The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  16. Cumberland and Westmoreland are counties comprising a significant portion of the Lake District. We are now at about mid-June 1796. In 1799, William Wordsworth relocated to the Lake District, becoming known as one of the “Lake poets”; in 1811, Percy and Harriet Shelley had moved there, hoping to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  17. Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, was described by Baedeker’s Great Britain one hundred years after Victor’s visit as “one of the most romantically beautiful cities in Europe.” This is in sharp contrast to the views of Edward Topham, who, visiting the town in 1774, found it overpopulated, with “little room for elegance”: “I make no manner of doubt but that the High Street … is inhabited by a greater number of persons than any street in Europe,” opined the correspondent of Letters from Edinburgh, Written in the Years 1774 and 1775 (London, 1776), then all of twenty-five years old and enjoying his grand tour after over a decade at Eton and two inconclusive years at Trinity College, Cambridge. Topham was more naturally inclined to favor the streets of London, which as an aspiring playwright he mined for a series of farces. They were neither immediately successful nor enduring, and at the age of forty-one he retired to Yorkshire, where he became famous for breeding champion greyhounds.

  18. Much was expected of the “new town” still under construction at the time of publication of the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1797), which crowed that “from the advantages of its situation, and its being built according to a regular plan, it hath undoubtedly a superiority over any city in Britain.” The new town was first conceived in 1752, but was held up by the lack of concessions until 1767; even then, it was the subject of litigations reminiscent of modern battles with environmental organizations. By 1797, the Britannica described it as “almost finished,” and, though the editors failed to mention the construction, that must be the state in which Victor and Clerval saw it.

  19. Dominating the skyline of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Castle was only the latest of many fortifications to have occupied the promontory known as Castle Rock over the centuries. No reigning monarch visited the castle after 1651, when the Scottish crown was united with the English monarchy, until 1822. During the period of Victor’s visit, it was primarily used as a garrison fortress and for prisoners of war.

  20. Arthur’s Seat, in Holyrood Park in Edinburgh, was described in the early 1900s by Robert Louis Stevenson (whose grandfather had engineered much of the city a century before) as technically a “hill,” if one were to speak only of size, but “a mountain by virtue of its bold design” (The Travels and Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson [New York: Scribner’s, 1909], 335).

  21. St. Bernard’s Well was built in 1789 from a design by the Scottish painter Alexander Nasmyth. It was his first architectural commission, and he took his inspiration from the early first century BCE Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy (also known as Sibyl’s temple). The well is situated on the south bank of the Water of Leith in Edinburgh, once on private property, now owned by the city. The sulfurous waters that sprang from the spot had legendary healing properties, to which Nasmyth’s structure gives formal expression: Romanesque proportions are strictly adhered to, and from a detailed lintel, ten Doric columns rise. Under the dome is a statue of Hygieia (in Coade stone, and added in 1791), the daughter of the god of medicine. Etched on one face of the neoclassical monument are the words “St. Bernard’s Mineral Well.”

  22. Pentland Hills is an unnoteworthy range southwest of Edinburgh. Baedeker’s Great Britain describes the area as affording “numerous pleasant rambles.” What attracted Victor and Henry to the site is unknown. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) were known to have walked the hills, as was the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, when he was being treated for shell shock—by William Rivers, who famously pioneered the “talking cure” for the purpose—at the nearby Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, established in 1916 and now part of Edinburgh Napier University. (See also note 18, Volume III, Chapter IV, below.)

  23. Coupar Angus is a village about 12 miles (19 km) distant from Perth, described on eighteenth-century maps as “Coup Inn.” It was originally part of Angus County but was transferred to Perthshire County in 1891.

  24. St. Andrews is an ancient town, seat of a university, and long the “ecclesiastical metropolis of Scotland,” according to Baedeker’s Great Britain. Legend tells that golf was invented here, and history records that golf was played on the “Old Course” in the early fifteenth century, until it was banned by James II in 1457. The ban was lifted in 1501 when James IV took up golf. St. Andrews hosts the British Open approximately every five years.

  25. The river Tay, the longest in Scotland, flows through Perth until it empties into the Firth of Tay, south of Dundee. On September 26, 1877, a magnificent rail bridge built at a cost of £300,000 was opened across the Tay, only to collapse in a storm twenty-one months later as a train carrying seventy passengers passed over it. Fifty-nine known victims perished in the waters. The event has been studied obsessively, yielding no positive cause but three strongly suspected possible ones: the bridge was shaken apart and rent by violent oscillations, or waves, produced when its natural vibrating frequency was amplified by an identical frequency caused by gales of wind, creating high and low pressure above and below the path of the train (the Bernoulli effect); the wind caused the derailment of a carriage, whereupon an axle hit a pillar, which shuddered to earthquake-level proportions; the wind knocked down course after course of masonry like dominoes, to the extent that the upper and lower piers separated from each other and the bridge tipped into the river. The disaster was immortalized by William McGonagall, called by his own publisher “the greatest bad verse writer of his age … or of any other age”; among other transgressions, the poet multiplied the actual number of casualties:

  Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

  Alas! I am very sorry to say

  That ninety lives have been taken away

  On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

  Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

  26. The Orkneys are a chain of about seventy small islands off the tip of northern Scotland. The Greek Pytheas (see note 6, Volume I, Letter I, above) referred to the northernmost point of land, probably Dunnett Head, as “Orcas,” and the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela and historian Tacitus, both writing in the first century CE, called the islands the “Orcades.”

  As will be seen, it is impossible that Frankenstein was actually in the Orkney Islands; more likely, he was on a thinly populated island like Colonsay, in the Inner Hebrides, a short sail to Ireland. He may well have concealed his location for fear that he had left behind notes or other clues regarding his work.

  27. The word “sequel” is replaced with “consummation” in the 1831 edition.

  28. What “fellow-creatures”? Victor seems to have forgotten that he deliberately selected a location for his laboratory that featured only two other inhabited dwellings on the entire island.

  CHAPTER III.1

  I SAT ONE EVENING in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years before2 I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart, and filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each ot
her; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man;3 she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.

  Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats: but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race.

  The female creature is not yet unveiled by Dr. Pretorious (Ernest Thesiger) and Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), in a scene from the theatrical trailer for Bride of Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1935).

  I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the daemon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me. Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my progress, and claim the fulfilment of my promise.

  As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.4

  I left the room, and, locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart never to resume my labours; and then, with trembling steps, I sought my own apartment.5 I was alone; none were near me to dissipate the gloom, and relieve me from the sickening oppression of the most terrible reveries.

  The creature meets his bride (The Bride of Frankenstein, Universal Pictures, 1935)

  Several hours past, and I remained near my window gazing on the sea; it was almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices, as the fishermen called to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to my house.

  In a few minutes after, I heard the creaking of my door, as if some one endeavoured to open it softly. I trembled from head to foot; I felt a presentiment of who it was, and wished to rouse one of the peasants who dwelt in a cottage not far from mine; but I was overcome by the sensation of helplessness, so often felt in frightful dreams, when you in vain endeavour to fly from an impending danger, and was rooted to the spot.

  Presently I heard the sound of footsteps along the passage; the door opened, and the wretch whom I dreaded appeared. Shutting the door, he approached me, and said, in a smothered voice—

  “You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery: I left Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow islands, and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the heaths of England, and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?”

  “Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness.”

  “Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!”

  “The hour of my weakness6 is past, and the period of your power is arrived. Your threats cannot move me to do an act of wickedness; but they confirm me in a resolution of not creating you a companion in vice. Shall I, in cool blood, set loose upon the earth a daemon, whose delight is in death and wretchedness. Begone! I am firm, and your words will only exasperate my rage.”

  The monster saw my determination in my face, and gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger. “Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man, you may hate; but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness for ever. Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions; but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.”

  “Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words. Leave me; I am inexorable.”

  “It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”

  I started forward, and exclaimed, “Villain! before you sign my death-warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe.”

  I would have seized him; but he eluded me, and quitted the house with precipitation: in a few moments I saw him in his boat, which shot across the waters with an arrowy swiftness, and was soon lost amidst the waves.

  All was again silent; but his words rung in my ears. I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace, and precipitate him into the ocean. I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me. Why had I not followed him, and closed with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the main land. I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of his words—“I will be with you on your wedding-night.”7 That then was the period fixed for the fulfilment of my destiny. In that hour I should die, and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice. The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth,—of her tears and endless sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her,—tears, the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.

  The night passed away, and the sun rose from the ocean; my feelings became calmer, if it may be called calmness, when the violence of rage sinks into the depths of despair. I left the house, the horrid scene of the last night’s contention, and walked on the beach of the sea, which I almost regarded as an insuperable barrier between me and my fellow-creatures; nay, a wish that such should prove the fact stole across me. I desired that I might pass my life on that barren rock, wearily it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of misery. If I returned, it was to be sacrificed, or to see those whom I most loved die under the grasp of a daemon whom I had myself created.

  I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved, and miserable in the separation. When it became noon, and the sun rose higher, I lay down on the grass, and was overpowered by a deep sleep. I had been awake the whole of the preceding night, my nerves were agitated, and my eyes inflamed by watching and misery. The sleep into which I now sunk refreshed me; and when I awok
e, I again felt as if I belonged to a race of human beings like myself, and I began to reflect upon what had passed with greater composure; yet still the words of the fiend rung in my ears like a death-knell, they appeared like a dream, yet distinct and oppressive as a reality.

  The sun had far descended, and I still sat on the shore, satisfying my appetite, which had become ravenous, with an oaten cake, when I saw a fishing-boat land close to me, and one of the men brought me a packet; it contained letters from Geneva, and one from Clerval, entreating me to join him. He said that nearly a year had elapsed since we had quitted Switzerland,8 and France was yet unvisited.9 He entreated me, therefore, to leave my solitary isle, and meet him at Perth, in a week from that time, when we might arrange the plan of our future proceedings. This letter in a degree recalled me to life, and I determined to quit my island at the expiration of two days.

  Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to reflect: I must pack my chemical instruments; and for that purpose I must enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle those utensils, the sight of which was sickening to me. The next morning, at day-break, I summoned sufficient courage, and unlocked the door of my laboratory. The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. I paused to collect myself, and then entered the chamber. With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room; but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants, and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the mean time I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus.