In August 1823, when Mary and
her son had arrived back in England, they initially stayed with her father and
her stepmother—William and Mary Jane Godwin, who were living in a place on 195
The Strand, where they’d recently moved their bookshop. But Mary and the older
couple had never really gotten along well—not since her elopement with
Bysshe—so it wasn’t long before she knew that separate quarters would help keep
everyone sane.
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| The Strand, 1824 |
In 1999 I walked along The
Strand, which is very near the Thames at the Godwins’ old address. It was not a
pleasant experience. I was returning to my hotel after seeing a performance of Oklahoma! at The Lyceum (the theater
where Mary had seen the play based on her Frankenstein—though
now rebuilt). My journal for May 5 records the Dark Side:
… on the Strand, people sleeping in
doorways; a subway car filled—I mean filled—w/ trash (as if someone had dumped a couple of large green bags in the
car; streets full of ugly, angry,
dangerous-looking people. (A. Burgess had it right about the nights in A
Clockwork Orange.) I was glad to be going
home before [all of this]; now, I’m ecstatic! Only people with lots of money [cabs, personal vehicles]are even
reasonably safe; the rest of us are prey.
The Godwins’ place is long gone,
but (in any case) in less than a month Mary had found a place for her and young
Percy: 13 Speldhurst Street in Brunswick Square, about a mile north of the
Godwins’—another place that’s gone. But her social life accelerated a bit. She
visited with John Hunt (whose brother, Leigh, had not returned yet from Italy),
with the Novellos, a family of musicians whom the Hunts knew, with Thomas Jefferson
Hogg, Bysshe’s old schoolboy friend (the friend expelled with Bysshe from
Oxford because of On the Necessity of
Atheism), with Jane Williams (whose husband, Edward, had drowned with
Bysshe), and others.
Mary was also going to the
theater—a life-long love—and with the Godwins saw Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in December, a play
that must have had enormous personal relevance for her—a play about profound
family estrangement. And reconciliation.
Also with them that night at the
theater was playwright John Howard Payne (who wrote the song “Home Sweet Home”),
a young American whose presence would ignite one of the most fiery episodes in
Mary’s life, an episode involving Washington Irving.
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