Category Archives: History

The Shelleys Move to Marlow – Frankenstein Completed

Shelley Cottage Great Marlow in BuckinghamshireFinally married after two and half years of pretending not to be living together, Mary and Percy Shelley packed up their temporary lodgings in Bath on February 27, 1817 and moved to what they intended as a permanent residence in Marlow-on-Thames, in Buckinghamshire, found for them by Thomas Love Peacock. They would stay with Peacock for three weeks while Shelley was still traveling to London to attend the Chancery Court fighting with his now dead wife Harriet’s family, the Westbrooks, for the disposition of his children.

They moved into the Albion House on March 18, 1817 which Shelley described before moving in as “a house among woody hills…green fields and this delightful river.” But afterward found to be rather drafty and cold from its proximity to the river, a short distance away. Mary was pregnant again and working on the second notebook volume of Frankenstein.

On March 27, 1817 Shelley would finally be denied the custody of his children, Ianthe and Charles, by the Chancery Court and they would be given to the care of the clergyman in Warwick who had been seeing to them since Harriet’s drowning. The Westbrooks had been threatening Shelley with jail through much of this fight, and it was finally over, or so they thought, with an amount settled for their care.

shelley_albion_house_marlowDespite Mary’s wish that they could, at last, be alone without the constant presence of her stepsister, Clare moved with them. Shelley was still calling her alternately Clare, Claire, or Clara, sometimes in the same letter and Mary complained of her capriciousness. They had engaged a nurse for her newborn infant daughter by Byron, Alba, born in early January. Mary and Percy’s son, William, had just celebrated his first birthday on January 24, and Mary was pregnant again. The house was large enough to accommodate the Shelleys, Clare, their children, servants and visiting guests. The Leigh Hunts came often to stay.

The time in Marlow would be both auspicious and troubled. Mary would complete her novel in a burst of work, writing about 5 pages a day, while muddling through another difficult pregnancy and Shelley would be gone much of the time, trying to manage his debts, his own and the Godwins’.

Shelley had written a pamphlet “A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote” by the “Hermit of Marlow”, published by Charles and John Ollier, sending proof copies to a list of influential opinion makers while Mary completed the original copy draft of her own novel by May of 1817.

Shelley also completed his poem of “Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City”, written, according to Mary, while on his long walks in the woods, especially on his walks up river to Medmenham Abbey, and while sitting in a boat under the Beech groves of Bisham. He finished it in September of 1817 after six months of working on it. On cold days, Shelley could be seen around Marlow in a brown lamb’s wool collar coat and cuffs, and in summer wearing an open-necked shirt. The poem, though disguised as classic reference, was much inspired by his life with Mary in Marlow, and essentially a love letter to her. Their second child, a daughter they named Clara, was born on September 2, 1817, and clearly affected the poem. It also contained a reference to a finished “toil”. Was he referring to her work on Frankenstein, celebrating its completion, or to their new born daughter?

So now my summer-task is ended, Mary,
And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home;
As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry,
Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome;
Nor thou disdain, that ere my fame become
A star among the stars of mortal night,
If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom,
Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.

The toil which stole from thee so many an hour
  Is ended,—and the fruit is at thy feet!
No longer where the woods to frame a bower
With interlaced branches mix and meet,
Or where with sound like many voices sweet,
Water-falls leap among wild islands green,
Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat
Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen:
But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been.

The poem subtly referenced both their relationship meeting in 1814 and surviving the struggles of their lives in scandal and the turning away of friends in the previous two years, but with a renewed peace.

No more alone through the world’s wilderness,
Although I trod the paths of high intent,
I journeyed now: no more companionless,
Where solitude is like despair, I went. –
There is the wisdom of a stern content
When Poverty can blight the just and good,
When Infamy dares mock the innocent,
And cherished friends turn with the multitude
       To trample: this was ours, and we unshaken stood!

Now has descended a serener hour,
   And with inconstant fortune, friends return;
Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power
Which says:—Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.
And from thy side two gentle babes are born
   To fill our home with smiles, and thus are we
Most fortunate beneath life’s beaming morn;
And these delights, and thou, have been to me
The parents of the Song I consecrate to thee.

While tending to his own publishing, Shelley also submitted Mary’s novel to publishers. He did not say who the author was, but only referenced as “a friend”. He was purposely being secretive about its true authorship, urging his friend Leigh Hunt to “remain silent”, and even responding to a request for some changes that the author was indeed “not in the country” and Shelley offered to make corrections to language. The manuscript was first submitted to John Murray II, who was publishing Byron’s “Childe Harold”, being overseen by Shelley, and then to Charles Ollier, who was publishing Shelley’s own work, but both declined to publish the disturbing story. It was a disappointment. Why he apparently didn’t offer it to Thomas Hookham is unclear, but Hookham was quite busy. Thomas Love Peacock’s own novel “Melincourt” was published by Hookham at this time, and Hookham would also be publishing Mary’s first credited work, The Six Weeks Tour. Maybe it would be too close for comfort.

Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt’s wife Marianne for suggestions of other publishers. Finally in August of 1817, Shelley submitted the book to Lackington, Allen and Co., offering a deal for a new unknown author that, rather than a payment advance for the copyright, the publishers would risk the printing and advertising cost, and after deductions of the expense from sales would split the profits with the author. Lackington agreed to publish the work under the title “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus” with the author anonymous. The publishing preparation would take about three months, during which time Mary would visit London and Skinner Street, to see her father. Her stepmother was away in France at the time which allowed them to be alone.

In the meantime, Mary compiled and edited her diaries of their elopement trip of 1814, including some of Shelley’s material from their time in Geneva and the poem “Mont Blanc”, and would see it published by Thomas Hookham under her own name in December of 1817 as “History of a Six Weeks Tour: A Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni”.

During this time, the mysterious fatherhood of Clare Clairmont’s daughter, Alba (sometimes Auburn and later Allegra), began to grow into a threatening scandal. Clare had called herself Mrs. Clairmont in Bath, but her ambitions lead her to not want to pretend to be married. Lurid speculations of what was going on in the Albion household built with suspicions that Alba may have been the product of Shelley and Clare. Mary’s childhood friend Isabel Baxter, would publicly separate from Mary after marrying a rather too proper schoolmaster and brewer, Mr. David Booth, even with an endorsement of Shelley by her father after a visit to Marlow.

Shelley’s health had begun to feel the toll of the dampness of autumn and winter, and he proposed a trip to Italy on advice of his London physician and to take Byron’s daughter to her father. In the last few months of 1817, Shelley was staying much away from Marlow as creditors of his dead wife, Harriet, had come out of the woodwork and were trying to collect on unsuspected debts.  Although they had leased the Albion House in Marlow for 21 years, they sold the lease, packed and departed for London on February 10, 1818. They would depart for Italy on March 12, 1818, almost exactly a year after settling in at Marlow.

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Death of the First Mrs. Shelley December 1816

In the Matter of “Harriet Smith” – Harriet Westbrook Shelley – Murder or Suicide?

Mark Twain, the illustrious American humorist, novelist, essayist, travel journalist and general cantankerous expresser of contrary opinion, was so outraged at the historical treatment of the first Mrs. Percy Shelley that he felt compelled to write a lengthy correction of the opinion makers of his day “In Defense of Harriet Shelley”. Apparently a book had surfaced at the time that supported what was being taught in literature classes.

Ianthe Shelley

Ianthe Shelley

Twain wrote, “During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance. I was not aware that Shelley’s first wife was unfaithful to him, and that that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive honor by entering into soiled relations with Godwin’s young daughter. This was all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the proofs of it were in this book, and that this book’s verdict is accepted in the girls’ colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes.”

Harriet Westbrook Shelley is both one of the more tragic figures in the Mary Shelley story, in which there are so many, and perhaps the most troubling. The verdict of which Twain complained was engendered from the apparent need of the turn-of-the-century’s elevation of the literary stature of Percy Bysshe Shelley to paragon, that an effort was made to excuse his treatment of his first wife. Which, while rife with the passions and mistakes of youth, is a story that may need some excuse.

The tragic end of Harriet’s story comes to us in a death notice of The London Times on December 12, 1816 which read: “On Tuesday a respectable female, far advanced in pregnancy, was taken out of the Serpentine River and brought to her residence in Queen Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks. She had a valuable ring on her finger. A want of honour in her own conduct is supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe, her husband being abroad”.

The report was coy at best. The notice came from the paper of Thomas Hookham, Shelley’s sometime publisher. Her husband was not “abroad” but in Bath, living off and on with Mary Godwin, who would become the second Mrs. Shelley shortly following this notice. In fact the suicide death of Harriet Shelley freed Percy from the moral restrictions he had been under since first eloping with Mary in 1814 for their Six Weeks Tour and the next two and a half years of living as unwed lovers.

Hyde Park Serpentine 1816

Hyde Park Serpentine 1816

In fact, Shelley might be called a “Serial Eloper”. Harriet Westbrook was fifteen years old when Shelley met her through a friend of his, Helen, a classmate at a girl’s school in Clapham. Charmed by the 19 year old Shelley, Harriet began a pen pal correspondence with him, eventually writing Shelley letters threatening to kill herself because of her unhappiness at school and at home. Shelley had just been expelled from Oxford for publishing his treatise on “The Necessity of Atheism”, written with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. This caused the first rift with his father, Sir Timothy Shelley and he had just been forced to end a romance with his cousin, Harriet Grove. Not allowed to see his mother and sisters, and convinced that he did not have long to live, he decided to come to the aid of the passionate young Harriet Westbrook.

In 1811, when Harriet was sixteen (the same age as Mary Godwin when he later eloped with her) she and Percy eloped to Scotland. The relationship had been privately rather encouraged by her family, but treated with shock by his father, believing the daughter of an innkeeper (Mr. Westbrook operated a coffee house) was beneath his station. The couple bore a daughter, Ianthe, in June of 1813, and in March of 1814 the two were remarried in London when Harriet became pregnant with their second child, Charles. The second ceremony was to formalize the union and offer legitimate protection to their children, though Charles wouldn’t be born until November of 1814, after Shelley had eloped with Mary Godwin. (As a coincidental note, Harriet was pregnant when Shelley left for France with Mary, and Mary was pregnant when they returned to England.)

Harriet Westbrook was intelligent and pretty, and by accounts, attempted to be a worthy companion who supported his artistic pursuits, but without the real gifts of intellectual curiosity to match his interests. And Harriet had invited her older sister Eliza, single at 28 years old, to live with them. It was Eliza who seemed to be the burr which festered, whether by intent, or a matter of personality. Eliza did not view Percy Shelley’s philosophies of free love and atheistic intellectual utopias with any warmness and Percy’s original laudable motives in rescuing Harriet turned to a loveless union, at least on his part, with a plan to live a life of separate maintenance.

Percy was subject to his own mercurial passions and had come to Mary at Skinner Street in June of 1814 with a gun, and threatened to kill himself if he could not be with her. In some reports he threatened to throw himself in a river. He claimed he had learned that Harriet had been unfaithful. It is unclear whether this was true, but the pregnancy was advancing, and whether he suspected the child was not his is a matter of conjecture. Shelley’s friend Hogg had been attracted to Harriet, but she not to him apparently, though a series of correspondence between Shelley and Hogg argued the point.

Percy Shelley supported Harriet and his two children throughout his relationship with Mary Godwin, a significant factor in his want of money from being cut off from his income by his father Sir Timothy Shelley, beyond a modest maintenance amount for Harriet. The estate would provide her with £200 a year and Percy was to provide £100 on his own. The struggle to support Harriet and two children, Mary and her now pregnant step-sister (with Byron’s child), Claire, and Mary’s father, William Godwin, was a rather herculean dance of debt dodging and credit borrowings that filled Shelley’s state of mind through November of 1816. All the while searching for a permanent house in which to live with Mary. Harriet also had a habit of expensing purchases on account in Shelley’s name beyond her maintenance amount, for which Shelley would discover creditors appearing from the woodwork, seeking payment.

Two tragedies would befall within six weeks in late 1816. Mary’s older half-sister Fanny Imlay would commit suicide in Wales in October, and the news of Harriet’s end in the Serpentine would come in early December. Her body was found in the lake at the heart of Hyde Park on Sunday, December 8 of 1816. She had written a rambling letter filled with self-blame, but unspecific as to its object. At the inquest, her identity was only given as “Harriet Smith”, with no public acknowledgement of her relationship to her noble husband.

The Coroner, John Gell, issued the formal statement, apparently taking pains to stop any circling suggestions of a murder: “The said Harriet Smith had no marks of violence appearing on her body, but how or by what means she became dead, no evidence thereof does appear to the jurors”. The inquest simply returned a verdict: “Found dead in the Serpentine River”. No mention was made of her pregnancy in the inquest filing, but the news reports offered it as the salacious evidence that she had been abandoned by a lover.

Sometime in the late summer of 1816, Harriet left living with her father and had taken lodgings in Hans Place, Knightsbridge, in an effort to shield her family from her pregnancy. After having written the farewell addressed to her father, her sister, and her husband, Percy, she apparently walked the distance from her lodgings to Hyde Park and threw herself in the Serpentine River. She was twenty-one years old. But is that simple explanation the whole story?

Over the years, there have been various conspiratorial suggestions of foul play in Harriet’s death. Her unresolved marriage to Shelley was an impediment to the legitimacy of the relationship between Mary Godwin and Percy. In fact, with her death the Shelley’s married within three weeks, on December 30, 1816. The Godwins were reconciled with their daughter whom they had shunned for two and half years, and the money from the death of Percy’s grandfather could now flow. Poor Harriet was now out of the way, but a salaciously tantalizing prospect to add to the scandals of this Gothic couple.

There were plenty of suspects to go around who could have been brought to the bar. Speculative suspicions had fallen on William Godwin and upon Percy Shelley, who both had monetary motives to prefer her out of the picture. Jefferson Hogg had long been zealously infatuated with Harriet, but rebuffed by her over and again. And certainly, the mysterious, but unnamed paramour and father of her present condition cannot be ruled out – if he existed at all, as some suggested it was Shelley who had rekindled a relationship, but this is not very likely. And Shelley himself suggested it was the elder sister Eliza who was the villain of the story.

A later report by a Shelley friend told of Harriet’s going at last in despair to the house of a family relation in London, only to have the door slammed in her face, from where she there fled to fling herself in the Serpentine. As in modern investigations, the question might be asked, who was the last to see Harriet Westbrook Shelley alive? These make for tantalizing speculations, but in the 200 years since, no evidence, other than the stuff of recriminatory letters of friends and foes, has surfaced too prove anything other than the sad and tragic suicide of a pregnant young woman abandoned by both husband and lover.

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Did Mary Shelley and Jane Austen ever meet?

Jane Austen and Mary ShelleyAn interesting question, as these two most prominent women authors who have survived in popularity to today were being published as contemporaries. There is no known record or mention of one another in their writings and they were not in the same public circles. But it is a tantalizing question anyway.

Mary Shelley recorded most of what she read in her diaries, and there is nothing regarding anything of Austen. She occasionally lists “read novel” without further comment, either having no effect on her, or not taking them seriously. Shelley’s recorded interest in reading tended much more to the classical and philosophical, than the popular. And they were almost polar opposites in life experience and artistic sensibility. Austen came from a country life and wrote of themes of obtaining a good marriage and keeping a good name, in a comedic tone. Mary Shelley spent her formative life in a city environment surrounded by radical philosophers and her work was intellectual and dark, with tragedy at its core.

Yet, there are intersections of commonalities. Mary Shelley wrote her famous work when she was eighteen years old and revised it over years. Jane Austen wrote the first drafts of her most prominent works when she was twenty to twenty-two and revised them over years.

Austen began her first novels in the form of a series of letters. Shelley begins Frankenstein as a series of letters. Austen’s parents were from Bath and environs, and she lived there for several years. Mary Shelley’s parents were from Bath and she lived there for several months.

Okay, these are curious intersections, more having to do with the nature of women authors in their times. Could they ever have been in the same society? Austen lived in Bath from 1800 to 1809; Shelley wasn’t a resident until 1816.

Austen was being published in her lifetime beginning in 1811 until 1816. The first publishing of Frankenstein was in March 1818, several months after Austen had died on July 18, 1817. But yet, there are some connections where, if not encountering in person, they could have been aware of one another. Beginning with that summer trip of 1814 to France and Switzerland, Mary’s diaries made a fairly precise record of what she read daily, even in the circumstances of the greatest tragedies, but what she was reading before that is not detailed, and she was an ardent reader.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility first appeared in October 1811, published by Thomas Egerton. It had favorable reviews and the novel became fashionable among the young aristocratic class and the first edition sold out. And like Mary Shelley, it was first published anonymously. Pride and Prejudice followed in January 1813, was widely advertised, and sold well. Mary Shelley was the daughter of publishers and surrounded by writers. She was beginning her early attempts at writing at least by 1812. Surely she must have been aware of a successful authoress, though her peers may have looked down on work like Austen’s. The kind of societal focus on marriage central to her stories was the philosophical opposite of Mary’s father’s ideas. Even Austen’s most formative works included a satirical sendup of the kind of historical biography William Godwin was writing, though he would not have seen it. While William Godwin himself did read an Austen work, mentioned by him well after her death.

After Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park came out in May of 1814, at about the time Mary and Percy Shelley were becoming involved and her step-sister Jane (Claire) was taking an avid interest in the fashions of the time. Austen’s third novel was not-so-well reviewed but sold out. Austen’s writings became popular enough that the Prince Regent was counted as a fan and reportedly kept a set of her novels at his residences. In mid-1815, Jane Austen changed publishers from Thomas Egerton to John Murray for her anticipated new novel Emma.

Austen had occasion to come to London in November of 1815, when the prince’s librarian, the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, invited her to visit Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s London residence, and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming novel Emma to the Prince. Austen resided at 23 Hans Place in Knightsbridge while in London corresponding with Murray regarding a special limited edition of Emma dedicated to His Royal Highness, to be issued before public distribution of the novel.

Whether she visited the publisher while in London is not recorded, but Murray was well known for his salons of prominent writers gathering for meetings at his 50 Albemarle Street address in Mayfair. It was nearly the epicenter of the London publishing world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a friend of the Godwins and the Shelleys, was also being published by John Murray II, and William Godwin had many dealings with him as a writer and publishing competitor.

John Murray was the publisher of Lord Byron. The Shelleys became good friends with Bryon the summer of 1816 and on their return to England from Switzerland, Shelley took on the task of supervising the publishing of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Third Canto with Murray. Austen had completed a draft of Persuasion (The Elliots) in July of 1816 with the intention of publishing with Murray but was having financial difficulties with the failure of her brother Henry’s bank in March of 1816.

Austen was dealing with John Murray by correspondence while her brother may have been the conduit of manuscripts, though she very likely did meet the publisher in person, at least enough to write in a letter to her sister Cassandra in October of 1816, “He is a rogue of course, but a civil one.” This was at the same time Shelley was complaining to Murray that he had not been dealing appropriately with the proofs of Childe Harold which Byron had entrusted to him and may have visited Murray that October in London while he was staying in Marlow and meeting with Leigh Hunt.

In 1818, Bryon needed money. His library was valued at £450 and included in the inventory was a 1st edition of Emma, probably given to him by Murray, their common publisher. He was permanently traveling away from England by that time, but published in December of 1815, Bryon would possibly have been aware of it when spending time with the Shelleys in Geneva. And even though it was published with no author name, Murray would possibly have commented privately on the author’s identity to his other client. So, would Lord Byron have discussed the work of a female author with Mary Godwin when she was aspiring to write, especially an author who’s themes on marriage were so antithetical to Mary’s family influences, while she herself was risking her reputation in an unmarried relationship with Shelley?

Austen’s health was failing in 1816. She completed two revision drafts of Persuasion by August of 1816. She began another work, Sanditon, but stopped writing in March of 1817. She died on July 18, 1817 in Winchester. Percy Shelley began submitting the draft of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in note book form to publishers beginning in May of 1817, first offering it to Murray, then to Charles Ollier, both of whom declined to publish. Percy Shelley did not reveal at the time who the author was, only saying it was the work of a friend. It was finally accepted by George Lackington of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, printed in November of 1817 and formally published with anonymous author in March of 1818.

So, did Mary Shelley meet Jane Austen? It’s hard to prove a negative. Could she have been encouraged or inspired by the success of a woman author of her day like Jane Austen? She never mentioned it. Was Jane Austen familiar with Mary’s mother’s writing, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, when Austen was 17? She never mentioned it.

William Godwin published his memoir about Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, when Jane Austen was at the height of her creative energy, writing about the fear of loss of reputation when one of the pre-eminent woman authors of the day found her reputation sent her into the dustbin by the resulting scandal of the baring of her affair with Gilbert Imlay and illegitimate birth of her daughter. There is some suggestion that an acquaintance of Jane Austen’s father was a friend of the Wollstonecraft family, and the salacious scandal of the daughter of the eminent author and radical philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a friend of the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron could not have escaped her. But she never mentioned it. After all, it was far from Austen’s country world of polite manners, and probably best not to mention it.

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Mary Shelley in Bath – Frankenstein Begins

Tragedy, Turmoil and Creativity for the Shelleys in Bath

5 Abbey Churchyard Bath

Shelley’s 5 Abbey Churchyard

The city of Bath makes a great deal of fuss about its place in the life of Regency author Jane Austen. There’s an Austen Centre, exhibits and annual celebrations, tour marketing and the like. Austen lived in Bath for nine years from 1800 to 1809, but her time in Bath was not especially significant in her own literary history. She wrote the drafts of her completed novels before moving there, and she was not published until after she had left. While for the longest time, the city barely acknowledged its place in the life of Austen’s contemporary author, Mary Shelley, who developed and wrote a significant portion of her greatest work while a resident there. A museum for the author of Frankenstein is now in the planning stage.

Though only a fairly brief five months, the time spent in Bath by Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Clare Clairmont in 1816 were some of the most tumultuous and eventful in their story and in the formulation of Mary’s novel of Frankenstein. Within this few months, a birth and two suicides would deeply affect them, and by the time they left, Mary Godwin would be Mrs. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

After departing the company of Byron in Geneva, the Shelley party, Shelley, Mary, Clare, the Shelleys’ two-year-old son, William, and a nurse, Elise Duvillard, hired in Switzerland, returned back to England. They travelled through France on a different route than they had taken in 1814, passing through Dijon, Auxerre, and Villeneuve, while stopping for brief tourist visits at the palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles, and to Rouen for the Cathedral. They sailed from Le Havre to Portsmouth on the 8th of September, 1816.

Bath Then and NowFrom Portsmouth, Shelley separated from the two sisters to see his friend, Thomas Peacock, in Great Marlow, while Mary and Clare went to Bath. Clare’s pregnancy by Byron was beginning to show or make her condition, at least, clear by this time, and the idea was to find a distant lodging from London. Mary was still estranged from her father for her relationship with Shelley and they thought to conceal Clare’s condition. She was still using alternate spellings of her chosen name, Claire or Clare. It was mostly Claire in Switzerland and France using the French spelling, and Clare or Clara in England. Mary was confused enough to use both spellings in the same letter, while others of the family were still calling her by her birth name, Jane (Mary Jane, after her mother).

Mary Godwin wrote two diary entries of their arrival in Bath:

Tuesday, September 10.—Arrive at Bath about 2. Dine, and spend the evening in looking for lodgings. Read Mrs. Robinson’s Valcenga.

Wednesday, September 11.—Look for lodgings; take some, and settle ourselves. Read the first volume of The Antiquary, and work.

Mary had begun a short story version of the “nightmare” vision of that summer while in Switzerland, which Byron had referred to as a “Pygmalion” tale of making a man, but with Shelley’s encouragement, she had decided to write a full novel, which she began in earnest at Bath, writing the first chapters of Frankenstein. She had been writing in a notebook she had purchased in Geneva, but purchased new English paper notebooks in Bath for her longer vision.

The Shelleys had two lodging locations in Bath. The first address was No 5 Abbey Churchyard, on the main square across from the west front of the Bath Abbey. That building, which housed a reading library which may have attracted Mary’s notice, and apartments, was torn down in 1889 to make way for the addition of the Victorian Queen’s Bath expansion of the Bath Pump Room. The other address was two blocks away at No 12 New Bond Street. Shelley was travelling for much of this time, dealing with money issues, negotiations with his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, over his inheritance and the two tragic suicide events, as well as looking for a hoped permanent house to settle in near his friend in Marlow.

In early October, Shelley was corresponding from the 5 Abbey Churchyard address to both Godwin, regarding money he had promised to lend, and to publisher John Murray regarding the eminent publishing of The Third Canto of Byron’s Childe Harold. Shelley was waiting for the publishing proofs to be sent to him at that address where he expected to remain for the winter. For her part, Mary addressed her letters from the 12 New Bond Street address, where Clare was residing. One might conjecture that this was an attempt to show Shelley and Mary, still unwed, to be living separately, or they may have set the nurse and her son in New Bond Street with the pregnant Clare, so that she could be with Shelley when he was in Bath. Mary referred to her step-sister, “looking in on” her, so they were for at least some time apart.

Not long after settling, Mary travelled to Marlow on the 19th of September to meet Shelley and returned on the 25th. They received an alarming letter from Fanny sent from Bristol on the 9th of October and Shelley went to find her, following her to Swansea where she had committed suicide. Mary noted in her diary on 12 October “buy mourning” purchasing mourning clothes for Fanny’s death, although there was no funeral and the body was unclaimed to keep her anonymity and reputation. Mary was writing Frankenstein off and on through this period with a number of references to writing in her diary, making revisions as she went.

She was reading sea voyage literature at this time, suggesting she was writing the Captain Walton beginning of the novel, inspired by her youthful visits to Dundee, Scotland. She was also reading Sir Humphrey Davy’s reference on chemistry, as she was working on Victor Frankenstein’s studies and scientific background. Davey was the originator of ideas of electro-chemistry and voltaic batteries which had so intrigued a young Percy Shelley at Oxford.

Mary wrote a letter on the 5th of December in good spirits to Shelley in Marlow that she had completed “chapter four” (the bringing to life Victor’s creature), but also involving Safie and the creature’s language learning, which she noted she thought was long. She later edited this significantly shorter for the published 1818 version, separating into two chapters. She was also concerned with Shelley’s tendency to latch onto the first house he might find, and seemed to have a wish not to have to live with her sister, which had been nearly constant for two years.

“I was awakened this morning by my pretty babe, and was dressed time enough to take my lesson from Mr. West, and (thank God) finished that tedious ugly picture I have been so long about. I have also finished the fourth chapter of Frankenstein, which is a very long one, and I think you would like it. And where are you? and what are you doing? my blessed love. … in the choice of a residence, dear Shelley, pray be not too quick or attach yourself too much to one spot. … A house with a lawn, a river or lake, noble trees, and divine mountains, that should be our little mouse-hole to retire to. But never mind this; give me a garden, and absentia Claire, and I will thank my love for many favours.”

In November, Shelley was reading Plutarch’s “Lives” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and this seems to have crept into Mary’s writing, as she has the creature reading these while in the De Lacey Cottage in Chamonix.

Shelley returned to Bath from Marlow on the 14th of December, but the next day, the 15th , was informed in a letter from Thomas Hookham that his wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, was found drowned in the Serpentine Lake of Hyde Park. She had been missing from her residence for three weeks. She was named only as Harriet Smith at the inquest, a named she had used for a lodging in Queen Street. She had left no note, and little evidence was given, though a rumor suggested she was deserted by a household groom and that she had a proclivity to suicidal thoughts since her youth. The London Times reported only that a respectable lady she was found drowned “advanced in pregnancy”. Mary made no comment on the event of Harriet’s death, but she was enthusiastic to support Shelley’s effort to take custody of the children, Ianthe and Charles, and the Shelleys were now free to marry and hoped for a reconciliation with her father.

“How very happy shall I be to possess those darling treasures that are yours. I do not exactly understand what Chancery has to do in this, and wait with impatience for to-morrow, when I shall hear whether they are with you; and then what will you do with them? My heart says, bring them instantly here; but I submit to your prudence. You do not mention Godwin. When I receive your letter to-morrow I shall write to Mrs. Godwin. I hope, yet I fear, that he will show on this occasion some disinterestedness. Poor, dear Fanny, if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved, for my house would then have been a proper asylum for her.”

Shelley returned to visit Peacock in Marlow to search for a house they might take as a permanent residence and visited Leigh Hunt, the Publisher of the Examiner, beginning a long friendship. Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley went to London on December 30, 1816 to be married at St Mildred’s Church, and stayed with the Leigh Hunts. Godwin and Mrs. Godwin also attended the wedding. It was the first time Mary had seen her father since he banned them from Skinner Street after their return from the elopement in 1814. Clare stayed in Bath and Mary promised her a quick return.

Mary stopped writing on her novel during this time. Clare bore her daughter on January 12, 1817. She first named her Alba, in honor of the Shelleys’ nickname for Lord Byron, “Albe” (LB), put prudently changed the name later to Allegra, to avoid the too obvious connection. Mary wrote of “4 days of idleness” in her diary. Her son William’s first birthday was on January 24. Shelley had been in London since the 6th in Chancery Court arguing for custody of his children by Harriet, a suit he lost, despite Mary’s enthusiastic support. The Westbrooks had fought against his taking in the children, using his “atheistic” writings in Queen Mab as evidence of a lack of moral fitness. The children were sent to an unrelated clergyman in Warwick where Harriet had been living. The Shelleys left Bath on February 27, 1816 for Marlow. Mary was pregnant for the third time and beginning on a second notebook volume of her novel.

Take short tour of Bath today.

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Fanny Imlay Godwin’s Suicide

The Forgotten Tragedy of the Frankenstein Story

Of the many 200th Anniversary Celebrations for the creation of Frankenstein, it is unlikely these events of October of 1816 are on anyone’s party list.

Entries in Mary Godwin’s Diary

Wednesday, October 9.—Read Curtius; finish the Memoirs; draw. In the evening a very alarming letter comes from Fanny. Shelley goes immediately to Bristol; we sit up for him till 2 in the morning, when he returns, but brings no particular news.

Thursday, October 10.—Shelley goes again to Bristol, and obtains more certain trace. Work and read. He returns at 11 o’clock.

Friday, October 11.—He sets off to Swansea. Work and read.

Saturday, October 12.—He returns with the worst account. A miserable day. Two letters from Papa. Buy mourning, and work in the evening.

Fanny Imlay GodwinThese were the only entries in Mary’s daily diary of the news of the suicide of her twenty-two year old elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay Godwin. The entries are characteristic of Mary’s decidedly terse and brief references to the most wrenching of events in her life recorded in her daily accounts. This was during the time in which she and her younger step-sister Claire Clairmont Godwin were living in Bath, writing Frankenstein and her tour journals she called her memoirs. This was October of 1816. They had returned from their second trip to Europe and that famous fateful legendary summer with the impromptu contest on Lake Geneva. Claire was fully pregnant with Byron’s child, (to be born Alba and later changed to Allegra) and Mary was still rejected by her father for her “illicit” unwed liaison with Percy Shelley. They had taken up residence in Bath to hide Claire’s pregnancy from prying scandal eyes in London and Mary was working on the beginnings of a draft of the story she had envisioned in Geneva.

Mary’s father, William Godwin’s finances were a shambles and he was approaching bankruptcy. He had been counting on money from Shelley, but Shelley was still at odds with his own father over his inheritance and had already lent large sums. Even though the Godwins were estranged from their daughter, Mary’s step-mother Mrs. Clairmont Godwin was attempting to raise loans on the publishing business, based on the promise of Percy Shelley’s prospects. The family was feeling that Fanny was a burden at home and hoped she could be sent again to her relatives in Ireland, but her relations there had refused. Fanny’s letters gave little clue to the state of her mind, except for a general bleakness.

She left home and made her way to Swansea. It is unclear why she chose Wales. Perhaps it was familiarity from her younger days, when there are accounts that she had relatives, but her intention was clear in letters posted from Bristol. Fanny had written to both the Shelleys and the Godwins to account for her sudden disappearance from Skinner Street with the added note:

“I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove.”

Percy Shelley set out to follow her track. He arrived too late. The morning after that letter had been posted from Bristol she was found in a room at the Mackworth Arms, lying dead on the floor. Next to her was a bottle of Laudanum, and a note of profound despair:

“I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death may give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as…”

The note ends abruptly, the grammar is odd at the end so perhaps she was succumbing to the effects of the laudanum as she wrote it.

The local Swansea paper The Cambrian reported that Friday October 11, 1816:

 “A melancholy discovery was made in Swansea yesterday: a most respectable-looking female arrived at the Mackworth Arms on Wednesday night by the Cambrian coach from Bristol: she took tea and retired to rest, telling the chambermaid she was exceedingly fatigued and would take care of the candle herself. Much agitation was created in the house by her non-appearance yesterday morning, and on forcing her chamber door, she was found a corpse with the remains of a bottle of laudanum on the table and a note.”

Percy Shelley is not mentioned in any of the reporting, but the name on the note was said to have been torn off and burned. Did Shelley arrive and prevail to keep her identity secret? She was described as wearing stockings marked with a “G” (Godwin)and her stays had the letters “MW” (Mary Wollstonecraft), hand me down remnants of her mother. She was described as wearing a blue striped skirt, a white bodice, a brown fur-lined pelisse coat and matching hat. She had in her possession a small French gold watch, a brown-berry necklace, and a small leather purse containing five shillings and a six-penny piece. An inquest held a week later when she was still identified only as a “young lady” stated a verdict merely that she was ‘found dead’.

The suicide of Fanny Imlay Wollstonecraft Godwin is perhaps one of the saddest of episodes in the story of the Shelleys. Of her family, Mary was probably the most fond of her, but she had always seemed an innocent side player. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written of breast-feeding her as an infant in her travels in Norway, which seemed to cause her some embarrassment. And when William Godwin published his biography of Wollstonecraft which revealed the questionable legitimacy of her birth and Mary Wollstonecraft’s relation to her father, Gilbert Imlay (they had been declared as married in France, but not officially recorded in England), she held herself in part to blame for the resulting scandal-driven critical rejection of her writer mother as a libertine. This was likely the reference to her “unfortunate birth”. She had written in an earlier letter:

“I have determined never to live to be a disgrace to such a mother I have found that if I will endeavour to overcome my faults I shall find being’s to love and esteem me.”

But she found little esteem in her own household. She noted in the same letter in May of 1816 that her step-mother had told her that she was the subject of ridicule by Mary and Shelley:

“What ever faults I may have I am not sordid or vulgar. I love you for your selves alone. I endeavour to be as frank to you as possible that you may understand my real character. I understand from Mamma that I am your laughing stock – and the constant beacon of your satire.’

Fanny had been the first of the Godwin sisters to encounter Percy Shelley. She was most probably in love with him and had high hopes, though when he fell for Mary, she accepted and stepped aside in support of Mary’s happiness. Shelley was fond of Fanny, but more likely in friendship than more. William Godwin had leaned heavily on Fanny in dealing with his creditors as she seemed to have a skill at correspondence, but with his increasing financial difficulties, this constant task must have weighed on her, and Godwin may have turned to blame in his situation. It may have been his health she was referring to in her suicide note, and one can only offer conjecture that perhaps he or her step-mother had laid some blame on her in a moment of argument. Her relationship with her step-mother had always been difficult as well. Mary blamed Mary Jane Claremont Godwin for many things, one of them her treatment of Fanny. It was Mrs. Godwin who apparently was often sending Fanny away to other relatives. She had sent an inquiry to the Ireland clan to take her again, but when that request was rejected, it may have added to Fanny’s despair of being rejected and unwanted by all around her.

There seems no record of another particular incident or circumstance which caused Fanny Imlay to feel so rejected and unloved that she would travel from London to an inn in South Wales with a bottle of laudanum intent to destroy herself. Perhaps this was the last straw for her, accepting in self-blaming reasoning that she needed to be sent away, that no-one wanted her.  She could not go to the Shelleys, to see Mary and Percy together, when she was in love with Shelley but would not think of interfering in Mary’s happiness, and they, having their own difficulties with scandal. Claire was pregnant from her liaison with Byron, and Fanny was at this point feeling her own prospects for romance increasingly bleak.

mackworth_arms_swanseaHow Shelley found Fanny at the Mackworth Arms is unreported, though he probably took the Cambrian Coach from Bristol, just as she had the day before, and arrived at the inn to discover the news which had already been reported. What is less clear is whether they already knew her potential destination in Wales? Was she seeking out a familiar haunt from her youth, or was she thinking of a boat to Ireland? According to a fellow traveler to Swansea she said she had left London by the Post Coach to Bath on Tuesday. Had she seen Mary or Shelley in Bath or had traveled onward on Wednesday? It was still a ferry ride across the Severn River from Bristol to Wales so he could not have followed her that day. Had she waited one more evening, he might have been in time. Shelley felt his own pain at her loss and his own blame. When they had last spoken is not recorded, but was it that Wednesday and she did not find a solace in Bath? Shelley acknowledges that he was perhaps unaware of her real feelings for him when he wrote a requiem poem, though not identifying the subject until Mary published her collection of his works in 1817 as “On F.G.”:

“Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came,—and I departed,
Heeding not the words then spoken—
Misery, ah! misery!
This world is all too wide for thee.”

Godwin was deeply affected by Fanny’s loss and it sent him into a despondent gloom, but his chief concern at the moment of the news was the potential for more public scandal which was the cause of his separation from his other daughters.

He wrote to Mary:

“Do not expose us to those idle questions which to a mind in anguish, is one of the severest of all trials. We are at this moment in doubt whether, during the first shock, we shall not say that she is gone to Ireland to her aunt, a thing that had been in contemplation. Do not take from us the power to exercise our own discretion. You shall hear again to-morrow. What I have most of all in horror is the public papers, and I thank you for your caution, as it may act on this.”

In fact, the death and circumstance was kept private for some time. She was not identified by the family and was buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. Mary’s half-brother, Charles Godwin, was apparently unaware of it for a year when he referenced Fanny in a letter. Mrs. Godwin for her part spent a great deal of her energy blaming Shelley. When ultimately revealed, rumors that Fanny’s suicide had been the result of a tryst with Shelley and her jealousy at his relationship with Mary had been circulating. It became clear that it was Mary Jane Godwin who had been complicit in the rumor mongering when she wrote to a Mrs. Gisborne four years later that the three Godwin daughters, Mary, Claire and Fanny had all been simultaneously in love with Shelley. The Shelleys held Mrs. Godwin responsible for many of the more salacious slanders which would affect them for years.

Fanny’s tragic death would shortly be followed by another suicide, when Shelley’s wife, Harriet, was found floating in the Serpentine stream which flows through Hyde Park. Another unhappy figure in the story, but with his first wife’s death, Shelley was able to finally marry Mary in December of 1816, which also ended their separation from Godwin, and a move from Bath to Marlow for another chapter.

The original Mackworth Arms Inn, located on Wind Street in Swansea had once been described in 1798 as the best hotel in town, and had hosted Admiral Lord Nelson under its roof, but fell to progress and was demolished in 1890 to make way for a post office. And the residence in Bath rented by Mary and Shelley across from the Abbey was also torn down to make an addition to the Bath’s Pump House. Even Bath officials were apparently unaware of its place in the Shelley story for a century. It is not certain how much Fanny’s death played in the writing of Frankenstein. Mary wrote nothing more about it in her diaries beyond the terse one sentence of reportage, but as she was formulating the architecture of story at the time, it is tantalizing to consider could the tragic turn of reprisal by the creature against his wife and child in her novel be informed by the feelings of her own part in the story of her sister?

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Nightmare AI: Can Artificial Intelligence Machines Learn to Scare?

frankenstein_gloopy_twirlDr. Stephen Hawking and others have warned about a future where AI could reach a point of existential risk where humans are at danger from machines that out compete human intelligence. This is an idea expressed in movies like “The Terminator”, and have been around since the deep themes of man verses science in the first appearance of Frankenstein. But just in time for Halloween, the geeky researchers at the Media Lab of MIT are asking you to decide if AI machines can figure out how to scare you out of your candy, in what they call the Nightmare Machine of “Haunted Faces” and “Haunted Places”, computer generated scary visions powered by deep learning algorithms.

mit_ai_facesThe concept is to hand the computer algorithm a photograph, it could be a bucolic scene of sunsets and landscapes or a happy smiling face and the program will hand back a creepy manipulated vision intended to give you the shivers. So far, this nightmare device only offers demonstration versions and does not let visitors submit their own images. Currently, they have provided a set of demo photographs that have been morphed from a standard photo to the machine’s idea of what is unsettling to the human eye. For the demonstration they have landscaped settings with various themes like “slaughterhouse” or “alien invasion”. Faces have been twisted into screaming maws of twisted teeth and haunting soul-forsaken eyes. Some of the imagery is perhaps no more scary than a Vincent Van Gogh painting of flowers on Clozapine, but others are decidedly chilling creep outs. The AI machine learning comes in as visitors to the Nightmare Machine are asked to choose which images frighten and which don’t, so the computer algorithm can learn what truly frightens you.

To what use this scare machine will be put to in the future is a curious question. So, far it is mostly research in the next wave of AI, but in practical application will it be a funhouse graphics trick to sell Halloween season greeting cards from Hallmark’s Frankenstein collection, or will it be turned to the dark side of psychological warfare of the machines against the humans in the coming war for domination by Skynet’s robotic overlords.

ada_lovelace_blue_sqMary Shelley’s story explored the theme of the unintended consequences of scientific advancement and curiously by a degree of separation was connected to what might be called the first step in artificial intelligence. Lord Byron, now forever connected in literary mythology to the origin of Frankenstein from the stormy summer on Lake Geneva is also the connection to the origins of AI. Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace), George Gordon Byron’s only legitimate child by his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, found an interest in  mathematics, and in 1840 wrote the first computing algorithm for Charles Babbage’s Analysis Engine.

This was a “machine” which only existed on paper, but fueled Alan Turing’s imaginings of a mechanical device which learned the Nazi enigma code, and in 1956, Lovelace’s notes on what she called “poetical science” imagining individuals using technology as a collaborative tool, in rather a reverse of her father’s friend Mary Shelley’s darker vision,  inspired Marvin Minsky, the founder of MIT’s AI Lab, and a handful of other futurist thinkers gathered at Dartmouth College to begin the evolution of AI. At that other creative gothic summer, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a competition was held to create programs which could emulate learning, beating humans at checkers and even formulate sentences in English. It is apocryphal that the first computer uttered sentence was: “Trick or Treat?” How’s that for a Halloween scare? Watson, we need you. Try it out at  Nightmare MIT

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Assassination of Empress Sisi in Geneva

An Account of the Assassination of Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary in Geneva by the Italian anarchist Lucheni.

Empress Elizabeth Sisi of AustriaThe most famous assassination of a Habsburg was the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand by Yugoslav separatist Gavrilo Princip, while riding in a car in Sarajevo in 1914, which is deemed to be the catalyst which led to the beginning of the First World War. This was not the first murder of an Austro-Hungarian royal while traveling. Mary Shelley set the tragic events of her novel Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva with the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son on the Plainpalais by the creature he had created. This was the terrible retribution for his hubris of creating a living being and then abandoning him. A similar case might be made for the turning of the anarchists on the imperials in class warfare. The French Revolution, of which Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft had been a witness and had written about, and the resulting end of the Emperor Napoleon, had been one of the draws which had brought Mary and Percy to Paris on their elopement tour in 1814 as told in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Frankenstein Diaries.

Empress Sisi and Contes SztataryAs Geneva celebrates the 200th anniversary of the origination of Frankenstein, for history buff sight-seeking visitors to Geneva who might be drawn by the story of Frankenstein, and looking for more to explore, here is an account of the curious murder of one of the most sympathetic of the Imperial family of Habsburgs who ruled and dominated the life of Central Europe.

There had been warnings of possible assassination movements when the popular Empress Elisabeth, more commonly called “Sisi” (or Sissi), now sixty years old and essentially estranged from her husband, the Emperor Franz Joseph, visited Geneva in 1898. She was traveling incognito, but such an illustrious personage is hard to keep quiet and an employee of the Hotel Beau Rivage, where she was staying, had bragged that the Empress of Austria was a guest.

Assassination of Embress ElizabethOn Saturday, the 10th of September, at 1:35 in the afternoon, Sisi and her lady-in-waiting and traveling companion, the Countess Irma Sztáray, 35, left the hotel to walk the short distance to the harbor dock to catch the steamship Genève for a scenic cruise journey to Montreux where she was residing. The empress like many others had followed the “Grand Tour” which began with the writings of Byron and the other romantics. The Empress Sisi didn’t like “processions,” and she had ordered that her servants take the train ahead to  Territet on the lake shore at Montreux where they would meet the boat after she had taking the scenic Lake Geneva cruise boat on the waters. Percy Shelly and George Lord Bryon had made this trip by row boat, now it was a tourist trip by paddle steamer.

Hotel Beau Rivage Geneva TodayThe two women were strolling on the promenade when a 25-year-old Italian man approached them. In an account by Countess Sztáray, the young man tried to peek under her mistress’s parasol, then, just as the ship’s bell rang to signal the departure, the man stumbled against her and made a movement with his hand as if he was trying to catch his balance. She was unaware at the moment it happened that he was actually holding a small weapon made of a sharpened four inch long needle file embedded into a wooden handle. The attacker was an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. The tool was used to file the eyes of industrial needles, intended by the assassin as a symbol of the rise of the industrial worker against the oppressor, and he later pronounced this as part of the anarchist creed, the “propaganda of the deed”, promoting the change of society by a violent action. His original plan was to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, a pretender to the throne of France, but the duke had departed on a tour of the Swiss Valais before he could make his move. Then, a Geneva newspaper had reported from the hotel source that a guest staying under the name of the “Countess of Hohenembs” was in fact the Empress Sisi of Austria, and he changed his target.

Lucheni declared at his trail. “I am an anarchist by conviction…I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign” as an example for those impoverished who take no action to improve their social position, “it did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill. It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress; it was a crown that I had in view.”

Paddle Steamer GenevaAfter Lucheni had made his sly attack and moved swiftly on, neither woman realized the seriousness of what had happened, that she had been stabbed. The empress weakened on her feet and a nearby coach driver rushed to assist her. He signaled to the concierge of the Beau Rivage, an Austrian named Planner, who was watching. Rather than return to the hotel, the coachman helped the two women to the boat dock, about a 100 yards, and up the gangway to board the Genève steamer. Countess Sztáray relaxed her hold on the empress’s arm and at that moment she collapsed unconscious on the boat deck. The companion called urgently for a doctor, but there was none on board and only a fellow passenger, a former nurse, came to aid. The captain of the Genève, a Captain Roux, was unaware of the true identity of the ill passenger and since it was a very hot day, advised that her companion should take her back to the hotel. This was impossible as the boat was already departing from the dock, and sailing out of harbor onto the lake. Three men carried the empress to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Countess Sztáray then opened her gown and cut the laces of her corset so she could take air. The empress came around briefly and her lady-in-waiting asked if she was in pain. “No”, Elizabeth answered, and then asked, “What has happened?” They were her last words as she lost consciousness.

It was then that the Countess Sztáray noticed a small brown stain above her mistress’s left breast, but still didn’t know what it was. Frightened that she had passed out a second time, the lady finally revealed who her companion was. The captain, recognizing the seriousness, immediately turned the boat to return to the Geneva harbor, where the empress was carried by sailors on an improvised stretcher made from two oars and a sail with seat cushions, back to the Hotel Beau Rivage.

assassination_weapon1The wife of the hotel chief was a nurse and when she and Sztáray began to undress the empress’s layers, they finally noticed the small stain of blood and the tiny puncture wound. The empress was still. She had breathed her last breaths as they had carried her into the room, but when they lifted her to a bed, she was certainly dead. Two doctors arrived and a priest. Dr. Mayer made a small incision in her arm, but there was no blood flow, and the Empress Elizabeth was pronounced dead at 2:20 pm and that Saturday afternoon. An autopsy was performed by Dr. Golay, who determined that the thin tool, just three and third inches, had pierced the lung and penetrated the heart. The pressure from the tight corsets the empress wore to control her slim figure, had kept the blood flow from the surface and had kept the empress from being aware of the wound. When the corseting was removed, the blood hemorrhage had filled the pericardial sac, stopping the heart.

Empress Elizabeth Funeral in ViennaShe had been placed in placed in a triple coffin, with two inner lead linings and a bronze exterior case with lion claw feet. On Tuesday, before the coffins were sealed, Franz Joseph’s official representatives arrived to identify the body. The coffin had two glass panels with doors which could be slid back to view her face. Eighty-three sovereigns and the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed the funeral cortege of the hearse to her burial in the Habsburg crypt at the Church of the Capuchins in Vienna. The tomb inscription first denoted “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”, but the words “and Queen of Hungary” were added after the protests of Hungarians.

empress_sisi_coffin

On Wednesday morning, Elisabeth’s body was carried back to Vienna aboard a funeral train. The inscription on her coffin read, “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”. The Hungarians were outraged and the words, “and Queen of Hungary” were hastily added. The entire Austro-Hungarian Empire was in deep mourning; 82 sovereigns and high-ranking nobles followed her funeral cortege on the morning of 17 September to the Habsburg tomb in the Church of the Capuchins.

Rue Mont Blanc and Rue Des Alpes at Hotel De La Paix GenevaThe assassin had made his escape from the harbor down the Rue des Alpes and tossed the weapon into the doorway of No. 3 Rue des Alpes, which is now a storefront abutting the Hotel de La Paix. After an alarm was raised he was cornered by two sailors and a cab coachman until a gendarme could be called. The file was found by the building concierge who didn’t at first realize what it was as the sharp tip had broken off.

luigi_lucheni_arrestLuigi Lucheni was actually born Paris and left as an orphan and spent most of his life in Switzerland, so he was only really Italian by the parentage of his mother. But the news that the assassin of the adored Sisi was “Italian” caused a wave of anti-Italian reprisals through Switzerland. There was concern that a wave of political attacks was coming from cells of anarchists, but Lucheni claimed he was acting alone. But a few months later, the International Conference for the Social Defense Against Anarchists was held in Rome, but it failed to curb the movement, until another anarchist would fire the shot which sent the world into war and ended empires.

Lucheni wanted his trial moved to Lucerne when he learned that the Canton of Geneva had abolished the death penalty, as he wanted to be famous as a martyr. He was sentenced to life. He first unsuccessfully tried to kill himself with a sardine can key in 1900, but it was another ten years before he was found hanging by his belt in his cell in an apparent suicide.

In a bit of gruesome science theater worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lucheni’s head was removed during autopsy and kept in a jar of formaldehyde for 100 years, first at the Institute of Forensic Science of the University of Geneva until 1985, then given to the Federal Museum of Pathology and Anatomy in Vienna, until finally buried at the Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) in Vienna in the year 2000. The murder weapon can still be seen in the Sisi Museum at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna and Sisi’s hearse at Imperial Carriage Museum of the Schonbrunn Palace. You can still take the Lake Geneva cruise that Sisi never completed, or stay incognito at the Beau Rivage.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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