Scenes from the Childhood of Mary Shelley, nee Godwin

I can't speak highly enough of Miranda Seymour's biography Mary Shelley.

I am as in awe of this as I was of Barbara Guest's biography of H.D., which took Guest five years to write and during which period self-abnegation was pretty much the word.

The detail and meticulousness here are just beyond belief, and describing Seymour's research skills as tenacious would be an understatement.

And she has such a delicacy of manner, and a graciousness of spirit when in disagreement with previous biographers.

I heartily recommend you pick this up!

You won't only get Mary Shelley's life, but that of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (her parents), as well as much insight into Aaron Burr (who lived in exile with the Godwin family), Samuel Taylor Coledridge (a family friend and frequent visitor) and many other makers of the age.

The most surprising thing to learn (which really shouldn't be surprising to me) is how insane everyone is.

It's England in the early nineteenth century. What's not to be insane about? Death visits more than the sun; people are walking around in a state of constant disease; surgery might as well be a parlor game, it is so primitive.

But people put on their brave face and showed that English pluck in the face of tragedies of Monty Pythonesque proportions.

But the characters revealed here are just fascinating. Mary Wollstonecraft has an early erotic obsession with Fuseli. William Godwin's insane concept of candor would ruin his wife's reputation for generations, all done in a spirit of innocence. (Godwin was a sort of genius, but lacked all real discretion. And he seems to have been genial but not always constant in his affections.) Percy Shelley enters the debt-ridden Godwin family's life by posing falsely as a potential rescuer, a young chiseler and great idealist...

And many of the people in the intellectual circles in which Godwin circulated were extremely free in their amours and their manner. Many of these friends were extreme radicals. Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin had ideas for social engineering that would shock many today.

The war of ideas is amazing to watch. But it is played out in a theater of real flesh, and it is equally fascinating to see who gets ostracized, who gets locked up and who gets vilified for generations (often to be canonized later). History is a trip, and literary history is no different than the rest.

There has never been a single page where my interest flagged because Seymour's style is so piquant and thoroughly twentieth-century in its careful assays and assessments of actions and words.

However, she does not make unwarranted assumptions. Trust me, you will probably wonder, as I have, about Aaron Burr's infatuation with "the girls" in the Godwin household, and other suspect matters. Seymour finds that infradig to address, apparently...or simply speculative and thus worthless.

Seymour is no Andrew Morton. She's a real biographer.

I'm reading this very slowly. I always read great biographies slowly. So I'm only into Chapter Six, "A Glassite Household (1812-1814)."

I wanted to share some scenes from the early life of Mary Shelley by excerpting some here.

Mary's mother, the celebrated and maligned Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to Mary. Mary's father was not the sort of man to be long alone, so he was casting eyes about fairly soon after. Not that he was a cad; he just was not the overly sentimental type and very practical, although he reverenced his deceased beloved.

Here are some choice bits of Seymour's bio relating details from the childhood of Mary Shelley (nee Godwin)...these will be given higgledy-piggledy and the passages are not necessarily consecutive in the book.

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"Women naturally gathered where there were motherless babies to be cherished, but the tall house in the Polygon also attracted a number of men more interested in talking to Godwin than seeing his daughters. William Hazlitt, whose family had a long history of friendship with the Godwins, made frequent visits; so did an observant young lawyer, Henry Crabb Robinson, whose diaries still carry a faint aromatic whiff of pipe-smoke between their tightly packed pages. The year 1800 also marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship between Godwin and Charles Lamb. A small, pale, nervous-mannered young man with a disproportionately large and noble head, Lamb earned his living as a clerk at East India House and with his elder sister Mary kept a home as oddly cheerful as any from a novel by Dickens. Gin, whist and and smoking were Lamb's modest vices. Volatile and bright as a dragonfly in his rapid, charmingly inconsequential conversation, Lamb easily masked the sadness of living with a sister he adored but who, from time to time, reverted to madness--the madness which had, in 1796, led her to kill their mother, to whom she had been a devoted child."

*   *    *    *

"...Lamb was intrigued and sometimes alarmed by Godwin's eccentric behaviour; he was unaware of how anxiously his host was recording the spates of 'deliquium' (narcolepsy--me) which often afflicted him after his wife's death. They added to Godwin's fears for the children. Carlisle sensibly advised him to take a rest from his work; Godwin was too poor and too conscientious to listen."

*   *    *    *

"Coleridge erupted into their lives like a meteor in the winter of 1799. He cmae for meals and stayed for days. The habit of daily prayer with the children at the end of each day, thought it needed the atheistical Godwin's acquiescence, was probably Coleridge's introduction. His recital one evening of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' left Mary, hiding behind a sofa when she should have been in bed, with an unforgettable memory of an ice-bound sea and a man haunted by the swift, unstoppable treading in his wake of 'a frightful fiend.' The image struck; it haunts the story of Frankenstein."

*   *    *    *

"Fanny (Wollstonecraft's child by the American cad Imlay--me) and Mary lived in a country which was at war with France, but they were surrounded by the chatter of French voices every time they were taken out of the house. The churchyard where their mother was buried was full of French graves; in the two local hospices run by their kindly neighbour, Abbe Carron, old Frenchmen chanted their morning and evening prayers. When Mary followed Fanny to a nearby day-school at the age of four, their playmates were the children of emigre parents, all, naturally, in favour of England's war against a regime which had forced them into exile. Carron called Somers Town 'little France'; to the less well-disposed, it was 'Botany Bay.'"

*   *    *    *

"Peeping from the nursery windows at the top of No. 29 The Polygon, Fanny and Mary could look down on the circle of tidily divided gardens behind the house to watch Mr. Collins laying the strawberry nets or staking out a bean row. They could see across the fields of Twenty Acres and Fig's Mead to where the tall elms swayed their heads above Camden Town; north-west of them, the bald high dome of Primrose Hill jutted above the fields, looking ever so slightly like Mr. Godwin's head. Sometimes, a flash of light and a soft explosion told them that a duel--rarely fatal on this site--was taking place outside Mother Red Cap's tavern at Chalk Farm, known better to Fanny and Mary as the place where they went to drink syllabubs or to see a cow being milked; once, a manned balloon came sailing across the sky from Vauxhall's pleasure gardens, to land in one of the fields just north of their home."

*   *    *    *

"Visits to the city and its entertainments were rare events. Fanny, at the age of our, was taken to a children's play and, with Marshall in attendance, to admire the grotto made by Alexander Pope at Twickenham. Mary, too young for such treats, became familiar with the sandy footpath to St. Pancras churchyard where, when she had spelled out the letters on the stone marking her mother's grave, she was free to explore. As a small girl, she probably took most pleasure in peering through the churchyard fence at the clear, bubbling waters of the Fleet river, still sweet at Somers Town before it began its long inglorious plunge towards the Thames as the dirtiest open sewer in London.

"These regular visits to the churchyard helped strengthen Mary's sense of the mother she only knew through Opie's portrait. The little book of 'Lessons' in which she featured as baby William (Wollstonecraft and Godwin anticipated a boy and Mary wrote 'William' into her lesson book as a character...Mary was born instead--me) was probably the first she read. Even before she could puzzle out the words of Original Stories, the collection of tales Mary Wollstonecraft had written for her pupil in Ireland, Mary could admire the delicately engraved illustrations which the publisher had commissioned for the second and more expensive edition from William Blake, then at the beginning of his artistic career. One showed a mother standing between two little girls, imaginably Fanny and herself. Another showed two dead children lying under the gaze of a tall, gaunt man, not quite human. Someone must have read Mary the accompanying story, of how the man ran away from civilization to live alone, depending on the kindness of passing strangers. Was it here that the idea of Frankenstein was born?"

*   *    *    *

"Science and physicianship were frequent topics of conversation in Godwin's home, especially when Anthony Carlisle, a staunch believer in medical experiments, was visiting. She was six years old when Carlisle came to the Polygon with a story which no search for Frankenstein's origins can overlook.

"It was customary for the bodies of murderers hanged at Newgate to be handed over to doctors for dissection at anatomy theatres. In February 1803, the Annual Register reported an experiment on one such victim by John (Giovanni) Aldini which had taken place in front of an assembly of 'professional gentlemen'. Nothing would have kept Carlisle from being there to observe an experiment by the man who was locked in combat with Volta over the question of whether the body contained an electrical 'vital' fluid. Aldini had already shown that he could make a decapitated mastiff kick its legs while the head clashed its jaws in audible rage; on this occasion, a vast machine comprising two hundred and forty metal plates was wired to the corpse's head. This was the result, a disconcerting one even for such a sceptic as Carlisle.

On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye actually opened. In the subsequent course of the experiment, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion, and it appeared to all the bystanders that the wretched man was on the point of being restored to life.

"The experiment was hurriedly terminated. When repeated at a later date, the corpse jerked up an arm and struck one of the observers in the eye. To a man with Anthony Carlisle's interest in the advancement of medicine, and to Godwin, whose most recent subject (in St. Leon) had been the danger of seeking ways to prolong life, this offered rich matter for discussion. Electricity's power to animate seemed beyond doubt, but law restricted medical experiments of this kind to felons. What if Aldini went further? What if he had succeeded in restoring the body of such a villain--the man who had been hanged for murdering his spouse--to life?"