By 1837, the image of Shelley as a religious sceptic had faded almost entirely from sight. A less financially dependent – and by now cautious – woman than Mary might have jumped at the opportunity which The Genius of Christianity Unveiled provided to signal the remarkable link between her father’s last work and Shelley’s atheism, but these were pious times and such a publication would guarantee an end to her allowance from Sir Timothy. She had no wish to take the risk, either for her father, for her husband or for her son. Godwin had left a letter with his final manuscript, optimistically valuing it at a thousand pounds and insisting on publication. Mary did not destroy his work; she simply put it away. The Genius of Christianity Unveiled first appeared in 1873, more than twenty years after her death.
The project of writing Godwin’s life was not abandoned. Her idea seems to have been to produce two separate works, a collection of correspondence linked by biographical notes, and a life which would stop short at the death of her own mother, a period too remote for controversy. Shelley’s reputation and her own could suffer no harm from a book which ended at her birth.
Composing the linking passages for Godwin’s correspondence was a useful exercise; it afforded Mary an example of how, in time, she might present a life of her husband without angering Sir Timothy or revealing anything injurious to herself. Her notes, prepared between 1836 and 1838, suggest that this was to have been a work of reticence bordering on untruth.22 The revolutionary nature of the 1793 edition of Political Justice was downplayed as she carefully emphasized her father’s support of ‘the slow operation of change’. Due homage was paid to Godwin’s courage at the Treason Trials of 1794 and to the waking of ‘a giants mind’ in the heady dawn of the French Revolution. But, coming to the awkward fact of her own conception by an unmarried couple, Mary simply lied. ‘At the beginning of this year Mr Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft. The precise date is not known,’ she blandly wrote, although the date and place of the marriage was plainly written in the journals she had in front of her. Should we exonerate her, suggest an oversight, a misreading, in such an important detail as the marriage of her parents? Surely not; she would have scanned the entries twenty times for such a revealing fact. Respectability had become more important than the truth.
A separate project, for a life of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, seems to have been undertaken at the same time. It opened with a poem, ‘A Monody on the death of William Godwin’, composed by Mary with more feeling than art. ‘Godwin was versatile,’ she wrote; ‘he bore combined / A woman’s weakness, a Cato’s mind.’ The poem continued for another three pages. Reading it, few would disagree with the subject’s low opinion of his daughter’s abilities as a poet.23 Mrs Godwin copied out chapters 9 and 10, containing her husband’s account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, perhaps because her stepdaughter found this too distressing a task; elsewhere, with the exception of a few allusions to ‘the great man’, Mary was the principal author. It is not clear why she abandoned it, for a biography which stopped in 1797 offered no threat either to Percy or to Shelley’s reputation. It is tempting to suppose that, having sacrificed so much of her life to her father’s needs, Mary simply abdicated from a task which threatened to consume the remainder. And who could blame her? She had already done more than enough.§
*
The regularity of Mary’s complaints of exhaustion and ill health in the two years following her father’s death were not due solely to her worries about how to carry out his wishes. She was now forty years old and she was driving herself hard. In 1837, she was assessing Godwin’s papers, keeping an eye on her stepmother, worrying over whether the Shelleys would be willing to pay for Percy’s university education. She was also preparing, after an arduous two years of writing the Spanish Lives, to set to work on her third and final set of short biographies, of the eminent French.
Money was the spur. Writing the Spanish Lives had interested her, she told Leigh Hunt at the beginning of 1838: ‘these do not so much – yet it is pleasant writing enough – sparing one’s imagination yet occupying one and supplying in some small degree the needful’ – by which she meant, money.25
As in the earlier volumes, Lardner encouraged her to be as opinionated as she wished – and Mary did wish. She did not, on the whole, care for the French and she let it show.26 It was a pity, she observed, that Corneille had been born a Frenchman and forced to obey the ‘jejune’ rules of French verse. Racine’s tragedies represented, even at their finest, only ‘a dance in fetters’.27 The best she could say of Molière’s work was that he was, among his fellow playwrights, ‘the least merely French’.28 Voltaire was lambasted for cynicism (which did not stop Dr Lardner putting a handsome engraving of him at the front of the book), and Rousseau for hypocrisy. Few exceptions were allowed. Condorcet and Fénelon, so admired by Godwin, received almost unstinting praise; Mary’s enthusiasm for Rochefoucauld and Mirabeau suggests that she would gladly have extended her chapters on them to twice the length.
Nearing the end of this gruelling enterprise, Mary gives us a hint of the book, rejected by Murray in 1830, which she had wanted to write on celebrated women. Restrained in her accounts of Madame de Sévigné and Germaine de Staël, she made up for it when she came to Madame Roland, the woman young Isabella Baxter had taught her to regard as history’s greatest heroine. Mary was less impressionable in her forty-first year than Isabella had been at fifteen. She allowed Manon Roland to have been a trifle vain and thought that a little tact might have saved her husband from hearing ‘the ridicule which low-minded men delight in affixing on superior beings of the other sex’. But why, Mary demanded, when Roland himself took pride in his wife’s brain and her ambition, should she be criticized for having helped him? Mary’s own sense of a wife as partner, not subordinate, emerges clearly here, but this is one of the chief fascinations of her biographical studies. Writing objectively enabled her to reexamine her own life under the cloak of an anonymous chronicler of past events.
*
‘How easy it is in all that is human to spy defects,’ was one of the comments that Mary made in her defence of Manon Roland. In 1837, she could still identify with a woman whose name had been unjustly maligned; the sense of being judged and condemned remained as strong as ever. She still feared what was said behind her back; as Shelley’s name became increasingly linked to all that was beautiful and gentle and good, her own reputation as the callous wife who had not understood or appreciated him continued to ripple and spread. There were plenty of people who now read Shelley’s poetry but still wanted nothing to do with his wife. It was unfair, but it was so. Sir Timothy’s injunctions, combined with her own awareness of all the things that could never, for Shelley’s sake, be told, guaranteed that no remarkable change in attitude was likely.
She had, nevertheless, made some firm friendships during the 1830s and there is no evidence that any of the women who had become intimate with Mary Shelley during her first timid years of social entertaining had turned against her. Gee Paul, enduringly grateful for the support Mary had given after her separation from her husband, invited her down to Sussex to spend the Easter of 1837 with the Beauclerk family. Against her expectation and much to her delight, the local gentry were rude about the Shelley family and friendly to herself. ‘It is they say, & truly, a pleasure to be praised by the praiseworthy – & certainly it is gratifying to find one’s enemies unworthy & generally disliked,’ Mary wrote to Leigh Hunt on 26 April. She could, for the first time, imagine a future for herself in this pleasant southern landscape when – if ever – Sir Timothy consented to expire. She could not resist reporting that Lady Shelley was considered ‘illnatured’ by her neighbours, and the daughters thoroughly ‘arrogant and disagreable’. Sir Timothy, she had heard, ‘though something of a fox, is more of a fool’. It was not yet clear whether he was prepared to meet Percy’s college bills.
Back in London for the summer of 1837, she hunted for congenial lodgings. The rooms she had taken at South Audley Street were uncomfor
table; still, as she told Hunt in this same letter, ‘it is near several people I know & like – & if one is to have any society, I find one must tend towards the centre.’ Trelawny, always ready to criticize Mary for her social aspirations, allowed that company suited her and that she looked good – for her age. She ‘lights up very well at night – and shows to advantage in society’, he noted.29 The American statesman, Charles Sumner, meeting Mary in the late 1830s at a party given by lively old Lady Morgan, remembered that she had been dressed in pure white, a bold touch for a woman over forty; he had thought her ‘a nice and agreeable person, with great cleverness’.30 Here, we have an image of a woman who had stood up to years of hardship startlingly well; this was not an age which favoured cosmetics, and gaslight was not kind to wrinkles. Perhaps Mary’s volatile nature was reflected in her appearance, for the descriptions of Trelawny and Charles Sumner stand in striking contrast to the only known portrait of her at this time.
Richard Rothwell had left England for Italy shortly after Mary first sat to him in 1831. Back in England by 1836, he renewed his friendship with Mary, and in the following years often accompanied her in parties to the theatre. By this time, thanks to the influence of that ambitious but unfortunate artist, Benjamin Haydon, he had almost entirely renounced his lucrative career as a portrait-painter to work on large-scale historical scenes; still, he could not resist trying his hand at another portrait of Mrs Shelley Late in 1839, she sat for him in a low-cut, pinch-waisted black velvet dress which emphasized the fashionably wide slope of her white shoulders. Behind her, Rothwell gracefully alluded to the sustaining spirit of Shelley in a flame-coloured column. Skilled at the art of flattering coarse features and bad skins, he made no such concessions here. Mary looks noble, appealing and all of her years. Her hair, time-darkened and thin, is pulled away from her face; her complexion, while clear of pockmarks, is sallow. The mouth, thin and straight as her father’s, carries no hint of a smile; the eyes are tired and a little haunted. It is hard to imagine this woman being tempted to wear a white dress or being praised for the fact that she showed ‘to advantage’ in society, unless Trelawny meant that she did so by presenting a startling contrast to the worldly women whose company she appeared, increasingly, to enjoy.
The portrait must have been a truthful one; Mary liked it well enough to allow Rothwell to exhibit it in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1840 and without concealing her name.31 The catalogue entry, for which her permission must have been sought, quoted the lines from The Revolt of Islam in which Shelley had hailed her as a ‘child of light’, glorious by her birth, auspicious in her future. The Morning Chronicle critic thought the portrait one of the six finest in an exhibition crowded with sketches and paintings of literary figures; Rothwell’s entry was mentioned alongside Maclise’s celebrated portrait of Dickens.32
‘If one is to have any society,’ Mary had written to Leigh Hunt, as though she would be fortunate to find more than a scant handful of friends in London. Mary always tended to exaggerate the solitude of her life: thanks in part to the success of Lodore and in part to the rise in her husband’s literary fame, her circle was steadily expanding. Augusta Goring, unhappily married to Ida Beauclerk’s bullying, unpleasant brother Harry, became a devoted friend. Sending her consoling letters, Mary urged her to be as cheerful as she knew how and addressed her tenderly as ‘dearest little Guss’.
Her acquaintances included several politicians, many authors, and a few who combined both professions. One was Bulwer; another was the dandyish author whose most recent novel, Venetia (1837), had drawn on the lives of Shelley and Byron. Mary made no written comment on the book, but she admired Disraeli enough to urge him to strive for something beyond mere dazzle in his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1837. ‘Were your heart in your career it would be a brilliant one,’ she wrote, and, because it saved her a little money, she asked him to frank an enclosed letter.33
Shared hatred of Italy’s Austrian overlords had long ago helped to cement Mary’s friendship with the warm-hearted, downright Irish novelist and travel-writer Lady Morgan, who sometimes put her up at her home near Grosvenor Place during Percy’s holidays from Harrow and often invited her to attend the literary and political gatherings she held there. By the time Mary had settled into new lodgings in Park Street towards the close of 1837, she was even prepared to give Lady Morgan one of her most precious relics, a piece of the lock she had cut from Byron’s hair in the summer of 1822: ‘you may say that I have never parted with one hair to anyone else,’ she told her in the note which accompanied the gift.34
Pride remained an obstacle in some of her new friendships. She did not mind walking out to Brompton to call on Trelawny’s mother, Mrs Brereton, and his married sister, Charlotte Trevanion; embarrassed by her lack of a private carriage, she felt unable to call on the actress and author Fanny Kemble Butler after being sent a friendly invitation. Lack of a carriage also kept her from making cross-town visits to the Hunts at their new home by the river in Chelsea village. Now, if Jane Hogg and she were men and wore trousers, she wrote ruefully to Hunt, they would be there in a trice; but how could ladies in their trailing cloaks and lace-trimmed petticoats be expected to toil through the mud?35 Hunt did not need to be told that it was unthinkable for a respectable lady to hire a hansom.
No transport was needed to make the short journey down to Samuel Rogers’s home in St James’s Place, just south of Piccadilly. Small, sharp-tongued and with a nose that hooked almost down to his chin, the old banker-poet relished the company of clever women, although he never married. Charmed by Mary, he began in 1837 to issue her with regular invitations to his literary breakfasts, held in the treasure-stuffed house he had built for himself. Urged to hurry to ‘the little gate’ always open to her there,36 Mary went almost as often as she was asked, to admire his art collection – Rogers owned a Titian, a Giorgione, a Raphael – and to enjoy his company. ‘Rogers’ breakfasts are delightful – of such intellectual fascinating society I have had too little in my day,’ she wrote in her journal on 30 June 1838: ‘how highly I enjoy them when they fall to my share.’ It was through Rogers that she met Wordsworth and Keats’s friend, Joseph Severn, to whom she had tried to give Hogg an introduction in 1825;37 it was probably here that she met Leigh Hunt’s Chelsea neighbour, Thomas Carlyle, talking nineteen to the dozen, and Richard Monckton Milnes, one of Shelley’s warmest admirers among the younger generation. Mouselike, pale and as unquenchably fond of singing as Tom Moore, Milnes was a countryman turned aesthete, his poetically long hair combed down over his velvet collar. The story of his cross-country dash from Cambridge to champion Shelley’s name to a group of scornful Oxford men was one he loved to tell.
Milnes would have been able to reassure Mary about her son’s new life. Percy had gone to Trinity, Milnes’s own former college, in the autumn of 1837; Mary, with memories of Shelley’s tales of himself and Hogg at Oxford and of their expulsion for printing an atheistical pamphlet, was full of anxiety, although it relieved her to know that her son’s closest friend there was Julian, the youngest of Joshua Robinson’s sons. Stealthily, she began laying plans for a romance with Peacock’s daughter, Mary Ellen, who was kept carefully informed of the dates of Percy’s returns home. ‘I have very agreable letters from Percy,’ she told Aubrey Beauclerk’s brother George on 19 March 1838, and added that she had hopes of being ‘a happy woman & a lucky one yet’. It must have been very shortly after this date that Mary received the unwelcome news that Percy was in love, not with Miss Peacock but with a girl she had never met. We can note, for it is an intriguing gap, that none of Mary’s letters to Percy during this period have survived. It has been generally assumed that Mary’s correspondence with her father was destroyed because of the embarrassing degree of affection it may have betrayed; so, perhaps, it was with Percy. It is certainly unthinkable that a mother so possessive as Mary would not have communicated her anxiety; even her letters to Claire on the subject have disappeared. All we have to go on ar
e two letters which Claire wrote back to her in April 1838 from the Windsor household in which she was working as a governess and companion.
Claire’s letters, written on 7 and 20 April, make it clear that Mary was extremely uneasy about Percy’s affairs and that she had already indicated to Claire that the girl was socially unsuitable (‘however unworthy the girl,’ Claire wrote back, quoting her). Claire, while pleased to be consulted, was not helpful. She pitied her nephew, she announced in her second letter, ‘and all young people of his age, whose heart is opening, who pine to expand themselves, and find insurmountable barriers placed every where’. The barrier to which she referred was, presumably, Mary herself. Happily for Mary’s peace of mind, the love-affair seems to have petered out by the autumn of 1838; one can’t help wondering whether she assisted it to an end. Having given much of her life to ensuring that Percy grew up to become a fitting heir to the Shelley estate, she had no intention of letting him wreck his prospects by an unsuitable alliance.
This alarm was followed by two pieces of news which would have lasting repercussions. Aubrey Beauclerk’s wife Ida, visiting their Sussex estate in the spring of 1838 with her husband and young children, drowned in a pond, probably the same dark pool which can still be seen outside the hotel since built over the site of the old Beauclerk house, a mile or so from Field Place. Aubrey Beauclerk was if anything more appealing to Mary as a griefstricken widower than as the busy political candidate he had been when they first met. ‘We shall see,’ she wrote in her journal the following year. ‘… We shall see!’
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