Mary Shelley Read online

  The musical Novello family provided evenings of enjoyment to Mary Shelley, Jane Williams, and other friends.

  Another open-minded friend was the Scottish-born writer Mary Diana Dods. Using the pen name David Lyndsay, Dods had published poetry inspired by ancient myths and Bible stories. It was not uncommon in the early nineteenth century for a woman author to write under a man’s name. There were segments of society that thought it improper for a lady to place her name before the public. There were also female writers who wanted the literary world to treat their work as seriously as they would a book written by a man. This was why three sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë—would use the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell when publishing their first book, Poems, in 1846. A nonconformist, “Doddy” wore her dark, curly hair cropped short. Instead of puffed sleeves and snug waistlines, she favored plain, tailored jackets. In the nineteenth century, Dods’s style of dress was considered masculine.

  Through her father, Mary met John Howard Payne, an American songwriter and playwright living in England. Payne had written the hugely popular song “Home, Sweet Home.” People throughout Britain and America were singing its comforting words: “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” Payne went with Mary and the Godwins to the theater. Because he wrote plays, he often was given free tickets. He was a slim, modest man with thinning brown hair.

  Mary considered Payne only a friend, but he was falling in love with her. One day he decided the time had come to declare his feelings. “You are perpetually in my presence,” he said to Mary. “If I close my eyes you are still there, and if I cross my arms over them and try to wave you away, still you will not be gone.” Mary tried to handle the situation with grace and tact. “Your imagination creates the admired as well as the admiration,” she replied. The woman of his dreams was not the true Mary Shelley. This meant his love for her could not be real. Payne’s penetrating eyes made Mary think of Percy’s, but he lacked Percy’s lightning-fast mind and bold vision. He could never measure up to the husband she had lost; no one ever would.

  Playwright and lyricist John Howard Payne nurtured a hope of marrying Mary Shelley.

  William Godwin also arranged for Mary to see her girlhood friend from Scotland, who was passing through London. Isabella Baxter was now Isabella Booth. After her sister Margaret died, Isabella was pressured by her family to marry Margaret’s husband, David Booth. It was an odd arrangement, and one that brought Isabella no happiness. After years of dealing with money troubles and her husband’s ill temper, Isabella had reached the point of mental breakdown. “Be kind to me Mary,” she asked.

  “The great affection she displays for me endears her to me,” Mary wrote to Leigh Hunt in Italy. Mary showed Isabella compassion, but it was impossible to revive the closeness of their teenage years. They were different people now. “All is so changed for me,” Mary said.

  Through dark winter days and wet spring afternoons, Mary Shelley worked at her writing. She hiked for miles through the city, trying to keep her spirits up. “Ye Gods—how I walk!” she said. One evening’s stroll took her past the old, all-but-forgotten St. Pancras churchyard, a place that evoked memories of precious times with Percy. She wrote, as if in a letter to him, “my loved Shelley, now ten years ago, at this season, did we first meet . . . and these were the very scenes.”

  In mid-May 1824 came news from Greece that Lord Byron had died of malaria at age thirty-six. Mary, already in a low mood, asked, “Why am I doomed to live on seeing all expire before me?” She remembered the good in Byron, recalling him as a friend from happy days on Lake Geneva and as Shelley’s close companion. She mourned him as a dazzling figure and a gifted poet. It seemed that Byron’s death had left the earth darker than midnight.

  Byron lies on his deathbed in this painting by Joseph Denis Odevaere. Employing artistic license, Odevaere placed a crown of laurel leaves on Byron’s head, symbolizing high achievement. Byron’s arm falls on a lyre because he was a poet. In ancient Greece, someone often strummed a lyre while poetry was being recited.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Secrets

  Permit a heart whose sufferings have been, and are, so many and so bitter, to reap what joy it can from the strong necessity it feels to be sympathized with—to love.

  Byron’s body was shipped to England for burial. To preserve it for the long voyage from Greece, workers drilled holes in the poet’s coffin and placed it in a vat of liquor. Once in London, the body was removed from its whiskey bath and laid out in a private home. For two days in July, the public filed past the open casket. Gazing at the once-famous face now permanently at rest, they saw a mouth twisted open and teeth stained brown by the alcoholic spirits. “Of the crowding visitors the number of ladies was exceedingly great,” the press reported. Some distraught fans grew hysterical.

  Mary Shelley paid her last respects, but she kept her composure. On July 12, 1824, she and Jane Williams watched from a window as a horse-drawn hearse carried Lord Byron to his family’s burial ground in a small churchyard. Mary was living with Percy Florence in Kentish Town, a quiet old neighborhood in northwest London. Her home was close to Jane Williams’s and near fields where four-year-old Percy could run freely. The two families were close. Percy played with the Williams children, and Jane helped care for him when he had the measles.

  William Godwin paces in his bookstore. By summer 1824, the Godwin household in the Strand had broken up. Mary’s father had declared bankruptcy and closed his bookshop. He had moved with Mrs. Godwin and young William to smaller, cheaper quarters.

  Books about Byron were already being written. Percy Shelley’s tedious cousin, Thomas Medwin, had rushed to publish Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, based on his time spent with the famous poet at Pisa. Medwin thought greedily of the money he was to make. Mary disapproved of his project, but she shared her memories of Byron with an Irish writer named Thomas Moore. A friend of Byron’s, Moore was putting together a volume of the late poet’s journals and letters. Mary helped him on the condition that she remain an anonymous source; she had no wish to anger Sir Timothy. She also refused to take any money in exchange for her help. She cared about spreading the truth rather than profiting from the public’s curiosity. Too many worms were growing fat “upon the world’s love of tittle tattle,” she stated. She would not be counted among them.

  Yet a character based on Lord Byron appeared in her next novel, which was published in 1826. Mary Shelley set The Last Man far in the future, at the close of the twenty-first century. Instead of a king, the England of that period has an elected leader, the brave, spirited Lord Raymond. Raymond is “supremely handsome,” Shelley writes. “Every one admired him; of women he was the idol. He was courteous, honey-tongued—an adept in fascinating arts.” Raymond resigns his position to go off and fight in a Greek war for independence, much as Byron did.

  Admirers of Byron read a memorial plaque in Hucknall Church, where he is buried.

  The world Shelley imagines in The Last Man is much like the one she inhabited in the early nineteenth century. Technology has brought little change, which seems odd today. Twenty-first-century readers expect the authors of futuristic novels to imagine the wonders—or terrors—made possible by science. This is because today’s readers are used to innovation. New electronic products constantly come on the market; discoveries in fields from medicine to space science are regularly announced. When Shelley wrote The Last Man, however, the Industrial Revolution was just a few decades old. Artisans still produced most goods by hand, and farmers labored as their forebears had done for centuries. England’s first railroad line was still a few years away. Many people did not yet consider how inventions might alter their culture and surroundings.

  Unlike the world of the 1820s, however, the one in Shelley’s novel is rapidly headed toward catastrophe. Not only is there war, but a terrible plague is killing off the population. Those infected drop to the ground in convulsions. They soon exhibit the rigid limbs and distorted face
s of death, their “stony eyes lost to perception.” People die everywhere, and at any time. During a religious service at Westminster Abbey, a singer in the choir falls dead. “He was lifted from his desk, the vaults below were hastily opened—he was consigned with a few muttered prayers to the darksome cavern, abode of thousands who had gone before,” Shelley tells her readers. Before long, one person—Raymond’s brother-in-law, Lionel Verney—appears to be the sole human being left alive.

  In today’s novels depicting future devastation, survivors often have a responsibility to pass on their values and knowledge to the generations to come. True to the form, The Last Man ends on a note of hope. Lionel Verney gathers some of the world’s great books into a boat and sets sail with his dog to search for human companionship. His wish is that “after long endurance I may reap my reward, and again feel my heart beat near the heart of another like to me.”

  In Mary Shelley’s futuristic novel, The Last Man, people could travel rapidly from one place to another by balloon. In every other way, technology remained unchanged. Hot-air balloons had been invented by the early nineteenth century, but they were a novelty that drew crowds of onlookers. This picture is of an 1830 balloon launch in France.

  On its title page, The Last Man claimed to be by the anonymous author of Frankenstein, but readers knew this was Mary Shelley. The book sold well, although many people found it strange and morbid. One critic wrote, “The whole appears to us to be the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste.” Another called it a “monstrous fable” presenting “a sickening repetition of horrors.” This reviewer took a jab at Shelley because she was female. “Why not the last Woman?” he asked. Everyone knew women chattered too much; Shelley “would have known better how to paint her distress at having nobody left to talk to.”

  On September 14, 1826, eleven-year-old Charles Shelley died of tuberculosis, leaving Percy Florence as his late father’s heir. Sir Timothy Shelley increased the boy’s yearly allowance to two hundred fifty pounds, but he could be late in sending it. Even with the three hundred pounds she had earned from publishing The Last Man, Mary at times found herself scarily short of money. To pay her rent, she was forced to borrow from Claire, who was working as a governess in Russia, and from Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley’s old friend willingly helped her, but he treated her coldly. Puzzled by his attitude, Mary decided that Hogg was becoming eccentric, that he was “more queer stingy and supercilious than ever.”

  He was also sly. In February 1827, Jane Williams told Mary some startling news: she and Hogg had been carrying on a secret love affair, and Jane was pregnant. The two were moving in together and would live as husband and wife, as Jane and Jefferson Hogg. Jane had been passing herself off as Edward Williams’s widow, but she still had a husband somewhere and was not free to marry.

  Mary had met a teenage girl who had a secret too. Isabel Robinson belonged to a large family of siblings cared for by their widowed father. She had been involved in an early, brief romance and had given birth to a daughter. Few people knew about baby Adeline, who had been farmed out. Isabel desperately wanted to find a way to keep and raise her child. Mary Shelley understood full well the social, economic, and emotional hardships that single mothers endured. But she also knew the danger of farming babies out. Recalling how deeply Claire had longed to be with her child, and how Allegra had come to a sad end, Mary vowed to help Isabel. “Where I see suffering, there I must bring my mite for its relief,” she wrote.

  As Claire was discovering, a governess’s life could be sad and lonely. She was treated like a servant by her employers, yet she had little in common with the household staff. She worked long hours for low pay.

  Mary began by moving from London to someplace out of the way. She felt no sadness about leaving Kentish Town. “The country about here is really pretty; lawny uplands, wooded parks, green lanes, and gentle hills form agreeable and varying combinations,” she observed. “Yet I can attach myself to nothing here.” In July 1827, Mary went with Percy Florence, Isabel, and baby Adeline, who had been retrieved from her paid caregiver, to stay in the village of Sompting, on England’s southern coast. If Isabel could cross over to France, Mary thought, she could start a new life with her child. But to do this, she would need more help than Mary alone could give.

  It came from Mary’s writer friend Doddy. Mary Diana Dods was transitioning to life as a man. She began to wear men’s clothing and adopted the name Walter Sholto Douglas. The plan was for Douglas to escort Isabel and Adeline to France; they would travel as a married couple with a baby. In France, they would live on Douglas’s small allowance and anything he earned from writing.

  Mary sought further aid from John Howard Payne, in London. The playwright and songwriter still hoped for a future with Mrs. Shelley, and she knew that he would do anything for her. She asked Payne to obtain passports for Mr. and Mrs. Douglas. They were too ill to travel to London and do this for themselves, she lied. She asked Payne to have two of his actor friends stand in for the pair. She sent him samples of Isabel’s and Douglas’s handwriting, so the actors could forge their signatures. No law required British subjects to carry passports while traveling overseas in the 1800s, but the Douglases needed some form of identification. And since photography had yet to be invented, there was no need to worry about passport pictures.

  Before sailing for France in October, Isabel revealed some troubling news to Mary Shelley: Jane Williams—now Jane Hogg—had been spreading gossip about her old friend. In London, Jane had told Isabel that Mary had been a callous, unloving wife. Jane implied that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been so unhappy with Mary that he sailed into the storm on purpose, hoping he would die. Mary was taken aback upon hearing these terrible words and hardly knew what to think. She wrote in her journal, “My friend has proved false and treacherous! Miserable discovery. . . . My head weighed down; my limbs sink under me.”

  Kentish Town offered pleasant rustic scenery, but Mary Shelley put down no roots there.

  No wonder Thomas Jefferson Hogg had been so aloof! Who else had heard these lies? Jane had hurt Mary’s feelings—Jane, with whom she had shared so much. Mary had been present at the birth of Jane’s daughter; the two women had lost their mates in the same tragic accident; they had helped each other as struggling single mothers. Mary waited several months before saying anything to Jane. At last she confronted her friend in a letter, writing, “You gave ear to every idle tale against me—repeated them—not glossed over them.” She concluded, “My devotion to you was too entire.” Mary would never be so devoted again, although she felt sympathy for Jane, whose baby had died soon after its birth. The two women remained friends—“the past is too dear to me,” Mary said—but not as close as they had been.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s old friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg became romantically involved with Jane Williams. For a time, the two kept their relationship secret, but in early 1827 they began living together as husband and wife.

  After the Douglases left England, Mary enrolled Percy Florence in a boarding school. In mid-April 1828, with Percy settled at Edward Slater’s Gentleman’s Academy, she went to France to visit Isabel and Douglas. She brought Julia Robinson, Isabel’s younger sister, who knew nothing about Douglas’s old identity. Rather than sneak away, Mary informed Sir Timothy Shelley’s lawyer that she would be gone no more than three weeks while Percy remained in London at school.

  It was supposed to be a quick jaunt, but upon reaching Paris, where the Douglases were living, Mary felt feverish and achy. She thought a bath might restore her energy, but she emerged from the water even weaker than before. Her fair skin turned red and blotchy, and within days blisters arose on her face and arms. It was plain to all that Mary had smallpox, “the most terrible of all the ministers of death,” as one writer described it. This viral illness was greatly feared in the 1800s. It came on suddenly and attacked not only the skin, but also the mouth, throat, and internal organs. It could even afflict the eyes. A fourth of its victim
s died, and those who survived were left badly scarred and sometimes blind. To prevent the disease from spreading into the community, the Douglas home was placed under quarantine. For two weeks, no one was allowed out and no visitors could come in.

  Gradually Mary recovered. One day she mustered enough courage to look in a mirror. The woman who gazed back had crusted sores on her reddened face. The spun-gold hair that used to draw compliments hung dull and limp. French doctors assured Mary that she would have less scarring than some smallpox survivors, but her appearance would be forever changed. Mary made the best of her altered looks; what else could she do? After the quarantine was lifted, she went out to meet Isabel and Douglas’s new acquaintances. “It was rather droll to play the part of an ugly person for the first time in my life,” she wrote good-naturedly to her old Scottish friend Isabella. She was warmly welcomed in Paris, even by people who knew about her past. At one party, she was introduced to the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution.

  A smallpox sufferer gazes for the first time at his blistered face as two children are ushered out of the sickroom.

  As a teenage runaway, Mary Godwin had seen little to like in Paris. As a woman of thirty, Mary Shelley soaked up the warmth of late spring as she sat in gardens beneath chestnut trees newly green after the winter. She drew in big breaths of fragrant air that was so much cleaner than London’s. She returned to England in early June and summered at the coast with Percy and Julia Robinson. Nearness to the sea, she believed, would hasten her recovery.