Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  They returned to Geneva on 27 July. Mary had enjoyed her visit to ‘a world of ice’, but she was pleased to be back: ‘I longed to see my pretty babe,’ she confessed to her journal. ‘This is the second anniversary since Shelley’s & my union,’ she noted the following day, recording the date on which she, Claire and Shelley had fled to France. Full of tenderness for him, she began work on a handstitched balloon for his birthday present, strong enough to be flown on the lake from the boat which Shelley had purchased at the beginning of the holiday Another present which she knew would please him was a telescope; the two of them went into Geneva to choose one on 2 August.

  Mary was still in ignorance of Claire’s pregnancy. Shelley had known about it for at least a month; after his lake voyage with Byron, he had thoughtfully added a clause to his will, bequeathing a princely £6,000 to Claire, and the same sum again to an unnamed person of her choice. He may, as the editors of Mary’s journal suggest, have discussed Claire’s situation with Byron during the boat trip and concluded that, since Byron was unwilling to take any financial responsibility, he ought to do something himself.21

  Claire’s pregnancy was the likely subject of the ‘talks’ which Mary recorded taking place between Shelley and her stepsister the day after their return from the mountains. On 2 August, Shelley and Claire went up to Diodati. Mary would have liked to go with them, but ‘Lord B[yron] did not seem to wish it’, she wrote with evident perplexity. Shelley returned with a letter which had arrived from the lawyers. The news was not good; his father was prepared to keep a promise to increase his annual allowance by £500 and to lend him £2,000, but only if he returned to England. Grand schemes for a year of eastern travel would have to be dropped. Fanny, a week later, sent a letter so heartbreaking in its anxiety about Godwin’s finances and so wistful in its pleas for stories of the great Lord Byron that Mary and Shelley decided to find some token of their esteem. Fanny, on the day she died, was still wearing the pretty little gold watch which they bought for her in Geneva.

  On 21 August, Mary noted that she and Shelley had a long discussion about her story; a week later, Fanny fulfilled her promise of sending them, among other books, their own copy of Coleridge’s three recently published dream poems. Remembering the violent effect it had worked on him, Shelley read ‘Christabel’ aloud to Mary before they went to bed. This, not the earlier occasion specified in the Preface, may have been the moment when Mary’s imagination at last took flight, quickened by Shelley’s reading and by her recent journey to a landscape of terrifying isolation and grandeur.

  Mary’s 1831 Preface, when read alongside her journal entries for that cold and rainy August, lends support to this idea. On eight days of the first two weeks of the month, she spent part of the evening at the Villa Diodati, together with Shelley and Byron; the conversations, to which she represented herself as a passive witness, often returned to their favourite subject that summer, the principle of life. A story was going the rounds that Erasmus Darwin had once made an experiment with a piece of vermicelli which, when sealed in a glass case, had ‘by some extraordinary means [begun to move] with voluntary motion’.22|| Mary, a ‘devout but nearly silent listener’, became increasingly fascinated by the idea of spontaneous generation. ‘Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’23

  The setting provided her own galvanic spark. Watching the lightning leap across the distant mountain tops, listening to passionate discussions about the limits to which man’s ambition to outdo nature might lead him, thinking of Shelley’s own early years of experiments with electricity, of the strange ghost stories they had read, and of her tale of Walton’s ambitious voyage, she felt the elements coalesce. On 26 August, Shelley’s reading of ‘Christabel’ sparked a vision to match his own of 18 June. Where he had hallucinated a woman with eyes for nipples, Mary now saw a creature both horrifying and pitiful. This was the monster her promethean scientist would endow with life. Her journal noted that she had been busily writing a story in the days before Shelley read ‘Christabel’ to her: ‘Write,’ she wrote on 24 and 25 August. The day after the ‘Christabel’ reading, she stopped. She did not return to her work until 16 September. Three weeks had given her time to rethink and reassemble her material.

  Source-hunting is a slippery business where the evidence is so contradictory. It is, however, worth remembering that 1816 was also the summer during which Byron began planning, and perhaps talking about, his ideas for Manfred. Published two years later, the poem was described to John Murray as being about ‘a kind of magician who is tormented by a species of remorse … in the 3rd act he is found by his attendants dying in a tower – where he studied his art.’24

  Here, in the idea of a magician haunted by his own guilt, we seem to have something very close to the idea of Frankenstein, who is tormented by the thought of the horror he has, through a form of magic, knowingly unleashed. Here too, in Manfred’s famous incantatory poem, is the terror with which Frankenstein invests his abandoned creature, always seen by him as a spectral, menacing presence:

  Though thou seest me not pass by,

  Thou shalt feel me with thine eye

  As a thing that, though unseen

  Must be near thee, and hath been …25**

  Matthew Lewis, the gothic novelist whose most famous novel, The Monk, was published the year before Mary’s birth, arrived on 14 August to spend a few days with Byron. Joining in the spirit of the party, Lewis produced some hair-raising ghost stories which Mary faithfully copied into her journal. They have less bearing on Frankenstein than the fact that their narrator was fresh from a visit to his two slave plantations in Jamaica and full of concern about the slaves for whom he had come to feel affectionate responsibility. The London Times had recently reported a native uprising in Sierra Leone, leading to the murder of many of the white inhabitants. A corrected report on the following day, 7 May, showed that a bloodless riot had been hurriedly crushed by the local militia. The readiness with which the initial report had been accepted was much discussed.††

  At some point, possibly as a result of Lewis’s heated discussions with Byron and Shelley about the slave trade and unenlightened attitudes to black people, Mary decided to use her story to illustrate how environment and circumstances could act on an essentially virtuous being and lead him, through mistreatment, from light into darkness, into becoming what he was wrongly perceived to be. Her creature, Frankenstein’s electrically charged child, would remind her readers of the danger and wickedness of their attitude to the people whose unpaid labour sweetened their coffee. The 1814 Treaty of Paris secured French trading rights in slavery for a further five years; the main characters of Mary’s novel are all of French origin. Only the Creature, assembled from wherever limbs can be got, is made as rootless as a transported slave. Judged, as William Lawrence judged the black man, by his appearance and not by his acts, the Creature becomes an unprincipled monster. The fault is firmly attributed not to him but to the supposedly civilized Frenchmen who refuse to acknowledge his humanity.

  Some critics have interpreted the Creature as a symbol of the French mob at the height of revolutionary rage, believing that in the moment of his transformation, when he seizes kindling to raze the house of the de Laceys – the family he has looked on ‘in an innocent, half painful self deceit’ as his protectors – Mary offers a warning and an indictment of her own hypocritical times. In the Creature’s simple faith in the de Laceys as his guardians, she presented the attitude of the virtuous slave towards his owner. In his fall from innocence, she took care to remind the reader that these protectors had betrayed his trust. Thus, the mistreated and misunderstood slave had right on his side when he rebelled against those who refused to accept him as an equal member of their own species.

  I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, [and] anger returned, a rage of anger; and unable to injure anything huma
n, turned my fury towards inanimate objects … I lighted the dry branch of a tree, and danced with fury around the devoted cottage … I waved my brand … with a loud scream, I fired the straw, and heath, and bushes, which I had collected. The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames … As soon as I was convinced that no assistance could save any part of the habitation, I quitted the scene, and sought for refuge in the woods.27

  *

  Arrangements for Claire and her unborn child were finalized during the last days at Geneva. Byron proposed that it should be brought up by his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. When Claire objected, a compromise was reached, with Byron agreeing that he would not, for the first seven years of its life, place his son or daughter in a stranger’s care. Claire was graciously permitted to act in the role of her own child’s aunt until the moment when Byron might choose to send for it. With this arrangement, hardly ideal, they had to be satisfied.

  Early on the morning of 29 August, Shelley and his little party packed their bags and set off for England, taking with them Canto III of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon for delivery to Byron’s publisher. It is unlikely that Claire’s condition won her much sympathy from her stepsister. Mary’s journal gives nothing away. Any pity she may have felt would have been extinguished if she had known that Claire’s last pathetic letter to Byron from Geneva dismissed all friendships but his as meaningless, irrelevant. ‘I shall love you to the end of my life & nobody else‚’ Claire scrawled as the trunks were carried out of the house.28

  But Byron, while he had been delighted by Shelley and impressed by Mary, had already written the tiresomely persistent Miss Clairmont out of his life. The child was alleged to be his own. He would, in time, do what he could for it. But who could tell? Rumour – there had been a good deal of unpleasant gossip while they were at Geneva – suggested that Shelley did not care whether he slept with Mary Godwin, her stepsister or both. The child might as easily be Shelley’s. Shelley had, after all, seemed perfectly happy to bring it up in his own home; he had wasted no time in making arrangements for Claire’s unborn baby in his will. Perhaps – well, Shelley’s ways were not his. In the circumstances, Byron thought he had behaved rather well.

  Mary, whatever she may have thought of Byron’s fickleness to Claire, showed no lessening of affection for him. She continued to read everything he wrote and to associate him with a period of unusual happiness. ‘Dear Lake! I shall ever love thee,’ she wrote in May 1817 after reading the stanzas of Childe Harold which brought it all back to her.

  How a powerful mind can sanctify past scenes and recollections – His is a powerful mind. One that fills me with melancholy yet mixed with pleasure as is always the case when intellectual energy is displayed. I think of our excursions on the lake. How we saw him when he came down to us or welcomed our arrival with a goodhumoured smile. How very vividly does each verse of his poem recall some scene of this kind to my memory.

  A line later, Mary expressed her hope that they would see Byron ‘again & again – enjoy his society’.29 Cross though she was with Claire for her silliness, she could not blame her for falling in love with such a man.

  *

  Arriving in Geneva in 1818, Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin paid a respectful visit to Montalègre. Still anchored in the little harbour below Byron’s villa, he found the boat which Byron and Shelley had jointly purchased and in which, when the evenings were fine enough, their whole party had gone out on the lake. The boat was rotten, half-submerged in water; the villa rented by Shelley was already lost in a tangle of undergrowth and untamed trees. Diodati remains, meticulously preserved and emblazoned with a plaque recording Byron’s residence there; Maison Chapuis is gone, buried in an unlocated site under the Genevan suburb of Cologny.

  Notes

  1. See Silsbee Papers (hereafter Silsbee), box 7, file 3. Silsbee recorded his interviews with Claire Clairmont and her niece in small memorandum books which have been preserved in the Silsbee family papers at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Many of his comments are published in the two volumes of The Clairmont Correspondence, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), abbreviated here to CC, 1 and 2.

  2. I have accepted the convincing conjectures of Marion Kingston Stocking (CC, 1, p. 25, n. 1) on Claire’s likely whereabouts and the ordering and dates of her letters to Byron. Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh, was living at Devonshire House until mid-April.

  3. WG–John Murray, 21.5.1814 (Murray). Coleridge did get £100 from Byron; Murray discouraged Byron from making a similar gift to Godwin and Maturin.

  4. CC–Byron, 21.4.1816 (see note 2 above).

  5. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford, 1956–71), 4, pp. 628–9; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (HarperCollins, 1998), ch. 9, p. 426.

  6. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letters, 1, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University Press, 1974).

  7. CC–Byron, 21.4.1816.

  8. Ibid.

  9. CC–Byron, 6.5.1816.

  10. MWG–FI, 17.5.1816. This, the only extant version, was published in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817).

  11. Ibid.

  12. FI–MWG and PBS, 29.51816 (CC, 1).

  13. ‘J.S’ [St Aubyn?] to ‘Stuart’, 6.6.1816. This letter, held at the Horsham Museum, is printed in The Letters of Bysshe and Timothy Shelley, transcribed and annotated by Susan Cabell Djabri and Jeremy Knight (Horsham Museum Society, 2000), pp. 119–22.

  14. Thomas Moore, The Life of Lord Byron, with his Letters & Journals (1830 and 1831), ch. 27 in the one–volume edition (1838).

  15. Quarterly Review (July 1819); William Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology being the two Introductory Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on the 21st and 25th March, 1816.

  16. Cornelia A.H. Crosse, Memorials, Scientific and Literary, of Andrew Crosse, the Electrician (1857).

  17. Fantasmagoriana, pp. 152–3. Fantasmagoriana, on Recueil d’Histoires de Spectres, Revenans, Fantômes etc was translated from German to French ‘par un Amateur’ in 1812. When the Geneva party read it in this form, the book was already available in an English version, translated by Mrs Utterson as Tales of the Dead. Mary’s recollection of the details in 1831 was a little vague; their influence in 1816 should not be discounted.

  18. Preface to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1831). The Preface to the first 1818 edition was written by Shelley, as if by the [anonymous] author.

  19. The diary of Dr J.W Polidori, 18.6.1816 (Polidori’s diary was eventually published from a family-edited copy in 1911 by his nephew, W.M. Rossetti).

  20. See Gavin Beer, ‘An Atheist in the Alps’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, IX (1958). The entry mentioned here for 23 July 1816 was first recorded on 26 June 1817, by Humphrey Senhouse, when he, Edward Nash and Robert Southey were on an alpine visit. Mary was also bold enough to announce that she was en route to ‘I’enfer’ from London, which suggests a defiant awareness of her reputation as a fallen woman.

  21. The will is printed in Shelley and His Circle, 4, pp. 702–18; MWSJ, p. 122, n. 1.

  22. MWS, Preface to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1831).

  23. Ibid.

  24. Byron–John Murray, 15.2.1817, in Byron: Letters and Journals, 12 vols. and supplement, ed. Leslie Marchand (John Murray, 1973–94) (hereafter BL&J).

  25. Byron, Manfred (1817), lines 112–15.

  26. Byron, ‘Darkness’ (July 1816), lines 2–5.

  27. Frankenstein (1818), 2, viii.

  28. CC–Byron, ?29.8.1816.

  29. MWSJ, 28.5.1817.

  * Edward Augustus Silsbee, the Shelley admirer whose pursuit of manuscripts held by Claire Clairmont gave Henry James the idea for The Aspern Papers, noted, after a conversation with Claire in 1876, that ‘while living in Devonshire? Mrs S approaching her confinement sent for her while they were at Windsor. There she shortly ran off.’1 The q
ueried allusion to Devonshire may have been Silsbee’s own tentative attempt to create a time-scheme. Godwin’s diary shows Claire spending three nights at Skinner Street from 5 to 8 January 1816; she stayed for one night on 16 February. Mary’s baby William Godwin Shelley was born on 24 January. It seems probable that Claire returned from Enniscorthy to Lynmouth for the rest of the autumn of 1815, and then came to London. Godwin’s meticulous journal records no visit from her before January 1816.

  † Byron had invited Coleridge to Piccadilly Terrace in the hope of persuading him to publish ‘Christabel’, a poem which he hugely admired, together with ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’. His urgings were successful; the poems were published by John Murray shortly after their meeting. Byron already knew ‘Christabel’ well enough to be able to recite it, or part of it, from memory during his stay at Geneva.

  ‡ The change of feelings towards Byron is strikingly summed up in a letter from Thomas Babington Macaulay to his mother. Macaulay had been an eager reader of Byron, seeing in him a modern equivalent to his adored Tacitus. (‘Rien n’est égal à Tacitus. Sa genie me paroît de ressembler beaucoup à celle de Lord-Byron,’ he told his mother on 17 April 1815.) On 14 April 1816, two poems which Byron had printed privately were published by his enemy, Henry Brougham, in a Tory paper, the Champion. One was a vicious portrait of his wife’s governess and confidante, the hated Mrs Clermont. The other and still more damaging was ‘Fare Thee Well’. Addressed to his wife, the poem presented Byron as a broken-hearted husband and father, cast out but still loyal: ‘Even though unforgiving, never / ’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.’ To Macaulay, a brilliant schoolboy of fifteen, his hero seemed to have behaved like a cad. On 21 April, he invited his mother to share his disgust at ‘the abominable, unmanly, conduct of the Peer-poet to whom we once paid such admiration’. Macaulay, along with many readers of the Champion, assumed that Byron himself was responsible for the poems’ publication.6