He, whose chief wish it had been to avoid domestic entanglements and who wanted his gratification and happiness studied habitually, was living in a storm-centre of poverty, misery, and tragedy. Claire was known to have had a baby by Lord Byron, who had deserted her; Harriet Shelley had drowned herself in the Serpentine; Fanny Godwin, his step-daughter, took poison at Bristol. The philosopher, almost overcome, sought to conceal his troubles with a lie. To one of his correspondents he refers to Fanny's having been attacked in Wales with an inflammatory fever "which carried her off."
Meanwhile, the sufferings of others he bore with splendid fortitude. In a very brief letter to Mary Shelley, answering hers in which she told him of the death of her child, he said, "You should recollect that it is only persons of a very ordinary sort and of a pusillanimous disposition that sink long under a calamity of this nature." But he covered folio sheets in his complainings to her, counting on her sensitive heart and Shelley's good-nature for sympathy and relief.
With the death of Shelley, Godwin's affairs became desperate. Taking advantage of some defect in the title of the owner of the property which he had leased, he declined for some time to pay any rent, meanwhile carrying on a costly and vexatious lawsuit. Curiously enough, in the end, justice triumphed. Godwin was obliged to pay two years' arrears of rent and the costs of litigation. Of course, he looked upon this as an extreme hardship, as another indication of the iniquity of the law. But he was now an old man; very little happiness had broken in upon him, and his friends took pity on him. Godwin was most ingenious in stimulating them to efforts on his behalf. A subscription was started under his direction. He probably felt that he knew best how to vary his appeals and make them effective. So much craft one would not have suspected in the old beggar.
One thing he always was--industrious. He finished a wretched novel and at once began a "History of the Commonwealth." He finished "The Lives of the Necromancers," and promptly began a novel; but with all his writings he has not left one single phrase with which his name can be associated, or a single thought worth thinking.