by Mary Shelley
15. More commonly “cabriolet,” a single-horse, two-wheeled vehicle.
16. From the third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818):
ABOVE me are the Alps,
The palaces of nature, whose vast walls
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche,—the thunderbolt of snow!
Clearly we are not meant to believe that Frankenstein had read Byron’s work. Mary Shelley saw the manuscript in 1816.
17. Mont Blanc is the tallest mountain in Europe, rising to a height of 15,781 feet above sea level. The first recorded ascension was in 1786 by the guide Jacques Balmat. Murray describes the view, “the first usually enjoyed by travellers from England to Chamouny,” as “so impressive as to be generally acknowledged a sufficient reward for the journey.” On first seeing the Alps near Chamonix, Percy Shelley wrote, in Six Weeks’ Tour, “I never knew—I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these ærial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness” (151–52). He also wrote a four-page hymn to Mont Blanc, included as an appendix to Six Weeks’ Tour.
18. The custom was certainly still in place by the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein. In Six Weeks’ Tour, she remarks on the gates shutting “exactly at ten o’clock, when no bribery (as in France) can open them” (101). Murray observes in 1838, “In former times they finally closed before midnight, and it will be remembered that it was the accident of being shut out one evening, on his return from a walk in the country, that induced Rousseau to fly from his native town and a tyrannical master, whom he, as a truant apprentice, feared to face.”
19. The Hotel of Sécheron, about a mile from Geneva, is mentioned in Murray.
20. The phrase “at the distance of” is inserted here in the 1831 edition, and the phrase “to the east of” is replaced with “from.”
21. Murray describes Mont Salève: “On the S.E. side of Geneva rises the Mont Salève, a long line of limestone precipices, seeming to impend over the town, though it is in reality 5 miles off, and within the Sardinian territory. … The summit of the Salève, more than 3100 ft. above the lake, is frequently scaled by the inhabitants of Geneva, who make picnic parties to enjoy the view from its summit.” Though the Shelleys saw Mont Salève in 1816 and speculated favorably on the quality of the view from the peak, it does not appear that they took the time to climb it.
22. The territory of Savoy, generally the region bounded by Lake Geneva at the north and Dauphiné at the south, was annexed to France in 1792, shortly before the events described here. See note 27, Volume III, Chapter V, below, for the political situation of the Savoy region.
23. Copet, or Coppet, is about 9 miles (15 km) outside Geneva, described by Murray as “a small village of 600 inhabitants, only remarkable for the Château, which belonged to Madame de Staël [the celebrated French author, 1766–1817)], immediately behind it.” Germaine de Staël’s residence became an international cultural center, her salons attracting opponents of Napoleonic cultural chauvinism such as her mother, the celebrated writer and patron of the arts Suzanne Curchod, also known as Madame Necker; German poet August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), the older brother of Friedrich Schlegel (see the Foreword, note 14, above); Swiss-French activist-writer Benjamin Constant; and the Genevese historian-economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi.
24. Described by Murray as a “sugar-loaf mountain,” rising to 5,800 feet above sea level.
25. The “storm” is a “tempest” in the 1831 edition.
26. How can Victor be so certain? Because, answer Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss, in “Fantasy of Paternity and the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” the creature is Victor’s doppelgänger, and it was thus Victor himself who murdered the child (psychologically speaking).
27. This and the following two sentences were added by Percy Shelley to the Draft.
28. Frankenstein exaggerates—the creature was born in November 1793, and this can be no later than a few weeks following his father’s letter of May 12, 1795. Ingolstadt is only about 400 miles (650 km) from Geneva (see note 15, Volume I, Chapter II, above), a walk of perhaps a month at most if one’s pace were leisurely; Frankenstein hurried, at least at the beginning of his journey, and perhaps did not walk all the way.
29. The phrase following, up to the word “done,” was added by Percy Shelley to the Draft.
30. Vampire lore was not new to the eighteenth century: Accounts of the dead rising and preying upon living victims, often family members or neighbors, have been traced back to the Babylonians and ancient Greeks. As late as the ninth edition (1888), the Encyclopædia Britannica reported that the vampire was “supposed to be the soul of a dead man which quits the buried body by night to suck the blood of living persons. Hence, when the vampire’s grave is opened, his corpse is found to be fresh and rosy from the blood which he has thus absorbed. To put a stop to his ravages, a stake is driven through the corpse, or the head cut off, or the heart torn out and the body burned, or boiling water and vinegar are poured on the grave. … The belief in vampires chiefly prevails in Slavonic lands, as in Russia (especially White Russia and the Ukraine), Poland, and Servia and among the Czechs of Bohemia and the other Slavonic races of Austria. It became especially prevalent in Hungary between the years 1730 and 1735, whence all Europe was filled with reports of the exploits of vampires. Several treatises were written on the subject, among which may be mentioned Ranft’s De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1734) and Calmet’s Dissertation on the Vampires of Hungary (1751)” (Vol. XXIV, p. 52).
By 1740, the meme of the vampire was so common that Alexander Pope, in a letter to Dr. William Oliver, could confide that, on the occasion of a late-night errand outside his house, he felt like “one of those vampires in Germany.” Horace Walpole, writing a letter to Lady Ossory in 1786, commented regarding King George II, “I know that our late King, though not apt to believe more than his neighbours, had no doubt of the existence of vampires and their banquets on the dead.” Strikingly, Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, wrote to a friend in 1814, “Your fears are verified. Mr. Shelley has become profligate and sensual … and here I am, my dear friend, waiting to bring another infant into this woeful world. Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire.”
The earliest known poem concerning a vampire, “Der Vampir,” was written in 1748 by the German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder. Goethe, in “Die Braut von Korinth” (1797), tells the story of a bride who, dying prematurely, goes to her betrothed “[s]till to love the bridegroom I have lost, [a]nd the life-blood of his heart to drink …” (translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring, 1874). Robert Southey’s epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) included a tale of a vampire, and Byron wrote of vampires in his 1813 poem The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale. However, the most important English writing on the subject, The Vampyre (1819), came from the pen of John Polidori, reportedly drawn from the same well of inspiration as Frankenstein (see note 5, Appendix 1, and accompanying text, below).
31. Perhaps because the word “Besides” also appears in the prior sentence, the 1831 edition replaces the word with “And then.”
32. The word “respectable” is replaced by “venerable” in the 1831 edition.
33. This is an odd choice of circumstances in which to depict a lover, emphasizing, as it does, the near-incestuous relationship between Alphonse and Caroline. It is mirrored, however, in the final scene of the creature at Victor’s deathbed (see note 45, Volume III, Chapter VII, below).
34. The balance of this paragraph and the next paragraph are replaced in the 1831 edition with the following:
“Welcome, my dearest Victor,” said he. “Ah! I
wish you had come three months ago, and then you would have found us all joyous and delighted. You come to us now to share a misery which nothing can alleviate; yet your presence will, I hope, revive our father, who seems sinking under his misfortune; and your persuasions will induce poor Elizabeth to cease her vain and tormenting self-accusations.—Poor William! he was our darling and our pride!”
Tears, unrestrained, fell from my brother’s eyes; a sense of mortal agony crept over my frame. Before, I had only imagined the wretchedness of my desolated home; the reality came on me as a new, and a not less terrible, disaster. I tried to calm Ernest; I enquired more minutely concerning my father, and her I named my cousin.
This speech, referring to William as “our darling and our pride,” seems more suitable for a parent than a seventeen-year-old sibling, but that is perhaps natural in light of the age disparity. How old was William? Victor, at seventeen, describes him as an “infant” (presumably three or four, or even younger), at a time when Ernest was eleven, so William may have been under the age of ten when murdered.
35. The Thomas Text replaces this and the previous sentence with sentiments similar to those expressed in the 1831 edition, again inappropriate for someone of Ernest’s age: “the sense of our fortune is yet unalleviated; the silence of our father is uninterrupted, and there is something more distressing than tears in his unaltered sadness—while poor Elizabeth, seeking solitude and for ever weeping, already begins to feel the effects of incessant grief—for her colour is gone, and her eyes are hollow & lusterless.”
36. This phrase and the previous sentence are struck in the Thomas Text, and instead, Victor makes the suggestion, “You must assist me in acquiring sufficient calmness to console my father and support my poor Elizabeth.” This reliance on Ernest underlines the earlier age of maturity in centuries past; after all, Victor left for Ingolstadt at the same age.
37. The 1831 edition begins this paragraph: “ ‘She, most of all,’ said Ernest, ‘requires consolation …’ ”
38. Elizabeth—Mary Shelley’s counterpart, in the view of the psychoanalytic critics—repeatedly asserts her guilt in William’s death, far beyond reasonableness. The critics suggest that not only is this the expression of Mary Shelley’s hostility to her half-brother William Godwin, the progeny of her despised stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont, and the son her father had always craved, but also hostility to her father. This seems farfetched. No evidences suggests that Shelley felt that her father was to blame for the death of her mother or that she had any marked animosity toward her half-brother, a mere age ten when Mary wrote Frankenstein. If it must be seen as a personal expression, it seems more likely to be a disguised portrayal of the guilt of a mother who has “allowed” a premature baby to die, as Shelley’s own had in early 1816.
39. An additional sentence appears here in the 1831 edition: “I saw him too; he was free last night!”
40. In place of the balance of the sentence, the 1831 edition reads, “replied my brother, in accents of wonder, ‘but to us the discovery we have made completes our misery.’ ” The change was clearly necessitated in order to reflect Ernest’s puzzlement at Victor’s identification of the murderer as male in the sentence newly added by Mary Shelley.
41. In the 1831 edition, the balance of the sentence reads, “suddenly become capable of so frightful, so appalling a crime.”
42. The 1831 text deletes the phrase “and, after” to break up the long sentence to read as follows: “. . . confined to her bed for several days. During this interval one of the servants …”
43. The balance of this sentence is replaced in the 1831 edition with the following: “My tale was not one to announce publicly; its astounding horror would be looked upon as madness by the vulgar. Did any one indeed exist, except I, the creator, who would believe, unless his senses convinced him, in the existence of the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I had let loose upon the world?” The introduction of the word “presumption,” never before used by Victor in connection with his rash actions, may have been inspired by Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, the Fate of Frankenstein. The play, first produced in 1823, ran for many performances and was often restaged during the nineteenth century; it was also widely imitated (see Appendix 4, below). Shelley herself went to see a performance, concluding, “The story is not well managed,” though she expressed admiration for the program, which identified the creature only as “——— ” (letter to Leigh Hunt, September 9, 1823).
Program for Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, by Richard Brinsley Peake (1823).
44. The six following sentences are replaced in the 1831 edition with the following: “Time had altered her since I last beheld her; it had endowed her with loveliness surpassing the beauty of her childish years. There was the same candour, the same vivacity, but it was allied to an expression more full of sensibility and intellect.”
45. The phrase “and generous” is inserted here in the 1831 edition.
46. “Sweet” becomes “dearest” in the 1831 edition, and in the following sentence, “judges” is replaced by “laws.”
CHAPTER VII.1
WE PASSED A few sad hours, until eleven o’clock, when the trial was to commence. My father and the rest of the family being obliged to attend as witnesses, I accompanied them to the court. During the whole of this wretched mockery of justice, I suffered living torture. It was to be decided, whether the result of my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellow-beings: one a smiling babe, full of innocence and joy; the other far more dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that could make the murder memorable in horror. Justine also was a girl of merit, and possessed qualities which promised to render her life happy: now all was to be obliterated in an ignominious grave; and I the cause! A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine; but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman, and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me.
A trial in 1848 in the Old Bailey in London. Justine’s trial might well have looked like this.
The appearance of Justine was calm. She was dressed in mourning; and her countenance, always engaging, was rendered, by the solemnity of her feelings, exquisitely beautiful. Yet she appeared confident in innocence, and did not tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands; for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited, was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have committed. She was tranquil, yet her tranquillity was evidently constrained; and as her confusion had before been adduced as a proof of her guilt, she worked up her mind to an appearance of courage. When she entered the court, she threw her eyes round it, and quickly discovered where we were seated. A tear seemed to dim her eye when she saw us; but she quickly recovered herself, and a look of sorrowful affection seemed to attest her utter guiltlessness.
The trial began; and after the advocate against her had stated the charge, several witnesses were called. Several strange facts combined against her, which might have staggered any one who had not such proof of her innocence as I had. She had been out the whole of the night on which the murder had been committed, and towards morning had been perceived by a market-woman not far from the spot where the body of the murdered child had been afterwards found. The woman asked her what she did there; but she looked very strangely, and only returned a confused and unintelligible answer. She returned to the house about eight o’clock; and when one inquired where she had passed the night, she replied, that she had been looking for the child, and demanded earnestly, if any thing had been heard concerning him. When shewn the body, she fell into violent hysterics, and kept her bed for several days. The picture was then produced, which the servant had found in her pocket; and when Elizabeth, in a faltering voice, proved that it was the same which, an hour before the child had been missed, she had placed round hi
s neck, a murmur of horror and indignation filled the court.
Justine was called on for her defence. As the trial had proceeded, her countenance had altered. Surprise, horror, and misery, were strongly expressed. Sometimes she struggled with her tears; but when she was desired to plead, she collected her powers, and spoke in an audible although variable voice:—
“God knows,” she said, “how entirely I am innocent. But I do not pretend that my protestations should acquit me: I rest my innocence on a plain and simple explanation of the facts which have been adduced against me; and I hope the character I have always borne will incline my judges2 to a favourable interpretation, where any circumstance appears doubtful or suspicious.”
She then related that, by the permission of Elizabeth, she had passed the evening of the night on which the murder had been committed, at the house of an aunt at Chêne,3 a village situated at about a league from Geneva. On her return, at about nine o’clock, she met a man, who asked her if she had seen any thing of the child who was lost. She was alarmed by this account, and passed several hours in looking for him, when the gates of Geneva were shut, and she was forced to remain several hours of the night in a barn belonging to a cottage, being unwilling to call up the inhabitants, to whom she was well known. Unable to rest or sleep, she quitted her asylum early,4 that she might again endeavour to find my brother. If she had gone near the spot where his body lay, it was without her knowledge. That she had been bewildered when questioned by the market-woman, was not surprising, since she had passed a sleepless night,5 and the fate of poor William was yet uncertain. Concerning the picture she could give no account.
“I know,” continued the unhappy victim, “how heavily and fatally this one circumstance weighs against me, but I have no power of explaining it; and when I have expressed my utter ignorance, I am only left to conjecture concerning the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket. But here also I am checked. I believe that I have no enemy on earth, and none surely would have been so wicked as to destroy me wantonly. Did the murderer place it there? I know of no opportunity afforded him for so doing; or if I had, why should he have stolen the jewel, to part with it again so soon?