She often repeated those sentiments. On July 28, 1824, she wrote, “On this very day ten years ago, I went to France with my Shelley—how young heedless & happy & poor we were then —& now my sleeping boy [Percy Florence] is all that is left to me of that time—my boy —& a thousand recollections which never sleep.”
In October of the same year: “Tears fill my eyes—well may I weep—solitary girl!— the dead know you not—the living heed you not—you sit in your lone room, & the howling wind, gloomy prognostic of winter, gives not forth so despairing a tone as the unheard sighs your ill fated heart breathes. . . . I wonder why England should be called my country. I have not a friend in it—all those whom I have ever known here fly me.”
Since her return from Europe, Mary had found that the unconventional life she had lived with Percy had barred her from a certain level of English polite society. She had borne Shelley’s child out of wedlock and—many people believed—lured him away from his wife. And the rumors of her relationship with Byron did not help Mary’s reputation. While her mother might have had the strength of personality to shrug off society’s disapproval, Mary was different. She wrote to Trelawny, who was still in Greece, “I am under a cloud & cannot form new acquaintances among that class whose manners & modes of life are agreable [sic] to me —& I think myself fortunate in having one or two pleasing acquaintances among literary people.”
Mary had initially set out to rehabilitate Shelley’s reputation by creating a new version of him. Now she would do the same for herself: changing the story of their relationship, suppressing embarrassing or scandalous details. Acting once more as Dr. Frankenstein, this time she sought to create a perfect creature from her own parts. In the end, however, she could not escape that sense of alienation and loneliness that tormented her creature. As the years went by, the voice of the monster always returned to Mary’s journal.
Mary was now the sole literary survivor of the Diodati circle. The poets’ celebrity, however, did not die with them. Tourists could no longer view them through spyglasses, but the public’s fascination with them lingered. In time, the details of the poets’ lives blended with exaggerations and faulty memories to become myths. Byron and Shelley would forever remain young, and they left devotees who always associated them with their own youths. Fourteen-year-old Alfred Tennyson had run into the woods and carved Byron’s name on a rock when he heard of his death. Ten years later, at the beginning of his own career as a great poet, Tennyson wrote, “Such writers as Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses, and so are we kept going. Blessed be those that grease the wheels of the old world, insomuch as to move on is better than to stand still.”
As one who had known both men, Mary was frequently pressed to describe her memories of them. (Claire was now in Russia, working as a governess, and thus out of reach of English scandal-mongers.) Usually Mary turned down these requests, once claiming that she was keeping a “vow I made never to make money of my acquaintance with Lord Byron—his ghost would certainly come and taunt me if I did.”
Others had no such compunctions. Leigh Hunt, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Thomas Medwin, Edward Trelawny, Thomas Love Peacock, as well as others, published their inside accounts. For the public, the two poets came to suggest opposites. Lord Byron’s darker aspects were emphasized (he had once ironically termed himself “his Satanic Majesty”), which left Shelley to play the angel.
Mary broke her silence when Thomas Moore approached her for help on his biography of Byron. Mary had been horrified by Thomas Medwin’s book, which purported to be a journal of conversations he had with Byron in 1821 and 1822. (Among other things, Medwin reported that Mary had gotten the idea for Frankenstein from Matthew “Monk” Lewis, while the notorious author was staying at the Villa Diodati. Mary had in fact not even met Lewis while he was there.) Mary called Medwin’s book “a source of great pain to me, & will be of more—I argued against the propriety & morality of hurting the living by such gossip —& deprecated the mention of any of my connections—to what purpose, you see.” Medwin had asked her to review his manuscript for errors and she refused, finding it “one mass of mistakes.” Now, however, she realized she would have to tell someone her side of the story if only to counteract the lies that would inevitably appear.
After Byron himself, Moore was perhaps the most famous and popular poet of the time. Mary was eager to make his acquaintance, for she had read and enjoyed his works. Only days after Byron’s funeral, they connected. Moore charmed Mary by showing his familiarity with Shelley’s poetry, and later he told a friend that he found her “very gentle and feminine.” She related anecdotes about Byron and brought with her a letter from Edward John Trelawny describing Byron’s death in detail. (Trelawny, who was not actually there, had no trouble making up scenes as if he had been.) Moore reciprocated by singing for her; people said he had a fine Irish tenor.
Quickly, Mary developed a bit of a crush on Moore. She wrote in her journal that he was “very agreeable, and I never felt myself so perfectly at ease with anyone. I do not know why this is, he seems to understand and to like me. This is a new and unexpected pleasure.” Moore was in fact a great philanderer and seems to have strung Mary along to get his information. In any case, she promised to help him by writing to Trelawny on his behalf, asking for more recollections of Byron. She would also persuade Countess Guiccioli to contribute her memories of her role in Byron’s life.
When she met Moore again, three years later, Mary told the poet she had read the early portions of Byron’s memoirs in Venice. Presumably so had Moore, but perhaps there had been differences in the manuscripts, so Mary agreed to write what she remembered of them. She also agreed to provide details of the 1816 summer and Shelley’s death, as well as the story of Claire’s love affair and Byron’s child Allegra. Moore wrote in his journal after the meeting that Mary “seems to have known Byron thoroughly, and always winds up her account of his bad traits with ‘but still he was very nice.’”
When the first volume of Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of his Life was published in January 1830, he sent Mary an autographed copy. She approved of what she read. “The great charm of the work to me,” she wrote John Murray, “and it will have the same for you, is that the Lord Byron I find there is our Lord Byron—the fascinating—faulty—childish—philosophical being—daring the world—docile to a private circle—impetuous and indolent—gloomy and yet more gay than any other. I live with him again in these pages.”
Though Mary never remarried, she did occasionally seek love. Shunned by “proper” society in London, she nevertheless found friends among those who were outsiders. John Howard Payne, an American actor-playwright who wrote the lyrics to “Home, Sweet Home,” became a friend. When he was manager of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, he sent Mary free tickets and began to appear regularly as her escort. He did not quite reach the point of proposing marriage, for she fended off a deeper relationship by asking him to convey her affection to his friend and sometime collaborator Washington Irving. The handsome Irving, author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” had business interests that brought him to England, and Mary had made his acquaintance. Payne, feeling disappointed that he was to be a go-between and not a lover, broke off his courtship. For his part, Irving turned out not to be interested in Mary.
Mary still regarded Jane Williams as her strongest friend, once calling her “the hope and consolation of my life. . . . To her, for better or worse I am wedded—while she will have me & I continue in the love-lorn state that I have since I returned to this native country.” Jane’s adopting a form of marriage with Hogg, calling herself Mrs. Hogg, did not alter Mary’s feelings. After learning Jane was pregnant Mary wrote, “Loveliest Janey—to thee tranquility and health!” In fact, Jane was not the friend Mary imagined she was, for she had continued to spread the story that Shelley had turned to her because of Mary’s coldness. When Mary found this out, in July 1827, she wrote in her
journal, “My friend has proved false & treacherous! Miserable discovery—for four years I was devoted to her —& I earned only ingratitude. . . . Am I not a fool! What deadly cold flows through my veins—my head weighed down—my limbs sink under me—I start at every sound as the messenger of fresh misery —& despair invests my soul with trembling horror—What hast thou done?”
Yet even then, Mary could not bear to break off her relationship with Jane—they had too much history together. Mary, sounding as plaintive as her monster, wrote in her journal, “I need companionship & sympathy only —& the only one I love can afford me so little. . . . I cannot live without loving and being loved—without sympathy—if this is denied to me I must die.”
So Mary hid her pain and did not confront Jane until the following February when she wrote her: “Though I was conscious that having spoken of me as you did, you could not love me, I could not easily detach myself from the atmosphere of light & beauty that for ever surrounds you—I tried to keep you, feeling the while that I had lost you.” Jane apparently showed some remorse, and the two women maintained their relationship until death divided them. Jane outlived Mary, dying in 1884.
Although Mary needed to write to make a living, her father-in-law’s prohibition on using his son’s name in print sometimes hindered her. Mary was now a Shelley too, so as an author, she had to become as nameless as her monster. When she published The Last Man in 1826, the title page declared only that it was the work of “the author of Frankenstein.” Sir Timothy complained anyway, for the 1823 edition of Frankenstein, edited by Godwin, had claimed Mary Shelley as the author.
She continued to write novels, but none acquired the fame or popularity of her first. In each of her books, whether a novel of ideas or historical fiction, the characters are clearly drawn from the Diodati circle. Writing was her way of keeping them alive. In The Last Man, for example, two of the protagonists, Lord Raymond and Count Adrian, are depictions of Byron and Shelley. Raymond/Byron was “emphatically a man of the world.” As for Adrian/Shelley: “his sensibility and courtesy fascinated everyone. His vivacity, intelligence, and active spirit of benevolence, completed the conquest. . . . In person, he hardly appeared of this world; his slight frame was overinformed by the soul that dwelt within.”
In 1831, Mary had to fend off a proposal of marriage from Trelawny, along with his request for her help on another project. Seeing the success of Moore’s book on Byron, Telawny decided to publish his own about Byron and Shelley. Mary refused to help him, and her letter makes it clear that she feared publicity about herself:
You know me—or you do not, in which case I will tell you what I am—a silly goose—who far from wishing to stand forward to assert myself in any way, now than [sic] I am alone in the world, have but the desire to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. This is weakness—but I cannot help it. . . . Shelley’s life must be written—I hope one day to do it myself, but it must not be published now —
Her refusal irritated Trelawny, who pointed out she had helped Moore. But to Mary, contributing stories about Byron was one thing; talking about Shelley quite another. She wrote Trelawny, again trying to discourage him, “Shelley’s life so far as the public had to do with it consisted of very few events and these are publicly known—The private events were sad and tragical—How could you relate them?” Trelawny took her advice, for the time being, and wrote an autobiography that Mary helped put in shape for publication. She even supplied the title—Adventures of a Younger Son—and helped him find a publisher. Trelawny played on what he portrayed as his close relationship with Shelley and Byron, using quotations from their works as chapter epigraphs. It reads as much like a Gothic novel as fact.
Mary was entrepreneurial. She wrote for The Liberal and The Keepsake, popular magazines of the time, and she provided biographies for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia, among other projects. Mary worried about the quality of such work, because she had to churn out the words for money. “What a folly is it in me to write trash nobody will read,” she wrote in her journal in 1825. Claire, the only other survivor of Diodati, sometimes reproached Mary with similar criticism. In the 1830s, Claire returned to Italy and took up residence in Florence, from which she wrote Mary regularly. (Many people fled the city during a cholera epidemic, but Claire remained, saying she would not desert the family she worked for; she survived.) Claire praised Mary’s talents and chided her for being too modest. She was, moreover, disgusted that Byron appeared so often as a character in Mary’s novels. “I stick to Frankenstein,” she once told Mary, “merely because that vile spirit [Byron] does not haunt its pages as it does in all your other novels, now as Castruccio, now as Raymond, now as Lodore. Good God to think a person of your genius . . . should think it a task befitting its powers to gild and embellish and pass off as beautiful what was the merest compound of Vanity, folly, and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human Being!”
Claire added an exhortation to Mary that indicates how highly she regarded her:
If you would but know your own value, and exert your powers you could give the men a most immense drubbing; you could write upon metaphysics, politics, jurisprudence, astronomy, mathematics, all those highest subjects which they taunt us so with our being incapable of treating, and surpass them; and what a consolation it would be, when they begin some of their prosy, lying but plausible attacks upon female inferiority, to stop their mouths in a moment with your name: and then to add, “and if women, whilst suffering the heaviest slavery could outdo you what would they not achieve were they free?”
Claire sounded more like the heir of Mary Wollstonecraft than her stepsister did.
To some extent we are all products of our time and place. Percy Shelley and Lord Byron had died still believing in the ideals that had sparked the French Revolution in their youths. Regency England, the time of their artistic flowering, had been characterized by a permissive morality and spirit. (Even so, both of them went well beyond it.) Mary had the misfortune of living longer than they, and had to adjust to different times, different mores. In 1830, King George IV, the former Prince Regent—who as “Prinny” had been a symbol of that lively age—died. His younger brother, William IV, took the throne, ushering in a new era. Though the future queen Victoria was then only twelve, the prudish and restrictive age that would bear her name had already begun.
Mary had changed as well. By the time she was in her thirties, she was a very different person from the teenager who had written Frankenstein. Shelley’s ideals no longer appealed to her as they had when she ran off with him as a smitten sixteen-year-old. Deaths, betrayals, financial hardship, and despair had changed her outlook. She wanted respectability for her son and she needed the small stipends that Sir Timothy doled out—provided she didn’t displease him. Mary, after all, had never really been as independent as her mother. When Leigh Hunt invited her to come back to Italy, Godwin told Mary that he had set his “heart and soul” on her staying in England. She told Hunt she must stay with her father, for “in this world it always seems one’s duty to sacrifice one’s own desires.”
When Mary had the opportunity to revise the great novel of her youth, she took it. A publisher asked her to prepare a new edition of Frankenstein as part of a series called “Standard Novels.” The inexpensively priced series gave the authors a chance to make editorial changes (improvements, in theory) and to write an introduction to their books. Mary’s introduction contains an account of the events at Byron’s Villa Diodati that led to the writing of Frankenstein. “And now, once again,” she wrote, “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” Significantly, Mary herself was now willing to acknowledge her “hideous progeny”— the creature—as the true hero of the book, and not Victor Frankenstein, the title character.
Although Mary claimed that she made few changes from the original 1818 edition,
some of her revisions reflect the differences in both herself and the times. She removed the dedication to William Godwin. Ernest, the middle son of the Frankenstein family, was made stronger and more robust. He was the only surviving Frankenstein in the book, and perhaps Mary associated him with her only living son, whose survival she wanted to ensure. She also eliminated the hint of incest in the original by changing cousin Elizabeth into an orphan of no relation to the Frankensteins. She wanted no reminders of the so-called league of incest in Geneva.
Just as Mary had revised her public accounts of Percy’s life to make him a more respectable figure, now she also made changes in the man modeled after him: Victor Frankenstein. Victor is less manipulative in the 1831 edition and more the victim of circumstances. Though he is still overly ambitious and vain, the reader is told this is the result of a lack of parental guidance. “While I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva,” Victor relates, “I was, to a great degree, self taught with regard to my favorite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.” Victor’s need to teach himself without paternal oversight parallels the monster’s similar self-education, by reading books he has found.
Some of Mary’s 1831 additions are clearly prompted by bittersweet memories of Percy. When Walton describes Victor Frankenstein, this passage is new: “Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it—thus!”
The Monsters Page 35
