Danish Fire of 1795 and Mary Wollstonecraft

William Godwin called Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (1795), the kind of book to make a reader fall in love with its author, so he did. He and Wollstonecraft were an unlikely couple, and their relationship was cut short when she died after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley in 1797.

Today we had a wonderful interview with Christian Holm Donetzky, a Danish historian why runs History Tours in Copenhagen. We wanted to talk with him to fill out information for the portion of Swimming with Byron that deals with Wollstonecraft’s trip here.

Christian had an excellent way of showing us around the parts of Copenhagen affected by the fire, which radically changed Copenhagen, and left people 6,000 people living in tents and in the ruins of the Christiansborg Palace, which had just been wrecked by fire the year before.

She wasn’t impressed by Copenhagen, and it wasn’t just because of what the fire had done:

If I say that the houses did not disgust me, I tell you all I remember of them; for I cannot recollect any pleasurable sensations they excited; or that any object, produced by nature or art, took me out of myself. The view of the city, as we drew near, was rather grand, but without any striking feature to interest the imagination, excepting the trees which shade the foot-paths.

 

Filming begins: Day 1, The Serpentine

Swimming with Byron

I’ve been in London the past two days. Today I went with two student interns and filmed our first scene at The Serpentine in Hyde Park. Harriet Westbrook Shelley, the poet’s first wife, drowned there in 1816. Less than a month later, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were married. Some might see the speed as monstrous. Mary had already written the first draft of Frankenstein by then, so that might be the right adjective.

Harriet was buried under a false name and the suicide was covered up. It was a sad, anonymous end all too common in early 19th-century England. She was pregnant with another woman’s child when she died. Fallen, abandoned, and despairing.

The filming was surreal, since it turned sunny at The Serpentine and people on a charity walk were crowding all around us. One of the themes became Harriet’s forgotten death in England’s literary history…

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99 Followers

I just saw that I have 99 followers on this blog.

Should I offer a prize for the 100th? Who’s it going to be? When’s it going to happen? I’m busting with anticipation.

A big thanks to all of you who are reading. I almost put “by the way” at the end of that, but it’s “by the way” at all. We all sit in rooms and write alone, with the hope – that hope we try to pretend we aren’t really feeling – that someone’s out there reading. Getting to 100 followers and who knows how many readers doesn’t put me in major blog category, actually, but I like all of you, lots.

Look soon for a linked blog to the production company I’m forming to make my first full-length documentary film, Romantic Places. I have to change that title. As I re-read Byron’s Childe Harold, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s Frankenstein, the other Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge,” and so many others in preparation for the film, I’m hoping a phrase will jump out and say “I’m your title.”