The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  From this moment the Creature evolves rapidly through all the primitive stages of man. Mary’s account is almost anthropological, reminiscent of Banks’s account of the Tahitians. First he learns to use fire, to cook, to read. Then he studies European history and civilisation, through the works of Plutarch, Milton and Goethe. Secretly listening to the cottagers in the woods, he learns conceptual ideas such as warfare, slavery, tyranny. His conscience is aroused, and his sense of justice. But above all, he discovers the need for companionship, sympathy and affection. And this is the one thing he cannot find, because he is so monstrously ugly: ‘The cold stars shone in their mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me, the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest … I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.’60

  On the bleak Mer de Glace glacier in the French Alps, the Creature appeals to his creator Frankenstein for sympathy, and for love. ‘I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts … Oh! My creator, make me happy! Let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of one existing thing. Do not deny me my request!’61

  This terrible corrosive and destructive solitude becomes the central theme of the second part of Mary Shelley’s novel. Goaded by his misery, the Creature kills and destroys. Yet he also tries to take stock of his own violent actions and contradictory emotions. He concludes that his one hope of happiness lies in sexual companionship. The scene on the Mer de Glace in which he begs Frankenstein to create a wife for him is central to his search for human identity and happiness. The clear implication is that a fully human ‘soul’ can only be created through friendship and love: ‘If you consent [to make me a wife], neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again. I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man. I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.’62

  The Creature is here offering to go westwards to South America or the Pacific, and to return to that primitive Edenic state glimpsed by Cook and Banks. He and his mate will live as vegetarians, kill nothing, cook nothing, build nothing, and reject everything that European civilisation stands for. They will become, in fact, Noble Savages.

  In response, Frankenstein goes to London (rather than Paris) to study the latest surgical techniques. He consults with ‘the most distinguished natural philosopher’ of the day in this ‘wonderful and celebrated city’, though this man is not named.63 He then sets up a second laboratory in Scotland, in the remote Orkney islands, where he plans to create a second Creature, a woman. Her companionship will satisfy the male Creature.

  But Frankenstein is overcome with doubts. ‘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 Demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated on earth … Had I the right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?’64 His eventual decision to destroy his handiwork is perhaps the grimmest scene in the novel. The laboratory is revealed as a place of horror and blasphemy: ‘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 flesh of a human being … With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, cleaned my chemical apparatus, and put the relics of my work into a basket with a great quantity of stones.’65

  There is something more than deathly about those stones. It is as if Frankenstein is burying scientific hope itself beneath the earth.

  In his grief and fury the Creature revenges himself on his creator by destroying Frankenstein’s friend Clerval, and then his bride, Elizabeth. From thenceforth both are locked in a pact of mutual destruction, which eventually leads pursuer and pursued to the frozen wastes of the North Pole — the antithesis of the warm, Pacific paradise. In a sense, both have lost their own souls. Drawing on the Miltonic imagery of Paradise Lost, both see themselves as fallen angels, doomed to eternal solitude and destruction. The dying Frankenstein remains unrepentant as he gasps: ‘All my speculations and hopes are as nothing. Like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in eternal hell … I have myself been blasted in all my hopes … Yet another may succeed.’ 66

  But the Creature has attained a kind of self-knowledge, and even humility: ‘When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty of the world. But it is even so. The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation. I am quite alone … He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish … I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks.’67

  6

  Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in soul-making had ended in disaster. The novel itself disappeared into temporary obscurity, and fewer than 500 copies were sold of the first edition. But it was made famous, if not notorious, in the 1820s by no less than five adaptations for the stage. These caused widespread controversy. The first was staged in London in July 1823, at the English Opera House in The Strand. It was entitled portentously Presumption: or The Fate of Frankenstein. From the start there was sensational publicity:

  Do not go to the Opera House to see the Monstrous Drama, founded on the improper work called FRANKENSTEIN!!! Do not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families!!! — The novel itself is of a decidedly immoral tendency; it treats of a subject which in nature cannot occur. This subject is PREGNANT with mischief; and to prevent the ill-consequences which may result from the promulgation of such dangerous Doctrines, a few zealous friends of morality, and promoters of the Posting-bill (and who are ready to meet the consequences thereof) are using their strongest endeavours.68

  The part of ‘The Creature’, which was cleverly and sinisterly left blank in the programme, made the actor T.P. Cooke famous (despite his terrible gout) — just as it later made Boris Karloff famous. Over the next four years there were fourteen separate productions, mounted in London, Bristol, Paris and New York.

  Presumption made several fundamental changes to Mary Shelley’s novel, all without her permission. Nor did she receive any copyright fees. Curiously she did not seem to mind, and when she herself went to see the play in September 1823 she loved it. ‘But lo & behold! I found myself famous! Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama at the English Opera House … Mr. Cooke played the “blank’s” part extremely well — his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard — all he does was well imagined and executed … it appears to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience … in the early performances all the ladies fainted and hubbub ensued! … They continue to play it even now.’69

  Yet the changes have influenced almost all subsequent stage and film productions. They altered the scientific and moral themes of the book, and shifted it permanently towards a mixture of gothic melodrama and black farce. Victor Frankenstein is made the archetypal mad and evil scientist. He has stood for this role ever since. But in the original novel he is also a romantic and idealistic figure, obsessive rather than evil, and determined to benefit mankind. His demoniac laboratory becomes the centre of dramatic interest, with fizzing el
ectrical generators, sinister bubbling vats and violent explosions. But no such laboratory is described in the novel: Frankenstein works by candlelight at a surgical table. He is also given a comic German assistant called Fritz, who adds gothic farce to the whole proceedings. There is no such assistant in the novel: Frankenstein’s work is essentially solitary and dedicated, like that of an artist.

  But the most important change of all is this. Mary Shelley’s unnamed Creature is transformed into the ‘Monster’, and made completely dumb. He is deprived of all words, whereas in the novel he is superbly and even tragically articulate: ‘And what was I? Of my creation and my creator I was absolutely ignorant … Where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing … I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome. I was not even of the same nature as man … When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a Monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me … Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst and heat!’70

  7

  William Lawrence’s experiment ended in an altogether different way. At the end of 1819 he withdrew his Natural History of Man, yielding to pressure from the Royal College of Surgeons and a number of medical institutions. But he continued to speak out in favour of scientific freedom. ‘I take the opportunity of protesting, in the strongest possible terms … against the attempt to stifle impartial enquiry by an outcry of pernicious tendency; and against perverting science and literature, which naturally tend to bring mankind acquainted with each other, to the anti-social purpose of inflaming and prolonging national prejudice and animosity.’71

  Lawrence allowed the radical publisher Richard Carlile to reissue a pirate edition of the Natural History in 1822, which ran to nine editions (Carlile also successfully pirated Shelley’s Queen Mab). Carlile wrote his own pamphlet, Address to the Men of Science (1821), in which he urged Lawrence and others to retain their intellectual independence. When Carlile died, in a final gesture of support, he gave Lawrence his corpse for dissection, an almost unheard-of bequest.72

  Lawrence was also supported by Thomas Wakley, mercurial editor of the newly founded medical journal the Lancet. In scintillating and lively articles, Wakley attacked the old guard of the Royal College, and satirised the attempts of Abernethy and others to bring theology into the surgical theatre. Whenever they dissected some haemorrhaging organ, or pulsating artery, Wakley mocked, they would exclaim ‘with uplifted eye, and most reverentially contracted mouth: “Gintilmen, behold the winderful evidence of Desin!”’73

  But in 1829 William Lawrence stood for the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, a body famous for its conservatism. Silently renouncing his radical and ‘materialist’ views, he went to see his old patron and enemy John Abernethy. It was not a meeting on the Mer de Glace. After long discussions, Lawrence received forgiveness and wholehearted support from his old mentor. Lawrence was unanimously elected, and when his old comrade-in-arms Thomas Wakley came to protest on behalf of the Lancet, Lawrence helped to physically manhandle him out of the Council chamber. Sir William Lawrence finished his career as Surgeon-General to Queen Victoria, and was created a baronet. But perhaps he had lost his own soul.

  ♣ This is a line of argument that has a long scientific footprint, and can be found being used to great rhetorical effect today by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Against this, it is interesting to read the defence of the necessary and dynamic notion of ‘mystery’ by Humphry Davy in his lectures (see my Prologue), or by the great twentieth-century American physicist Richard Feynman in The Meaning of It All (posthumously published in 1999). Though not a religious man, Feynman believed that science was driven by a continual dialogue between sceptical enquiry and the sense of inexplicable mystery, and that if either got the upper hand true science would be destroyed. See James Gleick, Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (1992).

  ♣ This is possibly the first scientific identification of the famous ‘placebo effect’, although it would not be properly tested and defined until the 1950s. It has been claimed that over 30 per cent of all patients show a ‘placebo’ response, most notably in cases of depression, heart disease and chronic muscular pain. This figure has recently been questioned, since the earlier trials may have been methodologically flawed (they lacked a neutral ‘control’ group of patients); and the definition of ‘cure’ itself is open to a high degree of subjective distortion. e.g. Who is to say when a depression is cured, or how to measure if a severe pain is reduced to a milder one? This is similar to the problems Davy encountered when trying to describe objectively the effects of nitrous oxide. Nevertheless, the 1784 commission’s work indicates why Vitalism raised genuine scientific questions, and also drew attention to that mysterious area which Coleridge (again) would define as ‘psychosomatic’ — the mind-body interface. There is an elegant passage in his notebooks wondering what causes men to blush, and the female nipple to become erect. Shelley composed an intriguing poem, ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’ (1822), and Thomas De Quincey wrote a fine reflective essay, ‘Animal Magnetism’, for Tait’s Magazine in 1834, investigating this subject, which remains alive in the continuing debate about ‘alternative medicine’.

  ♣ Richard Dawkins has praised this passage from Coleridge as ‘good science’, in his remarkable study of Science and Romanticism, Unweaving the Rainbow (1998, Chapter 3, ‘Bar Codes in the Stars’). The whole chapter gives a scientist’s lively view of Haydon’s dinner party, to which Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, would clearly have liked to have been invited — as would I.

  ♣ Mary Shelley adds as her own footnote in the novel: ‘* the moon’.

  8

  Davy and the Lamp

  1

  After the hugely successful Geology Lectures of spring 1811 in Dublin, Humphry Davy returned to the west of England on a summer fishing expedition. Here, while innocently angling along the banks of the river Wye, he himself was hooked by a small, dark and vivacious Scottish beauty, Jane Apreece. For the first time in his life he fell desperately in love, and felt a power that might be greater than science.

  Jane, who had heard him lecture in Ireland, was, initially at least, rather cool about him. She wrote to a friend on 4 March 1811: ‘Mr Davy is remarkably pleasant, & all the fashion & celebrity of admiration do not injure his unaffectedness. It is said that a more dangerous Power in the sprightly form of an Irish Peeress may probably burn some of his combustible matter & at least singe if not scarifying his heart.’1

  Jane was thirty-one, a widow and an heiress. She was known in Edinburgh as a wit and a belle esprit. She dressed beautifully, and talked flamboyantly: she had a kind of electrical energy about her. Davy loved energy. Jane had travelled widely in Europe, and spoke fluent French and Italian. She could read Latin, and she liked going to lectures. She was clever, self-confident and original.

  Apart from Anna Beddoes, Davy’s decade of success and glamour at the Royal Institution had brought him various flirtations, as evidenced by the many Valentine poems addressed to him there.2 But as he wrote to his mother, until he met Jane Apreece he had never seriously considered marriage, and had felt that a scientific career was not compatible with a wife and family. His true bride was Science. However, perhaps his notions of scientific celibacy were changing.

  Jane was a romantic figure. She was the daughter of Charles Kerr of Kelso, who had made a fortune in Antigua, and left her a considerable inheritance. She may also have had some West Indian blood in her veins. There was certainly something tropical in her temperament. Her first marriage, at nineteen, to a much older man, a decrepit Welsh baronet languidly named Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece, had been unhappy and childless. Its best aspect,
said Jane, was that he had frequently taken her abroad. In Geneva she made friends with Madame de Staël, and later claimed to be the original of the heroine of de Staël’s sensational romance Corinne (1807), about a lonely woman who finds love in southern climes.

  She had other literary connections. She knew Sydney Smith and the waspish novelist Horace Walpole. In London, she once dined with William Blake. She was a subscriber to Coleridge’s philosophical magazine The Friend. Walter Scott was a distant cousin, and a close friend. In the summer of 1810 they had toured the Highlands and the Hebrides together, and he observed that she was headstrong, inquisitive and not frightened by storms. They got on well, teasing each other as cousins should, but Scott was clearly a little in awe of her. He wrote in his journal that he thought her ‘more French than English, and partaking of the Creole vivacity and suppleness’. It is not quite clear what he meant by this last compliment, perhaps that Jane was volatile and sexually provocative. She certainly had social ambitions: ‘as a lion-catcher, I would pit her against the world. She flung her lasso over Byron himself.’3