by Mary Shelley
51. Augusta Ada Byron, later Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and commonly known as Ada Lovelace, who died at the age of thirty-six, was encouraged by her mother to pursue studies in the fields of mathematics and logic, as “insurance” that she would not develop her father’s supposed insanity. She later worked with Charles Babbage on his “analytical engine” and is credited as the author of the first computer program. In John Crowley’s brilliant novel Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land (2005), Ada is an unseen character who annotates and attempts to preserve her father’s lost novel from her mother’s destructive hand by enciphering it. Recently, Ada and Charles Babbage appeared in the charmingly annotated graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015).
52. The Maison Chapuis is gone, but the Villa Diodati remains, although it is in private hands.
53. The story is repeated (without attribution) in Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler, The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (New York and Boston: Little, Brown, 2006), and in Gordon, Romantic Outlaws. Some years later, in August 1821, Percy Shelley wrote to the Countess Guiccioli, later the author of Lord Byron’s Life in Italy, edited by Peter Cochran and translated by Michael Rees (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005): “The natives of Geneva and the English people who were living there did not hesitate to affirm that we were leading a life of the most unbridled libertinism. They said that we had formed a pact to outrage all that is regarded as most sacred in human society. Allow me, Madam, to spare you the details. I will only tell you that atheism, incest, and many other things—sometimes ridiculous and sometimes terrible—were imputed to us. The English papers did not delay to spread the scandal, and the people believed it” (Frederick L. Jones, ed., Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], Volume II: Shelley in Italy, 328). Mary’s journal for Tuesday, August 13, 1816, records, “we all go up to Diodati—war,” interpreted by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, the editors of Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), as a reference to the neighborhood gossip. The Hooblers, however, in The Monsters: Mary Shelley and The Curse of Frankenstein, suggest that this is just as likely a reference to an argument that broke out among the company, for Mary Shelley never returned to the Villa Diodati afterward.
54. Mary apparently recorded her ideas in a notebook, now lost, referred to by scholar Charles Robinson as the “Ur-Text” of Frankenstein (see “A Note on the Text,” below). The earliest record of her actual writing of the story is a journal entry for July 24, 1816, in which she notes, “I read nouvelles [sic: Nouveaux contes moraux et nouvelles historiques, a multivolume collection of stories and histories by Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, Comtesse de Genlis, known as Madame de Genlis, published 1802–6] and write my story . . .” (Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, eds., Journals of Mary Shelley, 118).
55. Valperga is viewed today as a feminist response to Sir Walter Scott’s male-oriented historical novels. Though his writing is unfashionable today, Scott’s immense output and the quality of his writing made him the rage of the era, so that he became the unquestioned leader of the English and Scottish Romantic movements. Every major composer of nineteenth-century opera seemed to find inspiration in at least one of Scott’s works.
56. Uncharacteristically, in Mary’s direst straits, Percy took decisive action, probably saving her life. He wrote on June 18, 1822, to John Gisborne (the husband of Maria James Reveley Gisborne, who in her late twenties had cared for Mary in infancy following the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, and who had refused an offer of marriage from William Godwin during the same period): “Mary will write soon; at present she suffers greatly from excess of weakness, produced by a severe miscarriage, from which she is now slowly recovering. Her situation for some hours was alarming, and as she was totally destitute of medical assistance, I took the most decisive resolutions, by dint of making her sit in ice, I succeeded in checking the hemorrhage and the fainting fits, so that when the physician arrived all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but to applaud me for my boldness” (Roger Ingpen, ed., Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, collected by Roger Ingpen, 2 vols. [London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909], Volume II, 975).
57. The scene was imagined by the painter Louis Edouard Fournier in 1889. He fancifully depicts Mary kneeling on the sand, and Byron, Trelawny, and the Shelleys’ friend Leigh Hunt standing before the flames. By custom, Mary would have remained in a carriage. Hunt was not in fact there (though an unsigned review of Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [London, 1847] in the Eclectic Magazine [vol. 12, September 1847] puts him in a carriage at the site, an account later hotly disputed by Hunt himself), and Byron left before the fire consumed the corpse. The pyre itself may be reflected in the closing scene of Frankenstein.
58. Biographer Richard Holmes reports that the quotation is from the beginning of a “brief obituary” that appeared in The Courier, a leading Tory newspaper in London.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1
59. Arthur M. Z. Norman, “Shelley’s Heart,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 10, no. 1 (January 1955): 114. Norman wrote variously on topics as wide-ranging as references to Plutarch in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, “Linguistic Aspects of the Mores of U.S. Occupation and Security Forces in Japan” (a 1954 piece for the academic journal American Speech), and the subclasses of the English nominal.
60. Jones, ed., Mary Shelley’s Journal, 180–81. She was, of course, speaking metaphorically: Mary was surrounded by friends, as she assured her father in a letter, and Godwin, while he complained that he learned of Percy’s death from a stranger, recanted his vow to cease to write to Mary and offered to share her troubles. See St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 467–68.
61. For more on the Hunts, see note 23, Volume III, Chapter I, below.
62. Although the battle brought about the fall of Missolonghi to the Ottomans, it was a turning point for the rebels in the War of Independence.
63. Sunstein, in Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, relates that on June 25, 1825, the playwright John Howard Payne gave signs of declaring his love for Mary on a walk home with her from her father’s: “She forestalled him by saying, gently but frankly, that in the hypothetical event that devotion to Shelley permitted her a ‘second connection’ he must be a man whose character and genius approached Shelley’s, who ‘had drawn her from obscurity’ ” (267). The actual source of the remarks is revealing: Payne was disappointed to learn that Mary’s friendship with him was little more than an opportunity to obtain theater tickets and an introduction to Washington Irving, the American writer who had, by 1825, achieved great success in Europe. Mary apparently placed some hope in initiating a relationship with Irving. Crushed by Mary’s rejection of him but determined to remain the “hero,” as he put it, Payne wrote Irving, “There was a long conversation in walking home with Mrs. S. … in which she attempted fully but delicately to explain herself upon our sentiments with regard to our correspondence—plainly enough, but very indirectly. She said that she felt herself so placed with the world that she could never expect its distinctions; and that the high feeling she entertained for the memory of her husband forbade the hope of any future connection, which should make the world indifferent to her—or rather the English world. Therefore she was desirous of getting to Italy. . . . The conversation then turned upon you. She said you had interested her more than any one she had seen since she left Italy … and that she longed for friendship with you. I rallied her a little upon the declaration, and at first she fired at my mentioning that she talked as if she were in love. … The scope of her remarks was that whenever she formed any alliance it must be with some one whose high character and mind should be worthy of him who had drawn her from obscurity, and that her selection must not dishonor his choice” (F. B
. Sanborn, ed., The Romance of Mary W. Shelley, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving [Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1907], 59–60). In fact, the remarks reported by Payne regarding Percy seem to have been aimed at him, not Irving, but Payne got his subtle revenge: Irving never pursued Mary.
64. Gordon, Romantic Outlaws, 505.
65. See note 23, above.
66. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
67. For line-by-line comparisons of word substitutions, changes in punctuation, etc., made by Mary Shelley in her late husband’s poems, as well as an overview of her masterful compilation generally of his body of work, see Richard Allen, “Mary Shelley as Editor of the Poems of Percy Shelley,” http://oro.open.ac.uk/40143/1/MWS%20Finalx.doc; Allen’s piece is also included as a chapter in Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence, and Gill Perry, eds., Women, Scholarship, and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c. 1790–1900 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000)—the above remark about Percy’s Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue (1818) may be found on page 84 of the book. Editors Kevin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (The Poems of Shelley, Volume 2, 1817–1819 [London and New York: Routledge, 2000] further parse Mary Shelley’s individual interpretations and elucidations of Percy Shelley’s work, maintaining, for instance, in the present case, that “[n]ot all of [Mary Shelley’s] statement” with regard to the genesis of Rosalind and Helen “is correct” (266).
68. Rainy evenings were plentiful in June 1816, the “year without a summer,” as the eruption of Tambora caused major climate changes throughout the world. See note 2, Appendix 1, below.
69. See Appendix 1 for the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, in which she gives a fuller account of the conversations that led to the dream.
70. For a more detailed discussion, see “A Note on the Text,” below.
71. Much nonsense has been written in support of this thesis. See, for example, John Lauritsen’s outrageous The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (New York: Pagan Press, 2007), in which he argues that the book is an encoded hymn to Percy Shelley’s secret homosexuality. Germaine Greer, in a 2007 Guardian review, trashes Lauritsen’s book, arguing that his proposition that only a skilled writer like Percy Bysshe Shelley could have written it bears no consideration: “[Lauritsen’s] logic goes something like this: Frankenstein is a masterpiece; masterpieces are not written by self-educated girls and therefore Frankenstein cannot have been written by Mary Shelley. If Frankenstein is not a masterpiece, the thesis collapses. Though millions of people educated in the US have been made to study and write essays about Frankenstein, it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given, notwithstanding the historic fact that its theme has inspired more than 50 (mostly bad) films.” Yet in a 2007 Salon review, Camille Paglia defends Lauritsen, taking at face value an anonymous 1824 Knight’s Quarterly review of Valperga that suggests that Frankenstein might have been written by Percy Shelley. Paglia incorrectly states that the Knight’s Quarterly review is evidence that Percy’s authorship “seems to have been known in British literary circles.” In fact, the review states, “Still I should not, from internal evidence, suppose Frankenstein to be the work of [Percy] Shelley. It has much of his poetry and vigour—but it is wholly free from those philosophical opinions from which scarcely any of his are free.” (The full review appears in the Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein edited by J. Paul Hunter, and as an appendix to Lauritsen’s book.) However, Paglia maintains of Lauritsen’s work, “This is a funny, wonderful, revelatory book that I hope will inspire ambitious graduate students and young faculty to strike blows for truth in our mired profession, paralyzed by convention and fear.”
Lauritsen is not alone in his search for evidence that Percy Shelley was the true author of Frankenstein: See, for example, Phyllis Zimmerman’s Shelley’s Fiction (Los Angeles: Darami Press, 1998) and the otherwise thoughtful Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein’s True Creator, by Scott Douglas de Hart (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013), both of which conclude that the biographical coincidences of Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley are evidence of Percy’s authorship. One may give the conclusion as little credence as the suggestion that Mary Shelley borrowed the entire story from tales she heard while allegedly visiting Castle Frankenstein along the Rhine. See note 18, Volume III, Chapter I, below.
72. See, for example, Betty T. Bennett, “Feminism and Editing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Editor and/or the Text,” in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 67–96. Bennett writes, of her edition of Mary Shelley’s letters: “My guiding principle in editing the letters was to credit Mary Shelley, based on the manuscript of the work, with the aesthetic and intellectual mastery that created Frankenstein (as opposed to those who still believed that Shelley had either written it or edited it so extensively as to make it his work)” (86).
73. For example, for the year 1817, Mary’s journal lists seventy books that she read, fifteen of which she indicated were read by Percy as well. There were also many, many books that they read aloud to each other.
74. Mary Shelley was not definitively identified as the author until publication of the two-volume 1823 edition of Frankenstein, wherein she is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. See “A Note about the Text,” below, for more on the 1823 edition.
75. Although it is impossible to ascertain accurate sales figures and difficult to make comparisons, Susan Tyler Hitchcock estimates that by 1851 the novel had sold more than seven thousand copies, far more than all the volumes of Percy Shelley’s poetry combined (Frankenstein: A Cultural History [ New York: W. W. Norton, 2007], 101). Indeed, according to Hitchcock, Mary made more from the first printing alone—around £70—than Percy would ever earn from his writing (77).
76. Quarterly Review, January 1818.
77. Edinburgh Magazine, March 1818.
78. More artistically important matters.
79. The British Critic (new series) 9 (April 1818): 432–38. The reviewer also commented, “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.” How the critic came to his “understanding” of the true authorship of Frankenstein is unknown.
80. Anonymous, Knight’s Quarterly (August–November 1824): 195–99.
81. Can “classic” ever be more than personal taste and, as such, a product of the time? For example, Arthur Conan Doyle’s charming Through the Magic Door, a paean to the books Doyle loved, written in 1907, unsurprisingly selects from the nineteenth century the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Melville’s “Otaheite” novels, and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Guy de Maupassant (notably all men) but includes as the greatest novel ever written Charles Reade’s now obscure The Cloister and the Hearth and the writing of George Borrow and F. T. Bullen, wholly ignoring anything by Jane Austen, George Sand, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, or the Brontës and dismissing the writing of Flaubert, Verne, and Wells.
82. Routledge’s World Library was, according to advertisements appearing in 1886, intended to make available to the middle class, at a cost of a mere three pence per volume in paperback, works that “the world will not willingly let … die.” These were initially advertised to include Goethe’s Faust, Joseph Allen’s Life of Lord Nelson, a life of Garibaldi, Daniel Defoe’s History of the Great Plague in London, and Scott’s Marmion.
83. Joyce Carol Oates, “Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984): 543–54.
84. Hitchcock, Frankenstein: A C
ultural History, 5.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE TEXT USED in this volume is that of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. Scholars have debated for years whether the 1831 edition of the work is “preferable to” or “better than” the 1818 edition. Anne K. Mellor, in “Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach,” argues that the September 1816 manuscript is the “preferred” text because it permits the reader to discern the intentions of Mary Shelley by ignoring Percy Shelley’s revisions.1 Second best, according to Mellor, is the 1818 text, which espouses the “values” of the original; the 1831 edition is, in Mellor’s opinion, fatally compromised by a new pessimism in Mary Shelley’s views (see Letter IV, note 53, below). The notes in the volume at hand provide the text of every change made between the 1818 and 1831 editions. The introduction written by Mary Shelley for the 1831 edition is reproduced as Appendix 1, below. Hundreds of editions of Frankenstein have been published since 1818,2 but few identify the text used, although the 1831 text is the most common.
In 1823, a two-volume edition of the novel was published, at last identifying Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as the author. This was not, as was originally thought, a mere reprinting of the 1818 edition. E. B. Murray observes,3 “The fact that there are a good many substantive changes … seems so far to have escaped editorial scrutiny. M. K. Joseph refers to the 1823 edition as ‘simply a page-by-page reprint of the [1818 edition], rearranged in two volumes,’ while James Rieger both concurs with Joseph and adds that the volumes were so ‘rearranged’ by Godwin because Mary was in Italy.” Murray went on to tabulate the substantive changes between the 1818 and 1823 editions, mostly word substitutions. Virtually all of the changes would be retained in the 1831 edition, which, in addition, contained often lengthy new passages, reproduced, as noted, in the annotations below. “It is clear that a scrupulous editor was responsible for” the 1823 changes, Murray concludes. Who was that editor? It appears likely that it was William Godwin, who—on the strength of the public’s appetite for the play Presumption, based on Frankenstein (see note 43, Volume I, Chapter VI, below), and the many imitations of Presumption— also arranged for publication of the 1823 edition. Godwin applied a similarly liberal editorial hand to the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga in 1823. The 1823 changes are not material to understanding Frankenstein and are not detailed in the notes below.