No continuous record exists of the family life, and the numerous letters of Godwin and Mrs. Godwin when either was absent from home contain only occasional references to it. Both parents were too much occupied with business systematically to superintend the children’s education. Mrs. Godwin, however, seems to have taken a bustling interest in ordering it, and scrupulously refers to Godwin all points of doubt or discussion. From his letters one would judge that, while he gave due attention to each point, discussing pros and cons with his deliberate impartiality, his wife practically decided everything. Although they sometimes quarrelled (on one occasion to the extent of seriously proposing to separate) they always made it up again, nor is there any sign that on the subject of the children’s training they ever had any real difference of opinion. Mrs. Godwin’s jealous fussiness gave Godwin abundant opportunities for the exercise of philosophy, and to the inherent untruthfulness of her manner and speech he remained strangely and philosophically blind. From allusions in letters we gather that the children had a daily governess, with occasional lessons from a master, Mr. Burton. It is often asserted that Mrs. Godwin was a harsh and cruel stepmother, who made the children’s home miserable. There is nothing to prove this. Later on, when moral guidance and sympathy were needed, she fell short indeed of what she might have been. But for the material wellbeing of the children she cared well enough, and was at any rate desirous that they should be happy, whether or not she always took the best means of making them so. And Godwin placed full confidence in her practical powers.
In May 1811 Mrs. Godwin and all the children except Fanny, who stayed at home to keep house for Godwin, went for sea-bathing to Margate, moving afterwards to Ramsgate. This had been urged by Mr. Cline, the family doctor, for the good of little Mary, who, during some years of her otherwise healthy girlhood, suffered from a weakness in one arm. They boarded at the house of a Miss Petman, who kept a ladies’ school, but had their sleeping apartments at an inn or other lodging. Mary, however, was sent to stay altogether at Miss Petman’s, in order to be quiet, and in particular to be out of the way of little William, “he made so boisterous a noise when going to bed at night.”
The sea-breezes soon worked the desired effect. “Mary’s arm is better,” writes Mrs. Godwin on the 10th of June. “She begins to move and use it.” So marked and rapid was the improvement that Mrs. Godwin thought it would be as well to leave her behind for a longer stay when the rest returned to town, and wrote to consult Godwin about it. His answer is characteristic.
When I do not answer any of the lesser points in your letters, it is because I fully agree with you, and therefore do not think it necessary to draw out an answer point by point, but am content to assent by silence.... This was the case as to Mary’s being left in the care of Miss Petman. It was recommended by Mr. Cline from the first that she should stay six months; to this recommendation we both assented. It shall be so, if it can, and undoubtedly I conceived you, on the spot, most competent to select the residence.
Mary accordingly remained at Miss Petman’s as a boarder, perhaps as a pupil also, till 19th December, when, from her father’s laconic but minute and scrupulously accurate diary, we learn that she returned home. For the next five months she was in Skinner Street, participating in its busy, irregular family life, its ups and downs, its anxieties, discomforts, and amusements, its keen intellectual activity and lively interest in social and literary matters, in all of which the young people took their full share. Entries are frequent in Godwin’s diary of visits to the theatre, of tea-drinkings, of guests of all sorts at home. One of these guests affords us, in his journal, some agreeable glimpses into the Godwin household.
This was the celebrated Aaron Burr, sometime Vice-President of the United States, now an exile and a wanderer in Europe.
At the time of his election he had got into disgrace with his party, and, when nominated for the Governorship of New York, he had been opposed and defeated by his former allies. The bitter contest led to a duel between him and Alexander Hamilton, in which the latter was killed. Disfranchised by the laws of New York for having fought a duel, and indicted (though acquitted) for murder in New Jersey, Burr set out on a journey through the Western States, nourishing schemes of sedition and revenge. When he purchased 400,000 acres of land on the Red River, and gave his adherents to understand that the Spanish Dominions were to be conquered, his proceedings excited alarm. President Jefferson issued a proclamation against him, and he was arrested on a charge of high treason. Nothing could, however, be positively proved, and after a six months’ trial he was liberated. He at once started for Europe, having planned an attack on Mexico, for which he hoped to get funds and adherents. He was disappointed, and during the four years which he passed in Europe he often lived in the greatest poverty.
On his first visit to England, in 1808, Burr met Godwin only once, but the entry in his journal, besides bearing indirect witness to the great celebrity of Mary Wollstonecraft in America, gives an idea of the kind of impression made on a stranger by the second Mrs. Godwin.
“I have seen the two daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft,” he writes. “They are very fine children (the eldest no longer a child, being now fifteen), but scarcely a discernible trace of the mother. Now Godwin has been seven or eight years married to a second wife, a sensible, amiable woman.”
For the next four years Burr was a wanderer in Holland and France. His journal, kept for the benefit of his daughter Theodosia, to whom he also addressed a number of letters, is full of strange and stirring interest. In 1812 he came back to England, where it was not long before he drifted to Godwin’s door. Burr’s character was licentious and unscrupulous, but his appearance and manners were highly prepossessing; he made friends wherever he went. The Godwin household was full of hospitality for such Bohemian wanderers as he. Always itself in a precarious state of fortune, it held out the hand of fellowship to others whose existence from day to day was uncertain. A man of brains and ideas, of congenial and lively temperament, was sure of a fraternal welcome. And though many of Godwin’s older friends were, in time, estranged from him through their antipathy to his wife, she was full of patronising good-nature for a man like Burr, who well knew how to ingratiate himself.