My note to Betty on October 4, 1999, has a special
poignancy for me now as I read it for the first time since then. I’ll get to
that in a bit.
I told her that I was heading off to Bloomington,
Indiana, to read a rare book, Shelley and
Mary, a collection of letters and other documents about the Shelley family—nearly
1200 pages—in special collections at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library.
Mary’s surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, had arranged for a private
publication in three volumes in 1882. There were only twelve copies.
I also told Betty that while I was in the area, I was
going to visit New Harmony, Indiana, over on the southwestern edge of the
state, lying along the Wabash River. Robert Owen had bought the town—called
“Harmonie” at the time—in 1825. Here’s what the town’s website says about Owen
and his dream:
Robert Owen’s
ambition was to create a perfect society through free education and the
abolition of social classes and personal wealth. He encouraged world-renowned
scientists and educators to settle in “New” Harmony. With the help of his
partner, William Maclure of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia,
the Owen/Maclure community introduced educational and social reforms to
America.
So why was I going there?
Well, the Owens had a connection with Mary’s father, William Godwin. Robert
Owen had consulted with Godwin about his (Owen’s) plans to create a more just
society for workers. According to one of Mary’s recent biographers, Miranda
Seymour, Owen gave his workforce of
semi-destitute people proper schooling, housing and rules of behaviour,
[leading] … to a better understanding of citizenship [84]. This is just the
sort of thing Godwin would have loved, for he wrote all his life about a just,
humane society.
Later, Mary became good friends with Owen’s son,
Robert Dale Owen, who was a few years younger than she. There was some …
electricity … between them, but he sailed off to America with Frances Wright,
who was going to found a settlement, Nashoba (near Memphis, Tennessee), where
she would train for employment former slaves (whom she would purchase and
free). I’ll get into the Nashoba story a little later (I visited the site), but
I wanted to see the New Harmony community because of its connections to the
Owens and, by extension, to Godwin and his daughter Mary.
I see from my journal in late September 1999 that I
was reading every day about Frances Trollope and Frances Wright (both, by the
way, went by “Fanny” with their friends, a name that has always made (immature)
me laugh because it was a word that my dad always used to refer to his
posterior[1]).
I left on my Indiana trip on the afternoon of October
5, a Tuesday—a sunny & beautiful Ohio
fall day, I wrote in my journal that night. I stayed in a Comfort Inn south
of Indianapolis, and I’m smiling right now as I read about that night, about
how I, using a dial-up modem, accessed America On-Line to send an email to
Joyce (after we’d already talked on the phone).
Early next morning, I hit the Lilly Library, where I
went through their strict security protocols (as I’ve said, it’s their special
collections facility). I quickly obtained their copy of Shelley and Mary and typed frantic notes for two and a half hours—Not a lot of stuff, I wrote later, but some golden stuff—especially the letters
from Godwin to Mary, unpublished most other places.
I just now dug through my myriads of folders and found
my Shelley and Mary file—including the
notes that I’d typed that long-ago day. And there are some lovely exchanges,
including this, in a letter Godwin wrote to Mary on March 30, 1820. I cannot conceal from myself, he wrote, that the time must come when I must rest
from my labors, and that my life and my power of intellectual production may
not go out together.
The fear of all of us as we age. Godwin would live
another sixteen years—and was able to continue his intellectual life and
productivity for virtually all of that time. A lucky man. My father was not so
fortunate.
[1]
An example. On long car trips, Dad, driving, would lean back and rise a few
inches out of his seat from time to time. His explanation: “Just cooling my
fanny.” My mother did not find this charming.
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