William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. VII. 1806-1811
William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 30 May 1811
“I am delighted with the cheerfulness that pervades
your letter of yesterday. Fanny conducts
herself delightfully, and I am what you call comfortable. But I cannot look
with the sanguine temper I could wish on the prospect before us. N’importe!
“’Tis not in mortals to command
success: But we’ll do more—we’ll deserve
it.’ |
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No effort, no invention of mine shall be left untried. I will never give
in, while I have strength to wield a pen or tell a tale. . . .
“I went last night to the Haymarket to see a new
two-act piece, called ‘Trial by
Jury.’ But my chief entertainment arose from two persons in
the next box to me. They had for sometime the whole box to themselves, and sat
in the front row—a man and, as ![]()
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it seemed, his daughter.
The man was sixty, a long, lank, colourless face, with deep furrows and
half-shut eyes, something, I thought, between primitive simplicity and cunning.
His face was overshadowed on all sides with thick, bushy, lank, dark-brown
hair. He was precisely such a figure as they would make up on the stage for a
saint; indeed he seemed escaped from the stage, and seated for a joke in the
side box. His dress was like that of a farmer in Westmoreland, and under his
arm he had all night a chapeau de
bras. The daughter was thirty, dressed like the daughter of
a substantial farmer, where, as Lamb
describes it, they have twelve long miles to the nearest church—nothing could
be more unfashionable. She looked a great deal about her, stared me and others
full in the face, burst into roars of laughter at the jokes on the stage. I
looked often on these very singular neighbours. I had difficulty to confine my
observations within the bounds of decorum. Once or twice I said to myself, Is
it possible this should be a man to lend me money? At last I could no longer
sit still, but went out of the box to ask the box-keeper who he was. Earl Stanhope—I said to myself; this box-keeper
dares not attempt to hoax me. I went and examined the box book—Earl
Stanhope.
“Fanny is
quite ferocious and impassioned against the journey to Margate. Her motive is a
kind one. She says, This cook is very silly, but very willing; you cannot
imagine how many things I have to do. She adds, Mamma talks of going to
Ramsgate in the autumn; why cannot I go then?”
Fanny Imlay Godwin (1794-1816)
The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay; she lived in the Godwin household
and died a suicide.
Charles Lamb [Elia] (1775-1834)
English essayist and boyhood friend of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital; author of
Essays of Elia published in the
London
Magazine (collected 1823, 1833) and other works.
