Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Percy’s optimism was short-lived. On 23 January, Mary had a series of fits, after which she lapsed into a coma: The last and most astute of her physicians, Richard Bright, deduced that the paralysis had been caused by some form of brain damage. Her case was now recognized to be hopeless. The coma lasted for eight days, during which no signs of suffering were apparent to her attendants. She died shortly after dusk on 1 February. Mary Anne Henry, the maid who had faithfully attended her for more than ten years, was in the room to draw down the blinds and close the curtains. Percy and Jane were by the bed: ‘her sweet gentle spirit passed away without even a sigh –’ Jane told Alexander Berry in one of the letters she wrote to give out the news.31

  No medical records have survived but the death certificate confirmed what Dr Bright had already deduced from his patient’s symptoms. Mary Shelley’s illness stemmed from brain damage: a ‘supposed tumour’ in the left cerebral hemisphere was noted to have been ‘of long standing’.

  *

  The house in Chester Square was sold a month after Mary’s death. Moving promptly to Boscombe, Jane and Percy rented out Field Place. The estate was gradually parcelled out and sold off to raise revenue for its absentee landlord. In private hands today, Field Place makes no outward advertisement of its connection to the Shelley family;‡ at Boscombe, a small museum in the much-altered house, the names of the local roads – and, bizarrely, the Sir Percy Florence Shelley pub – keep the connection alive. Even though Mary Shelley never saw the pleasant view from the manor-house windows, of pine trees and lawns spreading out high above the sea, it is easier to imagine her here, a small resolute figure marching into the wind which gusts along the cliff path on a bright afternoon, than in the woods and low flat fields which enclose Shelley’s old home.

  Mary’s death, mourned by the few old friends who survived and had stayed in touch with her son, was marked by a few trite verses and, on 15 February 1851, by a bland obituary in the Athenaeum. Shelley’s dedication to The Revolt of Islam was quoted here as evidence of ‘a real affection and the confidence of a real companionship’. All details of their early life together were omitted: if Shelley’s story could not yet be told, the anonymous writer argued, then the same discretion should be extended to his wife. Commended for her ‘singular elegance of tone’, Mary Shelley was reproached for the ‘pervading melancholy’ of her contemporary fiction and for the ‘oppressive’ languor of her historical novels. Her accounts of travels in Italy were praised; those of her travels in Germany were dismissed. Her editing of Shelley’s works and her intelligent, opinionated essays for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia were passed over as mere literary hackwork. Only for Frankenstein was the obituarist unreserved in his enthusiasm. Mrs Shelley had here achieved ‘a wild originality unknown in English fiction’, he wrote; The Last Man had been unjustly neglected, but ‘her “Frankenstein” will always keep for her a peculiar place among the gifted women of England’.

  Notes

  1. Information about Lady Shelley is based on Betty T. Bennett’s notes to MWSL, 3, pp. xxiv–v and pp. 334–5. I do not share Professor Bennett’s belief that Jane was ‘especially dear’ to Mary because she was in need of social protection. Jane was wealthy, respectable and surrounded by devoted relations, including those from her late husband’s family. Nothing demonstrates this so strongly as the fact that Mr St John’s eldest brother took the service for her second marriage.

  2. This was alleged by William Albery, A Parliamentary History of the Ancient Borough of Horsham, 1290–1885 (1927), p. 404.

  3. Talks, pp. 25–8.

  4. Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 310.

  5. MWS–Alexander Berry, 30.6.1848.

  6. MWS–CC, 28.7.1848.

  7. MWS–Augusta Trelawny, 24.2.1850.

  8. MWS–CC, 28.8.1848.

  9. Abinger, Dep. c. 767/3. For further discussion of Laura Galloni’s work, see Claire Tomalin’s excellent introduction to Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot (Viking, 1998), pp. 40–52; Betty T. Bennett, MWSL, 3, p. 282, lists several of Galloni’s novels, including the posthumously published I due castelli (1881). Laura Galloni’s letters to Mary Shelley, written between 1848 and 1850, express affection and gratitude for Mary’s kind encouragement in her literary endeavours (Abinger, Dep. c. 517/3).

  10. Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 311.

  11. CC–MWS, 11.4.1849.

  12. CC–MWS, 1.4.1849.

  13. MWS–CC, 6.4.1849.

  14. Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 312.

  15. Talks, pp. 40–2.

  16. Clara Clairmont–CC, 18.6.1849 (CC, 2, p. 509, n. 2).

  17. CC–Wilhelm Clairmont, 10.3.1850. Late in life, Claire gossiped to Silsbee that Lady Shelley had shocked these friends of hers and of Mary’s – a Colonel and Mrs Pringle – by going with Knox to Brighton after her marriage to Percy (Silsbee Papers, box 7, file 3). Claire was probably recalling Knox’s visit to Mary at Sandgate shortly after the marriage. There is no evidence that Lady Shelley had any special interest in Alexander Knox.

  18. Antonia Clairmont–CC, 18.9.1850, refers to ‘the letter you made Pauline write Mrs S’ (CC, 2, p. 534, n. 2.).

  19. CC–Antonia Clairmont, 1.8.1850.

  20. CC–Antonia Clairmont, 6.9.1853.

  21. Claire recalled a confused version of the quarrel in the 1870s when Silsbee came to Florence to play the traveller to her ranting mariner.

  22. The Stage Manager: A Weekly Journal of Dramatic Literature and Criticism, 10.3.1849, p. 29; 31.3.1849, p. 52; 28.4.1849, p. 84; 5.5.1849, pp. 90–1; 12.5.1849, pp. 100–1; 30.6.1849, p. 154; E.C. Hawtrey, Sermons and Letters delivered to Eton College Chapel 1848–9 (Eton, 1849), p. 112; W.G. Clark, ‘Cor Cordium’, A Score of Lyrics (Cambridge, 1849), pp. 20–1; P.P., ‘On the Poetry of the Modern Age’, London University College Magazine (April 1849), pp. 140–7. The affectionate portrait painted of Shelley by Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography (1850) helped to sustain the new image of a poet much slandered and misunderstood. So did a review of Matthew Arnold’s poems in which William Michael Rossetti, Polidori’s nephew, praised Shelley as ‘the heir of Plato’ (February 1850): The Germ: Tltoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art, ed. Robert Stahr Hosmon (University of Miami Press, 1970), p. 88.

  23. Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 312.

  24. EJ. Trelawny to the editor, Athenaeum, 3.8.1878.

  25. MWS–Augusta Trelawny, 24.9.1849 and 24.2.1850.

  26. MWS–Isabella Baxter Booth, 30.6.1850.

  27. Guide to Bournemouth (1842). Major Stephenson had been the previous owner of the house, which later became a school. The grounds have now been converted to tennis courts, a bowling green and a children’s play area.

  28. MWS–Octavian Blewitt, 15.11.1850.

  29. Sir Percy Shelley (hereafter PFS)–Isabella Baxter Booth,?6.2.1851.

  30. Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘Mary Shelley’s Last Letter?’, Notes and Queries (September 1977), P. 338.

  31. Jane Shelley (hereafter JS)–Alexander Berry, 7.3.1851.

  * ‘I walk very well – but must not use my head – or strange feelings come on –’ Mary told Claire on 5 February 1849; six days later, she told Claire that ‘writing is the one thing, that makes me uncomfortable.’ She had already made a stab, in 1846, at translating Laura Galloni’s Inez de Medine, a story which was published in Italy that year. The two chapters which survive in the Abinger collection do not make one regret the absence of more. Laura’s florid style and unconvincing characters, when married to Mary’s banality as a translator, would not have gladdened a publishers heart.9

  † The picture was not returned. Trelawny maintained that Mary had thought it unflattering and had been happy for him to keep it. He acknowledged that Mary had once asked for the portrait of herself to show to a friend: ‘To this verbally or in writing I refused, and she never afterwards alluded to it.’24

  ‡ A brass commemorative plaque was placed in Shelley’s birth chamber in the 1870s on the instructions of Richard Garnett, who had become closely involved with the Shelleys and their
archive. The interior has been meticulously restored by the present owner.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–SIX

  AFTERLIFE

  ‘What a Set! What a World!’

  Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (1888)

  DAYS AFTER MARY’S DEATH, PERCY AND JANE DECIDED TO EXHUME her parents’ bodies. Mary, so Jane told Maud Brooke years later, had authorized the deed herself. ‘I would like to rest at Bournemouth near you, but I would like to have my father and my mother with me.’ Jane probably made this up; during the same conversation, she said that ‘it would have broken my heart to let her loveliness wither in such a dreadful place.’1

  Their intentions were good. The old borough of St Pancras had been vandalized by the railway companies. Streets, gardens and manor-houses were being pulled down to make way for the new lines. The directors of the new Midland railway had their sights trained on the neglected churchyard; in the 1860s, Thomas Hardy, then a young architect, uneasily presided over the nocturnal excavation of the east part of the graveyard and the removal of inconvenient tombstones, monuments and coffins. One old tree is still enclosed by the evidence, mossy tablets propped in rows around the base of its trunk.

  The coffins of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin were hastily dug up and taken away in a private carriage; Everina Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s second wife were left to take their chances.* An American minister, visiting a neighbour of the Shelleys in 1868, was given the bizarre details of the sequel.2 Jane was determined that the bodies should be reburied in St Peter’s Church at Bournemouth; the vicar, having heard nothing to suggest that these were suitable candidates, was equally determined that they should not. He had not reckoned with Lady Shelley’s forceful nature. Bringing the coffins with her, she sat in her carriage outside the churchyard’s locked gate until the vicar, fearing the scandal in a tiny village, surrendered. A large common grave was dug on the high slope behind the church and, under cover of night, Mary’s parents were unceremoniously dropped into the pit.† The commemorative slab mentioned, despite the vicar’s protests, the most famous writings of Mary’s parents, but not Frankenstein. Even Jane stopped short of desecrating hallowed ground with the name of that blasphemous work, whatever the literary critics might say in its praise.‡

  Claire was outraged. She had already written Sir Percy a strongly worded complaint about his failure to inform her of Mary’s death. ‘Because I am myself dying I will speak my mind,’ she announced in her habitual style before dragging out the well-gnawed bone of Knox’s marriage to her niece.3 To learn from the lawyers that her own mother had been left to moulder alone at St Pancras, while Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were spirited away to join their daughter, was an insult she could scarcely credit. The news was indeed horrifying, Willy Clairmont agreed: ‘it is so atrocious a deed that it can not escape the notice of the public.’4 Willy was mistaken. Uninformed, the public failed to react.

  Lady Shelley, having successfully stormed the gates of St Peter’s, was ready for the next stage in the process of sanctifying the adored ‘Madre’. She was inspired, perhaps, by the last lines of a sentimental homage to Mary which appeared in the Leader a month after her death (‘Happy departed ones! A brief farewell, / Till friend clasps friend upon the silent shore’).5 A sculptor, Horatio Weekes, wa commissioned to produce a monument which, denied room in St Peter’s, was granted a discreet place in Christchurch Priory, by far the most beautiful and ancient religious building in the vicinity of Boscombe. Modelled after Michelangelo’s Pietà, the marble bas-relief shows Mary as the Mater Dolorosa, barefoot and tastefully dressed in a toga, sitting by some seaweed-draped rocks with her husband reclining on her knees in the position of the dead Christ. Very much in keeping with the new style of Victorian church sculpture, it was unusual in representing parents, rather than a spouse or children. But Mary and her husband had, for the childless Shelleys, filled that gap.

  Mary, in her final days, had apparently given many longing and beseeching’ glances towards the small locked writing-desk which she always kept near her.6 A year after her death, Percy reluctantly agreed to open it. Inside, they found his mother’s journal and a copy of Adonais with a page folded to make an envelope. ‘We opened it reverently,’ Jane told Maud Brooke, ‘and found ashes – dust and we then knew what Mary had so longed to tell us: all that was left of Shelley’s heart lay there.’ The discovery gave Jane her next idea, for a household shrine devoted to the memory of Shelley, Mary and their friends.

  Boscombe, over the next few years, became a museum for the dead and a stage for the living. Actors, neighbours and friends were invited to evenings of theatricals. As a boy, Sir Percy had always loved going to plays; as a man in his late thirties, he began writing his own. A talented amateur whose ambition was only to entertain, he also composed the music and painted the scenery, including a drop cloth representing the Bay of Lerici and the Villa Magni. (One friend to whom Percy taught his technique and who went on to become a professional artist, left Boscombe in disgrace after painting white ribs on his host’s Italian greyhounds and getting them to run through the garden like a pack of spectres.7) Jane, possessed of a good speaking voice and stage presence, was told by the silver-tongued Sir Henry Irving that she was the worthy heir to Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend Mrs Siddons and presented with a ring which the great actress had once owned.

  There was more than a touch of theatre in the shrine which Jane created at the opposite end of the house. A recessed corner of the drawing-room was chosen for ‘the Sanctum’ and given a blue ceiling studded with gold stars. Crimson curtains and dim red lighting created a suitably devotional atmosphere. Apricot satin cloths kept daylight from the glass display cases containing manuscripts, a mass of hair bracelets, miniatures and – a gift from Trelawny – the Sophocles found in the jacket Shelley was wearing when he drowned.§ Over the fireplace, Rothwell’s grim portrait of Mary in her forties looked down on a copy of the Weekes monument.¶ One impressionable young visitor remembered being shown an urn in which, her mother whispered, the ashes of the poet’s heart were kept. Another was more struck by a glimpse of the Shelleys on their way to Boscombe in a carriage emblazoned with the family coat-of-arms and driven by two splendid gentlemen in crimson livery, white cockades fluttering from their hats.8

  Here, at the beginning of 1857, Jane decided to bring together Hogg, Peacock and Trelawny to discuss the writing of a biography of Shelley. Percy had already visited Trelawny at Usk; he came away with the battered copy of Sophocles, but without the portrait of Mary which Trelawny now claimed had been given to him. Asked to Boscombe, Trelawny refused on the grounds that he had grown too old and crabbed to sit around telling tales of the past.9 The Shelleys, mistrustfully aware that he had begun his own version of Shelley’s last years, decided to waste no time. On 24 February, Jane informed Edward Moxon that Hogg was prepared to undertake the book; she believed that Mary, who had helped Hogg to publish his articles on Shelley at Oxford, would approve the choice.10

  Hogg, a regular visitor to Boscombe in 1857, seemed the perfect candidate. He talked with lawyerly enthusiasm about the importance of giving accurate evidence: ‘To falsify documents would be to injure the faith of history, and to destroy the credit of our book,’ he told Jane.11 Encouraged, and anxious that his account should seem in every way superior to anything Trelawny might offer, the Shelleys introduced him to the aunts and allowed him to take away boxes of letters, including the notes Mary had made for a life of Shelley. Jane invited Hogg to call her ‘Wrennie’; he signed himself her ‘Dah’. In March 1858, the first two of four projected volumes, ending on the eve of the 1814 elopement, were proudly delivered to Boscombe and, with rising dismay, perused.

  Hogg’s main crime against Mary had been to adapt her notes towards a life of Shelley for his own use and to omit the fact that she had asked his advice about whether or not to cut sections from Queen Mab for the 1839 edition. His account of his first glimpse of her at Skinner Street, pale and piercing-eyed in a tartan frock, is vivid en
ough to have been gratefully used by all biographers. Percy and Jane, not having seen Shelley’s letters to Hogg, were unaware of how ruthlessly the biographer had manipulated their contents. (A letter in which Shelley reproached Hogg for trying to seduce Harriet appeared, but as a fragment of an unpublished novel.) What they could not fail to see was that Hogg’s ego had wrecked the project; everywhere they looked, Shelley appeared as the simple-minded dependant of his cleverer and more interesting friend. And that this monstrosity, dedicated to herself, should have been ‘called into life by me’, Jane Shelley lamented to Peacock, seeing herself as an innocent version of Mary’s Frankenstein.12

  Percy, prodded by Jane, wrote to demand censorship rights over the next volumes; Jane, aware that Hogg still had a good deal of Shelley material at his home, was more diplomatic. Writing from ‘my own Sanctum’ a few days later, she apologized for Percy’s letter. He must not mind it. She had read the book three times now, and really, with a few trifling exceptions, it ‘is all we could wish; & many a good laugh it gave me’. He must promise to come and visit them soon.13

  Jane was playing a double game. While soothing Hogg, she was calling on everybody who had known her parents-in-law to speak out against his work. One friend needed no inviting. Writing to reassure Claire that she had not even been mentioned in Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), Peacock told her that the author had, if anything, been too discreet.14 But Hogg had infuriated Peacock with his condescending denigration of Harriet (‘the good Harriet’) Westbrook: Having refused to lend moral support to Jane Shelley by coming to Boscombe in the summer of 1858 when Harriet’s daughter Ianthe had been invited to stay, Peacock began preparing his own soberly corrective account of the past.