Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
The most important change that Shelley made was in the last line of the novel. Mary’s original was, “He sprung from the cabin
window as he said this upon an ice raft that lay close to the vessel & pushing himself off he was carried away by the waves
and I soon lost sight of him in the darkness and distance.” Percy changed this to “He sprung from the cabin-window, as he
said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and
distance.” Mary’s “lost sight of” more strongly maintained the possibility that the monster was still alive.
That summer Shelley’s hypochondria flared up again; he obsessively checked his legs for signs of the dreaded elephantiasis.
Meanwhile he had started what was to become one of his major works, a poem called
Laon and Cythna
. It was a defense of the ideals of the French Revolution, but a central feature of the plot was sexual love between brother
and sister.
Shelley’s unconventional ideas on marriage and “free love” made some people suspect that Allegra might be
his
child. That rumor did not help Shelley in his attempt to gain custody of his children by Harriet. In August 1817, the court
awarded both Ianthe and Charles to a guardian named by Harriet’s relatives. Just a month later, on September 2, 1817, Mary
gave birth to another child, a girl she named Clara Everina. Mary chose the second name after her mother’s sister; the first
obviously was meant to honor Claire.
Mary had a hard month after the birth of her daughter, for in addition to the usual cares of a new mother, she had to worry
about Shelley’s financial condition and his complaints of ill health. Again, Mary’s giving birth had prompted Shelley to develop
symptoms of illness. “My health has been materially worse,” Percy told Godwin.
My feelings at intervals are of a deadly & torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural & keen excitement that, only
to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass & the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with
microscopical distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of lethargy & inanimation, & often remain for hours on the
sofa between sleep & waking, a prey to the most painful irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my condition.
The first proofs for
Frankenstein
arrived at the end of September. Percy went to London to supervise the different publishing projects of the family, to consult
Dr. Lawrence, and to raise money. (Claire too had a novel that Percy tried to find a publisher for, but to no avail. No trace
of the book survives, but it may have been Claire’s “entry” in Byron’s ghost story contest.) Mary wrote to him, “I am just
now surrounded by babes. Alba is scratching and crowing—William amusing himself with wrapping a shawl round him and Miss Clara
staring at the fire. . . . Adieu—dear love.”
Mary was unable to supply enough of her own milk to satisfy her newborn, so cow’s milk was obtained, but that upset little
Clara’s stomach. Feeling depressed, Mary wrote to Percy that she no longer had the energy to work on the
Frankenstein
revisions. She sent him a batch of proofs with the notation, “I am tired and not very clear headed so I give you carte blanche
to make what alterations you please.”
Shelley informed Mary that the doctor in London had said he must go either to the English seacoast or to Italy for his health,
and asked her to decide. Though she dreaded being uprooted again, Mary chose Italy. One of her reasons was to make sure that
Byron accepted the responsibility of caring for Allegra. Claire’s love for the child had made her reluctant to take steps
to send her to Byron, and Byron refused to come to England to fetch her. He was now living in Venice in a large house on the
Grand Canal overlooking the Rialto Bridge. Claire, always hopeful of a reconciliation with Byron, wrote him, speculating on
what Allegra’s life with him would be like, “Poor little angel! in your great house, left perhaps to servants while you are
drowning sense and feeling in wine.”
Mary was worried about what her father would say when he heard they were leaving. Worse, Percy had promised to give Godwin
more money, but now found he could not supply it. Mary wrote a letter to Percy in October that shows the deep attachment she
would always have for her father, “I know not whether it is early habit or affection but the idea of his silent quiet disapprobation
makes me weep as it did in the days of my childhood. I am called away by the cries of Clara . . . God knows when I shall see
you—Claire is forever wearying with her idle & childish complaints.” At Percy’s suggestion, they concealed from Godwin their
plans for going abroad.
As it turned out,
Frankenstein
would not be Mary’s first published book. While she was putting the finishing touches on the novel, she combined some of
her letters and journal entries to produce a book about her elopement trip in 1814.
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
was published anonymously in December, shortly before
Frankenstein
was due to appear. Such travel accounts were popular in an era without movies, television, or even photography, and Mary
clearly wanted to do her part to raise some money for the household.
The end of 1817 was a fertile period for the family publishing industry. William Godwin’s novel
Mandeville
—the book Fanny had thought should be completed for the world’s sake, even as she contemplated suicide—was published. Some
readers, including Shelley, thought it was Godwin’s best work in years. But Peacock, in his novel
Nightmare Abbey,
has a character flip through what is obviously intended to be Godwin’s book, remarking, “Devilman, [
Mandeville
] a novel. Hm. Hatred, revenge, misanthropy, and quotations from the Bible. Hm. This is the morbid anatomy of black bile.”
Mary was gratified with the warm reception that greeted
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
. Thomas Moore praised it, guessing who the author was, and Percy told him, “Mrs. Shelley, tho’ sorry that her secret is discovered,
is exceedingly delighted to hear that you have derived any amusement from our book.— Let me say in her defence that the Journal
of the Six Weeks Tour was written before she was seventeen, and that she has another literary secret which I will in a short
time ask you to
keep
in return for having
discovered
this.”
Percy himself was hardly idle. The publisher of
Laon and Cythna
had withdrawn all copies of the book from sale because of its inflammatory contents, but allowed Shelley to tone it down
and republish it under the title
The Revolt of Islam
. In December he also wrote the sonnet that has proved to be his most enduring work, “Ozymandias.”
Mary received her first bound copy of the three-volume
Frankenstein
on the last day of 1817. Percy had written a preface in the author’s voice. He assured readers that “The event on which this
fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible
occurrence.” He then went on to describe the origin of the book in “casual conversation” and in the setting of the book around
Geneva. “The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused
ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire
of imitation.” This story, he said, was the only one completed. He declared that the book was a psychological study that “affords
a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which
the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.” It is doubtful that Mary herself would be immodest enough to make such
a claim.
The first edition consisted of five hundred copies. It would eventually sell out, but after the publisher deducted his expenses,
Mary was left with proceeds of only twenty-eight pounds (the equivalent of about $3,000 in 2005 dollars). Mary braced herself
for bad reviews—just the book’s dedication was sufficient to garner several. After reading
Mandeville,
Mary had decided to dedicate her own novel to her father, and reviewers, seeing this, suspected that Percy was the author
of
Frankenstein
. In the Tory
Quarterly Review,
John Wilson Croker wrote:
[
Frankenstein
] is piously dedicated to Mr. Godwin and is written in the spirit of his school. The dreams of insanity are embodied in the
strong and striking language of the insane, and the author, notwithstanding the rationality of his preface, often leaves us
in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero. Mr. Godwin is the patriarch of a literary family, whose chief skill is in delineating
the wanderings of the intellect, and which strangely delights in the most afflicting and humiliating of human miseries. His
disciples are a kind of
out-pensioners of Bedlam,
and like “Mad Bess” or “Mad Tom,” are occasionally visited with paroxysms of genius and fits of expression, which make sober-minded
people wonder and shudder.
Croker was a prominent opponent of Romantic poetry (his later review of John Keats’s
Endymion
was so savage that it is said to have hastened Keats’s death), but he wasn’t alone in disliking
Frankenstein
. William Beckford, a fellow Gothic novelist and author of
Vathek,
a Byron favorite, noted in the flyleaf of his copy of Mary’s novel, “perhaps the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up
from the reeking dunghill of the present times.” Samuel Johnson’s muse Hester Thrale Piozzi, now an old lady, wrote, “Nothing
attracts us but what terrifies, and is within—if within—a hairbreadth of positive disgust . . . some of the strange things
they write remind me of Squire Richard’s visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says ‘They are
pure
grim devils,’— particularly a wild and hideous tale called Frankenstein.”
Shelley had personally sent a copy of the novel to Sir Walter Scott, one of the most popular and respected writers of the
time. Scott responded by writing a generally favorable review in
Edinburgh Magazine
in the March 1818 issue, “It is no slight merit in our eyes,” he wrote, “that the tale [
Frankenstein
], though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanism
with which tales of wonder are usually told, as if it were necessary that the language should be extravagant as the fiction.”
Scott also commented favorably about the descriptions of landscape, as having “freshness, precision and beauty.” He found
some parts of the plot improbable—the monster’s ability to learn how to speak and read through a hole in the wall, for example—but
he enjoyed the book. “Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power
of expression. We . . . congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion.”
Those closest to Mary naturally praised the book, though she must have been particularly gratified by her father’s reaction.
Godwin wrote proudly of it as “the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of.”
Even Byron commented that Mary’s novel was “a wonderful work for a Girl of nineteen—
not
nineteen indeed at that time.” Claire, who had irritated Mary in so many other ways, was openly generous in her estimation
of the book. She wrote in a letter to Byron,
Mary has just published her first work . . . It is a most wonderful performance full of genius . . . as no one would imagine
could have been written by so young a person. I am delighted & whatever private feelings of envy I may have at not being able
to do so well myself yet all yields when I consider that she is a woman & will prove in time an ornament to us & an argument
in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong and cultivated intellect. How I delight to hear all the intricacies
of mind & argument hanging on her lips.
She was praising women’s intellect to the wrong person.
Shelley also wrote a review that he planned, unsuccessfully, to publish anonymously to publicize the novel. He praised the
book’s moral nature and the emotions it evoked, summing up the meaning of the work as, “Treat a person ill, and he will become
wicked. Requite affection with scorn . . . for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind—divide him, a social being from society,
and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—malevolence and selfishness.” This interpretation linked the book’s moral
to Godwin’s philosophy, indicating that Percy missed much of the point.
Mary had not seen any of the published reviews for her book by the time she and Shelley left England. When they had moved
into their house in Marlow, Shelley had taken out a twenty-one-year lease on it. In reality, they stayed there for just a
little less than a year, though that was a long stretch by Shelley’s standards. Since they were traveling for Shelley’s health,
Mary had no idea how long they might stay in Italy. She selected a hundred books to be shipped to their destination, and a
smaller number to carry in their luggage. In early February, she closed up the house and joined the rest of the party in London.
For the next month, Mary shopped and enjoyed company. They went to the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles, which had
just been put on display. They stocked up on writing materials and paper. They went to the theater and opera—Mary in a strapless
gown and Shelley in a formal coat. Hunt described Shelley as “a thin patrician-looking young cosmopolite yearning out upon
us,” and Mary as a “sedate-faced young lady bending in a similar direction with her great tablet of a forehead, & her white
shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.”
Before they were able to depart, more unpleasantness with the Godwins arose. Claire had never told her mother about Byron
and the child, but rumors had reached the Godwins that Allegra was Claire’s child and Shelley was the father. When confronted,
Claire told them about her love affair with Byron. Her mother was horrified and blamed her daughter’s downfall on Mary, whom
she bad-mouthed for the rest of her life. In point of fact, the Godwins never believed that Byron was truly the father of
Claire’s child, which made Mary’s father even more resolute in trying to collect what he felt was his monetary due from Shelley.