MARY SHELLEY IN DUNDEE, SCOTLAND – BEING HUMAN 2015
Dundee Firth of Tay 1814
In November of 2015, the city of Dundee, Scotland will explore the time the author of Frankenstein spent there in her youth. “Mary Shelley’s Dundee: Re-Animating a City” will be hosted by the University of Dundee as part of the city’s participation in the Being Human Festival of 2015. The festival which runs from November 12 to 22 is a collection of events celebrating the humanities held across the UK at 41 Universities and Institutions.
The program in Dundee will include the production of original theatrical adaptations related to Frankenstein and offer film screenings to examine Many Wollstonecraft Shelley’s teenage years in Dundee in the years before her work as a published author. The exhibition also proposes to relate the impact of her famous first novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” on modern writers, artists and filmmakers. The “Mary Shelley’s Dundee” exhibition is intended to further the cause of humanities research and its relevance to Scotland today. The Dundee exploration is the brainchild of Dr. Daniel Cook, a Lecturer in English at Dundee University and blogger proponent of Romanticism and Romantic Literature in education, who refers to Mary Shelley as “the mother of modern science fiction”.
The Frankenstein author was still Mary Godwin during her visits to Scotland when her father William Godwin had become acquainted with a Dundee fellow radical thinker, William Baxter. The teenage Mary, who had been suffering from an unexplained partial paralysis, was sent to stay with the Baxters in 1812 when she was 14 years old for her health, and to escape the rising contentious conflicts with her step-mother Mary Jane Clairmont-Godwin. Mary would spend time with the four Baxter daughters, with youthful experiments in mysticism and her explorations of the Scottish hills, while trips with the Baxters would expose her to the North Sea tales of sailors which would later appear in the wraparound telling of the sea captain who picks up Victor Frankenstein, chasing his monster, from the icy waters in the Frankenstein novel.
The story of “Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics” begins shortly following Mary Godwin’s second ten month trip to Scotland and Dundee, and her return to London when she would meet Percy Bysshe Shelley as a 16 year old and begin their tumultuous love affair and elopement to Paris. Mary recounts her time in Scotland to her half-sister Fanny Imlay-Godwin, and the inspiration to try her first formative steps as a writer, to follow the footsteps of the mother she idolizes but never knew, Mary Wollstonecraft.