Frankenstein Sundae, 357

Final Stop: Bournemouth

Mary wanted to be buried in the same plot with her parents—in the churchyard at St. Pancras in London—where they had lain since 1797 (her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft) and 1836 (her father, William Godwin). Complicating things a little: Also lying there now were the remains of her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, who’d died in 1841. Mary Shelley had never really gotten along well with the second Mrs. Godwin (the River Animus flowed both ways), so Mary’s surviving son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, fully aware of the toxicity of that river, moved briskly to remedy things.

He and his wife had recently (1850) moved to southern English coastal town of Bournemouth, where they had bought a home—Boscombe Manor—where they would live in muted pomp and circumstance, yachting, performing in private theatrical events, and living the sort of life that Sir Percy’s parents and maternal grandparents would neither have recognized nor sanctioned. Mary Shelley, though, had mellowed over the years, had suffered long for her youthful indiscretions, and she was grateful for the quiet that lay like a quilt about her son and daughter-in-law.

Sir Percy and his wife arranged to have the remains of Godwin and Wollstonecraft moved from St. Pancras to St. Peter’s Churchyard in Bournemouth, where they now lie with Mary—and with Sir Percy and Jane. The local rector was nervous about all these controversial folks arriving there, so the remains of Godwin and Wollstonecraft were interred at night. No service or ceremony.

Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin remains in St. Pancras alone with only the names of the others on the gravestone.

I visited the Shelley family tomb in Bournemouth on April 16, 1999—early in the morning (I would catch a train for Elsewhere a bit later). As I look at my journal today, I curse my failure to write more than that I went there. I commented about the sun (necessary for the pictures I wanted to take). And I wonder now, some eighteen years later, why I did not also go take a look at Boscombe Manor, still standing. (Lots of photos of it on the Internet.) All I can do is plead ignorance: I was in the early years of my pursuit and just flat forgot to do some things—or, worse, did not even realize there were such things to do. And is this not an insight we experience, again and again and again, as we age, Regret our most adhesive companion?

(All pix are mine from 1999--except the Boscombe Manor pic at the end.)