It had suited Mary‚ who never liked to think of Percy being alone, that he should have his aunt’s company while she was away. But Percy‚ lovingly urged to come and undertake a cure for an ailment of his own at the spa, was ready to take up the invitation by the end of a baking August in the city. Surely‚ Claire could not expect them to keep a full household running for a solitary visitor’s benefit in the season when all large London homes were asleep in their dustsheets? But Claire’s pride was easily wounded. ‘I fear I worded my letter about shutting up my house unkindly‚’ Mary wrote to her on 5 September in soothing tones:
for you seem hurt – & I am so, so sorry – God know[s] I am the last person who ought to inflict the smallest pain on you – I to whom you have ever been so kind – forgive me if it is so – I entreat you – When I wrote I was very ill … I was in hopes from Percy that your spirits were better – but you do not write so. This opera house &c must weigh on them … Adieu dear Claire pray forgive me …
The damage had been done. Claire was not to be comforted by friendly words on her new relationship with charming, elusive Walter Coulson‚ the Cornish-born newspaper editor whom Mary had often seen at the Novellos’ home in the 1820s. Sulkily, Claire moved back to the house she had rented earlier that summer on Osnaburgh Street, within earshot of the mangy lions in the Regent’s Park zoo and the wheeze and creak of trains being cranked up the last steep incline from Camden into the new station at Euston. The area was neither fashionable nor pleasant; the contrast to quiet, elegant Chester Square was hard to ignore. So was Mary’s reluctance to visit. True, her health was unimproved when she returned from Germany in the late autumn; to a touchy stepsister with rheumatic complaints of her own to worry about, Mary seemed to use illness as a convenient reason for staying clear of a less genteel area than her own.
Sick, fretful and worried as always about Percy’s future – ‘He is told he must look out for an Heiress,’ Mary informed Alexander Berry, a man who now took an affectionate interest in his late wife’s relations on the other side of the world – she was ready to admit that the appearance of an heiress ready to marry an easygoing young baronet would be ‘a desirable event’.13
The sale of Castle Goring and the death of Lady Shelley persuaded Mary’s friends that she must by now be a wealthy woman. She was not. She gladly applied to the Royal Literary Fund in December for assistance to Isabella Booth in her grim role as nurse and keeper to a lunatic invalid. But an appeal from the Novello family‚ perhaps for a contribution to the Italian school begun by Mazzini and energetically supported by them, was rejected; a guinea was all she could afford, she told Novello, and she imagined that a guinea was ‘giving nothing’.14 The Hunts chose that same month, January 1847, to remind Mary of the fortune they had saved her by producing the letter in which Byron had renounced the £2,000 due to him as Shelley’s executor.15 But when Marianne boldly called at Chester Square to ask for a reward, she was told that Mary was not at home. Mary did not pretend that the statement had been true: ‘beg Marianne to forgive me – but I could not see her,’ she wrote to Hunt.16 She could see less demanding friends: ‘I am always at home by ½ past 4,’ she told Edward Moxon that same week and then reproached him for staying away.
Mary’s wish to see Moxon probably had something to do with a small, three-volume edition of Shelley which was brought out with her approval, plus a reprint of the uncut 1839 edition, in 1847. Here, after all the trouble she had experienced over the cutting of blasphemous passages from Queen Mab in 1839, Mary chose the easy option of printing only the innocuous first two cantos. It had, she noted in her introduction, been ‘deemed advisable’; did she hope to draw the general reader’s attention away from the controversial passages in the later cantos and the notes, which were also omitted? Perhaps. ‘The opening of Queen Mab is the most striking part of the poem,’ she wrote defensively. ‘It is the boy’s dream of beauty and love. [The verses] bear the impress of earnest, daring, fearless youth. Shelley’s angelic nature breathes in every line, and these cantos must always be pre-eminently valued by those happy few who understand and love him.’ It was as near as she dared go to dismissing all that made the poem a treasure to Shelley’s radical audience; another brick had been laid in the wall she was protectively creating around her husband’s reputation.
The stepsisters had always competed when it came to preeminence in suffering; a return of Mary’s illness in the opening months of 1847 was sufficiently grave to put her well ahead in this grisly game. Sick though she evidently was, Claire was still suspicious enough to see her as a rival in love. When Mary, with the kindest intentions, invited Walter Coulson and Claire to dinner together, intending to spend the evening quietly resting upstairs, Claire instantly detected a plot. Mary had asked Coulson only because she was in love with him herself! ‘Take my word for it, dear Claire, I shall never marry anyone,’ Mary reassured her after apologizing for any unlucky vagueness in her invitation. She added affectionate hopes that Claire would win such ‘an excellent husband’, one who would be ‘too happy to have a clever accomplished wife fond of & taking care of him … I wish with my whole heart he were yours.’17
Mary’s wishes were heartfelt. Convalescing at Brighton in June, she sent Claire an affectionate letter of praise for her courage, her ability to make friends wherever she went, her willingness to shoulder her troubles alone; who could not want to see her rewarded? Advising against another friendship with someone identified only as ‘B’, she set herself to thinking how Coulson could be coaxed into marriage.
Mary’s advice to Claire was, she assured her, only ‘theoretical’. Coulson must be made to feel utterly comfortable and at home when he visited Osnaburgh Street. No man could resist having life made easy for him; it was up to Claire to offer peace, to become ‘a benign and gentle influence’. Self-control was the secret, Mary added:
All my experience tends to prove that a Man’s affections once engaged are much more easily kept if a woman can show attachment without passion & affection & devotion with a self-controul with regard to the greatest happiness, most difficult – yet most desirable to attain – This makes a woman all powerful with a man – He must believe in your affection yet know that you can resist him – & then … his attachment takes deep roots & is never changed …18
It is possible to interpret Mary’s reference to ‘the greatest happiness’ as marriage; it is as likely that she was warning Claire not to sleep with Coulson until she was sure of him. The second explanation, given the impetuousness of Claire’s past relationship with Byron, seems more convincing. Mary’s letter did not help bring about the desired match; it does raise the intriguing question of whether her advice was based on her experience of being loved and rejected by Aubrey Beauclerk. Had Rosa won him by showing a restraint which Mary herself had failed to exercise and which she now decided to use as a warning to Claire?
*
The illness which kept Mary in bed in the opening months of 1847, when she invited Claire to dine with Walter Coulson, was as severe as it had been after the scare she had given the doctors in March 1846. ‘I hope & trust I am getting better at last,’ she wrote to Vincent Novello on 5 January; a month later, she wistfully told Edward Moxon that she hoped to be ‘entirely restored to health before very long’; by May‚ she could only report that she was ‘nearly well’, having been confined to her sofa for almost four months. Dr Mantell, an agreeable neighbour who was always ready to lend books and to come round for talks about geology‚* a subject in which Mary took a keen interest‚ had retired from practising medicine; instead, Mary placed herself under the care of a Dr Smith.† This doctor, judging from his recommendation to Claire of soapy washes as a cure for rheumatism‚ was a man of eccentric views. The several operations he performed on Mary in February produced little improvement, although she was correctly informed that a small growth which Smith had discovered, seemingly on her spine, would disappear of its own accord. Still too weak to sit up without support, she was advised to ta
ke a holiday by the seaside: ‘change of air is the best remedy‚’ she wrote to Leigh Hunt just before setting off for the South Coast.
A change of air was always welcome if it meant escaping from ‘odious’ London, but Mary was quick to regret having chosen to visit noisy Brighton and not peaceful, congenial Sandgate for her summer convalescence. Percy was away‚ sailing his yacht among the Norwegian fjords with – a thoughtful gift from his mother – Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence at his side, but Aubrey Beauclerk’s sister Gee was staying nearby and Mary‚ still ‘sadly bored’‚ was feeling well enough by August to ask Isabella Booth and then Claire to join her. (Her anxious attempts to separate their visits suggests that the two women had little in common.) ‘I like to see young people‚’ she told Claire in her letter of invitation;20 she was rewarded by visits from Alexander Knox and from Jane Hogg’s daughter, Dina Hunt.
Dina and her husband Henry were as poor as the rest of the Hunts and just as hopeless at providing for themselves‚ although Dina had some skill as an artist. Mary‚ urging her to try to earn some money by this means, was again dismayed by the fecklessness of Hunt and his tribe. Marianne had long ago found solace in drink; Hunt, chattering delightfully on every subject under the sun, remained as incapable as his wife of keeping hold of the money he shamelessly took from anybody willing to support him. Carlyle left out gold sovereigns on his mantelpiece when expecting a visit from Hunt; Dickens‚ in 1847, raised £440 for him with a theatrical benefit. The Whig government were less generous, granting a reluctant annual pension of £200. They were ‘shabby’ not to have given more, Mary told him on 29 June; tactfully, she forbore to mention that she was still struggling to repay the last £200 she had borrowed on his behalf.
Hunt’s chance to show his gratitude followed almost directly on the happy report of his pension from the Whigs. Early in July, Medwin wrote that he was working on the last proof of his book about Shelley, that he expected it to cause a great stir and that he was indifferent to anything the critics might choose to say. Mary had barely put his note in the post to Hogg for legal advice when she saw the book advertised in the press. Immediately, and with touching faith in the ageing Hunt’s influence in the world of journalism, she begged him to exert his power to suppress any reviews that might already have been written. ‘I most earnestly desire that it may fall dead born,’ she told him on 11 July; Hunt gallantly promised to see that it did.
Five days later, Mary renewed her campaign. Conscious by now that Hunt’s eldest son Thornton was better placed as a journalist to work on her behalf, she concentrated on supplying him with a sense of the high importance of his mission. Think, she urged his father to instruct ‘dear good Thornton’, of the harm Medwin might do to poor Claire who ‘never injured any one – suppose she were mentioned’; think of the damage he might do to Harriet Shelley’s name, and to Ianthe – ‘& who knows how many whom the wretch with what he calls his slashing may inflict misery upon’. If the book could be suppressed before publication, ‘a triumph in evil’ would be vanquished, an achievement ‘worthy of Thornton’s best endeavours – God speed him in it – the bad seldom succeed in open wickedness –’21
Thornton’s endeavours came too late. Medwin’s life of Shelley was published that autumn and widely reviewed. The critics, one of whom inadvertently praised Medwin as the author of Hogg’s 1832 recollections of Shelley at Oxford, were friendly; a few smiled at his eagerness to push himself to the front of the story. (Thackeray‚ borrowing from Medwin for the character of Captain Sumph in Pendennis in 1849‚ allowed the captain to boast that his schoolfriend Shelley had been expelled ‘for a copy of verses, every line of which I wrote, by Jove’.22) The anecdotal, rambling style, similar to that employed by Medwin’s friend Captain Jesse in an 1844 life of the late Beau Brummell, was appealing and entertaining; the copious inaccuracies and misquotations counted for less with readers than Medwin’s affection and respect for his subject.
Mary, if she ever read the book – she begged for it not to be sent to her–was probably torn between relief and exasperation. Medwin had, after all, been more tactful than she had anticipated. Generous to Jane Williams, he had given a sympathetic portrait of Claire, while not disguising the fact that she had been pregnant when she arrived at Geneva in 1816. No mention was made of the fact that Harriet was with child when Shelley eloped with Mary and no attempt was made to suggest that Shelley’s first marriage had been suitable or happy. It was, Medwin observed, only remarkable that he should have continued for so long ‘to drag on a chain, every link of which was a protraction of torture’.23 Less use had been made of the Chancery papers than he had threatened; the story of little Elena Adelaide was transformed into a romantic tale of a lady who, having followed Shelley from Geneva to Naples, met him, told her history, and died. No child was mentioned; Medwin may never have known more than he breezily related.
Concerning Mary, Medwin displayed a mixture of respect and boorishness. ‘It could not have been her personal charms that captivated him [Shelley],’ he wrote, ‘for to judge of her in 1820, she could not have been handsome, or even what may be denominated pretty.’24 He hinted at ‘substantial reasons’ for Mary’s having ‘thrown herself on his [Shelley’s] protection’, a phrase which could only be taken to mean that she had become pregnant. Frankenstein, however, was stoutly defended as the work of Mary alone and Valperga was praised for its ‘eloquence and beauty and poetry’. Medwin was not being wholly unfair when he regretted her lack of skill in ‘delineation of character – and dialogue –; she had not seen enough of the world – or mixed enough in society to anatomize mankind.’25 It is not the criticism but the tone which grates; Medwin wrote as one who could do it all so much better. Not unexpectedly, he called on her to publish the ‘Essay on Christianity’; it did not seem to him that Shelley’s views would shock a mid-nineteenth-century audience.
Mary did not share Medwin’s confidence and she felt no obligation to heed his request. Writing a short article on her at the end of the year, George Gilfillan, one of Shelley’s most ardent admirers, sighed for the life which only she could write;26 Florence Marshall, Mary’s first biographer, claimed that she now began gathering papers for this purpose.27 There is no evidence that this was so. Mary had not shifted her view since May 1846, when she told Medwin that she had already done all that could be done, ‘with propriety’.
Percy, rosy and cheerful after his summer sailing trip around the coast of Norway, returned in September to take his mother on a visit to his Shelley aunts, now living at their late mother’s house near Hungerford. Percy gallantly escorted the aunts on riding expeditions; Mary, after purchasing Lady Shelley’s open carriage, an object she had coveted for some time, proposed that she and her son might use it for an excursion to Wales. Visiting the Vale of Usk, she grew conscious that Trelawny and Augusta, who had moved to Wales some time after Goring divorced her in 1841, were nearby. Writing to Augusta the following year, Mary gave ill health as her excuse for not calling;28 in 1850, she claimed not to have known that they lived in Wales. The truth was that she had been anxious to keep Augusta at a distance ever since her friend had begun living with Trelawny; she did not, perhaps, know that they had at last, in 1847, become a married couple.
In November, however, Trelawny came to London on his own. Mary had often confided her worries about Percy to him in the past; she did so again now, seemingly unaware of how little of his affection she had retained since their disagreement in 1838 over his relationship with Augusta and Mary’s refusal to share his political views. Percy had become involved with a young woman – too young, in his mother’s view. He was not suited to the role of a tutor or guide; that, at least, was the reason Mary gave for opposing a match. It is not known what Trelawny said, beyond urging Mary to resume her friendship with his wife. Percy’s romance was short-lived and it may well have been his mother’s interference which nipped it in the bud. Much though she loved her son, her desire to control his life is difficult to condone.
He was, after all, almost twenty-eight, seven years older than Shelley had been when Mary and he eloped to Switzerland.
The unexpected death of her friend Gee Paul in that December was felt deeply by Mary. Gee’s reclusive father, Charles Beauclerk, was already dead; Aubrey and Rosa were living at Ardglass in Ireland. The death of Gee broke her last link with a family whose kindness – Aubrey had long ago been forgiven for his betrayals – shone in contrast to the social slights and cuts over which Mary still often brooded. It was only occasionally now that she acknowledged her own bold flouting of convention to have been the first reason for her exclusion; all she remembered, in a bitter letter warning Isabella Booth about the unfriendliness of London society, was that people had refused to help her when she most needed friends.29 The year 1840, when Percy had turned twenty-one, and when she had hoped most for kindness and received none, was especially vivid in her memory of life as an outsider. To us, remembering her friendships with the Hares, the Manners-Suttons, the Beauclerks, Lady Morgan, Mrs Norton, Samuel Rogers – the list could fill a paragraph – it does not seem that her exclusion had been so absolute and enduring as she imagined, but Mary’s depressive nature caused her to dwell on the darker aspects of her life, until they obscured the existence of these affectionate and enduring relationships.
Shelley’s ‘child of light’ was now past fifty and becoming increasingly conservative in her views. Mary Wollstonecraft had been twenty years younger when she went to Paris, burning with enthusiasm for the high ideal of a revolutionized, egalitarian society. Mary, always more cautious than her mother, had grown up during the hardship and disillusionment of the post-revolutionary years. Travelling with Shelley through a ravaged France in 1814, she had been shocked by the deserted villages, the derelict countryside. The Creature of Frankenstein had been shaped, in part, as her response to this, its burning of the de Lacey family’s cottage a warning of the monstrous potential for damage which was released when revenge took precedence over justice. ‘I am not for violent extremes,’ she had written in 1838, when she refused to join Trelawny and his friends among the Philosophical Radicals in supporting agitation by the Chartists for a reformed electoral system; if she had sensed any injustice in the transportation of two rebel Chartists to Australia the following year, she failed to express it.
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