Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (6 page)

If Mary Wollstonecraft had survived, her second baby would have received the same joyous love lavished on her daughter Fanny Imlay, described eloquently in her poignantly beautiful
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
. But instead of being brought up by parents who were in love with each other and committed to a just and gentle education of their children, Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin were left in the care of a forty-one year old man dazed by bereavement, who, over the course of an austere, hard-working life, had learnt few lessons about how to give and receive affection freely, and who had no idea how to care for small children. Kind friends looked after Fanny and baby Mary in the weeks following Wollstonecraft’s death, but thereafter Godwin felt his inability to bring up the girls acutely.

In 1801, when Fanny was seven and Mary four, he remarried. His second marriage was pragmatic, and was designed to protect the children in his care, one of whom bore no blood relation to him at all. The second Mrs Godwin was a neighbour, Mary Jane Vial. Mary Jane referred to herself as ‘Mrs Clairmont’ – a surname she probably borrowed from the father of one of her two illegitimate children, Charles and Jane (who, in adult life, would always be known as Claire). In 1803 she bore Godwin a son, William, the only child in the Godwin ménage to know both his parents. Life in the Godwin household was thus far from straightforward. No child had the same pair of parents. Fanny was brought up by two adults to whom she was not related. She had never known her father, although she believed Godwin to be her natural father until sometime after her tenth birthday, and had only hazy memories of her mother, who died when she was three. But, from her teens, she could read about her childhood self in her mother’s
Letters
, and, more disturbingly, would have known from reading Godwin’s scandalous
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
that her father Gilbert Imlay’s desertion of her mother had led her to attempt suicide on more than one occasion. Mary, Godwin’s own daughter, grew up with the knowledge that her birth had caused her mother’s death, which was described in detail by Godwin in his
Memoirs
. But she also grew up as the favourite of Godwin, who was extremely proud of her developing intellect. Both girls were constantly reminded of their dead mother, whose portrait, painted by John Opie, hung in Godwin’s study long after Wollstonecraft’s death and his subsequent remarriage. And, along with their older step-siblings, Jane and Charles, both were expected to act like rational adults at all times. This could be unnerving for visitors. Coleridge, whose son Hartley was an occasional playmate of the Skinner Street children, found ‘the cadaverous Silence of Godwin’s Children . . . quite catacomb-ish’.
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When Mary was fifteen, Godwin wrote a letter to a correspondent anxious to know how Wollstonecraft’s educational theories were working in practice. This letter reveals a good deal about the dynamics of the household during the elder children’s adolescent years. ‘Of the two persons to whom your enquiries relate’, Godwin informed his correspondent, ‘my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her judgement. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny is by no means handsome, but in general prepossessing.’

In the same letter, Godwin informed his correspondent of the circumstances which had led to his second marriage. Noting that the enquiry put to him related ‘principally to the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Godwin conceded that ‘they are neither of them brought up with the exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother.’
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 Neither he nor Mrs Godwin had time, he confessed, for trying out ‘novel theories’, and in any case, Mary Jane was not exactly a slavish Wollstonecraft adherent. Indeed, everyone who knew the second Mrs Godwin agreed that she differed from her predecessor in certain key respects. With a few notable exceptions, Godwin’s friends were uniformly rude about her, and the normally equitable Charles Lamb castigated her for her ‘damn’d, beastly vulgarity’.
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 It cannot, however, have been easy to follow Mary Wollstonecraft. All three girls – including, eventually, Mary Jane’s own daughter, Jane Clairmont – were ardent Wollstonecraftian disciples, which strained their relationship with Wollstonecraft’s successor. Mary, in particular, resented many of her stepmother’s rules and instructions, and appears to have had little compunction about making her displeasure clear. Mary Jane’s lot was not made easier by the fact that the family were always short of money. Godwin’s position as the godfather of radical political philosophy was not rewarded by a steady income, and while the bookselling and printing business which Mary Jane started, rather enterprisingly, in 1805 produced some enduring works, it would ultimately prove to be disastrous. It was this financial background which coloured Shelley’s first meeting with Godwin.

From the outset, Godwin was impressed by Shelley’s intellect and was appreciative of his admiration. Underlying the decision to befriend him, however, was the knowledge that Shelley was a baronet’s heir with a relaxed attitude to the dispersal of his family’s money. He might be an impetuous youth whose ideas needed some refining, but he was also in a position to extricate Godwin from his never-ending financial difficulties. When the Shelleys visited Skinner Street in the autumn of 1812 they were therefore made welcome. Godwin and the children took to trim, smart little Harriet, and they were all rather fascinated by the energy of the charming and unpredictable Shelley.

Shelley returned to Wales at the end of 1812 buoyed by the conviction that in Godwin he had found at least one new friend. He and Harriet moved to London the following summer, and there Harriet gave birth to a baby girl, named Ianthe. But after Ianthe’s birth a shortage of money drove them first to the Lake District, and then to Edinburgh. Accompanied by Harriet’s sister Eliza, the young family travelled northwards in Shelley’s newly acquired travelling carriage, dogged at every stage of their journey by bills and letters from angry creditors, chief among them the harassed maker of their splendid new coach. Travelling for days on end with a small baby and a disapproving sister-in-law in tow was not, as Shelley and Harriet began to discover, a recipe for marital harmony, and by the time they returned to the south at the end of 1813 their relationship was fracturing under the triple stresses of constant travel, new parenthood and financial insecurity. At the beginning of 1814 Shelley took a house in Windsor, in which he installed Harriet, Eliza and Ianthe. He did not stay there himself for any extended period, but instead embarked once more on a peripatetic existence, moving between the houses of friends and temporary London lodgings. He continued to visit Windsor and, in spite of the strains, Harriet became pregnant for a second time. But he spent less and less time with his family as 1814 progressed and, by the summer, his occasional visits had ceased entirely.

This was because he was spending more and more time at the Godwins’ house in Skinner Street. Godwin and Shelley were in constant contact during the first months of 1814, exchanging several letters a week. The subject of all these letters was money. Godwin’s finances had reached a crisis point, and he desperately needed Shelley to provide some long-term financial support in order to release other loans and guarantees. In order to do so, Shelley had to raise funds on his expectations, and he and Godwin spent hours closeted with money lenders, hammering out the details of
post-obit
bond sales to financiers who would release cash against Shelley’s entailed inheritance. Such a scheme for raising money was ruinously expensive, as William St Clair’s meticulous research into the Shelley/ Godwin financial dealings has shown: in one case Shelley sold a
post-obit
bond of £8,000 and received a cash payment of £2,593–10s in return.
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Shelley’s cavalier dispersal of his inheritance greatly worried his family and his father, Timothy Shelley, reluctantly opened negotiations about an allowance for his son and the repayment of his debts – on condition that Shelley stopped selling his inheritance immediately.

In the early summer of 1814, a new reason for Shelley’s frequent visits to Godwin’s house appeared, when Mary Godwin returned to London from a long visit to Scotland. She was sixteen years old, beautiful, and extremely intelligent. She had made the long journey north by herself, had lived among strangers and made them her friends, and had acquired a wardrobe of dramatic tartan dresses which marked her out from her less exotically dressed sisters. She was also the daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft and thus represented a philosophical ideal. Shelley met her for the first time in May, and was enraptured. Writing to Thomas Hogg some months later he described his first feelings for her: ‘how deeply did I not feel my inferiority, how willingly confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation & magnificence of the intellectual nature until she consented to share her capabilities with me.’
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 Shelley was humbled by Mary: he had never met anyone who matched her in looks, character or parentage, and he felt acutely aware that her intellect far surpassed his own. But he also wanted to possess her, not just because she was beautiful and clever, but because of the radical union she represented.

There is no doubt that, at sixteen, Mary could have turned the heads of more than one wayward young philosopher. She could be funny, flirtatious and a tease, and she had a fine sense of drama and adventure. But she also had an air of reserve about her, which made it even more exciting when she revealed something of her passionate inner self to Shelley. She was, by the time Shelley met her, a highly independent young woman who had been sent away for her health, but also because her relationship with her stepmother was so fraught as to make her continued presence in Skinner Street tiresome for all concerned. In both looks and manners she presented a striking contrast to the more biddable Fanny, a quiet, slightly melancholic eighteen year old, who periodically tried to prevent the simmering tensions in Skinner Street from erupting into the rows she hated. Jane Clairmont, on the other hand, was nearly the same age as Mary and grew close to her stepsister after their parents’ marriage. She was blessed with dark good looks, was a talented musician and linguist, and she now showed a pleasing eagerness to assist Shelley and Mary in their secret romance.

Mary was just as fascinated by Shelley as he was by her.  He shared her devotion to the ideas of her adored father, as well as her love of drama; he was brilliant, quick and passionate, and he planned to reform the world.
Queen Mab
was a brave, inventive poem, which revealed in its author an alluring combination of talent, vision and rebelliousness. It was the poem of a man who could never be dull: cool and reasoned maybe, but also susceptible to fits of hyperactive over-excitement and to dreams and hallucinations. And all these qualities combined in someone who promised to rescue her family from financial disaster. Moreover, Mary had met very few young men, and Shelley reacted to her in the most flattering and unexpected way.  It is hardly surprising that things moved as quickly as they did. The end of June and the whole of July were spent in a haze of developing passion. With Jane as a willing chaperone, Shelley and Mary stole walks and talks together, and on 26 June 1814, by her mother’s tombstone in the overgrown graveyard of Old St Pancras Church, Mary declared her undying love for Shelley, while Jane loitered at a nearby grave.

Godwin became aware of the situation at the end of the first week of July.  He reacted badly.  Shelley was instructed to cease to call and Mary was ‘talked’ to – ‘talk’ signifying serious conversation in Godwin’s diary.
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This talk had little effect.  Jane assisted Mary and Shelley by passing letters between them and their affair continued unhindered. Various accounts of this period suggest that events became rather dramatic: that Shelley burst into Skinner Street and threatened to kill himself unless Mary promised to love him for ever, and that the Godwin household was disrupted one night by a message from Shelley’s landlord saying he had taken an overdose of laudanum. But these stories are recorded in mangled re-copying of the second Mrs Godwin’s letters, and cannot be trusted. The events that are not in doubt are, in any case, quite theatrical enough. On 24 July 1814, a chaise bearing Shelley arrived at the corner of Skinner Street at five in the morning. Quickly and quietly, it picked up its additional passengers, and made its way along the old Roman road to Dover, from where boats departed for France. Passengers, not passenger – this was to be an elopement with a difference. There would be no marriage: Shelley was already married, and had left a wife and a baby daughter behind. And the occupants of the chaise were Shelley, Mary and her half-sister Jane.