It seems strange that Mary, who had always disapproved of Mrs Gisborne’s over-protective attitude to her own son, should have taken the same course. ‘I think of you & Henry and shrink from binding my life up in a child, who may hereafter divide his fate from mine –’ she confessed, ‘But I have no resource – Everything earthly fails me but him.’8 And this was the awful truth of it. Deserted, as she felt in her darkest moods, by everybody, Mary clung to her only child. If he went so much as a mile out of her sight for a swim, she was frantic; if he invited more than two friends to the house, she resented their monopoly of his attention. Was it rebellion of a quiet kind which turned Percy increasingly towards theatricals, which his father had rather disliked, and to the pleasures of rowing, swimming and yachting, activities which filled his mother with black terror when she remembered how Shelley had died? It would not be surprising. We have a brief glimpse of Percy’s own unhappiness in a comment which found its way into Mary’s journal in December 1834. Percy, she said, had just told her that he wished he had been allowed to stay as a boarder at the school – ‘and I who have bartered my very existence for his good’, his mother bitterly wrote.
There were other blows. Her aunt, Mary Wollstonecraft’s sister Everina, who was now living in north London, took the view that it was Mary’s duty to befriend her, since her only other surviving niece, Elizabeth Berry, while ready to give financial help, lived on the other side of the world. Dutifully and wearily, Mary did what she could. She had always sworn to herself to help the poor and needy of her sex; Everina was poor and, being a singularly unpleasant old lady, she lacked friends. ‘Everina was never a favourite with anyone –’ Mary lamented to Mrs Gisborne, ‘& now she is the most intolerable of God’s creatures … she is so disagreable to me, that I know no punishment so great as spending an hour in her Company.’9 Hours had, nevertheless, to be spent, for Everina, having nobody else to turn to, became a skilful pricker of her niece’s tender conscience.
Her own past brought pain as well. ‘I am copying Shelley’s letters. Great God! What a thing is life!’ she exclaimed in November 1833. Both Shelley and Mary had been in the habit of keeping copies of the letters they wrote; it is possible that she was now reading those in which Shelley had complained of her coldness towards him. The hurt they gave was great; she went on to write of the need to find peace for ‘my wounded aching thoughts … Why do I ask what is to be – What better than the past? – and that past – it is torture to think upon … O that I could forget!’10
She could not forget. Time after time, the past rose to the surface in her fictions, as it did in those of her father. Publishing his last novel, Deloraine, at the beginning of 1833, Godwin had opened his book with a portrait of Deloraine’s young wife, who dies, as Mary Wollstonecraft had done, of a fever after childbirth. Painful though it must have been for his wife of thirty years, Godwin could not hide the tenderness he still felt for Mary’s mother. ‘There was no preparation in any thing she delivered,’ he wrote, ‘no hint of affectation, no wrinkle produced by any retrospect to herself, her own glory, and the expectation to be admired for what she said, or did. When I sat, or when I walked with her, I saw the thoughts of her mind exactly as they rose. It was all simple, and at the same time all wise.’11
For Mary, too, the past became inescapably present when she sat down to write. Lodore was intended as a money-spinner, a novel set in the present, ornamented with the kind of lively social detail in which the so-called ‘silver-fork’ novels of the 1820s and early 1830s dealt. But in the hands of a woman as intelligent, as thoughtful and as introverted as Mary Shelley, it acquired a resonance untypical of the genre.
The history of the manuscript is not straightforward. Mary claimed that she had completed a version of the book by November 1833. She had not really finished it, for she was still sending off chapters to the printer in March 1834, and suffering the writer’s ultimate nightmare of hearing that two fat packets of manuscript had been lost in the post. There was nothing for it but to sit down and rewrite and by June, as she sent off the last recomposed pages, having ‘no copy whatever’ from which to work, she was ready to snap at an impatient publisher that the misfortune had been ‘very disagreable indeed to me as well as to him:
… I did it as soon as ever I could – and tried all I could to do it sooner. The fairies are at work most malevolently if by this time the Printers have not the whole – as I sent the termination of the restoration on Saturday – in two packets … I am very sorry, that like Don Quixote, an Enchanter meddles with my affairs.12
Mary’s rewriting is, however, less intriguing than the fact that she had clearly not finished or even half-completed the novel in November 1833. It was only towards the close of that month that she recorded in her journal the misery it was causing her to copy out Shelley’s letters; this was the point at which her relationship with Shelley began to influence the narrative of Lodore.
One letter of Shelley’s which we know Mary read in November 1833, because she quoted it in her journal, expressed his unhappiness at having left England for Italy It had been Mary, not Shelley, who had insisted that they travel to Italy in 1818 to return Allegra to her father. She was now made guiltily aware of that fact. In the second and third volumes of Lodore, written in the winter of 1833 and early 1834, she turned back the clock and meant it to be seen that she had done so: ‘did you recognise any of Shelley’s & my early adventures?’ she asked Mrs Gisborne eagerly on 8 November 1835. Portraying herself and Shelley in the life of Edward and Ethel Villiers as they cling together in refuge from his creditors, Mary returned to an earlier time when, as it now seemed, their love had been brightest. Fearful and often deserted though she had felt in the first months of her life with Shelley, and correspondingly dark though some passages of the Villiers’ lives are, all emphasis is on their happiness.
Ethel’s relationship with Villiers is not the only part of the novel to show Mary drawing on experience and familiar events. Ethel has been brought up by her father, Lord Lodore, in the wilds of Illinois and the early chapters of the novel were probably drawn from what Mary had heard or read in Mrs Trollope’s book about Fanny Wright’s primitive community at Nashoba. Fanny was a Scotswoman; her companion, Mrs Trollope, had gone to Nashoba with an artist who was probably her lover. It cannot be a coincidence that the community in which Lodore raises his daughter is filled with Scots emigrants or that Ethel is loved by a drawing-master there. This was the kind of sly allusive game which Mary enjoyed playing with her readers.
Ethel, as always with Mary’s portraits of herself, is an excessively devoted daughter. Her father is Byronically self-willed and dramatic enough in his long exiles from England to have prompted Claire Clairmont to ask when Mary intended to stop drawing on that detestable man for her heroes? For Ethel’s heartless English grandmother, Mary fuelled her indignation with thoughts of the woman she had come to believe was the most active and malicious antagonist she and her young son had. ‘It is Lady S— who is my bitter enemy –’ Mary wrote to Leigh Hunt on 3 February 1835, ‘and her motive is the base one of securing more money for herself.’ Lady Shelley was the inspiration for Mary’s portrait of haughty, unsympathetic Lady Santerre, whose daughter Cornelia marries Lord Lodore at sixteen, the age at which Mary herself had eloped with Shelley.
Reviewing her father’s Cloudesley in 1830, Mary had warned against ‘merely copying from our own hearts’; Lodore did, nevertheless, draw on her own experiences. Ethel clearly reflects the difficulties of Mary’s situation when placed between Godwin and Shelley. Fanny Derham, the scholarly daughter of Lodore’s old schoolfriend, declares with Mary’s own passion the importance of championing oppressed women. Young Cornelia Santerre, worldly, silly, fashionable and wholly under the influence of her odious mother, is as far removed from Mary Shelley as one could imagine; but later in the novel her identification with Cornelia as the widowed Lady Lodore becomes striking. She has married Lodore at sixteen; she is just Mary’s age, thirty-four, when the n
ovel ends. She wears white dresses, as Mary was noted to do in the 1830s. Repenting of her frivolous life, she makes amends in the third volume by embarking on a lonely retirement, sacrificing everything to the love of her child.
There is one singular phrase which links Mary Shelley especially closely to Cornelia Lodore. Writing up her journal for September 1833, Mary had noted that ‘The friendship & gratitude of Gee [Paul] have been very soothing – & from unmerited misfortune my soul rises calm & free.’ Mary was surely referring here to Gee’s kindness at the time of Aubrey Beauclerk’s defection. In the second part of Lodore, Cornelia learns that her lover, Horatio Saville, has betrayed her to marry a woman of high rank. As Mary struggled to submerge her grief in caring for Percy, so she showed Cornelia’s thoughts turn to Ethel, her neglected daughter: ‘she felt that in watching the development of her mind, and leading her to love and depend on her, a new interest and real pleasure might spring up in life.’13 Describing Cornelia’s new mood of resolution, Mary wrote: ‘She rose calm and free, above unmerited disaster.’
Lodore has suffered from its links to the silver-fork genre; like them, it was for years too easily dismissed because the lively play of the surface disguises the seriousness of the author’s intentions. Mary eagerly consumed Edward Bulwer’s books while she wrote her novel; she was aiming at a similar audience. What she and Godwin both admired in Bulwer’s works was his ability to combine a romantic, somewhat florid, narrative with a strong social message.
The main theme of Lodore is love in all its forms, but Mary Shelley also used it to challenge masculine authority over children. She had seen Claire’s life destroyed by Byron’s fickle treatment of Allegra, the little girl who belonged by law to him. She had seen poor Gee Paul go weeping from her home while her son was taken from her. These cases were not unusual. This was the regular and heartless way in which a child’s future was decided. One could wonder if, in pretty, compliant Ethel, Mary Shelley had in mind the kind of girl Byron had wished Allegra to become and whether it had already occurred to her, as it must have done to Claire, that a less strong-willed child might have been kept and indulged, instead of being abandoned in the homes of acquaintances before being finally dumped in a convent.
*
The publication of Lodore was still two years away when Mary noted in her Harrow journal for November 1833 that ‘I am going to begin the lives of the Italians.’ She needed money for her aunt Everina as well as for her own lodgings, and for the new clothes which Percy must have if he was not to be mocked by his schoolfriends. Writing was also a welcome occupation; the house was empty all day when Percy was at school, and even when he was at home, as she sadly noted to Mrs Gisborne, his ‘pleasures are not mine’.14 Animals were his new passion; she had, with some difficulty, restricted him to keeping one friendly terrier.
She had failed in her attempt to become a regular contributor to John Murray’s Family Library, but when, in the autumn of 1833, Godwin’s friend at London University, Dr Dionysius Lardner, contracted her to produce almost fifty studies of the eminent men of Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, she was faced with a considerable task. Although she relished the challenge of ‘treading in unknown paths & dragging out unknown things’,15 obtaining books for her research was not easy. She hated the idea of working among a crowd of men in the King’s Library at the British Museum; Lord Holland, approached by Thomas Moore on her behalf, boorishly refused access to his superb collection of Spanish texts; Harrow lacked a good circulating library. But Mary had prided herself on her power to persevere. As she worked on the lives of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Metastasio, Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti and Foscolo, her only annoyance was that she had not been allowed more subjects. ‘Unfortunately before I was applied to[,] some of the best lives were in other hands,’ she complained to Leigh Hunt. ‘The Omnipresent Mr Montgomery wrote Dante and Ariosto for the present Vol. – the rest are mine.’16
Writing the Lives was hard work and it took her almost five years to complete them: the final volume of the French Lives was published in the autumn of 1839. But Mary realized that this kind of work suited her as well as, and possibly better than, ‘romancing’; few readers today would disagree, if they were able to sample her contributions to the Lardner Cyclopaedia, long out of print. Godwin, who began by reading his daughter’s studies of Foscolo and Goldoni in December 1835, was delighted and impressed. This was the channel into which he had always wanted to direct her; these shrewd and readable studies, enlivened by Mary’s candid observations and deepened by her ability to provide her own translations and to make stimulating textual analogies, confirmed the soundness of his judgment. It was an achievement beyond the chosen range of Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary might have inherited her mother’s impulsiveness, gullibility and melancholia; she was a Godwin in her scholarship and her desire to instruct.
Not only that: just as her father, in his early works for the Juvenile Library, had smuggled his political and religious opinions into his texts, so Mary used her studies to express her views. This was the period in which the education of a newly literate class of readers was being heatedly discussed and promoted; Mary did not write simply to inform, but to influence. Her essay on Vincenzo Monti, to take one example, became a means of conveying her thoughts on the French Revolution: ‘Monti … without that ardour of liberty which is so natural to many hearts, and which appears at once senseless and even wicked to those who do not feel independence of thought to be the greatest of human blessings, of course looked on the French revolution as a series of crimes …’ In the same essay, she forcefully attacked Napoleon as a man who had ‘but one idea with regard to liberty, which was a free scope to the exercise of his own will. When that was given him, he could be generous, magnificent, and useful; but when his measures were obstructed, no tyrant ever exceeded him in the combination of a despotism which at once crushed a nation, and bore down with an iron hand every individual that composed it.’
She also seized a chance to defend Shelley: ‘no people needs so much sympathy as poets. The interchange of thought and feeling, the fresh spirit of inquiry and invention … are with them a necessity and a passion. And though solitude is named the mother of all that is truly sublime, yet this solitude ought not to be that of desolation …’ Sympathetic to him here, she challenged his ringing proclamation in The Defence of Poetry (1821) that poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’: ‘a poet,’ Mary drily observed, ‘makes a bad politician.’
There are passages in these essays which deserve to be celebrated. Who has written more poignantly on remorse than Mary in her essay on Rochefoucauld?
These are the stings, this the poison, of death. There is no recall for a hasty word … the grave that has closed over the living form, and blocked up the future, causes the past to be indelible; and, as human weakness for ever errs, here it finds the punishment of its errors. While we love … let all be true and open, let all be faithful and single-hearted, or the poison-harvest reaped after death may infect with pain and agony one’s life of memory.
Reading her essay on Goldoni, one of the first she wrote, we can imagine how pleasant and amusing her company must have been when she was in a happy mood:
The light-hearted rambling life of strolling comedians was alluring beyond measure to a mirthful lad, who loved plays better than anything in the world. The company consisted of twelve, besides sceneshifters, mechanists, and prompters; there were eight men servants, and four women, two nurses, a quantity of children, dogs, cats, apes, parrots, birds, pigeons, and a lamb. The prima donna was ugly, clever, and cross; the suicidal drowning of her cat diversified the time; and, after a prosperous and merry voyage, the whole cargo, with the exception of poor puss, arrived at Chiozza.
*
While Mary wrote, tended her Harrow garden and fretted over her son, her father was enjoying a last sunburst of glory. It was an irony too delicious not to be noted by friends and enemies alike that the celebrated anarchist should have ended as a gover
nment employee, with the Tories responsible for his final rescue. Hazlitt’s affectionate tribute (in his 1825 collection of biographical essays, The Spirit of the Age) had shown the stern political philosopher as a genial old soul, soft as a well-worn glove. Friends, hearing him declare that he no longer believed in giving power to the people, assumed that Godwin had undergone a complete reversal of his views. They were mistaken. Mary, crushed by experience, was slowly becoming more conventional. Her father, in his last and most outwardly placid years, had begun preparing a series of writings on the dangers of orthodox religion.
As a smiling relic of past times, Godwin was visited in droves by people who still kept their distance from his scandal-haunted child. Sheridan’s beautiful granddaughter, witty Caroline Norton, was a regular caller, carrying the friendship with her family into a third generation. Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Wordsworth, Macaulay, Disraeli, Lady Blessington, Count D’Orsay, the great, the good and the notorious, all paid their respects to the philosopher who presided at New Palace Yard with the serenity of Mr Dorrit at the Marshalsea. Fashionable Elizabeth Stanhope wrote to beg his autograph for her album. (Godwin courteously declined to oblige.) An old gentleman sent news that his son had hoped to attend Godwin’s deathbed in order ‘to observe how you would conduct yourself in such an extremity, and how you would die’. Dying prematurely himself, Master Cooke missed his opportunity.17
Lamb, grief-stricken by the loss of his old friend Coleridge, died at the end of 1834; taking his place, young Edward Moxon, recently married to Lamb’s adopted daughter, came to visit Godwin. Moxon had an ulterior motive for his calls. A publisher of poetry, he had already approached Mary about her husband’s poetry, and had been given a polite refusal; next time Godwin saw his daughter, he advised her to think again. Moxon might help her to prevent the regular publication of Shelley’s poems in magazines with neither application made nor permission granted; in 1834, Mary had been dismayed by the appearance of two pirated editions of his works, published by John Ascham.
Mary Shelley Page 62
