by Mary Shelley
The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming, that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world, was now within my grasp. Not that, like a magic scene, it all opened upon me at once: the information I had obtained was of a nature rather to direct my endeavours so soon as I should point them towards the object of my search, than to exhibit that object already accomplished. I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual light.7
I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be: listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject.8 I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.9
When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking; but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed. I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect: yet, when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large.10 After having formed this determination, and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.11
No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species12 would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.
These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?13 My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel houses;14 and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house15 furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
Illustration of resurrectionists at work, accompanying the story of John Holmes and Peter Williams, whipped for stealing dead bodies in 1777, by Hablot Knight Browne (1877).
The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage: but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence disquieted them; and I well remembered the words of my father: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself, you will think of us with affection, and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me, if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.”
I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings; but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature,16 should be completed.
Ossuary in Valladolid, Spain (photo by Raúl Polanco Montriel, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).
I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice, or faultiness on my part; but I am now convinced that he was justified in conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved;17 Caesar would have spared his country;18 America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.19
But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; and your looks remind me to proceed.20
My father made no reproach in his letters; and only took notice of my silence by inquiring into my occupations more particularly than before. Winter, spring, and summer, passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossom or the expanding leaves—sights which before always yielded me supreme delight, so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation. The leaves of that year had withered before my work drew near to a close; and now every day shewed me more plainly how well I had succeeded. But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the min
es, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever,21 and I became nervous to a most painful degree; a disease that I regretted the more because I had hitherto enjoyed most excellent health, and had always boasted of the firmness of my nerves.22 But I believed that exercise and amusement would soon drive away such symptoms; and I promised myself both of these, when my creation should be complete.
1. Chapter 4 in the 1831 edition.
2. The three sentences following are deleted in the 1831 edition (up to the phrase “became so ardent and eager”) and replaced with the following: “In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon”
3. Waldman’s approval was added by Percy Shelley.
4. The Thomas Text adds, “The event of these enquiries interested my understanding, I may say my imagination, until I was exalted to a kind of transport. And indeed [unless I had been animated … ]”
5. This phrase, beginning with “all the minutiae,” was added by Percy Shelley.
6. As is the case in so many works of speculative fiction that followed Frankenstein, the “secret” is never revealed.
7. On his fourth voyage, according to Burton’s One Thousand and One Nights, the legendary Arabic or Persian sailor Sinbad is presented with a wife by a friendly king. He subsequently learns that it is the custom of the country in which he finds himself that, if one spouse dies, the other is buried alive along with the deceased. When his wife dies suddenly, Sinbad is forcibly entombed with her in a cave. Trapped, he escapes when he sees light admitted through a pinpoint opening in the cave wall, to which he climbs. He enlarges the hole and exits the tomb, fleeing the country. Victor’s allusion may also be taken as a commentary on his view of his pending marriage to Elizabeth—he is trapped by his dead wife, and only creation—only the creature—will save him from that fate. See William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny, chapter 4, “Woman and the Divided Self.” Veeder’s book summarizes the view of many psychoanalytic critics of Frankenstein and analyzes in some depth how the book attempts to resolve Mary Shelley’s personal relationships with “Promethean” men (including Percy Shelley and her father, William Godwin) through the depiction of Victor as well as the proper role of women. “Androgyny,” for Veeder, means the harmonious integration of male and female virtues and traits in a single personality, an objective he sees as vital to Mary Shelley in life and literature.
8. Was the “secret” so simple that, if he were so inclined, Victor could whisper a few words to the unschooled Walton and reveal all—to Walton’s peril? For example, “Apply a shock of sufficient voltage to the corpse …”? Even in the iconic James Whale film of Frankenstein (and its successors), although lightning and electricity are involved in the germination of life, the “secret” appears to be far more than a simple ignition switch, bringing an electrical spark to compressed gases in an internal combustion engine.
Note that the narrator here breaks the fourth wall, addressing the listener—Walton—and reminding us that we are hearing a retelling of Victor’s tale by Walton, as transcribed for his sister. This occurs only a few times in the course of a very long narrative.
9. Even at this late stage of his life, on his deathbed, Victor still does not understand that it was not his quest for knowledge that was his downfall—rather, it was his failure to take responsibility for his actions. This is the first instance in the novel in which this theme is sounded—be careful of probing too deeply, don’t seek too much knowledge—yet it is the theme on which the popularity of Frankenstein seems to be almost wholly founded. Peake’s play Presumption (see note 43, Volume I, Chapter VI, below), the usage of the creature in the popular press as a symbol of misguided science or invention, and the entire cinematic history of the novel focus on this narrow message and largely ignore Victor’s irresponsibility. See the more detailed discussion of this distortion in the Foreword, text accompanying note 6, above, and Appendices 4 and 6, below.
10. The average height of the English soldier ages twenty to twenty-three in 1800 was about five foot five (168.5 cm). See John Komlos, “Shrinking in a Growing Economy? The Mystery of Physical Stature During the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (1998): 779–802. Clearly Victor did not intend to be limited to human cadavers for his components.
11. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, students of human anatomy had difficulty finding the cadavers they required. The scarcity was the combined result of the expansion of medical training; a decline in capital punishment due to, among other things, criminal law reform; and the lack of refrigeration. As a result, body snatchers or “resurrectionists” stole corpses from graveyards. In 1827–28 and 1831, Edinburgh serial killers William Burke and William Hare and the copycat London Burkers committed murder for the sole purpose of providing fresh corpses. The Anatomical Act of 1832 in England ended such sprees by widening the pool of corpses available to supply the market.
12. Why did Victor think that assembling parts from human cadavers and animal remains would result in a “new species”? Perhaps he believed that the size of the creature would be inherited by its descendants. The work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck advocating the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics was not published until 1809 and so was clearly not known to Victor, but Lamarck’s work reflects contemporary thought, including the writing of the Comte de Buffon, who argued for similar notions. The theory was not discredited until the early twentieth century, although Trofim Lysenko, the leading Stalinist agricultural scientist of the 1930s, held on stubbornly to its tenets until his work, too, was discarded.
13. The element of “clay” contains recollections of both Adam, the first man, and, later, golems, creatures of animated clay. In the Babylonian Talmud, Adam is described as having been first a golem (גולם): dust was “kneaded into a shapeless mass,” or “husk,” resulting in his creation (Tractate Sanhedrin, 38b, Jews’ College, London). Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezazel of Prague (1520–1609) reportedly created a golem to serve as a defender of the Prague ghetto, to protect its residents from pogroms. In some versions of the legend, the creature is controlled by the rabbi and fulfills its mission; in others, it escapes its master’s control and engages in a murderous rampage. Paul Wegener’s silent black-and-white Weimar horror classic The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) finds the monster ultimately pacified by Rabbi Loew and an innocent girl, who is seen playing in the streets of the ghetto; the visual depiction of the golem is achieved through the employment of spectacularly grotesque German expressionist sets. In the popular serialized novel The Golem (1913–14), by Gustav Meyrink, the creature is presented as the uncontrolled embodiment of the spirit of the ghetto.
Scene from Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, How He Came into the World) (Projektions-AG Union, 1920), co-directed by and starring Paul Wegener, from the 1915 novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.
14. A building for the storage of bones, typically those unearthed in the course of grave digging. In some regions, where suitable burial grounds were limited, the corpse might be interred to decompose and then, after a period of time, the bones disinterred and deposited in a charnel house, allowing the burial site to be reused. Charnel houses persist today in regions such as the Cyclades and in the desert; Saint Catherine’s Monastery, at the foot of Mount Sinai, continues to operate its charnel house, which may have been established more than fourteen hundred years ago.
15. The clear implication is that the creature contains parts of the bodies of animals. Eighteenth-century slaughterhouses would have been populated with the carcasses of dead horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry. Beginning in the eighteenth century, reformers argued that, for the production of meat intended for human consumption, public (government-operated or -licensed) slaugh
terhouses would be preferable to private—for example, a marketplace or butcher’s shed. See Amy J. Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Human Ecology Review 17, no. 1 (2010), http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her171/Fitzgerald.pdf. However, the first such public slaughterhouse was not established until the nineteenth century, in France.
16. This sentence was revised by Percy Shelley from Mary Shelley’s more telling “until the great object of my affection was compleated” (Notebooks, 91).
17. It was common practice in ancient Greece for the conquerors to enslave the entire populace of a conquered nation. Victor here may refer to the conquest of Greece by the Romans in 146 CE, but Turkish rule (from the fifteenth century through 1821) would have been on his mind as well. Lord Byron, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, bemoaned the Greeks’ “[t]rembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand / [f]rom birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned” (Canto I).
18. Which “Caesar” is to blame for the fall of the Roman Empire is a matter of some debate. See, for example, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first published 1776–89), which considers the question in depth. Certainly the emperor Constantine (306–337 CE) played a significant role, in allowing Christianity to supplant the Roman gods and in dividing the empire into two parts, with capitals in Rome and Constantinople. Nonetheless, the downfall did not occur for almost one hundred years, when the Visigoths sacked Rome (410 CE).
19. Christopher Columbus made four voyages to the Americas, from 1492 to 1504, seeking a westward passage to the Indian Ocean. His announcement of the discovery of the Caribbean islands set off a frenzy of western exploration by Europeans, though the Caribbean island nations proved to have little to trade or exploit. Subsequent European explorations led to the South American continent itself and the discovery of vast natural resources there. Small groups of Spanish conquistadores, with the aid of forcibly recruited armies of indigenous Americans, along with the devastating pandemics the conquistadores brought from Europe, took over the empires they found in South America. The Aztec empire in Mexico fell in 1521, and the Peruvian Inca empire was conquered in 1532.