Bournemouth Plans Shelley Anniversary Frankenstein Festival
St Peter’s Church in Bournemouth is the final resting place of the author of Frankenstein and the other significant Shelley family members, and the city has discovered that they have taking their hometown literary heroes for granted to far too long. With the 200th Anniversary of the 1818 first anonymous publishing of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel of “Frankenstein” approaching, a proposal for a Shelley Frankenstein Festival is in planning stages.
Bournemouth was the nearest town to the estate of the family of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which the romantic poet was to inherit, until he tragically drowned in Italy. Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley would stroll from her parent’s publishing house on Skinner Street in London to the gravesite of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in the cemetery of the old church of St Pancras (see Shelley Touring London). There is still a marker there, but when the railroads came to London in the Victorian era, the actual remains of Mary Wollstonecraft were moved to Bournemouth, along with the remains of Mary Shelley’s father. Percy Shelley’s body was burned on a beach in the Bay of Spezia, but his heart was carried back home to England and also is at Bournemouth.
With the Frankenstein anniversaries approaching the city council, led by the church Rector, the Reverend Ian Terry, have come to the realization they’ve been sitting on a great national treasure, but have done very little to promote their place in the history of English literature. The first plan of the Frankenstein Festival is to celebrate the anniversary of the marriage of Mary and Percy in 2016. The couple scandalously traveled together while the poet was still married, until his first wife drowned herself in the Hyde Park Serpentine. Mary Godwin would become Mary Shelley in a ceremony in London in December 1816, just a few days after Christmas, six months after their return from the Geneva summer with Byron when the Frankenstein story legendarily born.
Starting in November of 2016, the church will invite back any couples who were married there to renew their vows in a celebration of marriage and the anniversary of the Shelleys’ wedding, though how the Shelleys themselves, who notoriously viewed marriage as a necessity to fit the rules of society rather than a noble institution of intrinsic value, would view such an honor, one can only speculate. Percy Shelley was of an avowed atheist and Mary’s perhaps more philosophical connection to the church might play with a certain irony. In 2017, the Arts University of Bournemouth is mounting a stage play version of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” with a Frankenstein Film Festival to follow. The council is hoping for something bigger for 2018 to attract international visitors to the city, to celebrate the publishing 200th Birthday and are holding meetings for ideas.
Any interested local residents or organization are invited to St Peter’s Church on Thursday, September 10, at 7.30pm, to hear about the plans and offer suggestions. Ideas can also be sent to ianterry@live.co.uk