by Mary Shelley
‘And do you dream?’ said the dæmon; ‘do you think that I was then dead to agony and remorse?—He,’ he continued, pointing to the corpse, ‘he suffered not in the consummation of the deed—oh! not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think you that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.
‘After the murder of Clerval, I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror: I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness; that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me, he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I recollected my threat, and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey. Yet when she died!—nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good.1 Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!’
I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. ‘Wretch!’ I said, ‘it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and, when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins, and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.’
‘Oh, it is not thus—not thus,’ interrupted the being; ‘yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being over-flowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure: when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
‘You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But, in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.
‘But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.
‘Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me thither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
‘Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.
‘But soon,’ he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.’
He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.
THE END
APPENDIX A
THE COMPOSITION OF FRANKENSTEIN
THE volume of Mary Shelley’s own journal covering the period 14 May 1815–20 July 1816, during which Frankenstein originated, is missing.
The earlier preface to the novel, dated September 1817, was written by Shelley. It states simply that the story was begun in the summer of 1816, at Geneva; that, during a t
ime of cold and rainy weather, the anonymous author and friends would meet of an evening by the fire, and would ‘occasionally’ read German ghost stories. Out of a ‘playful desire of imitation’, the author and two other friends (sc. Byron and Shelley) agreed each to write a supernatural tale; but the two friends left on ‘a journey among the Alps’, and the author’s tale was the only one completed.
Mary Shelley’s own account, written fourteen years later for the revised edition of 1831, is much fuller, but is certainly inaccurate in some details. The sequence here is: the summer of 1816—fine weather and ‘pleasant hours on the lake’, followed by ‘incessant rain’ which ‘often confined us for days to the house’; the reading of the book of German ghost stories; Byron’s proposal, taken up by himself, Shelley, Mary, and Polidori, that each should write a ghost story; and the prolonged search for a story which, it is implied, went on for some days. Meantime Mary had been listening to ‘many and long … conversations’ between Byron and Shelley: one of these was the discussion on ‘the nature of the principle of life’, which led immediately to Mary’s dream and to the beginning of the novel on the very next day.
Byron’s unfinished vampire-story, dated 17 June 1816, was published with Mazeppa in 1819, and suggested Polidori’s novelette, The Vampyre, later published in dubious circumstances and attributed to Byron. Of Polidori’s ‘skull-headed lady’, there is no further trace; his novel, Ernestus Berchtold (1819), has no reference to her.
Thomas Moore’s account of these events in his Life of Lord Byron (1830) is slightly earlier, and presumably based largely on Mary Shelley’s recollections. According to Moore, the regular routine while Byron was at Diodati included an evening excursion on the lake when the weather was fine; when it was bad, the Shelleys ‘passed their evenings at Diodati; and, when the rain rendered it inconvenient for them to return home, remained there to sleep’. It was during ‘a week of rain’ that the party agreed to write their ghost stories, and Frankenstein resulted.1
The impression given by these accounts is of a leisurely time-scheme, yet it must in fact have been fairly brief: Byron met Shelley’s party at Sécheron on 27 May, and did not move to the Villa Diodati until 10 June; the journey round Lake Leman began on 22 June, and the novel must have been started between these last two dates.
For more detailed information, we must turn to the brief and cryptic entries in the diary of Dr. Polidori. These confirm that Byron and Shelley’s party met regularly in the evenings from 29 May onward, often for boating on the lake; these expeditions were interrupted for the first time by rain on 8 June. After the removal to Diodati on 10 June, evening meetings were resumed there. Then come three significant entries:
June 15. … Shelley and I had a conversation about principles,—whether man was to be thought merely an instrument…
June 16. … Shelley came, and dined and slept here, with Mrs. S[helley] and Miss Clare Clairmont…
June 17. … The ghost-stories are begun by all but me.2
The ‘conversation about principles’ is likely to be the same as Mary’s discussion on ‘the principle of life’, and it would be typical of Polidori to make himself a principal speaker rather than Byron. James Rieger, in an important article (see Bibliography), would go further, and argue that in fact Mary gives the reverse order of events; that the ‘conversation about principles’ occurred first, followed next night by the stay at Diodati and the beginning of the ghost stories (including Mary’s) next morning. Certainly, Mary’s memory for detail, especially of the Fantusmagoriana stories, can be shown to be imperfect; but is Polidori’s record any more reliable? We have no certainty that the hasty entries were made day-by-day as they occurred, and soon after he makes errors in dates. Polidori was himself absent from Diodati on the nights of 12 and 13 June, and on the latter a thunder-storm occurred; it is possible that the scheme of writing ghost stories was proposed then, and that Polidori joined in later. This would agree with Mary’s order of events and, at least minimally, with her time scheme.
Incidentally, one would like to know whether, by ‘instrument’, Polidori meant ‘mechanism’, and whether anyone in the party had read de la Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, which also uses the phrase ‘a new Prometheus.’
Mary began her story with the words, ‘It was a dreary night of November …’, which now form the opening of Chapter V (Chapter IV in the 1818 edition). In late July occurred the excursion to Chamonix and the Mer de Glace which gave her the impressive scenery for Chapters IX and X; when her journal resumes, we find her writing at Chamonix on 24 July, and the work went on in earnest after her return to Geneva on the 27th.1 What had been originally designed as a story of ‘a few pages’ was being developed, on Shelley’s urging, into a full-length novel. Journal entries show her at work on at least half the days in August, and on one occasion discussing the story with Shelley. Writing was interrupted by their departure from Geneva and return to England, and possibly not resumed in earnest until mid-December; the work seems to have been virtually complete when it was suspended for the visit to London and her marriage to Shelley.1
Except for a few days early in 1817, Mary’s journal gives no indications of further writing until late February or March. For a week from 10 April 1817, the entries read ‘Correct “Frankenstein”’; transcription went on, with some interruptions, until about the middle of May. On 14 May, ‘Shelley … corrects “Frankenstein”’; on the 22nd, the Shelleys went to London to submit the manuscript to John Murray. Murray refused—on Gifford’s advice, or so Mary believed; Oilier also turned it down in August; but the book was accepted by Lackington, Allen and Company a month later. It was seen through the press, with some emendation, by Shelley, who wrote that he had ‘paid considerable attention to the correction of such few instances of baldness of style as necessarily occur in the production of a very young writer.’ He also busied himself in having copies sent out to friends and others whose opinions might be useful; and Frankenstein finally appeared in March 1818.2
The reviewers were impressed in spite of themselves by a book which they found rather shocking; with partial truth, they sensed the Godwinian influence in it, but believed it to have been written by a man, possibly Shelley himself. Mary’s authorship, which was at first intended to be a secret known only to a few friends like Moore and Byron, gradually became common knowledge.3
1 Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life (1830), ii. 31.
2 The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, ed. W. M. Rossetti (1911), pp. 122–5.
1 Journal (see Bibliography), p. 53. For what follows, see subsequent entries in the journal.
1 Letters (see Bibliography), i. 14.
2 Journal (see Bibliography), 78, 79, and 80; Letters (see Bibliography), i. 29, 31; The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (1964), i. 564–5.
3 Quarterly Review, Jan. 1818; Edinburgh Magazine, Mar. 1818; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Mar. 1818. R. Glynn Grylls, Mary Shelley (see Bibliography), pp. 315–18.
APPENDIX B
SHAFTESBURY ON PROMETHEUS
IN Advice to an Author (1710), Shaftesbury writes of the true poet as ‘a second Maker, a just PROMETHEUS, under JOVE’, and this passage has important repercussions on German writers of the Sturm und Drang. But for our purposes the significant analogues occur in a cluster of references which occur early in The Moralists (1709).
Prometheus is first introduced in the ‘romantick strain’ of a mock-proem:
O wretched State of Mankind!—Hapless Nature, thus to have err’d in thy chief Workmanship!—Whence sprang this fatal Weakness? What Chance or Destiny shall we accuse? Or shall we mind the Poets, when they sing thy Tragedy (PROMETHEUS!) who with thy stol’n Celestial Fire, mix’d with vile Clay, dids’t mock Heaven’s Countenance, and in abusive Likeness of the Immortals, mad’st the Compound MAN; that wretched Mortal, ill to himself, and Cause of Ill to all.
A little later, this reference is picked up in the discussion on the p
roblem of evil, and Prometheus becomes the demiurge upon whom the ills of mankind can be charged, thus exempting the gods; but Shaftesbury points out the objection:
A single PROMETHEUS was enough to take the weight from JOVE. They fairly made JOVE a Stander-by. He resolv’d, it seems, to be Neuter; and see what wou’d come of this notable Experiment; how the dangerous Man-moulder wou’d proceed; and what wou’d be the Event of his Tampering.—Excellent Account, to satisfy the Heathen Vulgar! But how, think you, wou’d a Philosopher digest this? ‘For the Gods (he wou’d say presently) either cou’d have hinder’d PHOMETHEUS’S Creation, or they cou’d not. If they cou’d, they were answerable for the Consequences; if they cou’d not, they were no longer Gods, being thus limited and controul’d. And whether PROMETHEUS were a Name for Chance, Destiny, a Plastick Nature, or an Evil Dæmon; whatever was design’d by it; ‘twas still the same Breach of OMNIPOTENCE.’
Further, he goes on to speak of ‘our modern PROMETHEUS’S, the Mountebanks, who perform’d such Wonders of many kinds, here on our earthly Stages.’ And a little earlier, in a passage which is separate from these sections but in close proximity to them, he had written:
We have a strange Fancy to be Creators, a violent Desire at least to know the Knack or Secret by which Nature does all. The rest of our Philosophers only aim at that in Speculation, which our Alchymists aspire to in Practice. For with some of these it has been actually under deliberation how to make Man, by other Mediums than Nature has hitherto provided.
