delicacy, more imaginativeness, something less of intellectual boldness
and independence. She had, however, all Mary Wollstonecraft’s tendency
to melancholy: “I fear you are a Wollstonecraft,” the equable Godwin
wrote her. She endeavored, in her happier days, to guard against this
evil by mingling in society, where she was animated and charming. Henry
Crabb Robinson mentions her at Godwin’s in 1823, looking “elegant and
sickly and young”; one calls to mind the description of Shelley, “like
some elegant flower drooping on its stem.” Robinson also relates what
he had heard from Harriet Martineau, that Mrs. Shelley “never had asked
a favor of any one, and never would.” This is a touch of her mother’s
pride, intensified.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Godwin’s account of Mary and her sister.]
Your enquiries relate principally to the two daughters of Mary
Wollstonecraft. They are neither of them brought up with an exclusive
attention to the system and ideas of their mother. I lost her in 1797,
and in 1801 I married a second time. One among the motives which led
me to choose this was, the feeling I had in myself of an incompetence
for the education of daughters. The present Mrs. Godwin has great
strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower
of the notions of their mother; and indeed, having formed a family
establishment without having a previous provision for the support of
a family, neither Mrs. Godwin nor I have leisure enough for reducing
novel theories of education to practice, while we both of us honestly
endeavor, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the mind
and characters of the younger branches of our family.
Of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, 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 own judgment. 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 every thing she undertakes almost
invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny[5] is by
no means handsome, but in general prepossessing.
WILLIAM GODWIN: _Letter to an unknown correspondent_, in ‘William
Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries,’ by C. Kegan Paul, Boston:
Roberts Bros., 1876.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Her stepmother.]
Mrs. Godwin [formerly Mrs. Clairmont], was a harsh stepmother.... She
had strong views, in which many would agree, that each child should
be educated to some definite duties, with a view of filling some
useful place in life; but this arrangement soon had at least a show
of partiality. It was found that Jane Clairmont’s mission in life,
according to her mother’s view, was to have all the education and even
accomplishments which their slender means would admit; while household
drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the life-work of Fanny
and Mary Godwin. That Mary Shelley was afterward a worthy intellectual
companion to Shelley, is in no degree due to Mrs. Godwin, and little to
her father’s direct teaching. All the education she had up to the time
when she linked her fate with Shelley’s, was self-gained; the merits of
such a work as ‘Frankenstein’ were her own; the faults were those of
her home-training.
C. KEGAN PAUL: ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mary at sixteen.]
When we reached Skinner Street, he [Shelley] said, “I must speak with
Godwin; come in, I will not detain you long.” I followed him through
the shops, which was the only entrance, and up stairs. We entered a
room on the first floor; it was shaped like a quadrant. In the arc
were windows; in one radius a fire-place, and in the other a door,
and shelves with many old books. William Godwin was not at home.
Bysshe strode about the room, causing the crazy floor of the ill-built
dwelling-house to shake and tremble under his impatient footsteps....
I stood reading the names of old English authors on the backs of the
venerable volumes, when the door was partially and softly opened. A
thrilling voice called “Shelley!” A thrilling voice answered “Mary!”
And he darted out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the
far-shooting king. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale
indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual
dress in London at that time, had called him out of the room. He was
absent a very short time--a minute or two; and then returned. “Godwin
is out; there is no use in waiting.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON HOGG: ‘Life of Shelley,’ 1858; quoted by R. H.
Stoddard. ‘Anecdote Biography of Shelley.’ New York: Scribner,
Armstrong & Co., 1877.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Elopement with Shelly.]
It was not until the summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin
became really acquainted, when he found the child whom he had scarcely
noticed two years before, had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen
summers.... Shelley came to London on May 18th, leaving his wife
at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that it was to be a
final separation from him, though the relations between husband and
wife had for some time been increasingly unhappy. He was received in
Godwin’s house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell
in love with Mary. Fanny Godwin was away from home visiting some of
the Wollstonecrafts, or she, three years older than Mary, might have
discouraged the romantic attachment which sprang up between her sister
and their friend. Jane Clairmont’s influence was neither then, nor at
any other time, used judiciously. It was easy for the lovers, for such
they became before they were aware of it, to meet without the attention
of the parents being drawn to the increasing intimacy, and yet without
any such sense of clandestine interviews, as might have disclosed to
themselves whither they were drifting. Mary was unhappy at home; she
thoroughly disliked Mrs. Godwin, to whom Fanny was far more tolerant;
her desire for knowledge and love of reading were discouraged, and when
seen with a book in her hand, she was wont to hear from her stepmother
that her proper sphere was the store-room. Old St. Pancras church-yard
was then a quiet and secluded spot, where Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave
was shaded by a fine weeping-willow. Here Mary Godwin used to take her
books in the warm days of June, to spend every hour she could call
her own. Here her intimacy with Shelley ripened, and here, in Lady
Shelley’s words, “she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortunes
with his own.”
On July 28th, early in the morning, Mary Godwin left her father’s
house, accompanied by Jane Clairmont. They joined Shelley, posted to
Dover, and crossed in an open boat to Calais during a violent storm....
The three went to Paris, where they bought a donkey, and rode him in
turns to Geneva, the others walking. Sleeping now in a cabaret and now
in a cottage, they at last finished this strange honeymoon, and the
strangest sentimental journey ever undertaken since Adam and Eve went
forth with all the world before them where to choose.
C. KEGAN PAUL: ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: No moral conflict.]
The theories in which the daughter of the authors of ‘Political
Justice’ and of the ‘Rights of Woman’ had been educated, spared her
from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she was the
child of parents whose writings had had for their object to prove
that marriage was one among the many institutions which a new era in
the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom
she loved--by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to
venerate--these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It
was, therefore, natural that she should listen to the dictates of her
own heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of
her love.
LADY SHELLEY: ‘Shelley Memorials, from Authentic Sources.’ London:
Henry S. King & Co., 1875.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mary at this period.]
It is remarkable that her youth was not the period of her greatest
beauty, and certainly at that date [1816-17] she did not do justice to
herself either in her aspect or in the tone of her conversation. She
was singularly pale. With a figure that needed to be set off, she was
careless in her dress; and the decision of purpose which ultimately
gained her the title of ‘Wilful Woman,’ then appeared, at least in
society, principally in the negative form--her temper being easily
crossed, and her resentments taking a somewhat querulous and peevish
tone.
THORNTON HUNT: ‘Shelley,’ in the _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1863.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Origin of ‘Frankenstein.’]
I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was
cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood
fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of
ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in
us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends and myself agreed
to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The
weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me
on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which
they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. [Frankenstein] is
the only one which has been completed.
MARY SHELLEY: _First Preface_ to ‘Frankenstein.’ Boston: Sever, Francis
& Co., 1869.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Its conception.]
I busied myself _to think of a story_--a story to rival those which had
excited us to this task.... I thought and pondered--vainly. I felt
that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of
authorship, when dull nothing replies to our anxious invocations. _Have
you thought of a story?_ I was asked each morning, and each morning I
was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to
which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these,
various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others, the
nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability
of its ever being discovered and communicated.... Night waned upon
this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired
to rest. When I had placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor
could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and
guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with
a vividness far beyond the usual bound of reverie. I saw--with shut
eyes, but acute mental vision--I saw the pale student of unhallowed
arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.... I opened my
eyes in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear
ran through me and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy
for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark
_parquet_, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through,
and the sense I had that the glassy lake and the high white Alps were
beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it
haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my
ghost story--my tiresome, unlucky ghost story. Swift as light, and as
cheering, was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it!”
... On the morrow I announced that I had _thought of a story_. I began
that day with the words, “_It was on a dreary night in November_,”
making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.
MARY SHELLEY: _Second Preface_ to ‘Frankenstein.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mary in 1822.]
The most striking feature in her face was her calm, gray eyes; she was
rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very fair and
light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends,
though mournful in solitude; like Shelley, though in a minor degree,
she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and appropriate
words, derived from familiarity with the works of our vigorous old
writers.
E. J. TRELAWNY: ‘Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron.’
Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1858.
* * * * *
It is clear that the society of Shelley was to her a great school,
which she did not appreciate to the full until most calamitously it was
taken away; and yet, of course, she could not fail to learn the greater
part of what it had become to her. This again showed itself even in her
appearance, after she had spent some years in Italy; for, while she had
grown far more comely than she was in her mere youth, she had acquired
a deeper insight into many subjects that interested Shelley, and some
others; and she had learned to express the force of natural affection,
which she was born to feel, but which had somehow been stunted and
suppressed in her youth.
[Sidenote: Her peculiar powers.]
She was a woman of extraordinary power, of heart as well as head. Many
circumstances conspired to conceal some of her natural faculties....
Her father--speaking with great diffidence, from a very slight and
imperfect knowledge--appeared to me a harsh and ungenial man. She
inherited from him her thin voice,[6] but not the steel-edged sharpness
of his own; and she inherited, not from him, but from her mother, a
largeness of heart that entered proportionately into the working of her
mind. She had a masculine capacity for study; for, though I suspect her
early schooling was irregular, she remained a student all her life, and
by painstaking industry made herself acquainted with any subject that
she had to handle.
THORNTON HUNT: ‘Shelley.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Constant reading.]
In looking over the journal in which, from day to day, Mrs. Shelley was
in the habit of noting their occupations, as well as passing events,
one is struck with wonder at the number of books which they read in the
course of the year. At home or traveling--before breakfast, or waiting
for the mid-day meal--by the side of a stream, or on the ascent of a
mountain--a book was never absent from the hands of one or the other:
and there were never two books; one read while the other listened.
LADY SHELLEY: ‘Shelley Memorials.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Loss of William Shelley.]
We suffered a severe affliction in Rome [in 1819] by the loss of our
eldest child, who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him
deservedly to be the idol of our hearts. We left the capital of the
world, anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too intimately
with his presence and loss.
[Sidenote: Italian life of the Shelleys.]
Some friends of ours were residing in the neighborhood of Leghorn, and
we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town
and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer. Our villa was
situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked
beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the
evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on,
and the fire-flies flashed from among the myrtle hedges:--nature was
bright, sunshiny and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic
terror, such as we had never before witnessed. At the top of the house
there was a sort of terrace ... very small, yet not only roofed but
glazed; this Shelley made his study; it looked out on a wide prospect
of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea.... In the
spring [of 1820, having passed the winter in Florence and Pisa] we
spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends,
who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beautiful summer
evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the
bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark,
which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.
[Sidenote: Shelley’s last home near Sant’ Arenzo, 1823.]
The bay of Spezia is of considerable extent, and divided by a rocky
promontory into a larger and smaller one. The town of Lerici is
situated on the eastern point, and in the depth of the smaller bay,
which bears the name of this town, is the village of Sant’ Arenzo. Our
house, Casa Magni, was close to this village; the sea came up to the
door, a steep hill sheltered it behind. The proprietor ... had rooted
up the olives on the hillside, and planted forest trees; ... some fine
walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark massy foliage, and formed
groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with
a sense of loveliness. The scene was indeed of unimaginable beauty;
the blue extent of waters, the almost land-locked bay, the near castle
of Lerici, shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to
the west; the varied forms of the precipitous rocks that bound in the
beach, over which there was only a winding rugged foot-path towards
Lerici, and none on the other side; the tideless sea leaving no sands
nor shingle--formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa’s
landscapes only: sometimes the sunshine vanished when the sirocco
raged--the ponente, the wind was called on that shore. The gales and
squalls, that hailed our first arrival, surrounded the bay with foam;
the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared
unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship. At
other times sunshine and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints
of Italian heaven bathed the scene. The natives were wilder than the
place.... If ever fate whispered of coming disaster, such inaudible,
but not unfelt, prognostics hovered around us. The beauty of the place
seemed unearthly in its excess: the distance we were at from all signs
of civilization, the sea at our feet, its murmurs or its roarings
forever in our ears--all these things led the mind to brood over
strange thoughts, and, lifting it from every-day life, caused it to be
familiar with the unreal. A sort of spell surrounded us, and each day,
as the voyagers did not return, we grew restless and disquieted; and
yet, strange to say, we were not fearful of the most apparent danger.
The spell snapped, it was all over; an interval of agonizing doubt was
changed to the certainty of the death that eclipsed all happiness for
the survivors forevermore.
MARY SHELLEY: _Notes_, in ‘Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.’
Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1857.
* * * * *
She impressed me as a person with warm social feelings, dependent for
happiness on loving encouragement, needing a guiding and sustaining
hand.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Shelley in her widowhood.]
In person she was of middle height and graceful figure. Her face,
though not regularly beautiful, was comely and spiritual, of winning
expression, and with a look of inborn refinement; as well as culture.
It had a touch of sadness when at rest.
ROBERT DALE OWEN: _Quoted in_ ‘Heroines of Free Thought,’ S. A.
Underhill. New York: Charles P. Somerby, 139 Eighth Street, 1876.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Development of character.]
I have heard her accused of an over-anxiety to be admired; and
something of the sort was discernible in society: it was a weakness
as venial as it was purely superficial. Away from society she was as
truthful and simple a woman as I have ever met--was as faithful a
friend as the world has produced--using that unreserved directness
toward those whom she regarded with affection, which is the very
crowning glory of friendly intercourse. I suspect that these qualities
came out in their greatest force after her calamity; for many things
which she said in her regret, and passages in Shelley’s own poetry,
make me doubt whether little habits of temper, and possibly of a
refined and exacting coquettishness, had not prevented him from
acquiring so full a knowledge of her as she had of him.
THORNTON HUNT: ‘Shelley.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Appearance.]
Her well-shaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and
drooping; her marble-white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible
in the perfectly plain black velvet dress, which the customs of that
time allowed to be cut low, and which her own taste adopted (for she
never wore the conventional “widow’s weeds” and “widow’s cap”); her
thoughtful, earnest eyes; her short upper lip and intellectually curved
mouth, with a certain close-compressed and decisive expression while
she listened, and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility while
speaking; her exquisitely formed, white, dimpled, small hands, with
rosy palms, and plumply commencing fingers, that tapered into tips
as slender and delicate as those in a Vandyck portrait--all remain
palpably present to memory. Another peculiarity in Mrs. Shelley’s hand
was its singular flexibility, which permitted her bending the fingers
back so as almost to approach the portion of her arm above her wrist.
She once did this smilingly and repeatedly, to amuse the girl who was
noting its whiteness and pliancy, and who now, as an old woman, records
its remarkable beauty.
Very sweet and very encouraging was Mary Shelley to her young namesake,
Mary Victoria, making her proud and happy by giving her a presentation
copy of her wonderful book, ‘Frankenstein,’ and pleasing her girlish
fancy by the gift of a string of cut-coral graduated beads from
Italy....
Her mode of uttering the word “Lerici,” dwells upon our memory with
peculiarly subdued and lingering intonation, associated as it was with
all that was most mournful in connection with that picturesque spot
where she learned she had lost her “beloved Shelley” forever from this
fair earth.
[Sidenote: Love of Music.]
She was never tired of asking Francesco [Mr. Francis Novello] to sing
Mozart’s “Qui Sdegno,” “Possenti Numi,” “Mentre ti Lascio,” “Tuba
Mirum,” “La Vendetta,” “Non piu Andrai,” or “Madamina;” so fond was she
of his singing her favorite composer.
MARY (VICTORIA NOVELLO) COWDEN CLARKE: ‘Recollections of Writers.’ New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A portrait.]
If the reader desires a portrait of Mary, he has one in the well-known
antique bust sometimes called “Isis,” and sometimes “Clytie”; a woman’s
head and shoulders rising from a lotus-flower. It is most probably
the portrait of a Roman lady: is in some degree more elongated and
“classic,” than Mary; but, on the other hand, it falls short of her,
for it gives no idea of her tall and intellectual forehead, nor has it
any trace of the bright, animated, and sweet expression that so often
lighted up her face.
THORNTON HUNT: ‘Shelley.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A criticism.]
How changed is the taste of verse, prose, and painting, since _le bon
vieux temps_, dear madam! Nothing attracts us but what terrifies, and
is within--_if_ within--a hair’s breadth of positive disgust. Some of
the strange things they write remind me of Squoire Richard’s visit
to the Tower Menagerie, when he says: “Odd, they are _pure_ grim
devils,”--particularly a wild and hideous tale called ‘Frankenstein.’
MRS. PIOZZI: _Letters to Mme. D’Arblay_, in the latter’s ‘Diary and
Letters’; edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1880.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Scott’s remarks.]
The feeling with which we perused the unexpected and fearful, yet,
allowing the possibility of the event, very natural conclusion of
Frankenstein’s experiment, shook a little even our firm nerves.... It
is no slight merit in our eyes that the tale, though wild in incident,
is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that
mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are
usually told. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as
forcibly expressed; and his[7] descriptions of landscape have in them
the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty. The
self-education of the monster, considering the slender opportunities
of acquiring knowledge that he possessed, we have already noticed as
improbable and over-strained.
SIR WALTER SCOTT: ‘Remarks on Frankenstein,’ _Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine_, March, 1818. (‘Scott’s Miscellanies,’ _vol. i._
Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841.)
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Lamb’s praise.]