The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  Mary enjoyed the production in spite of the changes that had been made to her text. It was no doubt a thrill for her to see her characters brought to life in so public a form. She wrote, “I was much amused, & it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience.” Mary particularly liked the fact that in the program, the role of the monster (who wore blue makeup) was represented only by a dash, showing that it had no name.

  At least one London newspaper declared the stage production an “attack [on] the Christian faith” and a “burlesque [of] the resurrection of the dead.” Handbills circulated in the streets warning people not to take their families to the play, mentioning that “The novel itself is of a decidedly immoral tendency; it treats of a subject which in nature cannot occur.” But the moralists were apparently ineffective; that same year another dramatic version of the novel, titled Frankenstein: or, The Demon of Switzerland, opened at a playhouse across the Thames. Two other London productions appeared not long afterward, and three years later, one in Paris. Mary received no payment for these adaptations of her work, but Godwin realized that the publicity generated by them made a new edition of the novel potentially profitable. He arranged for its publication, and for the first time Mary Shelley was listed as the author.

  Encouraged by her fame, Mary now embarked on a new life earning a living in the only way she knew how—through writing. She also found a refuge in religion, a clear indication of her growing independence from both her father and her husband. Mary had a solid faith in an afterlife, many times expressing her belief that she would join Shelley after death, and she looked forward to her reunion with her “lost divinity.” She wrote, “But were it not for the steady hope I entertain of joining him what a mockery all this would be. Without that hope I could not study or write, for fame & usefulness (except as far as regards my child) are nullities to me.” She wrote to Jane Williams in December about their common loss. “God has still one blessing for you & me—the hope—the belief of seeing them again, & may that blessing be as entirely yours as it is mine.”

  Such letters were a sign that Mary felt a strong attraction to Jane Williams, even though they had been rivals for Shelley’s affection. Mary’s letters to Jane were indeed reminiscent of those her mother wrote to Fanny Blood, but Jane did not want that kind of relationship. She found a new love with Shelley’s old friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, whom Mary now found “queer, unamiable and strange.” Mary watched curiously as the relationship grew between Jane and the man Shelley had wanted her to sleep with. In 1827, Jane entered into a common-law marriage with Hogg (she was still married to her original husband), and gave birth to his child. It was perhaps appropriate for Hogg to take Shelley’s last love to be his own.

  For her part, Mary was not yet seeking a new companion; she still lived with the ghosts of the past. “The wisest & best have loved me,” she wrote. “The beautiful & glorious & noble have looked on me with the divine expression of love . . . those who might have been my lovers became my friends & I grew rich—till death the reaper carried to his overstocked barns my lamented harvest—But now I am not loved . . . Never o never more shall I love.”

  As she became more involved with collecting and editing Shelley’s poems, her own work suffered—and she knew it. She wrote in her journal for January 1824: “I was worth something then in the catalogue of beings; I could have written something—been something. Now I am exiled from those beloved scenes. . . . I am imprisoned in a dreary town. . . . Writing has become a task—my studies irksome—my life dreary. . . . My imagination is dead—my genius lost—my energies sleep—I am not worth the bread I eat.”

  Painstakingly Mary tracked down Shelley’s poems, some of which were written on scraps of paper. Even for Mary it took hours of patient work to decipher them. She knew that in order to rehabilitate Shelley’s reputation she would have to play down his radicalism and stress his genius. She began the process in a preface to the collection of his poems she was planning, turning the tables and becoming Victor Frankenstein, reassembling her dead husband in perfect form. She described Percy as a poet who loved nature rather than as a radical atheist. “His life was spent in the contemplation of Nature, in arduous study, or in acts of kindness and affection,” she wrote. Those who reviled Shelley misunderstood him: “His fearless enthusiasm in the cause which he considered the most sacred upon earth, the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind, was the chief reason why he . . . was pursued by hatred and calumny. No man was ever more devoted than he to the endeavour of making those around him happy; no man ever possessed friends more unfeignedly attached to him.”

  Percy’s unconventional ideas about marriage, which had hurt Mary so much, were never mentioned, and she described their final days together at the Casa Magni as happy ones: “I am convinced that the two months we passed there were the happiest he had ever known: his health even rapidly improved, and he was never better than when I last saw him, full of spirits and joy, embark for Leghorn.”

  In June 1824, Leigh Hunt and his brother John published Shelley’s Posthumous Poems to fine reviews. Sales were good, though hardly Byronic. Before all the copies could be sold, however, Sir Timothy tried to extinguish his son’s name and reputation as a poet. He insisted that the book be withdrawn, going so far as to halt the sale of the remaining 191 copies of the first printing. Sir Timothy threatened to cut off all financial aid to Mary and her son unless she agreed not to publish anything more by or about Shelley while Sir Timothy lived. An astonished Mary wrote, “Sir T. writhes under the fame of his incomparable son as if it were a most grievous injury done to him—& so perhaps after all it will prove.” However, she agreed to comply with his demands, since Sir Timothy was over seventy; she assumed that by the time she had assembled enough materials for a biography of Percy, his father would be gone. However, Sir Timothy stubbornly lived on for twenty-one more years, during which time Mary continually chafed against the restrictions he had placed on the spirit and the work of his dead son.

  The day before Mary had left Genoa for England, Byron departed Italy too. His destination was his destiny: Greece, where a war of independence against the Turks had begun in 1821. Byron had decided to join the fight; it matched his image of himself as a romantic hero who would roam the world fanning the flames of freedom. He was not content with poetry alone; as he had once told his wife in happier times, “All contemplative existence is bad. One should do something.”

  Byron had been moved by Shelley’s death, for even though the younger poet felt intimidated by him, Byron admired Shelley’s work. He had told Shelley’s cousin Tom Medwin, “Shelley has more poetry in him than any man living; and if he were not so mystical, and would not write Utopias and set himself up as a Reformer, his right to rank as a poet, and very highly too, could not fail of being acknowledged.” When Shelley died, Mary had turned to Byron for support and he had saved her dignity by giving her work, not simply handouts. Ever since Geneva, Byron had trusted Mary with his own poetry, letting her transcribe much of his masterpiece Don Juan. Sometimes he even wrote alternative endings to stanzas, letting Mary choose the one she liked better, and allowing her to remove verses she thought would not pass the delicacy test of Byron’s lover, the Countess Guiccioli. Mary herself was no prude. She had read Byron’s secret autobiography, which was reportedly scandalous, and it did not shock her.

  Like most other women, Mary felt Byron’s attraction. Her emotions were colored by the fact that she strongly associated him with Shelley and the magical summer of 1816. She wrote in her journal,

  I do not think that any person’s voice has the same power of awakening melancholy in me as Albe’s—I have been accustomed when hearing it, to listen & to speak little;—another voice, not mine, ever replied, a voice whose strings are broken; when Albe ceases to speak, I expect to hear that other voice, & when I hear another instead, it jars strangely . . . since incapacity & timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations of Diodati—they were as it were en
tirely tete-a-tete between my Shelley & Albe & thus . . . when Albe speaks & Shelley does not answer; it is as thunder without rain—the form of the sun without heat or light—as any familiar object might be, shorn of its dearest & best attribute—& I listen with an unspeakable melancholy—that yet is not all pain.

  Tragically, the last time they saw each other, money caused a rift between Byron and Mary. When Mary requested that Byron send funds to Claire, who was said to be dangerously ill in Vienna, Byron told Mary to send the money and then he would repay her. As ever, he did not want to give Claire any reason to think they could be reunited. Byron did, however, want to help Mary when she decided to return to England. To salve her pride, he gave Leigh Hunt a thousand pounds, telling him to offer it to Mary as a “loan,” but with the understanding that it would not have to be repaid. Hunt pocketed the money for himself. Moreover, Hunt viciously told Mary that Byron was bored by her and was paying for her voyage to England only because he didn’t want her around.

  Byron had been approached by the London Greek Committee, which had been formed to lend support to the Greek independence movement. Byron, like every English schoolboy, had been inculcated with the ideals of classical Greece. From the time of his first trip abroad as a young man, he had sympathized with the Greeks’ desire to liberate themselves from the Ottoman Empire. He had written in the third canto of Don Juan:

  The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

  Where burning Sappho loved and sung.

  Where grew the arts of war and peace,

  Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

  Eternal summer gilds them yet,

  But all, except their sun, is set.

  Byron was feeling dissatisfied with his life, perhaps with life itself. The Liberal stopped publication after only four issues; it was neither a financial nor a critical success. The three-mile swim in the ocean Byron had made at Shelley’s cremation caused his skin to blister and brought on a persistent fever. His hair was graying and he felt a decline in his physical powers. Drinking heavily and relying on purgative pills to control his weight did not help matters. He contributed money toward the cause of Greek independence, but the siren call of military glory drew him toward Greece itself.

  Byron knew something of the difficulties he would face, but he wanted to rehabilitate his own reputation, at a low ebb in England because of Don Juan’s critical thrashing and lingering memories of the affair with his sister and the separation from his wife. (Byron had written a preface to the three newest cantos, charging his critics with “cant”—a word he enjoyed using, to mean the expression of conventionality and piety. Nonetheless, Blackwood’s called the latest cantos “Garbage!” and The Literary Gazette termed them “moral vomit.”)

  In Italy, Byron remarked to another of his confidantes, Lady Blessington, “Yes! A grassy bed in Greece, and a grey stone to mark the spot, would please me more than a marble tomb in Westminster Abbey.” Byron asked Trelawny to accompany him, and the make-believe adventurer was only too glad to agree. Countess Guiccioli was unhappy that Byron was leaving her, but her brother Pietro himself signed on and helped round up about fifty volunteers for the expedition. The Bolivar had been sold, but Byron chartered two boats, and procured enough medical supplies, he thought, to supply a thousand men for two years.

  As always, Byron seized the opportunity to dress up in costume. He had tailors make him scarlet full-dress uniforms trimmed with gold lace, shoulder knots, and silver epaulets. Byron even commissioned several elaborate helmets modeled after those worn by Greeks of the Homeric era, and he had his family coat of arms and the motto of the Byrons embossed on the one he chose for himself. A decorative sword completed the outfit.

  As Byron’s fleet set sail from Genoa harbor on July 15, 1823, the men fired pistols into the air, sang patriotic songs, and shouted, “Tomorrow in Missolonghi.” The next day, however, saw them back in Genoa, for a storm blew up that evening, forcing the ships back into port; it was not an auspicious beginning, but Byron told Pietro Gamba “that he considered a bad beginning a favourable omen”—a sentiment all too reminiscent of Shelley’s optimism about his near-drowning.

  Byron was aboard the Hercules, a small boat crammed with medical supplies, livestock, five horses, and chests stuffed with coins and banknotes. He was cash rich for the first time—from the sale of the family lands at Newstead—and Byron knew that spreading it around would ease his travels. Never without dogs, he brought a bulldog and a Newfoundland named Lyon. The mood on the voyage was light-hearted. Byron and Trelawny, along with the dogs, sometimes slipped overboard for a swim in the sea. Once, before going over the rail, the two friends donned the captain’s scarlet waistcoat as a prank; he was so stout that it encompassed them both.

  On August 3, Byron and his men landed at Argostoli in the Ionian Islands. Here Byron received his first reality check to the romantic view of the Greeks’ struggle. There were many factions among the Greeks, and some were fighting each other rather than the Turks, who still controlled parts of Greece with heavily armed garrisons. The strongest rift was between those Greeks who had lived outside the country for many years, and those who had never left, having remained loyal to local chieftains called klephts. No matter which faction they belonged to, they all had a hand out for financial help from Byron.

  His reaction was to retreat to the British-controlled island of Cephalonia and go into a funk. “I was a fool to come here,” he wrote, “but being here I must see what is to be done.” He fell in love for the last time—with a fifteen-year-old boy, Lukas Chalandritsanos. Byron made Lukas his “page” and bought him lavish presents—expensive clothes and a set of gold-plated pistols. Trelawny, who was eager for action, was disgusted and left to join a rebel leader named Odysseus, who reportedly lived in a cave.

  On Cephalonia Byron thought mostly of the past, of what his life might have been. He would sometimes stare out to sea, wearing a cloak of Stewart tartan, reflecting his mother’s claim that she had been related to Scottish royalty. He received letters from Augusta, his half-sister in England, reporting that Byron’s seven-year-old daughter Ada suffered from headaches that were so severe they threatened her eyesight. He fretted that her mother, Lady Byron, was overtaxing her with a rigorous study schedule. Byron answered that he had had a similar condition when he was a child, but had bathed his head in cold water every morning to cure it. The letter made Byron recognize and regret how little he knew about his daughter. He wrote Augusta back asking, “Is the Girl imaginative? . . . I hope that the Gods have made her any thing save poetical—it is enough to have one such fool in a family.”

  On another day, Byron was startled to see the ghost of Shelley approach. In reality it was George Finlay, who bore a striking resemblance to the dead poet. Finlay, who would later write a history of the Greek war for independence, had come to Greece because he heard Byron was here, and wanted to join the fight. “Both [Byron’s] character and his conduct presented unceasing contradictions,” Finlay noted. “It seemed as if two different souls occupied his body alternately. One was feminine, and full of sympathy; the other masculine, and characterised by clear judgement. When one arrived the other departed. In company, his sympathetic soul was his tyrant. Alone, or with a single person, his masculine prudence displayed itself as his friend.”

  Byron finally made up his mind to join the Greek forces under Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, the man who had taught Greek to Mary in Pisa. She had described Mavrocordatos as a cultivated and honest man, and Byron felt he was the potential George Washington among the Greek leaders. The prince’s provisional government and headquarters were at the coastal town of Missolonghi and from there he wrote Byron, “Be assured, My Lord, that it depends only on yourself to secure the destiny of Greece.” Byron’s vanity could not resist such a summons.

  Before he left, Byron was showing signs of ill health, probably brought on by the fierce heat of the Greek summer. He had brought one doctor with him from Italy; now a second, Julius Millingen, ap
peared, courtesy of the London Greek Committee. (It was Millingen who quoted Byron as saying, “I especially dread, in this world, two things, to which I have reason to believe I am equally predisposed—growing fat and growing mad.”) Millingen tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Byron from the frequent use of weight-reducing pills and his heavy drinking.

  Byron did not set off for the mainland till December 29. His little flotilla then maneuvered its way through the blockade of Turkish warships off the Greek coast. The larger of his two vessels, carrying Pietro Gamba and valuable supplies, was captured and briefly detained; by a coincidence Byron might have written in a fanciful poem, the captain of Gamba’s ship had once saved the life of the Turkish commander, who accepted his story that Gamba was a traveler. However, it was an unpleasant reminder to Byron that there really was a war going on.

  He landed at Missolonghi on January 5, and received a reception suitable for a conquering hero. Dressed in his scarlet uniform, he was greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute and a singing crowd of soldiers, priests, women holding up babies, and old people who wanted to catch a glimpse of him. News of his arrival had been rumored for weeks, and he was regarded as the savior of Greece. It was believed that Byron was capable of raising large amounts of money from English sources, organizing an army and navy to attack the Turkish stronghold of Lepanto, and settling the blood feuds among the Greek chieftains assembled at Mavrocordatos’s headquarters. The prince himself turned out to be no George Washington: he was paralyzed with indecision and everyone now looked to Byron for leadership. The expectations for him were too great for anyone to fulfill.