Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
On a winter’s day in January, our family huddled inside a warm church in North London. We were running late and seated towards the back. This suited our three teenage children, who had reached the stage of life where they so much wanted to be invisible that they drew attention to themselves.
‘How long are they going to be married for?’ asked my fourteen-year-old son. I think he meant to ask how long the service would take.
We had returned from Rome the night before, so we were tired. My wife had been part of this colourful community twenty years previously and it has remained a mooring point in her life. Bernini had built the colonnade of St Peter’s Square in Rome, which we had visited during the week, to express a welcome to the whole world. This place did it without so much fuss. On the way in, a gentleman introduced me to his husband.
Now we were celebrating the wedding of a young woman whom Jenny had looked after as a toddler what seemed like a fortnight ago. Grace had been working among women who struggled with every kind of challenge. She was a person with a strong and gentle sense of where she stood in the world. Today she was standing beside Harry, a superb performance poet. His extraordinary feats of comic verbal dexterity had attracted over two million views of one of his appearances on YouTube. Yet today his voice fell apart when he came to say a few ancient words of promise, words as familiar as they are awesome. ‘For richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.’ They are words of giving and surrender; Harry was present in them, not performing them.
When Harry’s voice cracked, I started to blubber, earning me a swift dig in the ribs from my embarrassed fourteen-year-old. But Harry’s words had liberated me from all the hassles of the moment and I grabbed Jenny’s hand, full of gratitude, even for impatient children, especially for her hand. The archdeacon, Liz, reminded us of the power of community. A marriage involves far more than two people. This celebration was all about substance, not image. How could I keep from crying? Afterwards, we had baklava and peppermint tea. Jacob, my younger son, looked at my wedding ring as if he had never seen it before; the finger had grown around it.
‘Can you get this off?’ he asked.
‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ I said.
~
The following day, Sunday, I went to find the place where Mary Godwin (1797–1851) had married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), a few days after Christmas in 1816. They had chosen the church of St Mildred’s, designed by Christopher Wren, in Bread Street, because this was the narrow thoroughfare in Cheapside where the poet John Milton was born in 1608. It is a stone’s throw from Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral.
Mary married an atheist and was the daughter of an atheist philosopher, William Godwin. Atheists were harder to come across in those days and she found two. Yet she also had an intense relationship with Milton’s epic creation story, Paradise Lost, which she had read by the age of thirteen, and used lines from it for the epigraph for own creation story, Frankenstein. These words foreshadow that Frankenstein, like every other creation myth that comes to mind, including both the Book of Genesis and The Epic of Gilgamesh, conceives of creation as a mixed blessing. They draw a fine line between creation and destruction:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
Paradise Lost was written, as the poem itself claims, ‘to justify the ways of God to men’. Mary Godwin, about to become Mary Shelley, was to discover that it was harder to justify the ways of men to women. Percy Bysshe Shelley, her husband, was a manipulative self-mythologiser. He was conceited, insensitive, and he preferred the company of men who could flatter his monstrous ego to that of his wife who, in the course of their relationship, was to lose four of the five children they conceived together, two from fever within a matter of months. His response to her grief was usually distant.
Frankenstein is alive to the romance of science, a romance that often turns sour. It refers to polar exploration and the use of electricity to engender life as Dr Frankenstein, the creator, prepares to ‘infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet’. These are ideas that Mary absorbed from the stellar intellectual company kept by her father, the celebrated author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). There is a great story of little Mary hiding behind the couch in her father’s house while Coleridge, a compulsive talker, recited The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She pays tribute to that poem in Frankenstein and, indeed, explores its themes.
But no amount of intellectual ferment or excitement can disguise the fact that Mary’s childhood was desperately lonely and that Frankenstein—despite the inclination of movie-makers and others to turn the novel into schlock horror—is, at its core, a brilliant study of one of the most mundane and pervasive human experiences, namely loneliness. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the groundbreaking author of both A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and its better-known sequel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died ten days after Mary’s birth from puerperal fever, a common catastrophe that could have been avoided if the doctor attending the birth had washed his hands. The same thing happened to Mrs Beeton (see Chapter 27), who urged cooks to wash their hands. It’s a pity the medical fraternity did not apply her principles of modest practicality.
It is said that Wollstonecraft’s infant daughter learnt to read by tracing her fingers through the letters on her mother’s tombstone. This could have been a scene from Frankenstein. Being the daughter of a famous but absent mother was a burden for Mary: she felt the weight of her expectations but never her love.
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were at odds with their time in many ways, not least in their unconventional approaches to marriage; Wollstonecraft had children from an earlier relationship. It was hardly surprising that Mary was to follow suit, despite her father’s misgivings. Not long after Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin married his excruciating neighbour Mary Jane Clairmont, who brought with her two children who were called, in the supercilious parlance of the time, illegitimate.
Mary could not stand her new stepmother. Shelley, who had been paying court to her father, a publisher, became her parachute. In July 1814, when Mary was still sixteen, they headed off together for Europe. They were joined by Mary’s new stepsister, Jane, who later changed her name to Claire. Shelley was having a relationship with both young women. Claire also started a relationship with the leading bad boy of the age, Lord Byron. She had a child to one or other of the men.
Although Mary did profess a belief in open marriage and had liaisons throughout her life with both men and women, you do have to wonder where she found herself in this tangled network. Over many years, she often seems lost, trying to find connections with people that would sustain her. Shelley, who came from aristocratic stock (which he played either up or down, as circumstances required), was providing financial support to the impecunious William Godwin. So Mary needed Shelley to be good to her father even as her father was disowning her. Like countless others in history, Mary Shelley’s attempt to escape led to a harsher form of imprisonment. At the time they headed off to Europe, Shelley left behind a pregnant wife, Harriet.
The genesis, to use the word advisedly, of Frankenstein is well known. In the gloomy summer on 1816, stuck in Villa Diodati, Byron’s holiday house near Geneva, Mary found herself in a party that had been afflicted by what was, for them, a moral crisis. They were bored. So the four—Mary, Shelley, Byron and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori—decided to amuse themselves by writing ghost stories. Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit had not yet been invented. Thomas Merton (see Chapter 16) was likewise once in a group that decided to kill a weekend by pumping out a novel. The tiresome vacuity of the exercise brought him one step closer to his commitment to a life of silence.
Mary’s life was similarly about to head into deeper waters. She was the only person in the group who took the game seriously. Frankenstein is an arresting account of the currents in her life that were leading a naturally creative person into destructive patterns. As she kept working on the book, Shelley read Paradise Lost to her as well as Don Quixote (see Chapter 33).
Later that year, Mary’s half-sister Franny (her mother’s daughter) committed suicide. So did Shelley’s wife, Harriet, pregnant again to a ‘Mr Smith’. This allowed Mary and Shelley to tie the knot, an event she records in her diary with the spare words ‘a wedding took place’. The callousness of the couple towards Harriet is staggering but it is clear that Mary was already being tossed about by the storms of anxiety and depression which she would have to weather for much of her life. There are many times in the years ahead—such as in her determination to send her one surviving child, the uninspiring Percy, to school at Harrow—when her strength in the face of adversity is awesome. Her wedding at least brought about a reconciliation with her father.
Frankenstein, published in an edition of five hundred copies on 1 January 1818, has many interests. Nevertheless, it spends more time exploring the nature of language than the scientific process of creating life. The creation scene is a feast of language but light on anything that might pass for scientific specifics. Creation myths throughout history often surf on the need to harness the oceanic movements of language and this is no exception. One of the most touching sequences is the being’s own account of his attempt to become part of a human community by learning to speak, then read and write. He longs for connection. He is an improbably fast learner. One of the first books he reads is Paradise Lost, where he finds a fellowship with Adam, the creature fashioned from the earth in Chapter 3 of Genesis. The name of Adam actually derives from the Hebrew word for ‘earth’: he should really be known as Earthling.
He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.
A good deal of the rest of the story concerns the attempts of the being to find love and to force Frankenstein to make a partner for him. He even says that if Frankenstein agrees, he would happily head off to ‘the vast wilds of South America’ and keep out of everyone’s way.
The being becomes infected with jealousy and curses Frankenstein: ‘I will be with you on your wedding night.’ But Frankenstein will not co-operate. Again, the novel shares with many creation myths the understanding that the worst thing for a creature to become is something like God. Dr Frankenstein feels he has transgressed the boundaries of his own creature-hood. The power he has found, and which the monster rightly identifies, is terrible. The story will not end well.
~
My search for St Mildred’s was fruitless. I was surprised that a Wren church had vanished; it was also the place in which Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, had been christened. Surely it was worth preserving. I didn’t know that it had been destroyed in an air raid during World War II. Bread Street is now a cavern of soulless offices. On a cold Sunday afternoon, it reminded me of the arctic wastes in which the being is swallowed.
Percy Bysshe Shelley died in a boating accident in 1822. His remains were cremated on the beach but his heart survived. Mary fought with one of Shelley’s blokey mates, Leigh Hunt, for the right to possess the relic. She returned from the continent to find that various theatrical versions of Frankenstein were making a splash in England. There was no copyright law to protect her from this and she didn’t make a penny from the celebrity of the story. For more than thirty years, her life was one of endless financial struggle. Shelley’s father was unhelpful. Many people insisted that such a fine novel as Frankenstein must have been written by her husband, an impression reinforced by Shelley’s ambiguous preface to the first edition.
A revised edition of 1831 attempted to win Mary a place of more conventional respectability. She was a victim of gossip and prejudice, and her unusual lifestyle, especially regarding her sexuality, meant she was ostracised from polite society. She had few friends and even some of those betrayed her. She did it tough. I love her character and her sensuality, even the shock of bright-red hair that she wasn’t going to cut to social expectations. When she died, in 1857, the remains of Shelley’s dry heart were found in her desk. The being lives on.