Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (48 page)

It was therefore fortunate that she arrived back in England to be greeted by an astonishing piece of news. Almost overnight, she had become famous. The Lyceum Theatre was staging a production of
Frankenstein
which ‘caused the ladies to faint away & a hubbub to ensue’.
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Mary went to see the new incarnation of her novel with Godwin, William and Jane a few days after her arrival in London. Her unnamed Creature was represented by a long dash in the playbill, setting the tone for a delightfully silly production, described fully by Mary for the benefit of the absent Hunts:

At the end of the Ist Act. the stage represents a room with a staircase leading to
F
workshop – he goes to it and you see his light at a small window, through which a frightened servant peeps, who runs off in terror when F. exclaims ‘It lives!’ – Presently F himself rushes in horror & trepidation from the room and while still expressing his agony & terror —— throws down the door of the laboratory, leaps the staircase and presents his unearthly and monstrous person on the stage . . . I was much amused, and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience.
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Godwin had cannily arranged for a new edition of
Frankenstein
to be published to coincide with the stage play, so Mary found that her book was both making her a little money and was enjoyed by the reading public once more. It meant that she attracted a certain amount of attention as she re-entered the literary world. Henry Crabb Robinson, the prolific diarist who met her one evening at a supper party, found it difficult to square her person with her reputation. ‘She looks elegant and sickly and young’, he recorded. ‘One would not suppose she was the author of “Frankenstein.”’
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Mary was gratified to find that her novel was once more in the public eye, but the celebrity it brought her was not entirely welcome. The association between
Frankenstein
, Shelley, and the Swiss ‘league of incest’ was still vivid in the public mind, and the drawback of her fame became apparent when the Lyceum production was placed under scrutiny by some self-appointed guardians of public morality. The
Theatrical Observer
for 9 August 1823 carried reports of placards ‘posted widely throughout the Metropolis’. They carried a stark warning for ‘The Play-Going Public’:

Do not go to the Lyceum to see the monstrous Drama, founded on the improper work called ‘Frankenstein’ – Do not take your wives and families . . . This subject is pregnant with mischief.
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This was hardly the kind of attention Mary wished to attract as she attempted to establish herself in London as a respectable literary widow. Nevertheless, the placards had the effect of drawing the crowds to the Lyceum, and
Frankenstein
appeared in many stage versions throughout 1823 and 1824. It all helped to build Mary’s professional reputation, even if the methods by which her name was made were not of her choosing.

Mary was not, however, content merely to focus on her own career. Nor would her battle for emotional survival allow her to do so. Her diary demonstrates that she felt that she could only grieve for Shelley properly once she had made reparation to him for her coldness by devoting herself to the promotion of his work and reputation. Accordingly, she prepared an edition of Shelley’s poems, many of which remained in manuscript at his death. Mary believed she had a sacred duty to present these poems to the world, in order to convince an ignorant public of his genius.

The resulting volume,
Posthumous Poems
,
eventually appeared in June 1824, and in it Mary presented Shelley’s major unpublished works (including ‘Julian and Maddalo’, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and the unfinished ‘Triumph of Life’) alongside translations and a large number of miscellaneous verses, many of which she carefully reconstructed from near-illegible fragments. She also reprinted
Alastor
, which was no longer in print. Shelley did not write his poems neatly, and Mary had to contend with a vast array of manuscripts – some loose, some bound in notebooks – where scraps of verse competed for space with doodles of boats, trees, letters and other ephemera.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the difficulty involved, working on Shelley’s manuscripts brought Mary much solace in the months following her return to England. She was determined to enshrine his reputation and to reveal to an unappreciative world the full extent of his talent and goodness. To that end, she wrote a biographical Preface for her volume in which she portrayed Shelley as a transcendent, brilliant spirit, and as a man adored by his friends, with an immense capacity for love and affection. Creating such a portrait of her husband might have been comforting to Mary, but it necessitated some drastic rewriting of the past.  Shelley had not always been as kind as Mary suggested, and she had not always been alert to the manifold virtues she attributed to him after his death. And while it was possible for her to forget the periods of unhappiness which occurred throughout their relationship, it was harder to ignore the evidence of his poetry. Her fair-copy manuscript of
Posthumous Poems
shows that she seriously considered publishing some poems which made direct reference to periods in which both she and Shelley experienced mutual alienation. The most notable example of this was the stanza ‘To Mary’, written during the dreadful summer of 1819, in the weeks after William’s death:

 My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed, a lovely one;

But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road

Which leads to sorrows most obscure abode;

Thou sittest on the heath of pale despair;

 
                               
where

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
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This brief verse laid bare Shelley’s compassionate response to Mary’s despair, and cannot have been easy to read. Shelley’s lines beautifully articulated his loneliness, even as they accepted that Mary could not control her emotions. Mary presented herself in
Posthumous Poems
as the grieving spouse of a great writer, and it was brave of her to consider revealing Shelley’s response to one of the darkest periods in their marriage. She copied the poem into her fair-copy book in preparation for publication, but in the end she felt unable to publish such a private work. Other poems ‘To Mary’ appeared instead, but this one remained unpublished until 1840.

Even without the most painfully private of Shelley’s poems, there was plenty in
Posthumous Poems
which was upsetting to print. The volume included the depiction of the cold lady of ‘Julian and Maddalo’; the nostalgic final stanzas of ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’; poems which revealed Shelley’s fascination with Claire and Emilia Viviani; and verses mourning William Shelley. These works demonstrated Shelley’s talent, just as Mary intended they should, but they also highlighted the emotional strains of his life.
Posthumous Poems
was thus characterised by a disjunction between the beloved genius of its Preface and the troubled, introspective voice of its poetry.

John Hunt published 400 copies of
Posthumous Poems
and the volume was warmly received by the slowly increasing circle of Shelley’s admirers. But before the edition could sell out Sir Timothy Shelley intervened, furious that his renegade son’s name was once again in the public eye. Mary’s allowance was stopped, and she had to agree both to recall all unsold copies of
Posthumous Poems
and to refrain from publishing or using Shelley’s name during Sir Timothy’s life. Her intended prose companion to
Poems
had to be abandoned, as did any thought of a biography or memoir. Mary was not unduly concerned by Sir Timothy’s prohibition. She did not expect the old man to live very long, over 300 copies of the volume had already been sold, and she had no real wish to put herself through the emotional strain of writing Shelley’s life. It was one thing to print Shelley’s poems, but quite another to expose Shelley, herself or their friends and family to the glare of biography and public scrutiny.

Editing Shelley’s manuscripts was a cathartic experience for Mary. It allowed her to compensate for the failures of understanding which had at times marred her marriage, and, in the process, to rediscover her own creativity. ‘I feel my powers again’, she wrote in her diary in the summer of 1824, shortly before the publication of
Posthumous Poems
.
‘The eclipse of winter is passing from my mind – I shall again feel the enthusiastic glow of composition – again as I pour forth my soul upon paper, feel the winged ideas arise, & enjoy the delight of expressing them.’
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  Preparing the volume played an important part in Mary’s efforts to rebuild her life, and it allowed her to reassert herself, not just as the author of a scandalous novel, but as a professional woman of letters, and as one half of a powerful literary couple.

In June 1824, Claire made contact, after a silence of more than a year. ‘We have had a letter from her’, Mary told Trelawny, ‘but it details no particulars about her situation, while she complains of its extreme discomfort and the bad effect a Russian winter had on her.’
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It was clear that Claire’s battle for survival had been a good deal rougher than Mary’s. A month before she wrote to Mary, Claire left St Petersburg and made the 400 mile journey to Moscow. There she built up a small group of pupils whose parents wanted to acquire the social cachet offered by an English governess, and subsequently gained a permanent position in a professional family with a five year old daughter, Dunia. She was determined to remain independent after Shelley’s death and never again to rely upon another for survival. In her quest for self-sufficiency she battled bedbugs, brutal cold and barbarous Russian manners, all of which made life miserable and uncomfortable. She survived by holding herself apart from her employers and their acquaintances. ‘With the Russians I never associate’, she told Jane Williams, ‘and am reckoned by them to be incurably proud.’  At least their ignorance meant that ‘I may say what I please, while, in England, I should be obliged to follow their opinion, and not my own.’
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Although she must have appeared stand-offish to Moscow society, Claire was a good and kind governess, and she daringly incorporated Wollstonecraft’s educational theories into her lessons with her rote-bound Russian pupils. She was devastated when, a few months after becoming her governess, little Dunia died of diphtheria, a tragedy which threw Claire back into the Moscow governess market.  She became increasingly worried that her scandalous family, as well as her Byronic entanglement, would prevent her from securing employment, and was careful to avoid sending letters directly to either ‘Mrs Shelley’ or ‘Mrs Godwin’. ‘How often do people here touch upon the brink of all my history’ she told Jane. ‘I do not wish, in any degree, to become an object of curiosity.’
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The dangers of becoming an ‘object of curiosity’ increased dramatically when news arrived in Moscow that Byron was dead. Byron’s Greek adventure ended at Missolonghi, where Mavrocordato, now the leader of the Greek forces, had based his headquarters. At the beginning of April 1824 Byron developed a fever, which was then made fatal by over-zealous doctors who bled him and dosed him with purgatives and laudanum. He died on 19 April, watched over by his servants, Fletcher and Tita. It was not the heroic ending for which he might have hoped, but his death was quickly mythologised by the many admirers of his poetry drawn to the glamour of his presence in Greece, and his body was shipped back to England amid much pomp and circumstance. Claire was scathing about the reverential solemnity with which his ornate funeral procession was greeted in London. ‘Pray think of the modest funeral of our Shelley’, she wrote to Jane, ‘and then of the one given to Lord Byron, and ask yourself, if anyone with a soul can condescend to interest themselves in human affairs.’
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Claire was afraid that renewed interest in Byron’s life would expose her, and she wrote frantically to Mary to ask about the glut of memoirs and biographies which quickly followed his death. When gossip about her connection with Shelley, Byron and the Godwins did eventually reach Moscow she found herself the subject of unwelcome interest, and a university professor who was on the point of employing her to teach his daughter abruptly terminated their agreement. ‘You may imagine this man’s horror when he heard who I was’, she wrote bitterly, ‘[that] the charming Miss Clairmont, the model of good sense, accomplishments, and good taste was brought up, issued from the very den of freethinkers.’
¹⁴
As news of her exotic heritage spread, she was forced to endure snubs and listen to disparaging remarks about her former friends. One evening, two Russian aristocrats deliberately provoked her by discussing Shelley and Byron in her presence, and succeeded in tricking her into an admission of acquaintance with both poets. They ‘praised Albè up to the skies and reviled our dearest Shelley’, she wrote in her diary. ‘I would not bear this and defended him. – Among other things he said that this paragon of generosity had pensioned Shelley’s widow. Oh my God, the lies there are in the world.’
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