Mrs Shelley | Page 6

of the letters are to be found among her posthumous
works, and these, with letters written after her return, and when she was
undoubtedly convinced of Imlay's baseness and infidelity, are terrible
and pathetic records of her misery--misery which drove her to an
attempt at suicide. This was fortunately frustrated, so that she was
spared to meet with a short time of happiness later, and to prove to
herself and Godwin, both previous sceptics in the matter, that lawful
marriage can be happy. Mary, rescued from despair, returned to work,
the restorer, and refused all assistance from Imlay, not degrading
herself by receiving a monetary compensation where faithfulness was
wanting. She also provided for her child Fanny, as Imlay disregarded
entirely his promises of a settlement on her.
As her literary work brought her again in contact with the society she
was accustomed to, so her health and spirits revived, and she was able
again to hold her place as one of its celebrities. And now it was that her
friendship was renewed with that other celebrity, whose philosophy
ranged beyond his age and century, and probably beyond some
centuries to come. His advanced ideas are, nevertheless, what most
thinking people would hope that the race might attain to when mankind
shall have reached a higher status, and selfishness shall be less allowed
in creeds, or rather in practice; for how small the resemblance between
the founder of a creed and its followers is but too apparent.
So now Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the author of
_Political Justice_, have again met, and this time not under
circumstances as adverse as in November 1790, when he dined in her
company at Mr. Johnson's, and was disappointed because he wished to
hear the conversation of Thomas Paine, who was a taciturn man, and he

considered that Mary engrossed too much of the talk. Now it was
otherwise; her literary style had gained greatly in the opinion of
Godwin, as of others, and, as all their subjects of interest were similar,
their friendship increased, and melted gently into mutual love, as
exquisitely described by Godwin himself in a book now little known;
and this love, which ended in marriage, had no after-break.
But we must now again retrace our steps, for in the father of Mary
Shelley we have another of the representative people of his time, whose
early life and antecedents must not be passed over.
William Godwin, the seventh of thirteen children, was born at
Wisbeach, Cambridgeshire, on March 3, 1756. His parents, both of
respectable well-to-do families, were well known in their native place,
his great-great-grandfather having been Mayor of Newbury in 1706.
The father, John Godwin, became a dissenting minister, and William
was brought up in all the strictness of a sectarian country home of that
period. His mother was equally strict in her views; and a cousin, who
became one of the family--a Miss Godwin, afterwards Mrs. Sotheran,
with whom William was an especial favourite--brought in aid her
strongly Calvinistic tendencies. His first studies began with an
"Account of the Pious Deaths of many Godly Children"; and often did
he feel willing to die if he could, with equal success, engage the
admiration of his friends and the world. His mother devoutly believed
that all who differed from the basis of her own religious views would
endure the eternal torments of hell; and his father seriously reproved his
levity when, one Sunday, he happened to take the cat in his arms while
walking in the garden. All this naturally impressed the child at the time,
and his chief amusement or pleasure was preaching sermons in the
kitchen every Sunday afternoon, unmindful whether the audience was
duly attentive or not. From a dame's school, where, by the age of eight,
he had read through the whole of the Old and New Testament, he
passed to one held by a certain Mr. Akers, celebrated as a penman and
also moderately efficient in Latin and Mathematics. Godwin next
became the pupil of Mr. Samuel Newton, whose Sandemanian views,
surpassing those of Calvin in their wholesale holocaust of souls, for a
time impressed him, till later thought caused him to detest both these
views and the master who promulgated them. Indeed, it is not to be
wondered at that so thinking a person as Godwin, remembering the

rules laid down by those he loved and respected in his childhood,
should have wandered far into the abstract labyrinths of right and
wrong, and, wishing to simplify what was right, should have travelled
in his imagination into the dim future, and have laid down a code
beyond the scope of present mortals. Well for him, perhaps, and for his
code, if this is yet so far beyond that it is not taken up and distorted