Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  A final test of Mary’s political views came ten years later when Europe burst into rebellion against military oppression and antiquated monarchies. In February 1848 came the news from France that Louis Philippe had been replaced by a provisional government; by the end of March, revolutions had taken place in Sicily, where the Bourbons had been overthrown, and in Hungary and Lombardy. The ‘five glorious days’ of Milan marked the ousting of Austria’s military force from that city. The King of Piedmont-Sardinia was challenged and defeated. From Paris, as a flood of French emigrés made their way to England, news filtered through of terrified English families who had seen their homes ransacked and burned. The Chartists, marking the tenth anniversary of their claims with plans for a mass march on London, were perceived as evidence that the revolutionary spirit had spread to England.

  Mary’s initial response to the changes in France was indignant. Writing to Peacock’s widowed daughter she expressed her despair that so many French had abandoned their country instead of staying to fight for order: ‘the worst feature in all French changes is, that all people of any birth, station fortune or influence fly at once.’ She nevertheless passed on her secondhand news that Lamartine, appointed head of the new provisional government, was warning English residents to leave Paris and withdraw their property; Mary Ellen was urged to stay with her father in England until things calmed down.30

  Things did not calm down and Mary, by the end of March, had become both angry and frightened. These were ‘awful times’, she wrote to Alexander Berry in Australia. ‘There is no doubt that a French propaganda is spread among all the nations – they are rousing the Irish & even exciting the English Chartists.’ Ireland was locked in religious battle, one half detesting the other; in England ‘the Chartists are full of menace – covert & secret’. So complete was her terror that she was ready to ask Berry whether, if the worst came to the worst, they could take refuge with him. ‘We would make fight first – but if Percy & I ran to Australia would you allow us to squat on your land?’ They would pay rent, she forlornly added, by raising and selling crops.31 She made this request at a time when Percy was canvassing for the Horsham seat, but Mary had ceased to feel any faith in her son’s ability to become an effective political figure. The most she could say to Berry was that she expected him to win respect, if he gained the seat, for ‘stainless integrity & uprightness’.

  Mary’s fears of revolution in England were calmed by the extraordinary measures taken on 10 April to defeat the Chartists’ plan to march on Parliament with a monster petition signed, it was inaccurately rumoured, by almost six million names. Some 170,000 special constables were enrolled; the Bank of England and other public buildings were prepared against attack; the military, headed by the aged Duke of Wellington, were concealed at strategic points along the projected route to Westminster. The march was prudently reduced to a meeting and disbanded after a promise that the petition would be conveyed to Parliament for scrutiny and consideration. Mary, who had been worried that Claire’s home might be attacked by a riotous mob, was much relieved.

  The year of revolutions marked the culmination of ‘the hungry Forties’ in England and widespread unrest on the Continent among the rural and urban poor. Mary, as she heard of Germany, too, breaking down into anarchy, with rents unpaid and peasants making war against their landlords, reacted with terror and disgust. Her own celebrated novel and its message of political warning was surely in her mind as she wrote to Alexander Berry in June of the ‘fearful events’ in Europe: ‘Countless uncivilized men, long concealed under the varnish of our social system, are breaking out with the force of a volcano & threatening order – law & Peace.’32 However readily Mary championed individual causes, cared for former servants, raised or gave money to needy friends, she had little sympathy for revolutionaries. Her father’s daughter, she continued to place her trust in gradual, peaceful measures for reform.

  It was Charles Clairmont who now showed himself the truer heir to Mary Wollstonecraft, for whom he had always felt a profound admiration. Writing from Vienna to scold Claire for her increasingly reactionary views, he made a passionate defence of Italy’s right to free herself from Austrian domination, despite the fact that his own employers were the imperial family. Were the heroic rebels to be ‘crushed by the heel of a Metternich’, he demanded? How dare Lord Brougham tell the House of Lords that Austria was asserting her ancient right to rule! What right? No, it would not do to say that Austria had been quiet and happy until revolution came: ‘it was not a happiness suitable to the dignity of the human race … it was the contented torpor of the herd grazing and fattening for next week’s market …’33 Even Charles, however, was alarmed when his young son Wilhelm showed signs of joining the rebels. Eagerly though he championed the rights of the oppressed, Charles did not want any Clairrnont blood spilt in the cause. Wilhelm was shipped over to England to join his aunt Claire and take a course in farm management.

  Comfort, and the prospect of financial security, were on hand at last for a weary middle-aged lady who was increasingly at the mercy, not of dangerous revolutionaries, but of her own rapidly deteriorating health. On 22 June, at St George’s, Hanover Square, Mary witnessed her son’s marriage to a woman of whom she wholeheartedly approved, a woman who frankly admitted to a later biographer that she had lost her heart, not to Percy, but to his mother.34 Her name was Jane St John and she came into Mary’s life as a loving daughter, ready to share her burdens and, so Mary devoutly hoped, to give her the grandchildren she longed for. Percy was a disappointment; who could tell what his son or daughter might not be raised to achieve?

  Notes

  1. MWS–CC, 29.12.1845–3.1.1846.

  2. For Edward Bulwer’s translations, see The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, 2 vols. (1844). The reference to Shelley is in the Introduction; MWS–LH, 30.1.1846.

  3. MWS–Edward Moxon, 30.1.1846.

  4. Leigh Hunt, ‘Poems of Alfred Tennyson’ (Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842), anthologized in Leigh Hunt: Selected Writings, ed. David Jesson Dibley (Carcanet, 1990), pp. 119–27. Tennyson’s debts to Shelley are particularly apparent in the poetry written before 1840 at a time when many younger poets were acknowledging Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth as sources of inspiration.

  5. MWS, Notes on ‘Poems of 1822’ (PW).

  6. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Vision of Poets, 2 vols. (1844), 2, pp. 3–59; George Gilfillan, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, A Gallery of Literary Portraits (London, Edinburgh, Dublin, 1845), pp. 71–105. The collection also appeared in separate articles in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine.

  7. The Journal of Gideon Mantell, Surgeon and Geologist, ed. E. Cecil Curwen (Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 202.

  8. MWS–LH, 3.6.1846.

  9. MWS–Thomas Medwin, 13–16.5.1846.

  10. Thomas Medwin–MWS, 17.5.1846 (MWSL, 3, p. 285).

  11. Thomas Medwin–MWS, n.d. (ibid., p. 287).

  12. MWS–JWH, 30.5.1846.

  13. MWS–Alexander Berry, 12.11.1846.

  14. MWS–Vincent Novello, 5.1.1847. The Novello family were not importunate. Novello was approaching Mary at the suggestion of his daughter, Mrs Clarke, who also took an interest in the Italian school.

  15. MH–MWS, 26.1.1847 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).

  16. MWS–LH,?26.1.1847 (date conjectured from Mary’s allusion to Marianne’s letter and visit on this date).

  17. MWS–CC, 19.3.1847.

  18. MWS–CC, 22.6.1847.

  19. MWS–CC, 1.8.1847. MWSL, 3, p. 325 prints the letter from Sarah Dunstan to Mary dated 23.7.1847, first published in The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (1944), 2, p. 304.

  20. MWS–CC, 14.7.1847.

  21. MWS–LH, 16.7.1847.

  22. Quoted by Sylvia Norman, Flight of the Skylark: The Development of Shelley’s Reputation (University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), p. 175.

  23. Medwins Revised Life of Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1913), p. 123. Forman’s edition includes the Chancery pap
ers and additions and corrections made by Medwin for an unpublished second edition.

  24. Ibid., p. 121.

  25. Ibid., p. 374.

  26. G. Gilfillan, ‘Mrs Shelley’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (December 1847), pp. 850–4. This was the third of a series on female authors.

  27. Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 308.

  28. MWS–Augusta Trelawny, 10.6.1848.

  29. MWS–Isabella Baxter Booth, 16.4.1847.

  30. MWS–Mary Ellen Peacock Nicholls, 15.3.1848.

  31. MWS–Alexander Berry, 28–30.3.1848.

  32. MWS–Alexander Berry, 30.6.1848.

  33. Ch.C–CC, 7.6.1848 (CCL, 2).

  34. Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 310.

  * The Mantell collection of fossils was sold for £5,000 to the British Museum c. 1840.

  † Dr Smith is not to be confused with the better-known Dr Southwood Smith. The distinction is made clear in a letter from Mary to Claire of 28 July 1847 in which Mary wrote that ‘tho’ I was not acquainted with him’, she had commended Southwood Smith to their mutual friend Emily Dunstan as ‘both clever and liberal’. Miss Dunstan, who may have been a former servant‚ was in prison, although the charge against her is not known. Seriously ill, she was allowed home before the end of July. Mary, who had reluctantly sent £10 to her sister, was relieved to hear that the Dunstans had borrowed more successfully from another quarter. Later in the summer, she made excuses to prevent Emily from joining her at Brighton.19

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  THE CHOSEN ONE

  1848–1851

  ‘… she is to us as the dearest portion of ourselves.’

  Mary Shelley to Augusta Trelawny, 24 September 1849

  THE NEW LADY SHELLEY LIKED IT TO BE THOUGHT THAT SHE WAS a clergyman’s daughter. Her father, Thomas Gibson, was in fact a Newcastle banker who never married Ann Shevill, the mother of his nine children. Gibson, who died when Jane was twelve, left each of his children £5,400; Jane, sent off to live with an aunt and uncle in the Lake District, received her portion in 1841, when she married Charles Robert St John, a younger son of Lord Bolingbroke. Ann, her sister, married his first cousin.

  Jane’s husband, an invalid throughout their childless marriage, died three years later, leaving his twenty-four-year-old widow a legacy of £15,000 and the guardianship of his nine-year-old illegitimate son, Charles. His eldest brother, patron of a Dorset living, probably owned or helped find the small house nearby which became her main home. Tempting though it is to draw comparisons with Mary’s unconventional background, they are slight. Jane had not been stigmatized by her mother’s unmarried status; she herself never broke society’s rules.1 The illegitimate child to whom her husband appointed her guardian had been born six years before they met.

  Jane first enters Mary’s letters on the eve of the dreaded Chartist meeting on 10 April 1848. Writing to Claire two days earlier, Mary told her that ‘Mrs St John is still with us – She stays longer than I expected.’ This rules out a story that Percy cancelled his plan to stand for Horsham on 24 March because he became engaged that day;2 Mary would not have written so coolly to his devoted aunt two weeks after such an announcement.

  Jane, as a loquacious old lady, was happy to give a fuller account. Talking in 1894 to young Maud Brooke (Maud really was the daughter of a clergyman, a devoted Shelleyite), she gave away nothing of her parentage. The story, in her version, began in the autumn of 1847, when she came up from Dorset to stay with a sister who lived in Chester Square and who one day pointed out the house with ‘the Frankenstein curtains’ on the opposite side. Percy, she learned, was interested only in boats, but friends urged Jane to make friends with his mother. ‘You should know Mrs Shelley; you would suit each other so well.’ Visiting Baden-Baden, she met a friend of Percy’s who thought that she and Percy, too, would make a perfect couple.

  It was, in Jane’s recollection, Mary who initiated the friendship. Jane was staying with another member of the family in Bayswater and resting after ‘one of my bad headaches’ when a visitor was announced. Jane, who was short and plump, fondly recreated Mary for Miss Brooke’s attentive ears as a creature of almost ethereal grace. She had been ‘tall and slim’ with ‘the most beautiful deep-set eyes I have ever seen’. Mary’s spiritual looks were enhanced by the information that she always dressed ‘in long soft grey material, simply and beautifully made’.3 Jane’s voice can also be heard in the last pages of Florence Marshall’s 1889 life of Mary as she describes the same meeting: ‘a fair, lovely, almost girlish-looking being, “as slight as a reed”, with beautiful clear eyes … put out her hand as she rose, saying half timidly, “I’m Mary Shelley.”’4

  The details had been coloured by memory, but there is no doubt that Mary and Jane took to each other. Jane was invited to stay at 24 Chester Square and here, with his mother’s warm encouragement, Percy eventually proposed. On 30 March, Mary was still telling Alexander Berry that she hoped Percy would win his seat; by 10 June, she could inform Augusta Trelawny that her son had won instead ‘the sweetest creature I ever knew … all goodness & truth’. They were married twelve days later by Jane’s clergyman brother-in-law: ‘Please God, you will be happy together,’ Mary wrote to Jane that morning. A week later, while the couple honeymooned in the Lake District, Mary allowed herself to paint a happy picture of the future. Jane cared only for others, she told Alexander Berry; now that Percy had given up politics, the three of them would live together at Field Place where, helped by his wife’s modest fortune, they would devote themselves to the care of the estate and the tenants while, she hoped, improving their own income. Perhaps Mr Berry might wish to know that the nearest railway station was only three miles from the house, should he ever wish to visit England?5

  A month later, ensconced at her favourite seaside resort of Sandgate with Knox for company, Mary was trembling at the cost of compensating the Field Place tenant for his renovations (£500) while paying interest on their ‘odious mortgages’ on the estate (£1,500): ‘where we are to get it I don’t know,’ she wailed to Claire who, having been excluded from the wedding, was now angrily accusing Mary of saying unpleasant things about her. ‘The phrase you quote certainly does not look pretty all by itself,’ Mary admitted, but how could Claire suppose she would permit gossip, or indulge in it herself? ‘Talking over one’s friends to other friends is a practice I have in abhorrence …’6 Claire was unconvinced; had Trelawny not described Mary to her as ‘the blab of blabs’? She also took note that, after the move to Field Place in August, there was scarcely a letter of Mary’s in which she did not refer to Knox as a guest. Already suspicious, Claire drew the worst conclusions.

  Twenty-six years after Shelley’s death, Mary arranged her modest possessions, her writing-desk, her dressing-case, her books, in his old room on the first and uppermost floor of Field Place. From the windows, she looked out across the lawn to a handsome group of cedar trees. The estate was run-down; the house, while ‘any thing but a country seat of any mark whatever’, seemed more agreeable than she remembered from her first visit shortly after Sir Timothy’s death. It had a more relaxed atmosphere than she could have guessed from the pompous attitude of the Shelleys.7

  The thing which told against Field Place for two ladies who were such martyrs to their health as Mary and her daughter-in-law was the fact that the house stood on cold clay soil, and in a low position. In warm weather, Field Place would seem delightful. Arriving in a summer of torrential rain, Mary was appalled by the damp. The fires smoked; the drawing-room steamed like a laundry behind its long windows. It was ‘the dampest isle in Xendom’, she told Claire; ‘… the whole place is a swamp – Nothing can be so bad for me.’ Forbidden to bring even one maid when she visited because of lack of room, Claire was invited to sympathize with Mary’s own difficulty in this respect. ‘The number of Maids one must keep in the country is a trouble – & yet I always feel it is one of the best ways in the world of doing good – giving work to the industrious.’8

  Such startling lapse
s in tact, together with repetitions and nervous apologies for her forgetfulness, are a sad testimony to Mary’s increasingly confused state as the undiagnosed tumour on her brain began to affect her mind as well as her body. Neuralgia caused her spine to tingle as though it was on fire; the bouncing movement of a carriage was unbearably painful; even a short walk had become an endurance test. Dr Smith was unable to suggest anything beyond calomel, cod liver oil and rest as a cure for the nervous headaches and periods of semi-paralysis which afflicted his patient. Staying at Field Place at the beginning of 1849, Mary was too depressed and ill to join in conversation; the worst part of living in London during the previous autumn had been the lack of a room in which she could shut herself away in solitude. And still nobody could tell her what was wrong. She was puzzled when Mrs Mason’s elder daughter, the Italian-speaking Laura Galloni, now embarked on a writing career, declined her offer to act as a translator; Laura’s refusal was probably well meant, since Mary’s letters now frequently described writing as a great effort.*