Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Fanny could always be relied on to put a blight on things. Her letter, written on 29 May, informed Mary that she had caused her ‘a great deal of pain’ at their last meeting and that she had been most unjust to call Fanny either ‘sordid or vulgar’. (Their quarrel had probably been over Mary’s sense that Fanny disapproved of her cohabitation with Shelley.) She did not know why Mary so despised her: ‘I understand from Mamma that I am your laughing stock – and the constant beacon of your { } satire.’12 Mrs Godwin can be blamed for being unkindly inventive, but it is revealing that Fanny believed her. Mary could, when she was angry or scornful, be very wounding.

  Mary’s next letter to Fanny, written on 1 June, was sent from their new home south of the lake. The house they had chosen for themselves and Elise Duvillard, a good-looking young Swiss woman engaged to care for William – herself already mother of an illegitimate child – was Maison Chapuis at Montalègre, a chalet with a private harbour, close to the village of Cologny. Byron’s pleasure in their company was rapidly confirmed by his decision to join them after a week of daily jaunts across the lake. He had already toyed with renting the expensive Villa Diodati, set high on the Belle Rive bank with a terraced garden sloping down to the lakeshore and a balcony offering a magnificent view of the distant violet ridge of the Jura mountains. The villa, grey, handsome and reasonably modern, was one of the loveliest around the lake; it was only a tangled vineyard away from the little house at Montalègre. Byron took it on 10 June: Monsieur Dejean promptly installed a telescope for the use of visitors to his hotel. Spying across the lake, the hotel guests argued about whether it was Mrs Shelley’s or her sister’s nightdress they could see hanging out to dry on the Diodati balcony. (Byron could have disillusioned them, although Claire was not always copying poems when she visited the villa; the white drapes were his bed-sheets.)

  An intriguing sidelight on this view across the lake is provided by a letter written by one ‘J.S’ from Geneva on 6 June. ‘J.S’ may have been the Cornish baronet, Sir John St Aubyn, who subsequently bought a handsome country house near Geneva. His letter, written during a period of convalescence, tells us that a large colony of English had settled at Geneva for the summer, and that most of them had, like Byron, taken villas by the lake. From a reference to the presence of the Earl of Euston and ‘his friend Mary’, J.S. turned to a more exciting topic. ‘Our late great Arrival is Lord Byron, with the Actress and another family of very suspicious appearance. How many he has at his disposal out of the whole set I know not, but different houses have been taken for both establishments …’ J.S. had not met Byron himself, but he was ready to pass on the view of those who had. Byron had visited the home of a neighbour, a M. Pictet; guests present on the occasion thought him ‘insolent and repulsive, and his countenance is very much disliked.’ Of Shelley and his companions, however, J.S. could give his correspondent no further information.13

  *

  Few periods in Mary’s life have been so eagerly discussed as the summer during which Frankenstein was conceived. Unfortunately for us, her daily record of life at Geneva occupied the last pages of the lost journal of 1815–16. She must have drawn on these entries for the vivid account which she wrote in 1828 as her contribution to Thomas Moore’s The Life of Lord Byron, with his Letters & Journals (1830–1). Tactfully presented by Moore as having been Shelley’s wife in 1816, Mary’s identity as his source of information was concealed. She was quoted, extensively, but only as ‘a person’ who had been among Byron’s circle. Writing out her recollections for Moore, Mary shifted and compressed events for dramatic effect in the confident belief that nobody would contradict her version. Claire, for reasons which will become apparent, was by 1828 only concerned with being excised from Byron’s history. Shelley and Byron were dead; John Polidori, the young doctor who accompanied Byron to Geneva, had killed himself with a massive dose of prussic acid at the age of twenty-one.

  Mary may never have known that canny John Murray had invited John Polidori to keep a diary of his travels with Byron. Edited and then transcribed by the doctor’s sister (she destroyed the original), the diary was eventually published in 1911 by Polidori’s nephew, William Michael Rossetti. This, together with a few details which Polidori published with his gothic tale, The Vampyre (1819), provides a skeleton outline against which to set Mary’s recollections. But Polidori also has to be treated with caution. He noted Shelley to be a twenty-six-year-old consumptive when he was actually twenty-three and had been cleared of the disease. He believed Mary and Claire to be full sisters. Polidori was, however, sufficiently in Byron’s confidence to know on the day after they all first met that Claire was his mistress and that Mary was not entitled to be called Mrs Shelley.

  Polidori was less of a fool than Mary made him sound in the account she gave Moore and in her 1831 Preface to Frankenstein. Exceptionally handsome – he did not object to being mistaken for Byron on occasion – he had been a brilliant student at Edinburgh, and had published a play and a discourse on the death penalty before the age of twenty. Both the play, Ximines, and the poems which Polidori wrote in the summer of 1816 show considerable talent; in retrospect, Byron had nothing harsher to say than that poor ‘Polly’ had been hot-headed and passionate, with an unfortunate ability to get himself into scrapes.

  The doctor’s diary suggests that he fell a little in love with Mary. He appointed himself her Italian teacher. ‘Read Italian with Mrs S,’ he noted on 31 May; ‘went into a boat with Mrs S, and rowed all night till nine; tea’d together, chatted, etc.’ Writing her account for Moore’s use, Mary may have been playing a private game when she described the extreme embarrassment of Polidori after Byron, ‘in the highest and most boyish of spirits … and in that utter incapacity of retention which was one of his foibles’, had merrily threatened to tell her about a mysterious lady with whom the young doctor was madly in love.14 Byron was certainly conscious enough of the doctor’s infatuation to suggest, when Mary was climbing the steep path to Diodati one day, that Polidori should make an eight-foot leap from the balcony and offer her his arm. The doctor gallantly did so – and sprained his ankle. He was laid up for more than a week. Mary dealt briskly with his passion. Polidori glumly noted in his journal that Mrs Shelley had told him she looked on him as a younger brother.

  Polidori had his tumble on 15 June. His friends consoled him by agreeing to hear a reading of his new play. Mary, remembering the occasion for Moore, described Byron’s attempts to keep a straight face during a scene which included the unfortunate line, ‘’Tis thus the goiter’d idiot of the Alps’. Seeking to offer comfort, Byron told Polidori that worse playscripts were often submitted to Drury Lane. The doctor was not deceived: ‘worth nothing,’ he wrote in his diary.

  Polidori made another entry in his diary for that day, one which is suggestive when we remember that Shelley, author of the first 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, noted there that the story’s central idea had first cropped up in a ‘casual conversation’. This central idea was for the manufacture of life in a being assembled from animal and human parts. The casual conversation may have occurred on 15 June, when Polidori noted that he and Shelley had talked about ‘principles, – whether man was thought to be merely an instrument’.

  There was good reason for this to be a hot topic. In March, only three months earlier, William Lawrence, the doctor who had treated both Mary and Shelley, gave two highly controversial lectures in his new position as Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. Polidori, as an ambitious and clever young doctor newly arrived in London from Edinburgh, would certainly have gone along to listen; he would have remembered enough to give the gist of their content to Shelley and, perhaps, to Mary.

  The lectures had caused a furore and considerable embarrassment to the college; for a time, Lawrence was viewed as a traitor to his profession. His crime was to attack the received view of life as an entity separate from, and superior to, the physical body. Creation, Lawrence argued, had nothing to do with God, providence or any
tale presented in the Bible. Reviewing the published version of the lectures in 1819, the reviewer for the Quarterly expressed his horror at the implications of Lawrence’s view. Did man have no soul? Was he to expect only decay after his death? Had Lawrence nothing better to do than ape ‘modern French philosophy’ and ‘the free-thinking physiologists of Germany’?15 The reviewer was not alone in expressing superstitious horror. It was one thing for surgeons to attach voltaic piles to the bodies of murderers and attempt to galvanize them into life; it was another entirely for a professional anatomist to suggest that his powers might in any way equal those of God.

  Both Mary and Shelley enjoyed, at the least, a professional friendship with Lawrence; they may even have attended his lectures. They were not trained, as Polidori had been, to grasp all of their implications, but the subject was one which fascinated them. The lectures, or allied matters, were discussed at the homes of Byron and the Shelleys from 15 June on, throughout the summer.

  Beyond the windows, nature seemed eerily attuned to their conversations. The weather became increasingly wild; Geneva’s famous storms, when lightning flashes from peak to peak and the surface of the lake shivers like a boiling cauldron, were never more violent and recurrent than in the summer of 1816. Shutters snapped open on stabbing lines of light, blanched clouds, a roar of wind. This, as Mary and Shelley knew if they had visited one of England’s most successful electrical scientists during their weeks in Devon, was perfect weather for generating electric power.¶ They could have imagined they were living in God’s workroom, had they believed in God.

  Shelley, Claire and Mary visited Diodati the day after Polidori’s tumble. Byron, who was in the habit of staying up until three in the morning, suggested they should amuse themselves by reading a French translation of some German fantasy tales. Of the several which provide possible influences on Frankenstein – one concerned the animating of a corpse’s stolen head – Mary singled out two in her 1831 Preface to the novel. One told of a gigantic spectre doomed to kill the heirs of his house with a kiss: ‘Je vis devant le lit de l’enfant l’effroyable figure … Je vis le spectre se pencher vers l’enfant, et lui baiser doucement le front. Il se pencha ensuite par dessus mon lit, et baisa le front de l’autre enfant.’17 Just so, she wanted to suggest in 1831, had the creature of her dreams looked threatening while acting with perfect gentleness towards his creator: ‘He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.’

  ‘These tales,’ Shelley wrote on Mary’s behalf in the 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, ‘excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends … and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence.’ Shelley’s account makes it plain that the two other storywriters were Byron and himself, and that, on a subsequent journey among the Alps (there had been no such joint journey into the mountains, only a lake tour), they had forgotten their ‘ghostly visions’. In Shelley’s account only Frankenstein emerged from the storytelling evening. Mary, in 1828, was ready to confirm this, telling Moore that her novel sprang straight from the storytelling session.

  By 1831, when a third edition of Frankenstein was published, following a series of stage versions of the story, Mary had a new explanation. Now, she wanted to connect the laborious process of creating a novel to Frankenstein’s slow assembly and animation of his creature. She wrote now that she had not begun or even thought of a tale until some time after the story session. Stressing the point, she recalled how all the others (she tactfully omitted any allusion to Claire) had started at once. Byron wrote the fragment which he later published with Mazeppa; Shelley began a tale based on his early life; Polidori ‘had some terrible story about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole …’ Day after day, Mary remembered in 1831, she had been tormented with inquiries about her tale: ‘“Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.’18

  This assertion is undone by Polidori’s diary in which, writing at the time as Mary was not, he stated that they all, with the exception of himself, began writing at once. It is unlikely that he would have neglected to mention the consoling fact, had it been a fact, that his admired Mary was also short of an idea.

  On the following day, 18 June, the party again assembled at Diodati. Byron decided to indulge in a spot of the terror-raising with which Claire and Shelley were familiar from their nights of storytelling together in London. At midnight, gathered around a blazing fire and with the shutters closed, they ‘really began to talk ghostly’. Byron, who had been bewitched by the effect Coleridge made on him when reciting ‘Kubla Khan’ in the Devonshire House library, decided to see if he could do as well himself. The results, noted by Polidori, were unnerving.

  LB repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, & Shelley, shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs S, & suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.19

  A local doctor was called in; Polidori undertook to sit up with Shelley while the others, frightened and exhausted, went to bed.

  Shelley himself made no reference to the ‘Christabel’ evening in his Preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein; neither did Mary in 1831. She had a good reason for not wanting to mention it; there is, after all, a startling likeness between the way the story of Frankenstein was supposed to have come to her, in a waking dream, and the supposed origin of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. The 1816 publication of this poem was the first in which Coleridge provided his famous account of its emergence, towering out of his imagination while he dozed over a book. If Mary made no allusion to the ‘Christabel’ evening, it may have been because she did not want to draw too much attention to her own act of cool appropriation. She wrote the 1831 Preface in order to help sell the book; telling the best possible story mattered more than the truth. Polidori was reduced to the sidelines and made to sound like a buffoon; Byron, the most famous of the Geneva group, was brought to the fore to discuss with Shelley how life could be generated. Mary, following Coleridge’s vivid example, sank into a receptive trance after listening to their conversation.

  When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision …

  Sceptics might ask themselves why, if the occasion was as exciting to Mary as she makes it in the Preface (‘On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story’), Polidori never recorded any such declaration in his diary. He was devoted to Mary; such anticipation and relief would surely not have passed unobserved.

  *

  Shelley set off on a brief tour of the lake with Byron on 22 June, leaving Mary to be entertained by her disabled gallant, the young doctor. Converting the lake voyage into a tour of the Alps in the 1818 Preface, Shelley announced that this was the point at which the beauty of their surroundings drove their own story-ideas clean out of their heads. This was a graceful conflation of events. Shelley, accompanied by Claire and Mary, set off for the Alps on 21 July. They failed to persuade Byron to go with them. Instead, they took a new journal. Along the route, as Mary ruefully noted on 22 July, they purchased a trapped squirrel which promptly bit her finger. Shelley carried the little creature in his arms until, losing its charm, it was dumped on a roadside railing.

  Avalanches, tumbling torrents and gigantic pines rising towards them from mist-drenched valleys provided all the excited sensations the travellers had hoped for. At Chamonix, their chosen destination, they were told that the gigantic glacier was advancing by a foot each day, threateni
ng to engulf the entire valley. Staring across the vacant breadth of a vast river of ice enclosed by dark mountains which soared above them to sunlit white peaks, Mary remembered the accounts she had heard in Scotland of the Arctic whalers, of risks taken and lives lost. ‘This is the most desolate place in the world,’ she wrote on 25 July after excitedly underlining the fact that she had at last seen the ‘mer de glace’.

  Danger was an added incentive to intrepid tourists. Every hotel and inn they stayed at was packed with English, French and German travellers, eager to impart their awed sense of a superior power and to thank God for so kindly preserving them. Shelley, Mary and Claire, while happy to fill their pockets with the usual alpine souvenirs of rock fragments, crystal seals and flower seeds, were disgusted by the pious entries in the visitors’ books they found at every stop. Giggling at their own wickedness, they signed themselves in as atheists: ‘Mr Percy Bysche Shelley, Madame son Epouse, Theossteique la soeur ,’ they wrote in the rest-hut at Montanvers. Given the daring nature of an entry which proclaimed them all to be atheists, it is surprising that they were so keen to present Mary as Shelley’s wife. The next visitor, also a classicist, added a dry sentence in Greek: ‘If this is true they are fools and miserable revellers in their folly; if not true they are one and all liars.’20 It may have been Byron, visiting Montenvers with Polidori a month later, who tried to spare Claire additional scandal by partly erasing her signature.

  Mary’s new journal shows that she had started work on a story by the time they reached the mer de glace: ‘write my story,’ she noted on the rainy day before they scrambled up the steep path to the top of the glacier. Over a month had gone by since the evening of reading ghost stories around the fire; perhaps, in these desolate surroundings, her mind returned to the tale which she may have started to contemplate, and even to write, when in Scotland. This was the narrative of Robert Walton’s search for a new land beyond the North Pole; it encloses, and became integral to, the story of Frankenstein.