The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  Tilbury Fort (photo by Mark.murphy, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).

  At length we saw the numerous steeples of London, St. Paul’s towering above all,32 and the Tower33 famed in English history.

  St. Paul’s Cathedral. St. Paul’s Cathedral (photo by David Iliff, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).

  Tower of London (photo by Carlos Delgado, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).

  1. Chapter 18 in the 1831 edition. It is clear from the Draft that in an earlier version (the Ur-Text—see “A Note on the Text,” above), the trip to England was proposed by Alphonse. However, at Percy Shelley’s suggestion, Mary Shelley substantially rewrote the passage to make it clear that it was Victor’s idea.

  2. Who this might have been is uncertain. In 1794, Erasmus Darwin (see note 5, Preface, above) published Zoonomia, a work expressing what may be described as proto-evolutionary ideas that would later influence Charles Darwin; Victor may have seen the book and desired to seek out this original thinker. It is also uncertain exactly what additional knowledge Victor sought: He had already successfully created life, and the only announced difference between his current and previous projects was the substitution of a female’s morphology for a male’s. He may have planned to include female reproductive organs, which are admittedly more complex than the male machinery, but there is no indication of when he decided to take this step. See note 3, Volume II, Chapter IX, above. Only when he realizes that the creature is a threat to humanity does he express concerns about propagation of his new “species.” See text following note 3, below. In fact, the reasons for the trip appear thin; this was likely a demonstration of simple procrastination.

  3. The balance of the sentence is replaced in the 1831 edition by the following: “and shrank from taking the first step in an undertaking whose immediate necessity began to appear less absolute to me. A change indeed had taken place in me;”

  4. The phrase “your cousin” is replaced by “Elizabeth” in the 1831 edition.

  5. The word “cousin” is replaced with “Elizabeth” in the 1831 edition.

  6. Veeder, in Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, suggests that this is an allusion to the Mariner in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who carried the weight of the albatross around his neck, and that it refers not to the threat of the creature but to the pending marriage.

  7. This sentence is substantially revised in the 1831 edition, where it reads as follows:

  The latter method of obtaining the desired intelligence was dilatory and unsatisfactory; besides, I had an insurmountable aversion to the idea of engaging myself in my loathsome task in my father’s house while in habits of familiar intercourse with those I loved. I knew that a thousand fearful accidents might occur, the slightest of which would disclose a tale to thrill all connected with me with horror. I was aware also that I should often lose all self-command, all capacity of hiding the harrowing sensations that would possess me during the progress of my unearthly occupation. I must absent myself from all I loved while thus employed. Once commenced, it would quickly be achieved, and I might be restored to my family in peace and happiness. My promise fulfilled, the monster would depart forever. Or (so my fond fancy imaged) some accident might meanwhile occur to destroy him, and put an end to my slavery forever.

  In the 1818 text, Victor anticipates delight in being away from his family; in the revised version, his impending solitude is a matter of necessity, not pleasure.

  8. The balance of this paragraph and the next three paragraphs are replaced in the 1831 edition with the following:

  a guise which excited no suspicion, while I urged my desire with an earnestness that easily induced my father to comply. After so long a period of an absorbing melancholy that resembled madness in its intensity and effects, he was glad to find that I was capable of taking pleasure in the idea of such a journey, and he hoped that change of scene and varied amusement would, before my return, have restored me entirely to myself.

  The duration of my absence was left to my own choice; a few months, or at most a year, was the period contemplated. One paternal kind precaution he had taken to ensure my having a companion. Without previously communicating with me, he had, in concert with Elizabeth, arranged that Clerval should join me at Strasbourg. This interfered with the solitude I coveted for the prosecution of my task; yet at the commencement of my journey the presence of my friend could in no way be an impediment, and truly I rejoiced that thus I should be saved many hours of lonely, maddening reflection. Nay, Henry might stand between me and the intrusion of my foe. If I were alone, would he not at times force his abhorred presence on me to remind me of my task or to contemplate its progress?

  To England, therefore, I was bound, and it was understood that my union with Elizabeth should take place immediately on my return. My father’s age rendered him extremely averse to delay. For myself, there was one reward I promised myself from my detested toils—one consolation for my unparalleled sufferings; it was the prospect of that day when, enfranchised from my miserable slavery, I might claim Elizabeth and forget the past in my union with her.

  In this version, then, Clerval’s companionship is thrust upon Victor by his father. The proposed length of the journey is also shortened.

  9. Victor would have traveled northeast from Geneva to Basel on the border of Switzerland and followed the Rhine to Strasbourg, the capital of the Alsace region, in northeastern France. From there, he and Henry would likely have traveled north by boat through Germany into Holland. This is essentially the return route followed by the Shelleys from Switzerland in 1814, the trip they memorialized in Six Weeks’ Tour.

  10. August 1795, perhaps six weeks after his interview with the creature.

  11. This paragraph is substantially revised in the 1831 edition:

  It was in the latter end of September that I again quitted my native country. My journey had been my own suggestion, and Elizabeth therefore acquiesced, but she was filled with disquiet at the idea of my suffering, away from her, the inroads of misery and grief. It had been her care which provided me a companion in Clerval—and yet a man is blind to a thousand minute circumstances which call forth a woman’s sedulous attention. She longed to bid me hasten my return; a thousand conflicting emotions rendered her mute as she bade me a tearful, silent farewell.

  12. That is, in accordance with the proprieties of the times, Elizabeth could not travel unchaperoned. The Shelleys’ journey with Claire Clairmont in 1814 seems to verge on scandal by comparison.

  13. The balance of this sentence is deleted in the 1831 edition.

  14. Some 240 miles (390 km), about a four-hour drive today.

  15. This is another “aside” to Walton.

  16. Mannheim is about 60 miles (90 km) from Strasbourg.

  17. Mayence (Mainz) is only about 120 miles (913 km) from Strasbourg. The failure to mention any other passengers or crew and the image of Victor lying “at the bottom of the boat” suggest that Victor and Henry hired a boat that they paddled themselves. With the current, they may have achieved as much as four or five miles per hour, but they were in no hurry.

  18. Radu Florescu suggests, in his speculative In Search of Frankenstein (1975), that this is a reference to the actual Castle Frankenstein, near Darmstadt, a historic location that he claims was the inspiration—indeed, the source—of the name “Frankenstein” used by Shelley in her account. The suggestion has met with widespread skepticism, not least on the grounds that despite a trip on the Rhine (documented in Six Weeks’ Tour), there is no evidence that either of the Shelleys visited or knew about the castle.

  19. The grape harvest, that is.

  20. Uri is actually a bay of Lake Lucerne, or a “gulf,” as it is described in the posthumously published memoirs of Scottish historian and jurist Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832): “The vast mountains rising on every side and closing at the end, with their rich clothing of wood, the sweet soft spots of verdant pasture scattered at their feet, and sometimes on their breast, and the expanse
of water, unbroken by islands, and almost undisturbed by any signs of living men, make an impression which it would be foolish to attempt to convey by words” (Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh, 2nd ed. [London, 1836], 307). Mackintosh is best known for his Vindiciae Gallicae: A Defence of the French Revolution and Its English Admirers (1791), like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Man a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.

  21. La Valais or Valais is a canton in the southwestern part of Switzerland, in the central valley of the Rhône River, and includes magnificent mountains such as the Matterhorn.

  22. Pays de Vaud (the Vaud region) refers to the canton of Vaud, in the western part of Switzerland. Its capital is Lausanne. Extending from the Jura to the Alps, it crosses three regions of distinct features: the towering Alps of its southern portion, the hills, moraines (rocks and sediment left by glaciers), and lakes of its middle region, and the gentler Jura mountains.

  23. From Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, canto 2, line 55, first published in 1816 and therefore clearly another anachronism. The source is noted in the 1818 edition but not in subsequent ones. Hunt, a lesser Romantic poet who composed Rimini while serving a two-year prison sentence in Surrey for having slandered the Prince Regent (the future King George IV, whom he called “corpulent” and “the companion of gamblers and demireps”), dedicated the long work to Byron, who had helped him edit it.

  Hunt’s incarceration was leavened by visits from friends and by the permanent cohabitation of his wife, Marianne Kent Hunt, and their two children (a third was born in the prison infirmary about halfway through Hunt’s sentence); by the presence of a pianoforte in the cell; and by a fragrant orchard just outside, which Hunt himself had been given leave to plant and cultivate. He was no stranger to prison cells, having spent time in debtor’s prison as a child with his father, a Barbadian lawyer turned Anglican preacher. In 1817, three years after his release from Surrey, Hunt and his family—by then he and Kent had four children; eventually they would have six more—lived with the Shelleys. The year saw the birth of their fifth child, whom the couple named Percy Bysshe Shelley Leigh in honor of their host. (In 1822, following Percy’s death, Mary Shelley and Percy Florence Shelley, three, lived with Leigh and Marianne and the couple’s six children outside Genoa—see text accompanying note 61, the Foreword, above.)

  24. Attributed in the 1831 edition to “Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ” more properly, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” by William Wordsworth, first published in 1798. Apart from thus also constituting an anachronism, the text was actually altered by Mary Shelley and italics added to reflect the change: “me” in the second line became “him.”

  25. Victor, not much of a storyteller, gets ahead of himself, foreshadowing the imminent death of Clerval.

  26. Another aside to Walton.

  27. Now the fourth largest city in Germany, it was a free state in 1797, on both banks of the Rhine, part of the Holy Roman Empire. Occupied by the French Republic in 1794, the portion on the left bank of the Rhine was incorporated into the republic in 1801.

  28. Travel by post coach, that is.

  29. The manuscript reads “September,” and this reference to December is evidently a typographical error (repeated in all three editions supervised by Shelley or her father), for shortly after arriving, Victor remarks that it is October. See note 5, Volume III, Chapter II, below.

  30. Tilbury Fort is on the north bank of the Thames, opposite Gravesend. Originally constructed by Henry III and subsequently extended and strengthened, “[i]t was here,” according to Baedeker’s London and Its Environs (1896), “that Queen Elizabeth assembled and reviewed her troops in anticipation of the attack of the Armada (1588), appearing in helmet and corselet, and using the bold and well-known words: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ ”

  31. All about twenty-five miles from London Bridge. Gravesend was then a resort and terminal for London stagecoaches, and Pocahontas is buried in the local church; Greenwich was also a popular resort and the home of the Royal Observatory (and, after 1851, the origin point of lines of longitude); and Woolwich was, even then, the site of the Royal Arsenal, the Royal Dockyard, the Royal Military Academy, and the Royal Artillery.

  32. St. Paul’s Cathedral, still the most prominent building in London, had been completed by the architect Sir Christopher Wren only about eighty-five years earlier, in 1710.

  33. The Tower, which Baedeker’s London calls “the ancient fortress and gloomy state-prison of London, and historically the most interesting spot in England,” was, at the end of the eighteenth century, still surrounded by a battlemented wall and a deep moat (now drained). Though there is speculation that a Roman tower preceded the current structure, it probably was first built by William the Conqueror.

  CHAPTER II.1

  LONDON WAS OUR present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in this wonderful and celebrated city. Clerval desired the intercourse of the men of genius and talent who flourished at this time; but this was with me a secondary object; I was principally occupied with the means of obtaining the information necessary for the completion of my promise, and quickly availed myself of the letters of introduction that I had brought with me, addressed to the most distinguished natural philosophers.

  If this journey had taken place during my days of study and happiness, it would have afforded me inexpressible pleasure. But a blight had come over my existence, and I only visited these people for the sake of the information they might give me on the subject in which my interest was so terribly profound. Company was irksome to me; when alone, I could fill my mind with the sights of heaven and earth; the voice of Henry soothed me, and I could thus cheat myself into a transitory peace. But busy uninteresting joyous faces brought back despair to my heart. I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my fellow-men; this barrier was sealed with the blood of William and Justine; and to reflect on the events connected with those names filled my soul with anguish.

  But in Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive, and anxious to gain experience and instruction. The difference of manners which he observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement.2 He was for ever busy; and the only check to his enjoyments was my sorrowful and dejected mien. I tried to conceal this as much as possible, that I might not debar him from the pleasures natural to one who was entering on a new scene of life, undisturbed by any care or bitter recollection. I often refused to accompany him, alleging another engagement, that I might remain alone. I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation,3 and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head. Every thought that was devoted to it was an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my lips to quiver, and my heart to palpitate.

  After passing some months in London, we received a letter from a person in Scotland, who had formerly been our visitor at Geneva. He mentioned the beauties of his native country, and asked us if those were not sufficient allurements to induce us to prolong our journey as far north as Perth,4 where he resided. Clerval eagerly desired to accept this invitation; and I, although I abhorred society, wished to view again mountains and streams, and all the wondrous works with which Nature adorns her chosen dwelling-places.

  We had arrived in England at the beginning of October,5 and it was now February. We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh,6 but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes,7 resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July. I packed my chemical instruments, and the materials I had collected, resolving to finish m
y labours in some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland.

  We quitted London on the 27th of March, and remained a few days at Windsor, rambling in its beautiful forest.8 This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer, were all novelties to us.

  From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king, and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Gower, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city, which they might be supposed to have inhabited.9 The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had not found an imaginary gratification, the appearance of the city had yet in itself sufficient beauty to obtain our admiration. The colleges are ancient and picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent; and the lovely Isis,10 which flows beside it through meadows of exquisite verdure, is spread forth into a placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, and spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees.

  Windsor Castle (photo by David Iliff, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).

  High Street, Oxford, ca. 1890.

  I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent11 to myself.