Byron described the scene to a friend: “We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams on the sea-shore, to render them fit for removal and regular interment. You can have no idea what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has, on a desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame. All of Shelley was consumed, except his heart, which would not take the flame, and is now preserved in spirits of wine.”
Leigh Hunt took possession of the heart, and refused Mary’s request that he turn it over to her; Jane Williams finally convinced Hunt to give it up. Mary would keep the badly charred object in a portable writing desk. The rest of Shelley’s ashes, kept in a walnut case covered with black velvet, went on Byron’s boat to Livorno and then to the home of the English consul in Rome. He was also a wine merchant so the ashes were stored in a wine cellar, awaiting a final decision on their disposition.
Just as her father could not bear to attend her mother’s funeral, Mary herself stayed at home during the cremation. She spent the time writing a long letter to Maria Gisborne, telling everything that had happened since the beginning of the summer. To Mary, the act of writing was the beginning of expiation. She felt guilty because her relationship with Shelley was in tatters when he died. On the very day he left, they had quarreled, for she had felt his departure, at a time when she was still recovering from her miscarriage, was a desertion. She recalled that on that day, “I called him back two or three times, & told him that if I did not see him soon I would go to Pisa with the child.”
In August, Byron wrote to Thomas Moore of Shelley: “There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it.” He was overly optimistic.
The first public announcement of Shelley’s death came from Leigh Hunt in the Examiner for August 4, 1822. He praised the poet: “Those who know a great mind when they meet it, and who have been delighted with the noble things in the works of MR. SHELLEY, will be shocked to hear that he has been cut off in the prime of his life and genius.” Other publications noted Shelley’s “fearless and independent spirit,” his “estimable” character, and “highly cultivated genius.”
Less flattering opinions appeared as well. The publication John Bull noted: “Mr. Byshe [sic] Shelley, the author of that abominable and blasphemous book called Queen Mab, was lately drowned in a storm.” The Gentleman’s Magazine wrote in an obituary, “Mr. Shelley is unfortunately too well known for his infamous novels and poems. He openly professed himself an atheist.” Charles Lamb wrote to a friend that summer from France, “Shelley the great Atheist has gone down by water to eternal fire!” The response of Shelley’s own father was cold and emotionless. “To lose an eldest son in his life time and the unfortunate manner of his losing that life,” wrote Sir Timothy, “is truly melancholy to think of, but as it has pleas’d that great Author of our Being so to dispose of him I must make up my mind with resignation.”
Reliable old Godwin put his own feelings above the need to comfort Mary. When news of Percy’s death came via a letter from Hunt, he wrote his daughter,
That you should be so overcome as not to be able to write is, perhaps, but too natural, but that Jane [Claire] could not write one line I could never have believed. . . . Leigh Hunt says you bear up under the shock better than could have been imagined; but appearances are not to be relied on. It would have been a great relief to me to have had a few lines from yourself. In a case like this, one lets one’s imagination loose among the possibilities of things, and one is apt to rest upon what is most distressing and intolerable. I learned the news on Sunday. I was in hope to have my doubts and fears removed by a letter from yourself on Monday. I again entertained the same hope to-day, and am again disappointed. I shall hang in hope and fear on every post, knowing that you cannot neglect me for ever.
He recalled that he had not been speaking or writing to her; that had been for her own good, Mary’s father explained. Now that she has experienced tragedy, they are again on the same, miserable level:
All that I expressed to you about silence and not writing to you again is now put an end to in the most melancholy way. I looked on you as one of the daughters of prosperity, elevated in rank and fortune, and I thought it was criminal to intrude on you for ever the sorrows of an unfortunate old man and a beggar. You are now fallen to my own level; you are surrounded with adversity and with difficulty; and I shall no longer hold it sacrilege to trouble you with my adversities. We shall now truly sympathise with each other; and whatever misfortune or ruin falls upon me, I shall not now scruple to lay it fully before you.
He invited her to come and live with him and his wife and, of course, asked what financial provision Shelley had made for her.
Lord Byron told a friend after Shelley’s death:
He was the most gentle, most amiable, and least worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius, joined to a simplicity, as rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a beau ideal of all that is fine, high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter. He had a most brilliant imagination, but a total want of worldly-wisdom. I have seen nothing like him, and never shall again, I am certain.
At the end of August, Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne describing the five weeks since she learned of Shelley’s death:
And so here I am! I continue to exist—to see one day succeed the other; to dread night; but more to dread morning & hail another cheerless day. . . . At times I feel an energy within me to combat with my destiny—but again I sink—I have but one hope for which I live—to render myself worthy to join him. . . . I can conceive but of one circumstance that could afford me the semblance of content—that is . . . in collecting His manuscripts—writing his life, and thus to go easily to my grave.
Mary would, in time, become the custodian of Shelley’s memory and indeed place his reputation as a poet on a far higher level than he ever achieved during his lifetime. It would be Mary who ultimately made Percy a great man. In doing so, she carried out the words he wrote in “Ode to the West Wind”:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GLORY AND DEATH
Now fierce remorse and unreplying death
Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,
Thrilling and keen, in accents audible,
A tale of unrequited love doth tell.
—“The Choice,” Mary Shelley, 1823
AT PERCY’S DEATH, Mary was just twenty-four years old. Her identity had always been defined by those around her. First, she had been the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; then she became the companion and wife of Shelley. Now she would be known as the widow of Shelley. Like her creature, she had no name of her own.
Despite the difficulties of their marriage, Mary had loved Percy, and she depended on him in many ways. They had always been intellectual partners, and he had been her mentor from before the time she wrote Frankenstein. Literally her entire adult existence had been spent with him, and as bizarre as Percy’s behavior had sometimes been, it was what Mary had come to experience as everyday life.
Unfortunately, Shelley had died at a low point in their relationship, and Mary would never be able to repair the rift, to say what needed to be said, to resurrect the warmth and intimacy they had formerly shared. As the initial shock of his passing wore off, however, Mary sought a way to resolve the conflicts between them. Words had been her refuge and now would be her tools. Just as her mother had once created ideal versions of her own life, Mary would use her writing skills to repair her marriage. She wou
ld go farther than that: she would create an ideal version of Shelley himself.
Mary and Jane Williams, companions in grief, left the house at Lerici and moved back to Pisa, where Mary wrote lengthy and feverish letters that were novelistic in their description of Shelley’s death and the events leading up to it. Mary now saw clearly the foreshadowings of disaster, visions showing the interrelationship of writing and reality.
In September 1822, Jane Williams went to London and Mary rented a large house in Genoa, where she was soon joined by the Hunts and their six children. Claire, after a brief love affair with Trelawny, headed off to Vienna to live with her brother Charles. Byron felt a certain obligation toward Mary, and paid her to make legible copies of his poems. He was writing more cantos of Don Juan, having received “permission” from his lover Teresa Guiccioli, who had felt that the earlier parts of the poem were too indelicate. Mary also wrote for the new journal, The Liberal, that Hunt edited with Byron’s financial support. For the first issue she transcribed Shelley’s poetical translation of Goethe’s Faust; for the second she contributed a story of her own, “A Tale of the Passions, or the Death of Despina.”
Meanwhile, Mary began what was to be a years-long task: editing Shelley’s poems for publication. She wrote to people who might have copies, among them Percy’s publisher Charles Ollier, Thomas Love Peacock, the Gisbornes, Hogg, and Godwin. Some of the work reopened wounds that had hardly begun to heal. At one point she asked Peacock for a desk from the Shelleys’ former house at Marlow, in which she had kept letters. When it arrived in Italy, she found that reading the letters brought poignant memories of the ghosts of the past: “What a scene to recur to!” Mary reflected. “My William, Clara, Allegra are all talked of—They lived then—They breathed this air & their voices struck on my sense, their feet trod the earth beside me —& their hands were warm with blood & life when clasped in mine. Where are they all? This is too great an agony to be written about.”
Nevertheless, working on Shelley’s poems proved to be a tonic for Mary, and for the first time in the three months since his death, she began writing in her journal. The new journal, which Mary called her “Journal of Sorrow,” began October 2, 1822. Her entries and letters made it clear that one of the few things that she lived for now was her three-year-old son, Percy Florence. “But [except] for my Child,” she wrote, “it could not End too soon.”
Mary felt the need to defend herself from the story being spread (unknown to Mary) by Jane Williams, that Percy had turned to Jane for companionship because Mary was so cold to him. (That had been why Hunt initially had refused to give Mary the heart of Percy after cremation.) Mary now used her journal to re-create a relationship with Percy—one that was “romantic beyond romance.”
Hearing of these rumors, but not their source, she often tried to face her feelings honestly. “Oh my beloved Shelley,” she wrote,
it is not true that this heart was cold to thee. Tell me, for now you know all things—did I not in the deepest solitude of thought repeat to myself my good fortune in possessing you? How often during those happy days, happy though chequered, I thought how superiorly gifted I had been in being united to one to whom I could unveil myself, & who could understand me. Well then, I am now reduced to these white pages which I am to blot with dark imagery.
Other entries echoed the thoughts and feelings of the monster she had created in Frankenstein: “No one seems to understand or to sympathize with me. They all seem to look on me as one without affections—without any sensibility—my sufferings are thought a cypher —& I feel my self degraded before them.”
That isolation increased with the passing days. A letter Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne in November begins, “No one ever writes to me. Each day, one like the other, passes on and if I were where I would that I were methinks I could not be more forgotten. I cannot write myself, for I cannot fill the paper always with the self same complaints—or if I write them, why send them, to cast the shadow of my misery on others.” Mary confessed to Byron, “I would, like a dormouse, roll myself in cotton at the bottom of my cage, & never peep out.” By the end of 1822, she was writing about herself as if she were the creature of her novel: “I am a lonely unloved thing.—Serious & absorbed—none cares to read my sorrow.”
Mary forced herself to turn her attention to practical matters. She wrote to Percy’s father, Sir Timothy, asking for an allowance for herself and her son. Byron, as co-executor (with Peacock) of Percy’s estate, sent a letter supporting this request. Sir Timothy was unsympathetic; he blamed Mary for breaking up his son’s first marriage to Harriet. He offered to help his grandson—but only if he could take control of his upbringing, as Sir Timothy had already done with Percy’s first son, Charles. (Shelley’s other child by Harriet, Ianthe, was in the custody of Harriet’s father and her sister Eliza, whom Percy had so resented. Eliza had married a London bank clerk named Farthing Beauchamp, who had been left a fortune by an old lady on the condition that he change his name to Beauchamp.) Mary adamantly refused to surrender her son.
Shelley’s ashes were still in the wine cellar of the English consul in Rome. The city’s Protestant cemetery had refused to bury Shelley next to his son because there was no room, so Mary decided that William’s body should be moved. When the grave was opened, however, it was discovered that it contained the skeleton of an adult. A ghastly mistake had been made, straight out of a Gothic novel. William’s body was never found and a memorial tablet was erected to his memory, with no bones under it.
Finally, on January 21, 1823, an English chaplain buried the square wooden box containing Shelley’s ashes in the New Enclosure of the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Mary showed her growing religiosity in allowing such a service, for Percy died, as he lived, an avowed atheist.
The next month, Trelawny, just arrived in Rome, found what he considered a prettier spot, moved Percy’s remains there, and even secured a plot next to it for himself. At Mary’s request Trelawny put this quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest on the tombstone:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Trying to support herself by literary efforts, Mary was hindered by constant bouts of depression. On March 30, 1823, she wrote: “I cannot write. Day after day I suffer the most tremendous agitation. I cannot write or read or think—there is a whirlwind within me that shakes every nerve. I take exercise & do every thing that may prevent my body from influencing evilly my mind; but it will not do. . . . I am a wreck.”
Her depression was not helped by living with the Hunts. Their six children—compared by Byron to a “kraal” of savages—had been raised according to Rousseau’s principles and were unruly and undisciplined. Mary was paying nearly half the rent of the huge house, and she was having trouble making ends meet. Byron even suggested that Mary accept Sir Timothy’s offer, requiring her to abandon her son. (Byron himself showed he was not immune to the power of money when his wife’s mother, known as Lady Noel, died and in her will left a large sum to Byron if he agreed to take her name. Accordingly, he began to sign himself “Noel Byron,” although his knowing friends pointed out that this name change enabled him to use the initials “N. B.”—the same as his idol Napoleon.)
For Mary, the only good news came from England, where Frankenstein was a success. Godwin, of all people, wrote Mary to express his pride. Whether he had suddenly developed paternal affection or was angling for money that Mary didn’t have (Godwin would be forced into bankruptcy in the spring of 1825), he sounded sincere: “Frankenstein is universally known, and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading is everywhere respected . . . most fortunately you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind in the manner most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author.” Unconditional praise for his daughter from Godwin was rare indeed.
Mary’s historical novel Valperga had been published in February 1823 to good reviews, although some critics w
ere disappointed, for they had wanted another Frankenstein. She felt it was time to go home. She left Italy on July 25, 1823, and arrived in London with Percy Florence in August. At first they stayed with Godwin and his wife. A month later, Mary took up lodgings off Brunswick Square. For the first time in her life she had a room of her own.
Four days after her arrival, Mary attended a theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein and learned that her creature had acquired a kind of celebrity. From the beginning, people saw the dramatic possibilities in her novel, and onstage the characters took on new lives. The book’s first transformation was Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 play Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which was staged at the English Opera House in the Strand. It introduced a new character, but one who would acquire permanent status in the Frankenstein canon: Fritz, Victor’s bumbling assistant, who, in this version, sang a ditty to start the play.
Peake’s Victor Frankenstein demonstrated the danger of misdirected intelligence and misuse of power, just as in the novel. He was an anguished person who turned inward and could not relate to others. Peake gave Victor a soliloquy on the nature of life and death near the end of the first scene. “To examine the causes of life—I have had recourse to death—I have seen how the fine form of man has been wasted and degraded—have beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life!”
Mary attended the play with her father William, half-brother William, and Jane Williams; unfortunately their reaction to the scene in which William Frankenstein is taken and murdered by the monster was not recorded. The playwright made crucial changes in translating the novel to the stage. Even in this very first adaptation, the monster does not speak—setting a precedent for most of the subsequent dramatic renderings of it, including the 1931 motion picture that starred Boris Karloff. The novel’s Arctic surroundings are ignored, as in most subsequent productions. Peake’s play is set entirely in Geneva, and ends when an avalanche destroys both Victor and the monster.
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