before she sat down to work. The lodgings were very disagreeable, she told Mrs Gisborne, and made worse by the fact that she lacked the money to furnish them. ‘At the same time I cannot in the least regret having come here. It was the only way I had of educating Percy in a public school – of which institution, at least here at Harrow, the more I see, the more I like –’4
Mary’s letters suggest that she was u
naware of just how little Harrow merited its high fees. Floggings were frequent but random. Masters were hooted when they entered the classroom; boys read the Satirist behind their desks and slept through their lessons. In their spare hours, they went beagling, drinking at the weekly fairs at nearby Pinner, swimming in the dirty canal three miles outside the village, and ‘toozling’ – stoning sitting birds.5
Only one pupil, the father of W.B. Yeats’s patron, Lady Gregory, won a scholarship to Oxford during Percy’s time at Harrow; several others distinguished themselves in the annual Eton v. Harrow cricket match at Lords. Percy made his mark neither in sports nor studies. He left before reaching the school’s top form, seemingly because of his need for cramming to reach university level. Yet it was not wholly Harrow’s fault that Percy failed to do well. By the end of his second year, Mary was beginning to understand that he had no outstanding gift. ‘He has the true Shelley hatred of society –’ she told Mrs Gisborne; ‘he has no ambition & little emulation – yet attentive to his lessons & sufficiently diligent – he is the 20th boy in a form of 50 boys.’ She wished that he liked poetry and worked at Latin, although he seemed fond of romances. He had ‘a great want of sensibility’. His blue eyes and pink face had been very like his father’s at one time, but now, to his mother’s dismay, he had become ‘excessively fat – his chest would remind you of a Bacchus’, she told her old friend.6 Describing his affection for her, however, Mary could never praise him highly enough. ‘One day I said to him – “Suppose when you grew to be a Man – you would leave me all alone” – “O Mamma,” he said, “how do you think I could be so shabby: – that would be too bad!”’7
Mary Shelley Page 61
