The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  The original version depicted Victor Frankenstein as a man making choices with free will—he could have abandoned his search for the “principle of life,” but instead chose to pursue it to its destructive end. In the 1831 edition, however, he is the pawn of forces he does not control: “Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.” The deaths of William Frankenstein and Justine are, in 1831, attributed to a curse imposed by “inexorable fate.” Perhaps this change was prompted by Mary’s inner guilt at killing off a character with the name William, now even more charged with painful memories than when she first wrote the book, at a time when her son William was safely at her breast. It also accompanied a shift in Mary’s own viewpoint. She wrote to Jane Hogg in August 1827, “The power of Destiny I feel every day pressing more & more on me, & I yield myself a slave to it, in all except my moods of mind, which I endeavour to make independant [sic] of her, & thus to wreath a chaplet, where all is not cypress, in spite of the Eumenides.”

  Similarly, in 1831 Victor has a religious sensibility that was missing in 1818, and the passages relating to science and magic are now either excised or softened into “natural history,” which the “new” Victor dismisses as “a deformed and abortive creation.” When he attends Ingolstadt, his revived interest in science is portrayed as a regression to his childish enthusiasms.

  Some changes in the revised version reflect timely new concerns. Imperialism enters the book when Victor’s friend Clerval now announces his intention of joining the East India Company after his studies. “He came to the university with the design of making himself complete master of the oriental languages, as thus he should open a field for the plan of his life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes toward the East, as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise.” In the earlier edition, Clerval had loved learning, the arts, and nature for their own sake; now he, like Victor, is attracted to power. (Peacock, Shelley’s real-life friend, was in fact a lifelong administrator for the East India Company.)

  Mary also transformed herself. Writing about her own childhood in the introduction, she said, “I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. . . . It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.” She is describing the Baxter home, not the Godwin family’s crowded flat above the bookstore where Mary lived until she was fourteen. With the stroke of a pen, she wiped out Skinner Street, with its slaughterhouse stench, the mobs flocking to public executions, and even the despised stepmother. Mary was picking and choosing from the assembled parts of her past to create a better life.

  Mary’s ongoing project to rejuvenate her husband’s reputation reflected her plans for the upbringing of her son Percy Florence. The radical educational ideas of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley were dismissed, for above all, Mary intended Percy Florence to fit in. When a friend advised her to send her son to a school where he would learn to think creatively, she reportedly replied, “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!” That intention seemed to suit the boy’s personality. He resembled his grandfather, Sir Timothy, more than his father, just as Percy Bysshe had resembled more his grandfather than his father.

  Young Percy Florence’s future suddenly looked brighter when his elder half-brother Charles, the son of Harriet, died of tuberculosis in 1826. Percy Florence was now the presumptive heir to the baronetcy, and the fortune that his father would have inherited. Sir Timothy took a greater interest in his grandson and even increased the allowance—slightly. He dangled the promise of even more aid, provided that the child be turned over to his care, an offer Mary again refused. A single mother scrounging to make ends meet from the little she received from Sir Timothy and her own literary earnings, she managed to give her son a fine education. She moved to the town of Harrow so that she could send him to its prestigious prep school as a day student.

  Mary gave a motherly description of her son to Maria Gisborne in 1834, when the boy was fourteen and attending Harrow. “In person he is of a fair height & excessively fat—his chest would remind you of a Bacchus he has a florid complexion, blue eyes—like his father —& his looks & gestures & shape of his face would remind you of Shelley & his person before he grew fat—he is full of spirit & animation, but proud & reserved with strangers . . . he loves me more than he knows himself & would not displease me for the world.” Mary related a story that reflected her own deepest fear: “One day I said to him —‘Suppose when you grew to be a Man—you would leave me all alone’—‘O Mamma,’ he said, ‘how do you think I could be so shabby:— that would be too bad!’ To be left all alone [Mary’s emphasis] seems to him the worst evil of all.” As it was to her.

  Later Percy Florence attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his degree in 1841. He never showed any artistic promise, nor was he interested in poetry. He much preferred the theater. Leigh Hunt, who knew him as an adult, recalled, “When I mentioned Tennyson’s poetry, Sir Percy said fellows had bored him a good deal with it at one time. He never read any of it of his own accord—saw no sense in it.”

  More deaths continued to shrink Mary’s circle. In 1832, her half-brother William (the William she had not been), died of cholera. The following year, William Godwin, then seventy-seven and thinking himself forgotten, received a pleasant surprise when admirers (there were still some) obtained for him a sinecure government job as “Yeoman Usher” that provided him with a yearly stipend and an apartment for him and his wife. Ironically, the government Godwin had condemned would support him in his last years.

  Three years later, in 1836, the eighty-year-old Godwin realized his end had come. Having prepared for this, as for all other vicissitudes, he pasted into his journal a valedictory message he had written just for the occasion. It warns, “Everything under the sun is uncertain. No provision can be a sufficient security against adverse and unexpected fortune, least of all to him who has not a stipulated income.” He went to bed, where Mary watched over him during the next ten days, until he died.

  At his request, Godwin was buried in St. Pancras Churchyard beside his first wife, though his second wife had been at his side for thirty-five years. Just as Godwin could not bear to attend Mary Wollstonecraft’s funeral, so his daughter Mary was too distraught to come to his. Young Percy was the chief mourner and Trelawny showed up, ever ready to bask in greatness.

  Godwin suffered in death the opposite fate of Percy Shelley. Percy had died before the scope of his achievement was widely known. Mary’s father, by contrast, had reached the prime of his influence and fame early, and lived to see the diminution of his reputation. On his death, the Gentleman’s Magazine printed a devastating estimate of Godwin: “In weighing well his merits with his moral imperfections, it is melancholy to discover how far the latter preponderated, and we are led to the very painful though certain conclusion, that it might have been better for mankind had he never existed.” Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, wrote that “most people felt of Mr. Godwin with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre, or the monster created by Frankenstein.”

  The creator of Frankenstein, of course, had a different view, which she expressed in her journal.

  O my God—what a lot is mine—marked by tragedy & death—tracked by disappointment & unutterable wretchedness—blow after blow—my heart dies within me. I say “would I might die.” that is wicked—but life is a struggle & a burthen beyond my strength. . . .

  I have lost my dear darling Father—What I then went through—watching alone his dying hours! . . .

  Thus is it—we struggle & storm but return to our task Master full soon.

  Two years later, she had indeed returned to her task: “The great work of life goes on,” she wrote. Pi
rated editions of Shelley’s work had appeared, sometimes including poems that Shelley had not written, or corrupt versions of those he had. When trying to gain Sir Timothy’s permission, Mary pointed to this as a reason to bring out an authorized edition. At long last, Sir Timothy consented, but only with the qualification that no biography of his son appear. Mary would get around this prohibition by attaching to each poem her own prefaces, which gave details of what was happening in Shelley’s life at the time he wrote it. At the time, this was a new way to look at poetry, but it later became a standard critical method.

  She also had to decide what precisely Percy had intended to be the final form of his poems. This was difficult, for his handwriting was notoriously illegible. Trelawny recalled, “It was a frightful scrawl; words smeared out with his finger, and one upon the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together in most ‘admired disorder’; it might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks.” It was also painful work. Mary noted in her journal for February 12, 1839, “I almost think that my present occupation will end in a fit of illness. I am editing Shelley’s poems & writing notes for them. . . . I am torn to pieces by Memory.” Byron had trusted Mary to choose between alternate verses he had written; now she became a major force in shaping Shelley’s work.

  It was an auspicious time for all this, since Shelley’s poetry had been taken up by the Chartists, a radical group that called for changes in Britain’s electoral process that seem mild today, such as universal male suffrage, and vote by secret ballot. Mary herself resisted calls that she endorse the People’s Charter, a petition asking Parliament to bring about these changes. She also turned down Trelawny when he asked her to write a pamphlet supporting women’s rights, the cause that had been closest to her mother’s heart. Mary felt her primary task now was to bring her husband’s work into print; to do that she had to steer clear of any actions that would offend Sir Timothy. She also wanted to shelter her son from the storms of public abuse that had engulfed her parents and her husband. In her search for respectability, it was not just herself she was thinking of.

  In any case, Mary’s own views had changed; they were not the same as those of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, or Percy. She wrote in her journal in 1838 a defense of her refusal to speak out for liberal causes. For her it was a declaration of independence:

  In the first place, with regard to the “good Cause”— the cause of the advancement of freedom & knowledge—of the Rights of Women, &c.— I am not a person of Opinions. I have said elsewhere that human beings differ greatly in this—some have a passion for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions. That my Parents and Shelley were of the former class, makes me respect it. . . . For myself, I earnestly desire the good & enlightenment of my fellow-creatures . . . but I am not for violent extremes which only bring on an injurious reaction. . . . Besides, I feel the counter arguments too strongly . . . on some topics (especially with regard to my own sex), I am far from making up my mind . . . and though many things need great amendment, I can by no means go so far as my friends would have me. When I feel that I can say what will benefit my fellow-creatures, I will speak,— not before. . . .

  Mary’s dilemma was that she craved the benefits of conventional ideas of womanhood, yet also wanted to fulfill the hopes of her unconventional parents and husband. She was always drawn in opposite directions, and she realized it.

  In the suppressed 1824 edition of Percy’s posthumous poems, Mary had written an introduction that gave a sanitized version of their marriage. She continued the process of making Shelley respectable in the prefaces she wrote for the publication of his collected poems in 1839. With Shelley no longer living, Mary could make him in death what he had not been in life. She had the opportunity to reverse roles with him as well. In their relationship, Shelley had been very much a mentor to her, but now she could act as the critic of his work. She wrote, for example, that he was often indiscriminate in his literary exploration. “His reading was not always well chosen; among them were the works of the French philosophers. . . . He was a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature, but had not fostered these tastes at their genuine sources—the romances and chivalry of the middle ages—but in the perusal of such German works as were current in those days.”

  The condemnation that critics had showered on Wollstonecraft’s memory, once her unconventional life was revealed in Godwin’s Memoirs, had obscured the messages of her writing. Mary did not want to be responsible for that happening to Shelley’s work, so she never mentioned his atheism and ignored the fact that she and Percy were living together while he was still married to Harriet. Mary wrote out of Percy’s (and her) life the marital crises, the revolutionary beliefs—and even Claire Clairmont. She gave her husband an honored poetic place in Victorian England. Most drastically, she dropped the parts of the notes to Queen Mab that made its irreligious subtext clear. She was in fact the real author of what Matthew Arnold would call “the beautiful and ineffectual angel” Shelley.

  The four-volume edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley was published in the first months of 1839. Trelawny and Hogg, who fancied themselves custodians of Shelley’s memory, promptly attacked Mary because of the cuts she had made to Queen Mab. A second edition of the Poetical Works appeared; it restored the cuts to Queen Mab and contained other new material. Shelley’s reputation did in fact benefit from the publication of this authoritative collection; in time he would rival Byron in both popularity and critical esteem.

  In 1840, Mary and her son, then twenty-one, took a summer trip to Switzerland and Italy. They visited the place where Percy had died, and the Villa Diodati, where Byron’s challenge had sparked Mary to bring forth her monster twenty-four years earlier. Mary was touched by the sight of those familiar surroundings:

  The far Alps were hid; the wide lake looked drear. At length, I caught a glimpse of the scenes among which I had lived, when first I stepped out from childhood into life. . . . I could mark and recognise a thousand slight peculiarities, familiar objects then—forgotten since—now replete with recollections and associations. Was I the same person who had lived there, the companion of the dead? For all were gone; even my young child, whom I had looked upon as the joy of future years, had died in infancy—not one hope, then in fair bud, had opened into maturity; storm, and blight, and death, had passed over, and destroyed all.

  Only the novel remained. Was it worth all the deaths, all the pain that had followed?

  In April 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died. Percy Florence inherited the fortune and the title of baronet that had been withheld from his father. Mary now had no constraints on her writing, but it had been seven years since she had written a novel, Falkner, and she no longer felt healthy enough to begin another one. For the first time she visited Field Place, the estate where her husband had grown up, and found it too dull to live in. Her son, now comparatively wealthy, purchased a boat, something that understandably made Mary uneasy.

  In October, she made a last entry in her journal: “Preserve always a habit of giving (but still with discretion), however little, as a habit not to be lost. The first thing is justice. Whatever one gives ought to be from what one would otherwise spend, not from what one would otherwise pay. To spend little & give much, is the highest glory a man can aspire to.” This was in fact a passage of advice from a letter Edmund Burke wrote to his son. Mary’s mother had gained her first fame by replying to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France fifty-three years before. Mary had completed the circle.

  Despite Mary’s intention, expressed several times, to write the biographies of her father and her husband, she never did. Perhaps her creative energies were just no longer up to the task of doing any sustained work. It would have been emotionally wrenching to relive the past one more time. Most likely Mary could simply not deal directly with her feelings about the men who had been her mentors and shaped so much of her intellect and personality. In life
they had both caused her great pain, yet she maintained a public devotion to them. Her true literary portrait of them was Victor Frankenstein. Perhaps that was enough.

  Ever since her sojourn in Scotland during her early teens, Mary had yearned for a stable family life, as happy as the ones she portrayed in some of her books. Late in her life, like a heroine in a fairy tale, she got her wish. Mary did not wait passively for it: she seems to have arranged it herself. Living in London in 1847, she learned that a pretty young woman who admired Percy Shelley’s poetry was visiting a relative nearby. Jane St. John had been widowed three years earlier at the age of twenty-four, the same age Mary had been when Shelley drowned. Fate was clearly knocking, and since Jane was too shy to approach Mary, Mary paid a call on her. As Jane recalled the scene a half century later:

  I had been resting one afternoon in my bedroom after having suffered from one of my bad headaches. Feeling better towards the late afternoon, I wandered down to the drawing-room to find my book, not knowing that the maids had let in a visitor. As I opened the door I started back in surprise, for some one was sitting on the sofa, and I said to myself, “Who are are you—you lovely being?” She must have seen my start of surprise, for, rising gently from the sofa, she came towards me and said very softly, “I am Mary Shelley.” You ask what she was like. Well, she was tall and slim, and had the most beautiful deep-set eyes I have ever seen. They seemed to change in colour when she was animated and keen. She dressed as a rule in long soft grey material, simply and beautifully made. A more unselfish creature never lived.