It has even been suggested that Frankenstein, the new man, represented, in Mary's mind, the man she was living with, Shelley, with his ideas of social reform and scientific progress. If we accept that Frankenstein and his shadow—doppelganger, evil twin, monster—are one and the same, and that Mary, probably without knowing it, was writing of Frankenstein as a warped version of her husband, then what is she saying about him, or their lives together? More than she knew, or could have known at that time. Frankenstein's intentions were good; instead, he brought destruction into the world. And so were Shelley's—but death and disaster were to follow him everywhere he went, until his own tragically early death at the age of twenty-nine.
The reality is that Mary Shelley's book is a concoction of scientific and ethical ideas, of her own past, her present and, I believe, her premonitions about the future. It is impossible to separate the strands, which is perhaps a working definition of inspiration in writing. This is why it has fascinated people for two hundred years.
Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818. It was dedicated to Mary's father, William Godwin. The preface was written, also anonymously, by Shelley, as if he had been the author. There was no reason why Mary should not have put her name to the book—authorship was a relatively respectable career for a woman—but it may have been that whatever name she chose, Godwin or Shelley, would have labeled the book as subversive and biased reviewers and editors against it. The two notorious radicals were not household names (there was hardly any such thing in those days of poor communications and mass illiteracy), but they would have been well known to reviewers, newspapers, editors and others. And so would the scandals, which included now the suicide of Shelley's wife.
The book was successful and was eventually turned into a play. Mary does not seem to have referred to it much herself. Perhaps she thought it too mundane, just a potboiler. More likely, she was just trying to endure.
On their return to England the Shelleys, and Claire, retired to Bath. Claire's child was to be born in January, but the party had only been back in England for a month when dreadful news reached them. Fanny, Mary's older sister (the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American lover who had abandoned her) was missing. Shelley tracked her down, but too late: she had killed herself. Two months later news just as bad, if not worse, arrived. Harriet, Shelley's wife, had also committed suicide. Impregnated by someone who has never been identified, she had drowned herself in a London river. A fortnight later Mary and Shelley married, and another fortnight later Claire's baby, to be called Allegra, was born. And Mary, through all this, apparently managed to go on writing.
The disasters were not at an end. The Shelleys (and Claire, of course) went to Italy in the Spring of 1818, almost two years after their visit to Switzerland. With them went Shelley and Mary's two children—William, aged three, and the baby, Clara—and Claire's one-year-old daughter by Byron. The plan was that Alle-gra should be raised by her father and eventually Claire, reluctantly, handed the child over to Byron. During the summer, Mary's baby, sick and teething, died in Venice after a hurried journey from Tuscany in the heat of summer.
A year later, Mary and Shelley's son, William, died in Rome. Three years later, Allegra, now age four, who had been placed in a convent by Byron, also died. Three months later, Shelley drowned. Byron died two years later, at age thirty-six, in Greece, where he had gone to assist the Greeks in their fight against the occupying Ottoman Turks.
It had been eight years since the party of friends had spent their evenings talking in the Villa Diodati.
After Shelley's death, Mary returned to England with her remaining son and lived on a small income from Shelley's father—which kept her well under his control. Sir Timothy's aim was to censor Shelley's work and keep his widow from revealing who he had been and what their lives had been like. In this endeavor he largely succeeded. Mary did write four further novels but none achieved the success of Frankenstein. Meanwhile, Claire Clairmont, penniless, worked in hard circumstances as a governess in Russia.
When Sir Timothy Shelley died twenty years later at the age of ninety-one, Mary's son was his heir. Shelley's older son, by his first wife, had died of tuberculosis. Sir Timothy's death had unlocked Shelley's will, in which he had provided for Claire generously (there is little doubt they were lovers), and she was able to return to Britain. Mary died seven years later but Claire, who lost the Shelley legacy through unwise speculation, nevertheless lived on, in Florence, into her eighties.
Mary's son Percy married. He and his wife had no children. Lord Byron's surviving daughter by his wife grew up to work with Charles Babbington on what is considered to be the earliest version of a computer.
This edition of Frankenstein also includes my own sequel to the book, the basis of which is that, instead of destroying the monster's bride, Frankenstein allows her to live. I suppose I was interested partly in what interests all of us: actions and their consequences. Another motivation was personal. In the late sixties, many years before writing Frankenstein's Bride, I was living in London with my husband and three children. My husband, a writer, edited a cutting-edge science fiction magazine. Our flat was filled with writers, painters and musicians. We were libertarians and free thinkers; we knew the old world would soon give way to the new, better one. (We knew a lot about Shelley and Byron, too.)
On the other hand, although there was no doubt everyone in the world must be, and would be liberated, there was evasion in the midst of the debate, where the women ought to have been. There were perfectly good arguments against treating women as a separately oppressed class but these arguments failed to convince in the face of brutal facts. Men still wrote the manifestos while women still cooked, cleaned, did the laundry and brought up the children. Small wonder I took Mary Shelley and her sister Claire to heart.
Meanwhile, there were casualties. People were arrested, went mad, committed suicide. We lived from crisis to crisis. And then the music stopped. Authority, which had been lurking all along, biding its time, and the power of money, which had never really abated, resumed full control again. Just as it had in Victorian times.
And that is the barely recalled background which was with me when I began to write Frankenstein's Bride.
TO JOSHUA ALWYNE COMPTON, MARQUIS OF NORTHAMPTON, PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY, LONDON
August 31st, 1846 Kittering Hall, Nottingham
My Lord,
You will recall, I believe, our meeting at the house of my wife's kinsman Mr. Flint. After dinner you made mention of the curious old story of the death of Victor Frankenstein over twenty years ago now, and of the rumors that have since circulated round his name.
Perhaps you will recall my confiding privately to you later that evening that I had been a friend of Mr. Frankenstein, had been a witness and sometimes a participant in the events surrounding his death. I added that I had a full account, made from notes concerning the affair kept daily around the turn of the year 1825—that in my possession I had also Mr. Frankenstein's scientific notes and diagrams made over many years—and also his own account of his life and the events leading up to his death. I believe I told you that my ownership of these papers had made, and was making me increasingly, uneasy. I think I may say that this information caused you much astonishment. You were good enough to suggest that if I would send you my account of the life—and death—of Mr. Frankenstein, as well as papers of his I have in my possession, you would be content to read the documents and appraise them, volunteering to give me some idea of what, in your opinion, I should do with the material.
I now gladly send you these papers, happy to be able to share the burden of them with a man of such reputation as your own. I fear the contents may shock you gravely, although I venture to guess they will also interest you greatly. I give you my assurance that all you read is true to the best of my belief.
I remain, thanking you for your goodness in undertaking the task of reading this account, your obedient servant. My Lord,
Jonath
an Goodall
O N E
THE TALE I HAVE TO TELL, my Lord, which for twenty years or more I have kept to myself, is a strange and terrifying one. There are those who might say it would be better to leave the story forever untold. Yet, as a man reaches a certain age he must, perforce, settle his debts and fulfill his obligations to those who will live after him. I do not believe that in my case this ordering of affairs should stop at my own gates. I believe it is my duty, my debt to the past, to tell the story I have to tell.
So I will relate the history of my friend, the unfortunate Victor Frankenstein, the story of a soul which took itself to perdition, a man who was the author of his own, terrible, downfall. Whether my revelations will bring good or evil in themselves I am unable to predict.
My story begins in November 1825—but first I will say something of myself as I then was, a young man of not quite thirty years, healthy, not poor, a possessor, I believe, of a cheerful disposition, the only great grief of my life having been, up to that point, the death of my dearly loved mother when I was but fifteen years old. The remainder of my family, my father and two younger sisters, Arabella and Anna, resided near Nottingham at Kittering Hall, in a house which had been owned by our family for more than a hundred years. In that neighborhood lived also many friends and kinsfolk. Our family believed we had been in the neighborhood, farming our land since the Domesday Book. What family does not? But there are records to prove that, if we had not been there quite since the first William's time, the Goodalls had been for long enough as honest a family as any in the county, being careful landlords, maintaining the common land, showing justice to their tenants and in the years just preceding the time of which I write, having lowered their rents during the bad years following the war against Napoleon. But I digress. Suffice it to say the family did its duty and over the years produced its own share of honest doctors, lawyers, magistrates and the like.
In the later years of my grandfather's life, though, came a change in the family fortunes—not, as these words normally mean for the worse but for the better. Grandfather discovered coal on our land, whereupon fields which had formerly produced a modest income through tilling and grazing became the source of considerable profit to us. To cut the story short, then, that black crop from our fields made of me a young man with no need to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow or the scratch of my pen. I was thus able to pursue a course of study without care. It was, as it turned out, through these studies that the connection between myself and Victor Frankenstein arose.
Having almost enjoyed my schooldays, which is, I believe, as much as any man can honestly say, I rejoiced in my years at Oxford. In addition to the normal pursuits of a man in his university years such as friendships, suppers, rowing, horseplay and disturbing the peace of the worthy, I took greatly to the study of languages, not for themselves alone but for what they indicate about the lives of men and the operations of the many different societies in which they live. So I graduated from Oxford not merely skilled in the arts of port and claret—and love, which I took lightly, though, I hope, leaving neither myself nor my beloved of the time any worse off than either of us had been before—but also as something of a scholar in philology.
In the beginning was the Word, says St. John the Divine. The study of language is the study of man, for it is language which distinguishes man from the beast, language alone which allows us to convey higher thoughts, scientific, religious or poetic. Through the study of languages and their origins we may learn much of ourselves. King James I, it is said, suffered a baby to be put in a pit for seven years, without seeing any human being during all that time, on the grounds that when pulled up the child might speak Latin!
I came to London to work on my dictionary of Aramaic, the very tongue in which Our Lord spoke. My friend David Hathaway, a printer and publisher, has since published this work—though at the time of which I speak he was still waiting for me to complete it.
One evening I attempted to explain my theories of languages to my landlady Cordelia Downey. She, I am afraid, laughed at me. “Why,” she exclaimed, looking up, I believe from the mending of her little daughter's stockings, and fixing me with her large, bright, blue eyes, “language is a simple thing, we learn it as babies, babbling and mumbling as we attempt to copy the speech of our elders. And that,” said she, “Mr. Goodall, is that.”
“Then why are there so many tongues?” I questioned. “Why do we not all, from here to China, use the same language? What of that speaking with tongues when, as the Bible tells us, each man in the crowd at Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost, wherever he came from and whatever tongue he spoke, could understand the other? What of oracular speech, what of speech when we dream—whence come those voices when the conscious mind is not in control?”
Well, I regret to say that Mrs. Downey offered no answer to these questions. Instead she gave a puzzled frown, followed by a dismissive noise—I will not call it a snort—and then turned to cutting out a small dress for her daughter. Women in general have little taste for the speculative, preferring the here and now of things. Yet it was those studies of mine, however arcane they may have appeared to Mrs. Downey, which led to my part in the sad and horrifying tale of Victor Frankenstein and, I believe, changed my view of life completely.
However, at the time when my story begins I was a contented man, the times we lived in forced no great efforts on us. The war with France was over; the country at peace.
As I look back, to use an image drawn from science, I see my younger self as unshaped and undefined, a mass of gases, so to speak, made up of my own natural qualities and of my circumstances in life, waiting only for the catalyst which would turn those gases into solid form—my later self. To think that these changes came through the study of philology! For that was the reason why, to take you to the heart of the tale, that on that November afternoon of which I spoke earlier I found myself walking through rapidly swelling river fog, at dusk, beside the Thames, looking longingly but with little hope for a conveyance I could hire to take me back to my lodgings in Gray's Inn Road.
I had arrived by the riverside on foot to visit my friend Dr. Victor Frankenstein at his house in Cheyne Walk. I regretted having to make my way home by the same means, for the fog thickened, it grew ever darker and I was alone.
There was not a soul about as I trod the road which lies beyond the northern bank of London's great river. Missing the warmth and hospitality of Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein's house, I hurried on, not altogether happy about the prospect of a dark and foggy walk through the suburbs of London. The fields, manufactories and market gardens beside the road on which I was traveling were deserted at that season and hour. All were places where a footpad or some other assailant could lurk undetected—and I had no stick or cudgel with me.
It was at this point that, looking down towards the strand, I spotted, by the light of a flaming torch which had been set up on a small wharf below the road, a massive and extraordinary figure. He stood on a small stone quay built out a little distance into the river. On this tiny wharf, only about fifteen feet wide and twenty across, men were unloading large crates and some barrels from a barge which had come from upriver. In astonishment I gazed at this monstrous figure, almost six-and-a- half feet tall, I judged, and correspondingly massive, clad in what seemed like a long, ragged black coat with flapping sleeves. He was bare-headed, and dark, flowing locks hung to his shoulders. As the barge slipped and slopped at anchorage this man I noted with such awe and disbelief was bending into the vessel, seizing wooden boxes from within, then, with enormously powerful movements, half-throwing them on to the jetty. The weight of the boxes to an ordinary man could be judged by the efforts his companions were making with the others. Where they strained, the other threw them about like so many children's bricks.
There came a cry, as the men hurled one on to a pile on the jetty, as if the crate had struck, or almost struck, another man. Yet, as if in a frenzy to get done, he continued to haul them out, not ackno
wledging the protest. Then came another cry. The ogre (for so he seemed), then clambered in an ungainly way into the barge, apparently dragging a crippled leg behind him, and went on unloading from inside the vessel. I watched him stagger a little as the water moved the barge, then raise a cask above his head and almost hurl it into the arms of another man, who reeled and nearly lost his footing. Someone, to provide more illumination, set light to a pile of wood and tarred rope on the jetty. Just as the resultant stench struck me, the light caught this vast creature, flickered away with the wind, then caught him again, revealing him more clearly. The face was heavy-browed, heavy-jawed and seemed twisted somehow, as if malformed at birth. It was a face such as one sees sometimes on those unfortunate enough to have come into the world feeble-minded. I could not see his eyes. They were hidden under jutting brows. His shoulder-length black hair blew about in the wind. I noted his feet were bare—cruel in such weather.
As he stood on that swaying deck I thought of some old figure from mythology, half-brute, half-human. So seized was I by this extraordinary spectacle I forgot for a moment my predicament, alone in freezing fog and darkness, yet as it came back to me, to my horror, the creature threw back his head and gave a great howl, a howl of agony. I do not know how to describe this sound. It was not the cry of a wolf or other beast but the cry of a man, as if in unbearable pain. And as he howled he pointed an arm in a flapping sleeve, in my direction. I froze—but no—he had not seen me, found some mad prejudice against me. He was pointing beyond me, and a little to my right, up the strand, across the road in the direction of the houses of Cheyne Walk, the direction whence I had just come.
The bargee, at the head of his barge while the off-loading proceeded, did not hesitate. He leapt instantly from his position, crossed the body of his vessel and brought up his arm and crashed some heavy object, a bludgeon or a piece of wood across the side of the head of the pointing figure. Then, shouting something I could not properly hear, he did the same thing again, with all his force. In the face of the blows which would have toppled a normal man, this ogre dropped his pointing arm and threw it round his head, to ward them off—and went back to his work again.
Frankenstein's Bride Page 2
