After dictating the opening pages of his novel to Mary the following day, Shelley gave her some worrying news. Their sixty pounds had shrunk to less than thirty. If they travelled up the Rhine and through Holland, it was just enough to get them home to England. Jane was too hysterical to be entrusted with the truth. If they had to find reasons, the atrocious heating arrangements in their rooms could be blamed; the lodgings were heated with an enormous old-fashioned stove which, when it worked, almost suffocated them.
Jane seemed to accept this improbable explanation; tired of playing gooseberry, she even expressed pleasure at the prospect of going home. She waited for the first stop on the return journey to throw a fit of what Mary would name ‘Janes horrors’. The horror had been brought on by reading King Lear, and Mary suspected her stepsister of trying to impress Shelley with her sensitivity. She was not wrong; later attacks of ‘horrors’ were unmistakably aimed at obtaining Shelley’s attention. But the feelings expressed in Jane’s diary sound heartfelt enough. She was, or thought she was, in love; the play seemed to offer a mirror to her own confused feelings. ‘I think Lear treats Cordelia very ill – “What shall poor Cordelia do – Love & be silent”,’ she wrote that night. ‘Oh [th]is is true – Real Love will never [sh]ew itelf to the eye of broad day – [i]t courts the secret glades.’11
Exclusion was a painful experience: entries in the lovers’ joint journal show Shelley entirely wrapped up in his love for Mary, aware of their companion only as an intrusive third party. Noting Mary’s seventeenth birthday at Basle, he doubted that they would ever be happier; they passed the following day reading A Short Residence aloud and comparing their own water trip to Mary Wollstonecraft’s lonely journey. Reading also provided a welcome distraction from the company of their fellow travellers, a subject on which Mary and Jane were at one in their disgust. ‘[O]ur only wish was to absolutely annihilate such uncleansable animals,’ Mary wrote after their first day on the Rhine; a week later, Jane noted that the men actually kissed each other, and that her soul had shrunk back from ‘countenances begrimmed with mental & bodily depravity’.12 Prejudiced though these remarks sound, they were echoed by many contemporary diarists. The German peasant class was insufficiently picturesque in costume or in manner to find favour abroad.
The 2nd of September was one of the rare days on which Shelley and Mary managed to have some time to themselves. Leaving the boat a few miles north of Mannheim, they were away from Jane for three hours, long enough to explore the surrounding foothills and, very possibly, to learn some of the folk tales and legends of the area.†
Frankenstein is a striking and unusual name. It has no resonance in Geneva, where Mary conceived her novel in 1816. It has strong links to this region of the Rhine. Castle Frankenstein was not among the popular hilltop castles competently sketched and painted by English visitors; it was, despite its towers and moat, hardly a castle at all, and well beyond a three-hour round journey on foot. But the outline was clearly visible from Gernsheim, where their boat was moored; any local hoping to earn a few coins with a good story would have told the young travellers about Konrad Dippel.13
A pastor’s son, Dippel was born at the castle in 1673, when it was being used as a military hospital. After studying alchemy at university, he became a fashionable physician whose dream was always to buy and live in his birthplace. (He liked to sign himself as Dippel Frankensteina, Dippel of Frankenstein.) Chased out of Strasbourg after allegations that he had been robbing graveyards for his anatomical experiments, Dippel was convinced that he could bring a body back to life by injecting it with a concoction of blood and bone, often made from both mammal and human corpses. In Mary’s novel, Victor Frankenstein would use animal bones to help manufacture his monstrous creature.
Like other alchemists of the period – their ambitious dreams gave Mary’s father the subject for St Leon, the novel Byron thought his finest – Dippel experimented with the creation of gold and with an elixir of life. By selling the results to the nobility, he hoped to raise money to buy the castle. Instead, it went to a wealthy widow; poor Dippel, who boasted that he had found a way to live to the age of 135, died the next year, aged 61. Storytellers hinted at a pact with the devil, which Dippel had failed to keep. The intervening years had turned him into a favourite local legend, to be added to gruesome tales of a cannibal monster who, in times long past, used the grim little castle as his headquarters.
Sitting on the shores of Lake Lucerne, Mary had been introduced to one of Shelley’s favourite books, the Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–8).‡ Here, Barruel traced the birth of ‘the monster called Jacobin’ to the secret society of the Illuminati at Ingolstadt. Ingolstadt is where Mary decided to send Victor Frankenstein to university; Ingolstadt is where he animates his creature, in circumstances and with methods similar to those used by Dippel. Journeying from Lucerne along the Rhine, Mary’s disgusted comments on their fellow travellers had included this comment: ‘Twere easier for god to make entirely new men than attempt to purify such monsters as these … loathsome creepers’ (my italics).14 God here, with the lower-case ‘g’, is demoted to the level of a man who assumes godlike powers, a promethean overreacher.
And so, following closely on each other, we have a setting for Frankenstein’s experiment, the hint of a newly created man of human manufacture, and the tale of Konrad Dippel’s attempts to bring the dead to life. The idea for a novel about a whaling voyage had already taken shape at Dundee and may have been among the manuscripts that were carelessly left behind in Paris; the 1814 tour offered rich material on which to draw for the central subject of Frankenstein.
*
The beauty of the Rhine landscape captivated them all. Jane was convinced that she would never again care for a view which lacked a ruined castle; Mary, returning to the Rhine in her forties, longed to spend a full summer there, ‘to penetrate the ravines, to scale the heights, to linger among the ruins, to hear still more’ (my italics) ‘of its legends, and visit every romantic spot’.15 In the late summer of 1814, sitting in discomfort on deck to escape the low crowd who smoked and sang beneath them in the cabin, her only cause of complaint was the extreme slowness of the boat.
When they reached Holland, Mary, exhausted by the journey and no doubt suffering some physical discomfort in the early months of pregnancy, could find nothing to admire except the hedges; Jane, whose spirits invariably gravitated in the opposite direction, was in ecstasies. The willow-shaded canals! The green-shuttered country houses! The shining brick pavements of Utrecht! While Mary and Shelley prepared themselves for the crossing to Gravesend and talked earnestly ‘of many thing[s] past, present & to come’, Jane buried her nose in Emile and worked herself up into a state of fine indignation over the way Rousseau judged women by his fictional Sophie, one of the ‘most finished and [deleted] of Coquettes … It is indeed partial to judge the whole sex by the conduct of one whose very education tended to fit her more for a Seraglio than the friend & equal of Man.’16 It should not surprise us to find a strong echo of Mary Wollstonecraft in this energetic language; her books had accompanied the travellers on their journey. Jane shared with Mary and Shelley a happy conviction that they were behaving just as she, their presiding spirit, would have wished.
Bad weather hindered their return. Stranded at Maarluis, with a high west wind blowing out to sea and keeping them all in their rooms, Mary won admiring comments from Shelley for starting work on a story, since lost. She called it ‘Hate’, an intriguing title. Was the tale directed at those German passengers she so despised, or was she, as they drew nearer to England, warming to the theme of her hated stepmother? Least likely seems the notion that she would have written a story which focused on her hostility to Jane. Shelley might have sometimes wished Jane out of the way, but he was full of concern and affection for her. Mary would have had to be uncommonly brash to choose a hateful stepsister for her subject.
Always competitive and conscious of Mary’s enviable in
tellectual superiority, Jane began writing a story of her own on the same day. She called it ‘The Ideot’ and planned it as a Wollstonecraftian tale of a sweet and noble girl who follows her own impulses rather than society’s laws.17 The theme suggests that Jane had been reading Adeline Mowbray, a novel on precisely that subject which was published in 1805 by Godwin’s Norfolk friend, Amelia Alderson, who married John Opie. Neither this unfinished project nor Jane’s comments on Emile suggest that she had any intention of returning to the Skinner Street fold.
The crossing was terrible. The captain sailed in defiance of warnings that they would all be drowned; if Jane’s diary is to be believed, they almost were. ‘The face of the captain was all anxiety – We asked him some trifling question but he said at present we must not plague him.’ The breakers were beyond her wildest imaginings, vast ridges of white foam racing towards them across the sea and threatening to dash the boat to pieces. ‘Poor Mary was sick as death & was obliged to go to bed,’ she wrote with smug compassion, but ‘Shelley and I sat upon deck & the waves which had become terribly high broke over us.’ Later, even Shelley had surrendered: ‘Every one of the Passengers were sick except myself.’18 Mary, however, recovered enough on the second day at sea to conduct a fierce argument with a man who began defending the slave trade, and to note the fact in her journal.
Shelley’s financial calculations proved frighteningly exact; the trio arrived back in England without having been able to pay the cost of their crossing. The captain was prepared to wait until money could be obtained; a boatman was found to row them slowly up the broad mouth of the Thames – and to keep them in sight. He was still with them when they caught the City stage, jostling grimly back to reality through streets crowded with carts and coaches, back into a dirty, smoke-hazed city, littered with derelict building sites. Paris had the excuse of being suspended in the middle of Napoleon’s grand plans for its future; London, on a dull September day, seemed trapped in the past.
It was the beginning of an experience which was to become wretchedly familiar to them all, of a desperate hunt for money on this occasion, or a frantic flight from creditors on another. They went, accompanied by the unbudgeable boatman, from Shelley’s bank to the Hookhams and on to the Voyseys, a family who had known Mary and Jane since they were children. The girls had often stayed in their London house; the Voysey children had been their playmates. Today, Mrs Voysey did not even want them in the house, let alone to lend them money. Her son was more sympathetic. Henry Voysey agreed to keep Shelley company as he set off to see if he could borrow from – of all people – his wife. For two long hours, while the sky grew dark, Mary and Jane sat in their hackney outside the closed door of Mr Westbrook’s handsome house in Chapel Street, just off Grosvenor Square. The boatman did his best to keep the weary young ladies in good spirits; he had, Jane gratefully noted, been most kind. Eventually, Shelley emerged with the necessary sum and the three travellers settled themselves into a quiet hotel on Oxford Street, then a residential area.
The following day, they moved to lodgings at Margaret Street, off Cavendish Square and conveniently close to Chapel Street for Shelley’s dealings with his wife. For Mary, it marked the beginning of a wandering life of which she later wistfully wrote: ‘it seems as if I were never to be stationary – I who long so for a home.’19
Notes
1. The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Harvard University Press, 1968) (hereafter CCJ).
2. MWS, ‘The English in Italy’, a review of three travel books for the Westminster Review, October 1826.
3. PBS, 2.8.1814 (MWSJ).
4. PBS–HS, 13.8.1814.
5. CCJ, p. 61, translated by Professor Kiffin Rockwell. The gender of the embracer is not, in fact, identified by Shelley’s Latin.
6. Hogg, Shelley, 1, p. 257.
7. CCJ, 20.8.1820. In later life, Jane (as Claire Clairmont) rewrote part of the 1814 journal, incorporating details, such as Mary’s refusal to bathe naked, which had not been in the original. These are published in full in Shelley and His Circle, 3, pp. 342–75. The original journal is in the British Library (Ashley 394).
8. WG, Fleetwood (1805), ed. Pamela Clemit (Pickering & Chatto, 1992), p. 72.
9. This was The Assassins, later recalled by Mary as having been inspired by a French book which Shelley had bought in Paris.
10. CCJ, 25.8.1814.
11. Ibid., 27.8.1814.
12. MWSJ, 28.8.1814; CCJ, 5.9.1814.
13. Further details can be found in Christopher Frayling, Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (BBC Books, 1996), pp. 35–6. Mary herself never alluded to Dippel or to Castle Frankenstein as sources of inspiration.
14. MWSJ, 28.8.1814.
15. MWS, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844)‚ in Selected Works, 8, ed. Jeanne Moskal (Pickering & Chatto, 1996), p. 163.
16. MWSJ, 8.9.1814; CCJ, 9.9.1814.
17. See Marion Kingston Stocking in CCJ, pp. 40–1, n. 38.
18. CCJ, 11.9.1814.
19. MWS–Marianne Hunt (hereafter MH), 6.6.1840 (MWSL, 2).
* Their amusement probably derived from the fact that the passports, obtained at the Calais Custom House, offered a Frenchman’s view of their character and appearance.
† Lack of German, a language which most English travellers found exasperatingly difficult, need not have stopped them from hearing such stories; the journals offer evidence of plenty of conversations having taken place, presumably in English or French.
‡ Mary could already have been acquainted with Barruel’s work through her home reading. Godwin drew on Barruel’s account of the Illuminati for St Leon, in which the eponymous hero’s pledge of secrecy and his setting aside of family ties to pursue his experiments with alchemy reflect the undercover activities of the society described by Barruel.
CHAPTER NINE
EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING
1814–1815
‘… good creature press me to you and hug your own Mary to your heart perhaps she will one day have a father till then be everything to me love – & indeed I will be a good girl and never vex you more …’
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley, 28 October 1814
MRS GODWIN HAD RETURNED TO SKINNER STREET FROM CALAIS ON 31 July with the news that her mission to rescue Jane had failed. Perhaps they still hoped that the runaways would make a speedy return: nothing seems to have been said on 7 August when Lady Mountcashell came to bid the Godwins farewell before she left England with her lover, George Tighe, and their small daughter, Laurette. A week later, Mrs Godwin decided to take their aristocratic friend into her confidence. The event was presented as if it had only just taken place. ‘O my dear lovely child is gone,’ she wrote in the first of a stream of letters which now exist only in her daughter’s heavily revised copies.1 In her mother’s version, Jane was the innocent victim, abducted by a selfish and heartless young couple in need of an interpreter.
Godwin was still unable to believe that Mary intended more than a high-spirited escapade. He was ready at this point to take her back. A month after the dawn flit from Skinner Street, he readied himself for ‘the hour of distress (which I believe, is not far distant) when these unworthy children shall again seek the protection and aid of their father’.2
Godwin underrated their determination. They had gone together; they would stay together. If they needed schooling, then Shelley would supply it. If they starved, so be it. There was to be no going back. Mary, as they now knew, was pregnant and it would only be a matter of time before her condition began to show; Jane, in her determination to stay with them, tarred herself with the same brush. The world, from now on, would disapprove and keep a shocked distance. But Mary Wollstonecraft’s example flamed before them, bright as a lighthouse beacon over a stormy sea. She, too, had endeavoured to bring her warm understanding and reviving influence to a married couple, the Fuselis; it was not their fault that Harriet, like Mrs Fuseli, had declined their liberating proposal to live a
communal life. Mary Wollstonecraft, too, had boldly bred and raised her lover’s child. They could, in fact, fairly glow with the rightness of their behaviour and the feeble blinkered condition of those who questioned it.
It is hard not to pity the Godwins. Ostracized by many friends for their supposed complicity in the plot, appealed to by Harriet for support and still wretchedly dependent on Shelley, of all people, for the money to bail them out of debt, they were in an unenviable position. Reluctantly, for they were not unloving parents, they took the hard course of disapproval. Mary was forbidden to come anywhere near them; Jane was given the option of return, but only if she broke contact with Shelley and her stepsister. Fanny and Charles were told that, officially at least, they must support the Godwins in their stand.
Fanny’s own position was singularly delicate. Neither a Clairmont nor a Godwin, she was being viewed by her Wollstonecraft aunts, Everina and Eliza, as a potential successor for the small school which they were running in Ireland. It was not a bad prospect for a plain, shy, penniless girl but the aunts, having already suffered from Godwin’s candid memoir of their sister, were terrified by the prospect of another scandal; the Godwins were warned to keep Fanny away from Shelley’s dangerous company. The few timid visits Fanny made to see Mary and Jane in London were acts of great courage; she got little thanks for them. Fanny, to the Shelley household, seemed pathetic in her submission. They laughed at her little squeaks of fear when, on one occasion, Shelley and Jane chased her through the dark and made a play of kidnapping her. It was no game to Fanny; her whole future was at stake.
Harriet’s hopeful fancies of a penitent husband’s return to the fold were briskly shattered. Shelley may have seemed subdued on 13 September when he needed money to pay for their crossing, food and lodgings; having obtained it, he was quick to remind her that he had formed ‘a violent and lasting passion for another’. Harriet was invited to admire Mary’s courage: ‘she has resigned all for me.’3 On 3 October, as Harriet’s confinement drew near, her husband wished her well, asked for his stockings and handkerchiefs to be forwarded and told her to be realistic. ‘I am united to another,’ he informed her with the flourish of an eastern potentate; ‘you are no longer my wife.’4 Two days later, he coolly regretted the circumstances which had led to ‘your estrangement from Mary & myself’.5 The separation, Harriet was given to understand, was all of her own making.
Mary Shelley Page 17
