The events of Mary Shelley’s life (1797–1851) crowd into the early years. Many transactions that would mould her character occur before she was born.
Her parents both played important roles in the intellectual life of the time. William Godwin was a philosopher and political theorist, whose most important work is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793). Godwin wrote novels as a popular means of elucidating his thought, the most durable being Caleb Williams (1794), which can still be read with interest and excitement. The influence of both these works on Godwin’s daughter’s writing is marked.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She came to the marriage with Godwin bringing little Fanny Imlay. Distracted by the failure of her love for Gilbert Imlay, Mary had tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames off Putney Bridge. Surviving to marry Godwin, she bore him a daughter, Mary, only to die ten days later.
Godwin remarried. His second wife, Mrs Mary Jane Clairmont, brought with her two children by her previous liaison, Charles and Jane. Jane later preferred to be known as Claire. She bore Byron an illegitimate child, Allegra. Fanny and Mary, four years old when Godwin remarried, were further upset by the arrival of this new stepmother into their household. Alienation was no doubt increased when Godwin’s new wife bore him a son. The five children crowding into one house increased Mary’s feeling of isolation. Isolation is the refrain which sounds throughout her novels and short stories. Another constant refrain, that of complex familial relationships, derives from that confused childhood. Of the five children, no two could muster two parents in common, Charles and Jane excepted.
Mary grew to be an attractive woman. Her reserved manner hid a deep vein of feeling, baffled by her mother’s death and her father’s distance. The two kinds of coldness, one might say, are both embodied in her monster’s being in a sense dead and also unloved. When Shelley arrived on the scene he received all her love, and Mary remained faithful to him long after his death, despite his frequent neglect of her.
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone
And left me in this dreary world alone?
So said Shelley. In fact, the reverse was true.
The product of two intellectuals, Mary Shelley was a blue-stocking, and through many years maintained an energetic reading programme, teaching herself several foreign languages. She had the good fortune to meet in childhood many of the celebrated intellectuals and men of letters of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Trelawny said of her that ‘her head might be put upon the shoulders of a Philosopher’.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and son of a baronet, was an emotional and narcissistic youth. Before his twenty-second birthday, the pair had eloped to France, taking Jane Clairmont—soon to be Claire—with them.
Europe! What freedom it must have represented to Mary, after her sixteen circumscribed years, and what brilliant companionship Shelley must have offered. The youthful travellers were among the first to enter France after the Napoleonic Wars, and a desolate place they found it, fields uncultivated, buildings and villages destroyed. On the way to Switzerland, Shelley wrote to invite his wife Harriet, now pregnant with Shelley’s second child, to join the party. Before they reached Lake Lucerne, Mary knew that she also was pregnant.
Catastrophe followed the lovers. Mary’s child, a daughter, was born after they returned to London and their debts. She was premature and died. A second child, William, scarcely fared better. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary went to Switzerland again, taking along William and, inevitably, Claire Clairmont. They found accommodation at the Maison Chapuis, on the shores of Lake Geneva, next to the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron was staying. Claire threw herself at Byron’s head, and managed to encompass the rest of him. It was a creative time for them, with philosophy and learning pursued, as well as the more touted facets of the good life. It was here that Mary began to write Frankenstein. She was eighteen. Summer had too short a stay, and the party returned to England to face more trouble.
Mary’s self-effacing half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum at the age of twenty two. The Shelley ménage had moved to the West Country. Claire still followed them, as the monster followed Frankenstein. She was now pregnant by Byron. Then news reached them that Shelley’s wife Harriet had drowned herself in the Serpentine, when far advanced in pregnancy. Shelley and Mary married almost immediately.
The date of the marriage was 29 December 1816. Five and a half years later, in July 1822, Shelley drowned whilst sailing on the Ligurian Sea. By that time, the little boy, William, was dead, as was another child, Clara. Mary had also had a miscarriage. A further son, Percy Florence, was born. He alone of Mary’s progeny survived to manhood. Even Claire’s daughter by Byron, the little Allegra, died in Italy.
The rest of Mary Shelley’s life is lived in the shadow of her first twenty-five years. After Byron died in Greece in 1824, both the great poets were gone. Mary remained ever faithful to the memory of her husband. She edited his poems and papers, and earned a living by her pen. Frankenstein, published in 1818, became immediately popular. She also wrote historical novels, such as Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) which enjoyed some success, travel journals, short stories, and a futuristic novel, The Last Man (1826) which, by its powerfully oppressive theme of world catastrophe, is classifiable as science fiction. Percy married. Her cold father, Godwin, died; Shelley’s difficult father died. Finally, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Mary herself died, aged fifty-three.
This painful biography, as confused as any modern one, helps to explain why Mary Shelley’s temperament was not a sanguine one. From it derives much of what we read in her two science fiction novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. As do all novels, both owe a great deal to the literature that preceded them. Much is owed to experience. Critics are liable comfortably to ignore the latter to concentrate on the former.
The essence of the story of Frankenstein is familiar, if in distorted form, from many film, stage and TV versions; Victor Frankenstein constructs a creature from corpses and then endows it with life, after which it runs amok. The novel is more complex than this synopsis suggests.
Some of its complexities have recently been explored by Marilyn Butler in her exemplary edition of the novel (see Bibliography). Butler examines the work of scientists who were influential, in particular the avant-garde William Lawrence. Something of the disputes of the time regarding the role of mind, physical sciences, and the irrational, are preserved in Frankenstein’s three narrators, Walton, Victor, and the creature. In the same way, modern SF novels contain debates about the future of Artificial Intelligence, and whether AI will prove beneficial or otherwise.
Butler presents the 1818 text, with convincing arguments as to why it is to be preferred to the hitherto more popular 1831 text. The latter was toned down in many aspects, to make it more acceptable in a conformist age. Mary Shelley had to live by her pen, in a harsh society well depicted in William St Clair’s biography (see Bibliography). Besides, that one surviving son of hers was to become a baronet …
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus begins with letters from Captain Walton to his sister. Walton is sailing in Arctic waters when he sees on the ice floes a sledge being driven by an enormous figure. The next day, the crew rescue a man from a similar sledge. It is Victor Frankenstein of Geneva. When he recovers, he tells Walton his tale. This account takes up the bulk of the book, to be rounded off by Walton again. Six chapters give the creature’s own account of its life, especially of its education. If the style of the novel is discursive, Mary Shelley was following methods familiar to readers of Richardson and Sterne. It became unfashionable but—to readers of eccentric modern novels—is now increasingly sympathetic and accounts in part for the new-found popularity of the novel.
Most of the drama is set not in the seamy London Mary Shelley knew from her childhood, but amid the spectacular Alpine scenery she had visited with Shelley. The puissance of Frankenstein’s creature gains greatly by its association with the elements—storm,