CHAPTER III.

‘Godwin met her at a moment when she was deeply depressed by the ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence; who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and thoughtless generosity, and lofty independence of character, to plunge her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly difficulties, indeed, she set at nought.... It was at this time that Godwin again met her at the house of her friend Miss Hayes, having done so occasionally before she went to Norway.’

Further, in a note on the marriage of her parents, Mrs. Shelley says—

‘At the beginning of this year (1797) Mr. Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft. The precise date is not known; he does not mention it in his journal, and the ceremony had taken place some time before the marriage was declared. This secrecy partly arose from a slight shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from avowing that he had acted in contradiction to his theories.... They both however looked on this sort of struggle, in which they had been born, and had always lived, as a very secondary matter, and after a short period of deliberation they, in the month of April, declared the marriage which had before been solemnized.’

(1.) By difficulties, worldly difficulties, Mrs. Shelley obviously means ‘pecuniary difficulties.’ However ill people may think of Imlay’s treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft, it must be admitted that Imlay did not leave her without wishing and seeking to free her from immediate pecuniary difficulties and to put her in easy circumstances for the moment. She showed proper spirit in refusing to take money of him under the circumstances; but as he offered it, he cannot be fairly charged with selfish indifference to the difficulties.

(2.) Mrs. Shelley does not say how long it was before her mother’s departure for Norway, when Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had occasional meetings at Miss Hayes’s house. Nor does she actually say that Godwin saw Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time at one of those meetings. But her words arecalculated to give, and have given, the impression that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time shortly before her departure from London for Norway, in the summer of 1795. But this impression is erroneous. Thomas Paine escaped from England to France in September, 1792, and never revisited his native country. He was present on the occasion when Godwin, in London, met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, and was displeased with her loquaciousness and apparent desire to engross Paine’s attention. This meeting, therefore, must have taken place before September, 1792. There is also other evidence that Mary Wollstonecraft knew William Godwin before she went to France.

(3.) As he was not ‘acting in contradiction to his theories,’ whilst living in Free Love with Mary Wollstonecraft, it is obvious that Mrs. Shelley’s words, touching the marriage of her parents, refer to their lawful marriage. Mrs. Shelley says this marriage was solemnized at the beginning of 1797. She is wrong; for the marriage was solemnized at Old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797.

(4.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the precise date is not known.’ She is wrong. The precise date may not have been known to Mrs. Shelley, but it was known to other people,—to all people who had taken sufficient trouble to inquire about the matter. There never could have been any uncertainty respecting the place of the wedding; for both Godwin and Mary were well known to be inhabitants of St. Pancras parish at the time of the event. To ascertain the precise date it was, therefore, only needful to search the parish register.

(5.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the ceremony had taken place some time before the marriage was declared’ in April; leaving the reader to infer that three months elapsed between the performance and the publication of the ceremony. She is wrong. The marriage was announced to Godwin’s most intimate friends within a few days of the performance of the ceremony. Holcroft acknowledged on 6th April, 1797, the announcement made to him by Godwin of what had taken place at Old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797.

(6.) Speaking of the secrecy of the marriage, Mrs. Shelley says, ‘This secrecy partly arose from a slight shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from avowing that he had acted in contradiction to his theories;’ readers being thereby led to infer that Godwinkept the marriage a secret from the beginning of the year till April, from reluctance to avow an act so inconsistent with his theories. Mrs. Shelley is wrong. Instead of postponing the announcement for three months from such a cause, her father announced the marriage within a few days of its solemnization.

(7.) Still writing as though what occurred on 29th March had taken place at the beginning of the year, Mrs. Shelley says,—

‘Another cause for the secrecy at first maintained was the stern law of poverty and necessity. My father narrowly circumscribed both his receipts and disbursements. The maintenance of a family had never been contemplated, and could not at once be provided for. My mother, accustomed to a life of struggle and poverty, was so beloved by her friends, that several, and Mr. Johnson in particular, had stood between her and any of the annoyances and mortifications of debt. But this must cease when she married.’

In other words, according to Mrs. Shelley, her father kept his marriage a secret from the beginning of the year till April, in order that he might derive advantage from money, given to Mary Wollstonecraft by Mr. Johnson and other friends, under the impression that she was a single woman with no husband to maintain her; which money they would not have given her, had they known of her marriage. This is what Mrs. Shelley says of William Godwin. What baseness for a daughter to attribute to her own father, and put on record against him! I wish I could say that nothing in Godwin’s life, till his powers languished under increasing embarrassments, countenances the opinion that he was capable of such baseness. Unfortunately, however, there is evidence that, whilst Mary Wollstonecraft was living in secret Free Love with him in The Polygon, he prevailed on Mr. T. Wedgewood to lend him a considerable sum of money, saying, when he asked for the loan, that he did not want it for himself, but for the use of another person. As this other person was Mary Wollstonecraft, and as a contract of Free Love was marriage in Godwin’s opinion, the money he wanted for her use was money borrowed for his own use. Why did he not tell Mr. Wedgewood outright that he wanted it for Mary Wollstonecraft? Because he thought it possible that some rumour of his arrangement with Mary had come to Mr. Wedgewood, in which case the benevolent manufacturer, instead of lending the money, would say, ‘No, you must support yourown “bosom-friend.”’ Why did he not tell Mr. Wedgewood that he was living in Free Love with Mary? For much the same reason; from a fear that, instead of lending the money, Mr. Wedgewood would say, ‘No; for I see why you want the money, and I think you ought to keep your own wife.’ Wedgewood lent the money in ignorance of the purpose for which it was needed.

After the declaration of his marriage Godwin confessed that he had wanted the money for Mary Wollstonecraft, and at the same time begged for a further loan of 50l.; saying, as he made this confession and prayer for further help, ‘I trust you will not accuse me of duplicity in having told you that it was not for myself that I wanted your assistance.’ Though he complied with the petition for another 50l., Mr. Wedgewood cannot have acquitted his friend of duplicity in the former application. Hence it is certain that Godwin kept the Free Love contract a secret to one particular friend, lest by revealing it he should lessen his power to draw money from his own friend. It is, therefore, only too probable that he was guilty of the meanness attributed to him by his daughter, and also refrained from publishing the Free Love contract, lest the publication should lessen the readiness of Mary’s friends to give her money. But though he was influenced by pecuniary considerations in keeping his relations with Mary Wollstonecraft a secret, it none the less remains that Mrs. Shelley was wrong in representing that he was moved by such considerations to keep his lawful marriage secret from the beginning of the year till April. As we have said more than once the marriage of 29th March, 1797, was declared in the first week of April.

How are these inaccuracies to be regarded?—as mistakes arising wholly or chiefly from misconception? or as deliberate untruths? Let us fix our attention on the two first misstatements; the assertion that the marriage was solemnized at the beginning of the year and the assertion that the date of the marriage was unknown. Did Mrs. Shelley make these misstatements innocently? in ignorance of the truth, or with a knowledge of the truth? It is not easy to believe that Mrs. Shelley, a woman of letters, curious about her mother’s history, and in her later time engaged in biographical inquiries for the illustration of her husband’s life, her own career, her father’s life, and her mother’s story, omitted to ascertain a fact so easily discovered,as the date of her father’s marriage. If she knew the date, she had obvious motives for putting the ugly fact out of sight, under specious and delusive verbiage. In her later time the woman, who in girlhood had been strangely lawless and defiant of the world’s opinion, was chiefly desirous of clothing herself with respectability, of toning and colouring her story into accordance with the social condition of the family into which she had married. The woman who would fain have justified her husband’s life to the world, was only a few degrees less desirous of rendering her own story the same service. What more natural than for such a woman to wish to cover up the ugly fact, that she was born only five calendar months after her mother’s marriage? She could not tamper with the evidences of the date of her own birth. They were too numerous and too well known. But by pushing the date of her mother’s marriage some two or three months back, she would cause the world to think her the child of a premature birth, who had entered the world none too soon for her mother’s credit. By doing so, she may well have conceived herself discharging a filial duty, as well as a duty to herself and her husband’s respectable family. She must have wished to think of herself as differing, in this respect, altogether from her base-born sister Fanny, who committed suicide whilst still young. She must have shrunk from the thought that, had it not been for so late a marriage as the one which preceded her own birth by only five months, she would have resembled her sister Fanny in being a bastard. Hence, whilst it is not easy to think her ignorant of the real date of her mother’s marriage, her motive for wilfully misstating the case is obvious. Thus much on the assumption that the main inaccuracy was a deliberate untruth.

It is, however, just conceivable that she did not know the date of her mother’s marriage, and had a sincere belief that it occurred somewhere about the beginning of 1797. This belief may have been due to words spoken to her by Mrs. Gisborne, who, her friend in Italy, had been her mother’s friend in the previous century. She may even have gone to the St. Pancras registry, and paid fees to the registrar for searching for evidence of the marriage amongst the records of marriages, solemnized in the parish in the later months of 1796 and the first month of 1797. She may have taken some, though insufficient, pains to arrive at the evidence of the marriage, and imagined herself tohave taken all possible pains, and come to the conclusion that she might honestly write of her mother’s marriage, ‘the precise date is unknown.’

Even so, though she would be innocent of wilful falsehood, she would remain guilty of writing positively on a mere assumption (a serious fault in an historian), and offering her readers as sure facts a series of inferences from a mere assumption, or a belief unsustained by positive testimony. Her narrative of her parents’ marriage, if not a tissue of untruths, would remain a thing made up of inaccuracies. It is important for readers to bear this in mind, whilst andafterreading this book. Mrs. Shelley did not die without leaving much biographical material behind her in the shape of printed notes to her husband’s works, and also in the shape of MS. notes and memoranda for the use of future historians;—stuff that would have appeared in her justificatoryMemoirof her husband, had not Sir Timothy checked her biographical zeal by the stern order, ‘Silence, or no allowance!’ But on being brought under critical scrutiny, all the passages, and bits, and scraps of her biographical sketches, at present before the world, are found so curiously inaccurate, that every one of her biographical statements should be read with nervous caution, lively suspicion, and watchful distrust, by those who would avoid error on matters of Shelleyan story.

I do not say she was an untruthful woman, though on some occasions she unquestionably rouses serious suspicion of her veracity. Like Lady Byron she enjoyed in her girlhood a reputation for sincerity of speech. But people often say things that are untrue without intending to be untruthful. It was often so with Mrs. Shelley, in some degree before her husband’s death, and in a greater degree after that event. An imaginative and highly emotional woman, she sometimes saw things in a wrong light. Not seldom, her mental vision was affected by the delusive media of sentimentality or anger, through which it regarded matters that stirred her feelings. In speaking of herself she was sometimes strongly influenced by romantic egotism. Affection and combativeness combined to render her an unreliable witness about matters touching her husband’s honour. Resembling Lady Byron in being a vehement and steady hater, she from her girlhood cordially disliked her step-mother and after loving her sister Claire with the romantic fervour described in theReal Lord Byron, came to detest heralmost as cordially as Lady Byron, long after Byron’s death, detested her sister-in-law. All that she said or wrote to the discredit of her step-mother and sister-by-affinity should be received with extreme caution, and large allowance for her animosity against them.

THE SECOND MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN.

The Blighted Being—Miss Jones’s Disappointment—The Blighted Being goes to Bath—He proposes to Miss Harriet Lee—Is rejected by Mrs. Reveley—Is accepted by Mary Jane Clairmont—Who was she?—Her Children by her first Marriage—Their Ages in 1801—Points of Resemblance in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Jane Clairmont—The Blighted Being marries Mary Jane Clairmont—Mr. Kegan Paul’s serious Misrepresentations of Claire’s Age—The Use made of this Misrepresentation—Mr. Kegan Paul convicted by his own Evidences—Charles Clairmont’s Boyhood—Godwin’s Regard for his second Wife—Misrepresentations touching the second Mrs. Godwin—Childhood of Mary and Claire—Education of Godwin’s Children and Step-children—Charles Clairmont’s Introduction to Free Thought—Godwin’s Care to withhold Mary from Free Thought—She is reared in Ignorance of her Mother’s Story—The Book-shop in Hanway Street—The Godwins of The Polygon—Their Migration to the City—The Godwins of Skinner Street.

By Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin was left with two motherless infants on his hands,—Fanny Imlay, three years and from four to five months old, and Mary, just ten days old. According to Mr. Kegan Paul, he was also left with a blighted existence. Let us see what Godwin did with his blighted existence in the years immediately following Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. For some time the infants in The Polygon, Somers Town, were cared for by Miss Louisa Jones, who would fain have become the step-mother of Mary Wollstonecraft’s legitimate child, and the tender guardian of Fanny.

Miss Jones, however, was not allowed to settle herself for life in this manner; for though he saw the necessity of finding a mother for the children, the widower with a blighted existence did not think highly of Miss Louisa.

Mary Wollstonecraft had been just six months in her grave; when the blighted being determined to woo one of the two Misses Lee, of Bath,—Sophia and Harriet Lee, daughters of John Lee, the Covent Garden actor, and authors ofThe Canterbury Tales; who, as writers with many readers, andschool-mistresses with a flourishing seminary for young ladies, were notable personages in the City of Health and Invalids. Going to Bath in March, 1798, Godwin saw enough of Miss Harriet Lee, on four different occasions, to resolve on laying siege (by letters from London) to her mature affections. In April 1798 Miss Harriet Lee received the first of the letters from London, that were intended to induce her to dissolve partnership with her sister, and enter into a different kind of partnership with the author ofPolitical Justice. Barely seven months had passed since Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, when her former and inconsolable husband is making love to another woman. This seems quick work for a blighted being. Is it usual for a blighted being to think of re-marriage so soon after bereavement? If so, blighted beings do not deserve more compassion than other widowers. But the suit was unsuccessful. There were several things to make Miss Harriet Lee think thrice before accepting William Godwin. There was his strong writing against the honourable estate into which he desired to lure Miss Harriet Lee; there was the unpleasant rumour that he had lived for months in Free Love with Mary Wollstonecraft; there were Mary Wollstonecraft’s two infants in The Polygon, Somers Town. Moreover, as a gentlewoman of elegant letters and a respectable schoolmistress, Mrs. Harriet Lee may have been prejudiced against the man who had admired the author of theRights of Woman. Miss Harriet Lee thought thrice; and in August, 1798, the author ofPolitical Justiceknew he must look elsewhere for a step-mother to his little daughter.

What next with the blighted being? One of the most unpleasant of the several ladies, with whom Shelley associated in Italy, was a certain Mrs. Gisborne, whilom Mrs. Reveley, of whom he wrote to Peacock in August, 1819 (giving her a character not more applicable to her in her advanced middle age than in 1799):—‘Mrs. Gisborne is a sufficiently amiable and very accomplished woman; she is δημοκρατικη and αθεη—how far she may φιλανθρωπη I don’t know, for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm.’ On 6th July, 1799, this gentlewoman lost her first husband, who died no long while after showing much uneasiness at her intimacy with the blighted being. Within a month of Mr. Reveley’s death, Godwin pressed the widow to give him personal interviews, in order that he might show reason why she should hasten to become his wife;—a requestthat was declined by the widow, who, though an atheist, a democrat, and a cold-blooded creature, had some faint notions of decency, and of what was due to the memory even of the husband with whom she had lived unhappily. Is it usual for a blighted being to behave in this way? In something more than a year from his wife’s death to offer a married lady attention that stirs her husband to indignation, and in less than two years from the blighting bereavement to make an offer of marriage to this same lady, within a month of her husband’s death? In the name of all the domestic affections, what is it to be a blighted being? What is blight of heart and life? It must surely be something that impels an inconsolable widower to make an offer of marriage to nearly every other woman who crosses his path.

Instead of marrying the man of blighted life, Mrs. Reveley in May, 1800, gave herself in marriage to Mr. Gisborne, whose Slawkenbergian nose is curiously associated with Shelley’s own ‘little turn-up nose;’ her action in this matter being (Mr. Kegan Paul assures us) ‘a severe blow to Godwin, who had never abandoned the hope he might overcome the lady’s objections to a marriage with him!’ Twelve months later (May 1801), the blighted being was in love with Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont,aliasClermont, whom he married in the following December,—just four years and three months from the day of Mary Wollstonecraft’s funeral.

My information respecting the second Mrs. William Godwin’s first husband is slight and shadowy, though I have done my best to make it more substantial. There is reason to believe he was a bookseller; but my evidence on this point is not conclusive. If he was in ‘the trade,’ the fact would account for the second Mrs. Godwin’s knowledge of printing and publishing matters, and of the confidence with which she urged Godwin to become a publisher of books for children. For the main purpose of this paragraph it is enough to say, that his surname is (as I remarked in theReal Lord Byron) variously spelt in Byronic and Shelleyan biography, and that one comes upon it in the fashion of Clermont, Claremont, Clairemont, and Charlemont, as well as Clairmont. For sufficient and obvious reasons, in theReal Lord ByronI spelt the name Clermont,—the spelling used in the British Museum Catalogue, for the reference to Claire’s well-known letter to Byron, preserved in the Egerton MSS. For no less sufficient and obvious reasons I spell thename in this chapter ‘Clairmont,’—Godwin’s way of spelling the name. Readers, therefore, must bear in mind that ‘Jane Clairmont’ and ‘Jane Clermont’ signify the same Claire (Mrs. Shelley’s sister-by-affinity), who was Byron’s mistress and the mother of Allegra.

By the Shelleyan apologists, who draw their inspiration from Field Place, the first Mrs. William Godwin and the second Mrs. William Godwin have been dealt with differently. It appearing to those apologists that to place Mary Wollstonecraft amongst the angels is to raise a presumption that the daughter of so pure and bright a spirit was also of angelical nature,—a presumption favourable to the poet and his family,—they have tortured the English language to make her into an angel. On the other hand, it appearing to the same apologists that to exhibit the second Mrs. Godwin as a harsh and odious step-mother is to justify Mary Godwin’s desire to get away from so hateful a ruler, and even to palliate the young lady’s conduct in running away to Switzerland with another woman’s husband, they have tortured and strained the English language even more cruelly, to prove that the second Mrs. Godwin was a superlatively disagreeable woman. Being no partisan, the present writer declines either to think the first Mrs. Godwin an angel of grace, or to think the second Mrs. Godwin a very hateful person. Seeing that Mary Wollstonecraft had various faults, he sees that Mary Jane Clairmont had several imperfections. Whilst declining to join with the Shelleyan enthusiasts in glorifying Mary Wollstonecraft because her daughter Mary lived to be Shelley’s second wife, and in decrying the second Mrs. Godwin for the advantage of her step-daughter’s reputation, he is none the less disposed to think favourably of Mrs. Mary Jane (Clairmont) Godwin, because she cordially disapproved of the views about marriage, which Godwin had successively promulgated and abandoned.

In several important particulars the second Mrs. William Godwin resembled the first Mrs. William Godwin. A woman of considerable cleverness and some education, she was an industrious woman of letters. Cleverer with her pen at translation than in original writing, she was enthusiastic and decidedly well looking. Even by her arch-enemy, Mr. Kegan Paul, she is said to have been ‘clever, enthusiastic, andhandsome.’ Having somewhat the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft intemper she resembled her in disposition. Both women were quick-tempered, captious, quarrelsome, given to imagine themselves slighted and to sulk. But the second Mrs. Godwin was by no means so violent and outrageous in wrath as Mary Wollstonecraft. In other respects Mary Jane had the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft. In social reputation she was far superior to Mary Godwin’s mother. Having never produced so scandalous a book as theRights of Women, she had not lived in Free Love with two men or any man; she had never given birth to an illegitimate child; her name had never been discreditably associated with another woman’s husband; nor had she ever thrown herself in a fit of white rage off Putney Bridge. On another point the advantage is with the second Mrs. Godwin. On mating with her Godwin matchedevenly; whilst the unevenness of his match with Mary Wollstonecraft had been to his disadvantage. On coming to her childless husband Mary Wollstonecraft brought an illegitimate child in her arms. Godwin hadtwochildren to maintain, when Mary Jane Clairmont entered his house with a child on either hand.

In the spring of 1801 Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont took possession of the tenement adjoining Godwin’s house in The Polygon, Somers Town, bringing with her to the new home her little girl Jane (afterwards ‘Claire’), at that time in her fourth or fifth year (older, perhaps, by a few months than little Mary Godwin), and her elder brother, who may be regarded as having been born on or about 4th June, 1795,—possibly on or about 4th June, 1796. My knowledge of the month in which the little boy (Charles Clairmont) was born came to me from a letter, dated 5th June, 1806, written to Mrs. Godwin (at Southend) by William Godwin, who says therein, ‘Yesterday (was that right or wrong?) we kept Charles’s birthday, though his mother was absent.’ My information about the year of the boy’s birth is less precise, but I put it in 1795. It is certain that he was older than his sister. On this point Mr. Kegan Paul has no doubt; if he had any I could remove it. Hence, at the time of Mrs. Clairmont’s entry into the house adjoining Godwin’s home in The Polygon, Somers Town, the ages of the four children of the two households stood thus:—(1) Fanny Imlay, b. April, 1794,ætat.just seven years; (2) Charles Clairmont, b. 4th June, 1795,ætat.five years and ten months; (3) Jane Clairmont, in her fourth (or possibly even in her fifth) year;(4) Mary Godwin, b. 30th August, 1797,ætat.three years and some seven or eight months.

A great deal turns on the ages of these children. In their desire to whitewash Mary Godwin, and exhibit her as a worthy mate for so faultless a person as Shelley, the Shelleyan enthusiasts have discovered that she was much younger than Claire; the discovery being used as a reason why Mary’s grand misdemeanour should be entered in the tale of Claire’s offences, and why, instead of censuring Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter for running off with her friend’s husband, we should be indignant with the mature Claire for not taking better care of her younger sister. It is well to inquire, whether the discovery, of which so much is made, is aught else than a misrepresentation.

Byron thought Mary and Claire were, within a few months, of the same age. Writing of them in 1820, in the famousObservations, he put the case thus ungrammatically, ‘Neither of them were, in 1816, nineteen years old,’—i.e.in the months of 1816, which they passed chiefly in his society at Geneva. It may be observed that Byron, often an inaccurate, was sometimes an untruthful writer. But spite against Claire, with whom he was quarrelling bitterly in 1820, would have disposed him to exaggerate her age. Whilst habitually truthful people sometimes tell fibs, persons never too nice about the truth sometimes tell it. On this occasion Byron seems to have told the truth. He was right as to the age of Mary Godwin, who did not complete her nineteenth year till 30th August, 1816. He certainly was not far wrong about Claire’s age.

What is said about Claire’s age by Mr. Kegan Paul, who tells two different stories about it? ‘This,’ he says of Mrs. Clairmont and her coming to The Polygon (videpp. 57, 58, vol. ii. ofWilliam Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries), ‘was a Mrs. Clairmont, a widow, with a son then at school, and one little daughtersomewhat olderthan Fanny, who came to occupy the next house to Godwin in the Polygon.’ The italics of two words of this quotation are mine. Farther on, in his book, when he comes to work on the discovery, so as to make it appear that Claire was much older than Mary, Mr. Kegan Paul (vol. ii., p. 213) says, ‘Jane Clairmont was only at home for two nights during the six weeks Shelley spent in London.She was several years older than Fanny, and even then led a somewhat independent life apart from her mother andstep-father, presumably as a governess, since that was the occupation she afterwards followed in Italy, during the intervals of her residence with the Shelleys.’ This extract (seven words of which I print in italics) refers to Shelley’s stay in London in the October and November, 1812. It is made up of inaccuracies. (1) Claire, like Mary, was only fifteen years old. (2) She may have been a pupil-teacher in some school where she was being educated; but she was not living in independence of her stepfather and her mother. (3) She was not several years older than Fanny.

Several years older! First, Mr. Kegan Paul sayssomewhat older, and thenseveral years older; the difference between the two expressions making the two passages tell two different stories. The purpose of the larger expression is obvious. Mr. Paul wishes us to think Claire several years older than Fanny Imlay, in order that we may think her very much Mary’s superior, by the authority of age. Several years may mean anything from three or four years to ten or twelve. Let us put the expression at four years. Then, as Fanny (born in April, 1794) was already eighteen years old, Claire must, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, have been twenty-two years old in 1812, and must have been born at least as early as April, 1790. It follows, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, that Claire’s brother, older than she, must have been born, at the latest, on 4th June, 1789,—might, indeed, be fairly taken as having been born a year earlier.

Charles Clairmont was therefore, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, rising twelve years old, when his mother came to her new house in the Polygon. Was he?

(1) In 1802, when Charles (according to Mr. Kegan Paul’s statement) was thirteen years old, William Godwin is admitted by Mr. Kegan Paul to have taken much pains to put the boy into Christ’s Hospital. Had Godwin succeeded in getting the admission, the boy would have been fourteen before he went into the school, where boys, eighty years since, used to be admitted, no less than now-a-days, in quite tender years. Is it probable Godwin would have sought for the admission when the boy was so old?

(2) As an admission in the Bluecoat School could not be got for the boy, we know from a letter, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s own book, that Charles Clairmont was sent to Charterhousein the summer of 1805, and kept at his studies there for six years. ‘I observed,’ Godwin wrote to Mr. Fairley on 5th October, 1811, about the boy, ‘that I had kept him for six years at the Charterhouse, one of our most celebrated schools, not without proportionable profit, and that he has since been several months under one of our most celebrated arithmeticians.’ If Charles was born on 4th June, 1789, he was sixteen years old when he first entered the Charterhouse school, and twenty-two when he left it. Does Mr. Kegan Paul think this probable or possible?

(3) Let us take some more evidence from one of the letters, which Mr. Kegan Paul seems to have pitchforked into his book without reading them. On 5th June, 1806, William Godwin wrote about the boy (who had been naughty just before his birthday) to his wife at Southend, in these words:—

‘Do not imagine that I took Charles into my good graces the moment your back was turned.... So that I had only just time to forgive him for his birthday. I wish to impress you with the persuasion that he is infinitely more of a child, and to be treated as a child, than you imagine. Monday I sent him for a frank, and set all the children to write letters, though by his awkwardness the occasion was lost. The letter he then wrote, though I took some pains previously to work on his feelings, was the poorest and most soulless thing ever you saw. I then set him to learn the poem of “My Mother,” in Darton’sOriginal Poetry.... I went upstairs to his bedside the night before you left us, that I might impress upon him the importance of not suffering you to depart in anger; but instead of understanding me at first, he, like a child, thought I was come to whip him, and with great fervour and agitation, begged I would forgive him.’

(4) Had he been born on 4th June, 1789, as we are asked to believe by Mr. Kegan Paul, Charles (a decidedly clever boy, who made a good position for himself in early manhood by his mental force) was just upon seventeen years old, when he was scolded and punished for being naughty,—was set to learn by heart ‘My Mother’ in Darton’sOriginal Poetry, and was thrown into lively agitation by fear that his stepfather had come upstairs to whip him. Can Mr. Kegan Paul seriously believe that a clever boy of seventeen years would have cried out for forgiveness, and in childish alarm have begged his step-father not to smack him?

(5) At the close of October, 1811, when, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, he was twenty-two years, Charles (the clever boy,who was still a mere lad when he became a tutor in the Imperial family of Austria) was sent to Mr. Thomas Constable’s publishing house for two years to learn business; it being arranged that the lad should receive a yearly salary of 15l., to which his stepfather should add 30l.for his sufficient maintenance. Can Mr. Kegan Paul believe that this arrangement was made for so promising a young man when he was twenty-two years old?

(6) Now let us see how Charles’s probable birthday of 4th June, 1795, fits in with the known dates of his story. Born on that day he would be seven years old in June, 1802; an age at which persons, wishing to get him into Christ’s Hospital, would be on the look-out for a nomination. Born on that day he was ten years old in 1805, when he went for the first time to the Charterhouse,—a fit age (as matters went seventy years since) at which to send him into the school. Born on that day, he would be still ten years old, when he was scolded, set to learn ‘My Mother,’ and thrown into noisy agitation by fear of being whipt. Godwin’s letter gives a picture of a rather childish boy of ten years, not of a young man seventeen years old. Born on that day, he would be sixteen, when he left school in 1811, and went as a clerk into the Edinburgh publishing-house. Let it be added (though more than enough has been said about the youngster’s age) that the boy’s letters, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders, are enough to show him to have been six or seven years younger than the book-maker requires us to think him.

(7) Another piece of evidence touching Claire’s age, taken from Mr. Kegan Paul’s book. If she was born, as Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe, no later than April, 1790, she was twenty-one years old in May, 1811. In that month of May, Mrs. Godwin went to Ramsgate for change of air, taking her stepdaughter, Mary, with her for the trip, whilst her own daughter Jane (Claire) remained in London with her father and Fanny Imlay. Writing from London to Mrs. Godwin at Ramsgate, on 18th May, 1811, William Godwin says:—

‘I have just been into the next room to ask the children if they have any messages. They are both anxious to hear from you.Jane says she hopes you stuck on the Goodwin Sands, and that the sailors frightened you a little.’

This message from thirteen-years-old Jane was a piquant piece of sauciness from the child to her mamma. From a youngwoman of twenty-one years it would have been a piece of silliness, that Godwin certainly would not have passed on to his wife, in order to heighten the enjoyment of her holiday. Enough surely has been said to satisfy readers that Byron was right in regarding Claire and Mary as girls of about the same age,i.e.as being both of them only eighteen years old when they were at Geneva in 1816; and that Mr. Kegan Paul is guilty of a serious error in making it seem that Claire was older than Mary by at least seven years and four months. Claire may have been older than Mary by some months; but she certainly was not older than Fanny by several years.

Repeating a piece of malicious domestic tattle, in order to make the lady ridiculous and contemptible, Mr. Kegan Paul says, that soon after entering her new home in The Polygon, Mrs. Clairmont, from the balcony outside her drawing-room window, addressed Godwin (sitting in the balcony outside his drawing-room window) in these words, ‘Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?’—words that, tickling the philosopher’s inordinate vanity, are represented as going far to enslave him. Let it be assumed that the widow made the first advances to acquaintanceship with her neighbour in this absurd fashion; that she set her cap at the widower, angled for him, caught him. Why should so much be made of this to the second Mrs. Godwin’s discredit, by writers who have nothing but eulogy for Mary Wollstonecraft, though she ran wildly after Fuseli, and certainly did not leave it to Godwin to make the first advances to her? We have Godwin’s published word that he made no such advances to her; and we have his serious declaration, in the private note intended only for Mary Wollstonecraft’s eye, that his ambition to heal her wounded heart resulted from her action in throwing herself on his compassionate sympathy.

It is urged by Mr. Kegan Paul, that Godwin’s second marriage was not a remarkably happy one; that Godwin would have lived on the whole more serenely, from middle to old age, had he not wedded the widow Clairmont; that they had two or three lively quarrels, and divers keen disputes; that some of his old friends disliked her so much that they visited her husband less frequently; that she was a ‘managing,’ domineering woman, with a far from happy temper. All this must be admitted, though every count of the indictment is pressed againstthe lady with extravagant exaggeration. When all has been urged that can be fairly urged to the discredit of her temper, the second Mrs. Godwin was a less irascible and overbearing woman than Mary Wollstonecraft. There are grounds for a strong opinion that had Godwin been Mary Wollstonecraft’s domestic mate for thirty years, instead of some ten or eleven months, he would have suffered far more from her temper, than he suffered from his second wife’s temper during more than thirty years. If in one of their squabbles arising from paltry questions, Godwin and his second wife talked about separating from one another when they had been married only a year and ten months, let it be remembered in what terms he was moved to write to Mary Wollstonecraft, when he had been (legally) married to her only three weeks. If the man of letters and his second wife had another lively difference in August, 1811, when they had been married nine years and seven months, the quarrel ended under circumstances, affording evidence of much good feeling on Mrs. Godwin’s part, and also of the strong mutual affection of the husband and wife. The documents of Mr. Kegan Paul’s book (documents he cannot be supposed to have read) yield conclusive testimony that, whilst falling out with her, and scolding her roundly once in a while, Godwin had a high regard for his second wife’s energy, a corresponding respect for her good sense and discretion in affairs of business, a genuine admiration for several of her qualities, a curious pride in the gentility of her birth, and a steady affection for her,—in truth, all the sentimental fondness so cold a man could feel for any woman. There is a homely saying in Wiltshire that ‘married people are made to bicker and breed.’ Godwin and his wife bickered barely up to the standard of Wiltshire morals; and their recorded bickerings are never without indications of a homely (albeit quite unromantic) liking for one another. Of their petty tiffs and short-lived quarrels, biography would never have said a word, had not the Shelleyan enthusiasts thought it needful to hunt up materials for palliating Mary Godwin’s conduct, in running away from her father’s house with another woman’s husband.

‘The old acquaintances,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says in his general account of Godwin’s life in 1802-3, the first year of his married life with his second wife, ‘did not like Mrs. Godwin, and she did not like them; she was a harsh stepmother, whom hischildren feared.’ There are, of course, two sides to the story of Mrs. Godwin’s dislike of her husband’s old friends. The dislike has in some cases been exaggerated; and her dislike of some of the people was reasonable and even creditable to her. Possibly her children feared her; for the way, in which children were generally governed in English homes eighty years since, caused them often to fear parents who abounded in parental affection. But there is no evidence that she was a ‘harsh stepmother,’ in any fair sense of the term, apart from Mrs. Shelley’s vindictive words against her. Such scanty evidence as Mr. Kegan Paul gives us from the Field Place papers, goes in the other direction. On this point Mr. Kegan Paul makes strong assertions without supporting them with facts, which he certainly would have done, had the facts been to hand. He says (speaking of 1802-3):—

‘She’ (i.e.the second Mrs. Godwin) ‘had strong views, in which many would agree, that each child should be educated to some definite duties, and with a view of filling some useful place in life; but this arrangement soon had at least a show of partiality. It was found that Jane Clairmont’s mission in life, according to her mother’s view, was to have all the education, and even accomplishments, which their slender means would admit, and more than they would admit; while household drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the life-work of Fanny and Mary Godwin.’

This is the case against Mrs. Godwin, as it is put by the gentleman who insists that Claire (in after-life a governess) was six or seven years older than Mary. As they were of the same age, it was incumbent on Mrs. Godwin to treat them alike in respect to educational advantages; but it is droll that Mr. Kegan Paul, who declares Claire to have been so much the older of the two girls, should be so severe on Mrs. Godwin for spending more money on the education of the elder girl (so soon to be a governess), than on the younger who was still a little child. What accomplishments can Mary (from five to six years old in 1802-3) have been denied by her harsh stepmother, that so much should be made of the denial? The truth is that the two girls of about the same age were educated precisely in the same way, by the same governess, and with the same books. In other matters they were treated in the same way; taking their childish ‘treats’ together or by turns, and taking their punishments in proportion to their naughtiness. It has already been seen, howMary went with her stepmother in May, 1811 (a rare ‘outing’ for the Skinner-Street people in those days!), Claire being left at home. Had Mrs. Godwin taken Claire and left Mary in Skinner Street, what a fuss the Shelleyan apologists would have made about Mrs. Godwin’s galling neglect of Mary and partiality for her own girl! The alleged difference in the treatment of the two children existed only in the imagination of Mary, who inherited some of the worst defects of her mother’s temper.

These two children, of the same household and about the same age, were fifteen years old, when Godwin received a letter from a stranger, begging for information respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters, and asking especially whether they were educated in accordance with their mother’s educational theories,—an inquiry to which Godwin replied with a statement that Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters had not been educated in accordance with their mother’s educational notions. ‘They are,’ he wrote, ‘neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother.’ At the same time, Godwin told his unknown correspondent that he was chiefly moved to marry his second wife by considerations arising from his sense of his own incompetence to educate his daughters. Further, he remarked that he and his wife were too fully occupied by the labour of maintaining their family, to ‘have leisure enough for reducing theories to practice;’—a series of significant admissions.

There is another piece of remarkable evidence, respecting the education Godwin gave his children, to be found amongst the excellent materials of Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders. Four days after the boy’s withdrawal from the Charterhouse School, Godwin sent his step-son Charles a book, instead of another work the lad had been advised to read. On sending the book to Ramsgate, where Charles was staying with his mother, Godwin, on 24th May, 1811, wrote to Mrs. Godwin in these words:—

‘I send Charles’s book agreeably to his desire.... The very choice of the book is taken out of my hands; T. T. undertook to procure for him Paine’sAge of Reason; this I objected to. It is written in a vein of banter and impudence, and though I do not wish the young man to be the slave of the religion of his country, there are few things I hate more than a young man, with his little bit of knowledge, setting-up to turn up his nose, and elevate his eyebrows, and make his sorry joke at everything the wisest and best men England ever produced, have treatedwith veneration. Therefore I preferred a work by Anthony Collins, the friend of Locke, written with sobriety and learning, to the broad grins of Thomas Paine.... Observe, I totally object to Mary’s reading in Charles’s book. I think it much too early for him, but I have been driven, so far as he is concerned, from the standing of my own judgment by the improper conduct of T. T.’

It is instructive to observe how William Godwin fell away from his philosophical theories as soon as he was required to put them in practice. It is one thing for a scholar to theorize in his arm-chair for the guidance of individuals, who are unknown to him; another thing for him to act on his precepts, in the education of persons to whom he is drawn by parental affection. In theory an enemy to marriage, when Mary Wollstonecraft gave him her wounded heart, he had lived with her in Free Love for only a few months, when he discovered that he had better marry her. From the day of his marriage he moved further away from his old hostility to wedlock, till he altogether abandoned his former views against marriage, and became a supporter of the institution he had so long derided. A theorist on education, he no sooner had little girls to care for at his own hearth, than he discovered his ‘incompetence for the education of daughters,’ and bethought himself that he had better find a second wife, who would bring them up in the old-fashioned way. A bold Deist whilst he was a bachelor, he became a timid Deist in private life on becoming a father. When Charles Clairmont came to reasonable years, Godwin shrunk from the thought of giving him theAge of Reasonand would fain have postponed his introduction to Free Thought. On putting Anthony Collins’ moderate book in the hands of the sixteen-years-old boy, he was urgent that his daughter (in her fourteenth year) should not be allowed to look into the book.

Godwin’s reluctance to act on his theories, his absolute abandonment in mature middle age of several of his social views (especially his notorious theories respecting marriage), must be borne in mind by readers, who would judge between him and Shelley, in regard to matters that must soon be narrated. Orthodox cynics have laughed over the old man’s chagrin at his daughter’s elopement with another woman’s husband, and have declared him properly punished by the scandalous incident for his denunciations of wedlock. Men of the world, like Trelawny (a true sailor to the last in finding a new lovewherever he harboured), have made merry over Godwin’s displeasure and wrath at the elopement. In his old age, Trelawny used to maintain stoutly that, as Shelley acted in this matter in accordance with the philosopher’s published doctrine, the latter had no right to complain of the poet’s action towards Mary. By the majority of the Shelleyan apologists, it is declared or suggested that Godwin, with a marriageable daughter in his house, was bound by the words he uttered against marriage long before he had a daughter; as though he had no right to change his views after coming to mature age. Whilst questions, touching Godwin’s relations with, and conduct to, Shelley are debated in this fashion, it cannot be stated too plainly that his views about marriage in 1814, and in many previous years, had nothing in common with what he thought against marriage, before his union with Mary Wollstonecraft.

In hisLeaf from the Real Life of Lord Byron, the rash and deplorable article on matters about which he knew nothing, Mr. Froude asserted that Mary Godwin was, in her childhood, ‘bred up to regard love as the essential part of marriage;’ these words being used in a sense which caused the essayist to assert that, notwithstanding this breeding-up, she was ‘a perfectly pure innocent woman.’ This assertion that in her childhood Mary was indoctrinated in the anti-matrimonial views her father had abandoned, is absolutely the reverse of fact. Godwin’s children and step-children were educated much like other English children of their social degree; just as they would have been educated had he, instead of being a Deist, been a lukewarm member of the Church of England. Sent to a Church of England school, Charles Clairmont was in no way introduced to Free Thought till he had entered his seventeenth year, and had it not been for T. Turner’s busybodyism, the young man’s introduction to Free Thought would have been deferred till he was much older. Instructed by professional governesses and men-teachers, Mary Godwin and Claire were taught chiefly out of the books produced by their parents in the way of their business, for use in Church-of-England and other Denominational Schools. Their minds were not led prematurely to think about marriage. No eccentric notions touching the intercourse of the sexes had been put into Mary’s mind, when Shelley made her acquaintance. It may be assumed confidently, from the way in which she was educated, that she had never known anything of her mother’spainful history and peculiar views, till Shelley spoke to her about them, and used them as arguments for inducing her to become his mistress. It is certain from her own written words that, instead of regarding marriage as an idle form, she regarded it as a sacred and momentous ceremony. As Godwin was so urgent that she should not be allowed to look into ‘Charles’s book,’ and thought sixteen years a ‘much too early’ age for Charles’s introduction to Free Thought, we may be sure he thought the ageverymuch too early for a clever girl’s initiation in the views of Free-thinkers.

Enough has been said to show that, though her temper was defective, theEdinburgh Review(October, 1882) had no sufficient justification for saying, on the authority of Mr. Kegan Paul, that the second Mrs. Godwin ‘was a person who rendered life intolerable to those who shared it with her.’ The evidence is superabundant that she did not render life intolerable, or otherwise than fairly enjoyable, to her husband, her elder son Charles, her younger son William, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny. That Fanny got on pleasantly with Mrs. Godwin, and that Mrs. Godwin proved a good and kind mother to this child of shameful birth, are sufficient testimony that Mary’s stepmother was by no means so bad a woman as certain of the Shelleyan apologists would have us think her. The fault was not wholly on Mrs. Godwin’s side that, on entering the period in which girlhood passes imperceptibly into womanhood,—the period when high-spirited girls are sometimes very difficult persons to control,—Mary and Claire went into rebellion against her. Godwin’s admission to his unknown correspondent, that his favourite child was ‘singularly bold, somewhat imperious,’ points to some of the difficulty Mrs. Godwin experienced in managing the girl, who had inherited a liberal share of Mary Wollstonecraft’s quick, fervid, and querulous nature. Beautiful in different styles, clever in different ways, these two wilful, daring, saucy pusses, would have tried the temper and skill of the most judicious governess. Mrs. Godwin being what she was, it is not surprising that they went into rebellion against her government, and constituted themselves ‘the opposition’ in the Skinner-Street Parliament. It was a grievous misfortune of both damsels, that Shelley (ever quick to sympathize with ‘the victims of domestic tyranny’) made their acquaintance, when they were in this dangerous period of girlhood.

That the handsome, clever, managing Mrs. Godwin had great influence over her husband, is shown by the way in which she induced him to become a publisher and retail seller of children’s educational books,—the business being so arranged that she was for some time its nominal and actual manager, whilst he, keeping in the background of the affair, avoided public observation. Knowing much of printing and the book-trade, it occurred to the managing lady that she and her husband would do well to go into this business. There was much to be said in favour of the project in 1805, when in the fourth year of their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin were no richer than they had been on their wedding-day. Still earning an income that would have been wealth to him as a bachelor, Godwin had not ‘done well’ of late years. Since his second marriage things had been going ill with him. His income was waning, his family had increased. Fanny was rising twelve; Charley was ten; Jane (i.e.Claire) and Mary were rising eight; Willie, the babe of the household, was nearing the end of his second year. How were these children to be clothed, fed, taught, and raised creditably into young men and women, on an income that, already barely sufficient for present necessities, seemed likely to dwindle to smaller revenue? With all their industry, Godwin and his wife had barely kept things going; and they were now nearing a time of life (Godwin was in his fiftieth year), when even the most improvident people begin to anticipate the usual incidents of life’s decline.

Under these circumstances, the shop was opened in 1805, in Hanway Street, Oxford Street, under the name of M. J. Godwin and Co.; the M. J. Godwin being Mary Jane, whose Co. at The Polygon, and on the shop-front, went to work bravely in throwing off copy for new Children’s Books, to be published under thenom-de-plumeof Baldwin. Mrs. Godwin also worked hard with her pen, whilst she went daily from The Polygon to the little shop near Oxford Street, to look after the person who had been engaged to wait on customers; Godwin keeping in the background, because his reputation might be hurtful to the venture, were the shop known to be his shop, and many of the books sold in it known to be by his pen. Something less than two years later, when the business (which, beginning in this modest way, became a considerable affair) was moved to Skinner Street, it was decided with questionable discretion that Godwinshould live over his own shop, and, dropping all concealment, work the business under his own name. The business was thus removed to Skinner Street in May, 1807.

Thus it was that the Godwins of The Polygon, Somers Town, became the Godwins of Skinner Street. There is room for two opinions respecting the policy of the enterprise, that made Godwin for the remainder of his working days a struggling tradesman; whilst with failing powers he persisted in literary toil. But much may be said against the view taken by the partisans who, never finding aught to commend in anything for which Mrs. Godwin was accountable, maintain it was an evil day for the man of letters when he was persuaded by his meddlesome wife to go into ‘the trade.’ Burdened with a wife and five children, Godwin’s only prospect, towards the close of his time at Somers Town, was one of incessant labour and anxiety about money. Had he kept out of business, he would, perhaps, have needed the help of his friends in a greater degree. On the whole, I am disposed to think that, whilst his difficulties were somewhat lighter, his means of supporting his family were somewhat greater, than they would have been had he remained in The Polygon, and kept clear of the commercial side of literature. Sending his boys to good schools, he gave his girls the usual training, together with some of the accomplishments and pleasures, of young gentlewomen. In some respects it might have been cheerier without being in any way costlier or more luxurious; but the house in Skinner Street was a fairly happy home for the five young people who, one and all, called Godwin ‘papa’ and Mrs. Godwin ‘mamma.’

THE IRISH CAMPAIGN, AND THE STAY AT NANTGWILLT.

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