by Mary Shelley
In 1836, William Godwin died, at the age of eighty, forty-three years after publication of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. His relationship with his daughter had always been complex. She worshipped him, perhaps unnaturally, she feared.65 Having adopted many of his ideals and principles, Mary nevertheless felt that he had kept her at arm’s length, perhaps seeing her more as an experimental subject than as a beloved daughter. Her last two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), are about tyrannical fathers and, unsurprisingly, are seen by at least one scholar as scathing criticisms of her father’s ideas on education and parenting.66
Portrait of Percy Florence Shelley, by George Romney (from Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England: New Facts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Press [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917]).
Title page of Mary Shelley’s The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830).
In 1839, despite Sir Timothy Shelley’s continued vocal opposition to a biography of Percy, Mary published a four-volume edition of her late husband’s Poetical Works with extensive notes, including anecdotal biographical material, primarily in the service of the work. Her use of the first person (“Rosalind and Helen was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside until I found it; and at my request it was completed”)67 clarified her role in the composition and revision of many of the poems during their marriage, bringing full circle the collaboration that had defined their marriage. While never reaching the depth of biographical study plied on Percy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mary’s notes were the first literary biographical study of Percy’s work.
Title page of Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835).
Title page of Mary Shelley’s Falkner (1837).
Plagued by various illnesses during the months comprised by this massive and emotionally taxing effort, Mary nonetheless managed to travel, and in 1840 and 1842–43, she made extensive European trips with Percy Florence. In 1844, Sir Timothy died, and Percy inherited the baronetcy. In the same year, Mary published her last book, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, an account of her travels.
Befriended by many, often courted, cherished by her immediate family (including Percy Florence’s wife, Lady Jane Gibson St. John Shelley, whom he married in 1848 and who was deeply attached to Mary), perhaps even reconciled to her nemesis Claire, she lived out her remaining seven years in England. On February 1, 1851, after suffering for almost three years with a brain tumor, she died, at the age of fifty-three. She was buried at St. Peter’s Churchyard, Bournemouth, in Dorset, England, thirty-three years after first publication of the book that would make her immortal. Yet her lasting fame was still in the future: In the 1888 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, while Percy Shelley merited an entry of nine and a half columns, the entry for Mary ran only a half-column and opened with the description, “the second wife of the poet Shelley … deserves some notice on her own account, as a writer of romance, chiefly imaginative.”
Title page of Rambles through Germany and Italy, by Mary Shelley (1844).
THE GENESIS OF FRANKENSTEIN
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley recounts that on a rainy evening in June 181668 at the Villa Diodati, Byron announced to the company—consisting of herself, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont—that they would each write a ghost story. The group had been reading aloud a collection of such stories, and a competition seemed like a natural extension of that activity. Claire seems not to have tried, and the others abandoned their initial attempts. The project foundered, with all but Mary dropping out, and although she persisted, she was devoid of a workable idea until, one night when she could not fall asleep, she had a “waking dream,” as she called it, a vivid image of a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” She dreamed that the thing came to life, but its vivification struck terror into the student, who fled.69 That dream became the basis for the novel that she wrote over the following months. In fact, Mary claimed, “I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”
Tombstone of Mary Shelley, Percy Florence Shelley, and his wife, Jane Shelley (St. Peter’s churchyard, Bornemouth, Dorset, England).
Of course, no book as complex as Frankenstein emerges from a single vision. A perusal of the text reveals that the novel does not begin with the phrase “It was on a dreary night of November”—that phrase does not appear until Chapter IV (V in the 1831 edition), almost thirteen thousand words into the story. Clearly, Shelley’s vision had evolved and grown, incorporating many other themes and characters. From an examination of the manuscripts that have been preserved (see “A Note on the Text,” below), we can deduce that between June and August 1816, she wrote a narrative that may have been twenty to thirty thousand words. By the end of August or the beginning of September, she had begun a revised draft that was likely simultaneously read and edited by Percy Shelley; new passages were more than likely written by him as well. A “fair copy” (that is, a clean copying-over) was made in 1817 by Mary, with further revisions by both Mary and Percy, resulting finally in the text of the 1818 edition. Although, as will be seen, it is possible by careful comparison of handwriting to determine which portions of the draft were written by Mary and which by Percy, the authorship is confused after that stage of the revisions.70 The New Annotated Frankenstein will examine in detail the material written by Mary versus that written by Percy, as well as the revisions made by Mary in later versions of the text.
Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley, with Douglas Walton as Percy Shelley and Gavin Gordon as Lord Byron (from Bride of Frankenstein, Universal Pictures, 1935).
A few critics have complained that credit for Frankenstein should be given almost wholly to Percy.71 Others are quick to belittle his contribution.72 However, this much is clear about the couple’s working relationship: First, during the entirety of their companionship, from 1814 till his death in 1822, they collaborated—they read together,73 conversed endlessly, and together wrote poems, stories, and journals. As Charles E. Robinson writes, in the four-volume Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Novel, 1816–17 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), “That PBS collaborated on [Frankenstein] should come as no surprise to anyone, because the Shelleys left a long history of their shared activities as creative artists. They transcribed and they edited each other’s works; they encouraged each other to undertake or to modify major works; and they even collaborated in the publication of History of a Six Weeks’ Tour at a time when Frankenstein was being readied for the press.”
Second, after Percy’s death, for reasons she never clearly expressed (see her comments in the introduction to the 1831 edition, in Appendix 1, below), Mary began to revise Frankenstein, first tentatively in 1823, and then further in 1831. She was an inexperienced writer when, at nineteen, she began her tale; Percy had already published several novels and at least five books of poetry, including Queen Mab, one of his major works—and he was five years older, a significant difference, no matter how sophisticated Mary’s upbringing. He had an important role in the auctorial process, though scholars argue about the nature and extent of it. If one were to award authorial credit to each of those who strongly influenced Mary Shelley’s work, the list would extend to include John Milton, from two centuries before, whose Paradise Lost is such an important source for Frankenstein, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were vital to the final product, as were Percy’s suggestions and revisions and, perhaps most importantly, his encouragement.
CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION
Readers and critics alike were confused about the authorship of the book from the beginning. Percy Shelley handled the submission of the manuscript to various publishers. The book was published anonymously, as has been noted above, with an unsigned preface by Percy and a dedication to William Godwin.74 The dedication led many to conclude that Percy had writ
ten the text, and the book’s initial reception was largely favorable.75 Among the exceptions was the Quarterly Review: “Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing, and the greater the ability with which it may be executed, the worse it is—it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality; it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated.” One can only imagine the reviewer’s comments if he or she had known the true author. The reviewer did manage to praise the “highly terrific” language and the “rationality” of the preface (ironically, wholly from the pen of Percy).76 The Edinburgh Magazine remarked upon the book’s “power of fascination” and its “mastery in harsh and savage delineations of passion” but added, “[I]t is one of those works … which, when we have read, we do not well see why it should have been written.”77
Sir Walter Scott, who, by 1818, was already a celebrated Romantic poet and literary lion, assumed, like most reviewers, that the author was Percy Shelley and praised the book highly.
[In] this extraordinary tale … the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. . . .
Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression. We shall be delighted to hear that he has aspired to the paullo majora;78 and, in the meantime, congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion.
Other reviewers were put off by the horrific nature of the story, though its contents seem far less shocking than the supernatural terrors of prevailing gothic literature. One wrote:
We need scarcely say, that these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral; the horror which abounds in them is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach near the sublime, and when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright; and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better.”79
Portrait of Sir Walter Scott, by William Nicholson (1817).
Another reviewer, writing after the second printing of the novel, this time with Mary Shelley’s byline, concluded: “Frankenstein is, I think, the best instance of natural passions applied to supernatural events that I ever met with. . . . For my own part, I confess that my interest in the book is entirely on the side of the monster. His eloquence and persuasion, of which Frankenstein complains, are so because they are truth. The justice is indisputably on his side, and his sufferings are, to me, touching to the last degree.”80
Perhaps because of its highly imaginative theme, the book did not achieve the status of a literary classic overnight.81 As late as 1886, Hugh Reginald Haweis, the series editor of the Routledge World Library Edition of Frankenstein, wrote, “I issue ‘Frankenstein’ with some degree of hesitation, but after mature reflection. The subject is somewhat revolting, the treatment of it somewhat hideous. The conception is powerful, but the execution very unequal. … It is in her natural descriptions, as well as her subtle analysis of moods, that Mrs. Shelley proves herself to be an imaginative writer of no mean order. It is in her construction and plot that she is weak. … Still ‘Frankenstein’ retains its popularity as the first of a class of fiction—not of a very high order—to which the genius of Edgar Allan Poe has given an importance somewhat out of proportion to its merits.”82
Haweis’s opinion was shared by many literary scholars and critics for nearly a century, until, as described in Appendix 5, below, academia discovered Mary Shelley’s work in the 1970s, and Frankenstein came to be recognized as a deeply nuanced work of genius.
THE LEGACY OF FRANKENSTEIN
Joyce Carol Oates writes, “Frankenstein’s double significance as a work of prose fiction and a cultural myth—as ‘novel’ of 1818 and timeless ‘metaphor’—makes it a highly difficult story to read directly. A number of popular misconceptions obscure it for most readers: Frankenstein is of course not the monster, but his creator; nor is he a mad scientist of genius—he is in fact a highly idealistic and naive youth in the conventional Romantic mode.”83 Oates suggests that the novel melds two archetypal myths: that of the hero who crosses over into unknown realms, as did Odysseus, Jonah, and Beowulf; and that of the cautionary tale of straying beyond the boundary between the human and the divine, as did Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Faust. She also identifies a salient cause of the book’s enduring currency: “[N]o one in Frankenstein is evil—the universe is emptied of God and of theistic assumptions of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ Hence, its modernity.” Because Victor is both hero and villain and the creature is both to be feared and pitied, “the ultimate other and … a mirror of the deepest self,” in Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s phrase,84 the novel both fascinates and repels the reader.
Sherlock Holmes and the Horror of Frankenstein, by Luke Benjamin Kuhns, writer, and Marcie Klinger, artist (London: MX Publishing, 2013).
Frankenstein: A Monstrous Parody, by Ludworst Bemonster (New York: Scholastic, 2012). Rick Walton, writer; Nathan Hale, artist.
As suggested above, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature is the first myth of modern times, an early nineteenth-century version of the epics of more distant times. By focusing on science rather than the gods or the angels, Frankenstein could not have been written earlier; it broke new ground and resonated in a way that the classic myths it encompasses no longer do. Certainly the creature was one of the first of the small pantheon of immortals recognizable by virtually all outside of the original work of art, standing alongside the earliest, Don Quixote and Sir John Falstaff, and later Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. If for no other reason than the sheer indestructibility of Mary Shelley’s creation, we feel we must pay attention to the story and seek to understand its power.
What follows is not a stage play or a film or a comic adaptation of Frankenstein: It is the original raw material from which this modern myth emerged, the “hideous progeny” of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband, Percy Shelley. This volume supplements the text with notes that illuminate the creative process; it examines the sources and roots of the ideas and characters; and it elucidates the elements of the lives and times of the Shelleys that are interwoven into the narrative. With such material at hand, the contemporary reader may experience Frankenstein in all its power.
Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Frankenstein Monster, by Don W. Baranowski (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006).
1. Fortunately, readers may turn to The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Short Stories (W. W. Norton, 2004), The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels (W. W. Norton, 2005), and The New Annotated Dracula (W. W. Norton, 2008), compiled by this editor.
2. For an excellent scholarly view of literary history and the textual allusions of Frankenstein, see Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao, The Annotated Frankenstein (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2012).
3. The Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tabulates the appearances of words in the millions of publications scanned by Google, reports that from the mid-1830s, when the revised 1831 edition of Frankenstein was first published, to the early 1920s, the word “Frankenstein” appears in about 0.00002 percent of all English-language scanned works. This doubled by the 1940s to about 0.00004 percent and remained steady at this rate of appearance until the 1980s, when Frankenstein became the subject of academic study (see text accompanying note 1, Appendix 5, below), and the rate of appearance again tripled to 0.00012 percent. By 2015, this rate had again climbed steadily and sharply, to about 0.00018 percent, perhaps in anticipation of the two-hundredth anniversary of publication of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. According to Google, the figures are normalized to reflect the number of books actually published in each year. For more on the Ngram Viewer, see Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, the Google Books Team, Joseph
P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science (published online ahead of print: December 16, 2010).
4. See Appendix 4, below.
5. In Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, with David Wingrove (New York: Athenaeum, 1986). Aldiss dismisses the arguments of David Ketterer, in Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, the Monster and Human Reality (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria, 1979), who denies “that Frankenstein is science fiction at all, on the grounds that it is much else beside. But,” Aldiss retorts, “so indeed is all good SF.”
6. Maurice Hindle, introduction to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
7. See, for instance, Ashton Nichols, editor of Romantic Natural Histories: William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin, and Others (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), at http://blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat/2011/06/07/percy-bysshe-shelley/.
8. A point made by Nicholas Marsh in Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
9. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is referred to in various places below as “Mary Shelley” even though she may have been “Mary Godwin” at the time. She was often called “Mrs. Shelley” or “Mary Shelley” before she and Percy Bysshe Shelley married—see, for example, text accompanying note 53, below. This volume largely uses the simplest and clearest designation, the name by which she is actually known: “Mary Shelley.”