Mary Shelley Read online

  This respectful attitude did not survive the publication, in January 1798, of Godwin’s memoir of his wife.

  Rousseau’s Confessions pale beside the unflinching candour with which Godwin presented details which most of his readers would have preferred not to know, or to seem not to know. The Memoirs of the author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ did not allow for the luxury of hypocrisy. Fanny’s illegitimacy was as frankly acknowledged as the fact that Godwin’s own daughter had been conceived out of wedlock. Mary’s suicide attempts, which had previously been the subject of rumour rather than certainty, were no longer left in doubt. Railing against the double standards of women like Elizabeth Inchbald, Godwin did more, in the short term, for her cause than his wife’s. The last nail hammered into the coffin of Mary’s reputation was his simultaneous publication of the letters she had written to Gilbert Imlay at the height of their affair.

  The Monthly Review’s contributor, one of the mildest, waited until the autumn issue to wonder what on earth Mr Godwin could have been thinking of when he exhumed a history

  which we must read with pity and concern, but which we would have advised the author to bury in oblivion. Blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands, if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world.28

  Others were less kind, notably the Tory journals who already viewed Godwin as a political outcast and his wife as a threat to womanly virtue. The new Anti-Jacobin Review’s index for 1798 noted under the heading ‘Prostitution’: ‘See Mary Wollstonecraft.’29 Hannah More, whose educational views were not radically different from Mary’s own, opened her 1799 book on female education with an attack on ‘The Female Werter, as she is described by her biographer’ for daring to defend adultery.30 Mary’s friend, the philanthropist and biographer William Roscoe, pitied her the fate of being mourned by a husband ‘with a heart of stone’.31

  Scandal and hostile reviews had the predictable effect of making the Memoirs more discussed than read. By 1801, the anonymous author of ‘The Vision of Liberty’ was ready to believe that Godwin had told a story of ‘brothel feats of wantonness’:

  Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight,

  How oft she cuckolded the silly clown

  And lent, O lovely piece, herself to half the town.32

  The damage was enduring. A Vindication was not republished until the 1840s.33¶ References to it were hedged by warnings against the character of the author. As late as 1833, the author of a six-volume book on British painters jeered at the ‘ridiculous advances’ made by Mary to Fuseli, hailed here as ‘the Shakespeare of canvas’ for his celebrated engravings of Shakespeare’s plays. Reviewing this, the Quarterly wondered if the author had been able to transcribe without laughing Mr Godwin’s account of a relationship based on ‘“refined sentiment, and the simple deduction of morality and reason.” Refined Sentiment!’ jeered the Quarterly. ‘Morality and Reason!’34

  The Memoirs cost Godwin several friendships and helped to identify him as a cold-blooded monster. The fault was not all his, and he probably knew it. Publications like the Anti-Jacobin Review, which had a secret subsidy from the government, were dedicated to ridiculing anyone whose ideas offered a threat to the establishment; Political Justice, with its proposals for a self-governing benevolent society of equals, made Godwin a prime target for the review’s crude satire. He was known to be against marriage and official religion; he was (wrongly) believed to favour abortion, easy divorce and infanticide. The Memoirs enabled the government’s supporters to tar Mary with the same sticky brush. From 1798 on, Godwin and his late wife were repeatedly singled out as wrong-headed, irresponsible enemies of public safety, the kind of loose-living idealists of whom honest Englishmen should beware.

  Little Mary knew nothing of this. Her mother was spoken of with a love amounting to veneration by her father and by the women whose comforting arms embraced her. The mother she knew was the warm-eyed lady who smiled from the wall in her father’s study, whose grave she was taken to visit when she was still too small to understand quite what death meant.

  It is hard to be sure at what point and to what degree Mary felt that her own birth had robbed this beautiful, vital woman of her life – her mother was only thirty-eight when she died. Frankenstein’s creation of a child he perceives as abhorrent may tell us something dark and troubling about Mary’s view of herself. It reveals nothing of her feelings towards Mary Wollstonecraft. But it is worth noticing how closely the infamous creation scene is linked to one of Victor Frankenstein’s most nightmarish fantasies. He has already seen the Creature move and open an eye when, retreating to his bedroom, he has a hideous vision of his beloved cousin, Elizabeth Lavenza.

  I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of flannel.35

  Waking, Frankenstein is confronted by his own and to his eyes, hateful creation as, smiling, it stretches a hand towards him. His response is to rush away from it. Does the clue to Frankenstein’s hysterical aversion to his ‘child’ lie in the horrible train of connections its birth has mysteriously stimulated? His mother died, as we have already been informed, from a fever caught from Elizabeth. Mary may well have blamed herself for the puerperal fever of which Mary Wollstonecraft died. No doctor knew enough to lift that troubling conviction from her mind. Godwin, however privately, may have shared it.

  One could fill a book – and many books have been filled – with such speculations.36 But it is not always wise to see Mary Shelley’s fictions as exactly reflecting the truth. ‘He adored my mother,’ she wrote in one of her short souvenir album stories; ‘he mourned for her to the verge of insanity; but his grief was silent, devouring, and gloomy.’37 It sounds just right; surely this is how William Godwin must have been after Mary’s death? Godwin’s distress was great and sincere, but by April 1798 he was looking for a new wife.

  Mary did not open the Memoirs until she was past girlhood. Reading them in the full knowledge of her mother’s fallen reputation, she understood for the first time the danger of absolute candour. The Memoirs offered her a lesson which, however contrary it was to her father’s teaching, she took to heart: telling the truth does not require the whole truth to be told. ‘You misunderstand me,’ observes a lady in a tale Mary Shelley never completed:

  I do not demand that you should make any confessions, but merely relate those events that have taken place that have reference to yourselves – not telling all the truth if you have anything you wish to conceal (and who has not?), but promising not to falsify any thing.38

  Notes

  1. Godwin, 1, p. 276.

  2. Ann Godwin–WG, 3.5.1797 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516/1).

  3. MW–WG, 11.4.97 (G&M, as for all similar citations in this chapter).

  4. MW–WG, 3.6.1797.

  5. WG–MW, 17.6.1797.

  6. MW–WG, 19.6.1797.

  7. WG–MW, 5.6.1797.

  8. MW–WG, 6.6.1797.

  9. Memoirs, ch. 7, p. 242.

  10. MW, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (I have used the excellent Cambridge University Press 1995 reissue, edited by Sylvana Tomaselli), p. 246.

  11. MW, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin Books, 1987), p. 183.

  12. WG, The Enquirer (1797), p. 1.

  13. Ibid., p. 130.

  14. MW, Lessons (Abinger, Dep. f. 65). These originally appeared in the posthumous edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works, published by Godwin in 1798. (A copy of the printed pages, bound as a separate booklet with the signature ‘E Wollstonecraft – 1798’, is preserved in the Abinger collection, Dep. f. 65. This suggests that Mary’s aunt had a copy bound as a first reading book
for the baby girl.)

  15. Gentleman’s Magazine, LXVII, noted on 2.8.1797, p. 203.

  16. MWS, ‘The Choice’, written in 1822–3: Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 704 (hereafter MWSJ).

  17. MW–WG, 30.8.1797.

  18. Ibid.

  19. J.F. Clarke, Recollections of the Medical Profession (1874), p. 293.

  20. Anthony Carlisle–Richard Owen, 12.3.1834 (Library of the Royal College of Surgeons, Carlisle Mss).

  21. Eliza Fenwick-Everina Wollstonecraft, 12.9.1797 (Godwin, 1, p. 283).

  22. WG, St Leon (1799), ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994), ch. 28, pp. 293–4. Godwin described his sensation of devastated bereavement with less passion but as much eloquence in one of his last novels, Deloraine (1833).

  23. WG–George Tuthill, 13.9.1797 (Godwin, 1, p. 284).

  24. WG–Anthony Carlisle, 15.9.1797 (ibid., p. 285).

  25. William Nicholson–WG, 18.9.1797 (ibid., pp. 289–90). The impressive size of Godwin’s own forehead was often cited by phrenologists as proof that the intellect was reflected by external dimensions. He may, in the desolate weeks following his wife’s death, have been temporarily inclined to catch at straws for comfort. But common sense prevailed. In his collection of essays, Thoughts on Man (1831), ch. 20, Godwin rejected the science of phrenology, while gleefully reminding his readers that one of the most cold-blooded murderers in history had been discovered to have an unusually large ‘organ of benevolence’.

  26. WG, ‘Note’, 1798 (Godwin, 1, p. 295).

  27. Gentleman’s Magazine, LXVII, October 1797.

  28. Monthly Revieiw, XXVII, September–December 1798.

  29. Anti-Jacobin Review, 1, 1798.

  30. Hannah More, Strictures on Female Education (1799), 1, pp. 48–9.

  31. Quoted in Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (revised edition, Penguin Books, 1992), ch. 19.

  32. ‘The Vision of Liberty’ was published in the Anti-Jacobin Review, August 1801. The author was anonymous.

  33. I am indebted for this information to the series of lectures on reading in the Romantic period given by William St Clair at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1998.

  34. Quarterly Review, 1833. The work under review was Allan Cunningham’s six-volume Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1830–3).

  35. MWS, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), 1, iv.

  36. Ann Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (Routledge, 1988), is one of the liveliest and most stimulating, whether or not you agree with Mellor’s interpretations.

  37. MWS, ‘The Elder Son’ (1835). Reprinted in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) (hereafter CTS).

  38. MWS, ‘An Eighteenth Century Tale: A Fragment’, reprinted in CTS and dated by Robinson as preceding 1824.

  * Odd though it sounds to our ears, ‘animal’ was a word frequently applied to babies. In 1795, Wollstonecraft had reported to Imlay of Fanny that ‘my animal is well’ and was being weaned.

  † The name is misleading: the hospital was, until 1834, no more than a large dispensary for the local area. Surgeons were, however, attached to it; Anthony Carlisle, who had been the principal surgeon there since 1783, did much to get the hospital enlarged and improved. The lying-in hospital was separately housed.

  ‡ ‘As a surgeon he was far inferior in every way to his colleagues Anthony White, James Guthrie and William Lynn,’ wrote J.F. Clarke in Recollections of the Medical Profession (1874).19 Carlisle must nevertheless have seemed the best man available. He was the leading surgeon at the Westminster Hospital, a position he retained until 1840; he had studied under the great John Hunter at the Windmill Street school; he was held indispensable by the Prince Regent; Carlisle took a lively interest in the advance of medical science. The explorer and surgeon Mungo Park rated him highly enough to bestow his own medical instruments on him; in 1834, he became a willing adviser and mentor to the anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen in the year of Owen’s influential lectures on generation to the Royal College of Surgeons.20 Later in life, Carlisle acquired a reputation for being vain and crotchety; this was not true of the man on whom Godwin’s household gratefully relied in 1797.

  § This part of the churchyard was demolished to make way for the new railway line some sixty years later.

  ¶ Strangely, neither Godwin nor his daughter showed any interest in republishing Mary Wollstonecraft’s most important work.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FATHER AND DAUGHTER

  1798–1801

  ‘Tell Mary I will not give her away, and she shall be nobody’s little girl but papa’s.’

  William Godwin to James Marshall, 11 July 1800

  STEPMOTHERS DO NOT APPEAR TO ADVANTAGE IN MARY’S fictions. In her later writings, however, the love between fathers and daughters is presented in terms of almost religious intensity. ‘When a father is all that a father may be … the love of a daughter is one of the deepest and strongest, as it is the purest passion of which our natures are capable,’ Mary wrote in 1830.1 Five years later, in another story, ‘The Elder Son’, she described a father whose reserved manner and measured style of speech masked the strength of his feelings.

  He never caressed me; if ever he stroked my head or drew me on his knee, I felt a mingled alarm and delight difficult to describe. Yet, strange to say, my father loved me almost to idolatry; and I knew this and repaid his affection with enthusiastic fondness, notwithstanding his reserve and my awe. He was something greater, and wiser, and better, in my eyes, than any other being. I was the sole creature he loved; the object of all his thoughts by day and his dreams by night.2

  This heightened feeling appears again in Lodore, published in 1835. In this novel, Mary isolated a father and his baby girl in a remote American settlement. As in ‘The Elder Son’, the eponymous hero is shown as a chilling figure whose chief object of devotion is his child; again, Mary offers a portrait of exclusive love, while emphasizing that it can only flourish when complete obedience has been enforced. It takes no more than a disapproving look from Lord Lodore to make his daughter Ethel ‘turn as with a silken string, and bend at once to his will’. But the rewards are great.

  She grew into the image on which his eye doated, and for whose presence his heart perpetually yearned. Was he reading, or otherwise occupied, he was restless, if yet she were not in the room; and she would remain in silence for hours, occupied by some little feminine work, and all the while watching him, catching his first glance towards her, and obeying the expression of his countenance, before he could form his wish into words. When he left her for any of his longer excursions, her little heart would heave, and almost burst with sorrow.3

  In fiction, Mary could recreate the past and see herself as the chief and adored companion of a lonely father. This is not quite how it had been. Godwin’s journal shows that he briskly returned to his old way of life, working first on the Memoirs and then on a play, ‘Alonzo’ (later retitled Antonio). He resumed his regular visits to the theatre; he dined out, frequently, with friends. Concerned though he was for the welfare of his little girls, his work took precedence over their needs. Mary’s fictional fathers subdue their children with disapproving looks; so had Godwin: ‘the idea of his silent quiet disapprobation makes me weep as it did in the days of my childhood,’ she would write to her husband in 1817, when she was twenty.4

  One work suggests that there had been a softening in Godwin’s nature from which Fanny and Mary might have benefited. The subject of St Leon, the novel he wrote in 1798–9, was the difficult and isolated position of the man who knows he is truth’s oracle. Godwin’s work had isolated him; St Leon’s acquisition of the elixir vitae and the philosopher’s stone attracts envy, hatred and, eventually, results in his being cut off from the human race. The character of Bethlem Gabor, a good man made into
a misanthropic monster by the murder of his family, is the best thing in the lamentably confused fourth volume of this novel.* Of significance to Godwin’s disciples and to his children was the retraction he made in the Preface. Alluding to the justice which he had previously argued should be sternly impartial, he now acknowledged that justice was ‘not incompatible’ (Godwin loved his double negatives) with a ‘culture of the heart’. Further than this, he recognized that ‘domestic and private affections’ were an inseparable part of man’s nature. These were the retractions of a man warmed by the affection of an impulsive, warm-hearted woman, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence is apparent throughout the novel in St Leon’s Wordsworthian raptures over the beauty of nature and the solace it offers. The man who wrote in this spirit and with such evident sincerity cannot have been altogether stern as a parent. His daughter’s fictional fathers veer strikingly between icy remoteness and passionate, demanding affection. This is probably an accurate reflection of Godwin’s behaviour. He loved his child; he would not allow her emotional needs to take precedence over his customary habits.

  *

  It is unlikely that either Fanny or little Mary were aware of the determination with which Godwin set about finding a second wife after their mother’s death. Rebuffed in the summer of 1798 by Harriet Lee, an authoress he had met on a brief visit to Bath, he proposed to the recently widowed Maria Reveley. But Maria had another suitor. Instead of Godwin, she married John Gisborne, a moderately successful merchant with cultivated tastes and an interesting family.† Maria and her new husband set off in 1800 to make a new life in Italy; Godwin set about looking elsewhere. His presentation of a copy of St Leon to Elizabeth Inchbald, together with a strong hint that he might call on her at home, suggests that his intentions were serious. Mrs Inchbald, who had not forgiven his scandalous relationship with an unmarried woman, or the way he had chosen to relate her sordid history, told him to stay away.