Mary need not have worried. From almost the moment he set out, Godwin felt pangs of regret, having proposed this trip out of his own predilection for self-denial, not because he wanted to escape Mary’s clutches. His Calvinist upbringing made the pleasure he experienced almost too much to bear. He needed to appease his guilt at how happy he was and make sure he could do without Mary, at least for a few weeks.
When his first letter arrived, spelling out his love for her and Fanny, Mary was reassured and wrote him a passionate response, referring to their unborn baby as “Master William” since she and Godwin both assumed she would be giving birth to a boy:
I am well and tranquil, excepting the disturbance produced by Master William’s joy, who took it into his head to frisk a little at being informed of your remembrance. I begin to love this little creature and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie. Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you for ever—and I will add what will gratify your benevolence, if not your heart, that on the whole I may be termed happy.
Godwin’s response was even more heartfelt than Mary’s:
You cannot imagine how happy your letter made me. No creature expresses, because no creature feels, the tender affections, so perfectly as you do: &, after all one’s philosophy, it must be confessed that the knowledge, that there is some one that takes an interest in our happiness…is extremely gratifying. We love as it were to multiply our consciousness…even at the hazard…of opening new avenues for pain and misery to attack us.
Fanny, too, missed Godwin. Mary reported that she had gotten hold of his letter and would not let it go. She asked repeatedly where he had gone, and when Mary told her he had “gone into the country,” this became her phrase for anything that was missing; she greatly amused Maria Reveley by saying that a lost toy monkey must have “gone into the country.”
Given the complicated natures of both husband and wife, however, a squabble inevitably arose. Godwin postponed his arrival home, citing a desire to go to Coventry Fair and see a young woman reenact Lady Godiva’s ride. Lady Godiva! All of Mary’s insecurities resurfaced. She was home roasting in the heat, fat, lonely, and cranky while he was admiring a beautiful, scantily clad young woman on horseback. She wrote back, castigating him for his “icy Philosophy” and asking if he thought she was a stick or a stone. Even though this was just one incident, his behavior reminded her of Imlay. All delays and broken promises.
When at last he did arrive home, bearing gifts for Fanny—a mug with an F on it and a few other such trinkets—he made matters worse by encouraging Miss Pinkerton’s advances, visiting her alone in her chambers and inviting her to come see him at Chalton Street when Mary would not be present. That same week, the weather changed, becoming windy and wet, reminding Mary of the terrible autumn when she had tried to end her life over Imlay’s desertion. It was all too much for her, and she wrote an accusatory letter to Godwin that sounds remarkably like the letters she used to write to Imlay:
I am absurd to look for the affection which I have found only in my own tormented heart; and how can you blame me for tak[ing] refuge in the idea of a God, when I despair of finding sincerity on earth?…My old wounds bleed afresh.
But Godwin was not Imlay. He agreed to stop seeing Miss Pinkerton at once, rushing off a note to Mary from his office: “I would on no account willingly do any thing to make you unhappy.” That afternoon, Mary drafted a stern note to the young woman, chastising her for her forwardness. Before she sent it, she gave it to Godwin to polish:
Miss Pinkerton, I forbear to make any comments on your strange behavior; but unless you can determine to behave with propriety, you must excuse me for expressing a wish not to see you at our house.
Godwin amended the note to read “incomprehensible conduct” in place of “strange behavior,” and Mary put it in the mail immediately. Miss Pinkerton responded immediately. “I am sensible of the impropriety of my conduct,” she wrote Mary. “Tears and communication afford me relief.”
This was a new experience for Mary, who, in the past, had always been the third one out. Imlay’s actress and Mrs. Fuseli had driven her away. Now, although Miss Pinkerton and Godwin were not actually having an affair, Mary had staked her claim, making it clear that she refused to share her man, and she had won her ground.
Having dealt with Miss Pinkerton, Mary felt calmer and more confident. It helped that others had come forward in the past month to express their admiration and praise the couple for their originality. Thomas Holcroft said, “I think you the most extraordinary married pair in existence.” Young poets and intellectuals gathered at the Polygon to pay court to these middle-aged radicals and to admire the partnership that they had forged. The Godwin/Wollstonecraft marriage seemed to unite all the principles they held most dear: freedom, justice, reason, sensibility, and the imagination—in essence, the ideals of the Enlightenment combined with the exciting new tenets of Romanticism.
The nineteen-year-old William Hazlitt, who would one day become one of the great essayists and critics in the English language, admired the egalitarian nature of their arrangement. Mary was neither deferential nor quiet. She actually teased Godwin, laughing at his stiff ways. When Godwin disagreed with her, she refused to back down and instead adopted a “playful, easy air.” The young Coleridge praised Mary’s creative spirit, finding her far superior to her husband, since in his estimation all “people of the imagination” had “ascendancy” over “those of mere intellect.” A few years later, he would change his mind about Godwin, but at the time, he was impressed with the philosopher largely because he had married Wollstonecraft.
Instead of spending the last weeks of her pregnancy napping or doing needlework, the kind of activities recommended for women in her condition, Mary walked vigorously, usually heading out into the fields with Fanny to let her play with her hoop or toy rake. Maria Reveley and her small son, Henry, often accompanied them on these excursions and Mary cherished her last days with Fanny without the distraction of a new baby. Her humor and her ready ability to enter a child’s viewpoint are displayed in a note Fanny “dictated” to Henry:
Little Fanny would be very glad to have the promised Rake, in the course of a day or two because she wishes to make Hay in the fields opposite to her house. If Henry will bring it she shall like to have a tumble with him on the Hay. The Pitchfork has been used every day.
Fanny sends her love to Henry, and wishes him to direct his next letter to herself, and she will put it up with her books, in her own closet.
Occasionally, Mary and Godwin walked to the village of Sadler’s Wells or downtown to visit Johnson and the other booksellers: she was always happy to hear the latest book gossip. She saw Mary Hays for tea, worked on The Wrongs of Woman, and also finished some little stories for Fanny to read once “William” was born. These short passages offer glimpses into Mary and Fanny’s daily routines and at the same time show Mary’s tenderness and pride in her daughter:
See how much taller you are than William. In four years you have learned to eat, to walk, to talk. Why do you smile? You can do much more, you think: You can wash your hands and face.…And you can comb your head with the pretty comb you always put by your own drawer. To be sure, you do all this to be ready to have a walk with me. You would be obliged to stay at home, if you could not comb your own hair. Betty is busy getting the dinner ready, and only brushes William’s hair, because he cannot do it himself.
And:
When I caught a cold some time ago, I had such a pain in my head, I could scarcely hold it up. Papa opened the door very softly, because he loves me. You love me, yet you made a noise. You had not the sense to know that it made my head worse, till papa told you.
You say that you do not know how to think. Yes, you do a little. The other day papa was tired; he had been walking about all the morning. After dinner he fell asleep on the sofa. I did not bid you be quiet,
but you thought of what papa said to you, when my head ached. This made you think that you ought not to make a noise, when papa was resting himself. So you came to me, and said to me, very softly, Pray reach me my ball, and I will go and play in the garden, till papa wakes.
You were going out; but thinking again, you came back to me on your tiptoes. Whisper whisper. Pray mamma call me, when papa wakes; for I shall be afraid to open the door to see, lest I should disturb him.
Away you went—Creep, creep—and shut the door as softly as I could have done myself. That was thinking.…Another day we will see if you can think about anything else.
THE SECOND WEEK OF August, the famous comet, or, to use Mary Shelley’s words, a “strange Star,” appeared in the night sky, bewildering all who saw it streak across the heavens. Mary hoped it meant their child would be born soon. She wanted “to regain my activity, and to reduce to some shapeliness the portly shadow, which meets my eye when I take a musing walk.”
As the month drew to a close, Mary and Godwin gave up their habit of going out without each other and spent the late summer evenings reading together. The last week of August, they decided to reread a favorite novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. This was a time of “true happiness,” Godwin said later. They would “point out unobserved beauties” in this melancholy novel and “were mutually delighted to remark the accord of our feelings, and still more so, as we perceived that accord to be hourly increasing.”
ON THE MORNING OF August 30, Mary woke to the first flutters of labor. As in Le Havre, she did not summon a doctor. She believed the odds were in her favor. Fanny’s birth had gone briskly without any complications. She was expecting the same for baby William and had found a midwife with a good reputation, a Mrs. Blekinsop, although she did not think there would be much for her to do. She sent Godwin to his office as usual, and after a few hours, the contractions became steady enough for her to write him a note saying, “I have no doubt of seeing the animal today.” She also asked him to send over some light reading, a book or newspaper for the long waits between contractions. However, despite her optimistic prognostications, at midday she was still pacing the rooms of the house; the labor was progressing much more slowly than it had with Fanny. At two o’clock, she went up to her bedchamber and summoned the midwife, writing Godwin to tell him the baby would be born soon, and then repeated her mother’s dying words: “I must have a little patience.”
But the baby did not come soon. Mary had nine more hours of labor to endure. Godwin dined with the Reveleys and did not come home until after dark, only to find Mary still upstairs enduring contractions. The baby was not born until almost midnight on August 30, 1797. The midwife invited Godwin to meet his child—not a boy, after all, but a tiny, weak-looking baby girl. Godwin felt the solemnity of this occasion and would often recall the moment in the years to come, even writing an account of a husband and wife greeting one another after childbirth in his novel St. Leon:
Never shall I forget the interview between us…the effusion of soul with which we met each other after all danger seemed to have subsided, the kindness which animated us, increased as it was by ideas of peril and suffering, the sacred sensation…the complacency with which we read in each other’s eyes a common sentiment of melting tenderness and inviolable attachment!
In awe and overwhelmed by love for his wife, Godwin regarded the new baby as “the joint result of our common affection” and “the shrine in which our sympathies and our life have been poured together, never to be separated. Let other lovers testify their engagements by presents and tokens; we record and stamp our attachment in this precious creature.”
Godwin’s diary: “Birth of Mary, 20 minutes after 11 at night” (fourth entry down). (illustration ill.35)
Mary was too tired to speak, but Godwin stayed by her side, holding their little daughter and rejoicing in her safe delivery, until the midwife shooed him out because Mary still needed to deliver the placenta. After two more hours, however, there was still no afterbirth, leaving Mary at risk of developing an infection. Mrs. Blekinsop alerted Godwin, who leapt into a carriage with “despair…in my heart” and raced to the Westminster Hospital to bring back a doctor.
Godwin and a Dr. Poignand arrived back at the Polygon shortly before dawn and Poignand went right to work, ripping out shreds of the placenta without any anesthetic, causing Mary the greatest pain she had ever experienced. She fainted repeatedly and at times wanted to die but “was determined,” she whispered, “not to leave [Godwin].” At last, after many hours, Dr. Poignand assured them that he had extracted everything. Relieved, Mary finally slept. But the damage had been done. Dr. Poignand had introduced the disease that would kill his patient, never realizing that his efforts to save Mary would cause her death. In 1797, germ theory did not yet exist; the idea that doctors with unwashed hands could spread an infection would have seemed ridiculous.
Once the sun was up, Fanny padded down the hallway to meet her new sister, whom they had decided to name Mary, after her mother. After Fanny had kissed the baby, her weary mother hugged her goodbye. Maria Reveley had offered to take her for a few days so Mary could rest. Godwin sat with his wife that afternoon and Maria came back to visit that evening. All seemed well the following morning, and so Godwin walked to his office to do a little work, called on Mary Hays to give her the news, and did not return until evening. While he was gone, Johnson visited Mary and met the new baby. Godwin also summoned a new doctor, an old friend of Mary’s named George Fordyce, who stopped by to check on her, afterward reporting to Godwin that he was optimistic about Mary’s recovery. The couple dined together and decided that this would be how they would order their lives for the next few months. Godwin would work. Mary would take care of the infant. They went to sleep that night tranquil, contented with each other and delighted with their new family.
Friday and Saturday were restful, happy days. The baby nursed. Mary napped and began to make plans for the weeks ahead. The first order of business was a nursemaid. Godwin’s sister had a friend, Louisa Jones, who was interested in the position. On Sunday, she brought her to the Polygon for an interview. But while the two women waited downstairs, a dreadful banging began to shake the walls. Mary had developed a sudden fever and was shivering so acutely that her iron bed bumped across the floorboards, rattling the whole house. An anguished Godwin sent for Dr. Fordyce at once. His sister and Louisa fled, and the household geared to meet the crisis.
It did not take Dr. Fordyce long to diagnose the problem: puerperal or childbed fever. There was still unshed placenta inside Mary and it was decaying; infection had begun and there was nothing anyone could do. To keep Mary calm, Fordyce lied to her, telling her that she would recover and inventing a pretext for why her milk was no longer good for the baby. Since Mary’s breasts were stretched painfully taut, they brought in puppies to nurse, an eighteenth-century custom that Mary tried to smile at, but which seemed unbearably cruel when little Mary was in the next room eager to be fed.
Fordyce, meanwhile, had told Godwin the truth. So while Mary clung to the belief that she would live, her husband sank into gloom. The baby was dispatched to the Reveleys to join her sister. Pale and underweight, she was also not expected to live. Godwin moved into Mary’s room, sleeping in the chair next to her bed. He “intreated her to recover” and “dwelt with trembling fondness on every favorable circumstance; and, as far as it was possible in so dreadful a situation, she, by her smiles and kind speeches, rewarded my affection.” Her friends, led by Mary Hays and Maria Reveley, stationed themselves in the house, and the loyal Marguerite refused to leave Mary’s side. Four of Godwin’s male friends kept watch downstairs. As Mary Hays said, “The attachment and regret of those who surrounded her appeared to increase every hour.” Mary, who was still conscious, touched everyone with her “anxious fondness” for her well-wishers.
Dr. Fordyce paid frequent visits to no avail. To ease her suffering, he told Godwin to ply her with wine. Godwin complied, but felt unsure about how
much to give. He did not want to speed her death, but neither did he want her to suffer; he felt as though he had been asked “to play with a life that now seemed all that was dear to me in the universe.” It was “too dreadful a task.” Mary grew weaker by the hour. Desperate for reassurance, Godwin asked Mary, the servant, what she thought of her mistress’s progress and was horrified when Mary said she thought her mistress “was going as fast as possible.” Finally, on Friday, September 8, Godwin, suspecting that his wife knew the truth, gave up pretending and had what he called a “solemn communication” with her, trying to discover Mary’s wishes for her daughters. But by then Mary did not have the strength to talk, let alone make plans. All she could say was “I know what you are thinking of…”
For the next forty-eight hours Mary slipped in and out of consciousness. The shaking fits had stopped and she seemed, as Godwin had thought, to know that she was dying. Her last words were that Godwin was “the kindest, best man in the world.” The doctor tried to encourage him by saying it was a miracle that she was still alive and that “it was highly improper to give up all hope.” After all, if anyone could survive, it would be Mary. Still, Godwin knew that these were empty words and did his best to prepare for the end.
He slept for a few hours early on Sunday morning, with orders to be woken up if there was any change. At six, the doctor called him to Mary’s side and he sat with her until she died, less than two hours later, a little before eight in the morning of September 10. Afterward, Godwin drew three mute lines in his journal. Mary was lost to him forever. It would take him two years to describe what he felt, and when he did, he spoke through a fictional character whose wife had just died in childbirth, conveying far more emotion here than he was able to express in real life:
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 49
