Mary Shelley Read online

  Mary was writing too. She put the finishing touches on Frankenstein and sent it to a London publisher. This firm rejected it, and so did another. The story was too bizarre, Mary was told; readers would find it too unsettling. Mary disagreed. Confident that her book would find an audience, she mailed it to a third publisher. While she waited for a response, Mary felt warmed by glowing comments from her father, who had read her manuscript. William Godwin called Frankenstein “the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of.” (Mary was actually nineteen when she completed her novel.)

  She also went through the journal she and Shelley had kept in 1814, when they first ran off to Europe, with the idea of transforming it into a book. She polished the writing and added letters she and Percy had written to Fanny and Peacock in 1816, while in Geneva. Percy tacked on his poem “Mont Blanc.” Travel books were popular at the time. Photography had yet to be invented, and usually just the wealthy or adventurous went abroad. Reading a book was the only way for many people to know what it was like to tour Italy or venture into deepest Africa. Books transported them to the forests surrounding St. Petersburg, Russia, or the villages of distant Persia. Mary Wollstonecraft had taken her readers to Scandinavia with her book Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

  The typewriter belonged to the future when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Like all authors of her day, she composed her book by hand.

  The Shelleys’ book, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, earned a few good reviews in the press. One book critic noted that it contained “little information, no reflection, and very few incidents . . . yet it somehow or other produces considerable amusement and interest.” No author’s name appeared on the book, but the critic understood that it had been written mostly by a “Lady.” “She prattles away very prettily,” he commented. “Now and then a French phrase drops sweetly enough from her fair mouth.” He was condescending toward the woman author, but he also offered some praise: “Her heart is at all times open to gladness and kindly feeling; and we think that no one will part with so amiable and agreeable a companion, without regret, and sincere wishes for her future happiness.” Despite the good words for the book, only a small number of copies sold.

  On September 2, 1817, Mary gave birth to a daughter she and Percy named Clara. Clara was a fussy newborn, and Mary grew exhausted soothing her day and night. She watched anxiously over nineteen-month-old William as well, lest he catch a chill as the weather turned cool. Money problems also wore at Mary’s nerves. Debts were piling up again, and her father continued to pressure Shelley for help with his own financial troubles.

  In November, good news came just when Mary needed it. Frankenstein had found a publisher. Lackington, Allen and Company printed books with such spooky titles as Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses and Tales of the Dead. The firm also ran a popular shop called the Temple of the Muses, where books lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Like many novels of the time, especially those written by women, Frankenstein would be published anonymously.

  Books cover the walls in the Temple of the Muses, the bookshop run by Lackington, Allen and Company, the firm that published Frankenstein. Many more books are shelved in the upstairs balcony.

  But bad tidings came on the heels of good. In autumn, the chancery court reached a decision on the guardianship of Ianthe and Charles Shelley. Neither their father nor the Westbrooks were to have custody of the children. Instead the little ones were sent to live with court-appointed foster parents, an esteemed minister and his wife.

  No one had expected this outcome. The court’s ruling threw Percy Shelley into a panic. He feared—for no good reason—that the authorities might snatch William and Clara away from him. He was so distressed that he came down with imaginary illnesses. After sitting in a coach beside a woman with heavy legs, he worried that he had caught elephantiasis, a rare disease that causes great swelling. For weeks he checked his legs for any sign of enlargement. As the days grew short and Albion House became chilly and damp, Shelley was certain that the changing weather was harming his health. Surely he would waste away unless he moved to a warm place—somewhere like Italy, where Byron was living.

  The Shelleys and Claire still had heard nothing from Byron; a new love affair was taking up his time. They told people that Alba was the child of London friends who had sent her into the country for her health. Living with a lie can be tricky, though, and to honest people, it can simply feel wrong. So pretty soon the residents of Albion House admitted that Alba was Claire’s daughter. Once that happened, the local gentry made up their own lie, that Percy was Alba’s real father. They pointed fingers at Mary, Percy, and Claire and avoided their company. “Country town friends are not very agreeable,” Mary commented dryly.

  At long last, Byron wrote to ask that his daughter be baptized in the Church of England and given the name Allegra; he mentioned nothing about taking over her care. Perhaps it would be wise to bring Allegra to her father, Shelley reasoned. Byron could afford to support her, and without the day-to-day responsibility of a child, Claire could find work as a lady’s companion or governess. The decision was made: they would all go to Italy. The Shelleys sold off many of their possessions. Percy found a new tenant to take over the lease on Albion House and obtained another post-obit loan. Recklessly generous as always, he gave half the money to Leigh Hunt, who was short of funds, and a hundred and fifty pounds to Mary’s father. William Godwin had wanted more, and he let the Shelleys know he was displeased.

  Mary was eager to leave. Her impossible father, lenders demanding to be repaid, a prudish society, Percy’s wavering health—sailing to Europe meant leaving them all behind. “Le rêve est fini,” she wrote in her journal; the dream of English country life had ended.

  On March 9, 1818, all three children were baptized. Allegra was fourteen months old. Mary had nicknamed her “the little Commodore” for the comical way she stood on her sturdy legs and stared at adults as though she were the one in charge. William had turned two in January, and Clara was just six months old. Percy Shelley hoped that baptizing William and Clara might silence any imaginary foes who considered him an unfit parent.

  On March 13, a year after they moved to Marlow, the Shelleys left England. Eight people traveled together: Mary, Percy, Claire, the three children, Elise Duvillard, and Milly Shields, a local girl who had been hired to help Elise. They sailed from Dover to France, where they purchased a carriage and hired a driver to take them over the Alps. After a stop in Switzerland, where Elise saw her daughter, they ascended a snowy mountain pass. Elated to be on the move, Percy sang all the way, his voice echoing off cliffs and frozen waterfalls. The rocky peaks, he said, were God’s ballet dancers.

  The travelers stayed at an inn in the northern Italian city of Milan. Tourists flocked to Milan to gaze at Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting The Last Supper, in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Moisture had damaged the work since Leonardo completed it in 1498, but Mary was thrilled to see it nonetheless. She liked everything about Milan and the countryside around it, “the fruit trees all in blossom and the fields green with the growing corn.” Pulling the peasants’ carts were “the most beautiful oxen I ever saw,” she wrote. “They are of a delicate dove colour.”

  Mary and Shelley dreamed now of making a life for their family in Italy. They talked about renting a house beside beautiful Lake Como, so deep, blue, and serene. Percy wrote to Byron in Venice, inviting him to spend the summer nearby. This would give everyone time to discuss Allegra’s future, Shelley said. Ideally she could grow up knowing both her parents, even if she saw them under different roofs. Byron replied that he was not interested in such an arrangement. He would not be coming to Lake Como, and he was sending a messenger to fetch his daughter. He had no wish to see Claire, then or ever. Claire’s bond with Allegra was to be permanently broken, just like that.

>   Milan’s cathedral, with its many spires.

  How could Byron do such a thing? Claire was torn apart. Desperate to change his mind, she dashed off a frantic note, writing too swiftly to bother with punctuation. “My dear Lord Byron I most truly love my child,” she pleaded. “She loves me she stretches out her arms to me & cooes for joy when I take her.” Claire had wept so much, she added, “that now my eyes seem to drop hot & burning blood.” Percy kept his feelings under control as he composed a pointed letter of his own. Claire, he noted, “requires reassurance and tenderness. A tie so near to the heart should not be rudely snapt.” He continued, “Your conduct must at present wear the aspect of great cruelty, however you justify it to yourself.” Shelley managed to accomplish a little good. Byron sent assurances that he would take good care of Allegra, and that Claire might visit her in the summer.

  Claire was in a sorry situation and wretchedly sad. She wanted to keep Allegra with her, but it was out of the question. It would mean depending indefinitely on Shelley for support, and she dared not ask that. Also, she needed to seek a job, and this was impossible to do with a child in tow. Claire knew that Byron could raise their daughter in comfort, but the thought of seeing Allegra only in summer devastated her.

  Byron’s messenger showed up in late April. He was Francis Merriweather, an Englishman who ran a shop in Venice. Claire searched her mind for a reason—any reason—to delay him. Allegra was sick, too sick to travel, she said. But the little girl’s healthy glow made it plain that this was untrue. At last, Mary came up with a way to help Claire say goodbye. Suppose Elise Duvillard went to Venice too, Mary suggested. Elise could care for Allegra and help her get settled, and she would be a familiar face among strangers. She could also inform Claire about her child’s well-being. Claire said she could live with that arrangement, so on April 28, the day after Claire’s birthday, Allegra and Elise left with Merriweather.

  Soon Elise wrote to say that Allegra had reached Venice safely and was being looked after well. “They dress her in little trousers trimmed with lace & treat her like a little princess,” Mary informed the Hunts. Elise and Allegra moved into the home of Richard Hoppner, the British consul in Venice, and his wife. Byron had wanted custody of Allegra, but he had arranged for her to live apart from him, with other people looking after her. Claire dreamed of August, when she would go to Venice and see her daughter again.

  Meanwhile, Lake Como was forgotten. Mary and Shelley went with their children, Claire, and Milly Shields to Pisa, where Mary climbed all two hundred and twenty-four steps to the top of the famous Leaning Tower. She looked down on the neighboring cathedral square, where the sight of prisoners in chains cleaning the pavement made her reflect sadly on the people throughout the world who were enslaved.

  From Pisa they made the short trip to Livorno, a city on the Ligurian Sea. There they called on someone Mary had known years before. She was Maria Reveley, who had cared for Mary in infancy. After her husband’s death, Reveley had married John Gisborne, a businessman, and moved with him to Italy. Known now as Mrs. Gisborne, she welcomed the newcomers and spoke fondly of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. The Shelleys admired Gisborne’s mastery of painting and European languages and her fearless atheism. “She is reserved, yet with easy manners,” Mary noted in her journal. She wrote to her father, “How inexpressibly pleasing it is to call back the recollection of years long past, and especially when the recollection belongs to a person in whom one deeply interested oneself.”

  Mary and Percy also enjoyed seeing Maria Gisborne’s son Henry Reveley. Fanny’s old playmate was twenty-eight and studying to be an engineer. He dreamed of building a steamboat powerful enough to carry cargo between ports in Italy and France. Steamboat technology was still new. Most steamboats navigated on rivers or as ferries, but daring inventors and engineers had recently begun launching their crafts in the seas. Excited by Reveley’s plans, Shelley invested two hundred pounds in the project, which was to fail.

  The Shelleys rented a cottage in the pretty town of Bagni di Lucca, sixty miles north of Livorno. Casa Bertini, as the house was called, stood high on a hill amid fragrant chestnut trees. The area’s hot springs attracted tourists, but Mary, Percy, and Claire avoided the places that drew the biggest crowds. They hired horses and rode into the Apennine Mountains, and they took long hikes in the woods. “I like nothing so much as to be surrounded by the foliage of trees only peeping now and then through the leafy screen on the scene about me,” Mary told Maria Gisborne. She wished she had the mind of a poet so she could describe the natural setting in the stirring words that it deserved.

  She was glad to be in Italy, but Percy was homesick, especially when letters came from England. Some were from Thomas Peacock, who informed the Shelleys that everyone there was talking about Frankenstein. “I went to the races. I met on the course a great number of my old acquaintance,” Peacock wrote. “I was asked a multitude of questions concerning Frankenstein and its author. It seems to be universally known and read.”

  The Shelleys had no idea that while they were settling in Italy, several British journals had reviewed the new novel. Most literary critics seemed to be scratching their heads, trying to make sense of this bold book. La Belle Assemblée, a fashionable magazine, predicted that due to its “originality, excellence of language, and peculiar interest,” Frankenstein was likely to be popular. “Fair readers”—meaning ladies—were advised to draw a moral from the story: humans must not play God. For a man to experiment with life and death “must be frightful, vile, and horrible; ending only in discomfort and misery to himself.” Reviewing Frankenstein for a Scottish journal, the popular novelist Sir Walter Scott drew attention to the excellence of the writing. He remarked, “The work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression.”

  There were critics who hated everything about the book, however, such as the one who growled, “What a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents.” There were too many passages in Frankenstein that “make the flesh creep,” he stated. “Our taste and judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing.”

  One man who bought the book wrote inside it, “This is, perhaps, the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times.”

  What kind of novel had Mary Shelley written?

  CHAPTER SIX

  “The Journal Book of Misfortunes”

  The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me.

  Frankenstein begins in the frozen north. An explorer named Robert Walton is aboard his ship, searching for a passage across the polar region. In this remote, desolate place, Walton and his crew spot a man on a drifting piece of ice. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” Walton recounts. They bring the stranger aboard and offer him warmth and safety. He recovers enough to reveal his name, Victor Frankenstein. In the days that follow, he tells his story to Walton, who writes it down. It is an unearthly tale, like nothing Walton—or anyone—has ever heard.

  Victor Frankenstein tells Walton that he grew up in Geneva alongside two younger brothers and his orphaned cousin, Elizabeth, whom he came to love. He enjoyed a close friendship with another youth, Henry Clerval. At college in Germany, Frankenstein planned to study science, but dark, forbidden subjects consumed his interest instead: how in death “the fine form of man was degraded and wasted”; “how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.” Working for many months alone, with body parts snatched from graveyards and autopsy rooms, Victor pursued the secret of life. At last he could claim, “I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” He had discovered how to bring dead flesh to life. From his putrid materials, Frankenstein constructed a massive, manlike, living creature.

  The full title of Mary Shelley’s book was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The Greek god Prometheus, according to myth, created the first human being.
He then stole fire from the heavens and gave it to humanity. The gift of fire can be understood to mean that the human race was endowed with intelligence.

  Like Prometheus, Frankenstein produces a thinking, feeling being. He expects to be proud of what he achieves. When his work is done, though, he can only look with shock and horror on the watery yellow eyes and shriveled skin of the gigantic “demoniacal corpse” he has endowed with life. Rather than offer it love and acceptance, Victor rejects his creation and his responsibility for it. The monstrous-looking being flees, and Frankenstein falls into a long illness, having sacrificed his health to his work.

  Slowly, under Henry Clerval’s care, he gets well. He has managed to put his experiments and their frightful result out of his mind when a letter comes from home, bearing terrible news. William, the youngest Frankenstein brother, has been brutally strangled. Immediately Victor returns to Geneva. His family is inconsolable, and a once-trusted servant, Justine Moritz, is charged with the crime. Victor knows she is innocent; he senses that the true killer must be the brute he created. Yet he says nothing, knowing he would never be believed. He stays silent even while Justine is tried, found guilty, and hanged.

  Victor Frankenstein stares in horror at the monster he created in this illustration from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

  Filled with grief, Victor concludes that the deaths of William and Justine are his fault. To ease his soul, he goes alone into the mountains, to Chamonix. Venturing onto a glacier, he encounters his monster. The creature admits to killing William but begs to be heard and understood.