by Mary Shelley
We passed a considerable period at Oxford, rambling among its environs, and endeavouring to identify every spot which might relate to the most animating epoch of English history. Our little voyages of discovery were often prolonged by the successive objects that presented themselves. We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden,12 and the field on which that patriot fell.13 For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice, of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.14 For an instant I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
We left Oxford with regret, and proceeded to Matlock, which was our next place of rest. The country in the neighbourhood of this village resembled, to a greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but every thing is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps, which always attend on the piny mountains of my native country. We visited the wondrous cave,15 and the little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix. The latter name made me tremble, when pronounced by Henry; and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which that terrible scene was thus associated.
From Derby still journeying northward, we passed two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland.16 I could now almost fancy myself among the Swiss mountains. The little patches of snow which yet lingered on the northern sides of the mountains, the lakes, and the dashing of the rocky streams, were all familiar and dear sights to me. Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost contrived to cheat me into happiness. The delight of Clerval was proportionably greater than mine; his mind expanded in the company of men of talent, and he found in his own nature greater capacities and resources than he could have imagined himself to have possessed while he associated with his inferiors. “I could pass my life here,” said he to me; “and among these mountains I should scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine.”
But he found that a traveller’s life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.
We had scarcely visited the various lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and conceived an affection for some of the inhabitants, when the period of our appointment with our Scotch friend approached, and we left them to travel on. For my own part I was not sorry. I had now neglected my promise for some time, and I feared the effects of the daemon’s disappointment. He might remain in Switzerland, and wreak his vengeance on my relatives. This idea pursued me, and tormented me at every moment from which I might otherwise have snatched repose and peace. I waited for my letters with feverish impatience: if they were delayed, I was miserable, and overcome by a thousand fears; and when they arrived, and I saw the superscription of Elizabeth or my father, I hardly dared to read and ascertain my fate.
Sometimes I thought that the fiend followed me, and might expedite my remissness by murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer. I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime.
I visited Edinburgh17 with languid eyes and mind; and yet that city might have interested the most unfortunate being. Clerval did not like it so well as Oxford; for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him. But the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh,18 its romantic castle,19 and its environs, the most delightful in the world, Arthur’s Seat,20 St. Bernard’s Well,21 and the Pentland Hills,22 compensated him for the change, and filled him with cheerfulness and admiration. But I was impatient to arrive at the termination of my journey.
We left Edinburgh in a week, passing through Coupar,23 St. Andrews,24 and along the banks of the Tay,25 to Perth, where our friend expected us. But I was in no mood to laugh and talk with strangers, or enter into their feelings or plans with the good humour expected from a guest; and accordingly I told Clerval that I wished to make the tour of Scotland alone. “Do you,” said I, “enjoy yourself, and let this be our rendezvous. I may be absent a month or two; but do not interfere with my motions, I entreat you: leave me to peace and solitude for a short time; and when I return, I hope it will be with a lighter heart, more congenial to your own temper.”
Edinburgh Castle (photo by Kim Traynor, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).
The Great Masson Caverns (photo by TheHeightsofAbraham, used under CC-by-SA 4.0 license).
Arthur’s Seat (photo by Kim Traynor, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).
St. Bernard’s Well (Edinburgh, 1800).
Henry wished to dissuade me; but, seeing me bent on this plan, ceased to remonstrate. He entreated me to write often. “I had rather be with you,” he said, “in your solitary rambles, than with these Scotch people, whom I do not know: hasten then, my dear friend, to return, that I may again feel myself somewhat at home, which I cannot do in your absence.”
Blaeu’s 1654 map of the Orkney and Shetland Islands.
Skara Brae, Orkney, in summer 2012 (photo by Chmee2, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).
Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of Scotland, and finish my work in solitude. I did not doubt but that the monster followed me, and would discover himself to me when I should have finished, that he might receive his companion.
With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands, and fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys26 as the scene [of my] labours. It was a place fitted for such a work, being hardly more than a rock, whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare. Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from the main land, which was about five miles distant.
On the whole island there were but three miserable huts, and one of these was vacant when I arrived. This I hired. It contained but two rooms, and these exhibited all the squalidness of the most miserable penury. The thatch had fallen in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges. I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession; an incident which would, doubtless, have occasioned some surprise, had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty. As it was, I lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and clothes which I gave; so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men.
In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea, to listen to the waves as they roared, and dashed at my feet. It was a monotonous, yet ever-changing scene. I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.
In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived; but, as I proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me. Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days; and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work. It was indeed a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel27 of my
labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.
Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous. Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor. Sometimes I sat with my eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the object which I so much dreaded to behold. I feared to wander from the sight of my fellow-creatures,28 lest when alone he should come to claim his companion.
The Isle of Colonsay, 2006 (photo by Chris Bazley-Rose, used under CC-by-SA 3.0 license).
In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably advanced. I looked towards its completion with a tremulous and eager hope, which I dared not trust myself to question, but which was intermixed with obscure forebodings of evil, that made my heart sicken in my bosom.
1. Chapter 19 in the 1831 edition.
2. The following is inserted here in the 1831 edition: “He was also pursuing an object he had long had in view. His design was to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade. In Britain only could he further the execution of his plan.” This expands the earlier emendation, making Clerval a man of business rather than a footloose student.
3. This could not have included body parts, for Victor had no means of preventing the corruption of such parts during his four-month sojourn. Yet, living on an isolated island, how did he obtain the parts he needed to assemble the creature’s female companion? He would have needed to make repeated trips to Perth to visit charnel houses, and his parcels of body parts were unlikely to have gone unnoticed on the thinly populated island.
4. Perth is an ancient town, probably of Roman origin, in central Scotland, on the banks of the river Tay. It was the capital of Scotland until 1437, when the royal seat was moved to Edinburgh. It did not receive its current nickname, “The Fair City,” until the publication in 1828 of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Fair Maid of Perth.
5. This confirms that the earlier “December” was a typographical error. See note 29, Volume III, Chapter I.
6. The Great North Road was the principal mail and passenger coach route from London to York to Edinburgh. The modern A1 highway now generally follows the route, a distance of about 410 miles. In 1658, the first regular stagecoach route to York—a trip of about four days—was established. By the end of the eighteenth century, faster mail and passenger coaches were used, and by 1815, a trip from London to York took only twenty hours, with another twenty-five-plus hours to reach Edinburgh. With the advent of rail in the nineteenth century, the coaching operations disappeared.
7. This was certainly the long way to get to Edinburgh, with the Lake District on the far western side of the island. Matlock is on the route to the Lake District, but one must wonder why it is mentioned here, other than for its splendor: Shelley’s contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Matlock, which he visited with his wife, the illustrator Sophia Peabody, and their young son, Julian, while serving as U.S. Consul at Liverpool under his close friend President Franklin Pierce (whose campaign biography he had written), “I think there can be no more beautiful place in the world” (Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2 vols. [Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1871], Vol. 2, 231). More prominent towns en route would have been Nottingham or Derby. While Matlock (properly Matlock Bath) was known for its spa in the eighteenth century and is described by Victor as resembling Switzerland, there is no indication that the travelers visited the spa, and no reason given for their visit. Shelley, in her journal entry for July 21, 1816, compares a Swiss vista to Matlock, suggesting that she herself had visited, but when such visit occurred is unknown.
8. About 22.5 miles (36 km) from London, Windsor Castle was traditionally the ancestral residence of English sovereigns.
9. In 1642, in the second year of the English Civil War, in which the Roundheads (the rebel forces allied with Oliver Cromwell and Parliament) contended with the Cavaliers (the royalists who supported the throne), Parliament took control of London, and the king, Charles I, departed the city to set up his court in Oxford. He was accompanied by his queen, Henriette Marie, and their son, Charles II. Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount of Falkland, was a member of the Long Parliament that took control of the government and originally opposed Charles’s policies. He later moderated his views and attempted to broker compromises to end the constant armed conflicts between Cavalier and Roundhead forces. He was appointed secretary of state by Charles on January 1, 1642, but, despairing of a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Charles and the legislature, threw himself into the combat and died on the battlefield in 1643. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion (1702–4), wrote of Falkland, “But all his parts, abilities, and faculties, by art and industry, were not to be valued, or mentioned in comparison of his most accomplished mind and manners: his gentleness and affability was so transcendent and obliging, that it drew reverence, and some kind of compliance from the roughest, and most unpolished, and stubborn constitutions.”
The first (or second, by some reckonings) round of the English Civil War ended in 1649, with the military victory of the Roundheads, the execution of Charles I, the abolition of the monarchy, and absolute power vested in Parliament, controlled by Cromwell, who termed the new era (and entity) the “Commonwealth of England,” eventually the “Protectorate” under his personal rule. After his death, his son Richard failed to hold power, and by 1660, the Cavaliers succeeded in restoring the monarchy, with Charles II taking the throne. But the goals of the Great Rebellion were achieved, and absolute authority vested in the monarch, the divine right of kings, was over; essentially, a constitutional monarchy became the form of English government, as it is today, with primary power vested in the legislature.
Sir Thomas Gower was High Sheriff of Yorkshire and suffered for his loyalty to Charles but nonetheless survived Charles’s execution and thrived during the Restoration. This is an error (evidently by Walton in his recollection of Victor’s story), corrected in the 1831 edition to “Goring.” Lord George Goring was a courtier and general who vacillated between supporting the king and Parliament, ultimately siding with the Royalists. According to Clarendon’s History, “The disputes between King and Parliament afforded an opportunity which he resolved to use for his own advancement … of all his qualifications dissimulation was his masterpiece” (Book 8, 169).
Certainly the Shelleys must have put their own feelings into the mouth of Victor, who shortly terms the period of the Civil War “the most animating epoch of English history.” Living in an era that was still imbued with the spirit of the American and French revolutions and under the influence of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the other English radicals of the day, the idealism of the English Civil War appealed greatly to them.
10. “Isis” was the name insisted on by cartographers of the day for that portion of the Thames that flowed from its source in Gloucestershire to Dorchester-on-Thames; it is still used occasionally.
11. The word “intolerable” is substituted for “abhorrent” in the 1831 edition.
12. John Hampden was a principal leader of the Long Parliament in its opposition to Charles I. See note 9, above. In his History of the Commonwealth of England (1824), William Godwin called Hampden “one of the most extraordinary men in the records of mankind.” The Shelleys visited the Great Hampden parish church in Buckinghamshire, where Hampden was reportedly buried, in October 1817. However, there is no actual monument to “the Patriot,” as he was known, in the church. See Clement Shorter, Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920).
13. Victor refers to Chalgrove Field, in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, where Hampden was fatally wounded in a battle w
ith Prince Rupert, a Royalist leader.
Portrait of John Hampden.
14. The word “remembrancer” is the official title of an executive officer of the Exchequer whose duty it is to memorialize the business of the Exchequer, but it is used here in a figurative sense, to mean “one who keeps memories.”
15. The Great Masson Caverns, on the Heights of Abraham above Matlock Bath, are natural but were mined for fluorspar and other minerals. They can still be visited by tourists. However, there are other, smaller caves on the High Tor, rising above Matlock Bath, described in Baedeker’s Great Britain (1894), and one of these could be the “wondrous cave” visited by Victor and Henry.
Hawthorne writes of visiting, in June 1857, Matlock’s “grand cavern,” once a Roman lead mine: The members of his party, holding tallow candles, were led by a guide into a “darksome and ugly pit … kept under lock and key.” Hawthorne disliked the “disagreeable” commercial aspect of such tourism: caverns, cataracts, and “precipitous crags compelled to figure in ornamental gardens,—and all accessible at a fixed amount of shillings and pence … it makes the wildest scenery look like the artificial rock-work which Englishmen are so fond of displaying in the little bit of grass-plot under their suburban parlour-windows.” But he could not discount the sheer natural wonder of the surroundings, including the Romantic Rocks, “some crags which have been rent away … a very picturesque spot, and the price for seeing it is twopence; though in our case it was included in the four shillings which we had paid for seeing the cavern” (Passages from the English Note-Books, Vol. 2, 230).