Mary Shelley Read online

  Mary Shelley

  MIRANDA SEYMOUR

  ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters.’

  Goya, Los Caprichos (1799)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Preface

  I A MOTHERLESS CHILD

  1 The Age of Prometheus 1789–1800

  2 A Birth and a Death 1797–1798

  3 Father and Daughter 1798–1801

  4 A Shared Life 1801–1807

  5 Tensions 1807–1812

  6 A Glassite Household 1812–1814

  7 Love and Confusion 1814

  II FREEDOM

  8 Six Weeks in Europe 1814

  9 Experiments in Living 1814–1813

  10 Retreat from London 1813–1816

  11 Storms on the Lake 1816

  12 Distressing Events 1816

  13 At Albion House 1817–1818

  III ITALY

  14 Joys and Losses 1818

  15 A Mysterious History 1818–1818

  16 A Loss and a Gain 1819–1820

  17 In Absentia Clariae 1820

  18 Life on the Lung’Arno 1821

  19 Don Juan among the Ladies 1821–1822

  20 At the Villa Magni May–August 1822

  IV A WOMAN OF ILL REPUTE

  21 Bitter Waters 1822–1823

  22 Fame, of a Kind 1823–1824

  23 Literary Matters 1824–1829

  24 Private Matters 1824–1827

  25 A Curious Marriage 1827–1828

  26 The Hideous Progeny 1828–1831

  27 Entering Society 1830–1834

  28 Relinquishing Pleasure 1833–1836

  V KEEPER OF THE SHRINE

  29 Problems of Reputation 1836–1838

  30 Reparation and Renewal 1838–1840

  31 Continental Rambles 1840–1844

  32 Enter, the Italians 1843–1844

  33 Blackmail and Forgery 1844–1846

  34 Anxious Times 1843–1848

  35 The Chosen One 1848–1831

  36 Afterlife

  Appendices

  1 An Account of the Burial of Shelley’s Heart

  2 Some Unpublished Letters

  3 Portraits of Mary Shelley

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft as sketched in 1794 by Lawrence

  2. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, by John Opie, 1796

  3. Detail from ‘The New Morality’, by James Gillray

  4. The Polygon, Somers Town

  5. St Pancras Churchyard, 1815

  6. An illustration by William Blake to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories

  7. No. 41 Skinner Street from Fleet Market

  8. Ramsgate

  9. Isabella Baxter Booth, as Lady Jane Grey, c. 1814–16

  10. Claire Clairmont, by Amelia Curran, 1819

  11. Charles Clairmont, c. 1835

  12. A sketch, possibly of Mary Shelley, given by Trelawny to W.M. Rossetti

  13. Mary Shelley, by Reginald Easton, c. 1857

  14. ‘Clytie’: bust of a Roman lady, Towneley Collection

  15. A possible portrait of Mary Shelley, 1833–43

  16. Possible self-portrait, 1822

  17. Mary Shelley, by Richard Rothwell, 1839–40

  18. Elizabeth Shelley

  19. Timothy Shelley

  20. Portrait of Shelley, by Amelia Curran, 1819

  21. Detail from the Curran portrait of Shelley

  22. A typical interpretation of the Curran portrait

  23. Edward Ellerker Williams’s watercolour of Shelley, c. 1821–2

  24. Byron, drawn by Count d’Orsay, 1823

  25. The Villa Diodati

  26. John Polidori

  27. The Auberge at Sécheron

  28. The Mer de Glace, by J. W. M. Turner

  29. The first page of volume 3 of Frankenstein

  30. The Bishopsgate cottage

  31. Albion House, Marlow

  32. Leigh Hunt, by Samuel Lawrence

  33. William Shelley, by Amelia Curran

  34. Allegra, Claire Clairmont’s daughter

  35. Margaret King, from an engraving c. 1801

  36. Casa Frassi, Pisa

  37. Casa Prini, Bagni di San Giuliano

  38. Thomas Medwin

  39. Francesco Pacchiani

  40. Edward Ellerker Williams

  41. Jane Williams, by George Clint

  42. Alexander Mavrocordato, by J. G. Hiltensperger

  43. Edward Trelawny

  44. Drawings by Edward Ellerker Williams

  45. The Villa Magni, by Henry Roderick Newman

  46. Shelley’s cremation, by Louis-Edward Fournier

  47. Byron, from a cut-out by Marianne Hunt

  48. Teresa Guiccioli, after John Hayter

  49. The Strand, near Villiers Street, 1823

  50. John Howard Payne

  51. Washington Irving

  52. An evening at Dr Kitchiner’s home, by George Cruikshank

  53. Thomas Moore, by Sir Thomas Lawrence

  54. Richard Rothwell

  55. John Murray

  56. Samuel Rogers

  57. Harrow on the Hill

  58. Augusta Goring, by John Linnell

  59. Godwin at seventy-six, by W. Brockenden

  60. Sir Percy Florence Shelley, photographed c. 1880

  61. Sir Percy Florence Shelley, from a cartoon by ‘Ape’ in Vanity Fair

  62. Lady Shelley

  63. Thomas Jefferson Hogg

  64. Monument to Shelley, by Horatio Weekes

  65. Shelley drawn by Alfred Sourd

  66. Frankenstein: the frontispiece of the 1831 edition

  67. Frankenstein on stage, 1850

  68. Frankenstein on screen, 1931

  PREFACE

  Mary Shelley’s course was set from that early morning in the summer of 1814 when she and her stepsister Claire Clairmont left their home in dingy Holborn to run away with Percy Shelley across war-ravaged France to Switzerland, seen by them as the romantic birthplace of the Enlightenment. Mary was only sixteen, her stepsister was fifteen. Shelley, just twenty-one, had left his young pregnant wife behind. The following spring, Mary gave birth to his child, a little girl who died a few weeks later.

  Eight years on, Mary miscarried her fifth child. Only one survived. She was not yet twenty-five when Shelley drowned in a sailing accident with a friend off the north-west coast of Italy. Shelley’s death was the scene to which Victorian painters were drawn, and one can see why. His friends Edward Trelawny, Byron and Leigh Hunt were there to see the fish-eaten remains of the poet’s body burned on a lonely shore while Mary, shocked and grief-stricken, shut herself away in her room to mourn alone. After her death, a sculptor would show her as the mater dolorosa, her husband’s body stretched over her knees.

  Today, the most famous scene from Mary’s life and, perhaps, in literary history is the stormy summer night at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva when Byron, his handsome young doctor John Polidori, the Shelleys and Mary’s stepsister, who was carrying Byron’s child, decided to write horror stories for fun. This was the night on which Frankenstein, that best known of all Romantic works, was born. Its author was not yet nineteen.

  Frankenstein has become part of our lives. The ambitious young scientist who, in Mary’s bold imagination, became the first creator of a living human being without divine assistance – a shocking idea in her day and an extraordinary one for a young woman to choose for her first subject – is invoked almost daily in debates on the ethics of genetic engineering. Cartoonists
from George Cruikshank to Gary Larsen have made use of Frankenstein; a recent survey among American children showed his name to be more familiar than that of the President.

  Many books have been written about Frankenstein. The subject is of endless fascination. Where did the idea come from? Why did Mary choose to make the Creature a monster? Was she, as as some have suggested, exorcizing her own demons? Mary Wollstonecraft died a few days after giving birth to Mary; did Mary see herself as the monstrous child who killed her mother, or does the Creature represent her tormented relationship with Mary Jane Clairmont, the stepmother who made her feel an exile in her own home?

  In the course of research, new possibilities presented themselves. As a sickly and troubled young girl, Mary was sent away from her family to live among strangers at Dundee, then one of the biggest whaling ports in Britain. The story which encloses the tale of Victor Frankenstein and his scientific experiment is of an ambitious young man who sets off to find a new land beyond the North Pole, following the route taken by the whaling vessels which were a feature of Mary’s life at Dundee. It was there, she wrote later, ‘that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered’. Here, it appears, she began work on a story which was later adapted to frame the story of Frankenstein.

  A further and intriguing possibility emerged as I was considering the summer of 1815, when Mary was temporarily on her own, staying in lodgings at Clifton. Living within strolling distance of Bristol, a town which had grown prosperous on the slave trade, Mary read books on the subject with increasing horror and indignation. Slavery, although formally abolished in England, remained a thriving industry; in England, slaves were still being rescued from service in the mid-nineteenth century. At Bristol, the evidence was all around her. Here, surely, was the explanation for the Creature’s carefully described and decidedly un-English appearance, his hair of ‘a lustrous blackness’, his ‘yellow’ skin and teeth ‘of a pearly whiteness’, features which, when combined with his strength and muscular build, suggest that the author was deliberately evoking the African and West Indian, while his yellow skin hints at the Eastern ‘lascars’ whom she would have seen on her journeys from the London docks. Here, too, was a clue to why Mary, whose sympathies as an author are with the Creature, lays so much emphasis on the fact that Victor Frankenstein judges him – misjudges him – by his appearance. She was, it seems, covertly attacking a society which still believed that the physical appearance of the Africans indicated their moral inferiority to Europeans.

  My interest in Mary began with the woman, not the subject. Twenty-five years ago I wrote a historical novel about Byron. This led me to the Shelleys. Richard Holmes’s enthralling life of the poet had just been published; there, I encountered Mary as a sulky, bad-tempered young woman, a nagging wife. Edward Trelawny’s celebrated memoirs confirmed Holmes’s portrait while suggesting also that Mary was a relentless social climber, frantic to be accepted on any terms. Why, I wondered, should Shelley have left his pretty young first wife and risked disgrace for such a woman? If he did have an affair with Mary’s stepsister, well, why not? They lived in the same house; they all believed in free love; Claire Clairmont sounded amusing and attractive. If Mary spent her widowhood struggling to promote her husband’s reputation and to elevate him to the status of a saint, she was no doubt compensating for having failed him during his life. This, I am embarrassed to remember, was how I presented Mary in my novel. I thought it was the truth.

  Biographers are often drawn to a subject with whom they have made some form of identification. Living on my own in London and bringing up a young son on not very much money, I began to think about Mary again. She, after Shelley’s death, was forced to bring her little boy back to England from Italy, the land she loved, in order to obtain an allowance – she had no money of her own and Shelley’s will had been lost – from her disapproving father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley. Her own father, William Godwin, once highly regarded as the author of one of the boldest works of the late eighteenth century, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, was by 1823 destitute and dependent on Mary’s help for his own survival.

  Despite Sir Timothy’s grudging payments, all of which were expected to be returned to the estate, with interest, after his death, and his insistence that she should neither publish his son’s works nor use his name, Mary managed to write successfully enough to keep them all. At the same time, although she was herself treated as a social outcast, she risked her reputation to help her friends. ‘I have ever defended women when oppressed,’ she wrote in the journal to which she confided her most private thoughts. When one friend was exiled from her husband’s house because she had been having an affair, Mary unhesitatingly championed and cared for her; when another had an illegitimate child, Mary helped mastermind a daring plan to send her abroad on a forged passport as the ‘wife’ of a woman who had boldly decided to become a transvestite. This, I began to realize, was a woman of exceptional courage and determination. She had no need to reproach herself for not having, like her mother, written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; she was a heroine in her own right.

  The more I read, the more Mary intrigued me. Not only did she live in a period of radical social transition, commencing in the bitter aftermath of the French Revolution and ending in the age of commerce – she died in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition – but in what a circle! Not only Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Trelawny, but Melbourne, Disraeli, Lady Blessington and Caroline Norton – Mary had known them all. Outcast though she felt herself to be, her friends had included the most fascinating and influential people of her times. It seemed a cruel irony that Sir Timothy Shelley, a wealthy provincial landowner whose world was circumscribed by the borders of his Sussex estate and who, it happens, was in no position to sit in judgment on the behaviour of his son’s young widow, should have possessed the power to control and restrict the life of a woman far superior to himself.

  Curiosity was further piqued by many mysteries and apparent contradictions in her story. Why did Mary give the name of her adored dead child to the little boy who is wantonly destroyed by Frankenstein’s creature? Did she, shortly after eloping with Shelley, resist or obey his instructions to have an affair with the man he regarded as his closest friend? Why did she turn so violently against this friend a year or two later? How much did she really know about the mysterious child – some believe it to have been Claire Clairmont’s – adopted by Shelley in Naples and registered by him as Mary’s baby? Why, when she so adored her father that she wrote of ‘my excessive and romantic attachment’ to him, did she abandon her attempt to write his life, knowing how much posthumous fame had meant to William Godwin? Why, when she evidently enjoyed flirtation and was sought after by many men, did she never remarry? Why, when she treasured her imagination and used it to produce such a powerful work as Frankenstein, could she never again match its vivid intensity? Was it some secret knowledge or experience that made her strangely apprehensive about her son’s sexual life? What were the ‘calumnies’ which caused her to be shunned by many after her return to England in 1823 and which were still being whispered when she died? Easily duped, as she often ruefully acknowledged, did she ever discover that she had been involved in a plan to smuggle a forged Titian into England for the new National Gallery? There were many questions to be asked and nowhere answers to be found.

  This was not, however, for lack of material. Mary Shelley has, over the last twenty years, become one of the most popular subjects for students of the Romantic period, second only to Wordsworth. In Japan, she is a literary cult. Examinations of her novels and of her editing of her husband’s poems could fill a bookcase. Emily Sunstein’s Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (1984; 1989), the most recent biography, celebrates Mary as an erudite and independent woman and a writer of significant merit in a period which, if we set aside Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, is not rich in female authors of distinction. Betty T. Bennett’s fine three-volume edition of her letters, together with a
splendid one-volume edition of her journals by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, have recently been augmented by the magnificent edition of the Clairmont correspondence assembled by Marion Kingston Stocking.

  The academic reader is well served. The general reader is not so fortunate. There are now accessible major biographies of every important literary figure of the Romantic period with the exception of Mary Shelley. Muriel Spark’s lively and unsurprisingly shrewd study of her, written in 1951, was updated in 1988, but this is an overview of her life and works rather than a comprehensive biography The enthusiasm which greeted Claire Tomalin’s publication in 1998 of Maurice, a long-lost short story which Mary had written for a little girl in Italy, demonstrated how much public interest in Mary Shelley has grown. This was cheering news, for by 1998 I was already fully committed to writing this book.

  I am, in several respects, extremely lucky. This is the first time that one of Mary Shelley’s biographers has been able to make use of authoritative printed editions, not only of all her correspondence and that of the Clairmonts and Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister, but of her short stories, her travel writings and her five novels. The only major work relating to Mary which remains unpublished is the daily journal which her father kept until his death in 1836 and of which I have made extensive use. Fortunate in having turned up several documents and letters by and relating to Mary which have not been previously published, I have been lucky above all in having had the time to explore the wonderfully rich variety of locations in which Mary lived, and in living at a time when so many of them survive.

  Places, I have often found, are the key to understanding. The little churchyard of St Pancras where Mary used to visit her mother’s grave as a child and where her love-affair with Shelley began is now hemmed in by railway lines and roads, not footpaths and cornfields. Sitting there at dusk, on a summer evening, however, the traffic begins to fade and it is not, after all, hard to imagine a little girl in 1800, learning to spell from the letters on Mary Wollstonecraft’s gravestone. Nor is it hard to conjure up the pale, excited girl with a cloud of red-gold hair who, in die summer of 1814, was standing here when she first told Shelley that she loved him. Climbing the steep twisting path up to the Casa Bertini, the Shelleys’ home at Bagni di Lucca, sneaking, without permission, up to the dusty library of books on the top floor of Byron’s grand palace on the Lung’Arno at Pisa, roaming through the abandoned gardens there behind the Shelleys’ own old home across the river, sitting, dazzled by light, on top of the little castle of San Terenzo which looks down on the Villa Magni and the bay where Shelley took Mary sailing the month before his death; all this brings the past to life with a jump.