Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
“Who was that, pray?” I asked, “a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“A daughter of William Godwin?”
“The daughter of Godwin and Mary.”
Shelley worked to establish a fund to support Godwin’s work, and he was continually at the house. (Godwin also claimed later
that he sheltered Percy from bill collectors who were looking for him.) By the end of June, Percy and Mary were seeing each
other every day. Mary used her stepsister Clara Jane to conceal their relationship from Mrs. Godwin. The two girls would walk
together in the forested grounds of a school, the Charterhouse, where they would meet Shelley. They also visited Mary Wollstonecraft’s
tomb. When that happened, Clara Jane recalled, “They always sent me to walk some distance from them—alleging that they wished
to talk on philosophical subjects.”
On June 26, 1814, the two of them first declared their feelings for each other while they were visiting the grave of Mary’s
mother under the willows in St. Pancras churchyard. Shelley was overcome. He afterward wrote: “The sublime and rapturous moment
when she confessed herself mine . . . cannot be painted to mortal imaginations.” Shelley told Mary of his long quest for love,
and she responded that she was entirely his. It is difficult to pierce the flowery prose that he used to recall the occasion,
but the two may well have consummated their devotion then and there.
A few days later, Percy wrote the following lines:
Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half dead;— thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw
Their soft persuasion on my brain,
Charming away its dream of pain.
On July 6, Shelley asked William Godwin’s consent for a union with his daughter. That very morning he had loaned a large sum
to Godwin. Shelley evidently believed that Godwin’s principles would come before his parental concerns. Yet, even though Godwin
had denounced marriage and declared that a person might flout the opinion of society if his or her actions were correct, he
was outraged by the budding romance between a married man and his daughter, and forbade them to meet again.
Shelley brooded about the rejection for a few days and then, as Mrs. Godwin recalled, suddenly entered the shop when Godwin
was absent and rushed upstairs to the living quarters. “He looked extremely wild” and carried a bottle of laudanum and a pistol.
When Mrs. Godwin tried to stop him, he violently shoved her aside. Finding Mary sitting with Clara Jane in one of the rooms,
he said, “They wish to separate us, my beloved; but Death shall unite us,” and held out the bottle of laudanum. “By this you
can escape from tyranny,” he said, “and this,” he said, gesturing with the pistol, “shall reunite me to you.” His talent for
melodramatic scenes had not diminished.
Mary, in her stepmother’s words, “turned as pale as a ghost,” and Clara Jane “at the sight of the pistol filled the room with
her shrieks.” Tears streaming down Mary’s cheeks, she pleaded with Shelley to calm himself and leave. “I won’t take this laudanum,”
she said, “but if you will only be reasonable and calm, I will promise to be ever faithful to you.” Shelley seemed mollified,
and he departed, leaving the laudanum on a table.
After that, Godwin tried desperately to keep his daughter away from Shelley. He may have been haunted by the fear that Mary
would follow her mother’s pattern of chasing lovers who would bring her only pain and rejection. Both girls were kept inside
the house, for Mrs. Godwin had her own memories of unhappy love affairs and didn’t want Clara Jane to become an accessory
to this one.
The efforts failed. Shelley bribed the porter in the bookshop to smuggle his letters into the house, and on July 28, Mary
and Percy ran off together accompanied by Clara Jane Clairmont, whose motive seems to be that she too wanted to escape the
Godwin household. (The other two agreed to let her go along because otherwise she might have revealed their plans, and also
for the practical reason that she knew French better than they did.) Thus it was that two girls dressed in black left the
Skinner Street house in the early morning hours. Shelley was waiting with a chaise and a little money. He wrote in his journal:
“She was in my arms—we were safe; we were on our road to Dover.”
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.— A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.— One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!— For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
— “Mutability,” Percy Shelley, 1815
M
ARY HAD DEVELOPED
fantasies of what the experience of living with Shelley would be like, beginning with her vision of it as a replication of
her illustrious parents’ marriage, a partnership between equals that would result in the love and emotional warmth for which
she yearned. But during their first year and a half together, Mary would learn that the dreams of her husband could bring
nightmares to her. The elopement developed into an emotional roller coaster. Just as in Percy’s poem “Mutability,” one day
would bring her joy, the next sorrow. She ended this period with the hard-won realization that she had not gained the stable
home she had always dreamed of. It was a time of unrest and anxiety that would, in the following year, find expression in
her great novel.
T
he day the lovers eloped was a warm one, and Mary became ill from the excitement. Seven months later she would give birth
to a child said to be premature, so the early stages of pregnancy are also possible cause for her illness. At the post houses
where the carriage stopped along the way, she had to get out for rest and fresh air. At some point, Shelley paid extra to
hire a carriage with four horses instead of two because he felt they would be pursued.
They arrived at Dover at four in the afternoon and made arrangements to be taken across the Channel in an small open fishing
boat. At first the water was calm, but then a storm blew up and the little craft was tossed back and forth in the water. Mary,
still weak and sick, closed her eyes and laid her head on Shelley’s knees as they sat on the bare wood of the boat’s hull.
He wrote later that he feared the little craft would be swamped: “I had time in that moment to reflect, and even to reason
upon death; it was rather a thing of discomfort . . . than horror to me. We should never be separated, but in death we might
not know and feel our union as now.” The journey lasted all night, and as they came into Calais, dawn was breaking. “I said
to Mary,” Shelley recalled, “look, the sun rises over France.” His spirits rose along with it, for he felt it was an augury
of the bright future that lay before them.
Mary’s stepsister looked back at the Channel, possibly because she had doubts about the wisdom of what she had done. “As I
left Dover and England’s white cliffs were retiring, I said to myself I shall never see these more,” Clara Jane wrote. Little
did she know that they would be back in six weeks—their lives forever changed.
Shelley could never be accused of being conventional, but taking his lover’s stepsister along on their elopement was one of
his oddest acts. The decision only increased the shock value of the affair as news of it spread. Gossips depicted Shelley
as running off with a woman on each arm. Harriet, Shelley’s abandoned wife, may have started the rumor that Godwin had sold
his daughter and Clara Jane to Shelley for eight hundred and seven hundred pounds each (Mary bringing the higher price). In
the beginning Mary may have regarded Clara Jane’s presence merely as a comforting link to her old household. Not till later
would she see her stepsister as a possible rival for Shelley’s love.
F
rom the pier at Calais, the three young adventurers walked along the sands to Dessein’s hotel, where Laurence Sterne had begun
writing his
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
in 1765. They arranged to get the very suite he had stayed in—an apartment that had both a sitting and sleeping room. Here
the young couple started a journal together. “Mary was there,” Shelley wrote at the beginning; Mary inscribed “Shelley was
also with me.” At the beginning most of the entries are in Shelley’s handwriting, but Mary’s contributions gradually increased.
On August 2, the pen went to Mary and from then on the journal was mainly, but not exclusively, hers. She usually wrote very
little about personal things, but since pages of it were later torn out it is impossible to know how frank she was at the
time she wrote it. Many of the journal’s pages describe the vigorous program of reading that she and Shelley did. The list
was long and varied, including works in French and Latin. They brought along Abbé Barruel’s four-volume
History of Jacobinism,
which Shelley found interesting for its information on secret societies, including the Illuminati, a mysterious group dedicated
to revolution and centered in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt. (Mary would have Victor Frankenstein study at the university
there.) The two liked to read the same books together, often taking turns reading them aloud.
Calais, with its exotic sights and sounds, was exciting to the three young people. It had been just three months since Napoleon
had abdicated power and was sent to exile in Elba. After two decades of war, English tourists were coming back to France.
Mary later wrote: “We saw with extasy [
sic
] the strange costume of the French women, read with delight our own descriptions in the passport, looked with curiosity on
every
plat,
fancying that the fried-leaves of artichokes were frogs; we saw shepherds in opera-hats, and post-boys in jack-boots . .
. it was [like] acting a novel, being an incarnate romance.”
Meanwhile, Mary’s stepmother was in hot pursuit of the trio. The day they fled, Godwin had found “a letter on my dressing
table, informing me what they had done. I had been of the opinion from the first that Mary could only be withheld from ruin
by her mind; & in that, by a series of the most consummate dissimulation, she made me believe I had succeeded. . . . You will
imagine our distress. If anything could have added to it, it was this circumstance of Jane’s having gone with her sister.”
Inquiry at a nearby stables revealed that the young people had intended to go to Dover, and from there presumably to France.
Mrs. Godwin set out on the mail coach and reached Calais on July 29. Godwin told a friend that he had allowed her to go only
on condition “that she should avoid seeing Shelley, who had conceived a particular aversion to her as a dangerous foe to his
views, & might be capable of any act of desperation.” Why Godwin himself did not join the pursuit is unclear. Perhaps, as
usual, though his words were forceful, he was content to let others perform the actions he recommended.
At Calais Mrs. Godwin soon found out where the three were staying, and sent a note to her daughter. Clara Jane responded,
and even spent the night in her mother’s room. According to Mrs. Godwin, Clara Jane promised to return to England with her,
but in the morning she insisted on meeting one last time with Shelley and Mary. The smooth-talking Shelley persuaded her to
remain in France. “Not the most earnest intreaties of a mother could turn her from her purpose,” wrote Godwin, and Mrs. Godwin
returned alone on July 31. Ironically, Mary felt she had triumphed over her stepmother, a victory she would later have cause
to regret, for it put the burden of Clara Jane forever on her shoulders.
The one pang of regret Mary had was the necessity of making a break with her adored father. At the time Mary may have thought
his disapproval would be temporary, but it was long-lasting and adamant. In a letter written in August of the year she left,
he declared, “Jane has been guilty of indiscretion only, . . . Mary has been guilty of a crime.” Godwin did not even speak
to his daughter for three and a half years. He was never able to forgive what he saw as a betrayal by both his disciple and
his daughter.
Clara Jane’s courage in turning her back on her mother made her a firm part of what was now a threesome. They hired a carriage
and headed for Paris. Shelley had left London so quickly that he did not bring adequate funds, but he had asked his publisher
Thomas Hookham to forward money to him in Paris. Unfortunately Hookham sent only what Shelley called “a cold & stupid letter,”
because he disapproved of the elopement. Shelley pawned his watch and chain while scrambling from bank to bank in hopes of
obtaining a loan. Despite the uncertainty, Mary had no fears. “Mary especially seems insensible to all future evil,” Shelley
wrote. “She feels as if our love would alone suffice to resist the invasions of calamity.”
Further indication that the young people thought love could conquer all was the fact that Mary and Clara Jane had brought
only the clothes they wore on their backs. But Mary’s devotion to writing had led her to carry a box containing something
more precious than clothes: her own early writings and letters from various people, including her father and Shelley. There
was even a pre-elopement letter from Harriet, who had hoped Mary would help send Percy back to her. She advised Mary how to
“calm” Percy and persuade him to subdue his passion for her. Obviously Mary hadn’t followed the instructions.