Did Mary Shelley lie about the origin of Frankenstein?
The story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.
This telling appeared in the 1831 edition of the book, after the novels first appearance in 1818 without an author’s name and after becoming a scandalous sensation, came out in a new edition in 1822, with an introduction written by Percy Shelley, and then again in 1831 after Shelley’s death in Italy, with the lengthy preface, in which Mary said she included it after constant requests by readers to tell of how she came up with the story, told of how she struggled for several days to think of a worthy ghost story, and then finally one night, as she lay to sleep, “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.”
But is this story the full truth? As Mary said herself, “Everything must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Authors do not wake up one morning and invent a full story. An idea, a concept, a vision, surely, but invariably informed by a personal past, a connection to something deeper in a lived experience. Mary drew for her characters and setting the world of Switzerland around her, the streets of the Plain Palais of Geneva and Mont Blanc outside her window. Yet, from where would the inner life of such a collection of characters of passion and betrayal come from in a young woman of eighteen? The influences of the exciting sciences of the day, electrified vermicelli and the buried, thought dead, ringing the bells from their coffins as they awoke from comas before they might be buried, were all around in the brewing ferment of the enlightening days of the late 18th and early 19th century. The author could infuse and develop these themes as the story took shape over time. But did Mary draw upon an earlier work to shape her first published book?
At the end of her “Six Weeks Tour” elopement with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire in 1814, Mary began her first attempt at a novel, which she entitled “Hate”. She never finished it or published it, and this seminal work of a young budding author of remarkable talent has never seen the light of day and Mary Shelley did not reveal its themes or content.
There has been considerable academic discussion over the years about how much her husband, Percy Shelley, may have contributed to the writing of the Frankenstein novel. Certainly, he encouraged her in the writing of it, and he may have offered some editing of it, but how much does he actually appear in the characters of the novel, and who else is represented in the pages? Was Mary’s first attempt at a novel, with the theme of an unexplained hate, also an influence or cannibalized in the writing of the second work? And was Mary Shelley being artfully discreet in her description of the events of that summer in Geneva?
In her public writings, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was very careful in her telling of personal events to leave in the editor’s bin any of the extraordinary personal trauma of her life, mentioning only in the slightest passing of a phrase the deep emotional struggles and passions that must have accompanied the passionate personalities which surrounded her. Deaths of her first born, two suicides, the scorn of society, the longing for a mother and hated step-mother, betrayed by an idolized father and the willful schemes of a step-sister which brought them, with an illegitimate pregnancy, to the doorstep of Lord Byron’s summer rental.
This suggests a thematic origin of something well beyond a ghost story about the hubris of science born in an instant from the image of a waking dream. Did that waking image really come from a past experience and more deeper personal meaning than just a casual story competition. Why did she never reveal from where she derived the unusual title name?
And did Mary Shelley finally reveal the truth behind this waking vision shortly before her death in a discovered confession in the form of a personal memoir of her first journey to Switzerland, in a fuller and more intimate “revised” version of her six weeks tour in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.
Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – E-Book
Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback
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Ever since the publishing of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s masterwork “Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus”, Geneva, Switzerland has been the touchstone of lore surround the creation of the most famous work of Gothic literature, with the story of the competition between the romantics gathered on a dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley had a nightmare, waking dream, where she got the idea for a creature brought to life by a student of science.
In the lower exhibit floor of foundation library, a row of glass cases hold 15 hand-written note pages of the first from draft version of the classic story beginning “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created; he held up the curtain, and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.”
Not since the hilarious “Puttin’ On The Ritz” scene from Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” has the creature of Mary Shelley’s imagination been so light on his toes. For the month of May 2016, London’s Royal Ballet will be putting the story of the mistreated and misunderstood monster and his science “father” creator from the classic “Frankenstein: or the New Prometheus” on the stage, from choreographer Liam Scarlett.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley probably did not spend a lot of time in pubs, as in very few casual meetings or clandestine trysts of “meet me for a pint”, though in her travels she certainly stayed in many inns of one kind or another, as in a few scenes in “Frankenstein Diaries: The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley“, but 200 years after creating the classic of Frankenstein she finally has a pub named for her.
While not the half-timber historic sort of pub from days past, but rather a new and modern restaurant and part of the Wetherspoon’s chain of pubs, 
Frankenstein will make a dramatic theatrical appearance at one of Devon’s most famous great stately homes, the Fulford Estate. Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece will appear in a stage incarnation with a focus on prosthetic make-up to go with the dramatic sturm and drang of the monster created from the dead. The Great Fulford estate, a Tudor manor near Dunsford in the Teign Valley of Devon, has risen itself to television fame in recent years as the setting for the antics of the The F***ing Fulfords aristocratic family on Britain’s Channel 4, and in the BBC3’s Life Is Toff series. This theatrical version hopes to take advantage of the locale’s “spooky appeal” for the appropriate atmosphere, having hosted more than its share of ghost hunters.
Review – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.
The Frankenstein legend has made another movie screen appearance, and of the latest incarnation of Frankenstein adaptation, Victor Frankenstein, reviews have been mixed to say the least, and the box office, rather a disappointment, though perhaps one might agree that it is if not the best, at least the most imaginative reimagining of the Frankenstein story since Frankenstein 1970.
The storyline has a modern day Baron von Frankenstein who was tortured and physically mangled at the hands of the Nazis in post WWII Germany, because he refused to use his science skills for the Nazi war effort. The Baron is continuing his work as a scientist, but needing money to continue his experiments, he agrees to rent out his castle as a film location to a movie crew to film a television movie about his famous family, and his grandfather, the old Baron von Frankenstein of monster reputation. Little do they know the current Baron is following in his ancestor’s footsteps. The money allows Frankenstein to obtain a nuclear reactor to power his creation, rather than the old standby lightning bolts. But when he runs out of body parts he starts killing off the members of the film crew. This is done through his partially completed monster, a lumbering figure with his head completely bandaged, serving both a story function in the later reveal, and a budget saving device of not having to create a monster make-up. His creature has no eyes at first and kills the wrong girl, until he can get the right ones. When the end finally comes in a climactic burst of atomic reactor steam, and the bandages are removed, inside them is revealed the face of Karloff/Victor Frankenstein as he was before he was tortured, with a recoding played explaining that the Baron was trying to create a lasting version of himself for perpetuation of the family name.
On an entertainment level it was very low budget and a bit of a cheat, with the monster. a mummy-like creature, a guy stumbling around in a bandage helmet ranking somewhere between Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (a gorilla suit with a space helmet) and Project Metalbeast (with Kane Hodder – Friday 13th’s Jason, in a rented werewolf suit) but certainly an imaginative take on the legend and the lore of extending the Frankenstein world. I don’t know what poor Boris Karloff felt about it, but I can imagine. His career had reached a nadir in the late fifties. Abbot and Costello had come and gone, and Hammer horror was taking over the classic stories with new stars like Christopher Lee. The aging great horror star would see a bit of a resurgence in the early 1960’s, with some modestly decent horror projects, but perhaps a more reverent casting in television, where he would appear in episodes of shows like I Spy as a kindly but eccentric old gentleman in a Don Quixote quest, and even lend his name to a series of spooky comic books from Gold Key.