The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  We passed a fortnight in these perambulations: my health and spirits had long been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I breathed, the natural incidents of our progress, and the conversation of my friend. Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow-creatures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clerval called forth the better feelings of my heart; he again taught me to love the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! how sincerely did you love me, and endeavour to elevate my mind, until it was on a level with your own. A selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and affection warmed and opened my senses; I became the same happy creature who, a few years ago, loving and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care. When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy. The present season was indeed divine; the flowers of spring bloomed in the hedges, while those of summer were already in bud: I was undisturbed by thoughts which during the preceding year had pressed upon me, notwithstanding my endeavours to throw them off, with an invincible burden.

  Henry rejoiced in my gaiety, and sincerely sympathized in my feelings: he exerted himself to amuse me, while he expressed the sensations that filled his soul. The resources of his mind on this occasion were truly astonishing: his conversation was full of imagination; and very often, in imitation of the Persian and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion.19 At other times he repeated my favourite poems, or drew me out into arguments, which he supported with great ingenuity.

  We returned to our college on a Sunday afternoon: the peasants were dancing, and every one we met appeared gay and happy. My own spirits were high, and I bounded along with feelings of unbridled joy and hilarity.

  1. Chapter 6 in the 1831 edition.

  2. That is, his political influence.

  3. This cynical view of lawyers was echoed by writers such as Samuel Johnson, who reportedly remarked that “he did not like to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney” (quoted in the Legal Observer, or Journal of Jurisprudence, for March 1838, in an article on “Public Opinion of Attorneys”). The article also reported the remarks of one Colonel Stanhope, who, in opposing the nomination of six attorneys to govern a commission, called them members “of a profession in which the public generally had little confidence, and against which many had a decided dislike.” Percy Shelley had many dealings with lawyers in the years preceding the publication of Frankenstein, as he fought for custody of his two children by his marriage (a marriage that, as we have seen, had ended with the suicide of his wife Harriet). Ultimately, the court found him unfit to assume custody.

  4. The name was originally “Martin,” not “Moritz,” in the Draft.

  All of the preceding paragraphs of Elizabeth’s letter and the heading “To V. Frankenstein” are replaced in the 1831 edition with the following:

  It was from my own Elizabeth:

  “My dearest Cousin,

  You have been ill, very ill, and even the constant letters of dear kind Henry are not sufficient to reassure me on your account. You are forbidden to write—to hold a pen; yet one word from you, dear Victor, is necessary to calm our apprehensions. For a long time I have thought that each post would bring this line, and my persuasions have restrained my uncle from undertaking a journey to Ingolstadt. I have prevented his encountering the inconveniences and perhaps dangers of so long a journey, yet how often have I regretted not being able to perform it myself! I figure to myself that the task of attending on your sickbed has devolved on some mercenary old nurse, who could never guess your wishes nor minister to them with the care and affection of your poor cousin. Yet that is over now: Clerval writes that indeed you are getting better; I eagerly hope that you will confirm this intelligence soon in your own handwriting.

  “Get well—and return to us. You will find a happy, cheerful home and friends who love you dearly. Your father’s health is vigorous, and he asks but to see you, but to be assured that you are well; and not a care will ever cloud his benevolent countenance. How pleased you would be to remark the improvement of our Ernest! He is now sixteen and full of activity and spirit. He is desirous to be a true Swiss and to enter into foreign service, but we cannot part with him, at least until his elder brother returns to us. My uncle is not pleased with the idea of a military career in a distant country, but Ernest never had your powers of application. He looks upon study as an odious fetter; his time is spent in the open air, climbing the hills, or rowing on the lake. I fear that he will become an idler unless we yield the point and permit him to enter on the profession which he has selected.

  “Little alteration, except the growth of our dear children, has taken place since you left us. The blue lake and snow-clad mountains—they never change; and I think our placid home and our contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws. My trifling occupations take up my time and amuse me, and I am rewarded for any exertions by seeing none but happy, kind faces around me. Since you left us, but one change has taken place in our little household. Do you remember on what occasion Justine Moritz entered our family?”

  There are a few subtle changes here: Ernest now desires the “foreign service,” a much more public-spirited choice for the son of a respected family than being a farmer. Clerval is no longer blamed for covering up Victor’s illness. And tellingly, Elizabeth no longer mentions the death of Victor’s mother.

  5. Here “M.” clearly stands for “Monsieur.”

  6. The phrase “Where she was taught all the duties of servant & kindly treated” was deleted by Percy Shelley from the draft, and the exaltation of Swiss egalitarianism following was inserted.

  7. These observations found their origins in a letter nominally by Percy Shelley in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (London: T. Hookham and C. and J. Ollier, 1817), hereinafter “Six Weeks’ Tour.” The title page of the book credits Percy Shelley as the author, but scholars agree that it was cowritten and significantly edited by Mary Shelley as a record of their trip around France, Switzerland, Holland, and Germany in the summer of 1814. (In a letter written in 1843, she referred to the volume as “my 6 weeks tour.”) The book also includes four letters written during a return trip in the summer of 1816 with Claire Clairmont; some were ostensibly written by Percy Shelley and some by Mary Shelley, but all were heavily edited or compiled by the latter from various letters and diary entries. In letter 2, dated June 1, 1816, Percy Shelley commented, “There is more equality of classes here than in England. This occasions a greater freedom and refinement of manners among the lower orders than we meet with in our own country. I fancy the haughty English ladies are greatly disgusted with this consequence of republican institutions, for the Genevese servants complain very much of their scolding, an exercise of the tongue, I believe, perfectly unknown here” (108).

  8. The prior portion of this sentence is shortened in the 1831 edition to “Justine, you may remember,”[.]

  9. Angelica is the heroine of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance Orlando Furioso, “The Mad Roland” (1516–32). There is no passage in which Orlando describes Angelica’s beauty as “frank-hearted” or “happy,” at least not in the John Harington translation (1591) or the John Hoole translation in couplets (1783), which would have been available to Elizabeth (the popular William Stewart Rose translation was published in 1823–1831), so we must take this remark as Elizabeth’s interpretation of the poem.

  10. The word “wives” is in all capitals in the 1831 edition.

  11. In January 1816, Mary Shelley gave birth to her second child by Percy Shelley, whom she had not yet married. The child, William, died of malaria in 1819.

  Many have suggested that the reference to “Biron” and the “two little wives” is no mere coincidence but rather a sly reference to Lord Byron’s pending divorce and his two children by his wife. Byron himself jokingly proposed the name “Biron” for his daughte
r by Claire Clairmont.

  12. The balance of the letter, up to Elizabeth’s signature, is replaced in the 1831 edition with the following: “better spirits, dear cousin, but my anxiety returns upon me as I conclude. Write, dearest Victor,—one line—one word will be a blessing to us. Ten thousand thanks to Henry for his kindness, his affection, and his many letters; we are sincerely grateful. Adieu! my cousin; take care of your self; and, I entreat you, write!”

  13. Mary Shelley notes in the Thomas Text, “This letter ought to be re-written.”

  14. It is now more than four months since “a dreary night in November” when Frankenstein awakened the creature, yet he spares not a single thought for the latter’s whereabouts or what might have happened to him in the interim.

  15. Victor makes no mention of having cleaned up his laboratory before passing into a coma. Are we to understand that Clerval found nothing remarkable in a workspace that must have been filled with spare body parts and strange apparatus? As we have seen, Belefant, in Frankenstein, the Man and the Monster, suggests that the laboratory (and the creature) are figments of Victor’s imagination, which would explain what we take to be Clerval’s failure to react.

  16. The preceding portion of this paragraph is replaced in the 1831 edition with the following:

  Clerval had never sympathised in my tastes for natural science; and his literary pursuits differed wholly from those which had occupied me. He came to the university with the design of making himself complete master of the oriental languages, and thus he should open a field for the plan of life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes toward the East, as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention, and I was easily induced to enter on the same studies.

  Clerval now pursues the languages for business purposes, a more conventional reason. By the end of the eighteenth century, trade with Persia and the Arabic-speaking countries was no longer confined to the Dutch, and there would have been ample opportunities for an enterprising young Swiss to develop commercial relationships that would have been facilitated by a knowledge of the local languages.

  17. The following is inserted here in the 1831 edition: “I did not, like him, attempt a critical knowledge of their dialects, for I did not contemplate making any other use of them than temporary amusement. I read merely to understand their meaning, and they well repaid my labours.”

  18. It is now fourteen months after Elizabeth’s letter.

  19. Persian literature was little known in European culture prior to the eighteenth century, its study largely confined to the Zoroastrian liturgical and philosophical texts. A translation into English by William Jones of the poetry of Hafiz (probably the first Persian writer to become known to Westerners) appeared in 1771, and this translation could have come to the attention of Clerval and Frankenstein. Probably the first German translation of his work, by Wahl, was published in 1791, and the famous Purgstall translation appeared in 1812. In 1819, Goethe published a collection of poetry inspired by Hafiz. The poetry of the thirteenth-century mystic Rumi, whose popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has eclipsed that of Hafiz, was not translated into English until the end of the nineteenth century; French and German translations appeared earlier.

  Arabic literature was much better known. For example, One Thousand and One Nights was translated by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717 and achieved vast popularity. The “philosophical” or “theological” novel or allegory Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Sira al-Nabawiyyah (The Treatise of Kamil on the Prophet’s Biography), known in English as Theologus Autodidactus, is a tale of an individual spontaneously generated (by unexplained means) on a desert island. By his own reasoning, he develops a system of natural, philosophical, and theological truths. Said to be the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, it was published in English, German, and French around 1708.

  CHAPTER VI.1

  ON MY RETURN, I found the following letter from my father:

  “TO V. FRANKENSTEIN.2

  “MY DEAR VICTOR,

  “You have probably waited impatiently for a letter to fix the date of your return to us; and I was at first tempted to write only a few lines, merely mentioning the day on which I should expect you. But that would be a cruel kindness, and I dare not do it. What would be your surprise, my son, when you expected a happy and gay3 welcome, to behold, on the contrary, tears and wretchedness? And how, Victor, can I relate our misfortune? Absence cannot have rendered you callous to our joys and griefs; and how shall I inflict pain on an absent child?4 I wish to prepare you for the woeful news, but I know it is impossible; even now your eye skims over the page, to seek the words which are to convey to you the horrible tidings.

  “William is dead!—that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay! Victor, he is murdered!

  “I will not attempt to console you; but will simply relate the circumstances of the transaction.

  “Last Thursday (May 7th)5 I, my niece, and your two brothers, went to walk in Plainpalais.6 The evening was warm and serene, and we prolonged our walk farther than usual. It was already dusk before we thought of returning; and then we discovered that William and Ernest, who had gone on before, were not to be found. We accordingly rested on a seat until they should return. Presently Ernest came, and inquired if we had seen his brother: he said, that they had been playing together,7 that William had run away to hide himself, and that he vainly sought for him, and afterwards waited for him8 a long time, but that he did not return.

  “This account rather alarmed us, and we continued to search for him until night fell, when Elizabeth conjectured that he might have returned to the house. He was not there. We returned again, with torches; for I could not rest, when I thought that my sweet boy had lost himself, and was exposed to all the damps and dews of night: Elizabeth also suffered extreme anguish. About five in the morning I discovered my lovely boy, whom the night before I had seen blooming and active in health, stretched on the grass livid and motionless: the print of the murderer’s finger was on his neck.

  “He was conveyed home, and the anguish that was visible in my countenance betrayed the secret to Elizabeth. She was very earnest to see the corpse. At first I attempted to prevent her; but she persisted, and entering the room where it lay, hastily examined the neck of the victim, and clasping her hands exclaimed, ‘O God! I have murdered my darling infant!’ 9

  “She fainted, and was restored with extreme difficulty. When she again lived, it was only to weep and sigh. She told me, that that same evening William had teazed her to let him wear a very valuable miniature that she possessed of your mother. This picture is gone, and was doubtless the temptation which urged the murderer to the deed. We have no trace of him at present, although our exertions to discover him are unremitted; but they will not restore my beloved William.

  “Come, dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth. She weeps continually, and accuses herself unjustly as the cause of his death; her words pierce my heart. We are all unhappy; but will not that be an additional motive for you, my son, to return and be our comforter? Your dear mother! Alas, Victor! I now say, Thank God she did not live to witness the cruel, miserable death of her youngest darling!

  “Come, Victor; not brooding thoughts of vengeance against the assassin, but with feelings of peace and gentleness, that will heal, instead of festering the wounds of our minds. Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your enemies.

  “Your affectionate and afflicted father,

  ALPHONSE FRANKENSTEIN.

  “Geneva, May 12th, 17—.”

  Clerval, who had watched my countenance as I read this letter, was surprised to observe the despair that succeeded to the joy I at first expressed on receiving news from my friends. I threw the letter on the table, and covered my face with my hands.


  “My dear Frankenstein,” exclaimed Henry, when he perceived me weep with bitterness, “are you always to be unhappy? My dear friend, what has happened?”

  I motioned to him to take up the letter, while I walked up and down the room in the extremest agitation. Tears also gushed from the eyes of Clerval, as he read the account of my misfortune.

  “I can offer you no consolation, my friend,” said he; “your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do?”

  “To go instantly to Geneva: come with me, Henry, to order the horses.”

  During our walk, Clerval endeavoured10 to raise my spirits. He did not do this by common topics of consolation, but by exhibiting the truest sympathy. “Poor William!” said he, “that dear11 child; he now sleeps with his angel mother.12 His friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest: he does not now feel the murderer’s grasp; a sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. He can no longer be a fit subject for pity; the survivors are the greatest sufferers, and for them time is the only consolation. Those maxims of the Stoics, that death was no evil, and that the mind of man ought to be superior to despair on the eternal absence of a beloved object, ought not to be urged.13 Even Cato wept over the dead body of his brother.”14

  Clerval spoke thus as we hurried through the streets; the words impressed themselves on my mind, and I remembered them afterwards in solitude. But now, as soon as the horses arrived, I hurried into a cabriole,15 and bade farewell to my friend.

  My journey was very melancholy. At first I wished to hurry on, for I longed to console and sympathize with my loved and sorrowing friends; but when I drew near my native town, I slackened my progress. I could hardly sustain the multitude of feelings that crowded into my mind. I passed through scenes familiar to my youth, but which I had not seen for nearly six years. How altered every thing might be during that time? One sudden and desolating change had taken place; but a thousand little circumstances might have by degrees worked other alterations which, although they were done more tranquilly, might not be the less decisive. Fear overcame me; I dared not advance, dreading a thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define them.