I am just about to start for the North, doomed to wander, like an unburied ghost, over the county of Northumberland, until the end of October. If you should desire further information I shall be happy to supply it; in that case address me as below.
I am ever, Dear Sir, faithfully yours,
T Jeffn. Hogg,
Revising Barrister, to the care of Mr John Elliot, Clerk of the
Peace, Newcastle upon Tyne
[copied out in TJH’s hand: Lady Shelley to TJH]
‘For the last three days, Dear Dah, you have never been out of my thoughts, & I am very glad to sit down in my own Sanctum to write & tell you, how grieved I was to have caused you so severe a disappointment.
Hellen [Shelley] promised to tell you this, & she seemed to think, when she left us, that she had comforted us all. I have read the book three times since then, & I find that merely the letters H.G. [Harriet Grove] in the margin of some of those letters without date make all the difference in the world. But for some of these letters, & the way in which he spoke occasionally of his father, I think the book is all we could wish; & many a good laugh it gave me, even in the midst of my distress. You know, dear Dah, that even the very sight of this long desired book put me in a horrible state of agitation, & the first reading of course was very different to both Percy & myself, than it could possibly be to anyone else. I had been so unwell too for a long time, that my brain once set to work seemed to be on fire: – my distress too to grieve you was very great. I want to know when you think you can come to us. In three weeks again I must go to town, to see my doctor, who is making me quite well & strong; but after that, I think, you might settle your own time within the next two months. We shall probably have the house full of people, somehow or another, but you won’t dislike that. Let me hear from you very soon; neither Percy, nor myself, can be quite happy & comfortable until we do. Believe me always, Dear Dah, very affectionately yours, Wrennie.
Percy says – “Do say to Dah how sorry I was to flurry him with my note, but then you know, Nin, you were in such a way that I did not know what to do!”
By the bye – Shd I get you a better bedroom candlestick? – for the stern hour of ten, when Chips & every other attraction fails to keep womankind from their beds & a scurvy bedroom candlestick.
Postmark. Christchurch, April 15 1858)’§
Byron to Mary Shelley, Genoa, 1823, n.d.
Dear Mrs Shelley
I have received the enclosed notice through Murray from London – which I can’t help feeling a little premature as well as public. It was not my intention to make my name stand forth so dramatically; will you ask Hunt whether he has any news from England on the subject? – I have h[ad] a long letter from M[urray] complaining bitterly about Mr John H[unt] whose behaviour he [says was] very rude to him. Have you anything on y[our] affairs?¶
* The last sentence only has been previously cited in The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L.Jones (University of Oklahoma Press, 1944) and The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley‚ ed. Betty T. Bennett (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), vol. 1.
† Mary Shelley’s grateful tone can be explained by the fact that Lord Normanby’s name often appeared on subscription lists for Godwin. She also, by 1839, knew him as a cousin of her late friend, Lord Dillon. She had read Lord Normanby’s The English in Italy (1825) without guessing the author’s identity. It is ‘very clever amusing & true’, she wrote to Leigh Hunt on 12 August 1826, adding that since she had also seen books about Italy by Lady Oxford and by Lady Charlotte Bury (the same Lady Charlotte who had a child by Aubrey Beauclerk), she thought she would review them in a single article. ‘The English in Italy’, published without signature in the Westminster Review that October, discussed Lord Normanby’s work together with Mrs Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée and the anonymous Continental Adventures: A Novel. Normanby also published two companion volumes, The English in France (1828) and The English at Home (1830). Matilda: a Tale of the Day was published in 1825 and has nothing in common with Mary’s then unpublished novel, Matilda. Lord Normanby also occasionally contributed to the Keepsake albums.
‡ Extract cited in a sale of autographs and letters advertised by John Weller, bookseller, 1871. Despite the reference to Shelley as though he was still alive, this was evidently written by Mary when Hogg was about to make his first visit to Italy in 1825. Severn was then living at Rome. Hogg reached Rome that autumn and was dismayed to find that Teresa Guiccioli knew all about his affair with Jane Williams and that Jane was still a married woman: ‘without telling her an actual untruth, I induced her to believe that was a mistake, & that you were free,’ Hogg reported. In the same letter, written from Naples on 6 December, he told Jane that he had met Severn. ‘Mr Severn has finished the portrait of Trelawny; it is said to be a good likeness; I will not forget it.’ On 6 January 1826, he confirmed that he had collected Severn’s portrait and was bringing it back to England ‘safe in my bag’. (After Shelley: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Hogg to Jane Williams, ed. Sylvia Norman (Oxford, 1934).)
§ This letter, printed with the kind permission of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, is in the Houghton Papers, 12/37. It was probably one of several which Hogg wrote after Lady Shelley’s attack on him in the Shelley Memorials. It certainly suggests that the Shelleys had decided to take a conciliatory attitude, perhaps because they knew that Hogg had already completed the material for further volumes which they wished to secure, and because they were eager to retrieve the letters which Hogg had been loaned. The mystery of what happened to the rest of Hogg’s work has never been solved. Hogg, if he retained it, would surely have decided to publish and be damned. It is not impossible that Lady Shelley obtained possession of the manuscript by this show of friendship, and then destroyed it.
¶ This unpublished letter is now in the library of the University of Pisa, Ms 775.232. It was displayed as part of the ‘Paradise of Exiles’ exhibition at Pisa in 1985 and has been printed by Mario Curreli in Una certa Signora Mason (Edizioni ETS, 1997). Byron’s discomfort seems to have concerned the fact that his name was being pushed to the top of advertisements for the Liberal. The letter shows how heavily Byron depended on Mary to act as a go-between in his dealings with Leigh Hunt, and that he felt able to treat her in a professional but friendly way.
APPENDIX 3
PORTRAITS OF MARY SHELLEY
The earliest alleged portrait of Mary Shelley was first seen in the edition of her journals prepared by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert and published in 1987. A miniature from a privately owned Irish collection, it is enclosed in a circle of plaited hair with the words ‘Mary Shelley 1815’ superimposed in gilt wire on the reverse. It shows a youngish woman – Mary was twenty at the time – with short, light curling hair and with a long nose and thin mouth which give it a passing, but not striking, resemblance to the oil portrait of her by Richard Rothwell. Against its authenticity stands the fact that Mary was not yet married to Shelley in 1815. Hers was not an unusual name; it is possible that the miniature is of Percy Bysshe’s sister Mary, who was also born in 1797 and who, confusingly, was physically similar to her namesake.
Rosalie Glynn Grylls, whose biography of Mary Shelley was published in 1938, was the first to publish ‘Mary Shelley at nineteen’. This was another miniature, allegedly painted at Geneva in the summer of 1816 and given to E.J. Trelawny, who in turn presented it to William Michael Rossetti. Here, Mary is shown with dark hair which is coiled into untidy shells over her ears. Doris Langley Moore, an authority on the history of costume as well as on Byron, has cast doubt on this portrait by pointing out that the leg-of-mutton sleeves of Mary’s dress are more appropriate to the year 1825. It is worth remembering, however, that Trekwny, who lived in Geneva shortly after Mary’s visit there and knew her well by 1821, never doubted that the portrait was authentic.
Mary was also painted in 1819 by Amelia Curran, when she was living in Rome. Left with Miss Curran in Rome, this portrait was eventually retr
ieved on Mary’s behalf by Trelawny. He kept it, asserting that Mary had never liked the picture, although she had made several requests for its return. This picture disappeared after Trelawny’s death. A further portrait of Mary in 1819, by Signor Delicati, has also been lost. So, regrettably, have the portrait and miniature which Edward Williams painted of her in 1821. Shelley, on 15 August, wrote to thank his wife for the birthday gift of a miniature to wear ‘upon my heart, this image which is ever present to my mind’.
A portrait of Mary seated behind a desk and looking wistfully conscientious, painted by S.J. Stump, has now been discredited.
The miniature reproduced on the jacket of this book was executed by Reginald Easton. Easton was staying with Sir Percy and Lady Shelley at Boscombe in 1857, during which year he drew Thomas Jefferson Hogg and painted miniatures of Sir Percy’s late parents. The portrait of Mary was alleged by Lady Shelley to have been made from a death mask, but the evident intention was to combine the image of her as a young woman with a hint of her widowhood, conveyed by draping a dark lace mantilla over her hair and shoulders. She wears a spray of pansies, for remembrance, at her breast.
In 1863, making a tour of Shelley sites in Italy, Sir Percy and his wife were allowed to copy a drawing of Mary which a Lerici fisherman told them he had found in the deserted Villa Magni. They did not question the portrait’s authenticity. There is, in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, a reproduction of a drawing of Mary, looking haggard and unhappy, her hair loosely pinned up into a cluster of curls. It is, quite possibly, a self-portrait dating from the summer of 1822: Mary had trained as an artist and kept up her lessons when she was living at Bath in the autumn of 1816. Her journals record her sketching and painting in Rome three years later. I have been unable to establish contact with the portrait’s owner, but I am indebted to Adrian Hemming for passing on the information that Dr Marcello Pelligrini, a Florentine, inherited this picture from a relation whose great-aunt was given it by Mary Shelley when she was living at the Villa Magni. The drawing is reproduced here for the first time.
In 1902, Richard Garnett was visited by Jane Williams Hogg’s grandson, Colonel Leigh Hunt, who had brought over from his home in Brussels a picture of Mary Shelley. Describing it after Colonel Hunt’s death to Edward Dowden on 8 January 1903, Garnett wrote that the artist was one ‘“Cleobulina” Fielding (whom I have not traced, but suspect to have been a member of Copley Fielding’s family).’ He added that the portrait, painted in ‘about 1833’, was ‘the best I had seen’. In 1903, he was still waiting for Hunt’s widow to communicate with him about the portrait, but no further mention of it has been traced.
Richard Rothwell had become a celebrated portrait painter, able to command eighty guineas for a commission, when William Godwin noted on 18 May 1831 that he had visited Rothwell’s studio while Mary sat for her portrait. In 1833, Mary confidently informed John Murray that she had no portrait of herself suitable for his engraver, Finden, to work from and that she would not, therefore, be available for inclusion among the gallery of friends who were to adorn his new luxury edition of Moore’s Life of Byron. Either Mary was lying or Rothwell had kept a portrait for which she could not afford to pay. There are references during this period to a portrait of her having been executed by George Clint, a well-known miniaturist who lived close to the Godwins’ home in Gower Place, but this work has been lost.
Mary’s friendship with Rothwell was resumed when the Irish artist returned from Italy in the late 1830s. In April 1840, his portrait of her was shown in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.
It is usually assumed that this was the portrait on which Rothwell was working in 1831, when Mary was thirty-three years old. Since the Royal Academy only exhibited recent work in the Summer Exhibition, the likelihood is that Mary sat for him again, probably in the autumn of 1839, when she was forty-two. This is a more convincing age for the face of the woman whose portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Mary either bought or was given the painting after the exhibition. It was hung in the Boscombe shrine after her death.
In 1958, a new portrait of Mary Shelley turned up in a South Kensington saleroom, stowed away in a box of theatrical props and costumes which sold to a private buyer for 18 shillings. Put up for sale again in 1998, the painting was withdrawn because of insufficient authentication.
A label on the back of this mysterious work announces it to be of Mary Shelley by Rothwell. The portrait is strikingly unlike any other of Rothwell’s works and can, I think, be assumed to be by another hand. But is the sitter Mary Shelley? The long, Godwinian nose and thin lips, together with the thin gold head circlet which also appears in the authenticated Rothwell portrait, suggest that this may be the case. The historical costume department of the Victoria & Albert Museum has dated the sitter’s off-the-shoulder dress of pale blue satin with short puffed sleeves to between 1835 and 1843. A shawl of dark lace loosely draped over the arms is evidently intended to be admired and may possibly be the lace mantilla which Claire brought over from Paris in the mid-1840s.
Against this, we must set the fact that, although Mary wore two rings, she is not known to have worn other jewellery. The sitter for this portrait wears two handsome bracelets. It is possible that the sitter was Mary’s sister-in-law and namesake, but it is also tempting to see this as a portrait of Mary, intended to acknowledge the dignity of her new role in society following the death of her father-in-law in the spring of 1844. If this was the case, we would need to ask why Lady Shelley, a devoted daughter-in-law and preserver of Mary’s possessions, would have allowed such a treasure to pass unnoticed. Another possibility is that the painting was commissioned in 1833, when John Murray first approached Mary Shelley to ask if she would be willing for an engraving of her by Finden to be included in the new Byron edition. ‘I could not make up my mind to be exhibited among the portraits, I have such a dislike of display,’ Mary told Murray on 10 February 1835. But perhaps a portrait had been commissioned, which Finden then decided was unsuitable for the purposes of engraving or which Mary decided should not be used. In the 1830s, Mary was still apprehensive of being publicly identified as Mrs Shelley, since such publicity had been expressly forbidden by Sir Timothy.
More tenuous likenesses can be mentioned here. A portrait of Beatrice Cenci which was, in Mary Shelley’s lifetime, attributed to Guido Reni, was thought by some of her friends to have been very like her; others thought she resembled the tragic actress Eliza O’Neill who Shelley had hoped would play the part of Beatrice in his drama. Leigh Hunt gave a hint of Mary’s slyly elusive expression when calling her, as a young woman of twenty-two, ‘the nymph of the sidelong looks’;* while his son Thornton, writing on Shelley in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1863, made an intriguing observation on Mary’s resemblance to a marble bust in the Towneley Collection, now at the British Museum:
If the reader desires a portrait of Mary, he has one in the well-known antique bust sometimes called ‘Isis’ and sometimes ‘Clytie’: a woman’s head and shoulders arising from a lotus flower. It is most probably the portrait of a Roman lady, and is in some degree more elongated and ‘classic’ than Mary; but, on the other hand, it falls short of her, for it gives no idea of her tall and intellectual forehead, nor has it any trace of the bright, animated, and sweet expression that so often lighted up her face.
* Leigh Hunt-Mary Shelley, 9 March 1819, Shelley and Mary (1882), pp. 366–71.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY MARY SHELLEY
Novels
Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, 3 vols. (Lackington, 1818); revised one-volume edition with new preface (Colburn & Bentley, 1831)
Matilda, 1819–1820; first published as Mathilda, ed. Elizabeth Nitchie (University of North Carolina Press, 1959)
Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, 3 vols. (Whittaker, 1823)
The Last Man, 3 vols. (Colburn, 1826)
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance, 3 vols. (Colburn
& Bentley, 1830)
Lodore, 3 vols. (Bentley, 1835)
Falkner: A Novel, 3 vols. (Saunders & Otley, 1837)
Plays
‘Proserpine, a Mythological Drama in Two Acts’, The Winter’s Wreath for 1832(1831)
‘Midas!’, Proserpine & Midas, ed. André Henri Koszul (Humphrey Milford, 1922)
Stories
Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Robinson includes ‘The Pole’, although this was in fact written by Claire Clairmont, with Mary Shelley’s revisions, and ‘The Pilgrims’, about which he records strong reservations. The story is included because Richard Garnett had published it in a collection of Mary Shelley’s stories in 1891 and, as Professor Robinson notes, ‘he possibly had access to a letter or MS by which to determine her authorship’.
Children’s Stories
Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot, ed. Claire Tomalin and first published in 1998 (Viking)
Travel Works
(with P.B. Shelley) History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland: with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (Hookham & Ollier, 1817)
Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 vols. (Moxon, 1844)
Mary Shelley Page 81
