Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  In September, she discovered she was pregnant. Godwin had been through this once before with Wollstonecraft, whose pregnancy with Mary had occurred unexpectedly, forcing them into marriage, an institution they had both opposed. In Political Justice, Godwin had argued that a husband’s legalized “possession of a woman” in marriage is “odious selfishness.” The radical Wollstonecraft agreed, but she had discovered how cruel the world could be to an unwed mother when she had Fanny. She did not want her second child to suffer the ignominy she feared lay in Fanny’s future. And so, even though it was against their principles, they decided to conform to convention.

  After Wollstonecraft died, Godwin, the sole protector of two daughters, became more conservative. He revised Political Justice to restate his views, backing off his earlier claim that marriage should be abolished and conceding that it was a necessary evil in a flawed society such as nineteenth-century England. If one of his girls became pregnant outside wedlock, he would want the father of her child to marry her to save her from social exile. It followed, then, that the right thing to do was to give Mary-Jane and the new child the protection of his name. Besides, he liked the idea of gaining a companion, and, as Coleridge had pointed out, his girls needed more than he could provide; they needed a mother. The early signs of trouble—Mary-Jane’s temper, jealousy, pushiness, and overall abrasiveness—did not deter him. “Do not…get rid of all your faults,” he told her. “I love some of them. I love what is human, what gives softness, and an agreeable air of frailty and pliability to the whole.”

  Godwin was the first man Mary-Jane had encountered who embraced his responsibilities as a father. Letting her guard down, she confessed her romantic history, including the fact that she had never been married. Her first love, a French soldier, had died tragically, she said, leaving her with an infant, Charles. Her second suitor, a scoundrel, left her with a second baby, Jane, and a pile of bills, which she could not pay. Far braver and more resourceful than her stepdaughter Mary would ever acknowledge, she survived many misfortunes, including a three-month stint in debtors’ prison with two babies. When she got out, she used her fluency in French to get work as a translator; her translation of The Swiss Family Robinson (1814) would be the standard English version for more than a century.

  After these hardships, Mary-Jane wanted stability. Unlike Godwin and Wollstonecraft, she was a pragmatist, not a dreamer, and it was money—making it, spending it, saving it, and appearing to have it—that was her primary concern. Godwin did not like Mary-Jane’s materialistic leanings, but for him, it was a relief to be with a woman who did not challenge his ideas the way Wollstonecraft sometimes had.

  Late that December the couple slipped off to church without telling the children. To save Mary-Jane from being exposed, they had come up with a daring plan, staging an illegal ceremony for their friends in which Mary-Jane maintained her false identity as the widow Clairmont. When it was over, they took a coach to a different church. Here, they had the legal ceremony performed: the marriage of William Godwin to the spinster Mary-Jane Vial on December 21, 1801.

  They spent their wedding night in a country inn and returned home the next day. Godwin told Fanny and Mary that he had given them a new mother, a “second mamma.” But neither Mary nor Fanny wanted a second mamma, particularly not Mary-Jane, whom they regarded as an interloper. For four-year-old Mary, who had, as she later said, an “excessive and romantic” attachment to her father, Mary-Jane’s arrival spelled disaster. Her once undemonstrative father now embraced Mary-Jane with enthusiasm, kissing her in the hallway and indulging in a kind of lovers’ patter that embarrassed onlookers. Did he no longer care about his favorite daughter? And what about her own mother? Had Godwin forgotten her entirely?

  Within two weeks, the Clairmonts had moved into No. 29, shattering the quiet order of the Godwin household. Mary-Jane slammed doors, tore up letters, shouted at the servants, slapped her children, then begged forgiveness. She thought Godwin had spoiled Mary, and to compensate she treated the little girl with unmerited severity. Fanny she largely ignored.

  Mary-Jane’s own daughter, three-year-old Jane, was far from being a model of good behavior. Prone to tantrums, she pouted and wept stormily when reprimanded, a new spectacle in the Godwin household, since Fanny and Mary were rarely disobedient. Charles played outdoors and tried to avoid the dramatic scenes that took place inside. Poor Jane did not know what to make of her new stepsisters; they were not the kind of playmates she was used to. In fact, they were not like other girls at all. They did not giggle, play dress-up, or sing, nor did they shriek if their wills were crossed. Fanny seemed dull. The brilliant Mary could already read and write. Jane wished she could be more like her; maybe then her new stepfather would notice her. She was jealous of the attention he paid to his own daughter. Although he tried to be kind, he rarely spoke to the Clairmont children. Charles did not seem to mind; outnumbered by the girls, he ran up and down the stairs and galloped outside in the fields near the Polygon. But Jane was her mother’s daughter. She fought for Godwin’s love, striving to triumph over Mary.

  Over time, Godwin made matters worse by reading books to Mary but not Jane, discussing philosophy and politics with his own daughter while ignoring his stepdaughter, driving a wedge between the girls that grew deeper as the years passed. For the rest of her life, Jane would struggle with feeling second best to her stepsister. Mary, for her part, quickly came to regard her stepsister as a competitor, someone who wanted to see her fail so she could steal her place in Godwin’s affections. There was loyalty and affection between the two girls as well, but thanks to the Godwins’ notable faults as parents, a famously complicated relationship had begun.

  The differences between the two families soon calcified into fixed points of hatred. The Clairmonts resented Godwinian condescension; the Godwins despised Clairmont histrionics. When she was older, Mary would use “Clairmont” as an adjective that meant selfish, self-dramatizing, and coarse. Mary-Jane, in turn, would accuse Mary of being a liar, and she made matters worse by going out of her way to enforce her authority. She felt it was up to her to break Mary’s will. She banned any mention of her predecessor, insisted on being called “Mamma,” and was furious when Mary resisted. She fired Fanny and Mary’s beloved nurse, Marguerite, as well as Godwin’s maids and the cook—all the women who had cared for the Godwin girls since their mother died. In their place, she hired strangers, including a governess and a tutor. Overnight, the Godwin girls were evicted from the comfort of their nursery and plunged into the rigors of the schoolroom. Godwin did not intervene, having decided to relegate all child-rearing matters to his new wife.

  It was not that Mary-Jane was always cruel. She applied her formidable organizational skills to feeding and clothing four children on very little money and made sure their sheets were clean and their mattresses aired and hard (for the rest of her life, Mary could not bear sleeping on soft beds). She took them for romps on Hampstead Heath, and to plays, exhibitions, and spectacles; she nursed them when they were sick, taught the girls to sew and embroider, tucked them into bed, and worried about their manners. But she could never bring herself to truly love the Godwin girls. Even if her eviction of the old staff had been her only unkind act, which it was not, it exemplified her lack of empathy for her stepdaughters. Fanny, especially, mourned the drastic break from her old nurse, her last tie to her mother.

  In June, Mary-Jane gave birth to a little boy who died a few minutes after delivery. Angry and grieving, Mary-Jane was more short-tempered than ever. Eighteen months later, she had a baby who lived, William Junior, delighting Godwin, who had always wanted a son, but shocking Mary into outright rebellion. Now that she had to share her father with baby William, she outraged Godwin by fighting Mary-Jane like a partisan; anything was fair game—chores, what dress to wear, how to brush her hair. Despite her envy of her stepsister, Jane usually sided with Mary, further enraging Mary-Jane. Fanny, on the other hand, kept her head down. She did not like Mary-Jane, but she
was far too insecure to rebel.

  When Mary was eight years old, Coleridge paid a visit to London. Mary and Fanny had not seen the poet since Mary-Jane had married their father, but Godwin had kept his memory alive by reading aloud his letters and poetry. Mary-Jane did her best to stop Coleridge from seeing them. She was suspicious of Godwin’s old friends, fully aware that they made insidious comparisons between her and Wollstonecraft. But in Coleridge’s case, she could not prevail. Godwin loved the younger man too much to turn him away.

  On the evening of Coleridge’s visit, in a petulant show of power, Mary-Jane sent all four children to bed instead of allowing them to stay up to listen to the poet’s stories. Nothing could have been better calculated to alienate her younger stepdaughter, who stole back downstairs, followed by the admiring Jane. The girls crept into Godwin’s study and hid behind the couch, just as Coleridge began to recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For Mary, Coleridge’s rounded, rolling voice created wild imaginary scenes she would never forget. For the rest of her days, she would be able to recall each word, reciting it to the poets she would later come to know, ensuring Coleridge’s influence on the next generation of Romantic writers.

  The story was at once terrifying and familiar to Mary: the mariner had killed an albatross and caused the death of his shipmates, just as she had caused her mother’s death by being born. How much of this Mary understood at the time is another matter, but when Coleridge intoned the famous stanza

  Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks

  Had I from old and young!

  Instead of the cross, the Albatross

  About my neck was hung,

  Mary could sympathize with the mariner; she, too, suffered under the weight of a heavy guilt. She could not yet articulate why, but this burden would one day spur her to create her own work of art, one in which she would explore and lay bare the oppressive feelings of self-blame that had plagued her all her life.

  At the same time, she was absorbing another, even more disturbing story: the poet’s helpless struggle with his own invention. Coleridge’s Mariner cannot rid himself of his tale—he must retell it endlessly as punishment for his “crime.” As an adult, Mary would understand that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is essentially a report from the deep, an exploration of the dark grottoes of Coleridge’s mind. But as a little girl, she experienced this viscerally, felt firsthand how creations can control their creators.

  To both Godwin and Coleridge, the poet’s recitation was more important than Mary-Jane’s rules, and if they did see the two small girls, as seems likely, they would not have sent them away. However, Mary-Jane had no such reverence for poetry. When she discovered their empty beds, she flounced into Godwin’s study, pulled the culprits out from behind the couch, and marched them back up to the nursery. She had won this skirmish, but at a cost. Her stepdaughter would not forget this humiliation. A wiser parent might have tried to assuage Mary’s rage, but Mary-Jane was not wise; she lacked the steadiness and agreeable calm that would have helped her make peace with her furious small opponent.

  Godwin did nothing to ease the conflict between Mary and Mary-Jane. Consumed by financial worries, he did not bother himself with domestic disputes. His income, always unsteady, was stretched beyond its limits by his new family. Before long, Mary-Jane was reduced to buying groceries on credit, negotiating with angry merchants, and lying to the landlord about the rent. Haunted by memories of debtors’ prison, she urged her new husband to change his ways and earn some income. He needed to stop dabbling in philosophy and write books that sold. Or, if he insisted on pursuing unpopular subjects, he needed to write faster so he could bring in more cash.

  But Godwin could not, or would not—she was not sure which—write different books or write more quickly; he hated intellectual sloppiness and imprecision, and so his advances ran out long before he finished. Even more frightening, Godwin had begun to experience blackouts, losing consciousness for extended periods of time. These fits of what he termed “deliquium” worried his already anxious wife and further delayed his writing projects. His doctor accounted for these episodes with a diagnosis of mental stress. But the stress showed no sign of letting up. His book sales continued to drop.

  After three years of enduring the threats of local merchants and the landlord, Mary-Jane, a canny businesswoman, took matters into her own hands, declaring that it was time to open their own bookshop. Aware of the growing market for children’s literature, she decided that juvenile literature should be their specialty, making their store one of the first of its kind. This was an excellent plan, as it would remove them from competing against other more established booksellers. Also, they could supply their own material: Godwin had some tales he had written for his daughters, including a version of Aesop’s Fables in which he emphasized the evils of tyranny and the importance of freedom.

  But Godwin was reluctant to enter the commercial world, and it was not until their financial situation took an even more dramatic turn for the worse that he relented. In the summer of 1807, just before Mary turned ten, the family moved into London, skulking out of the Polygon to escape paying the back rent.

  41 SKINNER STREET, THE GODWINS’ new home, was five ramshackle stories tall. It was unpainted and ugly. Newgate Prison was a block away, and on execution days, the bells of the neighborhood church, St. Sepulcher, rang the condemned to death and crowds rushed by on their way to watch the hangings. From the schoolroom windows on the top floor of their house where they had lessons each day, Mary, Fanny, and Jane could witness the prisoners making their final journey from Newgate to the gallows at Tyburn.

  They could also see the River Fleet, dark and poisonous looking. How could this be the same river that meandered past St. Pancras churchyard? Here it was like a black snake, coiled at the base of Holborn Hill. Closer to home, the carcasses of cattle, sheep, and pigs hung on racks outside the butcher shops of the Newgate Market, making it difficult to walk without stepping in puddles of blood. On hot summer days, the cries of the animals from the nearby Smithfield slaughterhouses drifted through the open windows.

  The noise, poverty, and stench of Skinner Street were overpowering. Merchants vied for customers, loudly peddling their wares. Once Mary-Jane opened the shop on the ground floor, the girls’ free time evaporated. They packed, unpacked, and shelved the volumes. When they were older, they helped Mary-Jane wait on customers. Charles, away at boarding school, escaped these obligations, and William was considered too young to help.

  View of Newgate Market in Paternoster Square, London, c. 1850, showing “carcasses hanging on hooks and a crush of figures.” (illustration ill.6)

  Mary chafed at these restrictions, adding them to her long list of complaints against Mary-Jane. To her, Skinner Street represented the evils of life with “second mamma,” whereas the tranquillity of the meadows near the Polygon symbolized Mary Wollstonecraft’s virtues. In Somers Town, the girls had been allowed to roam at will, but here it was unsafe to go outside alone. The old St. Pancras churchyard took on a special nostalgic glow. After all, not only was it the place where her mother was buried, this was also where Mary had spent hours alone with her father.

  There were some bright spots. The Godwins had moved into the heart of the publishing world. Authors stopped in to visit. Books were everywhere, stacked on chairs and on the floor. Godwin steered Mary in the direction of the social theorists he and her mother had admired, Rousseau and Locke. Family dinners were often spent discussing these authors. Godwin subscribed to Rousseau’s idea that society corrupted human nature, and so from her earliest years Mary absorbed the Romantic idea that the chains of convention should be broken. Her father demanded that she try to answer the questions of all reformers: What were the best ways to change the world? What role should the government play in the lives of the people? Should there even be a government? While Fanny and Jane looked on in awed silence, Mary delivered her opinions, skillfully citing examples from the books her father had given her to read.

>   Skinner Street’s central location also made Godwin more accessible to his admirers. Even though he was still considered a notorious radical by many conservatives, political reformers continued to seek Godwin out. Among the most notable was America’s third vice president, Aaron Burr. In 1808, Burr had been driven out of the United States by his enemies, only three years after serving as second in command to Thomas Jefferson. During his last year as vice president, Burr had fought a duel and fatally wounded his political rival Alexander Hamilton. Now the fifty-two-year-old was at the low point of his career, and Godwin was one of the few brave enough to befriend him.

  A lifelong devotee of Mary Wollstonecraft, Burr believed in the equality of men and women and had encouraged his beloved daughter, Theodosia, to learn Latin, logic, and higher mathematics. But in 1811, tragedy struck: twenty-nine-year-old Theodosia was drowned in a shipwreck off the South Carolina coast. The heartbroken Burr comforted himself by taking a particular interest in the three Godwin girls, nicknaming them “les goddesses.” The girls in turn loved Burr. He did not stand on ceremony with them, allowing the girls to call him “Gamp.” Sometimes he could be induced to visit them upstairs in the nursery. On one such occasion, they persuaded him to listen to eight-year-old William deliver a speech that Mary had written, entitled “The Influence of Government on the Character of the People.” Fanny served tea while Burr admired a singing performance by Jane, who was, as usual, determined not to be outdone by Mary.

  Burr praised the tea and the song, but he reserved his greatest praise for the speech and the speechwriter. Even at thirteen, Mary knew that she was the one who had taken the laurels. She had won Burr’s attention with her pen. Her father had taught her that writing was her legacy, that she was the daughter of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, the child of philosophers. When she felt alone and wished she had a mother who loved her, she tried to comfort herself by thinking that fate had raised her above ordinary people. She had a pedigree that the Clairmonts could never take away. But these consolations did little to dispel her loneliness. Her father was no longer hers—he had been taken over by Mary-Jane. Fanny was too timid to be any solace. And Jane, a far better companion than Fanny, was a dangerous competitor, only too ready to take Mary’s place if she fell.