Vindication (54 page)

 

In the early autumn of 1819, a set of visitors from London broke into this self-contained, professional life. The group consisted of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, aged twenty-two, and her stepsister Claire (Clara Jane) Clairmont, aged twenty-one, together with Mary's husband Percy Shelley. On 30 September they came to the door of Casa Silva: Mary grave, milky-pale, and swollen in late pregnancy; Claire dark with a high colour, a cluster of black curls and wide black eyes; and the eccentric figure of the poet, showing the full length of his white neck–tinged with rose–from an open shirt, set off by a grey coat, like a dressing-gown, flapping at his heels. They were passing through Pisa on their way from Livorno to Florence. Mary presented a letter of introduction from her father.

‘Mrs Shelley, my daughter,' Godwin had written, ‘thought it possible that in the course of her travels she might accidentally arrive at some town where one of her mother's dearest friends had taken up residence.' He went on hesitantly, unsure how Mary's vagabond group would be received. If she were unwelcome, he adds, ‘you have only to put this billet in the fire; she will consider that is an answer sufficient'.

The fears were groundless. Mrs Mason (as they called her) declared herself too ‘a vagabond on the face of the earth'. She kissed Claire twice, and rejoiced with Shelley in ‘the frankness of your or my character…You cannot abhor
cant
more than I do.' Shelley's complaints about his kidneys she judged to be harmless pains brought on by stress over the recent Peterloo Massacre, when, that August, workers in Manchester had gathered to petition for the reform of Parliament.

‘I have a sad opinion of the British Parliament,' Margaret agreed. ‘Since my country sank never to rise again, I have been a cool politician, but I cannot forget how I once felt, & can still sympathize with those capable of similar feelings.'

Letters pursued the Shelleys in Florence, urging their return, with offers of company, help, and medical advice for Mary's newborn Percy Florence. Her advice again takes its sage tone from the voice Wollstonecraft had cultivated in Mrs Mason. This vein was not far off from the opinions of the great lady–and opinions came easily to a woman who had been Lady Mount Cashell. She thought Shelley should consult Dr Vaccà, happy though she was with her own diagnosis. ‘I am not sure that I should not myself be as good a physician for Mr S as any one, were not the first requisite wanting–I mean the confidence of the patient.' So it happened that, late in January 1820, Mary, Claire and Shelley settled in Pisa. Their home was Casa Frassi on the Lung'Arno. Over the next three years, a daughter, a pupil and two followers of Mary Wollstonecraft formed an outcast society of their own.

A
portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft had looked down on three girls as they grew up: on Godwin's adopted daughter, Fanny Imlay; on his own daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; and on his stepdaughter Clara Jane Clairmont. Opie's grave portrait of 1797 was to become the lasting public image of Mary Wollstonecraft, on permanent exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. In the opening years of the nineteenth century it still hung in what had been her study at the Polygon. After her death this room became Godwin's study, and here the continued presence of the dead broke through the limits of the lifespan. For girls growing up with Godwin, this thoughtful image of Mary Wollstonecraft was the model of what they must strive to be. No slander reached them; no questioning of marriage; no atheism. Faith was not absent from their home. The second Mrs Godwin was Catholic, and her own two children had attended the Chapel of St Aloysius in Somers Town. She took the view that one form of Christianity did not differ in essentials from another, so after her marriage to Godwin all the children attended Sunday service at St Paul's. Godwin tested them on the sermon when they returned. In this home, religious conformity was endorsed, while the respectability of the second wife was ensured through two marriage ceremonies, in different places, to cover and legalise the alternate names she had used.

Mrs Godwin was animated and hardworking, and these qualities seem
to have sufficed in the main for so constant a man. His friends disliked her: a clever, second-rate woman without the finer sensibilities, Marshall judged. This new wife was given to ‘baby-sullenness', Godwin discovered. Equable as he was, he did have to remonstrate over ‘the worst of tempers'. Twice, she threatened to walk out on the family. When she came back the second time Jane capered, but Fanny stood still in dismay. Her stepmother was moody, outspoken, and given to dramas. Similar, it might be thought, to the flaws of Mary Wollstonecraft, were it possible to separate those from the eager sympathy and truth. Once, while Godwin was away, he asked his wife to kiss her stepdaughters–but only if she could do so wholeheartedly. Fanny and Mary called her ‘Mamma', though Mary loathed her–Mamma at once divined Mary's romantic attachment to her father–while Fanny tried to see Mamma's good points. Godwin was attracted by what he called her ‘unsinking courage under calamities that would have laid any other person level with the earth'. She told him a dramatic tale of going abroad alone to seek her fortune at the age of eleven. He believed her–but can we? She was liable to twist facts, and determined to fix her husband's mind on money.

One reason why Godwin had meant to be a bachelor was that he could not support a family through writing. When he remarried he had four children to maintain, and then there were five, for in March 1803 little William was born. It became necessary to find new means. Back in 1800–1 Godwin had been amongst the contributors to a high-flying publication for children called
The Juvenile Library
, a cross between an encyclopaedia and a magazine, specialising in moral philosophy, botany, geography and the manners of nations, ancient and modern languages, mathematics, scientific experiment, and biography. Included were lives of intellectual women like Margaret Roper (daughter of Sir Thomas More); Katherine Parr (who entered into the theological debates of her age and published devotional books in the 1540s); and Mme Dacier, a translator of Greek and Latin classics in the time of Louis XIV. Peacock, De Quincey and Holman Hunt, then schoolboys, were amongst the monthly prizewinners; also, a number of girls, in nearly every subject. Godwin and his wife set up their own Juvenile Library, a publishing firm for children's books, in 1805. In
1807 the family moved from the salubrious air of the Polygon, on the outskirts of London, to a corner site in the centre of the City, occupying four floors above their bookshop at 41 Skinner Street. It was the right home for Margaret Mount Cashell's
Stories
, published anonymously in December of that year.

There is a drawing in Godwin's
Fables Ancient and Modern
, where Aesop holds up an explanatory forefinger to two little girls. When Godwin tested his storytelling powers on Fanny (eleven), Charles (ten), Mary (eight), and Jane (seven), he found that Aesop's moral came too abruptly. The children would ask, ‘What happened then?' So Godwin (under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin) expands the fable. He also adds fables of his own. In December 1805 the
Anti-Jacobin
recommends this book–if it had only known–by the enemy. A bust of Godwin's Aesop went up above the door of the shop in Skinner Street, where beasts went lowing and snorting to their end at the Smithfield Market, and crowds rushed by to view public hangings at Newgate Prison–unlikely readers for the Godwins' fine list which included Godwin's
Life of Lady Jane Grey
(1806), the model of a learned girl who at the age of twelve knew eight languages; Charles and Mary Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare
(1807); and an English grammar by William Hazlitt (1810). Mrs Fenwick, who had assisted with the delivery of little Mary and nursed her dying mother, contributed
Lessons for Children
, which taught the rudiments of humanity in manners and morals. Mary Jane Godwin did the first English translation of
The
[
Swiss
]
Family Robinson
(1814), wrote (anonymously)
Dramas for Children
; and there was a performance version of
Beauty and the Beast
in verse, accompanied by Beauty's Song set to music. Margaret Mount Cashell's reading-books were popular.

Amongst the most successful publications were several schoolbooks by Godwin: histories of England, Greece and Rome. He believed that history should raise questions, not provide answers, and that the true aim of education was not rules and imitation but to stimulate a pupil to reach beyond the limits of his lessons. The respected schoolmasterish author called Baldwin was able to get away with more emphasis on republican virtues than was customary at the time. In his
English Dictionary
the word
‘revolution' is defined as ‘things returning to their just state'. The bookshop also carried stationery, maps, games and gifts, including a series of shilling booklets.

One of these was by Mary Godwin, a prodigy at the age of eight in 1805. She took up a current song about the adventures of an absurdly mistaken John Bull in France. Addressing the French in English, he takes their ‘
Je n
'
entends pas
' to be information about a grandee called Nongtongpaw. So pervasive does this grandee appear that John Bull begins to doubt the French Revolution. The hilarious quatrains of
Mounseer Nongtongpaw
dramatise, in effect, why the word ‘insular' entered the English language at this time.

 

When Fanny was eleven, the Wollstonecraft sisters proposed to take her over. Godwin refused. Fanny was his–a charge Mary Wollstonecraft had left him. She was known as Fanny Godwin, though the French registration of her birth had recorded her surname as Imlay. It might have been a prudent move to send Fanny for a visit at this time, when the Wollstonecrafts reached out to her, but the coolness between the sisters and Godwin remained. The effect of Godwin's
Memoirs
had been to taint the name of Wollstonecraft and this, the sisters feared, might undermine their Dublin schools. To start schools had been risky–Johnson had shaken his head–but they did survive: Everina had a boarding-school for girls and Bess had a day-school for boys. Whatever lessons were to be learnt from the failure at Newington Green, they had learnt them. They had to make their way with no help beyond the sisterly support they always gave each other.

Another attempt to benefit Fanny came when Joseph Johnson died in 1809. His will left fifteen-year-old Fanny £200, which Godwin was to give her to pay his debt to Johnson. Fanny was not given this bequest. Though the Godwins worked hard, their press was never solvent. There was no capital; the whole venture was based on loans, and under pressure from his wife to keep it going Godwin turned into an inveterate borrower. The need to scrounge what he could on the strength of a past reputation constricted somewhat the character of a thinker who had once opened himself to the ‘heart'. A need for £3000 was in the air when, in 1812, an apparent solution appeared in the shape of a young poet who was heir to a great fortune.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the grandson of an American named Bysshe who presents another prototype of Gatsby. Bysshe had been no one in New Jersey. Then he migrated to England, grew rich, sent his son to Oxford and his grandson to Eton. Percy Shelley was at Eton in the heyday of Dr Keate, known as ‘Flogger'. The boys were worse, and from 1804 to 1810 Percy Shelley was bullied for his oddity and gentleness. During this period, Bysshe became Sir Bysshe. Part of his gains had been to elope with two heiresses (while he kept a mistress with four children, one of whom was also called Bysshe). His grandson, Percy, expelled from Oxford for atheism, eloped at a very young age with a Jewish schoolgirl, Harriet Westbrook, and married her. Too late, he caught up with Mary Wollstonecraft's rationale against marriage. Like her, he detested political oppression and was a non-violent revolutionary who believed change must be gradual to be secure. He was a convert to
Political Justice
, and at the age of twenty approached Godwin with the awe of a disciple. He also had an eye to Fanny as Wollstonecraft's daughter.

In July 1812, before they met, Shelley invited Fanny to join him and Harriet in a rented cottage at Lynmouth in Devon. Godwin forbade it. He said he did not know a man until he had seen his face.

Shelley was puzzled: surely Godwin knew him through his ideas and letters? But Godwin would not budge.

When, at length, Shelley and Harriet arrived to dine at Skinner Street on 4 October, the two younger girls were away, and it was Fanny, a dark young woman of eighteen with long brown hair, who found herself drawn out by a poet's regard. Harriet set down their first impressions:

For the next six weeks there was daily contact with Shelley–the Godwins saw almost no one else. Their new friend was tall and stooped with long legs, narrow chest and shoulders, a prominent blue-veined brow and dishevelled light locks. His head was all front–straight behind–and his face and features small. Even his brow, though striking in a ‘marble' way, wasn't broad like Godwin's. He spoke in a high tenor that seemed to come from the back of his head, like a child's. This strange creature had grown up surrounded by five sisters, and would often try to reconstitute a female court. He was sensitive to women–as well as susceptible. ‘Then it was Fanny Imlay he loved', her stepsister reported later. She thought he loved ‘as women love', and she believed that ‘Fanny loved Shelley'.

Fanny was taken aback when Shelley, always restless, took off for Wales on 13 November. It was ungrateful not to say goodbye, she said in her direct way; she still had some questions to put to him, though she was not sure if this was proper.

Shelley replied on 10 December 1812: ‘So you do not know whether it is
proper
to write to me. Now, one of the most conspicuous considerations that arise from such a topic is–who & what am I? I am one of those formidable & long clawed animals called a
man
.'

He could assure Fanny that he was a tame representative of the species, lived on vegetables, ‘& never bit since I was born'. As such, he adds, ‘I venture to intrude myself on your attention.'

His attentiveness reflects a different Fanny from the plain girl. Others saw her as upright and generous yet ‘odd in her manners and opinions'–a girl with ‘nothing' of her mother in her. Though Fanny may have continued to look like Imlay, she was, in truth, much like her mother in the honesty and independence of her opinions, her domestic affections and acute feelings. Jane joked that the hero of
The Man of Feeling
(leading the cult of sensibility forty years before) would have made a perfect husband for Fanny. Her tender-hearted and hopeless attempts at keeping the peace provided some amusement for the younger children.

At a guess–it can only be a guess–Mary and Jane were jealous of her closeness to the woman of the portrait, the icon of the household. After all, it was Fanny whom Mary Wollstonecraft had adored unreservedly,
who was praised for her bloom and intelligence, who had slept in her mother's arms, and whose pulses of imaginative sympathy had been cultivated in accord with
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
. Wollstonecraft had worried that it might unfit this sensitised child for her future life, but it had reassured her that Fanny–‘gay as a lark' as they set sail for unknown lands far north–took so naturally to humane training. It was Fanny to whom Mary Wollstonecraft had clung for comfort when Imlay left, and to whom she had hastened on her return journey from Norway. ‘At Gothenburg I shall embrace my
Fannikin
,' she had written to the father of her ‘babe'. ‘I never saw a calf bounding in a meadow, that did not remind me of my little frolicker. A calf, you say. Yes; but a
capital
one, I own.' All this was in print in the prized relics of her
Travels
and
Letters to Imlay
.

‘Les Goddesses', the three girls were called by Aaron Burr, who came to visit, the American who had read the
Rights of Woman
through the night and wished his daughter, Theodosia, to benefit. When a stranger asked Godwin if he was bringing up Wollstonecraft's daughters according to her teachings, Godwin was too truthful not to admit that he had ceded control to his second wife, who was ‘not exclusively a follower'. He and Mrs Godwin lacked ‘leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice'. Although Godwin retained a special bond with Fanny, he was caught up in the slog of a failing business, and allowed Mrs Godwin to sideline the willing girl as her helper. Here, Godwin appears to forget that Fanny had already taken the imprint of Wollstonecraft's teachings–the compassion, the directness–an inward shape none could change.