by Mary Shelley
What I have most of all in horror is the public papers, and I thank you for your caution, as it may act on this.
We have so conducted ourselves that not one person in our home has the smallest apprehension of the truth. Our feelings are less tumultuous than deep. God only knows what they may become.
Charles Clairmont was not informed at all of Fanny’s death; a letter from him a year later contains a message to her. Mrs. Godwin busied herself with putting the blame on Shelley. Four years later she informed Mrs. Gisborne that the three girls had been simultaneously in love with Shelley, and that Fanny’s death was due to jealousy of Mary! This shows that the Shelleys’ instinct did not much mislead them when they held Mary’s stepmother responsible for the authorship and diffusion of many of those slanders which for years were to affect their happiness and peace. Any reader of Fanny’s letters can judge how far Mrs. Godwin’s allegation is borne out by actual facts; and to any one knowing aught of women and women’s lives these letters afford clue enough to the situation and the story, and further explanation is superfluous. Fanny was fond of Shelley, fond enough even to forgive him for the trouble he had brought on their home, but her part was throughout that of a long-suffering sister, one, too, to whose lot it always fell to say all the disagreeable things that had to be said — a truly ungrateful task. Her loyalty to the Godwins, though it could not entirely divide her from the Shelleys, could and did prevent any intimacy of friendship with them. Her enlightened, liberal mind, and her generous, loving heart had won Shelley’s recognition and his affection, and in a moment a veil was torn from his eyes, revealing to him unsuspected depths of suffering, sacrifice, and heroism — now it was too late. How much more they might have done for Fanny had they understood what she endured! There was he, Shelley, offering sympathy and help to the oppressed and the miserable all the world over, and here, — here under his very eyes, this tragic romance was acted out to the death.
Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, — and I departed,
Heeding not the words then spoken —
Misery, ah! misery!
This world is all too wide for thee.
If the echo of those lines reached Fanny in the world of shadows, it may have calmed the restless spirit with the knowledge that she had not lived for nothing after all.
During the next two months another tragedy was silently advancing towards its final catastrophe. Shelley was anxious for intelligence of Harriet and her children; she had, however, disappeared, and he could discover no clue to her whereabouts. Mr. Peacock, who, during June, had been in communication with her on money matters, had now, apparently, lost sight of her. The worry of Godwin’s money-matters and the fearful shock of Fanny’s self-sought death, followed as it was by collapse of his own health and nerves, probably withdrew Shelley’s thoughts from the subject for a time. In November, however, he wrote to Hookham, thinking that he, to whom Harriet had once written to discover Shelley’s whereabouts, might now know or have the means of finding out where she was living. No answer came, however, to these inquiries for some weeks, during which Shelley, Mary, and Clare lived in their seclusion, reading Lucian and Horace, Shakespeare, Gibbon, and Locke; in occasional correspondence with Skinner Street, through Mrs. Godwin, who was now trying what she could do to obtain money loans (probably raised on Shelley’s prospects), requisite, not only to save Godwin from bankruptcy, but to repay Shelley a small fraction of what he had given and lent, and without which he was unable to pay his own way.
The plan for settling at Marlow was still pending, and on the 5th of December Shelley went there again to stay with Mr. Peacock and his mother, and to look about for a residence to suit him. Mary during his absence was somewhat tormented by anxiety for his fragile health; fearful, too, lest in his impulsive way he should fall in love with the first pretty place he saw, and burden himself with some unsuitable house, in the idea of settling there “for ever,” Clare and all. To that last plan she probably foresaw the objections more clearly than Shelley did. But her cheery letters are girlish and playful.
5th December 1816.
Sweet Elf — I got up very late this morning, so that I could not attend Mr. West. I don’t know any more. Good-night.
New Bond Street, Bath,
6th December 1816.
Sweet Elf — I was awakened this morning by my pretty babe, and was dressed time enough to take my lesson from Mr. West, and (thank God) finished that tedious ugly picture I have been so long about. I have also finished the fourth chapter of Frankenstein, which is a very long one, and I think you would like it. And where are you? and what are you doing? my blessed love. I hope and trust that, for my sake, you did not go outside this wretched day, while the wind howls and the clouds seem to threaten rain. And what did my love think of as he rode along — did he think about our home, our babe, and his poor Pecksie? But I am sure you did, and thought of them all with joy and hope. But in the choice of a residence, dear Shelley, pray be not too quick or attach yourself too much to one spot. Ah! were you indeed a winged Elf, and could soar over mountains and seas, and could pounce on the little spot. A house with a lawn, a river or lake, noble trees, and divine mountains, that should be our little mouse-hole to retire to. But never mind this; give me a garden, and absentia Claire, and I will thank my love for many favours. If you, my love, go to London, you will perhaps try to procure a good Livy, for I wish very much to read it. I must be more industrious, especially in learning Latin, which I neglected shamefully last summer at intervals, and those periods of not reading at all put me back very far.
The Morning Chronicle, as you will see, does not make much of the riots, which they say are entirely quelled, and you would be almost inclined to say, “Out of the mountain comes forth a mouse,” although, I daresay, poor Mrs. Platt does not think so.
The blue eyes of your sweet Boy are staring at me while I write this; he is a dear child, and you love him tenderly, although I fancy that your affection will increase when he has a nursery to himself, and only comes to you just dressed and in good humour; besides when that comes to pass he will be a wise little man, for he improves in mind rapidly. Tell me, shall you be happy to have another little squaller? You will look grave on this, but I do not mean anything.
Leigh Hunt has not written. I would advise a letter addressed to him at the Examiner Office, if there is no answer to-morrow. He may not be at the Vale of Health, for it is odd that he does not acknowledge the receipt of so large a sum. There have been no letters of any kind to-day.
Now, my dear, when shall I see you? Do not be very long away; take care of yourself and take a house. I have a great fear that bad weather will set in. My airy Elf, how unlucky you are! I shall write to Mrs. Godwin to-morrow; but let me know what you hear from Hayward and papa, as I am greatly interested in those affairs. Adieu, sweetest; love me tenderly, and think of me with affection when anything pleases you greatly. — Your affectionate girl
Mary.
I have not asked Clare, but I dare say she would send her love, although I dare say she would scold you well if you were here. Compliments and remembrances to Dame Peacock and Son, but do not let them see this.
Sweet, adieu!
Percy B. Shelley, Esq.,
Great Marlow, Bucks.
On 6th December the journal records —
Letter from Shelley; he has gone to visit Leigh Hunt.
This was the beginning of a lifelong intimacy.
On the 14th Shelley returned to Bath, and on the very next day a letter from Hookham informed him that on the 9th Harriet’s body had been taken out of the Serpentine. She had disappeared three weeks before that time from the house where she was living. An inquest had been held at which her name was given as Harriet Smith; little or no information about her was given to the jury, who returned a verdict of “Found drowned.”
Life and its complications had proved too much for the poor silly woma
n, and she took the only means of escape she saw open to her. Her piteous story was sufficiently told by the fact that when she drowned herself she was not far from her confinement. But it would seem from subsequent evidence that harsh treatment on the part of her relatives was what finally drove her to despair. She had lived a fast life, but had been, nominally at any rate, under her father’s protection until a comparatively short time before her disappearance, when some act or occurrence caused her to be driven from his house. From that moment she sank lower and lower, until at last, deserted by one — said to be a groom — to whom she had looked for protection, she killed herself.
It is asserted that she had had, all her life, an avowed proclivity to suicide. She had been fond, in young and happy days, of talking jocosely about it, as silly girls often do; discoursing of “some scheme of self-destruction as coolly as another lady would arrange a visit to an exhibition or a theatre.” But it is a wide dreary waste that lies between such an idea and the grim reality, — and poor Harriet had traversed it.
Shelley’s first thought on receiving the fatal news was of his children. His sensations were those of horror, not of remorse. He never spoke or thought of Harriet with harshness, rather with infinite pity, but he never regarded her save in the light of one who had wronged him and failed him, — whom he had left, indeed, but had forgiven, and had tried to save from the worst consequences of her own acts. Her dreadful death was a shock to him of which he said (to Byron) that he knew not how he had survived it; and he regarded her father and sister as guilty of her blood. But Fanny’s death caused him acuter anguish than Harriet’s did.
As for Mary, she regarded the whole Westbrook family as the source of grief and shame to Shelley. Harriet she only knew for a frivolous, heartless, faithless girl, whom she had never had the faintest cause to respect, hardly even to pity. Poor Harriet was indeed deserving of profound commiseration, and no one could have known and felt this more than Mary would have done, in later years. But she heard one side of the case only, and that one the side on which her own strongest feelings were engaged. She was only nineteen, with an exalted ideal of womanly devotion; and at nineteen we may sternly judge what later on we may condemn indeed, but with a depth of pity quite beyond the power of its object to fathom or comprehend.
No comment whatever on the occurrence appears in her journal. She threw herself ardently into Shelley’s eagerness to get possession of his elder children; ready, for his sake, to love them as her own.
It could not but occur to her that her own position was altered by this event, and that nothing now stood between her and her legal marriage to Shelley and acknowledgment as his wife. So completely, however, did they regard themselves as united for all time by indissoluble ties that she thought of the change chiefly as it affected other people.
Mary to Shelley.
Bath, 17th December 1816.
My beloved Friend — I waited with the greatest anxiety for your letter. You are well, and that assurance has restored some peace to me.
How very happy shall I be to possess those darling treasures that are yours. I do not exactly understand what Chancery has to do in this, and wait with impatience for to-morrow, when I shall hear whether they are with you; and then what will you do with them? My heart says, bring them instantly here; but I submit to your prudence. You do not mention Godwin. When I receive your letter to-morrow I shall write to Mrs. Godwin. I hope, yet I fear, that he will show on this occasion some disinterestedness. Poor, dear Fanny, if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved, for my house would then have been a proper asylum for her. Ah! my best love, to you do I owe every joy, every perfection that I may enjoy or boast of. Love me, sweet, for ever. I hardly know what I mean, I am so much agitated. Clare has a very bad cough, but I think she is better to-day. Mr. Carn talks of bleeding if she does not recover quickly, but she is positively resolved not to submit to that. She sends her love. My sweet love, deliver some message from me to your kind friends at Hampstead; tell Mrs. Hunt that I am extremely obliged to her for the little profile she was so kind as to send me, and thank Mr. Hunt for his friendly message which I did not hear.
These Westbrooks! But they have nothing to do with your sweet babes; they are yours, and I do not see the pretence for a suit; but to-morrow I shall know all.
Your box arrived to-day. I shall send soon to the upholsterer, for now I long more than ever that our house should be quickly ready for the reception of those dear children whom I love so tenderly. Then there will be a sweet brother and sister for my William, who will lose his pre-eminence as eldest, and be helped third at table, as Clare is continually reminding him.
Come down to me, sweetest, as soon as you can, for I long to see you and embrace.
As to the event you allude to, be governed by your friends and prudence as to when it ought to take place, but it must be in London.
Clare has just looked in; she begs you not to stay away long, to be more explicit in your letters, and sends her love.
You tell me to write a long letter, and I would, but that my ideas wander and my hand trembles. Come back to reassure me, my Shelley, and bring with you your darling Ianthe and Charles. Thank your kind friends. I long to hear about Godwin. — Your affectionate
Mary.
Have you called on Hogg? I would hardly advise you. Remember me, sweet, in your sorrows as well as your pleasures; they will, I trust, soften the one and heighten the other feeling. Adieu.
To Percy Bysshe Shelley,
5 Gray’s Inn Square, London.
No time was lost in putting things on their legal footing. Shelley took Mary up to town, where the marriage ceremony took place at St. Mildred’s Church, Broad Street, in presence of Godwin and Mrs. Godwin. On the previous day he had seen his daughter for the first time since her flight from his house two and a half years before.
Both must have felt a strange emotion which, probably, neither of them allowed to appear.
Mary for a fortnight left a blank in her journal. On her return to Clifton she thus shortly chronicled her days —
I have omitted writing my journal for some time. Shelley goes to London and returns; I go with him; spend the time between Leigh Hunt’s and Godwin’s. A marriage takes place on the 29th of December 1816. Draw; read Lord Chesterfield and Locke.
Godwin’s relief and satisfaction were great indeed. His letter to his brother in the country, announcing his daughter’s recent marriage with a baronet’s eldest son, can only be compared for adroit manipulation of facts with a later letter to Mr. Baxter of Dundee, in which he tells of poor Fanny’s having been attacked in Wales by an inflammatory fever “which carried her off.”
He now surpassed himself “in polished and cautious attentions” both to Shelley and Mary, and appeared to wish to compensate in every way for the red-hot, righteous indignation which, owing to wounded pride rather than to offended moral sense, he had thought it his duty to exhibit in the past.
Shelley’s heart yearned towards his two poor little children by Harriet, and to get possession of them was now his feverish anxiety. On this business he was obliged, within a week of his return to Bath, to go up again to London. During his absence, on the 13th of January, Clare’s little girl, Byron’s daughter, was born. “Four days of idleness,” are Mary’s only allusion to this event. It was communicated to the absent father by Shelley, in a long letter from London. He quite simply assumes the event to be an occasion of great rejoicing to all concerned, and expects Byron to feel the same. The infant, who afterwards developed into a singularly fascinating and lovely child, was described in enthusiastic terms by Mary as unusually beautiful and intelligent, even at this early stage. Their first name for her was Alba, or “the Dawn”; a reminiscence of Byron’s nickname, “Albé.”
Most of this month of January, while Mary had Clare and the infant to look after, was of necessity spent by Shelley in London. Harriet’s father, Mr. Westbrook, and his daughter Eliza had filed an appeal to the Court of Chancery, pr
aying that her children might be placed in the custody of guardians to be appointed by the Court, and not in that of their father. On 24th January, poor little William’s first birthday, the case was heard before Lord Chancellor Eldon. Mary, expecting that the decision would be known at once, waited in painful suspense to hear the result.
Journal, Friday, January 24. — My little William’s birthday. How many changes have occurred during this little year; may the ensuing one be more peaceful, and my William’s star be a fortunate one to rule the decision of this day. Alas! I fear it will be put off, and the influence of the star pass away. Read the Arcadia and Amadis; walk with my sweet babe.
Her fears were realised, for two months were to elapse ere judgment was pronounced.
Saturday, January 25. — An unhappy day. I receive bad news and determine to go up to London. Read the Arcadia and Amadis. Letter from Mrs. Godwin and William.
Accordingly, next day, Mary went up to join her husband in town, and notes in her diary that she was met at the inn by Mrs. Godwin and William. Well might Shelley say of the ceremony that it was “magical in its effects.”
As it turned out, this was her final departure from Bath: she never returned there. On her arrival in London she was warmly welcomed by Shelley’s new friends, the Leigh Hunts, at whose house most of her time was spent, and whose genial, social circle was most refreshing to her. The house at Marlow had been taken, and was now being prepared for her reception. Little William and his nurse, escorted by Clare, joined her at the Hunts on the 18th of February, but Clare herself stayed elsewhere. At the end of the month they all departed for their new home, and were established there early in March.
CHAPTER X
March 1817-March 1818
The Shelleys’ new abode, although situated in a lovely part of the country, was cold and cheerless, and, at that bleak time of year, must have appeared at its worst. Albion House stood (and, though subdivided and much altered in appearance, still stands) in what is now the main street of Great Marlow, and at a considerable distance from the river. At the back the garden-plot rises gradually from the level of the house, terminating in a kind of artificial mound, overshadowed by a spreading cedar; a delightfully shady lounge in summer, but shutting off sky and sunshine from the house. There are two large, low, old-fashioned rooms; one on the ground floor, somewhat like a farmhouse kitchen; the other above it; both facing towards the garden. In one of these Shelley fitted up a library, little thinking that the dwelling, which he had rashly taken on a more than twenty years’ lease, would be his home for only a year. The rest of the house accommodated Mary, Clare, the children and servants, and left plenty of room for visitors. Shelley was hospitality itself, and though he never was in greater trouble for money than during this year, he entertained a constant succession of guests. First among these was Godwin; next, and most frequent, the genial but needy Leigh Hunt, with all his family. With Mary, as with Shelley, he had quickly established himself on a footing of easy, affectionate friendliness, as may be inferred from Mary’s letter, written to him during her first days at Marlow.
