Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Mary was entrepreneurial. She wrote for
The Liberal
and
The Keepsake,
popular magazines of the time, and she provided biographies for Lardner’s
Cabinet Cyclopedia,
among other projects. Mary worried about the quality of such work, because she had to churn out the words for money. “What
a folly is it in me to write trash nobody will read,” she wrote in her journal in 1825. Claire, the only other survivor of
Diodati, sometimes reproached Mary with similar criticism. In the 1830s, Claire returned to Italy and took up residence in
Florence, from which she wrote Mary regularly. (Many people fled the city during a cholera epidemic, but Claire remained,
saying she would not desert the family she worked for; she survived.) Claire praised Mary’s talents and chided her for being
too modest. She was, moreover, disgusted that Byron appeared so often as a character in Mary’s novels. “I stick to
Frankenstein,
” she once told Mary, “merely because that vile spirit [Byron] does not haunt its pages as it does in all your other novels,
now as Castruccio, now as Raymond, now as Lodore. Good God to think a person of your genius . . . should think it a task befitting
its powers to gild and embellish and pass off as beautiful what was the merest compound of Vanity, folly, and every miserable
weakness that ever met together in one human Being!”
Claire added an exhortation to Mary that indicates how highly she regarded her:
If you would but know your own value, and exert your powers you could give the men a most immense drubbing; you could write
upon metaphysics, politics, jurisprudence, astronomy, mathematics, all those highest subjects which they taunt us so with
our being incapable of treating, and surpass them; and what a consolation it would be, when they begin some of their prosy,
lying but plausible attacks upon female inferiority, to stop their mouths in a moment with your name: and then to add, “and
if women, whilst suffering the heaviest slavery could outdo you what would they not achieve were they free?”
Claire sounded more like the heir of Mary Wollstonecraft than her stepsister did.
T
o some extent we are all products of our time and place. Percy Shelley and Lord Byron had died still believing in the ideals
that had sparked the French Revolution in their youths. Regency England, the time of their artistic flowering, had been characterized
by a permissive morality and spirit. (Even so, both of them went well beyond it.) Mary had the misfortune of living longer
than they, and had to adjust to different times, different mores. In 1830, King George IV, the former Prince Regent—who as
“Prinny” had been a symbol of that lively age—died. His younger brother, William IV, took the throne, ushering in a new era.
Though the future queen Victoria was then only twelve, the prudish and restrictive age that would bear her name had already
begun.
Mary had changed as well. By the time she was in her thirties, she was a very different person from the teenager who had written
Frankenstein
. Shelley’s ideals no longer appealed to her as they had when she ran off with him as a smitten sixteen-year-old. Deaths,
betrayals, financial hardship, and despair had changed her outlook. She wanted respectability for her son and she needed the
small stipends that Sir Timothy doled out—provided she didn’t displease him. Mary, after all, had never really been as independent
as her mother. When Leigh Hunt invited her to come back to Italy, Godwin told Mary that he had set his “heart and soul” on
her staying in England. She told Hunt she must stay with her father, for “in this world it always seems one’s duty to sacrifice
one’s own desires.”
When Mary had the opportunity to revise the great novel of her youth, she took it. A publisher asked her to prepare a new
edition of
Frankenstein
as part of a series called “Standard Novels.” The inexpensively priced series gave the authors a chance to make editorial
changes (improvements, in theory) and to write an introduction to their books. Mary’s introduction contains an account of
the events at Byron’s Villa Diodati that led to the writing of
Frankenstein
. “And now, once again,” she wrote, “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was
the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” Significantly, Mary
herself was now willing to acknowledge her “hideous progeny”— the creature—as the true hero of the book, and not Victor Frankenstein,
the title character.
Although Mary claimed that she made few changes from the original 1818 edition, some of her revisions reflect the differences
in both herself and the times. She removed the dedication to William Godwin. Ernest, the middle son of the Frankenstein family,
was made stronger and more robust. He was the only surviving Frankenstein in the book, and perhaps Mary associated him with
her only living son, whose survival she wanted to ensure. She also eliminated the hint of incest in the original by changing
cousin Elizabeth into an orphan of no relation to the Frankensteins. She wanted no reminders of the so-called league of incest
in Geneva.
Just as Mary had revised her public accounts of Percy’s life to make him a more respectable figure, now she also made changes
in the man modeled after him: Victor Frankenstein. Victor is less manipulative in the 1831 edition and more the victim of
circumstances. Though he is still overly ambitious and vain, the reader is told this is the result of a lack of parental guidance.
“While I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva,” Victor relates, “I was, to a great degree, self taught
with regard to my favorite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added
to a student’s thirst for knowledge.” Victor’s need to teach himself without paternal oversight parallels the monster’s similar
self-education, by reading books he has found.
Some of Mary’s 1831 additions are clearly prompted by bittersweet memories of Percy. When Walton describes Victor Frankenstein,
this passage is new: “Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on
me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated
by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its
course, and wrecked it—thus!”
The original version depicted Victor Frankenstein as a man making choices with free will—he could have abandoned his search
for the “principle of life,” but instead chose to pursue it to its destructive end. In the 1831 edition, however, he is the
pawn of forces he does not control: “Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.”
The deaths of William Frankenstein and Justine are, in 1831, attributed to a curse imposed by “inexorable fate.” Perhaps this
change was prompted by Mary’s inner guilt at killing off a character with the name William, now even more charged with painful
memories than when she first wrote the book, at a time when her son William was safely at her breast. It also accompanied
a shift in Mary’s own viewpoint. She wrote to Jane Hogg in August 1827, “The power of Destiny I feel every day pressing more
& more on me, & I yield myself a slave to it, in all except my moods of mind, which I endeavour to make independant [
sic
] of her, & thus to wreath a chaplet, where all is not cypress, in spite of the Eumenides.”
Similarly, in 1831 Victor has a religious sensibility that was missing in 1818, and the passages relating to science and magic
are now either excised or softened into “natural history,” which the “new” Victor dismisses as “a deformed and abortive creation.”
When he attends Ingolstadt, his revived interest in science is portrayed as a regression to his childish enthusiasms.
Some changes in the revised version reflect timely new concerns. Imperialism enters the book when Victor’s friend Clerval
now announces his intention of joining the East India Company after his studies. “He came to the university with the design
of making himself complete master of the oriental languages, as thus he should open a field for the plan of his life he had
marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes toward the East, as affording scope for
his spirit of enterprise.” In the earlier edition, Clerval had loved learning, the arts, and nature for their own sake; now
he, like Victor, is attracted to power. (Peacock, Shelley’s real-life friend, was in fact a lifelong administrator for the
East India Company.)
Mary also transformed herself. Writing about her own childhood in the introduction, she said, “I lived principally in the
country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. . . . It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to
our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination,
were born and fostered.” She is describing the Baxter home, not the Godwin family’s crowded flat above the bookstore where
Mary lived until she was fourteen. With the stroke of a pen, she wiped out Skinner Street, with its slaughterhouse stench,
the mobs flocking to public executions, and even the despised stepmother. Mary was picking and choosing from the assembled
parts of her past to create a better life.
M
ary’s ongoing project to rejuvenate her husband’s reputation reflected her plans for the upbringing of her son Percy Florence.
The radical educational ideas of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley were dismissed, for above all, Mary intended Percy Florence
to fit in. When a friend advised her to send her son to a school where he would learn to think creatively, she reportedly
replied, “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!” That intention seemed
to suit the boy’s personality. He resembled his grandfather, Sir Timothy, more than his father, just as Percy Bysshe had resembled
more
his
grandfather than his father.
Young Percy Florence’s future suddenly looked brighter when his elder half-brother Charles, the son of Harriet, died of tuberculosis
in 1826. Percy Florence was now the presumptive heir to the baronetcy, and the fortune that his father would have inherited.
Sir Timothy took a greater interest in his grandson and even increased the allowance—slightly. He dangled the promise of even
more aid, provided that the child be turned over to his care, an offer Mary again refused. A single mother scrounging to make
ends meet from the little she received from Sir Timothy and her own literary earnings, she managed to give her son a fine
education. She moved to the town of Harrow so that she could send him to its prestigious prep school as a day student.
Mary gave a motherly description of her son to Maria Gisborne in 1834, when the boy was fourteen and attending Harrow. “In
person he is of a fair height & excessively fat—his chest would remind you of a Bacchus he has a florid complexion, blue eyes—like
his father —& his looks & gestures & shape of his face would remind you of Shelley & his person before he grew fat—he is full
of spirit & animation, but proud & reserved with strangers . . . he loves me more than he knows himself & would not displease
me for the world.” Mary related a story that reflected her own deepest fear: “One day I said to him —‘Suppose when you grew
to be a Man—you would leave me all alone’—‘O Mamma,’ he said, ‘how do you think I could be so shabby:— that would be too bad!’
To be
left all alone
[Mary’s emphasis] seems to him the worst evil of all.” As it was to her.
Later Percy Florence attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his degree in 1841. He never showed any artistic
promise, nor was he interested in poetry. He much preferred the theater. Leigh Hunt, who knew him as an adult, recalled, “When
I mentioned Tennyson’s poetry, Sir Percy said fellows had bored him a good deal with it at one time. He never read any of
it of his own accord—saw no sense in it.”
M
ore deaths continued to shrink Mary’s circle. In 1832, her half-brother William (the William she had not been), died of cholera.
The following year, William Godwin, then seventy-seven and thinking himself forgotten, received a pleasant surprise when admirers
(there were still some) obtained for him a sinecure government job as “Yeoman Usher” that provided him with a yearly stipend
and an apartment for him and his wife. Ironically, the government Godwin had condemned would support him in his last years.
Three years later, in 1836, the eighty-year-old Godwin realized his end had come. Having prepared for this, as for all other
vicissitudes, he pasted into his journal a valedictory message he had written just for the occasion. It warns, “Everything
under the sun is uncertain. No provision can be a sufficient security against adverse and unexpected fortune, least of all
to him who has not a stipulated income.” He went to bed, where Mary watched over him during the next ten days, until he died.
At his request, Godwin was buried in St. Pancras Churchyard beside his first wife, though his second wife had been at his
side for thirty-five years. Just as Godwin could not bear to attend Mary Wollstonecraft’s funeral, so his daughter Mary was
too distraught to come to his. Young Percy was the chief mourner and Trelawny showed up, ever ready to bask in greatness.
Godwin suffered in death the opposite fate of Percy Shelley. Percy had died before the scope of his achievement was widely
known. Mary’s father, by contrast, had reached the prime of his influence and fame early, and lived to see the diminution
of his reputation. On his death, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
printed a devastating estimate of Godwin: “In weighing well his merits with his moral imperfections, it is melancholy to
discover how far the latter preponderated, and we are led to the very painful though certain conclusion, that it might have
been better for mankind had he never existed.” Thomas De Quincey, author of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,
wrote that “most people felt of Mr. Godwin with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre, or
the monster created by Frankenstein.”