(2) As an admission in the Bluecoat School could not be got for the boy, we know from a letter, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s own book, that Charles Clairmont was sent to Charterhouse in the summer of 1805, and kept at his studies there for six years. ‘I observed,’ Godwin wrote to Mr. Fairley on 5th October, 1811, about the boy, ‘that I had kept him for six years at the Charterhouse, one of our most celebrated schools, not without proportionable profit, and that he has since been several months under one of our most celebrated arithmeticians.’ If Charles was born on 4th June, 1789, he was sixteen years old when he first entered the Charterhouse school, and twenty-two when he left it. Does Mr. Kegan Paul think this probable or possible?
(3) Let us take some more evidence from one of the letters, which Mr. Kegan Paul seems to have pitchforked into his book without reading them. On 5th June, 1806, William Godwin wrote about the boy (who had been naughty just before his birthday) to his wife at Southend, in these words:—
‘Do not imagine that I took Charles into my good graces the moment your back was turned.... So that I had only just time to forgive him for his birthday. I wish to impress you with the persuasion that he is infinitely more of a child, and to be treated as a child, than you imagine. Monday I sent him for a frank, and set all the children to write letters, though by his awkwardness the occasion was lost. The letter he then wrote, though I took some pains previously to work on his feelings, was the poorest and most soulless thing ever you saw. I then set him to learn the poem of “My Mother,” in Darton’s Original Poetry.... I went upstairs to his bedside the night before you left us, that I might impress upon him the importance of not suffering you to depart in anger; but instead of understanding me at first, he, like a child, thought I was come to whip him, and with great fervour and agitation, begged I would forgive him.’
(4) Had he been born on 4th June, 1789, as we are asked to believe by Mr. Kegan Paul, Charles (a decidedly clever boy, who made a good position for himself in early manhood by his mental force) was just upon seventeen years old, when he was scolded and punished for being naughty,—was set to learn by heart ‘My Mother’ in Darton’s Original Poetry, and was thrown into lively agitation by fear that his stepfather had come upstairs to whip him. Can Mr. Kegan Paul seriously believe that a clever boy of seventeen years would have cried out for forgiveness, and in childish alarm have begged his step-father not to smack him?
(5) At the close of October, 1811, when, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, he was twenty-two years, Charles (the clever boy, who was still a mere lad when he became a tutor in the Imperial family of Austria) was sent to Mr. Thomas Constable’s publishing house for two years to learn business; it being arranged that the lad should receive a yearly salary of 15l., to which his stepfather should add 30l. for his sufficient maintenance. Can Mr. Kegan Paul believe that this arrangement was made for so promising a young man when he was twenty-two years old?
(6) Now let us see how Charles’s probable birthday of 4th June, 1795, fits in with the known dates of his story. Born on that day he would be seven years old in June, 1802; an age at which persons, wishing to get him into Christ’s Hospital, would be on the look-out for a nomination. Born on that day he was ten years old in 1805, when he went for the first time to the Charterhouse,—a fit age (as matters went seventy years since) at which to send him into the school. Born on that day, he would be still ten years old, when he was scolded, set to learn ‘My Mother,’ and thrown into noisy agitation by fear of being whipt. Godwin’s letter gives a picture of a rather childish boy of ten years, not of a young man seventeen years old. Born on that day, he would be sixteen, when he left school in 1811, and went as a clerk into the Edinburgh publishing-house. Let it be added (though more than enough has been said about the youngster’s age) that the boy’s letters, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders, are enough to show him to have been six or seven years younger than the book-maker requires us to think him.
(7) Another piece of evidence touching Claire’s age, taken from Mr. Kegan Paul’s book. If she was born, as Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe, no later than April, 1790, she was twenty-one years old in May, 1811. In that month of May, Mrs. Godwin went to Ramsgate for change of air, taking her stepdaughter, Mary, with her for the trip, whilst her own daughter Jane (Claire) remained in London with her father and Fanny Imlay. Writing from London to Mrs. Godwin at Ramsgate, on 18th May, 1811, William Godwin says:—
‘I have just been into the next room to ask the children if they have any messages. They are both anxious to hear from you. Jane says she hopes you stuck on the Goodwin Sands, and that the sailors frightened you a little.’
This message from thirteen-years-old Jane was a piquant piece of sauciness from the child to her mamma. From a young woman of twenty-one years it would have been a piece of silliness, that Godwin certainly would not have passed on to his wife, in order to heighten the enjoyment of her holiday. Enough surely has been said to satisfy readers that Byron was right in regarding Claire and Mary as girls of about the same age, i.e. as being both of them only eighteen years old when they were at Geneva in 1816; and that Mr. Kegan Paul is guilty of a serious error in making it seem that Claire was older than Mary by at least seven years and four months. Claire may have been older than Mary by some months; but she certainly was not older than Fanny by several years.
Repeating a piece of malicious domestic tattle, in order to make the lady ridiculous and contemptible, Mr. Kegan Paul says, that soon after entering her new home in The Polygon, Mrs. Clairmont, from the balcony outside her drawing-room window, addressed Godwin (sitting in the balcony outside his drawing-room window) in these words, ‘Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?’—words that, tickling the philosopher’s inordinate vanity, are represented as going far to enslave him. Let it be assumed that the widow made the first advances to acquaintanceship with her neighbour in this absurd fashion; that she set her cap at the widower, angled for him, caught him. Why should so much be made of this to the second Mrs. Godwin’s discredit, by writers who have nothing but eulogy for Mary Wollstonecraft, though she ran wildly after Fuseli, and certainly did not leave it to Godwin to make the first advances to her? We have Godwin’s published word that he made no such advances to her; and we have his serious declaration, in the private note intended only for Mary Wollstonecraft’s eye, that his ambition to heal her wounded heart resulted from her action in throwing herself on his compassionate sympathy.