By the time Fanny Godwin killed herself, Mary and
Bysshe were firmly together (with Claire in tow), and when the dark dust
settled from the suicide of Harriet Shelley, Bysshe, now free to marry again,
promptly did so. Two and a half months later. He briefly pursued custody of his
two young children, then gave up. And never saw them again.
On December 30, 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
became Mary Shelley in a service at St. Mildred’s Bread Street. As I wrote
above, that building is entirely gone now—destroyed by the Luftwaffe in World
War II. I stood at the site and saw nothing. But imagined much.
One of the most direct results of that marriage?
Mary’s father, William Godwin, finally spoke to the daughter with whom he’d
refused all forms of communication after her elopement with Bysshe in late
July, 1814. Nearly two and a half years of bitter silence had ensued, a silence
that had devastated Mary, who’d adored her father. Godwin and his wife, Mary
Jane, attended the service at St. Mildred’s.
Once Godwin broke his silence, he wrote to family and
friends announcing that Mary had, well, married up. To his brother he wrote: “Mary has now (most unexpectedly)
acquired a status and character in society. Shelley is not without his faults
[!!!], but he is also not without many good and even noble qualities ….”[1]
Godwin also accelerated and intensified his requests to Bysshe for money.
Godwin was terrible about managing it, and he had cash problems his entire
adult life.
The next fifteen months were productive and
peripatetic for the newlyweds—and highly stressful. Immediately after the
marriage, the couple lived with the Godwins for a bit—and with Leigh Hunt and
family (who would emerge significant later in the story). They moved to a place
called Albion House in Marlow, a little over thirty miles west of London.
Less than a year later, they sold the place and moved to
119 Russell Street in London, just off Drury Lane and right around the corner
from the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on Catherine Street. Years later, on January
26, 1824, Mary would see the great Edmund Kean play Richard III there. “His
wonderful looks,” she wrote in her journal, “his tones, his gesture—transported
me.”[2]
She resolved to write a tragedy herself. It didn’t work out.
The day I’d planned to go to Russell Street, there was
a downpour, but I learned subsequently that the place is long gone anyhow—a busy
urban neighborhood. All I would have seen would have been confused ghosts.
And then Bysshe decided he and Mary (and Claire) should
move to Italy. This seemed sensible to him for a variety of reasons. For one,
it would get Godwin off his case (the pleas for money had become ever more
odious). For another, living expenses were much cheaper in Italy. For another,
they would get to see the places they’d read about all their lives—Florence,
Pisa, Rome, Naples.
But there was another, more pressing reason: Claire
Clairmont had delivered the child of Lord Byron on January 12, 1817.
Incredibly, they’d managed to keep the whole thing hidden from the Godwins and
others. She named the little girl Alba, but Byron, hearing, decided Allegra
would be a better name. Claire had little choice but to change it. Anyway,
Claire and Allegra would travel with the Shelleys to Italy, where Byron was
living, and deliver the child to him—as per his insistence.
And finally—before they left for the Continent, Mary
published her account of her 1814 elopement as a travel book (with no mention of the reason she’d gone to
Europe), History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
(1817). The complete title goes on and on.[3]
And on New Year’s Day 1818 … Frankenstein appeared. Published anonymously.
[1] Qtd.
in William St Clair, The Godwins and the
Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 417.
St Clair had consulted the text of the original letter at the New York Public
Library. Godwin’s letters are slowly being edited by the terrific scholar
Pamela Clemit and published by Oxford University Press, but only two volumes
are now in print—and the letters have not as yet reached beyond Mary’s
childhood.
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