Tag Archives: Mary Shelley

Frankenstein & Mary Shelley Books 2018

With the 200th Anniversary year upon us, a number of new books and takes on the Frankenstein story and Mary Shelley biographies have made their appearance, from indie publishers, self-publishing and mainstream.

There are a whole variety of stage productions at theaters large and small, from stagings of the original story adaptations to the more fanciful, including the puppet show version. The “Mary Shelley” movie should make an appearance in theaters in 2018 and Universal Cable Productions has announced a new untitled TV series project from Adam Simon and Robert Masello in which Mary Shelley is to play a part along with other 19th Century authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and H.G. Wells, in a reimagined “secret society of authors” monsterfest set in Victorian England. Mrs. Shelley has already appeared in the “Frankenstein Chronicles”, the London murder series, going into its second season.

Here is a list of some of the books recently released or soon to come.

Monster: The Early Life of Mary Shelley – by Mark Arnold

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley with and introductions – by Charlotte Gordon

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley – by Charlotte Gordon

Daughter of Earth and Water: Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – by Noel Gerson

The Complete Frankenstein: 200 Year Edition: 1818 and 1831 Versions

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein – By Fiona Sampson

Mary’s Monster: Live, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein – by Lita Judge

Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in “Frankenstein” – by Eileen Hunt Bonning

Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein’s Creator – by Catherine Reef

Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds – by Mary Shelley and David H. Guston

The Determined Heart: The Tale of Mary Shelley and Her Frankenstein – by Antoinette May

Mary, Who Wrote Frankenstein – by Linda Baily (Author) Julia Sarda (Illustrator) A Picture Book!

Son of Terror: Frankenstein Continued, A Sequel – by William A Chanler

And of course…

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries – Paperback

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries – Audiobook

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Publisher of Frankenstein First Edition – Lackington

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

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Temple of The Muses Book Emporium

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

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

james_lackington_portrait

James Lackington

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

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

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

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

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

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Get Mary Shelley Memoirs Audiobook Free with Trail at Audible

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook at Amazon

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Do Robots Get Lawyers?

What Rights for Artificial Intelligence Persons?

c3po_ticketDid 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

  1.   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;
  2.   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;
  3. 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.

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“Mary Shelley” to Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the movie, (formerly Storm in the Stars) has been announced as the Saturday Night Gala Premiere film for the Toronto International Film Festival, held from September 7 to 17, 2017. Toronto is one of the most commercial festivals on the International circuit, launching films like the Academy Award winning “Room” and horror film “Cabin Fever”.

The film directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley was filmed on location in Dublin and County Wicklow, Ireland and Luxembourg, was shot in Ireland with funds from the Irish Film Board by Parallel Film, the same company behind Soairse Ronan’s’ “Brooklyn”.

Mary Shelley tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing but yet finding inspiration when she meets Percy and is struck by love, but Percy is married with a child (actually it was two). Mary soon becomes pregnant with Percy’s child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and grieving for their child, they depart from London and Percy introduces Mary to Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva and the a stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein Creature story. Mary struggles to find a publisher and must fight for her monster and her identity.

The film also stars Douglas Booth as Percy, Maisie Williams as Mary Scottish girlhood friend Isabel Baxter, Bel Powley as Claire, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane as the parents, and Tom Sturridge as the mad, bad Lord Byron. The original script is by Emma Jenson with Alan Maloney and Ruth Coad producing for Parallel Films with Amy Baer of Gidden Media who originated the project.

The story covers some of the same ground as “The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Romantics” but skips lightly over the 1814 elopement trip and jumps to 1816 to 1818.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

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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.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Get Mary Shelley Memoirs Audiobook Free with Trail at Audible

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook at Amazon

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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.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Get Mary Shelley Memoirs Audiobook Free with Trail at Audible

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook at Amazon

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Nightmare AI: Can Artificial Intelligence Machines Learn to Scare?

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

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

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

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

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

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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

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

 

 

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Frankenstein in Frozen Yogurt and Waffle – the Franken Fraffle

franken_fraffle_sloan.jpgIt’s been 200 years since the story of Frankenstein was first envisioned in a fever dream of an 18 year old girl’s imagination, and countless movies, plays, novels and Halloween scares have followed, but you’ve never really “arrived” as a true cultural icon until someone names a FroYo treat in your honor. In the novel, the Frankenstein creature made of reanimated worm food escapes to the frozen arctic, but since the ice of the arctic is melting, making a frozen dessert of sweetened cream and amoebas seems just and appropriate.

London’s most indulgent British frozen yoghurt parlour, the Sloane Bros. Frozen Yoghurt Co., is opening its first location outside of London, in the Intu Victoria Centre of Nottingham, not far from Shelley friend Lord Byron’s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. To further its unique philosophy of combining British tradition and innovation and to celebrate 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the Sloane Bros. have introduced a new product intended as a treat on a treat on a treat, featuring its thick and creamy British-sourced fat-free frozen yoghurt accompanied by scrumptious toppings and freshly made waffles. The creature of Shelley’s imagination had no name, but this one does, christened the Mighty Franken’ Fraffle®.

Just like the famous monster sewn together of parts imagined in a dream by its literary progenitor, taking their customers’ love for both the company’s “froyos” and freshly-made waffles, the Sloane Bros. scientific team put their heads together one dark and stormy evening and in a flash of waking vision they came up with the ultimate indulgent treat and a monster was created! But a sweet creature combining all their tasty sweet treats. And it’s trademarked so no-one else will ever name anything the Fraffle, at least until Universal buys it and teams it up with the WereWoffle®. I just trademarked it, so stay away.

The Sloane Bros.’ creamy frozen yoghurt, freshly made waffles and thick refreshing smoothies are available at both the company’s London Brick Lane and Nottingham’s Intu Victoria Centre locations. And as the Frankenstein creature himself might say “Fire bad…Fraffle Yoghurt Goood”!

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Frankenstein Day – Mary Shelley’s Birthday August 30

Mary_Shelley_1820_cropNo kids get to go home from school. Precious few, but perhaps the most fervent will dress up with a flat-top haircut with bolts in their neck, more likely to save that for Halloween. It doesn’t appear on most calendars, and probably very few but the most ardent of fans know it at all. August 30th is rather unofficially, Frankenstein  Day. It doesn’t celebrate the creation of the monster, or the book, but the birth of the story’s author, Mary Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797 in a multiple residence (rather like a Regency era apartment building) called the Polygon, in Somers Town, London. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of author and philosopher, William Godwin, died 10 days later of sepsis. Godwin did not believe in the institution of marriage in theory, but he married Wollstonecraft because society expected it. Her pain wracked lingering death was horrible for him, and his daughter, Mary Godwin, later to marry Percy Shelley, (he didn’t really believe philosophically in marriage either, although he did it twice) was deeply affected by not having a living birth mother and idolized her as an author (Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and free thinker for the rest of her life.

Much of the impetus of the story Mary Shelley developed into the tale of horror and philosophical life view we now know as “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus” came from this longing for a parent who had abandoned her by death. Mary Shelley is virtually the mother of the Frankenstein Diaries, and August 30th is also coincidentally my mother’s birthday, so, Happy Birthday, Moms!

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