A far cry from Frankenstein
Jane Gardam
MAURICE, OR THE FISHER'S COT by Mary Shelley Introduction by Claire Tomalin Viking, £9.99, pp. 152 This is the first publication of a manuscript by Mary Shelley discovered in 1997 in a box of papers in an ancient family house in the Apennines. Its existence was reported to Claire Tomalin, a Shelley schol- ar since the 1970s, by a fax she found wait- ing for her when she returned from holiday, signed by an unknown Signora Dazzi of San Marcello Pistoiese. She set off there quickly, though with her husband's warning ringing in her ears: 'Remember the Hitler Diaries.'
It was known that Mary Shelley had writ- ten a story called Maurice in 1820 which her father, the philosopher William God- win, now turned children's publisher, had refused to print because it was too short. It disappeared and was considered lost, but there seems no doubt that it is here now, handwriting, provenance, watermarking, all as they should be. But a novel less like any- thing else Mary Shelley wrote and particu- larly Frankenstein, written four years earlier, cannot be imagined.
I wouldn't call Maurice a work of genius, though it is touched with a particular spirit. It is rather a dirge-like tale beginning with a weeping boy following a funeral and end- ing with the cottage where he has been briefly happy washed away by the sea. There is about it, though, something that might please a bookish child; and the child was Laurette Tighe, daughter of the expa- triate Lady Mountcashell and her lover, the eccentric Irishman Mr Tighe who was interested in converting Tuscany to the cul- tivation of potatoes (they called him Tatty).
The manuscript is in two bound bundles, pale blue and hand-stitched, the text writ- ten in short lines down the middle of each page, like a prose ballad. It mimics a grown-up three-volume novel by being arranged in three little parts. Laurette never threw it away — she had adored Mary Shelley at first meeting — and at her death her second husband, a walrus-like Sicilian professor, brought it with him to her sister's house, the Casa Cini at San Marcello where he moved in with his library until his death at 98. Signora Dazzi remembers him, and if this is not exactly 'seeing Shelley plain,' it is a sort of glimpse.
Claire Tomalin's introduction is full, readable and brilliant, and her account of her wintry visit to Casa Cini is delightful. The splendid library is still there. First edi- tions of the Romantics lie about. The house of a hundred rooms (some now offices) and the gardens with their fountains are much as they were when Laurette's happily mar- ried sister designed them. The hectic little tribe of Shelleys, the countess and her daughters, the Sicilian intellectual, Lau- rette's dreadful first husband, are just out of sight. The Shelleys had found in Lady Mountcashell and her family a door, almost the only one, not closed to them because of their atheism, free love and radical beliefs. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary's mother, had been governess to Margaret Mountcashell and the pupil had become as repugnant to the respectable as the tutor. A fearless, brawny-armed, brilliant-eyed aristocrat, Margaret became a lifelong friend.
'I was looking at your photo on the wall when you phoned me, dear.' Maurice is not what one would expect of a revolutionary. Where Frankenstein is about the construction of a personality, nurture over nature, Maurice is about the innate goodness in a child no cruelty can damage. There is Wordsworth in it somewhere, in 'the lichens yellow, green, white & blue' on the cottage roof, and the observation of the movement of the sea. Strangest of all for a radical, the setting is Torquay. The villain lives at Ilfracombe, where Mary had never been (at first he lived at Teignmouth, but she crossed this out). Why she chose an English coastline we don't know. Laurette knew only Italy. Mary had made one Cor- nish visit five years before, one of the few occasions when she and Shelley were alone together. Maybe she was happy, like Jane Austen at Sidmouth. Maybe she was wishing for a more settled life. What Claire Tomalin says 'stopped her short' on reading Maurice was that when the lost son was found at last, his true father sent him to Eton.
But the theme of the story is lost chil- dren: Maurice is plucked from his nurse's arms as a baby and disappears. Between them Mary Shelley, Shelley, Margaret Mountcashell and Claire Clairmont, Mary's half-sister who travelled with them, had lost fourteen children in a few years. Shel- ley had left two behind when he ran off with 16-year-old Mary (their mother then committed suicide). Three of Mary's four babies died as she trailed them about septic Italy before they were four years old. Shel- ley lost a mysterious baby called Elena, mother unknown. She was 'left somewhere to be collected' and died. Claire Clairmont lost the adorable five-year-old Allegra, Byron's illegitimate daughter. He took her from her mother, then gave her away, refusing her mother access. Allegra died at five in a convent, the youngest child ever to have been admitted. And among the Mountcashell family were the shadows of the seven children their mother had had to abandon when she left her husband for Mr Tighe. One feels that Mary Wollstonecraft has something to answer for.
Claire Tomalin has returned to Casa Cini, its manuscripts and photographs. Laurette grew up to be a novelist and for a moment Claire Tomalin thought she might have discovered an Italian George Eliot. Alas, no, all seems gothic nonsense. There are wonderful photographs of Laurette, a pert child with a preposterous hair-do, a Victorian pudding in her unhappy middle age, in old age a tired, skinny beauty wear- ing lipstick and covetable clothes. She had no children from either of her marriages, and gave thanks for it. Did she remember Maurice? When Mary Shelley met her as a grown woman she found her 'chilly', which must have been disappointing. Laurette had lived a rackety life before meeting her professor and becoming a lady novelist. Maurice's message of parental anguish and love was put away in the box. I doubt whether there was much poetry in Lau- rette, but maybe she had had enough of it.
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