Category Archives: Frankenstein Writing

New Paperback Edition of Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley

A new paperback edition of “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries” with an updated cover is available for bookstores and libraries through Ingramspark and through Amazon. The cover is of Mary Shelley as she writes her book and dreams of her visit to the castle on the Rhine where her experiences would suggest a story to her. The novel tells the story of Mary Godwin’s elopement with Percy Shelley and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont on a journey of discovery as they walk across France to Switzerland.

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Mary Shelley’s Seduction: Who was seducer and who seduced?

!9th Century Seduction Scene -Byron and ClaireIn present times we tend to have a modern revisionist view of human behavior in the past. Some behavior in relationships and sex seems a constant from ancient forgotten times to the present, but the rules of society, the prism through which we view them as acceptable or taboo changes and shifts. What was common to men and women in days of old has new meaning in the age of #metoo. I was recently reminded of this in a discussion of the movie version of Mary Shelley. The thematic premise of which seemed to be how Mary was seduced by Percy only to find out later he was married, and Claire was seduced and abandoned by a libertine Bryon, and that Mary was deliberately denied credit for writing Frankenstein because she was a woman. While the question of credit due for Frankenstein’s authorship is a complex subject, especially in a time when anonymous publication was fairly common and the risk to social reputation was as much a consideration as any financial reward, and deeply bound in the difficult search for a publisher for a manuscript rejected several times, I’ll stick to the seduction discussion.

I find it odd that what is intended to be a feminist view of a patriarchy chooses to make women so weak in character that they are unable to make deliberate choices in their own lives, at the mercy of scheming cads. In the recent movie version of the story, Shelley and Mary meet in Scotland, she falls for him, then later discovers! he is married. And then, that Shelley encourages Mary to be pursued by Hogg in some kind of free love invitation which horrifies Mary when Hogg seems to chase her around the furniture. This architecture is inaccurate at best, and disingenuously revisionist.

Mary, of course, knew that Shelley was married before she ever met him. He was in continual correspondence with her father William Godwin, and supplying Godwin with financial assistance when Mary was as young as fourteen. Mary first met Shelley when he came to visit Skinner Street with his new bride, Harriet Westbrook. It was with Harriet that Shelley had eloped with to Scotland, where they married privately and then remarried in London at a formal ceremony, where the Godwins may have been witnesses. Percy Shelley had been a visitor to Skinner Street while Mary was away in Scotland with the Baxters, during which time Mary’s half-sister Fanny developed an infatuation with him, which was superseded by Mary’s attraction to him in the spring of 1814, leading to the elopement trip to Paris.

Harriet Shelley, as the aggrieved wife, accused Mary as the romantic schemer, writing at the time that, “Mary was determined to seduce him, she is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him.” This is hardly the picture of the unwitting naïve waif presented in the film version of the story.

As for Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he was more infatuated with Shelley’s wife, Harriet, than he was with Mary. It had been Harriet who Hogg had pursued with an intensity of ardor that seems to be the inspiration for the chasing around furniture, and rebuffed by her. As for Mary, he was her confidante during the difficult days of pregnancy and the tragic loss of her first child, a time when Shelley was desperately dodging creditors. Shelley is notoriously on record as suggesting in the spirit of their shared philosophy of “free love”, that Mary could be with Hogg. Shelley meant this as an expression of freedom for her, that she enjoyed Hogg’s company and if they were true to their ideals he would not stand to the way. Mary rejected this idea outright, having no expressed desire for anyone beyond Shelley. If she did have a romantic thought for someone outside her relationship with Shelley it would have been Byron, with whom she seemed to share a sympathetic temperament and a respect of his talent. But any thought of a physical liaison had been tempered by her step-sister Claire’s difficult relation with Bryon.

In the film version, this is treated as Byron seducing and then abandoning Claire. However, it is much more likely that it was Claire who deliberately sought out Byron, who already had the public reputation of “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, from his scandalous affair with Caroline Lamb. Claire had an early infatuation with Byron as a famous figure of the time, like a modern girl might with a pop star. Claire (her actual given name was Jane, but she took on Claire as a romantic affectation), had an interest in the theater and sought an introduction to Bryon when he was a director of the Drury Lane Theatre. Drawing on her family connection to William Godwin and an introduction, very likely through Bryon’s publisher John Murray, she had delivered to him a copy of her, then and forever lost, unpublished manuscript of “The Idiot” or Ideot, written following the elopement trip with Mary and Percy, asking that he might consider it for a play and give her his reaction as a mentor, as many a young hopeful writer of today seeks out a peek at an over the transom unsolicited submission.

She went to see him to gain his response and later wrote of the sad treatment he had given as his reaction to her writing. Whether on this visit, he, like a Regency Harvey Weinstein demanded a sexual payment for her naïve theatrical ambitions, or instead, like a romantically infatuated groupie, she seduced him, I think is entirely open to conjecture. Claire had demonstrated a willfulness toward a sexual freedom notion of “free love” that was much more literal than the more intellectual ideas held by Shelley and Godwin, which was more about the financial strictures of legal marriage than it was about sex. In either case, the result was a pregnancy after apparently one brief encounter on a theatre office or London hotel residence casting couch.

It was Claire who then designed to pursue Bryon with the intent to snare his name in marriage with the evidence of the child growing in her. Claire suggested the trip to Geneva to introduce them to Bryon. Whether Mary or Shelley were aware of Claire’s intent is unknown, but it is clear that once the pregnancy was revealed to Lord Byron, he wanted nothing to do with a continued relationship with her. He agreed to financially support the resulting child, but his interest in the mother was less than nil. Byron’s temperament and Mary’s were much more compatible, and he likely felt much less a risk of his fortunes in a friendship with her than Claire.

Their friendship, even from afar, would continue until Byron’s death, with Mary caretaking the publication of his work along with Shelley’s, and a fondness in their Italy travels, even as Shelley’s relationship with Byron had become strained.

As for Shelley and Claire, whether he ever had a sexual relationship with her is also a matter of two-hundred years of conjecture. Mary herself insisted vehemently that they did not. Could she have been naïve about it, willingly blind, or just publicly defensive, protesting loudly to assuage the rumors? Maybe. Shelley clearly enjoyed Claire’s company at some level. She was less serious than Mary, more frivolous, and they could share ribald humor together that Mary chided as disgusting. Shelley was more amused by Claire’s antics than Mary, who seemed to view their life in each other’s constant company as mostly annoying. The salacious scandal rumors at the time among London gossips, the equivalent of tabloids, were that William Godwin had “sold” both of his daughters to Shelley, and every form of lascivious behavior was attributed to them. It had even been suggested that Claire’s daughter Ianthe was Shelley’s child and not Byron’s, but none of the actual participants ever accepted this.

Did Percy Shelley sleep with Claire or encourage an orgy of free love? This is a question Mary clearly answers in her Secret Memoirs, at least up to that point in her story and found at the heart of their journey.

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Shelley & Byron Lore House on Lake Geneva for Sale

mary_shelley_plaque_nernierAn historic property on the shore of Lake Geneva associated with the lives of Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron is offered for sale for €2.7 million. A plaque on the house declares that Mary Shelley wrote some pages of Frankenstein there in April of 1816. Short of the known facts that Mary did not start Frankenstein until after June of 1816, and did not arrive in Geneva from Paris until May of 1816, the house is surely connected to the travels of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

​The now custom designed four bedroom home with beautiful lake views of the Jura Mountains is located in Nernier, Haute Savoie France, on the southern shore of Lac Leman and dates back to 1739. In Percy Shelley’s journals, he reports that on his boating trip with Lord Byron as his companion to circumnavigate the lake while Mary remained with Claire in the house they had rented, one of their first stops was at Nernier. Percy had noted that Polidori was unable to join them on their trip, due to an ankle sprain. The trip continued to the Chateau Chillon on the Swiss side, which inspired Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon.

nernier_house_shelleyThe present house at the time in 1816 was an auberge guest inn for travelers around the lake. It has been reconstructed into a modern four bedroom single family home on upper and lower floors, which had been owned for many years by a French family, who have decided to sell, now that children have grown and moved away.

The property is situated on the harbor’s edge in the little medieval village of Nernier, about twelve miles from the Cologny neighborhood where the Villa Diodati is to be found, and across the lake from the Chateau Coppet, where Shelley and Byron visited Madame DeStael. The house can be reached by road from Geneva along the lake, or a ferry crosses the lake from Nyon on the Swiss northern shore to Yvoire on the French south shore. The winter ski resort of Portes du Soleil is an hour’s drive away.

nernier_house_interiorThe house is described by the real estate listing with Leggett Prestige as having an entrance hall on the ground floor with an open-plan kitchen, dining and living area and a balcony with idyllic views across the lake. The first floor has an office area and lounge with a fireplace and another balcony. The second floor has a landing with a built-in double closet and two bedrooms, one with its own balcony.

At the time of Shelley and Byron’s stay there he described it in rather a different frame:

“Leaving Hermance, we arrived at sunset at the village of Nerni. After looking at our lodgings, which were gloomy and dirty, we walked out by the side of the lake. It was beautiful to see the vast expanse of these purple and misty waters broken by the craggy islets near to its slant beached margin. There were many fish sporting in the lake, and multitudes were collected close to the rocks to catch the flies which inhabited them.

On returning to the village, we sat on a wall beside the lake, looking at some children who were playing at a game like ninepins. The children here appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats; but one little boy had such exquisite grace in his mien and motions, as I never before saw equaled in a child. His countenance was beautiful for the expression with which it overflowed. There was a mixture of pride and gentleness in his eyes and lips, the indications of sensibility, which his education will probably pervert to misery or seduce to crime; but there was more of gentleness than of pride, and it seemed that the pride was tamed from its original wildness by the habitual exercise of milder feelings.

My companion (Byron) gave him a piece of money, which he took without speaking, with a sweet smile of easy thankfulness, and then with an unembarrassed air turned to his play. The imagination surely could not forbear to breathe into the most inanimate forms some likeness of its own visions, on such a serene and glowing evening, in this remote and romantic village, beside the calm lake that bore us hither.

On returning to our inn, we found that the servant had arranged our rooms, and deprived them of the greater portion of their former disconsolate appearance. They reminded my companion of Greece: it was five years, he said, since he had slept in such beds. The influence of the recollections excited by this circumstance on our conversation gradually faded, and I retired to rest with no unpleasant sensations, thinking of our journey tomorrow, and of the pleasure of recounting the little adventures of it when we return.”

I’m sure the beds have much improved, and if you’re got a couple a million handy and looking for a beautiful location to live in France with a literary history, this might be a golden opportunity.

Photos Courtesy Leggett Prestige BNPS

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Johann Konrad Dippel – Frankenstein Castle and Dippel’s Oil

Johann Konrad DippelWas “mad scientist” and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel the inspiration and original model of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein? Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley never mentioned Dippel or a castle in Germany in any of her previously known writings, but the ties and contacts are rife with connections.

Johann Konrad Dippel was born in 1673 and died in 1734. He wrote over seventy works and treatises on mathematics, chemistry and philosophy, most written under the pseudonym of Christianus Democritus, with his texts now buried in various academic collections. He went to University in Giessen, Germany and lectured at a number of universities, ultimately at Strasbourg University in France, where Johann Goethe also studied in the city where Gutenberg first printed before establishing his press in Mainz, and just down the Rhine River from Darmstadt University in Germany, with many students travelling between them.

A contemporary professor who complained bitterly about Dippel’s ideas of theology also praised him with a bit of ironic shade, “Dippelius was an excellent chemist and a good physician; and this procured him many friends and admirers, as all men are fond of riches.”

This perhaps alludes to Dippel’s more commercial ventures and reputation as bit of the charlatan, though perhaps not intentially. He was an alchemist, trying to turn base metals to gold, and searching especially for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixer Vitae, the secret to extended, if not eternal life.

Dippel was an early chemical manufacturer. He created a concoction called “Dippel’s Oil” or “Dippel’s Animal Oil” used primarily as an agent in the tanning of animal hides, from where it most likely gets its name, and in cloth colouring. but also having some animal based in ingredients. It was also said locally around to be useful in calming the pangs and distempers of pregnancy. Whether it was to be used topically, digested, or as an aromatic, is unclear. Its chemical composition with ingredients like Butyronitrile Methylamine and Dimethylpyrrole Valeramide would suggest that ingesting any significant amount would not be very healthy. It was reputed to be a foul smelling business and this form of use may have also been a local joke around Darmstadt.

alchemy labDippel’s connection to Frankenstein comes from his days at the castle on the hilltop near Darmstadt above the Rhine River Valley below Mainz. Johann Dippel was resident there for a time when the castle had fallen vacant of its lordly Franckenstein family owners after the Reformation  and the War of European Succession. Dippel tried unsuccessfully to induce the Landgrave of Hesse to deed him the castle in exchange for Dippel’s providing the duke with the secret of everlasting life, the infamous elixir.

He never did come up with a successful Elixir of Eternal Life while at Darmstadt and eventually moved on, with the locals rather chasing him away like those pitchfork wielding villagers in the Universal Frankenstein movies. His permanent acquisition of the castle was opposed and the legends of his making his oil and formulas from the body parts of human corpses was likely an early form of conspiracy theory, born from his boiling animal bones to get ingredients, mixed with the castle’s time as a prison where prisoners were buried in pauper’s graves, and it was hinted that he dug them up to make his concoction, and therefore an easy connection to digging up the dead to bring eternal life.

Curiously, there is another connection between Dipple and the world of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, though indirect. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s companion that summer of ghost stories on the shores of Lake Geneva, is reported to have committed suicide by drinking Prussic Acid, more commonly known as Hydrogen Cyanide, which Sherlock Holmes always managed to deduce from its smell of bitter almonds. Prussic Acid gets its name and is derived from the painting pigment called Prussian Blue, which is now sometimes used as an anti-radiation medicine.

Prussian Blue was created by a Berlin paint-maker named Johan Diesbach, who reportedly made it from potash, from which potassium chloride is derived, that he got from Johann Konrad Dippel, one of the chemical ingredients at the core of Dippel’s work and a common chemical manufacturing compound today.

Dippel moved on from the castle at Darmstadt, still ever seeking his life sustaining elixir, but in the end it may have had the opposite effect. He died of complications of chemical poisoning, either from his close work with some very toxic substances over time, or perhaps sampling his own elixir formula, which may have had the opposite effect than the one intended.

Mary Shelley encounters Dippel’s Oil and the story behind it on the Rhine Trip in 1814 as told in the “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” when she was feeling the sensations of her first pregnancy.

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All is True. I’m not so sure.

All is True Poster ImageKenneth Branagh stars in and directs an English movie about the later days in the life of William Shakespeare, from a screenplay by Ben Elton. The title is taken from an alternate title, or perhaps more an advertising slogan, for a production of the Life of Henry VIII offered at the Globe Theater, during which, according to the pre-titles a prop canon set the Thames bankside theatre ablaze, burning it to the ground, and with it the creative life of Shakespeare. The film begins with him galloping home to Stratford-Upon-Avon, to settle back into a quiet country life, haunted by the memory of his son, Hamnet, who reportedly died of plague in 1596 at the age of eleven.

The title of “all is true” seems to suggest that the film is making the argument against the controversies surrounding the authorship of the plays and poetry William Shakespeare. The film presents an engaging enough but fairly dramatically limited picture of the domestic home life of the renowned author, taking some sparse public records of his activities in Stratford and drawing a picture of life at home, with a Puritan son-in-law hoping for his fortune and wife long abandoned for his busy days in the London.

If this was the intent, I am unconvinced. The film does make a very clever argument for the oddity of bequeathing his “second best bed” in his will to his wife Anne Hathaway, but not all that much else. The film furthers an authorship controversy theme by postulating that Shakespeare doted on some poetry verses he believed written by his dead son, when his daughter eventually claims that she came up with them and her brother only wrote then down, because boys were taught to write.

This curiously intersects with some of the controversy or at least mystery, surrounding the anonymous publishing of Frankenstein, leading to questions of its authorship over the centuries, and thematically at the center of the recent biopic version of “Mary Shelley”. Kenneth Branagh directed “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” the movie that intended to hear closer to the novel than previous film versions, so that Branagh will be forever connected in search algorithms to Mary Shelley. Perhaps even how you found this article.

The arguments against the man from Stratford, son of a middle-class glove maker, who left a limited education to write of kings and foreign lands with such convincing authenticity, to return to life of middle-class modesty, has always been about where does writing inspiration come from. Some have argued that it was about class, but I have always held it is about experience. The writer of “All is True” was born in Australia, but he writes about Shakespeare because he went to a college in Stratford, and so was steeped in the lore of the town.

If you visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, signs in the famed tourist town will warn you that only seven sites in town are officially connected to an historic William Shakespeare. What it doesn’t say is that none of them point to a creator of a library of plays and poems that have defined the English speaking world. The film posits that after the Globe burned down, Shakespeare decided he would never write again and spent his days in solitude digging a garden to honor is dead son, named Hamnet, so close to Hamlet it seems a misspelling by a grave marker mason. In seeming to attempt to answer where the inspiration and knowledge to produce his body of work came from, in the form a question asked by a young writer hopeful, like many a Comicon convention attendee might ask at an autograph signing, “how he did it”, Branagh as Shakespeare, answers dismissively of the earnest seeker of wisdom, that it was all from his imagination.

Mark Twain, who notoriously offered his opinion on many things, especially authorship, a subject he felt close to, was a non-believer in the man from Stratford. Twain complained of his friend and companion author, Bret Harte, that the dialogue of his pioneer west characters had the ring of an author who wrote of people he observed, rather than a life he lived, though the writing did come from his travels in the worlds of his stories. Twain traveled and wrote of his travels, but his most genius books came from his earliest days of personal experience and drawn on people he knew well.

In the present worlds of film and television, aspiring writers are told to “write what you know”. An entire system of hiring writers to work in writers rooms, based not on the alien worlds they can imagine but the authenticity of the lives they’ve experienced are what counts. Writing a courtroom show, hire a former lawyer, a spy show, a former spy. Maybe add some imagination.

Does this relate to the teeming theatre world of the Elizabethan Age of the late 16th Century? Could a young man of 19 from a small provincial town, seeking a stage acting career, sit down in some inexpensive hovel in London and invent entirely from his own imagination the accurate lives of royal households, details of foreign lands and indeed what was important to foreigners, setting his stories in Italy as mere convention, and produce accurate descriptions of the landscapes of Burgundy, France, cited from Lear by the Shelleys in their travels in the very landscape in the Secret Memoirs on Mary Shelley?

The puzzling question of Shakespeare has always redounded to idea that one man of ultimate genius created that incredible oeuvre of work of vast understanding of the wider world and laser grasp of the human heart and behavior. Whether candidate for authorship be the man from Stratford, DeVere or others, to dismiss the fact of the breadth of Shakespeare’s work as “I imagined it all”, seems at best a hopeful, yet hopelessly hollow, belief in miracles. And then to set it all aside in later life to retire with never a look back, beyond a casual visit with an old theater pal, entirely unsatisfying.

Mary Shelley didn’t just imagine a monster from a waking dream. She took the sum of experiences from her youthful life, her many travels and the complex people she knew and lived with and formed them with some research into one rich and imaginative enduring work. Mark Twain wrote often and the best from his experiences growing up on the Mississippi River in frontier Missouri.

Shakespearian scholars point to historic events which they site to attempt to place the date of his 37 or so credited plays. They count on public notices at the time which seem to indicate an upstart playwright, but relating as much to an actor, but almost no identifiable element that can point to an author’s inspiration or interest from the life of a provincial glove maker’s son who found his way to London, while swaths of elements in the plays and characters can be tied to the lives and experiences lived by others. Maybe Shakespeare was a really good listener and someone offered him visiting privileges to their private library, but to accept that all the Shakespearian canonical lore is true, requires an even broader imagination.

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Mary Shelley Memoirs Author Interview at Witch Haunt

Frankenstein Castle Karloff Halloween HauntThe Horror Authors Witch Haunt blog recently featured an interview guest post with “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries” co-author Michael January on the release of the audiobook narrated by Heidi Gregory on Audible, and just in time for Halloween, discussing how the book defies genre.

While the Secret Memoirs is not a horror book, Mary Shelley is the reputed “mother” of horror and with the founding of the origins of Frankenstein, suitably timely. The Frankenstein castle has in modern times become a major spot in the world for celebrating Halloween. While the spectral figures of witches and ghouls have been haunting the thick woods for millennia, making their appearances in Grimm’s Tales and Gothic legends and Romantic Tales of Terror, the tradition of parties with costumes on All Hallows eve didn’t really take hold in Germany until the arrival of American soldiers stationed there after the Second World War, who brought some of the home customs with them.

Defining the genre of the Secret Memoirs has been a bit of a challenge, as it takes a unique approach to the Mary Shelley biography, at the same time a novel and a look at history through the eyes of a real life participant in it. It is to quote, “a romantic adventure in the Regency Period of contemporary Jane Austin, a young adult coming of age story, a history of post–Revolution Napoleonic France and the London publishing world, a family drama of personal tragedy, and an exploration of the heart and mind of a young woman seeking a connection to the mother who died in giving her birth, and the creative formation of a young writer of genius accomplishment.” The audio format with the voice of Mary Shelley telling her own story is an especially intimate way to experience the young lives of Mary, Clair and Shelley as they lived them.

With the 200th anniversary of the first publishing of Frankenstein, the book world has filled with myriad biographies about Mary Shelley, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, examining the girl who wrote Frankenstein and academic examinations, even a biopic movie, but none as intimate and personal, told in her own words and experiences as she lived them.

How much is fact or fiction in the Secret Memoirs is outlined elsewhere here on Frankenstein Diaries. The book itself, ebook, paperback or audio book can be found here.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook
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Amazon https://amzn.to/2LcopPe

Ebook and Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W6R8V0G

Review Quote from the Historical Novel Society: “An entertaining ‘collaboration’, exhaustively researched, skillfully adapted…long on memorable characters that will make readers see the seminal classic Frankenstein in a new light.” Historical Novel Society

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Mary Shelley gets a Blue Plaque in Bath!

Unveiled Tuesday 27 February, 2018

bath_abbey_walkThe 200tth Anniversary of the first publishing of Frankenstein has finally brought Mary Shelley some well-deserved and long overdue notoriety, especially in some of the places where she lived and worked.

On Tuesday, February 27, in Bath, England, where Mary Godwin did much of her research and writing of the famous novel, a blue plaque will be unveiled attached to the Victorian Era Bath Pump House which mostly replaced the building at the former Abbey Church Yard where Mary took up lodgings after returning from Geneva, that notorious summer of 1816 (see Shelleys in Bath – Frankenstein Begins).

Update: It’s not a Blue Plaque, but rather a bronze plate, privately placed with some information of Mary Shelley and the writing of “Frankenstein” on the spot in 1816-1817, placed in front of the Pump Room, over the basement.

In England, notable historic sites and buildings which warrant recognition get the honor of a round blue plaque, noting where a historically worthy person or event gets a brief description. These end up being pointed out by tour guides, or photographed by tourists.

Blue plaques to the young woman author of Frankenstein, have been notably lacking. There is one where she is buried in Bournemouth, and two in London, where she lived at Chester Square in her later life, and one in Bloomsbury where she lived briefly with Shelley in 1815 after returning from the elopement trip France and Switzerland, but until now, none where she actually worked on her novel.

I have recently seen a number of stories saying that Mary spent 6 months in Switzerland writing her book, but those months were actually spent in Bath. The Shelleys and Claire Clairmont left Geneva at the end of August, travelling back by way of France, and spent the last four months of 1816 in Bath.

The plaque and Mary Shelley’s finally getting her due in Bath is due to local fans and authorities, recognizing the almost forgotten local famous figure, where a local theater company has been performing walking tours. It has been apparently a twenty year effort to get a plaque to Shelley in Bath, after two hundred years of neglect. Why so long?

Perhaps it was the scandalous reputation which followed the Shelleys since their own time. Maybe it’s the awkward name situation. When she was in Bath, she was Mary Godwin, not becoming formally the more future famous Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley until her marriage to her poet lover after the death of the first Mrs. Shelley days after Christmas  in 1816.

Now, if only Marlow would get a plaque – either blue or bronze – on the Albion House where Mary Shelley completed her classic.

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Goethe and Frankenstein: Or, The Devil and the Dream

Goethe and FrankensteinHere’s an exchange from The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley when Mary, Percy and Claire are unexpectedly entertained in Switzerland from a local academic who has read Percy Shelley’s St. Irvyne, addressing him under the mistaken name from his pseudonymous “A Gentleman from Oxford” author identity.

“Monsieur Oxford, in your book—an outcast from society wanders in the Alps Mountains hoping for death. This is Wolfstein,” he began, giving the abstract and the main character’s name to the author as if he might have forgotten it. “He encounters an alchemist, the Rosicrucian, who promises him the elixir of life if his magic can raise the corpse of his dead lover, Magalena, from her tomb. But to do this, he must denounce his faith and deny his creator. They are struck by lightning and they are destroyed.”

The familiar story of the creation of the Frankenstein novel is a fireside reading of a book of Gothic tales and a nightmare dream on the lakeside of Geneva one summer. But the formation of the ideas of Mary Godwin’s book arose from her exposure to many influences, of Shelley, a collection of literary minds in the circle of her father’s acquaintances, and her readings, assembling the themes and events of her story from as many parts as her fictional creature.

But what role did Johann Goethe play in the writing of Frankenstein? And his friend, Friedrich Schiller?

When Victor Frankenstein encounters his creature who has been wandering and hiding in the Alps above Geneva, his unwanted creation tells of his education, how he read “The Sorrows of Werter”, “Plutarchs Lives” and “Paradise Lost”, books he found in a dropped leather satchel. It is from Werter, he learns the human need for love and connection, which so angers him with Victor for denying him, it drives him to murder and revenge.

Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Goethe

Today, Goethe is more familiarly known for his play of “Faust”, the doctor who trades his soul for a deal with the devil, but Johann Goethe’s early masterwork “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young student so obsessed with a love he cannot have that he commits suicide, was the “Catcher in the Rye” or “Hunger Games” of its day in the late 18th Century, a popular story that reached out to the young, so melancholy that it was blamed for a wave of suicides. The creature in Frankenstein expresses the profound effect the story had on him, which is the author’s expression of the effect it had on her, so much that in it can be found her own inspirations.

“I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder…”

But the reading of his book was not Mary Godwin’s only connection to Goethe. At the time of her formations of ideas that would permeate her novel, the German classicism was infusing the English literature world, inspiring the romantics of her world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a regular of the literary society of her father, William Godwin, and a familiar acquaintance of Mary and Shelley, had been one of the founding sources of this.

Coleridge had learned German on a trip to Germany in his younger days, along with his friend William Wordsworth. Coleridge had encamped for a few months at Gottingen University, where he learned the language and listened to lectures and made side trips. He utilized this on his return to England to launch his literary career by translating to English his version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Wallenstein”.

And though he did not translate Schiller’s play of “Wilhelm Tell” he translated a poem “Tell’s Birthplace”. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin had been so influenced by the story of Wilhelm Tell it had inspired their elopement trip to Switzerland in 1814, to the beauty of the Lake Uri locations of Schiller’s story, where they had hoped to live away from the clucking tongues of English society, until they ran out of money. Shelley had even expected his wife and son might come and live with them in an egalitarian communal paradise.

Schiller was not Coleridge’s only influence on Mary and Percy. About the time of their elopement escape, Coleridge had been approached by publisher John Murray II to produce a translation of Goethe’s Faust. Coleridge was struggling with his own particular demons at the time, his long addiction to Laudanum, and his doubts about his own work with a tendency to begin brilliant works and never quite finish them, like Kubla Kahn, even going so far as to add: Or, a Vision in a Dream, A Fragment to the title, after Byron and friends convinced him publish it.

Coleridge would surely have been well acquainted with the literary circle of Darmstadt, the German Romantic movement “Circle of the Senses”, much like the literary circles of the English publishing world of John Murray, and of Madame DeStael at her Chateau Coppet in Geneva, visited by Bryon and Shelley in their travels around the lake.

The Darmstadt Circle was organized around the literary lights of Johann Merck, Gottfried Herder, and Christoph Wieland. The German authors had been translating works of Shakespeare and Cervantes into their language, as Coleridge had been the German works to English. Goethe, born in Frankfurt had served briefly as a magazine editor in nearby Darmstadt with Merck, before trying to revitalize his legal career in Wetzler, where he was inspired by the suicide of a friend and his own passionate attraction to an unattainable girl to write Young Werther.

Had Coleridge heard of the story of the strange activities of the one-time inhabitant of the Frankenstein Castle at Darmstadt, the college lecturer-alchemist and occult dabbler, Johann Conrad Dippel, from his travels in Germany? Coleridge may have readily been introduced to Dippel’s Oil, a malodorous concoction made from distilled animal parts, claimed as a universal medicine (meant to be rubbed on and not swallowed.) But by Coleridge’s time in Gottingen, the medicinal qualities of the Dippel’s Animal Oil had been largely dismissed and perhaps turned into somewhat of a joke after his chemical formulas had found a use in cloth dies. Mostly now only known for his tangential relation to the Frankenstein Castle, Dippel had written almost seventy works about his chemistry in German by the time of Coleridge’s studies at Gottingen.

Coleridge never published his English version of Faust in his lifetime and only later has what is believed may be his unfinished work been discovered. Mary Godwin also began a book before Frankenstein that she never finished, she called Hate, and what secrets of her sixteen year old heart it held may never be known. But why would she chose a German name for her French speaking Genevan characters of: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus? Not only were they French Swiss, but Victor Frankenstein’s father was Italian. Confusing?

Wallenstein, Wolfstein, Frankenstein, and some smelly creepy medicine for a pregnant young woman author, expressing her exposure to the lofty thoughts and influences of the circle of contemplative minds surrounding her. Constantly pressed for an explanation of where she got the idea for her story, if a vision in a dream worked for Coleridge to explain Kubla Khan, why not for Frankenstein?

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Frankenstein’s Secret of Life and Death

elixir_vitae_bottle_vertIn the novel of Frankenstein,  the protagonist Victor Frankenstein, while a student at Ingolstadt University brings a “creature” to life. But how did he do it? What is the secret to life and death he discovered? In telling his tragic story in the book, he says he made meticulous notes on his path to reanimating the dead tissue of assembled parts to life, but he insists his notes were taken by his monster, and he will not reveal the secret, as he now believes it would bring horror upon society.

What was the secret of life Mary Shelley imagined in her now 200 year old novel that has inspired the imagination ever since? In the bringing to life scene, she only refers to the application of “some powerful force”, but there are other clues. The role of electricity has been assumed, creating images in movies of bolts in the neck and rising operating tables in watch tower laboratories, to lighting rods, but it is not specifically claimed in the novel text. Victor Frankenstein did describe viewing a lighting storm over Lake Geneva which excited his thoughts, but he does not suggest any building of massive architecture apparatus for gathering lightning, though it makes for a very good visual image.

In the novel, Victor Frankenstein, before going to University, speaks of self-learning through a fascination with the writings of Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. All of them are associated with the theories of Alchemy, that early precursor to science, principally associated with the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, the primal element to change base metal to gold or silver, and the Elixir Vitae, a potion which would bring eternal. or extended life. When Victor applies to Ingolstadt University, the dons there dismiss his learning in these writings, which by the 19th Century were mostly discredited. But he returns to these earlier theories in his quest for life after spending hours in charnel houses and graveyards.

Mary Shelley had been amply exposed to the experiments of Luigi Galvani, shocking worms and frogs legs into action by the application of electricity, but this alone did not restore life. An electrical charge would likely be part of the secret, but what else? She had been introduced to the chemistry of life through the writings and lectures of Sir Humphrey Davy, the President of the Royal Society, and early theorist of electrochemistry, the power of electricity to interact in metals and separate elements. Davy was also a figure in the development of the Voltaic battery.

voltaic_pile_batteryMary Shelley had been introduced to the magical powers of the battery through her later husband, Percy Shelley, who had told her tales of his own fascination with electricity. While a student at Oxford University, bullied by others, Shelley had devised a revenge by attaching wires from a hand cranked battery to the doorknob of his room and when pranksters would try to enter, he would give them a shock. Shelley was so enamored of the power of batteries, he imagined a future utopian world where fields of batteries would provide the power to replace the dirty steam engine, and man would be freed from labor by machines, with the freedom to contemplate the arts and philosophy in the clear air. We’re still working on that one.

Percy Shelley also introduced Mary Godwin to the ideas of the alchemists. One of Shelley’s early poetic novels was “St Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian”, the story of a wandering outcast who encounters an alchemist seeking the secret of immortality. The ideas of the Rosicrucians (The Rosy Cross) had originated apocryphally with the Egyptians, the secrets of the pyramids and the afterlife of mummification, passed to the Greek philosophers to the Arabians, and to Europe with the Knights Templars, whose symbol was the Red Cross, as also the Knights Hospitalier.

While in Switzerland, Mary Shelley would be immersed in the ideas of Paracelsus (Philippus Theophrastus von Hohenheim), the Swiss alchemist whose remedies with plants led to modern Pharmacology. His mystical alchemy ideas were dismissed but his medical remedies were recognized by the Royal College of Physicians in 1618. Paracelsus was a part of the Rosicrucian mythos, and one of his ideas was that each part of the body was subject to its own needs and cures, leading to more interest in anatomy, which would have been prime in Victor Frankenstein’s process.

The practice of Alchemy in Victor’s extracurricular studies was chiefly directed to the effort to produce the Philosopher’s Stone, (Lapis Philosophorum) the substance which would be the key in turning base metals into gold and also the active ingredient of the Elixir Vitae for rejuvenation and immortality.

The name Frankenstein itself may be a clue to the secret of life and death. Mary Shelley never revealed in her lifetime where the name came from. It is an odd choice, since the family was from French speaking Switzerland and Victor himself was born in Italy. In the 1814 elopement trip to Switzerland and then up the Rhine River, a visit to the castle of Frankenstein at Darmstadt may have suggested the idea of retuning the dead to life. The castle at Darmstadt was once the abode of Johann Dippel a physician, traveling lecturer, crackpot theologian and alchemist.

Dippel was like many alchemy practitioners trying to discover the “Elixer Vitae” potion of eternal life. He was making his from the blood and body fluids of animals, though rumors were spread by locals he was using dead human bodies from the castle’s days as a prison. The story told that he gained the rights to the then abandoned castle by convincing the Landgrave of Hesse that he would create the eternal life giving elixir.

What Dippel created instead was a foul-smelling explosive concoction called “Dippel’s Oil” made from animal bones, used in cloth dyes, but also reputedly a local home remedy for the sicknesses of pregnancy. Mary was likely in the early stage of her first pregnancy at the time and Percy Shelley made an offhand remark to her on their return to England that she might add to her common remedy of spermaceti, “9 drops of human blood, 7 grains of gunpowder, 1/2 ounce of putrefied brain and 13 mashed grave worms”.

Mary Shelley wrote in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein the story of envisioning the rousing to life the creature of horror to Frankenstein in a waking dream. The method for that reanimation was a complex association of references and studies. The precise formula for the return to life of the dead which she had imagined, she didn’t reveal, but might be surmised from the clues.

alchemist_labThe events of creation did not happen in an elaborate laboratory of flashing movie studio devices, but in his student rooms. Victor Frankenstein’s lab would have to fit within the confines of a residential house in Ingolstadt. The available technology of the voltaic battery and visions of lightning suggest he might have stored energy in some collection of batteries from the use of a lightning rod, which could be applied at the necessary moment. Where alchemists before him had failed in the Elixir of Life, Victor’s application of electricity would have lent it a power unknown before. His studies of Paracelsian treatments of individual body organs may have provided the clues to a connecting mechanism for a being assembled from different dead bodies preserved and applied in a solution of whale oil, gunpowder, human blood, ground worms, electrostatic chemicals to provide the bonding, and his own discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone in a mixture of proprietary proportions.

Victor Frankenstein’s technique for the resurrection of the dead may never be found, with his notes spirited away by the monster of his creation, and as elusive as the recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone. Perhaps someday, a clever rebellious student fascinated with forgotten lore and mythology may replicate his discoveries.

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Publisher of Frankenstein First Edition – Lackington

The Temple of the Muses where Frankenstein was first offered for sale.

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Temple of The Muses Book Emporium

On the cover page of the first printing of “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”, the publisher is listed as Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones of Finsbury Square. Percy Shelley’s correspondence regarding the publishing was usually addressed to Lackington & Allen & Co.. But who were they?

The original founder of the firm, James Lackington had passed away by the time of the publishing of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel. Lackington, who once advertised himself as the “Cheapest Bookseller in the World”, was an early proponent of the “book emporium” with the business philosophy of discount books sold in volume (sound familiar). A self-made man who rose from selling meat pies at the age of ten and an apprenticeship at a shoemaker, he went to London in 1773 to make his fortune, and began selling books as Lackington & Co. in 1774 from his circulating library on Chiswell Street in London. He focused on selling books to all classes of society.

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James Lackington

In 1791 Lackington had become so successful he built a great store and shopping mall on the corner of Finsbury Square he called the “Temple of the Muses”, designed by George Dance, the London city architect who also designed Newgate Prison and London’s Guildhall. The building housed a collection of publishers and assorted shops. An advertisement of the time reported that the bookseller had a half million volumes for sale at any one time and by 1803, the printed catalogue listed 800,000 works available. Its scale was demonstrated at its grand opened by a mail coach and four horses driving around underneath its central dome. It was called “the most extraordinary library in the world”.

lackington_coinIntended to represent a temple to reading, the poet John Keats recalled visiting the Temple of the Muses as a schoolboy to wonder at the towering shelves of books and read for free in the lounges, and eventually met his publishers among the stacks. In a clever bit of self-marketing, customers could pay for books with a token coin with Lackington’s portrait on one side and Greek classical goddess on the reverse.

A trusted employee, Robin Allen, who was said to be an “excellent judge of old books” had risen to partner and the firm was then known as Lackington, Allen & Co. for several years. James Lackington retired in 1798, the year Mary Godwin was born. George Lackington, a third cousin to James, who had worked in the shop as an apprentice since the age of 13, borrowed funds from his successful merchant father to buy a share in the company. Then, through a series of deaths or life misfortunes, the partners changed over the next years. Robin Allen died in 1815 and it took a succession of partners to replace him. Richard Hughes, Joseph Harding, A. Kirkman, and William Mavor, (the son of William Fordyce Mavor who invented shorthand stenography). George Lackington expanded from publishing to real estate and acquired the Egyptian Hall at Picadilly, which he rented out as an exhibition space, (it was torn down in 1905) while his partner, Richard Hughes was a lessor of Sadler’s Wells Theater.

James Lackington wrote an autobiography, or rather a “a biography written by himself”, where he revealed his secrets of bookselling, opined on authors publishing their own works, and on the improving state of knowledge and literature among ladies, which would seem to come into play as the philosophy which led to the publishing of Mary Shelley’s work. The Temple of the Muses at Finsbury Square burned down in 1841 and the business moved to a location on Pall Mall East as Harding and Lepard after George Lackington’s retirement.

“Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus” was first offered to the public by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and & Jones on New Year’s Day of 1818. It was supposed to be published on December 30 of 1817, but the printing was late. The three volumes sold poorly, blamed on the late delivery and mix up in advertising. The novel was re-published officially on March 11, 1818.

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