The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

by Peter Ackroyd

  Bysshe argued from the precepts of reason that there was no God. He affirmed that truth was the only means to promote the best interests of mankind. Once he had discovered a truth, then it was incumbent upon him to declare it as forcefully as possible. He also stated that, since belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief. In this, as he realised soon enough, he ignored the general prejudices of English society. He wrote a short essay, entitled “On the Necessity of Atheism,” which was then printed and put on sale at the bookseller across the high street from the college. It had been on the shelves for no more than twenty minutes when one of the fellows of the college, Mr. Gibson, read it and berated the owner of the shop for putting such incendiary literature on display. The copies were immediately withdrawn and, I believe, burned in a stove at the rear of the premises.

  The authorship of the anonymous pamphlet was soon detected, on the information of the bookseller himself, and Bysshe was summoned to a meeting of the Master and fellows. A copy of “On the Necessity of Atheism” lay before them, as he told me later. But he refused to answer their questions on the grounds that the pamphlet had been published anonymously. It would be an act of tyranny and injustice, he said, to press him when they had no legal cause. His was a nature that turned into fire at any hint of oppression. Of course he was judged to be guilty. He hammered upon my door immediately after leaving this gathering.

  “I am sent down,” he said as soon as he entered my rooms. “Not merely rusticated, Victor. Expelled! Can you believe it?”

  “Expelled? From what date?”

  “From now. This moment. I am no longer a member of the university.” He sat down, trembling. “I have no notion what my father will say.” He always spoke of his father in terms of the greatest disquiet.

  “Where will you go, Bysshe?”

  “I cannot go home. That would be too hard to bear.” He looked up at me. “And I would not wish to be deprived of your company for very long, Victor.”

  “There is only one place for you.”

  “I know it. London.” He jumped up from the chair, and walked over to the window. “I have been in correspondence with Leigh Hunt for some weeks. He knows all the revolutionaries in the city. I will live in their society.” Already he seemed to be recovering his spirit. “I will grow towards the sun of liberty! I will find lodgings. And you must accompany me, Victor. Will you come?”

  I WAITED UNTIL THE END OF TERM before following Bysshe to London. He had rented lodgings in Poland Street, in the district of Soho, and I had found rooms close by in Berners Street. I had been in London once before, on my arrival from my homeland, but of course I was still amazed by the immensity of its life. No Alpine storm, no torrent among the glaciers, no avalanche among the peaks, can give the least idea of the roar of the city. I had never seen so many people, and I wandered through the streets in a constant state of excitation. What power human lives have in the aggregate! To me the city resembled some vast electrical machine, galvanising rich and poor alike, sending its current down every alley and lane and thoroughfare in the course of its pulsating life. London seemed ungovernable, obeying laws mysterious to itself, like some dim phantasm stalking through the world.

  Bysshe meanwhile had sought out and found the men of liberty. Together we attended a meeting of the Popular Reform League above a perfume shop in Store Street, where to our delight we heard epithets hurled against the members of the administration that would have marked them and burned them like firebrands! I was intoxicated by the language of liberty, convinced as I was that the old order of oppression and corruption must surely pass away. It was time to breach the foundations of tyranny, and to abrogate the laws by which humanity had been enslaved. There was a new world waiting to be brought to life and light!

  We were cordially welcomed by the members of the League, having satisfied themselves very quickly that we were not government spies but friends of freedom or Citizens as they called us. When I confessed that I came from Geneva there was an “hoorah” for “the home of liberty.” Bread and beer were ordered, and all became very merry. This was followed by a general debate in which the demands for annual parliaments and universal suffrage were loudly proclaimed. One young man by the name of Pearce rose to his feet and proclaimed that, “Truth and Liberty, in an age so enlightened as the present, must be invincible and omnipotent.” I could not help but interpret his words in the light of my own researches where truth, if pursued in a scientific manner, might also prove invincible. There was no possible limit to the power of the human mind if it were properly and justly harnessed.

  Pearce’s words were greeted with acclamation, in which Bysshe and I joined, and I could not help but compare these enthusiastic Citizens with the supine youth of the university. I was about to whisper this to Bysshe when, his eyes shining, he rose to his feet and declared to the gathering that “we have no occasion for kings.” This was loudly huzzahed, and several men got up and shook hands with him. “What have we to fear?” he asked them. “If we stay fast to our principles of truth and freedom, then all will be well. Follow the lightning flash!” The members of the League, roused by his rhetoric, then began a song of great fervour:

  “Come you sons of true liberty, let us agree

  To form an alliance firm honest and free

  Let’s join hand in hand as reason upholds

  Her bright torch of friendship. Let us be bold!”

  I do not know if Bysshe admired the poetry, but he thoroughly approved of the sentiments.

  At the end of the meeting one of the Citizens came up to Bysshe and introduced himself. “How do you do, sir? I hope your Oxford residency agreed with you?”

  Bysshe was taken aback. “How do you know of that?”

  “I am a particular friend of Mr. Hunt. He has been in correspondence with you, has he not?”

  “I have met him in London.”

  “Have you? As soon as I saw you and your companion-” he bowed to me, “I knew you to be the men expelled from the university.”

  “This is Mr. Frankenstein. He is not expelled. But he shares my principles.”

  “My name is Westbrook. I am a shoemaker.” He looked around the hall for a moment. “We rarely give our names here, for fear of spies. But you are exceptional, Mr. Shelley. You are the son of a baronet, are you not?”

  “I am. But I will use every particle of my birthright in the service of the cause.”

  “Well said, sir. Now we must make our way into the street. Before the magistrates interrupt us. We have learned to avoid what we call the war whoop of Church and King.”

  We walked down into Store Street, and stood together on the corner of Tottenham Court Road. Westbrook seemed to me to bear a noble mind. His physiognomy was firm and, with a prominent forehead, inclined to ideality; he was by no means shabbily dressed, despite his trade, and he wore his hair short without powder in the “liberty” fashion. “May I take you,” he asked us, “to a place where my sister is employed? It is not far from here. Distress is never far in this city. And there you will see the enemy.”

  He led us through the neighbourhood of St. Giles, as he called it, which was only a few streets from where we stood. It seemed to me the most wretched and depraved district imaginable on this earth. No low quarter of Geneva, however ruinous, had the least resemblance to this foul and degrading patch of London. The streets were no more than paths of mud, or filth, where the effluent ran in rivulets from the ragged courtyards and alleys. The stench was indescribable. “Are we safe here?” I whispered to Westbrook.

  “I am known. But if not-” He took from the interior pocket of his jacket a large knife with a bone handle and long blade. “This is what the French call couteau secret,” he said. “You cannot open it without being acquainted with the secret spring.”

  “Have you ever used it?”

  “Not yet. I keep it for the bloodhounds after me and my companions.”

  There was a shriek from an upstairs window, patc
hed with rags, followed by the sound of confused blows and oaths being exchanged. We hurried on. I had not known that such monstrousness, such abject horror, could exist in any Christian country. How had this fetid body grown in the largest city on earth, without anyone so much as noticing its existence? We were only a few moments from the glare of the Oxford Road, as I judged it, but these alleys were like some black shadow forever following its steps. We picked our way around the prone body of a woman, in the last stages of intoxication; her legs were covered with her own filth. If life could become so fearful a thing, then how could it be God’s handiwork? I fully believe that this entrance into the underworld of London took from me the last vestiges of Christian faith. Man was not a creature of God’s making. I thought that then, and I know it now.

  WE CAME INTO AN OPEN THOROUGHFARE, gasping for cleaner air.

  “Just a little further, gentlemen,” Westbrook said.

  Bysshe was scarcely able to stand upright, and was bent double in the street. “Are you unwell?” I asked him.

  “Not me,” he replied. “The world. The world is sick. I am the least part of it.” Then he retched in a corner.

  We came into a narrow street, of which I did not see the name. There was a circular building of red brick, much like a tabernacle of the sects, and Westbrook went up to a little door set in the side of it. He knocked upon it loudly, and then pushed it open. The air within was filled with the welcome fragrance of spice, such as I imagine might have embalmed the body of a pharaoh. The room itself was circular in shape, like the building, and seemed to be entirely populated by girls and young women. They were sitting upon stools along the sides of two long tables, pouring powders into small earthenware jars. I watched them closely for a moment or two, as long as it took to view their whole operation. They cut out a piece of oil paper from a sheet beside them, placed it over the opening of the jar, and then secured a piece of blue paper over that; then they tied it with string around the neck of the jar. Their speed and dexterity were extraordinary; they seemed to be imitating some mechanism with their nimbleness and efficiency.

  “Here is my sister,” Westbrook said. “Harriet.” He went over to one of the girls, and touched her shoulder. She smiled but she did not look up at him; she was too intent upon her labours. Her hair was pinned and held up in a linen cap, and it was clear that she had great beauty and delicacy of features. She could have been no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Bysshe quoted some words of Dante, or so he informed me later, and I must say that I was also smitten with some secret wound. I noticed her strange pallor, no doubt from the inhalation of the spices, and saw that her fingers were bruised and torn from their continual operations. “She prepares spices for the households of the rich,” Westbrook said. “Twelve hours each day. Six days each week. She works for the sake of our family. Her shillings bring food to the table. Not spices.” He spoke with such bitterness that his sister glanced up at him for a moment, concerned, before she resumed her labours. “We will not detain you any longer, Harriet. Your overseer is coming to admonish us.”

  An elderly female approached us, her hands held out. “Now Mr. Westbrook, you must not divert your sister from her work. She is all eyes for you and not her duties.” She seemed to be an amiable, comfortable woman not at all strict with her charges. “Go along now with your friends, and leave us poor females in peace.”

  We left the building. “You are thirsty now, gentlemen? The spice gets to the throat. Poor Harriet is often afflicted with a cough.” We walked past a row of cottages, and he stopped to look around. “There is a respectable tavern on the other side of this street,” he said. He led us across the cobbles. “She is little better than a slave.”

  “Who placed her there?” Bysshe asked him.

  “My father. Here we are.”

  We walked into the tavern, low and dark in the London fashion, and ordered three measures of stingo. Then we sat down at a table in the corner. “My father believes that the duty of mankind-and of womankind-is to work. He is a Particular Covenanter.”

  “The worst of the Christian sects,” Bysshe said.

  “He believes that the female is far inferior to the male. So he gave no thought to Harriet’s future welfare. He has decreed that she must work.”

  “That is abominable.” Bysshe clutched his tankard, and began to tap it upon the table. His face had become quite red, quite fiery, and for the first time I noticed the trace of a white scar upon his forehead. “How could she be tamed and enslaved like some animal?”

  “I pleaded with my father. I pointed out the benefits to Harriet of attendance at even a dame school. But he had hardened his heart.”

  “Monstrous. Terrible. Can you not support her?”

  “Me? I can hardly support myself.”

  “Then I will free her!” Bysshe was glowing now with energy and ardour.

  “What will you do?” I asked him.

  “I will go to her father and offer him the same sum-the same sum as she earns-if he will allow her to enter some school or academy. I will not rest until it is done.”

  “You must wait until she finishes her work,” Westbrook said.

  “Every moment is an agony. Forgive me. I must go outside.” I accompanied him to the door of the tavern, and gave him a handkerchief with which he wiped the moisture from his face. “Thank you, Victor. I have become quite molten.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Go? I am going nowhere.” Then, to my surprise, he began walking up and down on the cobbles outside the tavern.

  When I returned to Westbrook I found that he had already ordered two more measures of stingo. “Bysshe is treading out his fury,” I told him. “He has a fervent soul.”

  “Mr. Shelley is red hot. That is good. We need natures forged in fire.”

  “I have noticed that here, in England, emotions run freely.”

  “Ever since the Revolution in Paris. Mr. Shelley is right. There he goes. Do you see his cane swinging by the window? We, too, have been liberated. The events helped to create a new man.”

  “A new kind of man?”

  “You are laughing at me.”

  “No. Believe me. I am not.”

  “We cry more freely these days, do we not?”

  “I have no standard of comparison. Ah, here is Bysshe.”

  “I believe,” Bysshe said, laughing as he joined us, “that I was becoming an object of attention. There were comments.”

  “You are an unusual sight in the neighbourhood.” Westbrook went over to the counter, and brought back Bysshe another tankard.

  “Am I?” He seemed genuinely surprised, and it occurred to me that he was not aware of his own uniqueness. “One young man was eyeing my cane.”

  “They are all poor, sir. But they mean you no harm. Most of them are honest enough.”

  Bysshe seemed embarrassed. “Forgive me. I did not mean to impugn their honesty-” He drank quickly from his tankard.

  “I am surprised,” I said, “that they are not howling with rage.”

  “What was that, Victor?”

  “If I were forced to live in abject horror, while those around me were dripping with riches, I would wish to tear this city down stone by stone. I would wish to destroy the world that imprisoned me. That created me.”

  “Well said.” Westbrook raised his tankard to me. “I have often wondered what keeps these poor men in servitude.”

  “Religion,” Bysshe said.

  “No. Not that. They are not impressed by anything of that kind. They are as pagan as the men of Africa.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” Bysshe replied. “Let us drink to the death of Christianity.”

  “No,” Westbrook said. “It is the fear of punishment. The fear of the gallows.”

  “What do they gain from life?” I asked him. I was becoming drunk on the stingo.

  “Life itself,” Westbrook replied.

  “That is enough, I think.” Bysshe had gone over to the counter, and brought back three mo
re tankards. “Life is its own value. There is nothing more precious.”

  “Yet,” Westbrook said, “it could be led with dignity. And without suffering.”

  “I wish that were possible in this life.” Bysshe raised his tankard. “Health to you all.”

  “What do you mean?” Westbrook asked him.

  “Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.”

  “It need not be,” I said. “We must create a new standard of value. That is all.”

  “Oh, you will transform nature, will you, Victor?”

  “If necessary. Yes.”

  “Bravo. Victor Frankenstein will create a new kind of man!”

  “You have always told me, Bysshe, that we must find the unfindable. Gain the unattainable.”

  “I do believe that. We are all agreed upon it, I think. Yet to remove suffering itself-”

  “What if there were a new race of beings,” Westbrook asked, “who could not feel pain or grief? They would be terrible.”

  I took his arm. “Is not St. Giles, where we walked, more terrible still? Is it not?”

  We continued our drinking and, I believe, aroused some comment from the clerks and tradesmen who were sitting on other benches. It was a more respectable neighbourhood than that of St. Giles adjoining, but the presence of gentlemen was not necessarily welcomed. “We should go now,” Westbrook said. He took Bysshe’s arm, and helped him from the seat. “I think, Mr. Shelley, you should visit my father another time. He is not a friend to drink.”

  “What of your sister? What of Harriet?” Bysshe stood uncertainly on his feet.

  “Two or three days will make no conceivable difference, I assure you. Come now. And you, too, Mr. Frankenstein. I will find you both a cab in St. Martin ’s Lane.”

  3

  I HAD AVIDLY READ ACCOUNTS in Blackwood’s Magazine of Mr. Humphry Davy’s work, and had managed at Oxford to obtain a copy of the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he explained the process by which he had galvanised a cat. Quite by chance I opened a copy of the Gentleman’s Magazine, two or three days after arriving in London, and saw there advertised a course of lectures by Mr. Davy at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures under the title “Electricity Not Mysterious.”