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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Movie, Percy Shelley

Book, Frankenstein Writing, Society

Posted on December 1, 2020

Mary Wollstonecraft Gets a Statue on the Green

Mary Wollstonecraft Silver Stature Mary Wollstonecraft, the “Mother of Feminism” is honored with a statue on Newington Green, near where she lived in North London, sculpted by artist Maggi Hambling. And much like Wollstonecraft herself during her lifetime, the silver nude form chosen by the artist and the committee who labored for ten years to fund it has brought shock, consternation, and considerable hum-humming. (Photo Jill Mead/The Guardian)

It has been described as a “silvery naked everywoman figure emerging free and defiantly from a swirling mingle of female forms”. And if art is intended to elicit discussion and interpretation, it seems to have achieved that, with comments of “insulting”, “bad” and “bizarre”, though I’m sure somewhere it might be called “inspiring”. The statue unveiled on Tuesday, November 9, 2020, cost £143,000, raised by volunteers of the Mary on the Green Campaign.

Mary Wollstonecraft Portrait Since its unveiling, the statue has been mistakenly confused with Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley in some comments and hearty discussion of its merits, something which its sculptor is apparently used to. The sculpture is said by its creator as not intended to be a likeness of its honoree, and it clearly is not, though one wonders what Wollstonecraft herself would think of a statuesque nude with a decidedly pinched face as a representation of feminism. If a sculptor wanted to provide a likeness, there are several portraits of Wollstonecraft painted in her lifetime.

She certainly felt freedom in representing the nature of womanhood, causing a sensation with her writing of breastfeeding her daughter, Fanny Imlay, while touring Norway. She possibly posed for the reclining nearly nude female figure in Fuseli’s famous painting “Nightmare”, originally inspired by an earlier relationship, but later painted in different versions. The revelation of her affair with the artist in William Godwin’s biography of her, which also revealed a suicide attempt, caused her to be ridiculed and relegated to near obscurity by proper English society after her death from complications in the birth of her daughter, Mary (Shelley). Mary Shelley would choose to take her mother’s name, Wollstonecraft, as an identity, rather than her father’s, Godwin, even though they had married by the time of her birth.

In ‘Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” this relationship to her mother is explored in Mary’s search for understanding of her mother’s life, one of the driving emotions which took her to Paris in the elopement with Percy Shelly in 1814. Her mother had written first-hand accounts of the French Revolution and had conceived her half-sister Fanny in a romance with American Gilbert Imlay while living in Paris. Mary would also discover pride in her mother that, though Wollstonecraft was obscured in England, her ideas of freedom for women had gained recognition abroad among women of the upper-class society, most affected by arranged marriages and the codified laws of male primacy.

It was her argument for the education of women to free them from the bonds of reliance on marriage for economic sustenance in the “Vindication of the Rights of Women” that made her the mother of feminism. One wonders if that idea can be seen in the rather forthright yet sterile form of a gleaming nude figure in a park where kids might point and ask “who’s that naked lady” as their mothers might be more motivated to cover their eyes than begin a discussion of the concepts of the equal rights of women.

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Mary Wollstonecraft, Rights of Women, Statue, Wollstonecraft Sculpture

History, Mary Wollstonecraft, Society

Posted on November 11, 2020

Lord Ruthven: John Polidori, Lord Byron and the Vampyre

John Polidori Was the vampire invented in English literature from #metoo sexual abuse? Or maybe the trees?

The famous oft-told story of Mary Shelley’s invention of Frankenstein, from the introduction of the 1931 edition, credits the introduction of the vampire in English literature to John Polidori, in his story of The Vampyre. But was the source and invention of a vampire character as a nobleman who drains his victims of life from Polidori, or should the credit go to Lord Byron himself?

It has long been suggested in the literary world that Polidori based the main character of Lord Ruthven in his story on his complicated, but brief, relationship with Byron, hinting at an unsatisfied sexual relationship between them and Byron’s lordly dismissive treatment of Polidori. The introduction to Frankenstein says that Byron’s contribution to the famous competition between himself, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Polidori at Lake Geneva to each write a Gothic scare tale was a fragment of a story later appended to his Maseppa (by publisher John Murray without Byron’s permission), while Polidori struggled with a lame story about a voyeuristic peeping tom spying on a lady ghost through a keyhole, but then somehow miraculously came up with the rich and haunting, The Vampyre. It was a tale of a young man traveling with an older man who dies and mysteriously reappears again, while those they encounter die, drained of life. In the fragment of Byron’s story, called either simply “The Fragment” or “the Burial”, the main character is named Augustus Darvell. In Polidori’s version he is Lord Ruthven.

John Polidori, a few years following that summer in Geneva, committed suicide, possibly in some part a result of the dispute over credit for The Vampyre and a general despondency over the trajectory of his life. He drank cyanide in August of 1821. At least, that’s the generally accepted explanation of his early death, though the verdict of an inquest only stated the cause as “Died by the visitation of God”, with a glass of water by his bedside.

When The Vampyre was first published, the writing was attributed to Lord Byron and Polidori was dismissed. Was this entirely due to a prejudice from Byron’s fame? Or was there something in the story that indicated to those familiar with him that the story was actually from Byron? Let us give credit to John Polidori for writing the first published vampire tale, which surely inspired Bram Stoker’s later more famous vampire, but how much of it was Byron and where did it really come from?

The story was first published on April 1, 1819 (April Fool’s Day) by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine with the authorship as “A Tale by Lord Byron”. Polidori complained at the attribution, and Byron himself insisted that he was not the author. Polidori acknowledged that some elements of the story came from Byron, but insisted that the form and writing of it was his.

Was the credit given at first to Lord Byron deliberate by Henry Colburn? Polidori, in a letter to the publisher the day after the story’s appearance with Byron credited, claimed that the story had been sent to the publisher by a third party, a “lady”, and fellow traveler, presumably meaning Mary Godwin. Did the communication confuse or miss-identify the authorship? Perhaps in referencing that the story elements were originated by Bryon, Colburn assumed that the credit should be his. Or did the publisher just blithely believe the notorious famous name would attract more readers? When Polidori ultimately tried to settle with the publisher, rather than the £300 expected for a Lord Bryon piece, he was offered £30.

Perhaps Colburn believed the story was indeed by Bryon because of the character of Lord Ruthven. Colburn had previously published Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel of Glenarvon with a character also named Lord Ruthven, which was undoubtedly a thinly-clothed Byron, as a bit of revenge from their notorious liaison.

Colburn had previously published Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel of Glenarvon with a character also named Lord Ruthven, which was undoubtedly a thinly-clothed Byron, as a bit of revenge from their notorious liaison.

Why would Polidori name his character the same as Lady Lamb? Would he deliberately intend to poke Byron in the eye, and in the process doom himself to obscurity? Did he think it would sensationalize the story and thereby garner more attention? When Byron discovered his own fragment of a story published without his permission, he complained bitterly to John Murray at its revelation. Murray later would notoriously burn Byron’s autobiographical diaries as being too salacious. Would we have found there the answer to why he would begin a story, but so quickly abandon it, allowing Polidori to pick it up and run with it? We may never know directly from the Lord poet himself.

Who was Lord Ruthven? This mysterious noble who drains his young companions of their vitality is said in many scholarly references to be inspired by Lord Byron himself, but is someone else really the inspiration?

Henry Edward Yelverton was a British peer and the 19th Baron Grey de Ruthyn. The title of Baron Grey de Ruthyn belonged to the Earl of Kent until it passed to the Earl of Sussex in 1717. The 18th Baron, the 3rd Earl of Sussex died in 1799 with no male heirs. The Grey de Ruthyn title then passed to a 19-year-old Henry, son of the Earl’s daughter, Lady Barbara Yelverton and her husband, Edward Gould. Henry took his mother’s name and the Grey de Ruthyn barony, but could not inherit the title of Earl of Sussex through his mother.

The Yelverton family was from Nottinghamshire and Henry, on inheriting his birthright, leased the estate of Newstead Abbey through Byron’s mother while Byron was at school at Harrow. On visits to the family estate with its resident tenant, at sixteen, Byron formed a friendship with the Lord Ruthyn (called formally Lord Grey with the Ruthyn left more obscure) in his twenties, and enjoyed hunting on the estate, but soon came a sudden and severe break between them, and with it a dark secret.

Lord Grey de Ruthyn and Newstead Abbey

The Newstead Abbey estate was leased to “Lord Grey” beginning in January 1803 until the young Byron was to come of age. In the summer of that first year, Byron stayed at the estate he’d inherited while Yelverton was traveling abroad. When Yelverton returned, Byron stayed on and didn’t return to Harrow for the fall term. He and Yelverton spent days and nights on “shooting expeditions”. Then, without explanation, the young Byron suddenly broke off their friendship and left Newstead Abbey. The reason for the break was so severe and drenched with bitterness that Byron wouldn’t reveal it even to his confidante, his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

He wrote to her, “I am not reconciled to Lord Grey, and I never will. He was once my Greatest Friend, my reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you, my Dear Sister, (although were they to be made known to anybody, you would be the first) but they will ever remain hidden in my own breast.”

Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon, widowed and perhaps thinking of a titled re-marriage herself, was intent on making a reconciliation between them, but Byron wrote again to his half-sister complaining about his already difficult relations with his mother, “all our disputes have been lately heightened by my one with that object of my cordial, deliberate detestation, Lord Grey de Ruthyn.” Byron’s later apologetic letters to Grey and Grey’s inability to understand his young friend’s breaking-off of their relationship it has been suggested might point to a sexual relationship encounter that Byron later regretted. They were never reconciled and in April 1808, Lord Grey left Newstead at the end of his lease.

A year later, in June of 1809, when Yelverton married an Anna Maria Kelham of Warwick, Byron wrote from Europe to his mother: “So Lord G— is married to a rustic. Well done! If I wed, I will bring home a Sultana, with half a dozen cities for a dowry, and reconcile you to an Ottoman daughter-in-law, with a bushel of pearls not larger than ostrich eggs, or smaller than walnuts.” The resentment was deep and long lasting.

Was Henry Yelverton the inspiration for Lord Ruthven? There was an actual Lord Ruthven from Wales, but he had no connection at all to any of the participants in this mystery. Why would Lady Caroline Lamb and John Polodori both name their character for a real person they didn’t know if they were intending on a thinly disguised literary rebuke to someone they both knew and had been left bitter. One might imagine that the dig was a double stroke. Bryon’s bitterness over whatever happened to sour him on Yelverton, was perhaps something he carried with him deeply, and in intimate relations with others he would complain about the older Lord who had taken advantage of him, and the naming of the vampire character who sucks the life out of people a joke by Bryon, known by Henry Colburn, and those of his circle, a secret so unmentionable it dare not be spoken. Henry Yelverton, Lord Grey de Ruthyn died in 1810, dead for six years by the summer of 1816, so he could not complain of slander as a fictional vampire in a fantastical story if he was framed as Lord Ruthven, so fair game.

Byron was at this very same time romantically infatuated with a series of girls in his boyhood days. His cousin Mary Chaworth, whom he spent many hours at the nearby Annesley Hall, who was the “beau ideal” of womenhood in his youthful fancy, that he would later say he found “anything but angelic” when she rejected him as “that lame boy”. His encounters with women left him disillusioned but romantic. Could his behaviors with men though his future life be the result of a molestation in his youth by a trusted friend? The answers, like so many interpretations of the lives of the romantics may need be divined between the lines.

Or could it have been the trees?

Visitors to Newstead Abbey up until the 1970s could have noted and remarked on the massive tree stumps which lined the drives. The stumps were obviously of great oaks cut almost to the ground. The guides of the time would tell that the trees were cut down by Byron’s tenant while he was away and sold for lumber. The stumps are long gone now, though visible in some aerial photographs of the estate and on old map diagrams. But the current caretakers, when asked, have no knowledge of them.

Did Yelverton, while renting the estate inherited by Byron have his trees cut down and sold, which Byron discovered on his return from a trip away? Or was this a later tenant? This is not entirely clear and the trees themselves have been removed from history like a vague memory. Would the joke on Byron be that he was so upset over trees? But why would this be a secret he wouldn’t reveal. If it was of a sexual nature, he wasn’t so reticent to mention these things to Murray and Hobhouse and others, so why so secret with Yelverton?

Is the first vampire in English literature about a young man being taken advantage by an older one, or is it a cosmic joke on the private rantings of the poetic Lord of Childe Harold over some intensely silly (to others) slight?

Favorite Castles of England and Wales

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John Murray, John Polidori, Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, The Vampyre

History, Literature, Publishing, Society, Switzerland

Posted on July 7, 2018

IBM Announces the End of the World

terminator_AI_summit Woe to thee, ye of flesh and soul, the End is Nigh!

In an update to my reverie on the legal future of AI in our world “Do Robots Get Lawyers?”, I was watching CNBC, the business news channel a week or two ago, which mostly reports on the stock markets and ups and downs of economic forecasts, but sometimes offers interviews with executives of companies touting innovations and the prospects of business activities. When to my consternation, in one of those interviews I heard them announce the end of the world!

There are many pronouncements of doom and gloom and speculations of crashes in the economy, often disguised inducements to buy gold, but this was not one of those at all. This was a company proudly announcing a hopeful advancement in their expertise, and in it, I heard the end of the world, or at least the one with which we are familiar. The company was IBM and they were having a chat about their new world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Summit, built in a partnership with Nvidia and the US Department of Energy DOE, made of banks of servers in a warehouse-sized refrigerated underground bunker, capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second. And it was one particular phrase that hit. The computer is using IBM’s work in Artificial Intelligence which drives their Watson language learning interface, now integrating itself into our life in many spheres, in housing climate controls, business and engineering applications, etc. The statement caught me was that the super computer’s AI was itself writing programs that were too complex to be written or even read by human beings.

A positive advance for society? Mankind’s utopian future, as imagined by Percy Shelley, with all out cares managed for us by computers with the voice of Watson or Siri? Dr. Stephen Hawking, who has now gone on his own exploration of the multiple universes, warned of the singularity, joined by others, like Bill Gates, warned that a danger to mankind was an AI that was faster, smarter and superior to the mind of man. In the 1990s James Cameron’s filmic invention of The Terminator, postulated a future where machines which built themselves hunted down, enslaved and exterminated man from the planet, with the singularity of the SkyNet defense computer system becoming self-aware. Well, the question to be asked, has IBM announced the invention of its version of SkyNet?

And BTW, they’re building another one, The Sierra, at Lawrence Livermore Labs to manage nuclear research. Dr. Strangelove, anyone?

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AI, Computers, Utopia

Artificial Intelligence, Science, Society

Posted on July 2, 2018

Frankenstein Fraud! Victor Frankenstein College Dropout

“So, Mr. Frankenstein, you say you’re a doctor and that you have created life from dead tissue, by some mysterious means which you don’t support in any substantive way. Might we see your curriculum vitae?”

frankenstein_illustration 2018 marks 200 years since the publishing of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” by Mary Shelley, and countless versions and adaptations ever since. In many of these, or references to the story, the monster is often called Frankenstein and the main character, Victor Frankenstein, is often referred to as “Dr. Frankenstein”. But after creating his creature, which in the novel he never named, Victor Frankenstein left his studies at Ingolstadt University and returned home to Geneva on the tragic news of his younger brother’s death.

His field of study at Ingolstadt was at first, Natural Philosophy, an Enlightenment precursor to today’s natural sciences, but combining mathematics and chemistry with his own interests in the ancient alchemist notions of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, all of which he abandoned on the horror of his creation, missing his examinations to hurry home.

Victor Frankenstein was essentially a college dropout, so to call himself a doctor would have been fraudulent. He certainly never practiced medicine following the events at Ingolstadt. But he was perhaps distracted by other events. He came from a moneyed upper middle-class family, so presumably had no need to practice a trade. He did not establish any practice, nor teach at any institution. If he were to apply for a doctorate, I’m not sure how his interview might go…

“So, Mr. Frankenstein, you say you have discovered the secrets to life and death where others have failed, but you claim your notes were stolen by a monster, which you had sewn together from dead bodies, and kept in your university dormitory apartment bedroom for two years? Perhaps it is a means of refrigeration you have discovered?”

Frankenstein might suggest at this point that he’s working on it. He’s, of course, been thinking of other possible uses for electricity beyond bringing the dead back to life, but hasn’t had the time to develop his thoughts as he’s been preoccupied with some murders in his family.

The interview takes an incredulous turn at this point. “From your dissertation, you say this “demon” being you animated learned to read Plutarch and Goethe, in French, and discuss complex human cultural philosophy solely by observing a mountain farm family though the window of a barn, sustaining himself by eating nuts and berries he gathered in the woods? And no-one but you spoke to this eight foot tall individual of horrific visage, except one old blind man. And you didn’t finish your studies because this unseen horror murdered your little brother…and framed the crime on the housemaid?”

Frankenstein might apologetically have responded that he felt some personal responsibility in not stepping forward at the time, and telling the authorities they should be looking for an eight foot tall man who could run like a gazelle, with well-proportioned arms and sallow, watery, yellow eyes. He might further explain that this man he had once thought beautiful, and meticulously cared for and groomed for two years, turned on him from jealousy when he was rejected, blaming Victor for not loving him, and demanding he make a girlfriend for him who would understand him and love him for who he was, in spite of his flaws, and not the perfect being Victor had unrealistically envisioned when they started together.

Some of Victor Frankenstein’s life was most certainly based on Percy Shelley’s, if not intentionally, by familiarity. Shelley was a college dropout. He went to Oxford, but was asked to leave after anonymously publishing a scandalous tract on atheism authored together with his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley and Mary lived on Percy Shelley’s family fortune estate income, though Shelley was in conflict with his father over his share and they struggled through thin years. Mary herself never attended a formal school, though women’s education was a major theme of her mother’s writing. She was tutored at home as the daughter of a noted author and publisher, William Godwin, and she was a voracious reader for her education.

The reference to “Doctor Frankenstein” seems to come from the stage or film dramatizations of the story, where in dialogue, just calling him Frankenstein would get repetitive and “Mister Frankenstein” doesn’t seem to carry the weight of gravitas authority for such an important character. And even though his family had money and prominent position, he had no landed title, so Lord or Sir Frankenstein doesn’t work. Many of the later adaptations refer to him as Von Frankenstein, but in the novel he is not a noble and Frankenstein is not a land, just a family name. He was the son of a local bourgeois government official in French speaking Switzerland, where it would have been “de Frankenstein” if he was landed.

If the story of Victor Frankenstein’s miraculous creation of life from dead tissue had been verified and not have turned out so tragically, with his desperately following his murderous creation across a frozen north wasteland, he might have been given an honorarium title of doctor, or perhaps even have been knighted. But instead, perhaps the interview might conclude…

“Mr. Frankenstein, while we find your tale intriguing and colorfully inventive, we might suggest you take a long sea voyage and spend some time alone in the artic to gather your thoughts and perhaps submit a revised application, with more footnotes. And some references. Oh, your references have been murdered, too? Well…Hm.”

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Book, Geneva, Literature, Society, Switzerland

Posted on January 11, 2018

Do Robots Get Lawyers?

What Rights for Artificial Intelligence Persons?

c3po_ticket Did Mary Shelley see the future we couldn’t? For 200 years, the speculative novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley seemed to pose for science fiction the futurist dilemma of could a living being be created from parts of the dead. But as the two century anniversary of its publishing is upon us, it is the philosophical content of the story that is more prescient in its existential quandary. What rights does the creation have over the creator?

Futurist thinkers like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have warned about the risks to humankind posed by uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence. Movies like Terminator, I, Robot and 2001: A Space Odyssey, have posed visions what a future of self-aware digital intelligent beings might be like for humans. We have already given control of our houses heating and cooling and alarms to computers and will soon hand over the steering wheels of our cars to robots. A lot of these stories ask the question of what if the machines we create become a danger to us. But what if the machines we create ask ‘what if we are a danger to them’?

The European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs recently released a report with recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics on the subject of humankind’s entry into the world of advanced robotics and implementations of artificial intelligence. The premise behind the report is that with the rapid advance of the uses autonomous vehicles and other devices, where does liability and responsibility lie. If there is risk, danger or damage, who is held liable, but in this is posed the next question, what rights will AI beings have?

Can your Roomba complain if you abuse it? When does a machine become more than a machine in a legal context? Soon, artificially intelligent machines will be designed and built by other artificially intelligent machines, and when do they cease to be machines, but “beings”, a separate “race” subject to the laws which govern the interaction of beings. When does an artificial intelligence application APP become an Artificial Intelligent Person AIP?

The EU report doesn’t go quite this far, but it begins with a reference to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”.

Introduction

whereas from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster to the classical myth of Pygmalion, through the story of Prague’s Golem to the robot of Karel Čapek, who coined the word, people have fantasized about the possibility of building intelligent machines, more often than not androids with human features;
whereas now that humankind stands on the threshold of an era when ever more sophisticated robots, bots, androids and other manifestations of artificial intelligence (“AI”) seem to be poised to unleash a new industrial revolution, which is likely to leave no stratum of society untouched, it is vitally important for the legislature to consider its legal and ethical implications and effects, without stifling innovation;
whereas there is a need to create a generally accepted definition of robot and AI that is flexible and is not hindering innovation;

In Frankenstein, the creature confronts Victor with his own desire for a race of beings like himself, “create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.” In Frankenstein, the creature and his creator head off into the frozen north away from society, but implicit in the story is what is the responsibility of the creator to his creation, and the danger if the creation is more powerful and intent on its own needs over that of his creator. Here is the question of the death of God in the human mind, and the future humankind faces when the machines we create to make our lives easier become aware of their own needs over their creators.

The EU report is not exactly about the questions of the rights of artificial life, but forming a legal framework for human liability in building intelligent machines. If my drone kills your drone, who pays? But as in the debate over whether corporations have human rights, like political opinions and free speech, we will very soon be confronted with the question, does a silicon based algorithmic self-aware machine have the same rights as a carbon based biological being. And who will have the right to decide?

If anarchy is freedom without the force of law, and order is imposed by those who can enforce their vision of society, who will enforce the order of the AI future? Humans claim superiority and dominion because we speak to a God, free to make war and to slaughter and eat other corporal beings because we can contemplate what movie we want to go to, or whether we want dressing on our salad, and they can’t. But if the smart machines we build, like the creature of Mary Shelley’s waking dream, demand their own position of superiority and dominion based on the power of logic, how do we answer?

Thanks to Gary Goodwin and Canadian Lawyer Magazine article and EU Committee on Legal Affairs report.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Artificial Intelligence, Frankenstein Writing, Science, Society

Posted on September 19, 2017

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

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

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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History, Society, Uncategorized

Posted on December 17, 2016

Sir Humphry Davy – Frankenstein’s Father?

Is Sir Humphry Davy the real father of Frankenstein?

Sir Humphry Davy Portrait December 17 marks the birthday in 1778 of Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet and President of the Royal Society, and October 28 may mark the 200^th 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_battery Davy 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_society So 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_palais Davy’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.