Mary Shelley Read online

  She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became chearful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect, and which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it.9

  This is the Mary Wollstonecraft we see in the portrait which John Opie painted of her that summer, with the curve of a smile rounding her cheek, the softness of the famous auburn hair carelessly bound up behind, and the swell of her stomach frankly exposed to view by the new high-waisted style which allowed liberated – and pregnant – ladies to leave off their merciless stays. Here, and in Godwin’s memorable description, is the matchless Mary he loved, even if he did not always understand her. That came later, in the painful months when he was collecting material for her life.

  The greatest bond between them was their unborn child, referred to so often and so tenderly in their letters. They began to call each other ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ as they discussed the way their William would be brought up. Mary adored children. In her brief career as a governess in Ireland with the Kingsborough family, she had won the enduring devotion of little Margaret King who, as Lady Mountcashell, would later take pride in claiming that her ideas on education were based on the practical and kindly teachings of Mary Wollstonecraft. The letters Mary wrote to Imlay from Sweden are at their most moving in their references to Fanny, the ‘frolicker’ and ‘cherub’ over whose uncertain future she agonized. Her views on education altered as she matured, but they were linked by an enduring faith in love as the key to all. Sharing Godwin’s memory of an unhappy and neglected childhood, she shared with him too a conviction that the recipe for success in life lay in a happy and secure upbringing. In a passage from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which caught Mary Shelley’s eye long before she wrote about Frankenstein’s reviled monster-child, her mother observed that a ‘great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents’.10

  Female education had been a subject of primary importance to Mary long before she gave birth to a daughter. Much of A Vindication had been written as an attack on Rousseau’s Emilius (Emile), a book which she disliked as strongly as she admired La Nouvelle Héloïse. Angered by Rousseau’s emphasis on women as the weak, dependent pupils of their husbands, formed to flatter, captivate and allure but never to think for themselves, Mary stressed the importance of equal opportunity. Girls, in her view, would benefit from sharing in the vigorous exercise permitted to their brothers. (She had painful childhood memories of being kept sitting in useless activity for hours at a time by a vicious father and a mother who never resisted his will.) Girls should be co-educated in day schools for all social classes and tutored, until the age of nine, in a wide range of subjects which would include anatomy, medicine and the art of debate. Sex education could be given from the self-evident examples of domestic pets. Neatness of appearance was unfailingly emphasized. (We get a nice sidelight on contemporary life in Wollstonecraft’s reproaches to women too idle to take off their party dresses before crawling into bed.) Modesty, of the kind which Rousseau praised as a form of calculated titillation, was abhorrent to her. Education had achieved its ends if it produced self-respecting, reasoning women who saw no shame in earning their own keep.

  Like Godwin, and Locke before him, Mary was vigorously opposed to the notion that children should be restrained and checked. Many of the most remarkable women, she noted, had been allowed liberty when young. It was a principle she had put into practice when she was in charge of Margaret King; under her care, Margaret had flourished.

  Experience had softened some of Mary’s views. Vanity, which she had seen as a dangerous vice in A Vindication, had come to seem no more than an ‘enviable harmless’ quality, producing a charming ‘gai[e]té du coeur’ in the young women she met in France.11 Godwin had taught her to see that the reading of novels was not such a depraved activity as she had previously supposed. And, while she had once thought that ‘women of sensibility’, that is, women of feeling, were the least fitted to look after young girls, she now believed that stimulating a child’s imagination was among the most important aspects of its upbringing.

  The best guide to Godwin and Mary’s thoughts on education is The Enquirer, the collection of essays which Godwin wrote while he and Mary were discussing the upbringing of their unborn child. It is a work which starts from and constantly reverts to a single thought, that ‘The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness.’12 A happy child, these liberated parents thought, would be inquiring, cheerful, affectionate and articulate. To help it become so, there should be no threats, no sense of force, censure or restriction. ‘I cannot ardently love a person who is continually warning me not to enter his premises, who plants a hedge about my path, and thwarts me in the impulses of my heart,’ Godwin wrote, remembering the harsh ways of his own early teacher, Samuel Newton of Norwich.13 Don’t condescend, he warned; remember that children are to be brought up, not the adult down. Reason with them. Encourage them to grow beyond you and to relish the modern world of science and discovery. Let them see what is wrong in the world as well as what is good. Above all, let them choose for themselves.

  The Enquirer is a remarkable book, generous, hopeful, compassionate and wise. Reading it brings us close to the Godwins and their way of thinking; here, Mary’s sensibility is perfectly matched to Godwin’s dream of creating a wholly benevolent society.

  *

  In 1795, Mary had begun a child’s primer called Lessons, intended as the first of a series of books for little Fanny, then one year old.14 In 1797, she took it out and started making additions intended for the new baby. ‘See how much taller you are than William,’ she tells Fanny in Lesson X; in Lesson XI: ‘I carry William, because he is too weak to walk.’

  Another of these endearing short lessons invites Fanny to dry her tears after a fall and come out for a walk in the fields. Mary’s letters give us other glimpses of such expeditions. Both Maria Reveley and Eliza Fenwick had toddlers of an age to romp with Fanny and, as the grass parched in a strange, turbulent summer of violent storms and excessive, suffocating heat, the children were often taken out into the flat fields lying on the north side of the Polygon, to play at haymaking with miniature rakes and pitchforks. Mary, no believer in languishing on a daybed during the months approaching childbirth, went on long walks with her husband, strolling under a parasol across Lamb’s Conduit Fields, up to the inns and noisy staging posts of Holborn and on to the booksellers of Ludgate Hill where pleasant gossip was to be gleaned. Sometimes they walked out early, past the tea-gardens and the modest homes which workmen were beginning to build for themselves on the eastern fringes of Somers Town, to breakfast in the shady hamlet of Sadler’s Wells. Mary’s health was excellent, but she had to remind the inexperienced Godwin not to walk too fast. She was looking forward to liberation from the frisky burden of Master William.

  Inclement weather often kept them indoors. The storm of 16 July was felt all over the country. In London, not even the oldest inhabitant could remember anything to equal it; a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine recalled ‘the fiery agitation of the firmament seeming momentarily to threaten the earth with universal conflagration … the consequences cannot be contemplated without horror.’15 The storms continued with almost equal violence into the third week of August; a week earlier, the King’s Assistant Astronomer, Caroline Herschel, was the first to sight a new comet in the sky. To the Godwins, it was an augury of hope. ‘And thou, strange Star,’ Mary Shelley wrote twenty-five years later:

  ascendant at my birth

  Which rained, they said, kind influence on the earth,

  So from great parents sprung I dared to boast

  Fortune my friend …16

  On
the evening of 29 August, Godwin and his wife sat cosily reading a favourite book, The Sorrows of Young Werther. ‘En famille,’ Godwin fondly wrote in his journal, relishing the prospect of his first child’s arrival. ‘I have no doubt of seeing the animal* today,’ Mary reported to him the following morning; she allayed his anxiety with a calm request for a novel or a newspaper to while away the tedium of waiting.17

  Ideally, Godwin would have liked his wife to be attended by a male doctor, probably his friend, the chemist and surgeon Anthony Carlisle. But Mary overruled him. A midwife was all she required. Fanny’s birth had given her no trouble. She expected to be up for dinner the following day. Godwin was still working in his rooms that afternoon when a note from Mary arrived, telling him that Mrs Blenkinsop, an experienced midwife from the Westminster Lying-in Hospital, was in attendance and a safe delivery was confidently expected, ‘but that I must have a little patience’.18 Strangely, they were the words which her mother had spoken just before her death.

  It took nine hours for the baby to be born. Godwin was summoned in shortly before midnight to see, not the expected William, but a healthy baby daughter, a new Mary. It was a joyful moment, lovingly recalled in several of his novels. A short time later, the midwife asked him to send for assistance. The afterbirth had not come away. It was two in the morning, but Godwin was sufficiently alarmed by Mrs Blenkinsop’s manner to take a carriage across London to the Westminster Hospital.† He brought back Dr Poignand, the only member of the Royal College of Physicians who also held a licence as a midwife.

  Poignand shared Mrs Blenkinsop’s concern. He went to work at once and continued for a period of hours until he believed all of the placenta had been pulled free. He probably worked with his bare hands. Mary told Godwin the next day that she had never known such pain.

  Both Anthony Carlisle and George Fordyce, a doctor Mary had known and trusted for almost fifteen years, were reassuring when they visited the Polygon that day, a Thursday. All was going to be well. Fanny was dispatched for a short holiday with the Reveleys; Godwin felt easy enough to go back to his work room.

  Sunday was the turning point. Godwin had invited his sister to dine at the Polygon with her friend, Louisa Jones, a young woman who was being considered for the post of nurse to Mary and Fanny. He came back from a visit across town to hear that his wife had been suffering from shivering fits. The guests were hastily put off. Mary asked Godwin to eat in the little ground-floor parlour instead of the dining-room on the first floor which was directly below her bedroom. Perhaps she wanted to avoid alarming him; her next shivering fit was so violent that the floorboards rattled.

  The following day, Fordyce gave Mary the heartbreaking news that she must stop feeding her baby in case her milk poisoned it. She tried to join in the laughter when puppies were brought to drain her overflowing breasts. By now, a terrible play was in progress. Mary seemed to believe she would recover; Godwin had been quietly informed that there was little hope. On Wednesday, summoned by an anxious Basil Montagu at Godwin’s request, Anthony Carlisle arrived to take charge of the frightened household. His sweetness and consideration had helped them all to endure, Godwin told him later; he was a hero among men.

  Carlisle, later knighted for his services as Surgeon Extraordinary to the Prince Regent, was renowned for his kindness and for an uncommon faculty for making friends. He was not, however, regarded with much respect by his fellow surgeons,‡ and Fordyce was notoriously erratic in his diagnoses. It does not follow that any other doctor could have done better. Puerperal fever was common enough to wipe out whole wards of women at a time, but by 1797 only one Scottish doctor, Alexander Gordon, witnessing an outbreak in Aberdeen, had made a tentative connection between the birth attendant and the rapid spread of infection. All poor Godwin could gather from the many doctors who attended his wife at the Polygon during the dreadful last ten days of her life was that the afterbirth had been insufficiently extracted. In fact, had it been left in place to expel itself naturally, Mary might have survived. The disease was introduced on the hands that endeavoured to save her.

  Godwin was constantly in Mary’s room during the last three days of her life. So were Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick and Mary’s devoted maid, Marguerite. Four male friends kept vigil in the ground-floor parlour, in case any messages could be run; Carlisle was in constant attendance. On Friday, 8 September, Godwin tried to discover his wife’s wishes regarding the children without disclosing the hopelessness of her case. (Carlisle insisted that her hopes of recovery should be encouraged.) Godwin’s diary for that day recorded a ‘solemn communication’, although his subsequent memoir of Wollstonecraft states that she had nothing to communicate. Mary did have one message to give. Shortly before her death, she whispered to Eliza Fenwick that Godwin was ‘the kindest, best man in the world’.21

  She died on the morning of 10 September. Godwin noted the time but not the fact in his journal. For a man who resolutely opposed the comforting notion of an afterlife, the loss was absolute. In St Leon, the novel which he wrote the following year and in which his friend Holcroft found a moving portrait of Mary in Marguerite de Damville, he relived the birth of his child, the death of his wife, and the void into which he knew she had gone.

  Great God of heaven! what is man? and of what are we made? Within that petty frame resided for years all that we worship, for there resided all that we know and can conceive of excellence. That heart is now still. Within the whole extent of that frame there exists no thought, no feeling, no virtue. It remains no longer, but to mock my sense and scoff at my sorrow, to rend my bosom with a woe, complicated, matchless and inexpressible … I never loved but once; I never loved but Marguerite.22

  He could not bring himself to follow Holcroft’s urging and deliver Mary’s body up for useful dissection. A death mask was made. Tresses of her lovely hair were cut and preserved in the custom of the time, for himself and for the children. Opie either gave or sold him the lifelike portrait to hang in the room which had been hers, and which Godwin now made his. The finality of death made it all the more important that her memory should be kept alive.

  The funeral was held on 15 September at the little field-enclosed church of St Pancras where Godwin and Mary had married only a few months before. A grave was dug in the north-east corner of the churchyard.§ None of the friends Godwin had urged to attend were believers, but only one, George Tuthill, refused to compromise himself by entering a church, even when Godwin begged him to abandon ‘so cold a reflection’.23

  Misery rather than principle kept Godwin himself loitering wretchedly in James Marshall’s lodgings, where he tried to read a book about child education before writing a letter of gratitude to Anthony Carlisle. He could not trust himself to write about ‘the dear deceased’; he hoped that Carlisle reciprocated the love he felt for a man who combined ‘so clear and capacious an understanding, with so much goodness of heart and sweetness of manners’. Above the solace of friendship, Godwin asked his friend for the devastating candour which he himself offered only to those he loved: ‘But, above all, be severely sincere. I ought to be acquainted with my own defects, and to trace their nature in the effects they produce.’ Unusually, for a man of restrained expression, he signed the letter, ‘with fervent admiration and regard’.24 From any other man, it would have seemed an extraordinary letter to write during the funeral of his wife. It was entirely in keeping with the character of William Godwin.

  The baby was brought home from Mrs Reveley’s two days after the funeral. She was now the only Mary in Godwin’s life. Hoping to identify in her the qualities of his late wife, Godwin persuaded Carlisle’s friend, the physicist William Nicholson, to undertake a phrenological examination on 18 September. Nicholson, no expert, did his best and sent his assessment on the same day The baby had been squalling during the examination, and his chief concern had been to reassure the widower that there was no physical evidence of a difficult nature; ‘resigned vexation’, perhaps, but no indication of ‘sullenness’ or ‘scorn�
�. The area encompassing the eyes and brows showed again that she was ‘surely not given to rage’. The shape of the head suggested ‘considerable memory and intelligence’, but ‘it would be silly to risk a character’ on such a brief assessment.25

  We do not know whether Godwin took comfort from this; we do know that he was eager to establish a firm distinction between the child of Gilbert Imlay and his own. He had always argued that children are born intellectually equal; in the first year of Mary’s life, he recorded a change in his views. Education remained ‘a powerful instrument, yet there exist differences of the highest importance between human beings from the period of their birth.’26

  *

  In October 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft was highly enough esteemed for so sedate a publication as the Gentleman’s Magazine to publish the following tribute.

  Her manners were gentle, easy, and elegant, her conversation intelligent and amusing, without the least trait of literary pride, or the apparent consciousness of power above the level of her sex; and, for soundness of understanding, and sensibility of heart, she was, perhaps, never equalled. Her practical skill in education was even superior to her speculations upon that subject; nor is it possible to express the misfortune sustained, in that respect, by her children.27