by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley’s writing career neither began nor ended with Frankenstein. Her first book, a travelogue entitled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, co-written with Percy Shelley and discussed further below, was published in 1816, two years before Frankenstein. She wrote five other novels, all published initially without naming her but rather by identifying her as “the author of Frankenstein,” and all largely written after the death of Percy Shelley, as well as numerous essays. All are little remembered today; in this respect, Frankenstein is similar to Dracula, the story of the other “creature” of the nineteenth century, which greatly overshadows Bram Stoker’s other eleven novels, numerous short stories, travelogues, and reminiscences.
10. See Appendix 2, “A Chronology of the Events of Frankenstein,” below.
11. Lost among the Terrors of the French Revolution is the fact that in 1793, France established compulsory public education beginning at age six—a rejection of the philosophy of expatriate Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who despised public education and urged parents to provide their offspring with “well-regulated liberty.”
12. First published anonymously in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue, the book was subsequently edited by Mrs. Edward Bridgen, one of four daughters of the successful novelist Samuel Richardson, and republished to great success under this title. (The first name of Richardson’s daughter is unknown.)
13. Lewis later visited the Shelleys in Switzerland in 1816, on the eve of the “ghost story” competition discussed below, but he died just two months after publication of Frankenstein, in May 1818.
14. Schlegel (1772–1829) was a writer, critic, and scholar whose work spanned linguistics, philosophy, and other disciplines. For his distinction between the classical and the Romantic, see, for example, Allen Speight, “Friedrich Schlegel,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta,
15. Anne K. Mellor makes the important observation that Mary Shelley was not dependent on Percy to infuse the novel with an understanding of science and the scientific enterprise. “While no scientist herself … Mary Shelley nonetheless had a sound grasp of the concepts and implications of some of the most important scientific work of her day. In her novel, she distinguishes between that scientific research which attempts to describe accurately the functionings of the physical universe and that which attempts to control or change the universe through human intervention” (Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters [New York and London: Methuen, 1988], 90). In particular, Mary Shelley drew on her understanding of the work of Sir Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin, and Luigi Galvani (and his nephew Giovanni Aldani), all discussed in relevant places below.
16. See note 6, Volume II, Chapter VII, below.
17. Among those blamed for Mary King’s impropriety was the “notorious governess”: Mary Wollstonecraft, who had quit the premises eleven years earlier. See Janet Todd, Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 205.
18. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Printed for J. Johnson, no. 72, St. Paul’s Church Yard, and G. G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster Row, 1798), digital edition, loc. 434. An edition of the book edited by Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker, with five appendices containing material such as contemporary reviews, is available from Broadview Press, in Ontario, Canada, at https://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=236.
19. Ibid., locs. 620, 677, 618.
20. Ibid., loc. 643.
21. Ibid., loc. 672.
22. Letter from William Godwin to Mary Wollstonecraft, August 16, 1796, in Ralph M. Wardle, ed., Godwin & Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).
23. Letter to Maria Gisborne, October 30, 1834, in Betty T. Bennett, ed., Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), Volume II, 215.
24. See Julie Ann Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
25. The anecdote is repeated in Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life. Her Fiction, Her Monsters, 11, and William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989), 295.
26. The letter was written to Mrs. Julian [Florence A.] Marshall; see The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley and Son, 1889), Volume I, 201.
27. Charles Lamb was known as one of the most affable members of the English literary circle of the day. His older sister Mary suffered from mental illness, resulting in frequent institutionalization. In 1796, when Mary was thirty-two and Charles twenty-one, Mary snapped in the course of an argument and stabbed her mother to death. Charles arranged for private care for her, and after his father died in 1799 brought Mary to live with him, a companionship they shared for the rest of his life. Together, they had an active social and literary life, writing poetry and prose, including at least three books for the Godwins’ Juvenile Library. Mary Shelley must have known the Lambs through her father, and they are indirectly referenced in Frankenstein (see note 14, Volume I, Chapter II, below).
28. See Appendix 1, below.
29. In The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley’s Works (Plainsboro Township, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1975). The book’s eponymous outlaw, Pietro Zastrozzi, pursues his half-brother, Verezzi, whom he is compelled to punish in order to avenge the death of his mother, Olivia Zastrozzi, who was driven to penury and prostitution by the two men’s father. He maneuvers his half-brother into suicide to exact full revenge. “[B]y daring boldly, by striving to verge from the beaten path, whilst yet trammelled in the chains of mortality, [thy soul] will gain superior advantages in a future state,” Zastrozzi declares to the book’s heroine, Matilda di Laurentini, tricked by him into colluding in Verezzi’s killing. Tried and convicted, Zastrozzi continues to defy society with smiles of “contemptuous atheism” even as he is stretched upon the rack in the book’s closing scene. The text of Zastrozzi may be found at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/percy_bysshe/zastrozzi/index.html.
30. The precise monetary arrangements made between the two men are not known, but certain details of their relationship in this regard may be found in James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (New York: Random House, 2015). Percy was generally careless about money, and, to his father’s displeasure, he frequently borrowed on the strength of his future inheritance, often making gifts that he later resented and perennially finding himself short of funds.
31. The date is fixed in various biographies, including, for example, Emily Sunstein’s Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) and William A. Walling’s Mary Shelley (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1972). William Godwin gives the date as June 18 in a letter dated August 27, 1814, to John Taylor, to whom he wrote to renew a debt (reprinted in The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, as Narrated by William Godwin, with Commentary by H. Buxton Forman, C. B. [Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1911], 10). However, there is ample evidence that Percy visited the house frequently between March 30 and June 18.
32. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 73. Godwin wrote to Taylor, “He was under apprehension of arrests; & from this consideration I invited him to make my house his principal home, his known haunts being all at the west end of the town. He lodged at an inn in Fleet Street, & took his meals with me” (Godwin, Elopement, 11).
33. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 69.
34. First published in 1813, about a year after Percy first introduced himself to William Godwin, the poem is about the perfectability of humankin
d. It is substantially based on Godwin’s writings about “necessity,” melded with Percy’s own ideas about nature and society. The poem rejects the need for violent revolution and proposes that mankind will improve by reason of inherent virtues and the evolution of society. The actual book is now in the Huntington Library, and some of its nineteenth-century provenance is described in H. Buxton Forman’s The Shelley Library: An Essay in Bibliography (London: The Shelley Society, 1886).
35. Mary also included remembered lines of Byron’s poetry. Huntington Library Queen Mab, quoted in Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 76, and described in detail in Forman’s The Shelley Library.
36. Claire Clairmont to Edward J. Trelawny, ca. 1870, quoted in Mary Rosalie Glynn Grylls, Claire Clairmont, Mother of Byron’s Allegra (London: John Murray, 1939), Appendix C, 270. Percy’s self-centered view of the relationship with Harriet is evident in his letters to her. For example, in a letter dated approximately October 3, 1814, he wrote, “I am united to another; you are no longer my wife. Perhaps I have done you injury, but surely most innocently and unintentionally, in having commenced any connexion with you. That injury, whatever be its amount, was not to be avoided.” He went on, in a postscript to urge Harriet, then far advanced in her pregnancy, to “attend to the preservation of your health. I do not apprehend the slightest danger from your approaching labour” (Leslie Hotson, ed., Shelley’s Lost Letters to Harriet, with an introduction by Leslie Hotson [London: Faber & Faber, 1930], 41.
37. Frederick L. Jones, ed., Mary Shelley’s Journal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), October 7, 1822, 183.
38. Jane actually called herself “Clara” at this precise stage; later, indiscriminately, “Claire” or “Clare.” While Mary may have had little use for Claire, the latter had enjoined Percy not to leave her behind in “slavery” to her mother.
39. In his letter to John Taylor, written a month after the elopement, Godwin complains, “I felt it … my duty … to provide, if possible, for the hour of distress (which, I believe, is not far distant) when these unworthy children shall again seek the protection and aid of their father. … [T]he poor girls … may be brought back to the path of duty, time enough to prevent a stigma from being fastened on their characters … When I use the word stigma, I am sure it is wholly unnecessary to say that I apply it in a very different sense to the two girls. Jane [Claire] has been guilty of indiscretion only, & has shown a want of these filial sentiments, which it would have been most desirable to us to have discovered in her: Mary has been guilty of a crime” (Godwin and Forman, The Elopement, 15–16).
40. In a letter to Edward Trelawny dated May 4, 1836, in Frederick L. Jones, ed., Letters of Mary W. Shelley, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), Volume II, 271.
41. An obsolete term meaning the making of small fancywork items of netting, such as a handbag or sachet. This was reportedly one of the only such pastimes Mary Shelley enjoyed. Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) wrote a poem, “To a young lady netting,” in 1803:
While those bewitching hands combine,
With matchless grace, the silken line,
They also weave, with gentle art,
Those stronger nets that bind the heart.
But soon all earthly things decay:
That net in time must wear away:
E’en Beauty’s silken meshes gay
No lasting hold can take:
But Beauty, Virtue, Sense, combin’d,
(And all these charms in thee are join’d)
Can throw that net upon the mind,
No human art can e’er unbind,
No human pow’r can break.
Peacock was a good friend of Percy Shelley’s, and in his Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published from 1858 to 1862, he defended Shelley’s wife, Harriet, recalling her as beautiful, educated, and well spoken: “Her manners were good; and her whole aspect and demeanour such manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature, that to be once in her company was to know her thoroughly. She was fond of her husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed the change of scene.” He admitted that Percy’s second wife, Mary, “was intellectually better suited to him than his first, no one who knew them both will deny; and that a man, who lived so totally out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas, needed such an ever-present sympathy more than the general run of men, must also be admitted… ,” but he saw no reason to disparage Harriet because of Percy’s change of heart (H. F. B. Brett-Smith, ed., Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley with Shelley’s Letters to Peacock (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), 48, 51–52.
42. See Jones, ed., Mary Shelley’s Journal, 41. Some suggest that this dream was the true genesis of Frankenstein.
43. Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) was a friend of Shelley’s from his Oxford days, and they collaborated on a collection of burlesque poetry in 1810. Hogg attempted to seduce Harriet Shelley (without Percy Shelley’s approval) in 1811, and Percy and Hogg became estranged. By 1812, however, the two men were close again, and within a few short years, Hogg, reprising his earlier effort, declared his love for Mary. Percy encouraged Mary to consummate a relationship with Hogg, but there is no indication that she ever did so, and by March 1817, she wrote, “I do not like [Hogg] and I think he is more disagreeable than ever” (Bennet, ed., Letters of Mary W. Shelley, Volume I, 35).
44. Letter from Claire Clairmont to Byron, ca. March–April 1816, in the manuscripts of John Murray, publisher of Lord Byron, held by John Murray VI, quoted in Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 115.
45. Byron described their relationship in a letter of January 20, 1817, to Douglas Kinnaird: “You know—& I believe saw once that odd-headed girl—who introduced herself to me shortly before I left England—but you do not know—that I found her with Shelley and her sister at Geneva—I never loved her nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man—& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way—the suite of all this is that she was with child—& returned to England to assist in peopling that desolate island. … This comes of ‘putting it about’ (as Jackson calls it) & be dammed to it—and thus people come into the world” (Lesley A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1973–82), Volume V, 162.
46. Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 40.
47. Lady Caroline was married to William Lamb, later Viscount Melbourne, prime minister of England in 1834 and 1835–41, who was unrelated to the Godwins’ friends Charles and Mary Lamb (see note 27, above).
48. Lady Byron reportedly made this assertion in her unpublished memoirs and directly to Harriet Beecher Stowe; she also accused Byron of having frequent homosexual relationships. The issue of Byron’s sexuality has been controversial for more than a century. Stowe rose to the defense of Lady Byron when the latter was attacked in a memoir published by Lord Byron’s last lover, Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli (1800–1873). Stowe’s extended analysis of the testimony of witnesses on Byron’s conduct, her account of numerous conversations with Lady Byron, and a refutation of Lady Byron’s alleged unsupported accusations against her dead husband may be found in Lady Byron Vindicated (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1870; repr. Teddington, Middlesex, UK: The Echo Library, 2006). Lady Byron’s grandson Ralph Milbanke also determined to tell the truth about his grandmother and published a book about her marriage to Lord Byron, Astarte: A Fragment of Truth about George Gordon Byron, Sixth Lord Byron (London: Privately printed, 1905), in which he expresses unequivocally that Byron had an incestuous relationship with Augusta and that Medora was Byron’s daughter. See Julia Markus’s fine Lady Byron and Her Daughters (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
Henry James wrote a novella, “The Aspern Papers” (1888), about an individual’s struggle with a desire for priva
cy and a conflicting sense of obligation to history. In the story, the aged former lover of a great American poet wavers about whether to publish the poet’s revelatory letters and ultimately burns them. In a preface to the 1908 edition, James wrote that he had endeavored, in the work, to summon “the Byronic age” and “a palpable imaginable visitable past”) (The Aspern Papers and Other Stories [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], xxxi). James’s notes make clear that the story was based on his interest in the ultimate fate of Claire Clairmont’s Shelley and Byron memorabilia (Claire died in 1879, having been importuned repeatedly to publish her holdings), and he explicitly modeled the lover, Juliana Bordereau, on Claire. But Lady Byron’s own unpublished papers also must have been in James’s mind. He knew Ralph Milbanke well and observed his obsession with his grandmother’s papers. When Astarte was published privately by Milbanke, he sent James a copy, perhaps to underline that, unlike Juliana, Lady Byron’s grandson felt that setting the historical record straight was more important than family sensitivities.
49. The Milbankes did not have the fortune Byron might have desired, but an uncle of Annabella’s—her mother’s brother, Viscount Wentworth—left an inheritance, that, however, had to filter through Annabella’s parents upon his death, and was never to be enjoyed by the couple for the duration of their very brief marriage.
50. Stowe, in Lady Byron Vindicated, records the following interview with Lady Byron: “I said to her, that, even in the days of my childhood, I had heard of something very painful that had passed as they were in the carriage, immediately after marriage. She then said that it was so; that almost his first words, when they were alone, were, that she might once have saved him; that, if she had accepted him when he first offered, she might have made him any thing she pleased; but that, as it was, she would find she had married a devil. . . . At what precise time the idea of an improper connection between her husband and his sister was first forced upon her, she did not say …” (90, in the Echo Library edition).