me?however, I will not speak of that subject. I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester*?how unfortunate?and to pass
4. Shelley's blank-verse tragedy, The Cenci, had been published in the spring of 1820. 5. Wordsworth had said this in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. For 'Mammon' see Matthew 6.24 and Luke 16.13: 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' 6. From Spenser's description of the Cave of Mammon in The Faerie Queene 2.7.28: 'With rich metall loaded every rifte.' 7. Perfectly ordered; all tile suits in the deck matched up ('pips' are the conventional spots on playing cards). 8. Metaphysics. 9. Prometheus Unbound, of which Shelley had promised Keats a copy. 1. Keats's volume of 1820. including Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the odes. When Shelley drowned he had this small book open in his pocket. 1. Written to Keats's friend Charles Armitage Brown from the house on the Spanish Steps, in the Pi a//a di Spagna, where Keats was being tended in his mortal illness by the devoted Joseph Severn. 2. When it landed at Maples, Keats's ship had been quarantined for ten miserably hot days. 3. Bedhampton and Chichester are both near the harbor town of Portsmouth, where Keats had embarked for Naples two months before.
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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY / 95 5
on the river too! There was my star predominant!4 I cannot answer any thing in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend 1 love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse,?and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me?I have been well, healthy, alert &c, walking with hers?and now?the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recover)' of the stomach. There, you rogue, 1 put you to the torture,?but you must bring your philosophy to bear?as I do mine, really?or how should I be able to live? Dr Clarke is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George,?for it runs in my head we shall all die young. 1 have not written to x x x x x yet,6 which he must think very neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If 1 recover, 1 will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven. I shall write to x x x to-morrow, or next day. I will write to x x x x x in the middle of next week. Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell x x x x I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess;?and also a note to my sister?who walks about my imagination like a ghost?she is so like Tom.7 I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a
letter. I always made an awkward bow.
God bless you!
John Keats.
4. I.e., that was mv usual luck. Cf. Shakespeare's crosses for the names til Keats's friends to conceal The Winters Tale 1.2.202-03: 'It is a bawdy their identities. planet, that will strike / Where 'tis predominant.' 7. Keats's youngest brother, whom Fanny, his only 5. Fanny Brawne. sister, closely resembled, had died of tuberculosis 6. Charles Brown, whose manuscript transcrip-on December 1, 1818. George was John Keats's tion is the only text for this letter, substituted younger brother. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY 1797-1851
Percy Shelley wrote of his young wife, in the Dedication to Laon and Cythnu:
They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child.
The 'glorious parents' were William Godwin, the leading reformer and radical philosopher of the time, and Man' Wollstonecraft, famed as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft had died as the result of childbed fever incurred when she gave birth to Mary. Four years later Godwin married a widow, Mary Jane Clairmont, who soon had more than she could cope with trying to manage a family of five children of diverse parentage, amid increasing financial difficulties. Mary bitterly resented her stepmother but adored her father, who, she later said, 'was
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95 6 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
my God?and I remember many childish instances of the excess of attachment I bore for him.'
To ease the situation Mary was sent at the age of fourteen to live in Dundee, Scotland, with the family of William Baxter, an admirer of Godwin. After two pleasant years roaming the countryside, daydreaming, and writing stories (which have been lost), she returned in 1814 to her father's house in London. There, at the age of sixteen, she encountered the twenty-one-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of Godwin's and an almost daily visitor, who had become estranged from his wife, Harriet. The young people fell in love; within a few months Mary was pregnant. On July 28 they ran off to Europe, taking with them her stepsister Jane Clairmont, who later changed her name to Claire. Mary described their happy though heedless wanderings through France, Switzerland, and Germany in her first book, History1 of a Six Weeks' Tour, published anonymously in 1817.
Back in England she gave premature birth to a daughter who lived only twelve days; a year later, in 1816, she bore a son, William. Shelley was usually in financial difficulties and often had to hide from his creditors to avoid arrest. Nonetheless, he contributed substantial sums (borrowed against his expectations as heir to his father, Sir Timothy) to Godwin's support, even though Godwin, despite his earlier advocacy of free love, refused to countenance Shelley's liaison with his daughter. Claire Clairmont meanwhile sought out and had a brief affair with Byron, who left her pregnant. In the spring of 1816, the Shelleys went abroad again with Claire, and at the latter's behest settled in Geneva, where Byron, accompanied by his physician and friend John William Polidori, set up residence in the nearby Villa Diodati. Mary Shelley tells us, in the introduction to Frankenstein, how her imagination was fired by their animated conversations during many social evenings. Encouraged and assisted by Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, her story of the man of science who, with catastrophic consequences, seeks to conquer nature, rival the divinity, and make new life, and who then withholds love from the life he has made. Since its anonymous publication in 1818, the novel has never been out of print. As the basis for innumerable plays (beginning in 1823) and movies (beginning in 1910), the story has become a central myth of modern Western culture.
The last six years of Mary's life with her husband, spent first in England and then in Italy, were filled with disasters. In October 1816 her sensitive and moody half- sister, Fanny Imlay, feeling herself an unloved burden on the Godwin household, committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum. Two months later Shelley's abandoned wife, Harriet, pregnant by an unknown lover, drowned herself in the Serpentine lake at Hyde Park in London. Shelley at once married Mary, but the courts denied him custody of Harriet's two children on the grounds that he was morally unfit to rear them. In September 1818 came the death of Mary's third baby, Clara, followed less than nine months later by the death from malaria, rampant in Rome at the time, of her adored son, William: 'We came to Italy
