Mary Shelley Read online

  Mary, Shelley, and Jane moved to a suburb called Hans Town, but when their landlady eyed the strange household with suspicion, they moved again, to rooms nearby. All three were feeling rundown. Shelley insisted they eat a vegetarian diet, but cabbage and root vegetables were the only produce to be had in winter.

  On February 22, Mary gave birth prematurely to a girl. The child was tiny, but she nursed well, and her parents had every hope that she would live. The Godwins allowed Fanny to visit, and Charles Clairmont came on his own, bringing a gift of baby clothes. Charles was more accepting of Mary’s lifestyle than his mother and stepfather were. On March 2, when the baby was nine days old, the group moved across London to roomier quarters. The wee girl was sleeping peacefully when Mary went to bed on March 5, but Mary woke on the sixth to find she had died in the night. She had never been given a name.

  Mary said little and confided her feelings to her journal. “[I] think of my little dead baby,” she wrote. “This is foolish I suppose; yet, whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother, and am so no longer.” Another day she recorded a dream in which she discovered that the baby was really alive, “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.” Such a wish could only come true in a dream. “Awake and find no baby,” Mary wrote. “I think about the little thing all day.”

  Life is an unsparing teacher, schooling the heart in love one day and in grief the next. Mary read many books to take her mind off her sorrow. She read works of history, biography, and philosophy. She read the New Testament, Shakespeare’s plays, and popular gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho, which tells of terrifying events in a remote castle. She read poems by her father’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and others.

  Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Byron were poets of the Romantic movement, which celebrated freedom and the brotherhood of humanity. It was inspired by the outbreak of the French Revolution, when the common people of France rose up against tyranny. It had been fed by William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. The Romantic poets looked to nature in its unspoiled wildness to awaken wonder and passion.

  Wordsworth’s poetry brought together the themes of freedom and nature:

  How does the meadow-flower its bloom unfold?

  Because the lovely little flower is free

  Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold.

  George Gordon, Lord Byron, was England’s celebrity poet. He was witty and wise in the ways of the world. Women found him irresistible, and even men praised his looks. Coleridge went into raptures describing Byron’s beautiful face: “his teeth so many stationary smiles—his eyes the open portals of the sun.” Byron had large eyes and seductively long lashes, and he wore his curly hair cut short. His soft, musical speech pleased the listener’s ear. A little boy who did not know Byron’s name referred to him as “the gentleman with the beautiful voice.” Lord Byron had been born with a malformed foot that made him walk with a limp, but he disguised his disability with a padded boot. He was an aristocrat, one of the English nobility.

  Byron had taken the reading world by storm in 1812, when he published the first cantos, or sections, of his long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron’s hero, Childe Harold, is a brooding, melancholy man. He turns away from a life of pleasure to travel through Spain, Portugal, and Greece. In true Romantic fashion, Childe Harold finds peace in the natural world:

  To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,

  With the wild flock that never needs a fold;

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  This is not solitude; ’tis but to hold

  Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unroll’d.

  The knowledge Mary gained from reading made her a strong debater. Her sharp mind intrigued Shelley’s college friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. He drew her into friendly arguments on subjects such as virtue and free will. The discussions distracted Mary from her loss, which Shelley was glad to see.

  “Mary’s illness disappears for a time,” he noted. Hogg never could win these verbal contests, so after a while he gave up and joined the others in telling nighttime ghost stories. Hogg had large, solid features; few people would have called him handsome. He could be loud and brash. But he was fond of Mary and may have fancied that he loved her. About his ever-more-frequent visits, Mary said, “I like him better each time.”

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a friend of the Godwins, is remembered as one of the important Romantic poets.

  The poetry and notorious personal life of George Gordon, Lord Byron, had made him a celebrity.

  Mary wanted a break from the constant presence of another person: Jane. Her stepsister had been Percy’s companion for walks and shopping trips when pregnancy and mourning kept Mary housebound. Mary could see that Percy liked Jane’s high spirits and enchanting dark eyes, maybe a little too much. But even he was growing tired of her childish outbursts. He used some of the money received from his father to send her away to the seaside village of Lynmouth, where she stayed in a pretty cottage under the eye of a prudent landlady. Jane changed her name to Claire—Claire Clairmont—which sounded glamorous to her ears.

  On their own for the first time, Mary and Shelley went in late spring to another picturesque coastal town, Torquay. The English believed the sea air at Torquay was especially healthy to breathe. Mary filled her lungs, inhaling all its goodness. She was going to have another baby and was doing all she could to take care of herself and her unborn child.

  That summer, Shelley found a new home west of London for himself and Mary. It was a two-story brick cottage near Windsor Great Park, the thousands of acres stretching south from the king’s residence, Windsor Castle. Against this sweeping green background, Mary tended flowers, read, and studied Latin. Shelley sat against a tree in the royal park, writing poetry. In this setting, he composed a lengthy poem titled Alastor.

  Shelley tended to write long poems; he liked to expand on his ideas for many lines rather than pare them down into brief verses. In Alastor, a poet journeys to imaginary lands seeking an ideal love, a “veilèd maid” who sat near him in a dream. “Her voice was like the voice of his own soul,” Shelley wrote. Perhaps she was a symbol for poetic inspiration. Published in 1816 along with some of his other poetry, Alastor was the first important poem by Percy Shelley that the public had a chance to read. Mary saw in it “the worship of the majesty of Nature, the broodings of a poet’s heart in solitude.”

  Percy Shelley wrote poetry under the chestnut trees in Windsor Forest.

  In September, joined by Peacock and Mary’s stepbrother, Charles Clairmont, Mary and Shelley went for a boat trip on the Thames. They rode north, hoping to reach the river’s source. The ten-day excursion took them to Oxford, where Shelley showed the others the rooms where he and Hogg had lived. Rowing on past chalky hills, woodlands, and rolling farms, the friends talked of many things, from the government to the benefit and harm of a vegetarian diet. Peacock had convinced Shelley to eat some well-peppered mutton chops before they left, believing they would boost the poet’s stamina.

  For Mary and Shelley, nature did have the power to heal, as the Romantic poets had promised. They imagined what it would be like to keep going, to wend their way by river and canal to distant parts of England. “Shelley even proposed, in his wildness, that there should be no halting-place,” Charles Clairmont informed his sister Claire. Shelley envisioned a trip through Wales and Scotland, “when by the time we returned we should have voyaged two thousand miles,” wrote twenty-year-old Charles. But when they reached a spot where the Thames had grown shallow and wading cows blocked their progress, they turned around and rowed home.

  Autumn passed contentedly into winter, and on January 24, 1816, Mary gave birth to a healthy boy. Now, holding her small son, Mary learned the joy of seeing a child of hers thrive. She
and Shelley named the baby William, after Mary’s father. They hoped this gesture might persuade William Godwin to accept them into the family circle, but they were in for a rude surprise. Not only did Godwin remain as firmly disapproving as ever, but he had the nerve to bother Shelley for more money. This time Shelley shot back an angry letter chiding Godwin for being “thus harsh and cruel.”

  And what was Claire up to all this time? Bored in Lynmouth, she had returned to Skinner Street, to keep her mother company while William Godwin went to Edinburgh on business. Mr. and Mrs. Godwin still hoped to bring her back into the family fold. Claire was restless, though, and wanted more from life. She dreamed of being someone people noticed, an actress or a playwright. To succeed, she needed help, so she wrote a letter to the most famous person she could think of, the poet Lord Byron.

  Byron was now at the center of a shocking scandal. Recently separated from his wife, he was rumored to have had an incestuous affair with his half sister. One of his lovers called him “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Any girl trying to salvage her reputation was wise to stay far away from him, but Claire believed she was not just any girl. She was a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft and a talent waiting to be discovered. Besides, Byron was on the board of the Drury Lane Theatre, where the greatest actors performed.

  The only known portrait of Claire Clairmont was painted in 1819 by Amelia Curran, who had known the Godwins for many years.

  Claire’s letter gained her a brief, unpromising interview. Unwilling to be ignored, she kept on writing to Byron. She sent him stories she had written. She told him that she scorned marriage and hinted that she was an atheist. She revealed that she was connected to William Godwin, whom Byron admired, and his daughter with Wollstonecraft, Mary. She said, too, that she was close to an unknown poet of genius. Her letters charmed Byron, who met with her again. Pretty soon, sure she had made a conquest, Claire offered herself to him. Together they could take a coach out of town, “about the distance of ten or twelve miles,” she wrote. “There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning.” Claire was not quite eighteen years old; Byron was twenty-eight.

  As Byron’s mistress, Claire sat with him in his private box at the theater. He wrote verses in praise of her singing: “like music on the waters / Is thy sweet voice to me . . .” Claire brought Mary to meet Byron but insisted he keep their sexual intimacy secret. “Mary is delighted with you as I knew she would be,” Claire wrote to him afterward.

  Byron left London in April 1816, to escape the city’s gossip peddlers. He was headed for Geneva, Switzerland, and he was going without Claire. She knew he felt no love for her. “Were I to float by your window drowned all you would say would be ‘Ah voila!’” she wrote to him. Yet she was not about to let her poet slip away. Claire suggested to Mary and Shelley that they all go to Geneva too. Mary and Shelley were eager to get out of England, where they lived a nearly friendless life, and where Shelley owed money. Shelley also was excited to think he might get to know Byron. So in early May, they set off with baby William on another European adventure.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Year Without a Summer

  I busied myself to think of a story . . . one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.

  They registered at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, a place popular with English tourists, as a married couple traveling with the wife’s sister. Claire knew that Byron planned to stop at this hotel after he did some sightseeing, and she wanted to be waiting when he arrived.

  Until he came, Mary, Shelley, and Claire filled their days with walks on the hotel grounds, watching rabbits nibbling on flowers and little lizards darting across their path. The surrounding foothills and mountains reminded Mary of Scotland. Shelley rented a boat, and they sailed on Lake Geneva. “The lovely lake,” Mary called it, “blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams.” She leaned her head back and let the wind blow through her hair. With William plump and strong, Mary felt deep happiness. Sometimes she laughed out loud in pure joy. She and Shelley hired a Swiss woman named Elise Duvillard to help with William’s care. Elise was a few years older than Mary and Shelley. Unmarried, she had a daughter who was being raised by her parents.

  Two weeks later, Byron drove up in splendid style, in a coach that he had ordered built. Painted a bold blue with gold and red stripes, it looked like one of Napoleon’s. He came with a friend, a twenty-one-year-old physician named John Polidori, and brought along a dog, a monkey, and a peacock. For a day and a half, Byron avoided Claire and her party, but when he encountered them on the beach, he greeted them as good manners required. It was a fortunate meeting: Byron and Shelley liked each other from the start and quickly became friends. Polidori admired Mary and soon began teaching her to speak Italian.

  The hotel was filled with nosy guests who had spotted the illustrious newcomer. Byron called them “a parcel of staring boobies.” To escape their gawking, he rented a villa a mile away, not far from the pretty town of Cologny. Shelley, Mary, and Claire leased a more modest house nearby. It was close enough to the villa for Claire to see who came and went. When Polidori stepped out, she sneaked over and slipped into Byron’s bed.

  Not to be outsmarted, curious English tourists boarded boats and sailed past Cologny, eager to spot proof of Byron’s debauchery. They let their imaginations run wild, insisting that bedsheets hanging on his clothesline were women’s petticoats. Shaking their heads, they told one another that the poet was running a bordello. An Englishman wrote home to report that Byron had taken up with a “family of very suspicious appearance. How many he has at his disposal out of the whole set I know not.” One hotel owner brought in a telescope so his guests could spy on the alluring group from the comfort of his rooms.

  Shelley deplored this attitude, which he labeled “social hatred.” There were English people, he observed, who detested “those whose conduct and opinions are not precisely modelled on their own. The systems of those ideas forms a superstition, which constantly demands and constantly finds fresh victims.”

  To escape prying eyes, Byron and Polidori holed up in the Villa Diodati. Mary, Shelley, and Claire rented a house nearby.

  He and his companions simply wanted to enjoy their holiday. They rode horses and mules into the Jura Mountains, following rutted paths left by carriage wheels. They explored medieval castles. Mary, Shelley, and Claire went to Chamonix, a pretty village beside the river Arve. Mary watched this rushing mountain waterway crash against its banks “like a wild animal who is furious in constraint.” She wandered in alpine meadows, collecting wildflower seeds that she hoped to plant in a garden one day.

  Chamonix sits at the base of Mont Blanc, the highest Alpine peak. The mountain’s strength and silence awed Shelley and inspired him to write a poem. “All things that move and breathe with toil and sound / Are born and die,” he wrote. Meanwhile, “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high.” The mountain appears eternal, part of “the everlasting universe of things.”

  A standing Byron recites for his friends as they boat on Lake Geneva. The two ladies are Mary and Claire. Shelley sits in the stern, and John Polidori balances at the side of the craft. The two oarsmen have been hired for the outing.

  Majestic Mont Blanc rises behind the village of Chamonix.

  Later in the poem, he observes, “In the lone glare of day, the snows descend.” Contemplating that mountaintop snow, Shelley finds a power in himself. After all, how could nature’s beauty exist without a thinking being to perceive it? He asks the mountain,

  And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

  If to the human mind’s imaginings

  Silence and solitude were vacancy?

  Shelley could be starry-eyed and impulsive, but he could also write beautiful, complex poetry.

  There were many days that June when rain and chill kept everyone indoors. People called 1816 “the year without a summer.” Around the globe, temperatur
es stayed two or three degrees below average. The change was enough to cause heavy snowfalls in the northeastern United States in late spring and crop failures in Europe and India. The strange weather resulted from the explosion of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, more than a year before. This volcanic eruption—the largest in recorded history—sent millions of tons of dust and ash high into the atmosphere. Much of it fell to Earth, killing many thousands of people in the region, but the tiniest particles stayed aloft. Air currents carried them over the Northern Hemisphere, where they absorbed sunlight and disrupted normal weather patterns and people’s lives. At the time, no one understood the connection between the catastrophic event in Asia and changes in the climate thousands of miles away. People blamed the strange weather on sunspots, earthquakes in the Lower Mississippi Valley, or simply God’s will.

  A German artist tried to convey the enormity of the 1816 explosion of Mount Tambora. This massive volcanic eruption affected the planet’s weather for years.

  On stormy nights, the friends gathered at Byron’s villa. As thunder boomed overhead and sheets of rain washed down the long balcony windows, Mary and the others sat in the warmth and comfort of a roaring fire. They stayed up late into the night, talking over strange occurrences and novel ideas. One night, John Polidori read aloud his notes from a lecture by Sir William Lawrence, a surgeon whose teachings were causing controversy. Lawrence claimed that human consciousness arose solely from the workings of the brain. God played no role, and there was no such thing as a soul. “I see the animal functions inseparable from the animal organs,” he professed.