Mary Shelley

by Catherine Reef

  Godwin also rented a building next door to the Skinner Street home. There he housed his new publishing company, the Juvenile Library. He printed children’s books authored by himself and his friends. The essayist Charles Lamb wrote several books for the Juvenile Library, including a children’s version of the ancient Greek tale The Odyssey. Lamb insisted on leaving in the gory parts of the story. When a giant cyclops kills two sailors by “[dashing] their brains out against the earth,” for example, Lamb describes how the monster “tore in pieces their limbs, and devoured them, yet warm and trembling, making a lion’s meal of them, lapping the blood.” These children’s books were anything but dull.

  This illustration of an enchanted cat is from a children’s book published by Godwin’s Juvenile Library.

  Visitors to the house on Skinner Street saw a busy, noisy family. One person who came often was Aaron Burr. The former U.S. vice president was infamous for killing Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the treasury, in a duel. Burr had fled the United States in financial distress; while overseas he was hoping to refill his bank account and repair his reputation. Burr found Mary Jane Godwin to be “a sensible, amiable woman.” The youngsters, he remarked, were “very fine children.” Missing his own daughter, who was far away in South Carolina, Burr was charmed by the girls in the Godwin household, whom he called “les goddesses.” Burr played games with the children, and he watched them put on shows. One evening, he listened as Jane sang a song and eight-year-old William gave a speech on “The Influence of Government on the Character of the People.” It had been written by his stepsister Mary.

  The home had its share of tears and scolding and talking back, yet it was as happy as any, even if the girls groaned when asked to help in the bookshop. But at thirteen, Mary was unwell. She was listless and wan, and eczema, an itchy red rash, covered one of her arms. It refused to go away no matter how many poultices the Godwins spread over it. In May 1811, hoping that sea air might help Mary’s skin heal, they wrapped her arm in a sling and sent her to a girls’ boarding school in Ramsgate, on England’s southeast coast. A worried Mary Jane Godwin packed her off with a list of instructions: bathe often in seawater, see a doctor, and remember to apply your medicine. Money was tight: the family business was barely bringing in a profit, and loans had to be repaid. Nevertheless, if the change would help Mary, then it was worth the expense.

  Mary’s months at Miss Petman’s Academy were lonely ones. School offered no nourishment for her hungry mind. In the first half of the nineteenth century, girls’ schools instructed pupils in ladylike skills meant to help them fill idle hours, shine in society, and adorn their homes. They practiced dancing, drawing, speaking French, and doing fancy needlework.

  Mary returned to Skinner Street after six months no healthier than when she left. When spring came and she still showed no improvement, her parents fixed their hope on a bracing northern climate. They arranged for Mary to stay with the family of William Baxter, an acquaintance connected to book publishing, who lived beside the River Tay, near the Scottish city of Dundee. Baxter was a widower with four daughters and two sons. “I do not desire that she should be treated with extraordinary attention, or that any one of your family should put themselves in the smallest degree out of their way on her account,” William Godwin told him. Mary, he added, “will be perfectly satisfied with your woods and your mountains.”

  On June 7, 1812, Mr. Godwin, Fanny, and Jane escorted Mary to the dock where she boarded the Osnaburgh, the ship that would take her on the six-day voyage to Scotland. William Godwin approached another traveler, a woman whose three daughters were seeing her off, and asked if she would keep an eye on Mary during the voyage. The woman assured him that she would, but Mary rarely saw her once the ship left port. Mary was seasick for most of the trip, and somehow the money her parents gave her, which she had tucked into her corset, managed to disappear.

  The family that welcomed her when she stepped ashore lived in a simple but cozy house overlooking the broad Tay. Ideas buzzed in the air in the Baxter home just as they did at 41 Skinner Street, because Baxter encouraged his children to read and think. Smart, brown-eyed Isabella Baxter, who quickly became Mary’s friend, held Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings close to her heart. She had studied so much about the French Revolution that she felt as if she knew the heroes and villains of that epic conflict. Mary and Isabella read aloud to each other from the folktales and traditional ghost stories of Dundee. Sometimes the Baxters took Mary on brisk hikes. They boated with her across the Tay to the town of Newburgh, where Isabella’s oldest sister, Margaret, lived with her husband, David Booth. On one of those visits, the girls scratched their names into a pane of glass.

  The hills and peaks surrounding Dundee had been stripped of trees by the city’s busy shipbuilding industry. From Dundee, ships embarked to explore the unknown north or hunt whales. Whaling was dangerous work, especially in the frigid Arctic. Mary felt a horrific thrill upon hearing true tales of sailing men falling into bitter cold waters and drowning or being trapped on ice floes and freezing to death, or of ships that left Dundee and never returned.

  While in Scotland, Mary Godwin watched boats sail in and out of the Dundee harbor. Laden with supplies and sailing men, some headed for Arctic waters.

  In Scotland, Mary felt uplifted, as if she had been dropped into an eagle’s nest. She was in “the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy,” she later recalled. Her surroundings inspired her to write. “It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered,” she stated. Though she would later lose those early stories, in Scotland this fledgling writer tried out her wings.

  As an adult, she could summon back the intoxicating feelings of this time. “At fourteen and fifteen we only feel that we are emerging from childhood, and we rejoice,” she wrote. Adolescence was “a dreamy delicious period, when all is unknown; and yet we feel that all is soon to be unveiled.”

  Whether from joy or healthy living, Mary’s arm healed. Her smooth, clear complexion took on a healthy glow. When she smiled and shifted her light-brown eyes slyly to the side, young men were bewitched. Isabella’s brother Robert fell quite in love with her.

  Letters from home told Mary about new friends who had begun calling at Skinner Street. Percy and Harriet Shelley were a young married couple. The elder son in a wealthy family, Percy Shelley had begun writing poetry at an early age. Shelley was quick to act on his impulses and he could never sit still. He felt ready to change the world. While students at Oxford, he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg wrote and published The Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet insisting that God’s existence could not be proved. It was a radical enough statement in 1811 to get the young men called into the master’s office. Lying to the master about their authorship was a worse offense, and this is what got them expelled. Then, at nineteen, Shelley had eloped with Harriet Westbrook, one of his younger sisters’ schoolmates.

  When Shelley read William Godwin’s book An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, its call to reject stifling institutions seemed to be directed at him. He had assumed that William Godwin was an old author, long dead. Surprised to learn in 1812 that the revered writer was alive and living in London, Shelley wrote him a letter. Soon the Shelleys were frequent guests in the Godwin home. Percy Shelley gave William Godwin a copy of his long poem Queen Mab, a political message wrapped in a fantasy tale. In Queen Mab, Shelley takes his readers on a chariot ride across the heavens to view a future utopia. The past and the present, also on view, are marred by humanity’s institutions, especially monarchy and religion. At the end of the poem, Shelley tacked on more than a hundred pages of notes in which he argued against the existence of God. No commercial publisher would touch such an inflammatory work, so the poet paid to have a small number of copies printed.

  Harrie
t Westbrook was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in 1811, when she eloped with Percy Shelley.

  William Godwin was less impressed with Percy Shelley’s poem than with his purse. One day the youth would possess the estate of his well-to-do father, Sir Timothy Shelley. Sir Timothy had stopped Percy’s allowance upon his marriage to Harriet, of which he disapproved, but Percy had other ways of getting funds. He borrowed here and there, sometimes taking out “post-obit” loans. In other words, lenders advanced him sums based on his future inheritance. In exchange, Percy agreed to pay back that amount—plus a great deal of interest—when his father died. For a post-obit loan of two thousand pounds, for example, Shelley would have to pay the lender six thousand pounds after his father’s death. William Godwin liked the fact that Shelley had access to money. He believed that wealth was meant to be shared, and why not with himself?

  In November 1812, Mary went home to Skinner Street for a visit, accompanied by Isabella’s sister Christy, William Baxter’s oldest unmarried daughter. Whether Mary met the Shelleys at this time is unknown, but Christy Baxter did. Percy Shelley was tall, she noted, with large blue eyes and a penetrating gaze. He leaned forward when he walked, as though his mind moved faster than the rest of him, and his curly brown hair needed combing. Unlike most gentlemen, he seldom wore a hat when he went out, and he left the collar of his shirt unbuttoned. Harriet Shelley, in her purple satin dress, stood out from the plainly clothed women in the Godwin family.

  After seven months in England, Mary returned with Christy to Scotland. She stayed until March 1814, and cried when she left again, never to return. Seventeen-year-old Robert Baxter followed her to London, hoping for a promise of marriage, but love would lead Mary to someone else. She was soon to imagine a different life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Escape!

  Love is to me as light to the star.

  Percy Shelley’s friends called him by his last name or by his middle name, Bysshe (“Bish”). On June 8, 1814, on a London street, he ran into his college chum Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Hogg, a student of law, had just come from court. He walked with Shelley, who was hurrying toward Skinner Street. “I must speak with Godwin,” Shelley said when they reached number 41. “Come in, I will not detain you long.”

  They entered the bookshop and learned that Godwin was out. Hogg recalled, “Bysshe strode about the room, causing the crazy floor of the ill-built, unowned dwelling-house to shake and tremble under his impatient footsteps. He appeared to be displeased.” Again and again Shelley asked, “Where is Godwin?” Each time, Hogg could only say that he did not know.

  A door into the shop partly opened, and Hogg recorded what happened next: “A thrilling voice called ‘Shelley!’ A thrilling voice answered, ‘Mary!’ And he darted out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king.” Hogg glimpsed “a very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look.” She wore a bright Scottish-plaid dress that stood out from the colorless clothing commonly worn in London. Shelley was gone for a minute or two. When he returned, he had lost interest in seeing Godwin—if that had ever really been his goal.

  As time went on, Hogg reflected on that day. Clearly, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin had met before then. But, Hogg asked himself, “Do you think he loved her?” It seemed as though he did. “First impressions are indelible,” Hogg remarked, “and in them alone are the truth and reality of things for the most part to be found.” Percy Shelley became a daily caller at Skinner Street. Harriet Shelley and their year-old daughter, Ianthe, were miles away, staying in the spa city of Bath.

  Shelley was bored with Harriet. He regretted his hasty marriage, and now he had found a girl with whom his wife could never compare. Harriet had been brought up to please others rather than think for herself. Mary Godwin, however, was the child of two great minds. She had read many books and could hold her own in conversation. Harriet, with her small features and neat brown hair, was a pretty doll. But Mary was a sight to behold! Jane Clairmont described Mary’s hair as being “of a sunny and burnished brightness like the autumnal foliage when played upon by the rays of the setting sun.” It was so fine that it looked weightless, “as if the wind had tangled it together into golden network.”

  In early June, Shelley wrote a poem to Mary and slipped it to her across the bookshop counter:

  A young Percy Bysshe Shelley.

  Upon my heart thy accents sweet

  Of peace and pity fell like dew

  On flowers half dead;—thy lips did meet

  Mine tremblingly . . .

  The poem reveals that the pair had kissed.

  Mr. and Mrs. Godwin never suspected that anything improper might be going on. William Godwin had money on his mind. He was helping Shelley obtain another post-obit loan and expected to receive a share in thanks. Godwin told himself that if Shelley dined at Skinner Street every day, it was because he relished the literary talk. If Mary and Shelley took long walks—well, they had to be innocent, since Jane went too.

  The walks took Mary, Shelley, and Jane to the St. Pancras churchyard, where they sat on Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave and talked about life and the future. All three had grown up on Wollstonecraft’s words: “Gain experience—ah! gain it—while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness.” Through her books, she spoke directly to them. Eager for experience, they were all Wollstonecraft’s children in spirit.

  On Sunday evening, June 26, Jane perched on a tombstone at the far side of the cemetery while Mary and Shelley spoke alone. Mary never forgot how Shelley opened his heart to her, “at first with the confidence of friendship, & then with the ardour of love.” Nor would Shelley forget his joy when Mary said that she returned his affection. “The sublime and rapturous moment when she confessed herself mine,” he said to Jefferson Hogg, “cannot be painted to mortal imaginations.” The pair walked back to Skinner Street arm in arm.

  Soon afterward, Shelley told William Godwin that he and Mary were in love. If he thought Mary’s father would take the news well, he was badly mistaken. Godwin’s views on marriage had softened in the twenty-one years since he had published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. He had even married twice himself. Now Shelley, who had a wife and child, was romancing another woman, and that woman was his own beloved daughter, a mere girl of sixteen. Godwin was furious. “I could not believe that you would enter my house under the name of benefactor, to leave behind an endless poison to corrode my soul,” he said. “I would as soon have credited that the stars would fall from Heav’n for my destruction.”

  Godwin made the younger man promise “to give up his licentious love, and return to virtue.” He banished Mary to the upstairs schoolroom. Once the post-obit loan was finalized, on July 6, he ordered Shelley to stay away from Skinner Street. But irate fathers and promises made under pressure are no match for the sheer force of love—as William Godwin was about to find out.

  Mary and Shelley had a trusted ally in Jane, who sneaked their letters in and out of Mary’s schoolroom prison. Shelley, forbidden to see Mary, was frantic. “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered,” observed the writer Thomas Love Peacock, a friend of Shelley’s who had called on him in London. “Nothing that I ever read in tale or history could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him laboring.” Shelley snatched up a vial of laudanum, a medicine made from opium that was toxic in high doses. “I never part from this,” Peacock heard him say ominously.

  Laudanum was a key ingredient in one woman’s recipe for a cholera cure. In truth, this concoction was no more effective than any other treatment used at the time to combat infectious diseases.

  Meanwhile, Harriet, hearing nothing from her husband for several days, went to her father’s house in London. She met with Shelley, who informed her that he worshiped Mary, body and soul. He still cared for Harriet, but he explained to her, “Our connection was not one o
f passion & impulse. Friendship was its basis.” This was no one’s fault, not Harriet’s and not his own. “It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all sufficing passion,” he added. Harriet, who was pregnant, tried to remain dignified, but she blamed Mary for seducing Shelley away from her.

  A few days later, Shelley burst into the bookstore on Skinner Street. William Godwin was out; his friend and secretary, James Marshall, awaited his return. Shelley “looked extremely wild,” Mary Jane Godwin said. Pushing past Mrs. Godwin, he rushed upstairs and into the schoolroom. He gave Mary the bottle of laudanum and told her to swallow its contents. “They wish to separate us, my beloved,” he said, “but Death shall unite us.” Then he pulled out a pistol. He was going to shoot himself so they could be together in death like Romeo and Juliet.

  Mrs. Godwin and James Marshall stepped into a chaotic scene. Jane was shrieking; Mary, pale and crying, was begging Shelley to calm down and go home. “I won’t take this laudanum,” she said. “But if you will only be reasonable and calm, I will promise to be ever faithful to you.” Marshall helped Shelley get control of himself, and the poet departed, leaving the laudanum on a table. A few days later he took an overdose of laudanum himself, but his landlady discovered him in time to summon a doctor, who saved his life.