by Mary Shelley
Title page, Frankenstein (1818).
It is axiomatic to state that everyone knows the name “Frankenstein.” Millions have seen the eponymous 1931 film, loosely based on Shelley’s novel, starring Boris Karloff as the monster. A vast amount has been written about Frankenstein and continues to proliferate, almost at an exponential rate: Commentary has increased almost tenfold since original publication of the novel.3 There are nearly 150 films to date bearing the title Frankenstein in some form or other.4 Yet novelist, editor, and literary historian Brian W. Aldiss, who describes Mary Shelley as “the first science-fiction writer,” notes that for every thousand who think they are familiar with her tale of a deranged scientist and his ill-begotten creature, only one in fact has read the novel.5
Poster for Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1931), directed by James Whale.
Frankenstein is often summarized along the lines of its serving as “a cautionary tale warning of the dangers that can be cast into society by a presuming experimental science.”6 But it is so much more: Remarkably, a nineteen-year-old, writing her first novel, penned a tale that combines tragedy, morality, social commentary, and a thoughtful examination of the very nature of knowledge. The book is also the offspring of one of the most storied love affairs and collaborations in nineteenth-century literature, that between Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the prodigal daughter of two of the leading English intellectuals of the late eighteenth century and the son of an English aristocrat, destined to sit in Parliament, who turned his back on convention to embrace a wholly original, heretical, and visionary philosophy of life: a pairing of geniuses. And, as already suggested, the work is also deeply autobiographical. The elements of autobiography are so finely calibrated with the book’s form and content that the task of deciphering them, as demonstrated in these annotations, rewards effort yet is its own kind of trap; nonetheless, it has always been a vigorous line of research. Among the most obvious factors are, first, that Mary was motherless—her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever, contracted giving birth to her in 1797—and although her father, William Godwin, raised her after his wife’s death, their relationship was often strained and distant. Second, in the motherless creature’s demonstrations of love and hatred for his “father,” Victor Frankenstein, may be found echoes of Mary Shelley’s complex relationship with Godwin. Third, like Victor, Percy Shelley was obsessed with the natural and occult sciences, which manifested itself in his keeping “vials, crucibles, ‘philosophical instruments,’ a solar microscope, a galvanic trough, an air pump, a telescope, and an assortment of electrical devices” in his rooms at college.7 Fourth, Mary Shelley lost three children in infancy, and her dark feelings about childbirth and child-rearing suffuse the novel. Lastly, she puts into the mouths of the story’s principals her own strong feelings about her father’s and Percy’s pursuit of ideas to the detriment of family.
Too often, Frankenstein is dismissed as merely early science fiction, rather than what is truly the first modern myth.8 Some still view the book as an anomalous product of a youthful author and Mary Shelley herself as a freakish prodigy,9 but it has achieved its place as one of the Romantic period’s greatest works of imagination. Its richness and nuance contrast sharply with the reductive, if appealing, story told in stage and film adaptations. For all its antiquarian flavor, it has become a timeless classic, a book that can be read simply and enjoyed as entertainment, but one that can also be parsed and studied for its influence on Western literature—twin purposes that the volume at hand seeks to accomplish. Uniquely, this volume will pay close attention to the changes in the text over the course of its maturation and provide a single-source reference for all of the variant texts.
Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, by Richard Rothwell (1840).
Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Alfred Clint (date unknown), after a portrait by Amelia Clint (1819).
THE HISTORICAL WORLD OF MARY SHELLEY
Before actually reading Frankenstein, it is important to understand the contextual history. The turbulent period between 1772 and 1818, the years encompassed by the events of the book10 and the date of its publication, included two major political revolutions, the American and the French, as well as “ripple revolutions” the world over. The American and French revolutions, which shifted the tectonic plates of world history, revised drastically the relationship between rulers and the ruled and opened the door to new roles for government.11 An equally defining series of events was Napoleon’s rampage through the European continent, beginning in Italy in 1796, which created a new empire born of war, though one that collapsed by 1821. The period also witnessed revolutions in science, as the fields of chemistry and biology greatly expanded, as did an understanding of electricity. Major advances in theory were accompanied by practical applications, with the introduction of the spinning jenny, the power loom, and gas-lit, steam-driven factories. Roads were built at a growing pace, helping to usher in the Industrial Age and shape the great metropolises we know. Gas mains were laid in London. The first steam locomotives appeared, and then a steamship crossed the Atlantic, these transportation revolutions giving rise to modern cities. As local farms and cottage industries gave way to the Industrial Revolution, lives changed to the rhythms of factory work rather than farm work, and people began to live more distant from their employment. Printing became more efficient and less expensive, and reading, once a domain of academics, clergy, and the rich, flourished.
Le Serment du Jeu de paume (aka “The Tennis Court Oath”), by Jacques-Louis David (1791).
The political events in France stirred a multitude of vocal reactions in England. The great philosopher Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), beginning a long public debate in England over the role of the aristocracy and the rights of the citizenry. The same year, Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (on whom more below), achieved fame when she published a response to Burke, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, her defense of the ideals of the French revolution and a repudiation of the aristocracy. (The pamphlet did not actually bear her name until it went into a second edition, the first having sold out in a matter of weeks.) This was followed by the expatriate American Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, a radical exploration of liberty that appeared in 1791–92, and by Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin’s, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).
In the midst of, and perhaps because of, such changes and political debate, literature flourished, especially in England. The publication of The Castle of Otranto (1764), from the unlikely source of Whig politician Horace Walpole, the son of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of England, set a new fashion in fiction, called “gothic.” Walpole combined the tropes of medieval romance (castles and supernatural beings) with contemporary fiction, striking a balance between the wild fantasies of the former and the strict realism of the latter. Otranto was highly popular, and other authors copied Walpole’s style, including Clara Reeve (best known for The Old English Baron, 1778)12 and Ann Radcliffe, whose best-known work was The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), though she wrote a half-dozen other novels. Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis cashed in on the new genre with a tossed-off but wildly successful scandalous novel, The Monk (1796), written before Lewis was twenty.13 The book was a favorite of Percy Shelley’s. Certainly Frankenstein, on its surface, with the nearly supernatural monster and a hero (and heroine) threatened with an apparently implacable doom, displays some gothic elements, but, as will be seen, Mary Shelley’s work goes far beyond the tropes of previous books in the genre.
Entrée de l’Armeé française à Rome le 15 février 1798, by Hippolyte Lecomte, 1798.
Richard Trevithick’s Tramroad Locomotive (1802), artist unknown.
Title page of William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).
Title page of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Lewis’s work certainly owed a debt to Radcliffe’s but also to Things as They
Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a novel by William Godwin, published in 1794, three years before the birth of his first child, Mary. Godwin intended Things as They Are to be an exposition of his political principles, as expressed in his 1793 Enquiry, but the novel—glorified by his sympathizers and denounced by his detractors as dangerously revolutionary—was successful in its own right, a compelling story of two men in relentless pursuit of each other over a span of years (a theme that recurs in Frankenstein). In a preface to the first edition that went unused because of the reaction of skittish booksellers, Godwin described the novel as a record “of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” It has been said to have prefigured both the existential novel and noir detective fiction. Mary first read it in 1814, when she was seventeen, and it clearly made a great impression, as is evident not least from the title page of Frankenstein.
Title page of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (ca. 1818 edition).
The gothic movement in literature yielded in the 1780s and 1790s to Romanticism—coinage of the term is usually attributed to Friedrich Schlegel14—partly as a reaction to the morbid obsessions of gothicism. It became a complex response to the idealism of the American and French revolutions, with its emphasis on reason, and drew literary sustenance from the sudden onset of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of science, again a crucial and new element of Frankenstein.15 Its adherents rejected classical standards for art and embraced a return to Nature and medievalism. The Romantics extolled the virtues of strong individuals whose heroism and rejection of the strictures of society would by their example lead others to better lives. They also celebrated intense feelings, especially those brought about by the presence of the sublime—the wonders of the natural world. All of these themes are well in evidence in Frankenstein.
Title page of William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794).
Title page of Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
Although written during the height of the gothic movement in England, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (first published anonymously in 1774, when Goethe was twenty-five, and revised in 1787) was embraced by the Romantics for its emphasis on sentimentality over sense and may be viewed as the launching point for much of what followed. Werther was, to say the least, an incredibly popular novel about a young man driven to suicide by the tortures of love, so successful that not only did readers take to dressing like Werther, but the book appears to have induced “copycat” suicides among its devotees.16 Another very popular writer of the day was Sir Walter Scott, an early champion of Frankenstein, who achieved success with novels and poems dramatizing historical struggles, essentially inventing “historical fiction.” His long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel was published anonymously in 1805, when he was thirty-four. This was followed by the epic poem Marmion in 1808. Waverley (1814, again published anonymously, as was all of Scott’s fiction until 1827) was the first of twenty “Waverley” novels, and it and others—for example, Rob Roy (1817) and Ivanhoe (1820)—largely focused on individuals struggling heroically against the confines of their societies.
English poetry began to reflect this change as well, focusing on emotions recollected by the individual rather than consideration of classical or biblical themes. The collection Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, truly launched English Romanticism, and succeeding poetry penned by William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, and of course Percy Shelley, Mary’s husband, eschewed lofty themes and complex structures such as those in the poetry of Milton and Pope. Instead, the Romantic poets wrote about their experiences, usually in specific locations, recording their personal moods and emotions. Lord Byron, discussed further below, became in many ways virtually the personification of Romanticism, with the “Byronic” hero the ideal.
Sir Walter Scott, by Henry Raeburn (1822).
Title page of Lyrical Ballads (1798).
THE LIFE OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s biographical details are essential knowledge for anyone reading the novel. She was born on August 30, 1797, in London. Her father, William Godwin, a former minister and the son of a Nonconformist minister (that is, a Protestant who elected not to “conform” to the precepts of the Church of England), had achieved a fame equal to or greater than his wife’s with publication of his Enquiry Concerning Public Justice. It was followed by Things as They Are, and he became a central figure among English supporters of the French Revolution—styled as the “English Jacobins”—a group that included Tom Paine and William Blake and, most importantly for our purposes, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley.
Mary Wollstonecraft was the eldest daughter of a once wealthy family, who, as a child, witnessed her father’s violence toward her mother and set herself to be the protector of her mother and younger sisters and brothers. Her ministrations were unappreciated and resented by her mother, who, retiring to the sick chamber to nurse both unspecified ailments and at least one very real one (edema, then known as dropsy), would seat Mary in a corner with instructions not to move—a “punishment” that sometimes lasted for four hours. Uncharacteristically for the time, Wollstonecraft left her home at nineteen to make her own way, soon starting a school with her closest friend, Frances (Fanny) Blood. She subsequently served as caretaker of a widow in Bath and as a governess in Ireland for the country’s biggest landowners, Robert King and Caroline Fitzgerald King, Lord and Lady Kingsborough—a family once distinguished by its place among the governing elite then known collectively as the Ascendancy, and later disgraced by the elopement of their daughter Mary, one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s former charges.17
At twenty-eight, after a year in her employ, Mary Wollstonecraft was peremptorily dismissed by Lady Kingsborough. She had grown tired, in any case, of the limited opportunities afforded her and other women, and quite bravely she decided to move to London to try to make her living as an author. Her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), written on the job in Ireland, mined her friendship with Fanny Blood; its secondary female character, Ann, is based on Fanny. Wollstonecraft also wrote a 1788 collection of children’s tales, Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, centered around her experiences both at the school and in the employ of the Kingsboroughs. In November 1791, the year following the release of A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she met William Godwin, and, although their union seemed almost foreordained, this initial contact was a disappointment to both, as they disagreed on nearly everything. Godwin even took umbrage at what he perceived to be “offences, against grammar and other minute points of composition,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
Family tree for William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie (ca. 1797).
William Godwin, by Henry William Pickersgill (date unknown).
“The interview was not fortunate,” Godwin wrote, seven years later, in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), a sui generis account of his wife’s unconventional life that can safely be said to have no precedent in literature, at least that of the late eighteenth century. The book took its title from Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist classic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Clearly written from the heart but unsparing in its accounts, Godwin’s “memoir” incongruously details Wollstonecraft’s affairs—with the married painter Henry Fuseli and others—in the language of a political pamphlet, mixing theory and prurience. “She regarded her sex, in the words of Calista [in Greek mythology, the goddess who was both nymph and, after her seduction by Zeus, a bear], as ‘In every state of life the slaves of men.’ . . . It is necessary here that I should resume the subject of the friendship that subsisted between Mary and Mr. Fuseli. . . .”18 Some of Wollstonecraft’s sentiments regarding the position o
f women in society appear in Frankenstein, in the mouth of Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s unfortunate fiancée.
Wollstonecraft had become involved with Fuseli before she met Godwin. Eventually, Sophia Rawlins, Fuseli’s wife, not surprisingly, objected to her presence in their lives, and Wollstonecraft removed herself, traveling to Paris. There she had a relationship with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and became even more highly visible as a writer, publishing, among other works, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In 1794 she and Imlay had a daughter, Fanny, an event that precipitated a pattern of chronic absences, with Imlay’s “ambiguity” and extended business trips to London and elsewhere “the prelude to an eternal separation,” according to Godwin’s later account.19 Alone in the midst of the French Revolution, Mary followed Imlay to London, where she apparently attempted suicide. After a second unsuccessful attempt to take her own life, she had begun a slow return to literary circles. Imlay’s final desertion, in April 1795, had come with the rather cruel implication that he found Wollstonecraft too domesticated for his tastes: “Mr. Imlay,” Godwin wrote in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “. . . had formed another connexion; as it is said, with a young actress from a strolling company of players.”20
