Mary Shelley gets a Blue Plaque in Bath!

Unveiled Tuesday 27 February, 2018

bath_abbey_walkThe 200tth Anniversary of the first publishing of Frankenstein has finally brought Mary Shelley some well-deserved and long overdue notoriety, especially in some of the places where she lived and worked.

On Tuesday, February 27, in Bath, England, where Mary Godwin did much of her research and writing of the famous novel, a blue plaque will be unveiled attached to the Victorian Era Bath Pump House which mostly replaced the building at the former Abbey Church Yard where Mary took up lodgings after returning from Geneva, that notorious summer of 1816 (see Shelleys in Bath – Frankenstein Begins).

Update: It’s not a Blue Plaque, but rather a bronze plate, privately placed with some information of Mary Shelley and the writing of “Frankenstein” on the spot in 1816-1817, placed in front of the Pump Room, over the basement.

In England, notable historic sites and buildings which warrant recognition get the honor of a round blue plaque, noting where a historically worthy person or event gets a brief description. These end up being pointed out by tour guides, or photographed by tourists.

Blue plaques to the young woman author of Frankenstein, have been notably lacking. There is one where she is buried in Bournemouth, and two in London, where she lived at Chester Square in her later life, and one in Bloomsbury where she lived briefly with Shelley in 1815 after returning from the elopement trip France and Switzerland, but until now, none where she actually worked on her novel.

I have recently seen a number of stories saying that Mary spent 6 months in Switzerland writing her book, but those months were actually spent in Bath. The Shelleys and Claire Clairmont left Geneva at the end of August, travelling back by way of France, and spent the last four months of 1816 in Bath.

The plaque and Mary Shelley’s finally getting her due in Bath is due to local fans and authorities, recognizing the almost forgotten local famous figure, where a local theater company has been performing walking tours. It has been apparently a twenty year effort to get a plaque to Shelley in Bath, after two hundred years of neglect. Why so long?

Perhaps it was the scandalous reputation which followed the Shelleys since their own time. Maybe it’s the awkward name situation. When she was in Bath, she was Mary Godwin, not becoming formally the more future famous Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley until her marriage to her poet lover after the death of the first Mrs. Shelley days after Christmas  in 1816.

Now, if only Marlow would get a plaque – either blue or bronze – on the Albion House where Mary Shelley completed her classic.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Audiobook Free with Trial

Mary Shelley in Bath – Frankenstein Begins

Tragedy, Turmoil and Creativity for the Shelleys in Bath

5 Abbey Churchyard Bath

Shelley’s 5 Abbey Churchyard

The city of Bath makes a great deal of fuss about its place in the life of Regency author Jane Austen. There’s an Austen Centre, exhibits and annual celebrations, tour marketing and the like. Austen lived in Bath for nine years from 1800 to 1809, but her time in Bath was not especially significant in her own literary history. She wrote the drafts of her completed novels before moving there, and she was not published until after she had left. While for the longest time, the city barely acknowledged its place in the life of Austen’s contemporary author, Mary Shelley, who developed and wrote a significant portion of her greatest work while a resident there. A museum for the author of Frankenstein is now in the planning stage.

Though only a fairly brief five months, the time spent in Bath by Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Clare Clairmont in 1816 were some of the most tumultuous and eventful in their story and in the formulation of Mary’s novel of Frankenstein. Within this few months, a birth and two suicides would deeply affect them, and by the time they left, Mary Godwin would be Mrs. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

After departing the company of Byron in Geneva, the Shelley party, Shelley, Mary, Clare, the Shelleys’ two-year-old son, William, and a nurse, Elise Duvillard, hired in Switzerland, returned back to England. They travelled through France on a different route than they had taken in 1814, passing through Dijon, Auxerre, and Villeneuve, while stopping for brief tourist visits at the palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles, and to Rouen for the Cathedral. They sailed from Le Havre to Portsmouth on the 8th of September, 1816.

Bath Then and NowFrom Portsmouth, Shelley separated from the two sisters to see his friend, Thomas Peacock, in Great Marlow, while Mary and Clare went to Bath. Clare’s pregnancy by Byron was beginning to show or make her condition, at least, clear by this time, and the idea was to find a distant lodging from London. Mary was still estranged from her father for her relationship with Shelley and they thought to conceal Clare’s condition. She was still using alternate spellings of her chosen name, Claire or Clare. It was mostly Claire in Switzerland and France using the French spelling, and Clare or Clara in England. Mary was confused enough to use both spellings in the same letter, while others of the family were still calling her by her birth name, Jane (Mary Jane, after her mother).

Mary Godwin wrote two diary entries of their arrival in Bath:

Tuesday, September 10.—Arrive at Bath about 2. Dine, and spend the evening in looking for lodgings. Read Mrs. Robinson’s Valcenga.

Wednesday, September 11.—Look for lodgings; take some, and settle ourselves. Read the first volume of The Antiquary, and work.

Mary had begun a short story version of the “nightmare” vision of that summer while in Switzerland, which Byron had referred to as a “Pygmalion” tale of making a man, but with Shelley’s encouragement, she had decided to write a full novel, which she began in earnest at Bath, writing the first chapters of Frankenstein. She had been writing in a notebook she had purchased in Geneva, but purchased new English paper notebooks in Bath for her longer vision.

The Shelleys had two lodging locations in Bath. The first address was No 5 Abbey Churchyard, on the main square across from the west front of the Bath Abbey. That building, which housed a reading library which may have attracted Mary’s notice, and apartments, was torn down in 1889 to make way for the addition of the Victorian Queen’s Bath expansion of the Bath Pump Room. The other address was two blocks away at No 12 New Bond Street. Shelley was travelling for much of this time, dealing with money issues, negotiations with his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, over his inheritance and the two tragic suicide events, as well as looking for a hoped permanent house to settle in near his friend in Marlow.

In early October, Shelley was corresponding from the 5 Abbey Churchyard address to both Godwin, regarding money he had promised to lend, and to publisher John Murray regarding the eminent publishing of The Third Canto of Byron’s Childe Harold. Shelley was waiting for the publishing proofs to be sent to him at that address where he expected to remain for the winter. For her part, Mary addressed her letters from the 12 New Bond Street address, where Clare was residing. One might conjecture that this was an attempt to show Shelley and Mary, still unwed, to be living separately, or they may have set the nurse and her son in New Bond Street with the pregnant Clare, so that she could be with Shelley when he was in Bath. Mary referred to her step-sister, “looking in on” her, so they were for at least some time apart.

Not long after settling, Mary travelled to Marlow on the 19th of September to meet Shelley and returned on the 25th. They received an alarming letter from Fanny sent from Bristol on the 9th of October and Shelley went to find her, following her to Swansea where she had committed suicide. Mary noted in her diary on 12 October “buy mourning” purchasing mourning clothes for Fanny’s death, although there was no funeral and the body was unclaimed to keep her anonymity and reputation. Mary was writing Frankenstein off and on through this period with a number of references to writing in her diary, making revisions as she went.

She was reading sea voyage literature at this time, suggesting she was writing the Captain Walton beginning of the novel, inspired by her youthful visits to Dundee, Scotland. She was also reading Sir Humphrey Davy’s reference on chemistry, as she was working on Victor Frankenstein’s studies and scientific background. Davey was the originator of ideas of electro-chemistry and voltaic batteries which had so intrigued a young Percy Shelley at Oxford.

Mary wrote a letter on the 5th of December in good spirits to Shelley in Marlow that she had completed “chapter four” (the bringing to life Victor’s creature), but also involving Safie and the creature’s language learning, which she noted she thought was long. She later edited this significantly shorter for the published 1818 version, separating into two chapters. She was also concerned with Shelley’s tendency to latch onto the first house he might find, and seemed to have a wish not to have to live with her sister, which had been nearly constant for two years.

“I was awakened this morning by my pretty babe, and was dressed time enough to take my lesson from Mr. West, and (thank God) finished that tedious ugly picture I have been so long about. I have also finished the fourth chapter of Frankenstein, which is a very long one, and I think you would like it. And where are you? and what are you doing? my blessed love. … in the choice of a residence, dear Shelley, pray be not too quick or attach yourself too much to one spot. … A house with a lawn, a river or lake, noble trees, and divine mountains, that should be our little mouse-hole to retire to. But never mind this; give me a garden, and absentia Claire, and I will thank my love for many favours.”

In November, Shelley was reading Plutarch’s “Lives” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and this seems to have crept into Mary’s writing, as she has the creature reading these while in the De Lacey Cottage in Chamonix.

Shelley returned to Bath from Marlow on the 14th of December, but the next day, the 15th , was informed in a letter from Thomas Hookham that his wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, was found drowned in the Serpentine Lake of Hyde Park. She had been missing from her residence for three weeks. She was named only as Harriet Smith at the inquest, a named she had used for a lodging in Queen Street. She had left no note, and little evidence was given, though a rumor suggested she was deserted by a household groom and that she had a proclivity to suicidal thoughts since her youth. The London Times reported only that a respectable lady she was found drowned “advanced in pregnancy”. Mary made no comment on the event of Harriet’s death, but she was enthusiastic to support Shelley’s effort to take custody of the children, Ianthe and Charles, and the Shelleys were now free to marry and hoped for a reconciliation with her father.

“How very happy shall I be to possess those darling treasures that are yours. I do not exactly understand what Chancery has to do in this, and wait with impatience for to-morrow, when I shall hear whether they are with you; and then what will you do with them? My heart says, bring them instantly here; but I submit to your prudence. You do not mention Godwin. When I receive your letter to-morrow I shall write to Mrs. Godwin. I hope, yet I fear, that he will show on this occasion some disinterestedness. Poor, dear Fanny, if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved, for my house would then have been a proper asylum for her.”

Shelley returned to visit Peacock in Marlow to search for a house they might take as a permanent residence and visited Leigh Hunt, the Publisher of the Examiner, beginning a long friendship. Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley went to London on December 30, 1816 to be married at St Mildred’s Church, and stayed with the Leigh Hunts. Godwin and Mrs. Godwin also attended the wedding. It was the first time Mary had seen her father since he banned them from Skinner Street after their return from the elopement in 1814. Clare stayed in Bath and Mary promised her a quick return.

Mary stopped writing on her novel during this time. Clare bore her daughter on January 12, 1817. She first named her Alba, in honor of the Shelleys’ nickname for Lord Byron, “Albe” (LB), put prudently changed the name later to Allegra, to avoid the too obvious connection. Mary wrote of “4 days of idleness” in her diary. Her son William’s first birthday was on January 24. Shelley had been in London since the 6th in Chancery Court arguing for custody of his children by Harriet, a suit he lost, despite Mary’s enthusiastic support. The Westbrooks had fought against his taking in the children, using his “atheistic” writings in Queen Mab as evidence of a lack of moral fitness. The children were sent to an unrelated clergyman in Warwick where Harriet had been living. The Shelleys left Bath on February 27, 1816 for Marlow. Mary was pregnant for the third time and beginning on a second notebook volume of her novel.

Take short tour of Bath today.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Get Mary Shelley Memoirs Audiobook Free with Trail at Audible

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook at Amazon

Fanny Imlay Godwin’s Suicide

The Forgotten Tragedy of the Frankenstein Story

Of the many 200th Anniversary Celebrations for the creation of Frankenstein, it is unlikely these events of October of 1816 are on anyone’s party list.

Entries in Mary Godwin’s Diary

Wednesday, October 9.—Read Curtius; finish the Memoirs; draw. In the evening a very alarming letter comes from Fanny. Shelley goes immediately to Bristol; we sit up for him till 2 in the morning, when he returns, but brings no particular news.

Thursday, October 10.—Shelley goes again to Bristol, and obtains more certain trace. Work and read. He returns at 11 o’clock.

Friday, October 11.—He sets off to Swansea. Work and read.

Saturday, October 12.—He returns with the worst account. A miserable day. Two letters from Papa. Buy mourning, and work in the evening.

Fanny Imlay GodwinThese were the only entries in Mary’s daily diary of the news of the suicide of her twenty-two year old elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay Godwin. The entries are characteristic of Mary’s decidedly terse and brief references to the most wrenching of events in her life recorded in her daily accounts. This was during the time in which she and her younger step-sister Claire Clairmont Godwin were living in Bath, writing Frankenstein and her tour journals she called her memoirs. This was October of 1816. They had returned from their second trip to Europe and that famous fateful legendary summer with the impromptu contest on Lake Geneva. Claire was fully pregnant with Byron’s child, (to be born Alba and later changed to Allegra) and Mary was still rejected by her father for her “illicit” unwed liaison with Percy Shelley. They had taken up residence in Bath to hide Claire’s pregnancy from prying scandal eyes in London and Mary was working on the beginnings of a draft of the story she had envisioned in Geneva.

Mary’s father, William Godwin’s finances were a shambles and he was approaching bankruptcy. He had been counting on money from Shelley, but Shelley was still at odds with his own father over his inheritance and had already lent large sums. Even though the Godwins were estranged from their daughter, Mary’s step-mother Mrs. Clairmont Godwin was attempting to raise loans on the publishing business, based on the promise of Percy Shelley’s prospects. The family was feeling that Fanny was a burden at home and hoped she could be sent again to her relatives in Ireland, but her relations there had refused. Fanny’s letters gave little clue to the state of her mind, except for a general bleakness.

She left home and made her way to Swansea. It is unclear why she chose Wales. Perhaps it was familiarity from her younger days, when there are accounts that she had relatives, but her intention was clear in letters posted from Bristol. Fanny had written to both the Shelleys and the Godwins to account for her sudden disappearance from Skinner Street with the added note:

“I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove.”

Percy Shelley set out to follow her track. He arrived too late. The morning after that letter had been posted from Bristol she was found in a room at the Mackworth Arms, lying dead on the floor. Next to her was a bottle of Laudanum, and a note of profound despair:

“I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death may give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as…”

The note ends abruptly, the grammar is odd at the end so perhaps she was succumbing to the effects of the laudanum as she wrote it.

The local Swansea paper The Cambrian reported that Friday October 11, 1816:

 “A melancholy discovery was made in Swansea yesterday: a most respectable-looking female arrived at the Mackworth Arms on Wednesday night by the Cambrian coach from Bristol: she took tea and retired to rest, telling the chambermaid she was exceedingly fatigued and would take care of the candle herself. Much agitation was created in the house by her non-appearance yesterday morning, and on forcing her chamber door, she was found a corpse with the remains of a bottle of laudanum on the table and a note.”

Percy Shelley is not mentioned in any of the reporting, but the name on the note was said to have been torn off and burned. Did Shelley arrive and prevail to keep her identity secret? She was described as wearing stockings marked with a “G” (Godwin)and her stays had the letters “MW” (Mary Wollstonecraft), hand me down remnants of her mother. She was described as wearing a blue striped skirt, a white bodice, a brown fur-lined pelisse coat and matching hat. She had in her possession a small French gold watch, a brown-berry necklace, and a small leather purse containing five shillings and a six-penny piece. An inquest held a week later when she was still identified only as a “young lady” stated a verdict merely that she was ‘found dead’.

The suicide of Fanny Imlay Wollstonecraft Godwin is perhaps one of the saddest of episodes in the story of the Shelleys. Of her family, Mary was probably the most fond of her, but she had always seemed an innocent side player. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written of breast-feeding her as an infant in her travels in Norway, which seemed to cause her some embarrassment. And when William Godwin published his biography of Wollstonecraft which revealed the questionable legitimacy of her birth and Mary Wollstonecraft’s relation to her father, Gilbert Imlay (they had been declared as married in France, but not officially recorded in England), she held herself in part to blame for the resulting scandal-driven critical rejection of her writer mother as a libertine. This was likely the reference to her “unfortunate birth”. She had written in an earlier letter:

“I have determined never to live to be a disgrace to such a mother I have found that if I will endeavour to overcome my faults I shall find being’s to love and esteem me.”

But she found little esteem in her own household. She noted in the same letter in May of 1816 that her step-mother had told her that she was the subject of ridicule by Mary and Shelley:

“What ever faults I may have I am not sordid or vulgar. I love you for your selves alone. I endeavour to be as frank to you as possible that you may understand my real character. I understand from Mamma that I am your laughing stock – and the constant beacon of your satire.’

Fanny had been the first of the Godwin sisters to encounter Percy Shelley. She was most probably in love with him and had high hopes, though when he fell for Mary, she accepted and stepped aside in support of Mary’s happiness. Shelley was fond of Fanny, but more likely in friendship than more. William Godwin had leaned heavily on Fanny in dealing with his creditors as she seemed to have a skill at correspondence, but with his increasing financial difficulties, this constant task must have weighed on her, and Godwin may have turned to blame in his situation. It may have been his health she was referring to in her suicide note, and one can only offer conjecture that perhaps he or her step-mother had laid some blame on her in a moment of argument. Her relationship with her step-mother had always been difficult as well. Mary blamed Mary Jane Claremont Godwin for many things, one of them her treatment of Fanny. It was Mrs. Godwin who apparently was often sending Fanny away to other relatives. She had sent an inquiry to the Ireland clan to take her again, but when that request was rejected, it may have added to Fanny’s despair of being rejected and unwanted by all around her.

There seems no record of another particular incident or circumstance which caused Fanny Imlay to feel so rejected and unloved that she would travel from London to an inn in South Wales with a bottle of laudanum intent to destroy herself. Perhaps this was the last straw for her, accepting in self-blaming reasoning that she needed to be sent away, that no-one wanted her.  She could not go to the Shelleys, to see Mary and Percy together, when she was in love with Shelley but would not think of interfering in Mary’s happiness, and they, having their own difficulties with scandal. Claire was pregnant from her liaison with Byron, and Fanny was at this point feeling her own prospects for romance increasingly bleak.

mackworth_arms_swanseaHow Shelley found Fanny at the Mackworth Arms is unreported, though he probably took the Cambrian Coach from Bristol, just as she had the day before, and arrived at the inn to discover the news which had already been reported. What is less clear is whether they already knew her potential destination in Wales? Was she seeking out a familiar haunt from her youth, or was she thinking of a boat to Ireland? According to a fellow traveler to Swansea she said she had left London by the Post Coach to Bath on Tuesday. Had she seen Mary or Shelley in Bath or had traveled onward on Wednesday? It was still a ferry ride across the Severn River from Bristol to Wales so he could not have followed her that day. Had she waited one more evening, he might have been in time. Shelley felt his own pain at her loss and his own blame. When they had last spoken is not recorded, but was it that Wednesday and she did not find a solace in Bath? Shelley acknowledges that he was perhaps unaware of her real feelings for him when he wrote a requiem poem, though not identifying the subject until Mary published her collection of his works in 1817 as “On F.G.”:

“Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came,—and I departed,
Heeding not the words then spoken—
Misery, ah! misery!
This world is all too wide for thee.”

Godwin was deeply affected by Fanny’s loss and it sent him into a despondent gloom, but his chief concern at the moment of the news was the potential for more public scandal which was the cause of his separation from his other daughters.

He wrote to Mary:

“Do not expose us to those idle questions which to a mind in anguish, is one of the severest of all trials. We are at this moment in doubt whether, during the first shock, we shall not say that she is gone to Ireland to her aunt, a thing that had been in contemplation. Do not take from us the power to exercise our own discretion. You shall hear again to-morrow. What I have most of all in horror is the public papers, and I thank you for your caution, as it may act on this.”

In fact, the death and circumstance was kept private for some time. She was not identified by the family and was buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. Mary’s half-brother, Charles Godwin, was apparently unaware of it for a year when he referenced Fanny in a letter. Mrs. Godwin for her part spent a great deal of her energy blaming Shelley. When ultimately revealed, rumors that Fanny’s suicide had been the result of a tryst with Shelley and her jealousy at his relationship with Mary had been circulating. It became clear that it was Mary Jane Godwin who had been complicit in the rumor mongering when she wrote to a Mrs. Gisborne four years later that the three Godwin daughters, Mary, Claire and Fanny had all been simultaneously in love with Shelley. The Shelleys held Mrs. Godwin responsible for many of the more salacious slanders which would affect them for years.

Fanny’s tragic death would shortly be followed by another suicide, when Shelley’s wife, Harriet, was found floating in the Serpentine stream which flows through Hyde Park. Another unhappy figure in the story, but with his first wife’s death, Shelley was able to finally marry Mary in December of 1816, which also ended their separation from Godwin, and a move from Bath to Marlow for another chapter.

The original Mackworth Arms Inn, located on Wind Street in Swansea had once been described in 1798 as the best hotel in town, and had hosted Admiral Lord Nelson under its roof, but fell to progress and was demolished in 1890 to make way for a post office. And the residence in Bath rented by Mary and Shelley across from the Abbey was also torn down to make an addition to the Bath’s Pump House. Even Bath officials were apparently unaware of its place in the Shelley story for a century. It is not certain how much Fanny’s death played in the writing of Frankenstein. Mary wrote nothing more about it in her diaries beyond the terse one sentence of reportage, but as she was formulating the architecture of story at the time, it is tantalizing to consider could the tragic turn of reprisal by the creature against his wife and child in her novel be informed by the feelings of her own part in the story of her sister?

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Get Mary Shelley Memoirs Audiobook Free with Trail at Audible

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook at Amazon