The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  My feelings at intervals are of a deadly & torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural & keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass & the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopical distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of lethargy & inanimation, & often remain for hours on the sofa between sleep & waking, a prey to the most painful irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my condition.

  The first proofs for Frankenstein arrived at the end of September. Percy went to London to supervise the different publishing projects of the family, to consult Dr. Lawrence, and to raise money. (Claire too had a novel that Percy tried to find a publisher for, but to no avail. No trace of the book survives, but it may have been Claire’s “entry” in Byron’s ghost story contest.) Mary wrote to him, “I am just now surrounded by babes. Alba is scratching and crowing—William amusing himself with wrapping a shawl round him and Miss Clara staring at the fire. . . . Adieu—dear love.”

  Mary was unable to supply enough of her own milk to satisfy her newborn, so cow’s milk was obtained, but that upset little Clara’s stomach. Feeling depressed, Mary wrote to Percy that she no longer had the energy to work on the Frankenstein revisions. She sent him a batch of proofs with the notation, “I am tired and not very clear headed so I give you carte blanche to make what alterations you please.”

  Shelley informed Mary that the doctor in London had said he must go either to the English seacoast or to Italy for his health, and asked her to decide. Though she dreaded being uprooted again, Mary chose Italy. One of her reasons was to make sure that Byron accepted the responsibility of caring for Allegra. Claire’s love for the child had made her reluctant to take steps to send her to Byron, and Byron refused to come to England to fetch her. He was now living in Venice in a large house on the Grand Canal overlooking the Rialto Bridge. Claire, always hopeful of a reconciliation with Byron, wrote him, speculating on what Allegra’s life with him would be like, “Poor little angel! in your great house, left perhaps to servants while you are drowning sense and feeling in wine.”

  Mary was worried about what her father would say when he heard they were leaving. Worse, Percy had promised to give Godwin more money, but now found he could not supply it. Mary wrote a letter to Percy in October that shows the deep attachment she would always have for her father, “I know not whether it is early habit or affection but the idea of his silent quiet disapprobation makes me weep as it did in the days of my childhood. I am called away by the cries of Clara . . . God knows when I shall see you—Claire is forever wearying with her idle & childish complaints.” At Percy’s suggestion, they concealed from Godwin their plans for going abroad.

  As it turned out, Frankenstein would not be Mary’s first published book. While she was putting the finishing touches on the novel, she combined some of her letters and journal entries to produce a book about her elopement trip in 1814. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour was published anonymously in December, shortly before Frankenstein was due to appear. Such travel accounts were popular in an era without movies, television, or even photography, and Mary clearly wanted to do her part to raise some money for the household.

  The end of 1817 was a fertile period for the family publishing industry. William Godwin’s novel Mandeville—the book Fanny had thought should be completed for the world’s sake, even as she contemplated suicide—was published. Some readers, including Shelley, thought it was Godwin’s best work in years. But Peacock, in his novel Nightmare Abbey, has a character flip through what is obviously intended to be Godwin’s book, remarking, “Devilman, [Mandeville] a novel. Hm. Hatred, revenge, misanthropy, and quotations from the Bible. Hm. This is the morbid anatomy of black bile.”

  Mary was gratified with the warm reception that greeted History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Thomas Moore praised it, guessing who the author was, and Percy told him, “Mrs. Shelley, tho’ sorry that her secret is discovered, is exceedingly delighted to hear that you have derived any amusement from our book.— Let me say in her defence that the Journal of the Six Weeks Tour was written before she was seventeen, and that she has another literary secret which I will in a short time ask you to keep in return for having discovered this.”

  Percy himself was hardly idle. The publisher of Laon and Cythna had withdrawn all copies of the book from sale because of its inflammatory contents, but allowed Shelley to tone it down and republish it under the title The Revolt of Islam. In December he also wrote the sonnet that has proved to be his most enduring work, “Ozymandias.”

  Mary received her first bound copy of the three-volume Frankenstein on the last day of 1817. Percy had written a preface in the author’s voice. He assured readers that “The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.” He then went on to describe the origin of the book in “casual conversation” and in the setting of the book around Geneva. “The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation.” This story, he said, was the only one completed. He declared that the book was a psychological study that “affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.” It is doubtful that Mary herself would be immodest enough to make such a claim.

  The first edition consisted of five hundred copies. It would eventually sell out, but after the publisher deducted his expenses, Mary was left with proceeds of only twenty-eight pounds (the equivalent of about $3,000 in 2005 dollars). Mary braced herself for bad reviews—just the book’s dedication was sufficient to garner several. After reading Mandeville, Mary had decided to dedicate her own novel to her father, and reviewers, seeing this, suspected that Percy was the author of Frankenstein. In the Tory Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker wrote:

  [Frankenstein] is piously dedicated to Mr. Godwin and is written in the spirit of his school. The dreams of insanity are embodied in the strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero. Mr. Godwin is the patriarch of a literary family, whose chief skill is in delineating the wanderings of the intellect, and which strangely delights in the most afflicting and humiliating of human miseries. His disciples are a kind of out-pensioners of Bedlam, and like “Mad Bess” or “Mad Tom,” are occasionally visited with paroxysms of genius and fits of expression, which make sober-minded people wonder and shudder.

  Croker was a prominent opponent of Romantic poetry (his later review of John Keats’s Endymion was so savage that it is said to have hastened Keats’s death), but he wasn’t alone in disliking Frankenstein. William Beckford, a fellow Gothic novelist and author of Vathek, a Byron favorite, noted in the flyleaf of his copy of Mary’s novel, “perhaps the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times.” Samuel Johnson’s muse Hester Thrale Piozzi, now an old lady, wrote, “Nothing attracts us but what terrifies, and is within—if within—a hairbreadth of positive disgust . . . some of the strange things they write remind me of Squire Richard’s visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says ‘They are pure grim devils,’— particularly a wild and hideous tale called Frankenstein.”

  Shelley had personally sent a copy of the novel to Sir Walter Scott, one of the most popular and respected writers of the time. Scott responded by writing a generally favorable review in Edinburgh Magazine in the March 1818 issue, “It is no slight merit in our eyes,” he wrote, “that the tale [Frankenstein], though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanism with which tales of wonder are usually told, as if it were necessary that the language sho
uld be extravagant as the fiction.” Scott also commented favorably about the descriptions of landscape, as having “freshness, precision and beauty.” He found some parts of the plot improbable—the monster’s ability to learn how to speak and read through a hole in the wall, for example—but he enjoyed the book. “Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression. We . . . congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion.”

  Those closest to Mary naturally praised the book, though she must have been particularly gratified by her father’s reaction. Godwin wrote proudly of it as “the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of.” Even Byron commented that Mary’s novel was “a wonderful work for a Girl of nineteen—not nineteen indeed at that time.” Claire, who had irritated Mary in so many other ways, was openly generous in her estimation of the book. She wrote in a letter to Byron,

  Mary has just published her first work . . . It is a most wonderful performance full of genius . . . as no one would imagine could have been written by so young a person. I am delighted & whatever private feelings of envy I may have at not being able to do so well myself yet all yields when I consider that she is a woman & will prove in time an ornament to us & an argument in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong and cultivated intellect. How I delight to hear all the intricacies of mind & argument hanging on her lips.

  She was praising women’s intellect to the wrong person.

  Shelley also wrote a review that he planned, unsuccessfully, to publish anonymously to publicize the novel. He praised the book’s moral nature and the emotions it evoked, summing up the meaning of the work as, “Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn . . . for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind—divide him, a social being from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—malevolence and selfishness.” This interpretation linked the book’s moral to Godwin’s philosophy, indicating that Percy missed much of the point.

  Mary had not seen any of the published reviews for her book by the time she and Shelley left England. When they had moved into their house in Marlow, Shelley had taken out a twenty-one-year lease on it. In reality, they stayed there for just a little less than a year, though that was a long stretch by Shelley’s standards. Since they were traveling for Shelley’s health, Mary had no idea how long they might stay in Italy. She selected a hundred books to be shipped to their destination, and a smaller number to carry in their luggage. In early February, she closed up the house and joined the rest of the party in London.

  For the next month, Mary shopped and enjoyed company. They went to the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles, which had just been put on display. They stocked up on writing materials and paper. They went to the theater and opera—Mary in a strapless gown and Shelley in a formal coat. Hunt described Shelley as “a thin patrician-looking young cosmopolite yearning out upon us,” and Mary as a “sedate-faced young lady bending in a similar direction with her great tablet of a forehead, & her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.”

  Before they were able to depart, more unpleasantness with the Godwins arose. Claire had never told her mother about Byron and the child, but rumors had reached the Godwins that Allegra was Claire’s child and Shelley was the father. When confronted, Claire told them about her love affair with Byron. Her mother was horrified and blamed her daughter’s downfall on Mary, whom she bad-mouthed for the rest of her life. In point of fact, the Godwins never believed that Byron was truly the father of Claire’s child, which made Mary’s father even more resolute in trying to collect what he felt was his monetary due from Shelley.

  On March 11, the same day that Frankenstein had its official publication, Mary, Percy, and Claire, along with William, Clara, Allegra, and two nursemaids, set out on the road to Dover. Here they lodged for the night because no boats were leaving the port. The remnant of a tremendous storm that had passed over England spreading ruin in its wake was still producing high winds and rain. As in Mary’s novel, the bad weather was an ominous sign. They left England on March 12. Four of the travelers, including the three youngest, would never return.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GHOSTS’ REVENGE

  Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?

  Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?

  Who painteth the shadows that are beneath

  The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?

  Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be

  With the fears and the love for that which we see?

  —“On Death,” Percy Shelley, 1815

  THE STORM BLEW the Shelley entourage across the Dover Strait to Calais in less than three hours. Though speedy, the trip was rough; one of the frightened passengers recited the Lord’s Prayer constantly. Shelley, as always, was happiest when he traveled. He wrote to Leigh Hunt, “We are all very well & in excellent spirits, Motion has always this effect upon the blood, even when the mind knows that there are causes for dejection.” Before the summer was out, Shelley’s love of motion, abrupt and nearly incessant, would turn deadly.

  For their third trip through France, for novelty’s sake, they chose a different route, skipping Paris this time. They were disappointed; on the first day Mary wrote in her journal that “The country is uninteresting but the weather is delightful.” After a week they arrived at Lyons and hired another carriage to get them to Italy. Mary wrote with excited anticipation, “we can see from here Jura and Mont Blanc & the whole scene reminds me of Geneva.”

  By the twenty-eighth of March they were approaching the Alps. Mary was thrilled to see the sun rise on their snowy peaks, so reminiscent of her 1816 summer. Their carriage followed a winding river, where the scenery was gorgeous. Then they began to ascend the heights that they would have to cross. “The snows encroach upon the road,” Mary wrote, and she found it “dreadful” as they made their way along the edge of a precipice, where a thousand-foot fall was only inches away from the carriage wheels. Taking the new road that Napoleon had built though the Cenis Pass, they entered Italy.

  They stayed in Milan for three weeks, possibly to please Claire, who wanted to keep as long as possible her beloved Allegra, now fifteen months old and developing a personality. Claire, whose singing voice had been celebrated by both Byron and Shelley, also loved attending the operas and ballets at La Scala. Late in the evenings, after the nurses had put the children to bed, Claire played chess with Percy. The growing closeness between the two of them disturbed Mary but she could do nothing about it. There is little reason to think that Shelley would hesitate to have sex with Claire, for he always opposed “exclusive” sexual possession—by husbands or wives. Claire was, in this, even more an ardent disciple than Mary. Events later made the precise relationship between Shelley and Claire at this time important.

  On April 13, Shelley wrote to Byron, “. . . to inform you that your little girl has arrived here in excellent health and spirits, with eyes as blue as the sky over our heads.” They thought they could lure Byron to join them and re-create the atmosphere of the 1816 summer, but their hopes were dashed when Byron refused to pick up his daughter. He made it abundantly clear that he did not want to see Claire “for fear that the consequence might be an addition to the family.” Claire’s letters made it clear that she still hoped Byron might again become attracted to her.

  Apparently Byron also suggested that Claire should not visit her child after she gave it up. Percy, ever solicitous of Claire, replied to Byron on April 22, “You write as if from the instant of its departure all future intercourse were to cease between Claire and her child. This I cannot think you ought to have expected, or even to have desired. . . . What should we think of a woman who should resign her infant child with no prospect of ever seeing it again, even to a father in whose tenderness she entirely confided? . . . Surely it is better if we err, to err on the side of kindness than
of rigour.” But there was little kindness in Byron’s letter to his friend John Cam Hobhouse in England. “Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard & it’s mother—but won’t send the shild [sic]—unless I will go & see the mother—I have sent a messenger for the Shild [sic]—but I can’t leave my quarters.”

  Shelley, sensing Byron’s new attitude, warned Claire that it might be better if she raised the child herself. Claire disagreed, arguing that Allegra would have greater opportunities in life if she were brought up by Byron. Claire still hoped that Allegra could be her entry back into Byron’s life—that the little girl would melt the heart of the heartless lord. She wrote Byron a letter agreeing to give up Allegra, but asking him to send a lock of his hair so that she might put it with Allegra’s in a locket. “Remember that I am wretched how wretched,” she wrote, “and for the smallest word of kindness from you I will bless & honour you.” Having made up her mind, Claire kept Allegra until her own twentieth birthday, on the twenty-seventh of April. The next day, the child’s nursemaid Elise Duvilliard took Allegra to Venice.

  On May 1, the Shelleys, with their two children and Claire, went on to Pisa. There they received a letter from Elise, telling them that Byron was delighted with the pretty child with her blond hair and blue eyes. At Byron’s villa, she wrote, “they dress her in little trousers trimmed with lace and treat her like a little princess.”

  The Shelleys were still looking for a place to settle down, but though they visited Pisa’s famous Leaning Tower and the university, they decided the city was not for them. Mary was disturbed by the sight of chained criminals working in the streets. “I could never walk in the streets except in misery,” she wrote, for “you could get into no street but you heard the clanking of their chains.”

  They went south to Leghorn (Livorno) where a small colony of English emigrés lived. The Shelleys had a letter of introduction to Maria Gisborne, the grande dame of English society there—and onetime babysitter for Mary. Gisborne had led an adventurous life. As a child, she had lived with her father, who was an English merchant in Constantinople; they later moved to Rome, where Maria met and married her first husband, William Reveley. With him she returned to England, becoming friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Maria Reveley had taken the infant Mary Godwin and her sister Fanny Imlay into her home and cared for them in the days following the death of Mary Wollstonecraft. Widowed soon after, Maria had received several proposals of marriage from Godwin—by letter—but turned him down, instead marrying John Gisborne, a businessman. They moved to Rome in 1801 and had lived in Italy ever since. Shelley described the Gisbornes to Peacock, “Mrs. Gisborne is a sufficiently amiable & very accomplished woman . . . Her husband a man with little thin lips receding forehead & a prodigious nose is an excessive bore.”