A Fatal Likeness (42 page)

Shelley did indeed encounter two men called Maddocks in the course of his life—one in Wales and one in Marlow—and I have woven my own Maddox into what was clearly a genuine and strange obsession the poet had with names. Thomas Love Peacock recalls that Harriet claimed Shelley saw nothing in Mary “but that her name was Mary, and not only Mary but Mary Wollstonecraft.” Thomas Medwin, likewise, says there was “some magic in the name of Harriet.” As for the unusual name
Ianthe,
it appears first in
Queen Mab,
then as Shelley’s choice for his first daughter’s name, and lastly—and intriguingly—as the name of the innocent young girl in Polidori’s story
The Vampyre—
a girl who tells the hero “supernatural tales,” and whom he is unable to save from a terrible death.

Polidori wrote that story after the famous night of ghost-raising at the Villa Diodati. At one point during that evening Shelley did indeed react so violently to Byron’s reading of
Christabel
that Polidori administered ether to him in an attempt to calm him down. Under that influence Shelley talked, among other things, of how he had looked at Mary and thought of a woman with eyes for nipples. I have added the reference to an unknown pursuer, and a terrifying memory relating to a young girl, as well as the fact that he intended to write a story based upon it, which I have Mary Shelley later destroying. We know Shelley did begin a story that summer, possibly based on his own past, but it has been lost and we do not know how or why that happened, or what it was about.

I am very far from being the first to suggest that Shelley, not his wife, was the author of
Frankenstein,
and he did, of course, initially allow the publisher John Murray to believe it was his own work. Even the most passionate advocates of Mary’s authorship will probably concede that nothing she wrote thereafter can match it, and that Shelley played a significant role in its composition—Mary talks of them discussing it together, and the manuscripts that survive show signs of his extensive corrections and amendments. As for Mary’s famous preface, and the tale she tells of the book’s genesis, Miranda Seymour points out that Polidori makes no mention of her announcing one morning she had ‘thought of a story,’ and by the time her preface was written in 1831, Shelley, Byron, and Polidori were all dead, and she must have thought she risked no contradiction. Polidori’s account of that summer was not published until 1911.

Richard Holmes refers to the incident at Tremadoc as one of the two great biographical mysteries in Shelley’s career. It has never been adequately explained, and even now it is not absolutely clear what happened, or why. One of the original inspirations for
A Treacherous Likeness
was to create a narrative that might account for this incident, and my fictional version of Shelley’s past does indeed explain two of the more mysterious aspects of that night: the assailant’s threat to rape Shelley’s sister when the woman in the house was his sister
-in-law,
and the fact that a good many people believed at the time that the second attack that night—if not the first—was merely a hallucination prompted by Shelley’s seeing his own reflection in the window. The manager of the Tremadoc works, John Williams, was summoned to the scene the following morning and many years later his wife recounted that Shelley claimed to have seen “a man’s face on the drawing room window,” a phenomenon that was by then being referred to as ‘Shelley’s Ghost.’ I recommend Holmes’ account for a fascinating description of how the episode was reported by both Shelley and Harriet, and by others who later investigated it.

Needless to say, Ianthe and her brother are my invention, and there is no evidence at all that Shelley was involved in the drowning of a young girl when he was still at Oxford. However, some sort of incident of this kind would certainly explain a good deal, not least that strange and clearly horrifying memory of the windmill against the sky, and his preoccupation with drawing boats in the pages of his notebooks—some of which are sailed by a lone figure silhouetted in black. Images of some of these (including a page with large disembodied eyes) can be seen on the
Shelley’s Ghost
exhibition website, http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

However, there is no doubt that Shelley did suffer some sort of breakdown in early 1811, the severity of which seems out of proportion to the two events we know happened at this time—his expulsion from the university, and his enforced separation from his first love Harriet Grove. After leaving Oxford he spent a lonely and miserable time in London, and then stayed for a few weeks at Cwm Elan in Wales. Here he suffered what he called a “short but violent nervous illness”; he wrote a number of poems filled with wild thoughts of remorse, suicide, and despair, and—intriguingly for me—the same notebook he used that summer contains the lines about a girl in a “yawning watery grave” which I include in the paper I have Maddox discovering in Harriet’s pocket after her death. Shelley also made a number of enigmatic references to the fact that meeting Harriet Westbrook saved or distracted him from “bitter memories,” which I have likewise included in the paper found on her body. The lines beginning “Full many a mind” were apparently written by Harriet herself, but aside from the lines from
Christabel,
all the other poetry in the novel is written by Shelley. The blue beads I have Shelley giving to his own daughter Ianthe are of course my invention, and there is no proof he wished to give her the second name Mary.

One interesting footnote: E. R. Lovell points out that sometime before 1812 Thomas Medwin must have run through an inheritance of as much as three thousand pounds (the equivalent of at least one hundred thousand pounds today). Lovell can find no explanation other than extravagance and gambling, but I have fed this small fact into the fabric of my own story: If Shelley had needed money to buy the Smiths’ silence, he might well have turned to his cousin to obtain it. It was always very hard for people to refuse Shelley, and Medwin was later to say that this period of his life was poisoned by regrets.

THE SUICIDES

My account of these two sad deaths is based almost entirely on the facts as we know them, though there are some contradictions both in the contemporary accounts, and the one given by Claire some sixty years later. That said, we do know there was indeed a William Alder who dragged the ponds in Hyde Park, lodged in the same house as Harriet, and gave evidence at her inquest. Likewise the Godwins did pass on to Shelley a scurrilous rumour that his wife had been consorting with a number of different men, including a groom (in their version) by the name of Smith. I have, however, invented the idea that someone resembling Shelley was seen near Harriet’s lodgings, and even if Mary did not hound her by letter as I suggest, she certainly believed herself culpable in Harriet’s death—in 1839 she wrote in her journal that she believed many of her own sorrows were the atonement fate demanded for the death of “poor Harriet.” In my story I imagine a far more detailed and damning confession, which Jane Shelley burns.

One odd fact about Harriet’s suicide, which is not easily explained, is that Godwin’s journal records her death as 9 November 1816; this was the last day she was seen alive, but it would be another month before her body was found.

The intriguing thing here, for me, was that in the case of both of these suicides a person or persons unknown seems to have intervened to conceal the identity of the two young women, and hush up the scandal as far as possible. Someone removed the name from Fanny Imlay’s suicide note, someone oversaw her interment; someone seems to have arranged for Harriet to be buried under her assumed name, and ensured that there was only the briefest reporting of her drowning in the press. When I read these accounts I saw at once that I could create a fictional story in which Maddox becomes that unseen hand. Of course there is no evidence that Godwin ever employed such a person.

As I said, I have given Harriet’s suicide note exactly as it was written. There is nothing to suggest that she had another paper with her when she was found—that is my own invention.

ELENA SHELLEY

This is the second of Holmes’ biographical mysteries, and has also attracted enormous speculation. Shelley registered the birth of this little girl in Naples on 27 February 1819, stating that he was the father and Mary the mother. The latter was patently untrue, but many people believe Elena was indeed Shelley’s daughter, either by Claire, or by the Shelleys’ maid, Elise. The evidence is problematic in both cases, and it may be that the baby was in fact, as I suggest, no child of Shelley’s at all. It is certainly true that there was (as Mary recorded in her journal) a “most tremendous fuss” on the day of their departure from Naples, and that she appears to have rejected the child, though why, we do not know. The baby remained in Naples, at the Foundling Hospital, and died there on 9 June 1820. It is a fascinating subject, but too complicated to deal with adequately here, so again I refer interested readers to the Holmes and Seymour accounts.

THE LAST DAYS AT LERICI

Shelley’s last days were haunted by the visions I describe, including those in which he believed he saw his own doppelgänger. I have taken my description of his last moments on board the
Don Juan
from contemporary accounts. There is no actual evidence he was planning to leave Mary at this time, but as early as 1820 he had contemplated an expedition to the East without her (and probably with Claire). The marriage was certainly miserable in those last months, and Mary cursed the day as “hateful” when she discovered she was once again pregnant. A friend staying at the house was indeed suspicious of Mary’s first phantom miscarriage at Lerici, and when she later lost the baby Shelley almost certainly saved her life by forcing her to sit for hours in a bath of ice until the bleeding stopped. There is, however, nothing in the records to suggest that the miscarriage was the result of a fall.

As with
The Solitary House,
I drew on a number of books and resources for my portrayal of nineteenth-century London, including Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor,
Charles Dickens’ “On Duty with Inspector Field,” Jerry White’s
London in the Nineteenth Century,
and the excellent website www.victorianlondon.org.

I am grateful to Nigel Wilson, Emeritus Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, for his help in the translation from Aristotle in chapter 10.

I would also like to thank the first readers of this book who gave me invaluable insight and support, most especially my husband Simon, my friend and former tutor Professor Stephen Gill, and Tom Atherton.

And finally my gratitude, as always, to my excellent agent Ben Mason, and my two wonderful editors, Kate Miciak and Krystyna Green.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L
YNN
S
HEPHERD
TO COME