Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Trelawny’s threat of publicizing the help she had given to Moore had given Mary a fright: ‘it would destroy me to be brought forward in print,’ she told him. She was nevertheless proud of the assistance she had given and delighted by the result. Claire, not surprisingly, thought the extracts she had read from Moore’s book were ‘sad stuff;22 Mary, meanwhile, told John Murray that she had found the first volume ‘accurate to a miracle’. Reviewers made little comment on Shelley’s role in Byron’s life, but nobody reading Moore’s second volume could ignore the role assigned to him as a benevolent and intellectual influence on Byron. At the very least, Mary had ensured that Moore’s book did nothing to injure Shelley’s growing reputation.

  *

  Sir Timothy Shelley had, in the summer of 1829, made a small increase in Mary’s allowance to £300 a year; it was, however, insufficiently generous to free her from the need to support herself by writing. The number of proposals which Mary made to John Murray at this time suggests that she was hoping to be given regular employment as an author for his new Family Library, work which would have been adequately paid and more to her taste than producing insipid tales for ladies’ annuals.

  The range of her suggestions was astonishing. Following Murray’s own proposal, which he then dropped, for an ‘amusing’ life of Madame de Staël, Mary suggested books on Mahomet, on the conquest of Mexico and Peru, on eminent women and on the great philosophers. She was also keen to undertake a history of chivalry and, intriguingly, a history of the earth, ‘of the changes on the surface of the Earth, and of the relics of States and Kingdoms before the period of regular history’. She would not be offering controversial opinions, she added nervously, but ‘to me these speculations have always been the source of great interest’.23 Mr Murray preferred her suggestion of a book on philosophers, but in the end took none.

  Godwin’s approval of his daughter’s writings had never been easily obtained. He had praised Frankenstein as a remarkable creation, but he had made it clear that Valperga was greatly improved by his own revisions, while his commendations of The Last Man had been lavished on the Introduction rather than the novel. Perkin Warbeck, published in 1830 by Henry Colburn after Murray declined it, earned its author £150 and a friendly, if not ecstatic, reception in the journals and quarterlies. The meagre payment was explicable: these were hard times in the publishing industry and many of the larger firms had gone down. The reward for Mary was in knowing that she had, on this occasion, won her father’s wholehearted admiration, although not for the poignant passages in which she unveiled her private thoughts – the description of a mother’s agony after losing her child, the account of woman as social outcast, ‘fearful of repulse, dreading insult’, or the overwrought appeal with which the novel ends. (‘Permit this to be, unblamed – permit a heart whose sufferings have been, and are, so many and so bitter, to reap what joy it can from the strong necessity it feels to be sympathized with – to love.’) It was not these passages of self-revelation but her scrupulous research which had earned Godwin’s respect. Murray might have rejected Mary Shelley as a serious writer; her father was ready to embrace a born historian, a worthy daughter of the author of the four-volume History of the Commonwealth of England, the work which had been triumphantly completed in 1828 after several years of labour.

  There were other factors than paternal admiration binding Mary to her father in 1830. One was their shared disapproval of the marriage which young William had made at the beginning of the year; another was the future of little Percy. Godwin was fond of his only grandchild – there are several references in his journal to meals and outings with Percy – and Mary doted on him. John Howard Payne was pestered for theatre tickets for Astley’s entertainments and for juvenile dramas; in 1829, Mary had extravagantly paid for Percy to have dancing lessons at Mr Slater’s Academy and to take drill exercise for the stoop which had, as he grew taller, begun to develop.

  Sir Timothy, despite grudgingly raising Mary’s allowance in the summer of 1829, had shown no further inclination to meet the boy or, indeed, herself. The time was coming when Percy would need a new school; it would have been astonishing if Mary had not consulted on the subject a man so deeply interested in education as her father. They favoured Eton, and here, for once, it was Sir Timothy who showed more sensitivity. Writing to William Whitton in December 1830, evidently in response to a suggestion made by Mary, Sir Timothy opposed the idea not on grounds of cost but because ‘his Poor Father’s being there’ would cause unpleasantness for a young boy.24 This, just a month after the old gentleman had been invaded at Field Place by a mob of angry workers, armed with pitchforks and demanding his support, was considerate, even tender.† One wonders, as Mary Shelley often did, how much William Whitton was responsible for keeping the Shelleys at a distance from her and her child.

  The principal factor binding father and daughter together, however, was the need for money. A clear indication of their lack of it appears in a hasty note written to Godwin by Mary on 17 January 1830, in which she says that she may be ‘driven to borrow’ in order to help their old friend James Marshall. Neither Mary nor Godwin could help him; instead, Mary was forced to ask Claire to send home whatever she could spare from her salary.

  Supporting each other, Godwin and Mary sought publishers for each other’s work. Mary urged John Murray to take her father’s new collection of essays and, in May 1830, drew the attention of Cloudesley’s publisher to an enthusiastic review of it in Blackwood’s (the review which she herself had written). Godwin, thanking her warmly in July for her kindness to ‘a decrepit, superannuated old fellow’,26 responded in kind. Mary was introduced to his new admirer, Edward Bulwer, a clever young novelist with a shrewder sense of the literary market than either Godwin or his daughter.‡ Although he was not noticeably helpful to Mary in her search for commissions, Bulwer’s readiness to appear at her social gatherings had its own value. Like many of Bulwer’s contemporaries, Mary was intoxicated by his florid style. ‘What will Bulwer become? The first author of the age? I do not doubt it,’ she wrote in her journal on 11 January 1831 after reading Paul Clifford, one of his most dashing novels.

  A more fruitful alliance emerged from Godwin’s multitude of connections at the new university behind Gower Place. The Professor of Natural Philosophy, an energetic Irish charmer, steamboat enthusiast and preposterous snob called Dionysius Lardner, was superintending two massive projects for a complete Cabinet Cyclopaedia and a Cabinet Library. A ladykiller in his private life (he ran off with a Mrs Heaviside in 1840 and was successfully sued for £8,000 in damages by her husband§), Lardner had little room for women among his contributors.27 For Mary, however, an exception was made; in 1833, she was commissioned to undertake an account of the lives of eminent Italian authors, followed, in 1837, by those of the Spanish and Portuguese. Her final collection of essays, on eminent Frenchmen, was published in 1839.

  This, on Godwin’s part, had been kind; he knew from Mary’s fruitless approaches to John Murray how eager she was for work which would stimulate her. He was less high-minded in his readiness to push her into the grim but lucrative world of story-writing for ladies’ annuals through his friendship with Fred Mansel Reynolds. The introduction was productive (Mary had been one of the first writers to be commissioned by Reynolds when he began editing the Christmas Keepsake albums in 1829). The work was gruelling but well-paid. Composing hectic or sentimental tales appropriate to an engraving of Gulnare, Rosabella, or Medora at her casement window or perched on a rocky shore, Mary’s own standards dropped to that of her employer. There was nothing she would not offer to the annuals, if it could bring in a little cash. ‘Proserpine’, the children’s verse drama she had dashed off in the summer of 1820, finally found a home in The Winter’s Wreath (1832). If ‘Midas’ had to wait another ninety years, it was not for lack of endeavour.

  Mary’s correspondence in the early thirties shows her as an able hack. Mindful of the miserable sum she had received for Perkin Warbeck, she refus
ed to offer a proposal for her new novel until the economic situation improved: ‘things can never be worse than now – unless London were on fire,’ she wrote glumly to the publisher Charles Ollier at the beginning of 1831. She confessed to Ollier that she was ‘full of disquietude for my Father, who depends on his pen’; she hoped to support him by writing an essay a week for Richard Bentley’s Court Journal, ‘on any given subject that was wanted’.28 The following May, she turned to John Murray again, begging him to consider either Godwin’s proposal for a book about famous alchemists or any other of the ideas which he would undertake, so long as he was not expected to write anonymously for periodicals, such as Murray’s own Quarterly Review: ‘a kind of literary pride’ kept him from this kind of work, she added defensively and with no sign of resentment that she herself was unable to afford such an elevated attitude.29 But Murray was not to be enticed and Godwin had to wait another two years to find a publisher for his Lives of the Necromancers.30

  The reputations of both Godwin and his daughter had been made by their early works. (It was Frankenstein, not The Last Man, which won Mary a place, although at the head of the second rank of writers, in the new Athenaeum’s listing of eminent contemporary authors for November 1828.) In June 1830 Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley offered Godwin £50 for the copyright to his best-known novel. Caleb Williams was among the first on the list of Bentley’s Standard Novels, published in a single volume at six shillings, a fifth of the price of a new book. Shrewdly, Bentley insisted that all Standard Novel authors should revise their texts, thus providing him with a new copyright to their work; within a few years, he had become the owner of most of the great fiction of the Romantic period. Mary, increasingly bold about pushing her own work, offered Frankenstein for the series, with a new preface and revisions. Bentley bought himself a bargain for a mere £60; Mary was gratified to learn that 3,000 of the 3,500 copies printed had been sold in the first year.

  *

  Mary had written Frankenstein in close collaboration with Shelley. The book which appeared in 1831 is the one which should interest us more, for here she was the sole author, acting independently; there is no sign that Colburn had any hand in the changes she made to the text.

  Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s cousin in the original 1818 novel, becomes in 1831 an unconnected orphan whose marriage to him could cause no reader to disapprove. Reduced to a more passive role, she is in line with the sentimental heroines of the annuals to which Mary had become an assiduous contributor. The Frankenstein family’s involvement in Victor’s career is ruthlessly pruned, emphasizing his solitude and absolving them from complicity. Victor’s father, in the first version, had encouraged his interest in science and demonstrated the workings of electric power on a small machine of his own. In 1831, Victor’s interest in science is stimulated by a stranger, while Waldman, his second tutor at Ingolstadt, is positioned more powerfully as an evil influence on Victor’s ambitious, inquiring mind. ‘As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy,’ Victor declares in 1831; ‘one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose.’31

  Fate replaces individual choice in the 1831 edition, a revision which is heavily underscored by Mary’s enrolment of nature as a giant force, as implacable as the monster. In the 1818 version, Victor saw the glacier at Chamonix only as a wonderful spectacle; in that of 1831, he is aware of ‘the blind working of immutable laws’. On a personal level, he is more able to see that he has a parental duty to the Creature he manufactures: ‘we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up,’ he acknowledges, ‘if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves – such a friend ought to be – do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.’32

  Mary’s most striking revisions were directed to strengthening the parallels between Victor Frankenstein and the explorer Robert Walton, whose story encloses his own. Walton’s voyage, as has already been suggested, may have stemmed from an earlier novel plan; in the 1818 version, the connections between the two plots were slight. In her 1831 revision, she tightened the links. Walton is shown to share Frankenstein’s craving to achieve the impossible. ‘There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand,’ he tells his sister.33 Frankenstein’s belief that his man-made creature will mark the beginning of a world free of disease is matched by Walton’s hope of making a discovery which will enable him to defeat ‘the elemental foes of our race’.34 Like Godwin’s St Leon, Frankenstein and Walton sacrifice family ties to achieve their mission. Frankenstein spells this message out in his warning to Walton: ‘you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am.’35 In 1818, Walton felt no guilt about the men whose lives he was risking; in 1831, he acknowledges the folly of his ‘mad schemes’ and the deaths they may cause.36

  One striking declaration is left unchanged. In the 1831 revision, just as in the original text, Victor Frankenstein dies unrepentant, hoping that another may succeed where his experiment has failed. This, unless we choose to see it as a moment of exquisite irony, should convince us that Mary was on the side of progress. At a time when the worst cholera epidemic in history was ravaging Europe and threatening England, it did not seem wrong to dream of a day when science, by whatever means, might conquer disease, even by the creation of a new laboratory-produced species.

  ‘And now,’ Mary wrote in her celebrated Preface to the 1831 edition, ‘once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.’ She wanted her novel to sell. To help it do so, she presented the tale’s conception in a story so romantic, so convincing that it has gripped the imagination of all readers ever since. She had always been given to fantastic dreams, she told her readers; none were stranger than the one which visited her that night at Lake Geneva.

  I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

  Did any of her readers, remembering Coleridge’s explanation of the dream-birth of ‘Kubla Khan’, pause to question the authenticity of her account? Probably not; even today, Mary’s description of the birth of Frankenstein is quoted without scepticism. And yet, as we have seen in the affair of Mr and Mrs Douglas, she was, when she chose, a singularly convincing liar.

  There is one more important point that we should note about the Preface: it marks the beginning of Mary’s revised history of her marriage. She had already, in her Introduction to the Bentley edition of Caleb Williams, carefully obscured the date of her parents’ wedding, but she had always been open and honest about her own unmarried years with Shelley. No longer. The Preface’s readers were given the impression that she had gone to Switzerland in 1816 as a married woman. Shelley was introduced as ‘my husband’ who was ‘from the first, very anxious I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame’. Subsequent references to him maintain the impression that a marriage had taken place before 1816.

  Mary’s exclusion of Claire’s name from her account of the summer at Geneva was understandable; she was well aware of Claire’s need as a governess to disassociate herself from scandal. But what had happened to Mary herself since 1829, when she had insisted that Redding’s Preface to the Galignani edition should tell the truth about her elopement with a married man? What had changed her mind?

  Notes

  1. Maria Garnett–Julia Garnett Pertz, 22.4.1828 (Payne-Goposchkin Papers, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.).

  2. MWS–JWH, 28–29.6.1828.

  3. MWS–JWH, 5.6.1828.

  4. MWS–Isabella Baxter Booth, 15.6.1828.
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  5. MWS–JWH, 16.5.1828.

  6. Ibid.

  7. MWS–JWH, 5.6.1828.

  8. MWS, ‘Illyrian Poems and Feudal Scenes’, Westminster Review, January 1829, pp. 71–81. Her second appreciation of Mérimée was written in October 1830.

  9. MWS–Prosper Mérimée, 24.5.1828.

  10. Harriet Garnett–Julia Garnett Pertz, 25.5.1828, see note 1 and Bennett, Dods, p. 40.

  11. MWS–William Whitton, 4.6.1828.

  12. MWS–JWH, 28.6.1828.

  13. Prosper Mérimée–MWS, 5.10.1828.

  14. MWS–JWH, 5.6.1828.

  15. EJT–MWS, 8.7.1828 (Abinger, Dep. c. 510).

  16. Godwin’s Journal, 30.3.1830: ‘Clairmonts for Vienna.’ (Bodleian)

  17. Godwin’s Journal, 18.9.1829: ‘Jane C[lairmon]t. for Dresden.’ The Godwins never called her Claire or Clara.

  18. CCJ, although written as a separate note, dated by Marion Kingston Stocking to after 1828 by virtue of allusions to Dresden.

  19. MWS, reviewing ‘The Loves of the Poets’, Westminster Review, 2, October 1829, pp. 472–7.

  20. See note 18.

  21. MWS–EJT, 14.5.1836.

  22. CC–MWS, 28–30.3.1830.

  23. MWS–John Murray, 8.9.1830.