He moved at once after his wife’s death into the house, Polygon, Somers Town, where she had lived, and took up his abode there with the two children. They had a nurse, and various lady friends of the Godwins, Mrs. Reveley and others, gave occasional assistance or superintendence. An experiment was tried of a lady-housekeeper which, however, failed, as the lady in becoming devoted to the children showed a disposition to become devoted to Godwin also, construing civilities into marked attentions, resenting fancied slights, and becoming at last an insupportable thorn in the poor philosopher’s side. His letters speak of his despondency and feeling of unfitness to have the care of these young creatures devolved on him, and with this sense there came also the renewed perception of the rare maternal qualities of the wife he had lost.
“The poor children!” he wrote, six weeks after his bereavement. “I am myself totally unfitted to educate them. The scepticism which perhaps sometimes leads me right in matters of speculation is torment to me when I would attempt to direct the infant mind. I am the most unfit person for this office; she was the best qualified in the world. What a change! The loss of the children is less remediless than mine. You can understand the difference.”
The immediate consequence of this was that he, who had passed so many years in contented bachelorhood, made, within a short time, repeated proposals of marriage to different ladies, some of them urged with a pertinacity nothing short of ludicrous, so ingenuously and argumentatively plain does he make it that he found it simply incredible any woman should refuse him to whom he had condescended to propose. His former objections to marriage are never now alluded to and seem relegated to the category of obsolete theories. Nothing testifies so strongly to his married happiness as his constant efforts to recover any part of it, and his faith in the possibility of doing so. In 1798 he proposed again and again to a Miss Lee whom he had not seen half a dozen times. In 1799 he importuned the beautiful Mrs. Reveley, who had, herself, only been a widow for a month, to marry him. He was really attached to her, and was much wounded when, not long after, she married a Mr. Gisborne.
During Godwin’s preoccupations and occasional absences, the kindest and most faithful friend the children had was James Marshall, who acted as Godwin’s amanuensis, and was devotedly attached to him and all who belonged to him.
In 1801 Godwin married a Mrs. Clairmont, his next-door neighbour, a widow with a son, Charles, about Fanny’s age, and a daughter, Jane, somewhat younger than little Mary. The new Mrs. Godwin was a clever, bustling, second-rate woman, glib of tongue and pen, with a temper undisciplined and uncontrolled; not bad-hearted, but with a complete absence of all the finer sensibilities; possessing a fund of what is called “knowledge of the world,” and a plucky, enterprising, happy-go-lucky disposition, which seemed to the philosophic and unpractical Godwin, in its way, a manifestation of genius. Besides, she was clever enough to admire Godwin, and frank enough to tell him so, points which must have been greatly in her favour.
Although her father’s remarriage proved a source of lifelong unhappiness to Mary, it may not have been a bad thing for her and Fanny at the time. Instead of being left to the care of servants, with the occasional supervision of chance friends, they were looked after with solicitous, if not always the most judicious care. The three little girls were near enough of an age to be companions to each other, but Fanny was the senior by three years and a half. She bore Godwin’s name, and was considered and treated as the eldest daughter of the house.
Godwin’s worldly circumstances were at all times most precarious, nor had he the capability or force of will to establish them permanently on a better footing. His earnings from his literary works were always forestalled long before they were due, and he was in the constant habit of applying to his friends for loans or advances of money which often could only be repaid by similar aid from some other quarter.
In the hope of mending their fortunes a little, Mrs. Godwin, in 1805, induced her husband to make a venture as a publisher. He set up a small place of business in Hanway Street, in the name of his foreman, Baldwin, deeming that his own name might operate prejudicially with the public on account of his advanced political and social opinions, and also that his own standing in the literary world might suffer did it become known that he was connected with trade.
Mrs. Godwin was the chief practical manager in this business, which finally involved her husband in ruin, but for a time promised well enough. The chief feature in the enterprise was a “Magazine of Books for the use and amusement of children,” published by Godwin under the name of Baldwin; books of history, mythology, and fable, all admirably written for their special purpose. He used to test his juvenile works by reading them to his children and observing the effect. Their remark would be (so he says), “How easy this is! Why, we learn it by heart almost as fast as we read it.” “Their suffrage,” he adds, “gave me courage, and I carried on my work to the end.” Mrs. Godwin translated, for the business, several childrens’ books from the French. Among other works specially written, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare owes its existence to “M. J. Godwin & Co.,” the name under which the firm was finally established.
New and larger premises were taken in Skinner Street, Holborn, and in the autumn of 1807 the whole family, which now included five young ones, of whom Charles Clairmont was the eldest, and William, the son of Godwin and his second wife, the youngest, removed to a house next door to the publishing office. Here they remained until 1822.