William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. XIII. 1800
William Godwin to James Marshal, 11 July 1800
“I received your letter this morning, four days from
its date. I forget now what I said in my last letter about the poor little
girls, but in this letter I will begin with them. Their talking about me, as
you say they do, makes me wish to be with them, and will probably have some
effect in inducing me to shorten my visit. It is the first time I have been
seriously separated from them since ![]()
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they lost their mother, and I feel as if it was
very naughty in me to have come away so far, and to have put so much land, and
a river sixty miles broad, between us, though, as you know, I had very strong
reasons for coming. I hope you have got Fanny a proper spelling-book. Have you examined her at all, and
discovered what improvement she has made in her reading? You do not tell me
whether they have paid and received any visits. If it does not take much room
in your next letter, I should be very glad to hear of that. Tell Mary I will not give her away, and she shall
be nobody’s little girl but papa’s. Papa is gone away, but papa
will very soon come back again, and see the Polygon across two fields from the
trunks of the trees at Camden Town. Will Mary and
Fanny come to meet me? I will write them word, if I
can, in my next letter or the letter after that, when and how it shall be. Next
Sunday, it will be a fortnight since I left them, and I should like if possible
to see them on the Sunday after Sunday 20th July. . . . .
Fanny Imlay Godwin (1794-1816)
The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay; she lived in the Godwin household
and died a suicide.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] (1797-1851)
English novelist, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecaft, and the second wife
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is the author of
Frankenstein (1818)
and
The Last Man (1835) and the editor of Shelley's works
(1839-40).
