by Mary Shelley
However, there is another text that is considered in the notes below. In 1823, while residing in Genoa, Mary Shelley presented to her friend Mrs. Thomas—an Englishwoman whom she met there but who remains otherwise unknown to posterity—a corrected and hand-annotated copy of the 1818 edition. This was apparently created without reference to the Godwin-edited 1823 two-volume edition. Although the Thomas copy is part of the collection of the Morgan Library in New York, it was not until the 1982 edition of the 1818 text, published by the University of Chicago Press and edited by James Rieger, that these emendations were published. Material changes reflected in the Thomas copy (referred to hereinafter as the “Thomas Text”) are noted below.
Page from the Thomas Text of Frankenstein (1823), from Volume III, Chapter VI of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, with editorial notes by Mary Shelley.
Page from Notebook A, the draft of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Shelfmark MS. Abinger c. 56, fol. 59r, with the permission of The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford).
The manuscript of the 1818 edition exists in several versions. The original text written by Mary Shelley, alluded to in her journals (termed the “Ur-Text” by scholars such as Charles E. Robinson), has not survived. It is described by Robinson as a “novella-length narrative written between June and August 1816.” A “draft” (hereinafter referred to as the “Draft”) in Mary Shelley’s handwriting appears to have been begun at the end of August or the beginning of September 1816 and seems to have been in part a copying-over of sections of the Ur-Text.4 The conclusion that there was significant “copying-over” is supported by several apparent copying errors that appear in the Draft. These are principally of names that Mary Shelley meant to change from the Ur-Text to the Draft but instead copied over and then changed (in strikethroughs in the Draft). Of course, alternatively, she might have changed her mind while writing the Draft. At some point, perhaps even simultaneous with Mary Shelley’s editing, the Draft was revised by Percy Shelley, who made numerous handwritten additions, deletions, and emendations.
The Draft is preserved in the form of two notebooks, called A and B by scholars, consisting of 301 pages of text plus a supplement of 8 pages. Unfortunately, the Draft is not complete: The four introductory letters from Robert Walton, whose letters at the beginning and end form a framework for the action, and the first part of Chapter 1 in Volume I and almost half of Chapter 3 and all of Chapter 4 of Volume II are missing. The Draft was followed by a “fair copy,” completed in 1817; proofs, with additional changes; revisions, with still more changes; and, finally, the 1818 edition.
Notes below will address Percy Shelley’s significant textual changes to the Draft. Although substantial material was added to the work before the final text was published and Percy Shelley largely handled the publishing process, it is not possible to say definitively which portions of that added material were written by Mary Shelley and which by Percy Shelley (as contrasted with the changes to the Draft, where the handwriting of each is readily identifiable). For detailed discussions of Percy Shelley’s revisions of the manuscript of Frankenstein, see Anne K. Mellor’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters and The Original Frankenstein, edited by Charles E. Robinson. Also invaluable is Robinson’s The Frankenstein Notebooks, a comprehensive correlation of the notebooks with the published text. That work also contains a complete transcription of the notebooks, of special value because the handwriting is often difficult to decipher.
Page from Notebook C, the “fair copy” of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
1. In pursuit of Mellor’s idea, Charles E. Robinson published The Original Frankenstein (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2008), in which Robinson, using his previous Frankenstein Notebooks (1996), teased out Percy’s amendments from the 1816 manuscript and edited the remaining text into what he describes as the “original two-volume novel.”
2. There were 281 editions in all formats, including foreign, through 2000, according to the Romantic Circles website (https://www.re.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/textual). Many more have appeared since 2000.
3. In “Changes in the 1823 Edition of Frankenstein,” The Library 3, no. 4 (December 1981), 320–27, http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/murray.html. Murray tabulates 117 changes made to the 1818 text. Subsequently, David Ketterer, in “Frankenstein’s ‘Conversion’ from Natural Magic to Modern Science—and a Shifted (and Converted) Last Draft Insert,” Science Fiction Studies 71, no. 24, Part 1 (March 1997), describes 8 more, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/ketterer71art.htm.
4. The Draft is at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It has been published as part of Charles E. Robinson, ed., The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Manuscript Novel, 1816–1817 (with alterations in the hand of Percy Bysshe Shelley) as it survives in Draft and Fair Copy deposited by Lord Abinger in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and is available online at http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/frankenstein.
1 2
TO
WILLIAM GODWIN,3
AUTHOR OF POLITICAL JUSTICE, CALEB WILLIAMS, & C.
THESE VOLUMES
Are Respectfully Inscribed
BY
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE4
The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin,5 and some of the physiological writers of Germany,6 as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.
I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece,—Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream,7—and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.
Portrait of Erasmus Darwin, by Joseph Wright (1792).
The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation.8 It was commenced, partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these, as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the novels of the present day,9 and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.
It is a subject also of additional interest to the author, that this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid,10 and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands.11 These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to
the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story,12 founded on some supernatural occurrence.
The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.13
MARLOW, 1817
1. E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894) summarizes the myth of Prometheus: “Prometheus made men of clay, and stole fire from heaven to animate them. For this he was chained by Zeus to Mount Caucasus, where an eagle preyed on his liver daily.” Note that this is clearly the version of the myth that Shelley had in mind, not the version in which Prometheus gives fire to men to use. Entries in Mary Shelley’s journal confirm that in 1815 she was reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which work she would have found the following passage:
Whether with particles of Heav’nly fir
The God of Nature did his Soul inspire,
Or Earth, but new divided from the Skie,
And, pliant, still, retain’d the Aethereal Energy:
Which Wise Prometheus temper’d into paste,
And, mix’t with living Streams, the Godlike Image cast …
From such rude Principles our Form began;
And Earth was Metamorphos’d into Man.
(Garth, Dryden, et al. translation)
Prometheus was evidently very much on the minds of several of the circle of friends at the Villa Diodati in 1816: Not only did Lord Byron write his poem “Prometheus” in July 1816 (the year he also divorced his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, whom he had married the previous year); in September he began his Promethean saga Manfred; and between 1818 and 1819, Percy Shelley wrote his epic poem Prometheus Unbound.
Prometheus Creates Man from Clay, by Constantin Hansen (1845).
Shelley Composing “Prometheus Unbound” in the Baths of Caracalla, by Joseph Severn (1845).
2. Book 10, lines 743–45.
3. Mary Shelley’s father and the author, in addition to the works she lists here, of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793), hereinafter referred to as “Political Justice.” This last was one of the prime planks of the platform of the English Jacobins, who not only supported the French Revolution, but raised the possibility of revolution in England. Among these English radicals were prominent artists including Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge in particular admired Godwin’s impassioned but reasoned arguments and wrote a sonnet, “To William Godwin, Author of Political Justice,” published in 1795, in praise of his outspokenness:
O! form’d t’ illume a sunless world forlorn,
As o’er the chill and dusky brow of Night,
In Finland’s wintry skies, the Mimic Morn
Electric pours a stream of rosy light,
Pleas’d I have mark’d OPPRESSION, terror-pale,
Since, thro’ the windings of her dark machine,
Thy steady eye has shot its glances keen—
And bade th’ All-lovely “scenes at distance hail.”
Nor will I not thy holy guidance bless,
And hymn thee, GODWIN! with an arden Lay;
For that thy voice, in Passion’s stormy day,
When wild I roam’d the bleak Heath of Distress,
Bade the bright form of JUSTICE meet my way—
And told me, that her name was HAPPINESS.
Godwin’s Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a novel, was published in 1794. See the Foreword, text following note 13, above.
4. Notwithstanding the voice of the preface, which implies that it is the author speaking, the preface to the 1818 (anonymous) edition was written by Percy Shelley. In the introduction to the third (signed) edition, Mary Shelley wrote, “As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.” The preface also appears in the 1823 two-volume edition, the first to bear the author’s name.
5. This refers to Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). Eminent physician, poet, inventor, natural philosopher, and abolitionist, his grandsons included Charles Darwin and the explorer and anthropologist Francis Galton. He wrote widely on the origins of life, formulating a theory of evolution long before Charles was born. There is no evidence that either Mary Shelley or Percy Shelley actually met Darwin, but it appears that Percy Shelley and Lord Byron knew his work well.
6. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “physiological” at this time referred to the material universe or to natural science; thus the physiological writers were students of nature. The Shelleys’ awareness of the physiological writers of Germany likely arose (according to Shelley scholar Marilyn Butler) through friendship with William Lawrence, Percy Shelley’s physician. In 1809 Lawrence translated Comparative Anatomy, by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), one of the first to study the natural history of humans. In his Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (1819), Lawrence reported on the work of other “recent German zoologists,” including Karl Asmund Rudolphi (1771–1832), a Swedish-born German who served as professor of anatomy at the University of Berlin and studied the anatomy of nerves (among countless other topics), and Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861), professor of anatomy and physiology at Heidelberg, best remembered for his pioneering work on the development of the human brain.
Portrait of Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet (1783–1867), artist unknown (1839).
7. Each of these plays, which may be said to be Shakespeare’s only “fantasies,” includes a hideous creature: the monstrous, half-human Caliban, child of Sycorax the witch, appears in The Tempest, and Bottom, the (temporarily) ass-headed man, frightens away his friends in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Neil Gaiman has revealed in The Sandman that both plays were written by Shakespeare at the behest of Morpheus, “Dream” of the Endless.
8. The “casual conversation” is detailed in the Author’s Introduction to the 1831 edition, set forth in Appendix 1, below. Of course, no work of fiction can ever be traced to a single source, or to a single moment in an author’s life. The author may in fact not recollect all of what influenced her. For example, Mary Shelley may have read an account in the Edinburgh Review in September 1814 of a sailor who, having lain in a coma for seven months, was restored to life by physician Henry Cline. The incident is mentioned in an extensive uncredited review of An Inquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life, by John Abernethy. Abernethy was well known to William Lawrence (see note 6, above), and Lawrence may have pointed out the review—in fact, a long essay on the state of science regarding life and death—to Mary Shelley (who had been Cline’s patient).
It is also known that the Shelleys owned Robert John Thornton’s Philosophy of Medicine: Medical Extracts on the Nature of Health and Disease (1796), which includes extensive material on “the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead.” Several chapters describe methods to be applied to persons being “recalled to life” from the “silent mansions of the tomb.”
The recent death of her own child and a dream of resurrection may well have been another circumstance, though the dream may not have been known to Percy Shelley. See text accompanying note 42, Foreword, above.
The idea that life might be generated by artificial means was of great interest to many people in 1816, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. To which discussions of that idea she was exposed can never be definitively known.
Map of Geneva, ca. 1800.
9. The author here seeks to deflect the widespread criticism or “moral panic” that had arisen at the end of the eighteenth century as novel-reading spread. Ana Vogrinčič, in “The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic,” summarizes the prevailing criticism: “Broadly, one could divide the reproaches into those ascribing to novels the dangerous psychological affects, triggering imitation and inoculating wrong ideas of love and li
fe; and into those referring to the mere habit of novel-reading as a physically harmful waste of time, damaging not only the mind and the morale of readers, but also their eyesight and posture” (Medij. istraž. 14, no. 2 [2008]: 103–24, found online at hrcak.srce.hr/file/49661). Circulating or lending libraries were likened to brothels or gin-shops, and the readers of fiction, especially young women, were regarded as debauched and often deluded.
Whether Percy Shelley meant to skewer specific books that bored him is unknown. Popular books of the day that are remembered today include Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815); less memorable are, for example, Fanny Burney’s last work, The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties (1814), a five-volume historical novel that sold poorly, or Maria Edgeworth’s four-volume novel Patronage (1814), which features two families joined by kinship and inheritance: the Percys, “who demonstrate their worthiness through labor,” and their duplicitous cousins the Falconers, who “make their way by patronage into jobs they cannot sustain, homes and social classes for which their taste is deficient, and marriages that are not happy” (Mark Schoenfield, “Novel Marriages, Romantic Labor, and the Quarterly Press,” Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, edited by Kim Wheatley [London: Frank Cass and Company, 2003]), 76. As one of twenty-two children of a successful politician who married four times, Edgeworth was presumably well versed in her subject’s complications.