Category Archives: Literature

Frankenstein Looks For a Publisher – 1817

The Secret Identity of Authorship in the First Publication

frankenstein_cover_1818
Mary Shelley had completed the first draft of her novel, to be called “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus” by the end of May in 1817, and commencing in June, Percy Shelley began to submit it to publishers for her. He offered it without acknowledging the identity of the author, in some cases saying only that it was a friend who was out of the country.

Why did he Shelley not want to reveal that the author of this book was his wife? This is perhaps a curious matter of speculation. Shelley himself was no stranger to anonymous authorship. Much of his early work had been published without his name, using various non-pseudonyms, like, “A Gentleman of Oxford” or “The Hermit of Marlow”, only thinly disguising his credit. Was he afraid of nepotism, that he thought the work would be disregarded if it was his 20 year old wife he was representing? Was he worried about the reception of a literary work by a woman author? Was it the subject matter?

There were other women authors. By 1817, Jane Austen had received wide acclaim for her popular fiction, but Austen’s work was far more what was expected of a feminine author than the dark horrors and philosophical questions of Frankenstein. Would the shock be easier to take if it attained success first? Mary Shelley was the daughter of a known woman writer, but Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation was still clouded in the scandal produced by William Godwin’s biography revealing her love affairs. Would her daughter be tainted by the connection? Or was it the scandal of their own relationship which had dogged them for three years since their elopement that worried him. He had even urged his friend Leigh Hunt to remain silent in what he knew.

Some of these concerns over revealing the identity of the author seemed to be born out in some of the critical reception once rumors of the anonymous author’s sex spread, The British Critic wrote “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel…and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.” While knowledge of her literary lineage produced the comment by The Literary Panorama that the novel was a “feeble imitation of Mr. Godwin’s novels” referencing that she was the daughter of a “celebrated living novelist”. Sir Walter Scott offered a favorable review “an extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination …. written in plain and forcible English…” although Scott had assumed it was written by Shelley who had sent him the copy. Mary herself had even worried that a work written by one as young as she was at the time, might receive criticism for that alone.

Frankenstein Authorship Controversy – Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein?

The authorship identity mystery surrounding the publishing of Frankenstein was also the origin of conspiracy speculation and controversy surrounding whether Mary Shelley was the author of Frankenstein at all. Assorted discussions have arisen over 200 years of how much contribution Percy Shelley made to the book. Some have even gone so far to suggest that Mary was only “drafting fair copies” of Shelley’s work. But at the time of the creation of the novel, Shelley was working on his own writing, producing a political pamphlet and epic poem, as well as constantly on the move, dodging creditors, fighting for custody of his children, overseeing the publishing of Byron’s work and searching for a place for them to live, to have the time to contribute much.

The ideas in Frankenstein that are often cited as evidence of Percy Shelley’s contribution come from Mary’s deep connection to the philosophical discussions and habits of her husband. She was surely influenced by his interests and inspired by him. The record of her own research can be found in her diaries. Since their first meeting and through their elopement Shelley would introduce her to his reading and his ideas. It is often suggested from the story of that summer in Geneva, that Mary was inspired by one fireside discussion between Bryon and Shelley, but she had been introduced to the themes that appear in Frankenstein long before. Indeed, many of Percy Shelley’s philosophies were introduced to him by Mary’s father, William Godwin, and the circle of writers and thinkers he knew, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb.

Finding a Publisher  

The first known submission of the manuscript of Frankenstein was to John Murray. Shelley was in regular correspondence with Murray who was publishing Lord Byron’s “Third Canto of Childe Harold: Third Canto”. Murray declined the work. Perhaps Shelley had revealed to Murray that it was Mary who was the author. Mary was well known to Murray, both through her father and the close relationship between the Shelleys and Byron. He may have even been aware when she was writing it. Shelley next took the manuscript to Charles Ollier who was publishing his own poem “Laon and Cythna” written while in Marlow. Ollier also passed on it. Thomas Hookham had agreed to publish Mary’s History of a Six Weeks Tour Journal with her name as author, but may not have wanted to cloud the issue with two books, or may have believed it not a genre fitting his taste.

Shelley began to look for publishers whom he did not know. After a dinner discussion with magazine publisher on a visit with friends the Leigh Hunts, Shelley asked in a letter if Marianne Hunt might know of a publisher to approach. It was in August of 1817, that Shelley finally submitted the book to a publisher, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and & Jones. Whether this was a result of a suggestion by Marianne Hunt is unknown, but Lackington was a well known book seller of inexpensive books for the broad public through their book emporium, a fixture in London. Since the “unknown author” was new, Shelley proposed that instead of an advance, the author would only take a 1/3 share of the profits from the sales after deduction of expenses. Lackington agreed to publish the book with 500 copies, “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus – In Three Volumes” with no author listed.

Mary began revisions, which would be transmitted at first through Shelley to the publisher, then Mary allowed Shelley “carte blanche” to make any revisions necessary. He most likely added the passage of a letter in the first chapter to smooth out what Mary considered an  “abruptness”. Shelley also made some alterations to smooth out the writing style in some sections and spelling. The preparation would take three months, until November of 1817. The printing of the book was done by Robert MacDonald & Son. There were disputes with Lackington over advertisements surrounding the publishing.

First Publication of Frankenstein

The book first appeared on January 1 of 1818. The publication date was supposed to be December 29 of 1817, but was delayed. The press announcements referred to it as “A Work of Imagination” with a price of 16 Shillings and Sixpence. The publishing was largely unsuccessful as a financial adventure, and critical response could be described as mixed, but the story itself created a popular sensation, with unauthorized stage versions soon appearing, while its author was already gone away to Italy.

The author’s identity would first appear on a French translation in 1821, as only Mme. Shelley. The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley name would first appear as the author on the 1823 Edition, published by G. and W. B. Whittaker, supervised by her father following Mary’s return to England after Shelley’s death, and suddenly finding herself famous from her story adapted to a hit stage play. The best known version of the book would be published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley in 1831, with the now well-known, but perhaps artfully apocryphal story of the literary competition at Villa Diodati.

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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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Sir Humphry Davy – Frankenstein’s Father?

Is Sir Humphry Davy the real father of Frankenstein?

Sir Humphry Davy PortraitDecember 17 marks the birthday in 1778 of Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet and President of the Royal Society, and October 28 may mark the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein’s scientific birth in 1816. Sir Humphry Davy was a chemist and inventor from Cornwall who is most noted today as the originator of the scientific field of electrochemistry and for isolating several elements of the periodic table, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron. Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the commercial incandescent light bulb, but it was Davy who in 1802 first demonstrated the principle of passing electric current from a battery through metal to create a light source. The first demonstration using platinum was very short and impractical. In 1806 he used two rods of carbon passing electricity across the gap to create the first arc light.

Humphry Davy developed the concepts of Alessandro Volta, to create the most powerful electrical battery in the world at the Royal Institution. With it, he created the first incandescent light by passing electric current through a thin strip of platinum, chosen because the metal had an extremely high melting point. It was neither sufficiently bright nor long lasting enough to be of practical use, but demonstrated the principle. By 1806, he was able to demonstrate a much more powerful form of electric lighting to the Royal Society in London. It was an early form of arc light which produced its illumination from an electric arc created between two charcoal rods.

voltaic_pile_batteryDavy had a close working friendship with James Watt, the inventor of the practical steam engine from whom we get the word for power, wattage. Davy was also an amateur poet and friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and England’s Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. Davy and Watt were the creators of Nitrous Oxide “Laughing Gas”, first thinking it might be a cure for a hangover, but then envisioning its use as an anesthetic for surgical procedures. The gas became popular among the romantic poets for its more hallucinogenic properties.

As early as 1801, Davy began giving a series of lectures on the concept of “Galvanism”, inspired by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, passing electricity through muscle tissue to create a reaction and the application of electrical current to create a chemical reaction. Davy’s lectures with his spectacular demonstrations were a sensation in England, bringing the Italian scientist’s work into popular familiarity. Davy later used the Voltaic Pile battery to separate and produce elements becoming the basis for his most noted work.

davy_royal_societySo what does Davy have to do with the birth of Frankenstein? Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a familiar participant to the company of the intellectual discussions of William Godwin and his circle of philosophers and poets. Mary Shelley was introduced at a youthful age to the theories of electrochemistry and Galvanism. It was Coleridge who told of experiments he witnessed using Galvani’s theories on executed prisoners at Newgate Prison. Percy Shelley was an enthusiastic acolyte to the use of batteries and electricity. In his days at Oxford as a reaction to bullying he created a hand-cranked battery to shock entrants to his room who would touch the doorknob. He passed his enthusiasm for the ideas of Davy, proposing that giant farms of electric batteries would power utopian cities of the future, onto Mary in their early courtship. It was likely these concepts which initially excited Mary’s imagination to the possibility bringing to life to the dead. While formulating the first chapters of Frankenstein while residing in Bath, Mary reread and referred to Sir Humphry Davy’s reference work on chemistry.

On October 28, 1816, Mary recorded in her diary “Read the Introduction to Sir H. Davy’s Chemistry–write” while in Bath. The “write” refers to the first chapters of her work on her novel, which she had begun seriously on her return from Geneva. She mentioned Davy for her reference in her journals up through November 4 of 1816, delving for a week to write about chemistry and its relation to what she called Natural Philosophy in the chapters 2 and 4 of her notebook drafts.

In later lectures, after the book of Frankenstein was first published, Davy was approached by a young woman asking him if the theory of bringing the reconstructed dead back to life was possible. What his reply was is not recorded but he was apparently sufficiently familiar with the work to feel bemused that the theory which animated Mary Shelley’s fictional creature may have come from him.

frankie_plain_palaisDavy’s other connection to Frankenstein may be only coincidental, though perhaps a bit more than that. In his later life, Sir Humphry Davy left England and traveled, eventually settling in Geneva, Switzerland, spending his later days a short distance from the Villa Diodati, and strolling the lake shores haunted by Mary Shelley’s creation in her novel. Sir Humphry Davy is buried in the cemetery of Geneva’s PlainPalais, where the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son took place and just a few steps from where the modern statue of “Frankie” commemorating the Geneva connection to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still stalks, looking for a reconnection to the scientific father who turned from him.

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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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The Shelleys – Gothic Romance Couple Forever

Mary Shelley and Percy ShelleyMarried Couple

The Shelleys Married

It’s official, Brangelina are breaking up, but the Shelleys are still the eternal romantic couple, and in essence the real love story of Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley married on December 30, 1816 at St Mildred’s Church in London. It was an eventful and turbulent two and half year romance up until then. They had eloped to the continent in the summer of 1814, endured the condemnation of society and estrangement of their families, one miscarriage and the infant death of another child, the suicide of Mary’s sister Fanny and spent that fateful summer of 1816 in Geneva from which Mary’s famous monstrous literary invention would launch them to forever Gothic fandom fame together. They would have to live separately, with Mary moving from one dingy neighborhood to another to avoid the unseemly criticism of their common associates, while Shelley dodged bill collectors, denied the money due from his grandfather’s estate by his father as penalty for his love of Mary, until the suicide of Shelley’s first wife would free him from the restriction of “living in sin”.

Curiously for a couple to be defined by their hurried and long delayed marriage, neither of them really believed in the institution of marriage, but could not avoid the social consequences of the institution. Mary’s philosopher father, William Godwin, had been famous for his intellectual rejection of the idea of marriage, as did Shelley in his concept of “free love” but Godwin had married Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft to placate the judgment of their society and married again to Mary’s step-mother Mary Jane Clairmont. Indeed, it was Godwin, the most theoretical rejecter of the institution who was the hardest on Mary for her unmarried “illicit” relationship with Shelley, not because he believed in sin, but for its reflection on the reputation of his family, rejecting the affection of his daughter, even while accepting money from Shelley for his living expense, so much as to cause the scandalous perception that he had “sold” his daughter to the noble poet.

The modern version of Brad and Angelina at first avoided the artifice of official marriage, but ultimately fell to its hold on the concept of society. Curiously the divorce bill for the dissolution of Mr. and Mrs. Pitt doesn’t cite infidelity, but rather drug use in the home, as a cause of action. The tabloid scandal which had launched the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie romance to the headlines was contest between Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Anniston. Rumors had been spread and are even repeated to today suggesting that Shelley had an affair with Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont. Mary always rejected this idea until her dying day, but Shelley struggled with a dependence on laudanum for much of his life. It seems unlikely they would be broken up by the minor skirmishes of a modern day relationship. The Shelleys had endured so much turbulence and tragedy to be together, so that only Shelley’s tragic early death could break them up, and Mary would never marry again, so purely devoted, making them an eternal couple.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Lord Byron Returns to Chillon in 2016

At least until August 21 in

1816-1820 Byron is back ! Lord Byron’s Return

byron_chillon12016 is the 200th anniversary year of the romantic poets and Frankenstein inspiration in Switzerland. A number of events and exhibits are being offered to celebrate the “romantics summer” of 1816.

Lord George Gordon Byron visited the shores of Lake Geneva for five months in the summer of 1816, from May through October. It was a busy and auspicious time for English Literature. While staying at rented estate, the Villa Diodati in the Cologny suburb of Geneva, and joined by new friends Mary and Percy Shelley, came the now famous origin of the Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron produced his haunting Prisoner of Chillon, inspired by the beautiful castle which guards the eastern lake shore at Montreux, (called Clarens in the days of the romantics).

chillon_castle_sunriseWhile the tale of the ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati which is the common telling of the origin for Frankenstein, of which one is reminded of the line “when the legend becomes the truth, print the legend” is being celebrated with its own 200th Anniversary at the Bodmer Foundation Library in Geneva, the trip of Byron and Percy Shelley around the lake is less familiar and the Chateau Chillon is presenting its own temporary exhibition to celebrate the 200 years since the visit of the poet to its dungeons which inspired him to write of the priest held captive as a political prisoner. The aim of the 2016 bicentennial summer exhibit is to offer an homage to the man who ignited the romantic travel desires of the reading public to follow in the footsteps of the literary pioneers who described beautiful far-away places with such emotion.

Read Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley for the real love story origin of Frankenstein

During the five months stay at Lake Geneva from May 20 until October, the Shelleys and Bryon who had not met previously, became good friends that summer. Mary dedicated the first edition of Frankenstein to the “mad, bad, dangerous to know” poet and Percy Shelley and Bryon rented a boat to explore around the lake. The stop at the Chateau Chillon was brief, like any tourist’s visit might be, but the stories he heard of Francois Bonivard and his treatment in the hands of the Savoys caused him to begin his Prisoner of Chillon verse tale while staying on the Ouchy Riviera of Lausanne.

The “Byron Experience” Exhibition

byron_chillon_bookDuring the special exhibit a self-guided tour of Castle Chillon with present the experience of Byron through documents, rare publications and objects presented in context with a collection of evocative images to present visitors with the scope of work left to us by Byron, the rock star of his age. The exhibition has original and exceptional documents and objects on display lent by various prestigious institutions, including the Geneva State Archives, the National Library of Scotland and the University Library of Lausanne. Among the objects, is a manuscript of “The Prisoner of Chillon”, which was hand copied for Byron by Mary Shelley’s step-sister Claire Clairmont, who was pregnant with Byron’s daughter Allegra at the time. He didn’t get along with her, but she was dutiful to him. Also present is a first published edition, as well as numerous original editions written by Lord Byron.

For touring the sites visited by Bryon and Shelleys, and writing of in their journals, the exhibit offers an “Alpine Journal” guide, to retrace the footsteps of Lord Byron’s and explore the alpine landscapes of which inspired those first tourists so enchanted by Switzerland, that remains an inspirational today as it was 200 years ago. The exhibition is in French, English and German.

A combined ticket is available to see the Summer of 1816 exhibits around the lake, including 1816-1820 Byron is back ! Lord Byron’s Return at Chillon Castle and Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness at the Bodmer Foundation Library.

Other Events in Switzerland celebrating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bryon

mary_shelley_bellinzonaSeveral events are being held in 2016 and 2017 to celebrate Lord Byron and the friends coterie of the friends’ stay in Switzerland. The Musée du Léman holds an exhibition, Wanted! A la chasse sur le lac will be open until January 8, 2017. Byron himself appears in a large fresco by the artist Aloys. In Italian speaking Switzerland, just beyond the newly inaugurated Gotthard Base Tunnel, the Sasso Corbaro Castle of Bellinzona presents an exhibition about Mary Shelley & Frankenstein through the end of July.

For more about  Chillon Castle and Bellinzona in Favorite Castles of Switzerland

From 26 August, a musical comedy version of “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” will be presented at the Grand-Champ theatre in Gland before moving to Geneva. While in Geneva, the Musée Rath has organized an exhibition called “Le retour des Ténèbres” (Return from the Darkness) around the myths of vampires and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster which will run later in the season from December 2, 2016 to 19 March 19, 2017, while the Brocher Foundation Research for the Future of Human Being and Society in Hermance, Switzerland also has an exhibition cycle called 1816-2016: the Frankenstein Bicentennial and symposium June 14-15 on Frankenstein’s Shadow: A Bicentennial Assessment of the Frankenstein Narrative’s Influence on biotechnology, medicine and policy

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Did Mary Shelley lie about the origin of Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley's Lost Book HateThe story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

This telling appeared in the 1831 edition of the book, after the novels first appearance in 1818 without an author’s name and after becoming a scandalous sensation, came out in a new edition in 1822, with an introduction written by Percy Shelley, and then again in 1831 after Shelley’s death in Italy, with the lengthy preface, in which Mary said she included it after constant requests by readers to tell of how she came up with the story, told of how she struggled for several days to think of a worthy ghost story, and then finally one night, as she lay to sleep, “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.”

But is this story the full truth? As Mary said herself, “Everything must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Authors do not wake up one morning and invent a full story. An idea, a concept, a vision, surely, but invariably informed by a personal past, a connection to something deeper in a lived experience. Mary drew for her characters and setting the world of Switzerland around her, the streets of the Plain Palais of Geneva and Mont Blanc outside her window. Yet, from where would the inner life of such a collection of characters of passion and betrayal come from in a young woman of eighteen? The influences of the exciting sciences of the day, electrified vermicelli and the buried, thought dead, ringing the bells from their coffins as they awoke from comas before they might be buried, were all around in the brewing ferment of the enlightening days of the late 18th and early 19th century. The author could infuse and develop these themes as the story took shape over time. But did Mary draw upon an earlier work to shape her first published book?

At the end of her “Six Weeks Tour” elopement with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire in 1814, Mary began her first attempt at a novel, which she entitled “Hate”. She never finished it or published it, and this seminal work of a young budding author of remarkable talent has never seen the light of day and Mary Shelley did not reveal its themes or content.

There has been considerable academic discussion over the years about how much her husband, Percy Shelley, may have contributed to the writing of the Frankenstein novel. Certainly, he encouraged her in the writing of it, and he may have offered some editing of it, but how much does he actually appear in the characters of the novel, and who else is represented in the pages? Was Mary’s first attempt at a novel, with the theme of an unexplained hate, also an influence or cannibalized in the writing of the second work? And was Mary Shelley being artfully discreet in her description of the events of that summer in Geneva?

In her public writings, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was very careful in her telling of personal events to leave in the editor’s bin any of the extraordinary personal trauma of her life, mentioning only in the slightest passing of a phrase the deep emotional struggles and passions that must have accompanied the passionate personalities which surrounded her. Deaths of her first born, two suicides, the scorn of society, the longing for a mother and hated step-mother, betrayed by an idolized father and the willful schemes of a step-sister which brought them, with an illegitimate pregnancy, to the doorstep of Lord Byron’s summer rental.

This suggests a thematic origin of something well beyond a ghost story about the hubris of science born in an instant from the image of a waking dream. Did that waking image really come from a past experience and more deeper personal meaning than just a casual story competition. Why did she never reveal from where she derived the unusual title name?

And did Mary Shelley finally reveal the truth behind this waking vision shortly before her death in a discovered confession in the form of a personal memoir of her first journey to Switzerland, in a fuller and more intimate “revised” version of her six weeks tour in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness at the Bodmer Foundation

200 Year Anniversary in Geneva

frankenstein_illustrationEver since the publishing of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s masterwork “Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus”, Geneva, Switzerland has been the touchstone of lore surround the creation of the most famous work of Gothic literature, with the story of the competition between the romantics gathered on a dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley had a nightmare, waking dream, where she got the idea for a creature brought to life by a student of science.

While a number of myths and suppositions about the summer of 1816 have arisen in the 200 years since that time, an exhibit at the Martin Bodmer Foundation Library, just a short walk from the Villa Diodati, rented by Lord Gordon Byron for that summer and the nearby house rented by the Shelleys on the shores of Lake Geneva, has opened to celebrate the creation of the monster of id, of Shelley’s novel.

bodmer_frontIn the lower exhibit floor of foundation library, a row of glass cases hold 15 hand-written note pages of the first from draft version of the classic story beginning “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created; he held up the curtain, and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.”

The Villa Diodati is now converted to private residence apartments, the gardens of the villa over-looking the lake where then Mary Godwin (she wouldn’t marry Shelley until that December) and the pregnant Claire Clairmont might have strolled while Byron and Shelley were out exploring the lake, will be open for guided tours to the public during the length of the exhibit until October 9.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel was first published anonymously in 1818, and one of the editions found in the exhibit is inscribed to “To Lord Byron from the Author”.

Mary also wrote of the gloominess of the weather that summer and the exhibit features a weather report for June remarking on the late leafing of the trees. The weather has since been attributed to a volcanic eruption Mt. Tambora in Indonesia which created havoc with the climate across the globe that year.

While in Geneva other Shelley sites that can be visited including the statue of the “creature” named “Frankie” on the Plainpalais where the murder of the Frankenstein’s son took place in the novel, the Hotel d’Angleterre (not the actual one the Shelleys stayed at but a block from the spot, the birth house of Jean Jacques Rousseau whose writing ignited the romantic literature movement and drew the English romantics to Switzerland, and spots around the lake visited by Bryon and Shelley, from the Chateau Chillon  castle which inspired the Prisoner of Chillon for Byron, and the Hotel de l’Ancre in Lausanne where he began to write the work for which he abandoned his original idea of a vampire from legends he had heard in Turkey that he turned over to Polidori.

Creation of Darkness May 14-Oct 9 Martin Bodmer Foundation

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