Mary Shelley Read online

  In February, a few weeks after this meeting, Godwin paid a call at the house where Mary was staying; she was not at home. Presumably informed of his visit, Mary was still hoping Imlay might come back to her. By March, a final exchange of letters with her former lover had extinguished all hope. On 14 April, after spending a reviving month in the country with an old friend, Mrs Cotton, Mary was feeling enterprising enough to walk down the hill from her lodgings in Pentonville to the newly created estate of Somers Town, north of what has now become Euston Road, where Godwin had a home in Chalton Street. She knocked at his door, and was admitted. The following week, Godwin arranged a dinner for some close friends. His undisclosed purpose was to introduce them to Mary Wollstonecraft.

  For a cautious man, Godwin was positively reckless in his courting. By June, he was ready to submit a love poem, to which Mary nervously responded that he had said nothing until now about his feelings for her. She wanted, she told him, ‘a bird’s-eye view of your heart’. Invitingly, she accompanied the letter with a volume of one of her favourite books, Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse.21 ‘Shall I write a love letter?’ Godwin asked her tenderly in July, when he was taking his annual holiday in the country:

  May Lucifer fly away with me, if I do! … Well then, what shall be my subject? Shall I send you an eulogium of your beauty, your talents & your virtues? Ah! that is an old subject: besides if I were to begin, instead of a sheet of paper, I should want a ream.22

  Godwin ended the letter by promising that when he returned in a week, he would stay by her side, ‘to depart no more’. He arrived home to find that Mary, who had been contemplating a life abroad, had decided instead to move into rooms conveniently close to Chalton Street.

  A very private love-affair was consummated in the middle of August when Godwin’s diary recorded, in endearingly transparent code, ‘Chez moi, toute.’ Letters were carried to and fro by Mary’s maid and by her little daughter Fanny Imlay, who grew fond of the kind, shabby gentleman whom her mother scolded for stuffing her with cakes and biscuits. To Fanny as to Mary’s friends, the handsome and recently divorced Cornish portrait-painter John Opie, a frequent caller, must have seemed a far more plausible candidate for the role of lover than sober, orderly Mr Godwin.§ Even such close friends of Godwin’s as Thomas Holcroft and the surgeon Anthony Carlisle had no clue from his behaviour of what was afoot: given the choice of a meal in with Mary or the opportunity to attend a lecture, he never hesitated. Outside his own door, he was still ready to play the confirmed bachelor, agreeable to all women, committed to none.

  All of Godwin’s natural cheerfulness was required to combat the terrors of a woman who had suffered so much humiliation at Imlay’s hands. The ease of an equal, mutual love was alien to her; time and again, Mary withdrew with a forlorn declaration of her independence, protecting herself against rejection. ‘Be happy Resolve to be happy,’ Godwin urged her on 17 August. ‘You deserve to be so. Everything that interferes with it is weakness and wandering; and a woman like you, can, must, shall, shake it off.’ But Mary’s fears were deep-rooted and there was, as Godwin came to understand, an ineradicable tendency towards melancholy in her nature. Feelings of ‘sublime tranquillity’ were constantly overwhelmed by presentiments of misfortune against which her continuing religious faith provided an insufficient bulwark.

  Marriage played no part in their plans. Godwin had written vigorously against it as an odious institution; Mary had both preached and practised the doctrine of free love. But her registered title of Mrs Imlay had allowed her to protect Fanny’s illegitimacy. The discovery that she was pregnant again, five months after they had begun sleeping together, came as a shock to them both. Godwin, no expert in such matters, had relied on the rhythm method to protect them; Mary proudly assured him that she was ready to survive the consequences of her behaviour alone.

  How was it possible for Godwin to let her do so? The women of his circle were progressive in conversation and theory; he was perfectly aware that few would put those theories into practice. If Mary gave birth to a child out of wedlock, she would instantly be robbed of both reputation and friends. Principles, in such circumstances, would have to be dropped. On 31 March 1797, accompanied only by Godwin’s loyal friend James Marshall, the couple were married at the little local church of St Pancras. Terse as always in his journal, Godwin recorded the event in one word: ‘Panc.’

  The news, reluctantly released, was coolly received. Only old Ann Godwin was delighted to think that her dear son had a wife at last. Several of Godwin’s female friends, Elizabeth Inchbald and Sarah Siddons among them, professed outrage.¶ How, they wished to know, were they to rejoice at a marriage which revealed the fiction of Mary’s status as ‘Mrs Imlay’? These fairweather friends kept their distance; others, like Maria Reveley and the novelist Eliza Fenwick, offered congratulations and friendship to a woman they warmly admired.|| Amelia Alderson, amused by the gap between sublime ideals and conventional expectations, borrowed some of the details of Godwin’s marriage and a good deal of his views on the subject for her novel, Adeline Mowbray (1805). Having married John Opie herself in 1798, Amelia saw marriage as a social necessity and forced the spirited Adeline to die regretting her independence. The deathbed recantation is not wholly convincing; it was Godwin’s lack of religious belief, not his unexpected marriage, which caused Amelia to keep him and his wife at a prudent distance as she herself became increasingly devout.

  Godwin had already begun planning for the future. The evening before the marriage ceremony, he met Mr Leroux, the builder who had been responsible for developing most of the new Somers Town estate. Leroux, who controlled the leasing of its houses, many of them to the less wealthy members of French emigré society, offered him a house in the Polygon, a handsome sixteen-sided development standing on the edge of the low, flat fields which looked westwards to the remote bulk of Primrose Hill and, far away to the north, the high heathland of Hampstead and Highgate. The developer had a home in the Polygon himself; the house he recommended to Godwin, No. 29, could be rented from a Miss Leonora Knapp of Kentish Town at a reasonable price. Godwin took it. For work purposes, he kept a couple of rooms round the corner in Evesham Buildings. Sometimes, since theirs was to be a modern marriage, with proper respect for each other’s needs and privacy, he expected to sleep there.

  Independence was maintained by mutual consent. The couple continued to make and receive calls without always bothering to consult each other; sometimes, Mary signed her letters in sturdy republican style as ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: femme Godwin’. There had never been any doubt about the sex or name of their baby. It would be a boy, and they would name him William.

  Notes

  NOTE: Unsourced material in this chapter is taken from the autobiography of William Godwin and the biography of him by his daughter, Mary Shelley. Neither work was completed. Both are in the Abinger collection as Dep. b. 226/1, Dep. c. 606/1–5, Dep. c. 532/8 and other folders. Also in the same collection is Godwin’s Journal, comprising 32 small notebooks, Dep. e. 196–227.

  1. William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (Faber, 1991), pp. 51–2 (hereafter G&S). Written by Robert Merry, who wrote under the pen-name Della Crusca and founded a poetry school under that name. He was the first poet with whom Godwin had a close friendship.

  2. A lucid account of Godwin’s philosophy is given by John Passmore in The Perfectibility of Man (Duckworth, 1970), ch. 9, ‘Governmentalists, Anarchists and Geneticists’.

  3. Mary Shelley (hereafter MWS) was wrongly informed by her father that the book had been priced at three guineas (C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 1 (1876), p. 80 (hereafter Godwin). But £1 16s. still placed it far beyond the reach of the working man. Like many influential works of the period, it was more discussed than read.

  4. ‘Godwin … attended the trials every day, though he knew himself to be a marked man, had his friends been found guilty,’ Mary Shelley wrote in the biography of her father which she ne
ver completed. Quoted by Kegan Paul, Godwin, 1, pp. 134–5, but see also the headnote to this chapter.

  5. William Godwin (hereafter WG)–Joseph Gerrald, 29.1.1794. Quoted in Godwin, 1, p. 128. Gerrald, a wealthy radical passionately committed to the cause of reform, was sentenced to be transported for fifteen years after attending a dinner, perceived as a subversive meeting. Mary Shelley’s account (see note 4) does not conceal her indignation at the injustice done to him.

  6. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), Oxford World Classics, p. 20.

  7. WG (Abinger, Dep. b. 226/1).

  8. Andrew Kippis, A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers, with regard to their Late Application to Parliament (1772), p. 26.

  9. Godwin, 1, p. 19.

  10. WG, An Account of the Seminary (1783), reprinted in Political and Philosophical Works of William Godwin, 5, ed. Pamela Clemit (Pickering & Chatto, 1993) (hereafter Works). The prospectus offered tuition in Greek, Latin, French and English to twelve pupils.

  11. Ann Godwin–WG, 29.5.1788 (Godwin, 1, pp. 55–6).

  12. Ibid., p. 39.

  13. Amelia Alderson–WG, 1 November 1796 (Abinger, Dep. b. 210/6).

  14. Godwin, 1, p. 40.

  15. William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre (New York, 1832), p. 182.

  16. WG, Memoirs of the author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1798), ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin Books, 1987), p. 245.

  17. Godwin, who destroyed it, noted in the Memoirs that the autobiographical elements of the play had been treated seriously.

  18. Godwin and Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Lawrence, 1966), p. 2 (hereafter G&M).

  19. See St Clair, G&S, pp. 155–6, for an account of the relationship between Godwin and Maria Reveley (later Gisborne) at this period.

  20. WG, Memoirs, ch. 8, p. 249.

  21. Mary Wollstonecraft (hereafter MW)–WG, 1.7.1796 (G&M).

  22. WG–MW, 13.7.1796 (G&M).

  * Her timing was fortunate; when a second, signed edition was printed by her friend Joseph Johnson, in January 1791, its title swiftly connected her to that more famous revolutionary, Tom Paine, whose The Rights of Man was published shortly afterwards. Mary Wollstonecraft, admired but hitherto little known for a novel, Mary (1788), for a collection of children’s tales, Original Stories (1788) and for her hastily compiled Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was now a name to be reckoned with.

  † The number of Godwin’s siblings who outlived childhood is uncertain. Hull, the eldest brother, remained with his family on the Norfolk farm with their mother. Joseph, John, Nathaniel (Nattie or Nat), Hannah and Harriet are the names which appear in Godwin’s (unpublished) journal. Harriet seems to have been the wife of Joseph rather than a full sister.

  ‡ Imlay’s trade was largely based around shipping iron, soap and coal into wartime France from neutral countries. He arranged to be paid in Bourbon silver which he would receive in Sweden. Joel Barlow, a fellow American living in Paris, joined the scheme for breaking the British blockade; their Franco-Swedish colleague was one Elias Backman. Imlay’s part was to arrange shipping from Le Havre.

  § Opie’s feelings for Mary have never been quite clear, but the portrait he painted of her in 1797 is full of warmth and glowing colour. In 1798, he married Godwin’s friend, Amelia Alderson of Norwich.

  ¶ Mrs Siddons’s high-mindedness was particularly chilling, since Mary Wollstonecraft had become friendly with her family and often dined with her relations, the Twisses.

  || Eliza Fenwick had published a forward-looking novel, Secresy, in 1795; her husband John was a friend of Godwin’s.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A BIRTH AND A DEATH

  1797–1798

  ‘I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy.’

  William Godwin to Thomas Holcroft, 17971

  GODWIN’S FRIENDS RAISED THEIR EYEBROWS AT THE MARRIAGE. His mother sent her hearty congratulations together with a basket of eggs and the promise of a feather bed for a servant’s bedroom. Her only worry was that her sensible William might make the same mistake as his brother Joseph.

  My dears, whatever you do, do not make invitations and entertainments, that was what hurt Jo. Live comfortable with one another. The Hart of her husband safely trusts in her. I cannot give you no better advise than out of Proverbs, the Prophets, and New Testament … Your eggs will spoil soon if you don’t pack them up in sawdust, bran, or something of the kind and turn them often. ’Tis pitty to pay carriage for them if they don’t keep.2

  There must have been times when Godwin wished that his wife was as domesticated as his mother. Their arrangement was supposed to be one of equals, but he was old-fashioned enough to assume that, while he was peacefully writing in Evesham Buildings, Mary would be looking after the day-to-day affairs.

  In this, Godwin had mistaken his woman. Mary meant to emulate the success of Caleb Williams, a book still popular with the circulating libraries fifty years later, with a novel of her own. Her first, Mary, had been dashed off; if Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman showed more feeling than art, it was not for lack of hard endeavour. With a book to write, she had no time to waste on housekeeping. She was, she told Godwin, no more fitted to the unpleasant business of daily dealings with ‘trades-people’ than he was himself; besides, ‘my time appears to me, as valuable as that of any other persons accustomed to employ themselves.’3 Neither would she accept instructions about her choice of social engagements. She was willing to sacrifice a country outing to meet Hannah, her new sister-in-law, but she was not prepared to be told whether or not she might dine alone with Godwin’s playwright friend, Thomas Holcroft. ‘I like to see new faces, as a study,’ she defended herself, although Holcroft’s face was perfectly familiar to her.4

  There are many moments in the correspondence between this strong-willed couple to remind us of the passion with which they had disagreed at their first meeting. Godwin was forty-one; his wife was thirty-eight. They were too old to surrender the habits they had formed, and the sense of independence was strong on both sides. It seemed to Godwin, when he took a long jaunt out of town to the west Midlands in June, that he was behaving like the most dutiful of husbands. He had made himself amiable to Mary’s sister Everina, a woman who turned out to have all his wife’s spirit but little of her charm. (Everina was employed as a governess at the Staffordshire family home of Godwin’s benefactor, young Tom Wedgwood.) He had chosen a pretty little Staffordshire mug for Fanny with her initial in a garland of flowers. He had written almost every day. Mary had no need to chide him, he thought, for extending his stay to catch a glimpse of Lady Godiva at Coventry Fair. It did not occur to him that gawping at a slender beauty in a ‘close dress’ was not the most tactful pleasure to share with a pregnant wife. A little delay, he wrote briskly, was ‘not necessarily tragical’.5

  All delays and absences were tragical to a woman who lived in terror of being deserted again. After icily acknowledging that it must indeed have been tempting to stay for such a fine show, Mary asked if he thought his wife as unfeeling as ‘a stick or a stone’. For himself, he had clearly forgotten how to think or to feel; as for her, ‘I am afraid to add what I feel. Good-night.’6

  Mary had right on her side. Godwin was a kind man and a good man, but he lacked emotional intuition. He himself admitted that he had no tact. (In another letter dating from his journey to Staffordshire, he referred to a new female acquaintance as clever enough to outshine all the goddesses of the Pantheon; news of a young friend’s marriage plans produced the thought that it was like hearing of a prison sentence to hard labour.) Godwin was baffled by his wife’s distress when he indicated the flaws in her religious beliefs; he was puzzled by her anger over the siege laid to him that summer by a young lady to whom Mary had initially been kind. Shaw’s Professor Higgins could not have been more perplexed than Godwin by his wife’s inability to be rea
sonable, to behave like a man.

  If Godwin and Mary sometimes sound like Katherine and Petruchio at war, the confessions of their mutual love have all the corresponding sweetness of an honest and robust relationship. ‘Take care of yourself, my love, & take care of William. Do not you be drowned, whatever I am,’ Godwin wrote just after setting off on his country jaunt that June with Basil Montagu, a clever young man who had temporarily thrown over his law studies to learn philosophy from the author of Political Justice. ‘I remember at every moment all the accidents to which your condition subjects you …’7 And Mary, missing her husband even before his letter had arrived, confessed that the first frisks of ‘Master William’ in her womb made her anticipate the baby’s birth ‘as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie’. Her love for him had grown, she added, even beyond ‘when I promised to love you for ever … You are a tender, affectionate creature; and I feel it thrilling through my frame giving and promising pleasure.’ Of course, as a thoroughly modern wife, she did not wish to have him ‘always at my elbow’, but then she grew wistful and added that ‘at this moment I did not care if you were.’8

  When, later, Godwin found himself trying to imagine the happy state in which Mary had spent her first months with Gilbert Imlay, he had his own experience to draw on. Like Imlay, he had watched her emerge from the shadow of a disappointed love into light and confidence. She was, he wrote, a female version of Goethe’s Werther, one of those rare beings ‘endowed with the most exquisite and delicious sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable’. But under the spell of love, her whole nature was transformed. In unmistakably sexual imagery, he compared her to a serpent on a rock which had sloughed its old skin to display the brilliant sleekness of youth. Here, and in the description which follows, we are seeing not Imlay’s Mary, but Godwin’s.