The Limits of the Romantic Aesthetic in Mary Shelley's

Home , Elizabeth Lavenza, Mary Shelley

THE LIMITS OF THE ROMANTIC AESTHETIC IN MARY

SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

San Diego State University

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

______

Erica B. Aguillon

Spring 2011

iii

Erica B. Aguillon

DEDICATION

To my husband and my family, for their support.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

The Limits of the Romantic Aesthetic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Erica B. Aguillon Master of Arts in English San Diego State University, 2011

In this thesis I examine Mary Shelley’s departure from the Romantic tradition in order to reflect of the failure of Nature to inspire tranquility, in the context of the growing concern with urban menace picked up in the works of her father, William Godwin, and his contemporary, Thomas Holcroft. At the heart of this project is a conversation between Shelley and her contemporaries regarding both the limits of the Romantic aesthetic and shifting attitudes towards the city. Tracing these anxieties to the fears generated by the Gordon Riots and the French Revolution, I argue that sublime Nature, in the tradition of William Wordsworth, is unable to contain the evils unleashed by metropolitan horrors, ultimately suggesting that Shelley’s novel inaugurates the Gothic shift from the rural castles of Walpole and Radcliffe to the urban streets of Stevenson and Stoker.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ABSTRACT ...... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 1 REIMAGINING THE GOTHIC...... 5 2 IMAGINING URBANITY ...... 19 3 NATURE’S FAILURE AND THE CREATURE’S TRIUMPH ...... 40 REFERENCES ...... 52

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the faculty and staff of the English department for all of their assistance and support. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Quentin Bailey, without whom this thesis would not have been possible.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments… Such is the atmosphere I have exchanged for the pure, elastic, animating air of the Welsh mountains – O Rus, quando te aspiciam!1

Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 1771

I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818

Victor Frankenstein’s dream directs the reader’s attention to a number of the novel’s more chilling motifs. Having “rushed” from the room following the birth of the Creature, Victor dreams his future fiancé decays into the body of his dead mother at the touch of his lips, only for him to wake and behold again “the miserable monster whom [he] had created” (Shelley, The 1818 Text, 39). Long held to be indicative of the novel’s concern with Faustian overreaching, patriarchal ambition, and the usurpation of feminine creation powers, Frankenstein’s nightmare has courted substantial critical attention. 2 Anca Vlasopolos situates the dream within what she describes as the novel’s dominant theme of incest-avoidance, pointing to Victor and the Creature’s oedipal obsession (125), while Jerrold Hogle, borrowing from Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, points to the underlying infantile drive in Victor’s dream: “The hero's nightmare in Frankenstein, it seems, is at least the Freudian displacement where we are all shown to be concealing, in fact to be reversing, infantile

1 From the book notes: Horace, Satires, 2, 6, 60; O country house, when shall I behold you! 2 See Hogle, “Frankenstein’s Dream,” para 6; George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” 8-9.

2 longings of both eros and thanatos”(FD).3 Overlooked in scholarship, however, is the location of Frankenstein’s dream—a city street—which itself presents significant implications. Set in the streets of Ingolstadt rather than the Frankenstein home in the country, this rendering speaks to Shelley’s awareness of the city’s role in Victor’s downfall.4 The inclusion of Elizabeth in the dream, who is carefully described as “in the bloom of health,” identifies a concern with the dangerous possibilities associated with Elizabeth’s removal from her rural home. 5 This concern, as I argue in this thesis, is partially the result of a growing anxiety with urbanization which manifested itself in the writings of period as moral contamination, fear, and the Romantic aesthetic. In the case of Shelley’s novel, the overarching theme of domestic affection and the destructive effects of ambitious excess are symbolically represented in Victor’s nightmare. 6 The setting the dream, in which an innocent youth is infected with a disease contracted in the streets, is one that preoccupied many writers of the period. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the fear of city contamination was so widespread that guides to navigating the city were a popular form of both entertainment and urban education. The Countryman’s Guide to London (1775) offered its readers, “a picture of low-life that is daily acted in this town, to the ruin of thousands of innocent youth, and the distress of thousands of disconsolate parents” (Cooke iii). Shelley’s choice to cast Frankenstein’s dream in the city streets rather than rural countryside of his home reveals her interest in the city as a source of Gothic nightmares, and, as I shall ultimately argue, marks the beginning of the urban gothic genre. Although Shelley’s work is

3 For additional readings see Bibliography, VanWinkle, Rieder; in addition to Jonathan Glance, “Beyond the Usual Bounds of Reverie”? Another Look at the Dreams in Frankenstein.” (The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7.4 (1996): 30-47; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988); Fred Botting, “Freud’s Navel, Frankenstein’s Dream: Mastery or the Return of Difference” (118-138) in Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991); and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s iconic reading in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1979). 4 Though Ingolstadt is certainly not on the same metropolitan scale as London, it’s distinction from the country is perhaps on par with Oxford in Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor. 5 Interestingly, Elizabeth’s decay is a reference to Victor’s reflections on his study of decomposing cadavers, “I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life” (34). 6 The theme of “domestic affection” has been exhausted in critical research on Frankenstein. Some important contributors include Kate Ellis, George Levine, Anne K. Mellor, and Michelle Levy.

3 certainly not a treatise on the dangers of urban contamination, it does share with such writing a suspicion about the detrimental effects of city life and, conversely, with the regenerative effects of Nature. Nature—in an explicitly Wordsworthian sense—figures predominately throughout the text, serving to counterbalance urban threats. 7The Romantic aesthetic, in which Nature serves to mitigate the effects of “the din/ Of towns and cities” (Tintern Abbey, lines 25-26), is interrogated in Frankenstein; Shelley contests this aesthetic in Victor’s fruitless appeals to Nature to “Teach the adverting mind” (Mont Blanc, 100), and in her creation of a monstrous force that cannot be contained even by “The still and solemn power” (128) of Mont Blanc. In so doing, Mary Shelley not only articulates a new vision of Romantic sublimity, but also introduces a new paradigm for the Gothic novel to engage. This thesis examines Mary Shelley’s departure from the Romantic tradition in order to reflect on the failure of Nature to overcome menaces and cement domestic affections. My study specifically aims to locate the source of Shelley’s evil—long associated with the masculine birth, technophobia, and Godwinian critique—in social and literary concerns centered on urban development and menace. Shelley’s attention to urban horrors, which previous Gothic writers had generally ignored, is occasioned by a number of socio-historical factors. Shelley’s writing is appreciably influenced by her reaction to the political and intellectual radicalism of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.8 In Frankenstein, as Lee Sterrenburg has pointed out, Shelley “attempts to move beyond the utopian politics of [her father]” (144), while, as I will later argue, interrogating the Romantic aesthetic of husband Percy Shelley and his contemporaries. References to Frankenstein throughout are, unless otherwise noted, from the 1818 edition of the text. In the first chapter I examine the Gothic novels preceding Frankenstein, situating Shelley’s writing within the Gothic tradition and investigating the genre’s treatment of space as a feature of aesthetic horror. Chapter two begins with the significant demographic changes of the period, along with the literary responses to the shifting perception of urban pedestrianism in the 18th

7 In his seminal study, Edwin B. Burgum remarks, “To Wordsworth, nature is an objective reality, virtually synonymous with God, to which the poet reverently subordinates himself” (“Romanticism.” The Kenyon Review. 3.4, 1941) 481. 8 Shelley in fact refers to herself as “the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity” in the 1831 introduction.

4 century; I suggest that the increasingly ominous characterizations of city menaces—and by extension the relative serenity associated with rural refuge—informed the natural/unnatural dichotomy in Shelley’s novel. In the second section I expand my study to include the Gothic sensibilities Shelley inherited from her parents and contemporaries, particularly those of Godwin and his close associate Thomas Holcroft. Critically, as I shall try to demonstrate, their diagnosis of urban terrors and preoccupation with metropolitan surveillance and isolation are developed in Shelley’s novel, providing a metaphoric basic for the Creature, who ultimately triumphs over Nature, rendered incapable of containing the threat he presents. By the novel’s conclusion, Shelley successfully interrogates the Romantic idealism which claims that solitary reflection on sublime landscapes, rather than domestic affections and conjugal communion, offers true happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

CHAPTER 1

REIMAGINING THE GOTHIC

Nearly everything known about Mary Shelley’s personal and literary life suggests that she would write a novel in which Nature was triumphant. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was a key figure in the Romantic Movement and close associate of both Lord Byron and John Keats. Nature factored significantly in her father William Godwin’s writings, notably, as Monika Fludernik has pointed out, in Political Justice where Godwin, “had associated the appreciation of sublime landscape with virtue and sensibility” (867). Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft had penned Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a travel narrative dear to husband and daughter, on which the former had famously remarked, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to be the book” (133).9 Wollstonecraft observes Nature’s ability to overcome even the horrors of the French revolution:

I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectations of happiness, than I had for a long, long time before. I forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all nature…to be lighted afresh, care took wing while simple fellow feeling expanded my heart (11).

Mary Shelley’s exposure and adherence to Romantic idealism is evident in both Frankenstein and subsequent publications. The Shelleys’ tour throughout Europe, and to Geneva in particular—which factors predominately throughout Mary’s novel—became the inspiration for a number of Frankenstein’s most memorable pastoral images. Notably, Victor’s reflections on nature mirror the language in Shelley’s passages on her travels. In her History

9 Cynthia Richards has discussed the critical success and influence of Wollstonecraft’s Letters in her article Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 30:(2001) 71-89.

6 of a Six Week’s Tour written in Geneva in 1816, Mary describes the scene upon leaving Paris and the French countryside:

To what a different scene are we now arrived! To the warm sunshine and to the humming of sun-loving insects. From the windows of our hotel we see the lovely lake, blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams….behind [the banks] rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the midst of the snowy Alps, the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all (94).

Much later, in her Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843, Shelley wistfully recalls, “[I]n my girlhood I visited Scotland, and saw from my window the snow-clad Grampian, and I then imbibed this love for the ‘palaces of nature,’ which, when far off, haunts me still, with a keen desire to be among them, and a sense of extreme content when in their vicinity” (119). Shelley’s “palaces of nature” is a direct reference to Byron’s 1816 description of the Alps from his travelogue Child Harold’s Pilgrimage: “The palaces of nature, whose vast walls/ Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps…cold sublimity” (3.LXII). Recalling her summer spent reading Wordsworth with Byron and Percy Shelley years before, here Mary Shelley returns to the time Frankenstein was conceived, and to the Romantic view of Nature’s restorative power. As one might anticipate given Shelley’s fascination for mountain scenery and Mont Blanc in particular, descriptions of snow-covered mountains fill the pages of Frankenstein. Victor notes that the ruined castles on the Arve were “augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps,” where, “Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles” (Shelley 73).10 The profound influence of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Romantic aesthetic on Mary Shelley extends to her conception of nature’s ability to inspire moral virtue and emotional tranquility. Following the death of Justine, Victor’s father suggests that they travel to the valley of Chamounix, as it was “the best means of restoring…wonted serenity” (72). Upon their entrance to the valley Victor concedes, “These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving” (74). Fred Botting indeed notes that Victor’s

10 A reference to the Aiguilles Rouges in France.

7 description of the Chamounix valley “induces an affirmative sense of transcendence more in common with Romantic solitary wanderings than Burkean terror” (40).11 In outward accordance with her father’s philosophy, Shelley reimagines in Frankenstein Godwin’s characterization of the man of taste and accomplishment in Political Justice. Nature’s influence on man results in newfound pleasures and philosophic revelations. He writes:

The man of taste and liberal accomplishments . . . acquires new senses, and a new range of enjoyment. The beauties of nature are all his own. He admires the overhanging cliff, the wide-extended prospect, the vast expanse of the ocean, the foliage of the woods, the sloping lawn and the waving grass. He knows the pleasures of solitude, when man holds commerce alone with the tranquil solemnity of nature. . . . He has traced the subject of the universe...He studies; and has experienced the pleasures which result from conscious perspicuity and discovered truth (212).

Shelley endows Victor with all of the qualities of the man of taste. He finds pleasure in solitary commune with nature’s beauties, and ambitiously seeks scientific discovery and truth. But in a departure from Godwinian philosophy, rather than finding purpose and self- actualization during his scientific pursuits, Victor Frankenstein attains no lasting solace in the sublime, and is subsequently destroyed for pursuing scientific discovery at the cost of domestic tranquility. It is here that Shelley enters into a conversation with Godwin and the Romantics regarding nature’s failure to inspire tranquility and elevate the mind. Shelley’s poignant situation of the meeting between the Creature and Victor Frankenstein in the Alps suggests that even her beloved Mont Blanc is incapable of restoring the Creature to humanity and Victor to morality. Frankenstein’s investigation of Nature’s shortcomings—its inability to inspire (as Godwin and Wordsworth had argued) philosophic truths and overcome moral threats—also reveals Shelley’s location of these threats within the urban sphere. Victor’s ambitions, while confined to the domestic, natural space, are harmless; but nurtured in the urban environment, Victor’s illicit desires manifest themselves in the form of the Creature. Shelley’s novel can be understood as exploring both the limits of the Romantic aesthetic and the underlying threat of urban development.

11 Notably, however, Botting forgoes a closer examination of this dynamic, broadly concluding that “Frankenstein’s geographical and social settings place it outside other Gothic conventions” (40).

Within the context of the Gothic literary genre, Frankenstein resides in a position of both ideological and aesthetic novelty. As Botting as noted of the 18th century Gothic novel, “Medieval architecture became a significant feature of the genre: castles or monasteries in vary states of disrepair set the scene for superstition and supernatural occurrences. In Frankenstein, however, castles lose their central function of inspiring terror; they merely reside in the mountainous scenery as an invocation of a convention that is not elaborated” (39-40). What Botting overlooks in this assessment is that rather than simply elaborate, Shelley points towards a new path for the Gothic to pursue. It is within Frankenstein that the “urban” Gothic can be located in its first, fully-realized incarnation. Long set in remote rural castles and haunted abbeys, a feature of early Gothic novels was their experimenting with the

possibilities of, as Kathleen Spencer has put it, “violating the laws of nature” (200). Social anxieties concerning the Gothic tradition, the city’s menace, and the writings of Godwin and his contemporaries intersect in Shelley’s novel to create a counter-representation of the Romantic aesthetic. This opposition—the perilous city versus the serene country—reoccurs throughout the text, and the influence of Shelley’s parents and husband’s work is here undeniable. In History of a Six Week’s Tour, she writes “[t]he high mountains encompassed us, darkening the waters; at a distance the chapel of Tell… and indeed this lovely lake, these sublime mountains, and wild forests seemed a fit cradle for a mind aspiring to high adventure and heroic deeds” (50).12 For Percy and Mary, the forests and mountains of the Swiss Alps are a perfect setting for “high adventure and heroic deeds.” Recalling the Romantic sentiments exemplified in works such as Wordsworth’s The Pedlar, Shelley’s appreciation of pastoral retreats can be found in Frankenstein’s numerous monologues commending the restorative powers of nature. In his narration to Walton, Victor Frankenstein recalls, “A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy… I was undisturbed by thoughts which during the preceding year had pressed upon me” (51). Victor’s reflections closely echo those in the The Pedlar, a poem that encapsulates the Romantic Aesthetic of the late 18th century.13 Wordsworth writes,

12 Here the Shelley’s describe their journey through Switzerland with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. 13 The Pedlar, composed in 1798, would have been unknown to Shelley, though she would likely have known The Excursion (1814).

Low desires,

Low thoughts, had there no place; yet was his heart

Lowly, for he was meek in gratitude

Oft as he called to mind those ecstasies,

And whence they flowed; and from them he acquired

Wisdom which works through patience. (Wu 438)

But unlike the shepherd, who, on the mountain-top, gains wisdom and contentment through solitary reflection and natural communion, Victor finds no lasting transformation from sublime exposure. The city of Ingolstadt, the birthplace of the Creature and manifestation of Victor’s excessive ambitions, becomes the antithesis of the Natural, domestic sphere. Throughout the novel Shelley creates a division between the urban and rural spaces, the former synonymous with decay and Frankenstein’s unnatural desires, the latter with domestic felicity and the Romantic sublime. Picking up on the untapped fear in Romanticism of urban development, the threat the Creature poses represents both the neglect of domestic attachments and the threat of urban overgrowth to the Romantic aesthetic. 14 As discussed in the first chapter, a significant motivation for this dynamic lies in the socio-economic and demographic changes that dominated the 18th century. Descriptions of London as a noisy, filthy, and vice-filled metropolis characterized a great deal of the literature devoted to urban life in the 18th century, and well into the next. Samuel Johnson deftly observed, “They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city, know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see the town”.15 By collapsing social anxieties concerning urban menace into a narrative about

14 Numerous critics have reflected on the novel’s interest in domestic affections. Michelle Levy in particular has convincingly argued that “Shelley saw the domestic affections as the primary tool for restraining these [imperialistic and scientific] excesses” (694). 15 Idler #80 (October 27, 1759)

Natural limitations, Shelley creates an urban Gothic novel. Michael Gamer has defined the Gothic as “neither…a mode nor as a kind of fiction (the “gothic novel”) but as an aesthetic” (Romanticism 4), while Robert Mighall classifies the Gothic as a discursive tradition which shares historical and geographical interests (xiv). Though the categorization of “gothic” as a genre as been long disputed, contemporary observers such as Gamer, Mighall, David Punter, Jerrold Hogle, James Chandler, and Robert Miles have invariably pointed to Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis as iconic early Gothic novelists, if to varying degrees. While the Gothic preoccupation with castles, ruins, illicit sexuality, fatal women, and specters has been exhausted within critical research, there is far less discussion of the genre in regards to another prevalent feature of Gothic narratives: the shift from the rural to the urban landscape. This shift, as I argue throughout this thesis, is central to an understanding of Frankenstein and shapes the novel’s investigation of the dominant Romantic aesthetic. Though recent studies have investigated the historical, aesthetic, and demographic features of the Urban Gothic, these explorations have yielded little in regards to the literary inauguration of this shift. The Gothic of the 19th century registers a new set of concerns, ones that diverge from the representations of the medieval or historical terrors of The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, and Lewis’s The Monk. Mighall has offered a broad explanation, suggesting that the Urban Gothic belongs to the mid-Victorian era. He notes of W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844-1848) that “Reynolds has effected a transportation, shifting the scene for locating terrors from the exotic and ‘historical’ settings of Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin to the contemporary urban context” (30). Mighall’s location of urban terrors in the Gothic in the middle of the century disregards the earlier movement of cultural anxieties out of the rural space and into the urban that took place in the latter end of the 18th century.16 For Mighall, the Urban Gothic is particularly influenced by historical

16 There are those who locate the urban gothic movement, or “revived romance”, as late as the 1880’s and 1890’s. See Kathleen L Spencer’s “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (ELH 59.1 (1992): 197-225). Additionally, while David Punter has observed that Frankenstein has been identified as the moment in which the period of the classic Gothic novel ended, he remarks that it isn’t until the 1860’s that the “romantic Gothic villain is transformed as monks, bandits, and threatening foreigners give way to criminals, madmen and scientists” (Gothic 26).

11 concerns regarding the underclass and the association of poverty with criminality, an observation furthered by Gamer who asserts that “Urban Gothic horror is found in the sanitary sphere” (68).17 Other inquiries into 19th century Gothic texts focus on what Grace Kehler has identified as the “gothic’s mobilization of feelings for the purposes of public instruction and urban reform” (439), a critique that displaces the significance of Gothic monsters in favor of Gothic subjects. What are generally overlooked in such scholarship are both the literary location of the shift from Gothic to Urban Gothic, and a close examination of the Gothic texts that lead to the evolution of the genre. As such, the emergence of the Urban Gothic as a genre is generally considered to occupy the mid to late 19th century. But a close study of Gothic texts reveals a much earlier shift than is generally recognized. Judith Halberstam’s exploration of Gothic bodies and monsters has lead her to a similar conclusion. Pointing to Frankenstein (specifically, the later edition), she notes that “from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the terrain of Gothic horror shifted from the fear of the corrupted aristocracy or clergy, represented by the haunted castle or abbey, to the fear embodied by monstrous bodies” (16). Halberstam suggests that the movement of Gothic preoccupations that took place during the 18th and 19th centuries is one of physical, rather than geographic location. Indeed, a prevailing feature of Gothic literature in the 19th century is the personification of complex historical and social concerns in the body of a monstrous figure. The latter end of the century saw the addition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stroker’s Dracula to the Gothic pantheon, differing from their predecessors in both their location of Gothic horror and meaning in the body of the monster, and within urban society. As Halberstam notes, “Gothic novels produce a symbol for this interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster. The monster always becomes a primary focus of interpretation” (2). Though Halberstam does indeed point to Frankenstein as the quintessential 19th century Gothic novel, her focus on urban bodies rather than the urban spaces disregards Frankenstein’s critical focus on geography and the rural/urban dichotomy. This chapter will historicize the movement of Gothic concerns from the rural to the urban space, contending that it is in

17 Michelle Allen discusses this dynamic in her article Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (2008).

Frankenstein that urban horrors and Gothic sensibilities meet. In the opening of her essay “Frankenstein as Mystery Play,” Judith Wilt briefly addresses what few scholars have pursued regarding the geography of the Gothic novel. Describing Shelley’s decision to move the English Gothic from the “God-haunted Mediterranean into the Swiss Republic,” she notes, “In the early 19th century, however, Switzerland, with just a quick foray into Scotland, is as close as the Gothic can be allowed to come” (31). Wilt raises an interesting point, and one central to this thesis. In an examination of the following texts, I will chart the development of urban Gothic menaces from the genre’s preliminary manifestations to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What informs Shelley’s novel here is not the focus on monstrous bodies, but on monstrous geographies. By way of the Gothic form, Shelley interrogates Romantic aesthetics, revealing that urban concerns are central to both Gothic and Romantic texts. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), often regarded as the first of the Gothic novels, is a conjunction of 18th century views on Medieval feudalism and aristocracy (Punter 106), supernatural symbolism, and historical reimagination.18 Set entirely in rural Italy, Otranto introduces a number of Gothic features including the pursued virginal maid19, the ancestral specter, domestic infelicity as an occasion of horror, forbidden knowledge, and what a 1765 review of The Castle of Otranto identifies as “the unchristian doctrine of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children” (118). Despite a series of inexplicable supernatural events and the warnings of the church, Manfred, the Lord of Otranto, aims to divorce his wife and pursue a young virgin in order to secure his illegitimate claim to the throne. The events of Otranto are happily concluded when the rightful heir of the castle saves the maid from an unwanted marriage and the tyrant is displaced. In characteristic 18th century Gothic style, the instances of horror in Otranto are confined to the castle. Walpole’s novel engages cultural concerns with domestic oppression and sexual perversion, which arguably manifest themselves in Frankenstein as Victor’s ill-treatment of Elizabeth and the Creature’s perverse conception. Manfred is condemned for both his ill-treatment of his faultless wife, and his

18 Punter and Hogle in particular point to Walpole as having originated the genre. 19 A character that reappears as Nouronihar in William Beckford’s Vathek, Antonia in Lewis’s The Monk, and Elizabeth Lavenza in Frankenstein.

13 insistence he marry and bed young lady Isabella, a girl his daughter’s age. Having lost Isabella in the castle’s corridors, Manfred states, “Since hell will not satisfy my curiosity…I will use the human means in my power for preserving my race; Isabella shall not escape me” (23). Manfred’s excessive desire for the forbidden—another recurring Gothic trope—drives the occurrences of horror throughout the novel. His violent rages are as much an occasion for terror as the supernatural incidents. The narrator notes that “[Isabella’s] dread of Manfred soon outweighed every other terror” (24). Walpole’s historical Gothic novel explores anxieties concerning aristocracy, tyranny and domestic affection in the form of usurped princedoms and haunted castles. The reinforcement of domestic ideals as they pertain to the Gothic is particularly relevant to Shelley’s novel, in addition to the more obvious connection with illicit knowledge and excessive desire. However, in the Castle of Otranto, as we shall see in other Gothic novels of the 18th century, the horrors of monstrous geography, history, and society are containable. Vathek, William Beckford’s 1786 novel, is another historic rendering of the Gothic set in an exotic locale. A precursor to Frankenstein, Vathek introduces a number of the terrors to be reimagined by later Gothic novelists, such as concerns regarding excessive passions, restless ambition, and forbidden knowledge. The novel anticipates many of Frankenstein’s concerns with excessive desires and domestic corruption, but unlike Shelley’s novel, is able to contain these within an Orientalist discourse that locates the source of terror in far-away lands and mythic figures. Beckford’s Vathek is the Caliph of a thriving metropolis whose exhaustive desire for knowledge leads him and his family to destruction. Of the Caliph the narrator notes that “he had studied so much for his amusement…as to acquire a great deal of knowledge, though not a sufficiency to satisfy himself; for he wished to know every thing; even sciences that did not exist” (86). Excess desire for knowledge and power, a feature of the Gothic to be revisited by both Godwin and Shelley, results in the primary occasions of horror in the novel; Vathek sacrifices fifty of the city’s children to the jinns in order to be led to the palace that houses the world’s power. Vathek’s only equal in ambition is his mother Carathis, whom the Caliph “respected…as a person of superior genius” (89). However, unlike the virginal maids and idealized maternal figures in other Gothic novels, Beckford’s female characters are indicted in the excesses that result in the story’s terror. His wife, Nouronihar, is infected with Vathek’s pride and joins him and his

14 mother in eternal damnation. The narrator’s final words reinforce the Miltonic notion of divine knowledge:

Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be, the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which, aiming at discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceives not, through its infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be—humble and ignorant (153).

Beckford’s resounding aphorism is reimagined in both St. Leon and Frankenstein. But though there is no possibility of moral or spiritual reconciliation in Vathek, Beckford’s horrors are less threatening than the terrors of later works; the novel reveals that location is central to the Gothic’s rendering of terrors. Set in distant Asia, Vathek is distinguished from other Gothic novels by its emphasis on exotic gods, specters, and the Islamic religion. The terrors suggested are moderated by unfamiliarity and foreign detachment, unlike 19th century works set within the streets of London itself. Beckford further distances the novel’s terrors by subtitling it “An Arabian Tale”, an addition that—while appealing to 18th century interest in Orientalism—removes the horrors from the realm of British possibility and access. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Ann Radcliffe brings the Gothic closer to Britain than Beckford, Walpole, or Lewis. Set in early modern France and Italy, nature is itself a character in the novel, personified in Radcliffe’s extended descriptions of rural landscapes. Describing St. Aubert and Emily’s travels through the Pyrenees, the narrator notes, “Sometimes a cliff was seen lifting its bold head above the woods and the vapors that floated midway down the mountains; and sometimes a face of perpendicular marble rose from the water’s edge, over which he threw his gigantic arms” (31). A clear nod to Walpole’s monstrous knight, the description of nature as monstrous is part of Radcliff’s “Gothicizing” of the rural space. Mighall has suggested that to be Gothicized is to be historicized—to be associated with the medieval past. “Criminality,” he observes, “is Gothicized by being associated with the past, it perpetuates the errors of benighted antiquity” (49). But rather than Gothicizing Nature by its association with medieval or early modern castles, ruins and criminality, Radcliffe suggests that Nature itself is as menacing as it is existentially revitalizing; here geography, rather than the body, is monstrous. Radcliffe constructs

15 competing conceptions of the rural space: Nature as monstrous and Nature as spiritually fortifying. But ultimately the terrors of Udolpho and the menace posed by nature’s destructive potential are overcome by nature’s ability to inspire serenity and promote physical wellbeing. Regarding St. Aubert’s illness, the text notes that “the green woods and pastures…seem to revivify the soul, and make existence bliss” (8). Radcliffe reconciles Gothic terrors that accompany Romantic aesthetics. While crags of “stupendous height and fantastic shape…along whose broken ridges was often lodged a weight of snow, that, trembling even to the vibration of a sound, threatened to bear destruction in its course to the vale,” the narrator reminds us that, “The serenity and clearness of the air…was particularly delightful to travels; it seemed to inspire them with a finer spirit, and diffused an indescribable complacency over their minds” (35). Radcliffe extends her analogies to create a dichotomy between savage, menacing nature, and the wild, Romantic sublime. The potential dangers of the rural space are overcome by nature’s ability to revitalize and inspire. The image of the monstrous cliff whose “gigantic arms” threaten the destruction of the valley below is reconciled by the spiritual and constitutional benefits of the natural landscape. Radcliffe’s novel ultimately embraces the Romantic aesthetic in a way that Mary Shelley’s does not. As we will find in Frankenstein, Shelley’s monstrous personification of the Gothic cannot be reconciled within Romantic ideals. In contrast to the ambiguous role of nature in Udolpho, the city is decidedly more menacing, early on associated with infestation and contamination. St. Aubert, who is consistently connected to scenes of domestic tranquility and natural delights, is quoted as saying time spent with his wife and children was “infinitely more delightful than any passed amid the brilliant and tumultuous scenes that are courted by the world” (6). His admiration of Valencourt is spurred by the latter’s lack of urban knowledge: “St. Aubert was pleased with him: Here is the real ingenuousness and ardor of youth, said he to himself; this young man has never been to Paris” (30). Radcliffe begins to hint at the concerns of infection that are closely tied to the Urban Gothic. In addition to reconciling rural terrors, Radcliffe’s novel registers, but does not fully develop, growing anxieties regarding urban life. Of St. Aubert the narrator relates that

He had known life in other forms than those of pastoral simplicity, having mingled in the gay and in the busy scenes of the world; but the flattering portrait of mankind, which his heart had delineated in early youth, his experience had too sorrowfully corrected…he retired from the multitude, more in pity than in anger, to scenes of simple nature, to the pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues (1).

St. Aubert’s preference of “simple nature” to the world’s “busy scenes” foreshadows the county/city dynamic to be developed in later texts, particularly in his close association of nature and domestic virtue. Aubert’s “pity” of urban multitudes casts a negative light on metropolitan life, an apprehension that becomes fully realized by the Urban Gothic novelists of the 19th century. Anticipating this shift, and arguably influenced by Romantic focus on Natural sublimity, in Udulpho, Radcliffe reconsiders the rural space as the seat of Gothic terrors. The Natural environment, evocative in Vathek and Otranto of mystery and even dread, is in Udolpho a potential source of pleasure. In their journey across the Alps to Italy, Emily looks over the side of the precipice, “with her fears were mingled such various emotions of delight, such admiration, astonishment, and awe, as she never experienced before” (133). The iconic site of Gothic horror, the rural castle, is also described as both menacing and beautiful—a Gothic transformed by the Romantic sublime.20 The narrator notes that to Emily, “the Gothic greatness of [the castle’s] features… rendered it a gloomy and sublime object” (179), a comment that reveals the shifting cultural perceptions of Gothic terrors. The Monk, published two years after Udulpho, picks up on the changing Gothic aesthetic and further moves the Gothic out of the woods and into the city. A study of Lewis’s novel is central to a discussion on shifting Gothic aesthetics in the 18th century. Its terrors move from a rural German castle—the quintessential Gothic backdrop—to a secluded monastery in the city of Madrid, ultimately breaking the walls of the monastery and bleeding into the city proper. Key here is the inability of the rural space to contain the menaces generated in remote settings. Unlike its predecessors, Lewis’s novel is far less concerned with matters of domestic propriety and aristocracy; rather, the story sensationalizes and sexualizes its terrors, capitalizing on the spectacle of monstrous bodies.

20 Wordsworth did, in fact, give a decaying castle the Romanic treatment in his Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont (composed in 1805).

Retaining the Gothic archetypes of the pursued virginal maid and the licentious aggressor, The Monk, tapping into Protestant anxieties regarding Catholic sexual repression, suggests that repressed sexual desire leads not only to isolated deviant practices, but to the inevitable spread of these threats into the city.21 The location of the novel’s tensions moves from isolated settings to increasingly urban ones. This dynamic hints at the relocation of the Gothic in the 19th century and shifting Gothic aesthetics. Agnes, failing to escape the castle Lindenberg as the bleeding nun, is sent to the abbey in Madrid where she is tortured and imprisoned for her illicit pregnancy. In his nearby cell, Ambrosio is seduced by Rosario, who is revealed to be a woman, and later, Satan’s envoy. Having fulfilled his carnal desires with the demon Matilda, “The Monk was glutted with the fullness of pleasure: A Week had scarcely elapsed, before He was wearied of his Paramour” (312). Due to his increasing sexual appetite, the Monk becomes taken with a beautiful young virgin; unable to contain himself, he broke “his vow never to see the outside of the Abbey-walls” (318), leaving the confines of the abbey to steel into Antonia’s home where he murders her mother. This significant moment marks the movement of the novel’s horror from the confines of the monastery to the city. The abbey walls cannot contain the monk’s illicit carnal desires; rather, one of the key moments of horror in the novel is when Ambrosio steels into the urban space to spread his malevolence outside of his natural boundaries. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Ambrosio cannot be contained within his natural monastic domain. In Lewis, the Gothic infects the city, yet unlike Frankenstein, is not fully constituted by it. The terrors of The Monk can’t be contained within the abbey walls in the city; in Frankenstein, the Gothic horrors can’t be contained within the city walls, nor controlled by Nature’s power. It is within this context that I propose the Gothic novel makes a shift from rural to urban space. Frankenstein inaugurates the 19th century movement of the Gothic from the medieval ruins of Otranto and Udolpho to the urban city streets. While non-fictional texts informed Gothic fears concerning urban growth—often appearing as descriptions of illness and disease—in Shelley’s novel these fears put into question the very limits of Romanticism.

21 Steven Blackwell has in fact suggested that Lewis’s novel performs a Protestant Black Mass by “conjuring up demonic powers and performing an ambiguous double screw of the subverted, feminized con(texts) of his fallen Catholic world” (536).

Victor Frankenstein can be understood as having become victim to urban contamination both physically and morally. This degradation results in the monstrous birth of the Creature, the aesthetic personification of urban menace let loose from the confines of the city walls to devastate the rural space. In Shelley’s novel, Nature, long identified with moral virtue, domestic felicity, and Romantic idealism, is in direct opposition to the destructive excess of the city, and rendered incapable of containing the dangers it poses. As the following chapter will suggest, this dichotomy was largely constructed as part of a conversation developed in less sensational texts.

CHAPTER 2

IMAGINING URBANITY

Beneath the pastoral images in Romantic writing lies an untapped fear connected to social anxieties concerning urban development. Coleridge’s nightmare in The Pains of Sleep (1802) centers on “a fiendish crowd,” which he describes as, “a trampling throng,/…Thirst of revenge, the powerless will/…Fantastic passions! Maddening brawl!/ And shame and terror over all! (18-26). Coleridge’s fear of “fiendish crowds” and “trampling throngs” was common to Englishmen familiar with urban pedestrianism, particularly in light of the events that took place in London and Birmingham over the previous decade. Urban menace was a common motif throughout Romantic writing, and the anti-urban aesthetic was deeply embedded within descriptions of Nature’s ennobling tranquility and transcendence. In book seven of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) he reflects on the three and a half months spent in London in 1791, describing the violent London crowds as “[b]arbarian and Infernal—a phantasma/ Monstrous in color, motion, shape, sight, sound!” (7.687). Wordsworth’s city is personified as a monstrous phantasm, a source of terror and the epitome of Gothic horror. But for Wordsworth—and for the Romantics preceding Mary Shelley—Nature’s “soul” surmounts even London’s infernal crowds, endowing composure and serenity:

This did I feel, in London's vast domain.

The Spirit of Nature was upon me there;

The soul of Beauty and enduring Life

Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused,

Through meagre lines and colours, and the press

Of self-destroying, transitory things,

Composure, and ennobling Harmony (7.766-771).

Nature is here endowed with divine recuperative powers that are foreign to the urban landscape. London itself is composed of “self-destroying, transitory things,” that are remedied by the “ennobling Harmony” granted by “The spirit of Nature.” The Romantic aesthetic, often identified by nature’s personification, is additionally distinguished by, as Onno Oerlemans has observed, “its beauty and safety and its apparent freedom from human domination” (30). Composed in 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, echoes Wordsworth’s sentiments on urban monstrosities, writing,

My gentle-hearted Charles! For though hast pined

And hungered after Nature, many a year,

In the great City pent, winning thy way

With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain

And strange calamity!22 (28-32)

Addressed to Charles Lamb following his visit in June of 1797 in the company William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge reflects on Nature’s ability to “keep the heart/ Awake to Love and Beauty! (63-64), in light of Lamb’s recent misfortunes in London.23 Coleridge proposes that Nature will remedy the “evil and pain” Lamb contracted while “pent” in the city. Implicit here is the dichotomy between the revitalizing Natural space and the evils associated with extended exposure to the metropolis. Romanticism is, to some extent, a reaction to growing concerns with London’s increasing size and hazards. Frankenstein can be understood as showing the limits of the recuperative effects of Nature and thus paves the way for an urban Gothic that is very different to the rural one found in Walpole and Radcliffe. My aim in the following chapter is to situate Frankenstein within a historic, literary conversation on urban representation. The threat of metropolitan development and violence that writers in the 18th century had counted as part of urban amusements became, in

22 Lamb, however, was not so convinced. In a letter to Wordsworth dated January 30th 1801 he writes, “I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have with dead Nature.” 23 Lamb’s sister had, 10 months earlier, stabbed their mother to death “in a fit of insanity” (Abrams 421).

21 the context of the French Revolution and the English riots of the 1790s, a source of fear and literary horrors. Romanticism, largely understood as a reaction to the sociopolitical reformation of the 18th century, was also informed by growing anxieties regarding the technological development and violence of 18th century London. 24When Shelley reimagines the Gothic novel in 1818, she investigates the validity of the Romantic focus on Nature, ultimately rendering the Romantic aesthetic unattainable. English writers have long constructed the city and the country as opposing ideological landscapes that evoke very different responses. Looking back on 18th century travel guides, narratives that arose as a direct result of extensive demographic transformations, one finds that the urban monstrosity that emerges at the turn of the century started life as humorous, if often unpleasant, observations on urban pedestrianism. London was the commercial center of 18th century England, and the only metropolis of its size in Europe. It experienced exponential growth and unprecedented development; London’s population grew from an estimated 650,000 in 1750 to 1,000,000 people in 1800 (United Kingdom).25 London remained the undisputed urban giant throughout much of the century, and representations of city life in Britain were inevitably descriptions of London itself. As Alison O’Byrne has noted, literature of this kind abounded, particularly guides to safely navigating the city streets, avoiding sharpers, and effectively conducting business in the bustling and often confusing capital. By the early 19th century, as I will go on to argue, traversing the urban space had become synonymous with exposure to filth, contamination, and other potential grievances. Entertainment in the city was often characterized as violent. Bear, horse, and bull baiting were common spectator sports, as were physical contests between men, women, and youths, who bloodied each other for the amusement of the on-looking assembly. Such exchanges were often reported in the local newspapers, delighting readers with details of the injured persons. Public hangings attracted large crowds, entertaining Londoners with the spectacle of

24 See, for instance M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 1971); Aiden Day, Romanticism (London: Routiedge, 1966); Stuart Curran, ed. British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 25 By contrast, Paris, the next largest city in Europe, had only a half million inhabitants.

22 death. According to one account, after the heads of decapitated traitors were moved from London Bridge to Temple Bar, a storm in March 1772 knocked over the unfortunate remains of two Jacobites who were executed as traitors. Though reports describe women and men shrieking and fainting at the sight, the infamous spikes weren’t removed until 30 years later (Ackroyd, 285). Such accounts of city living from this period reveal a growing concern regarding the menaces threatening urban pedestrians, which I suggest were part of a discursive tradition that informed later Gothic novelists. Of course, not everyone was concerned with these. With tongue firmly in cheek, Robert Randal begins his preface to Excursion Round London (1776) with an address to his competitors:

There have been several publications whose chief objects were the arts, cheats, designs, and various deceptions of the metropolis, but they are generally allowed to be deficient…the Author of the following sheet, was not only a more ingenious, but a more ingenuous rambler: he left his country friends in order to oblige, instruct, and entertain them (vi).

As this account indicates, early guides to the city were often intended for country readership, and warned newcomers to London of urban hazards while entertaining them in the process. Randal’s Excursion is dedicated to “the Country Gentleman of Great Britain…written for their amusement and instruction, and to warn them of dangers.” His guide, a series of letters between him and John Trusty, details first-hand accounts of a country-dweller’s experience navigating the city. In another work, The Countryman’s Guide to London or Villainy Detected (1775), the title page claims to “enable the most innocent country people to be sufficiently on their guard,” so as, “to avoid the base impositions of such vile and abandoned artists, who live by robbing and ruining the young and innocent of both sexes” (Cooke). The author lists highwaymen, scamps, gamblers, whores, false friends, gossips, pimps and fortune-tellers among those to be avoided, implicitly suggesting that such unsavory types of individuals would be unknown, or at the least, far less of a menace, to a rural reader. This text further differentiates between urban and the rural anxieties by pointing out, “[t]hough to be ignorant of the various forms of fraud and deceit practiced in this busy scene of things, may be deemed some part of the happiness of rural life; yet if the inexperienced countryman embarks in this maze of perplexity, without caution against its various chicaneries, that very

23 ignorance may prove his bane” (ii). By comparison, rural life is characterized by its freedom from the frauds and deceits typical of the city. Anticipating Shelley’s dichotomy between rural and urban space, in its earliest incarnation, this contrast was made to delight and acquaint country travelers with the dodgy nuances of the city. Randal’s text, enticing readers with its description of metropolitan scandals and cheats, presents to its audience a first-hand account of urban travels with the intent of instructing and entertaining his audience. In his Excursion, Randal expresses no fear of the city, but rather a diverted, if occasionally disgusted, amusement. Later accounts of urban pedestrianism are marked by increasingly cautionary reports of violence, unsanitary conditions, and ever-present pestilence. But despite potential dangers, Randal’s Excursion, like Tobias Smollet’s 1771 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, is dominated by amused spectatorship. In a letter, Randal cheerfully writes, “How wonderfully the city differs from the country in respect to points of carnal amusement” (32), going on to discuss in great detail the ease with which a prostitute can be procured. Death and disease were commonplace in London, as Trusty writes “Ah, Frank, Frank—hanging, drowning, cutting throats, dying, damning, and everything is going forward in this fame city of London” (40). Regardless of the presence of scoundrels and fatalities, Randal concludes his guide of London favorably. In what might best encapsulate his view of the city itself, he writes, “I have had a peep at the Court, that circle of whim and wickedness, gaiety and giddiness, melancholy and merriment, folly and falsehood” (137). This laissez- faire attitude towards the city’s hazards was prevalent until the end of the 1770s, when urban amusements became more dangerous, and were subsequently represented in literature as metropolitan terrors in the context of the anxieties generated by the Gordon Riots, and secondly, and more forcefully, by the French Revolution. London crowds were infamous for their irritable and volatile nature. A letter in Excursion describes a public hanging in which the body was plundered by pick-pockets and thieves right after the hangman had done his work. “Upon our going away,” Trusty relates, “the mob began to be quarrelsome; and after that we were pelted with dead cats, rotten eggs, and all manner of vermin. Such, Frank, is the holiday manner in which your Cocknies amuse themselves” (42). Yet despite—or perhaps as a result of—the seemingly endless list of urban hazards, the tone of guide literature, as indicated by the rhyme above and Trusty’s wry reflections, was still decidedly comic.

Numerous texts elucidate the ruses common to the city, particularly those by sharpers, setters, spungers, money-droppers, pick-pockets, and other thieves. These deceptive individuals often appear as gentleman, and, like the city itself, present illusive and obscure threats. In Cooke’s Countryman’s Guide, the author devotes a section to sharpers, describing men whose fortunes and reputations have fallen by the wayside, and in an effort to redeem their loss, prey upon “young heirs of much wealth, and less prudence, who having left their rural abodes, and being captivated with the novelty of town life, often affect the company of those who, according to the common phrase, are said to “know life” (2-3). The 18th century equivalent of the pool shark, sharpers will play their naïve acquaintances at games such as billiards, bowling, and tennis, which they have already mastered, winning money through gambling. “In short,” Cooke concludes of them, “take nothing on trust, nor make any acquaintance till assured of their way of life and moral character” (5). As Cooke demonstrates, one of the primary concerns when traveling through London is the abundance of immoral characters. The city is rife with “vicious and abandoned characters” (Cooke iii) and as a result, to navigate the city safely is to be consistently doubtful of the character of anyone to make your acquaintance. Cooke ultimately advises, “If any one behaves with extraordinary civility towards you, or affects to desire your friendship beware of him, listen not to his enticements, for as you are a stranger to him, his desire of cultivating an acquaintance with you must arise from base or selfish views” (4). In a letter to his brothers, Randal writes of the city, “It does not ask for any great genius to observe, that the city of London is more full of scramblers, cheats, villains, and imposters, than any other in Europe” (87). Urban myths and legends abounded. According to Trusler, kidnappers, posing as pub comrades, will buy the victims drinks, only to have them awake from the evening’s ordeal in a state of slavery, forced to purchase their freedom at extortionate rates. Setters, a group that Cooke regards with particular aversion, were commonly held to trick young heirs into marriage. Describing them as “servile, despicable wretches, capable of every action base and sordid,” the setter watches for naïve and wealthy visitors to the city and, “[imposes] upon them jilts and whores for women of character and fortune” (15). For the country gentleman, the city is home to innumerable frauds and deceits; only the savviest city-dweller can navigate the urban terrain successfully. Guide literature serves to warn the rural visitors of

25 urban hazards, and to establish the city as a space of menace and misfortune. This is especially true of urban decadence and debauchery. In addition to fraud, the guides of the 18th century also describe the potential for even the most morally upright country person to fall prey to the indulgence of vice. The city is full of moral contaminants, each one threatening to infect the very character of the rural visitor. As discussed above, gambling was a major form of entertainment for the gentry and bourgeois alike. Peter Ackroyd has captured this moment in his book London: The Biography, noting that “[d]rink, sex, and violence one always consorted together. They were the trinity of London vice and weakness, an unholy threesome which disported happily across the city” (377). Gaming houses attracted patrons from all walks of life. Frequented by thieves and sharpers, gaming houses were an easy way to lose one’s money and reputation. Recalling the language of Defoe, Randal writes of his visit to such an establishment, “A gaming-house, my dear cousin, is like the grave, which confounds all ranks, and reduces all to a level. Villainy, scoundrelism, knavery, and cunning…shall insist upon their lead, through all stars and garters to stare them in the face. See how they all mix together –no difference, no subordinations, no distinctions!” (71). Devoting nine pages to the menace of the gambling hall, Cooke concedes that most games are “practiced by men of principle for diversion only” (7), but a country visitor to the city with little acquaintance with gaming provides too attractive an opportunity for a London gambler, and thus become targets of various schemes, some fatal. Cooke and his contemporaries construct an opposition between urban and rural space; the latter is a site presumably free of the menaces that characterize urban life, and as such, outsiders to the city require textual representations in order to understand the foreign hazards associated with moving through the city. Critical to a discussion on metropolitan dangers of the 18th century are disease and illness. As I will go on to argue, one of the primary ways in which urban menace is constructed is in terms of infection and contamination. In his chapter entitled “A Plague Upon You” Ackroyd notes, “Much has been written about the nature of fear in London,” citing James Boswell’s observations upon arriving in London in 1762, “I began to be apprehensive that I was taking a nervous fever, a supposition not improbable, as I had one after such an illness when I was last in London” (cited in Ackroyd, 192). Ackroyd attributes people’s fear of the city to the common presence of pestilence, in addition to the noise,

26 violence, and general urban commotion. Epidemics were common, as was suicide. The plague visited the city as early as the 7th century, returning in 1348, 1528, 1563, 1603, and 1664-1666 (194), the latter dates famously recorded in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Thousands perished in the plagues, at least 70,000 people in the 18 months following the 1664 outbreak alone. Two years later, London was visited by the Great Fire, the conflagration which burned for four days in September of 1666, destroying eighty per- cent of the urban area (Panton 13). Death and misery were synonymous with the city of London at these times, and images abound in literature of the bodies being carried out to be buried in massive graves. Though the plague did not return to London thereafter, and 18th texts such as Humphry Clinker and The Countryman’s Guide largely regarded the city with delight rather than fear, the metaphor of the metropolis as source of contamination was echoed in the works of writers for centuries thereafter. As Roger Lund has suggested, metaphors of disease and contagion were often used by writers in the 18th century to express their fear of perceived threats such as atheism or social corruption (46-48), a dynamic that I will argue was echoed in Frankenstein. In addition to non-fictional works on urban pedestrianism, the novel was similarly affected by metropolitan development and the social anxieties that resulted. The comparison between urban horrors and rural pleasures is central to Smollett’s novel, informing writers like Godwin and Holcroft in the years that followed. Matthew Bramble’s often hilarious observations in Humphry Clinker provide a unique insight into British life in the 1760’s and more specifically into cultural perspectives on urban traveling. Throughout the novel there are moments of significant threat; however, the overall tone is one of amusement and diversion. Smollett constructs Bramble as equal parts droll and cantankerous, as aptly observed by his nephew Melford, “He is the most risible misanthrope I ever met with” (43). Bramble’s negative comments regarding the city are related in a whimsical tone that nearly belies his assertions of danger and disease. Though the city is described as menacing, Smollett’s characters generally embody the same diverted revulsion that is exhibited in Randal. Melford notes, “This is what my uncle reprobates, as a monstrous jumble of heterogeneous principles; a vile mob of noise and impertinence, without decency or subordination. But this chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement” (43). But the

27 amusements the city offers are accompanied its perils. Bramble describes London itself as monstrous:

[T]he capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support. The absurdity will appear in its full force, when we consider that one sixth part of the natives of this whole extensive kingdom is crowded within the bills of mortality (79).

Bramble depicts London as excessively swollen and ailing, its concentrated population threatening the very kingdom itself. The anxieties that lead to this diagnosis are explored in this chapter, as Bramble describes the lure of wealth, and its destructive consequences. Like Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, Smollett’s Bramble suggests that the idle working-class deserts its dismal rural employments and flocks to the city of London in hopes of finding opportunity.26 “Great numbers of these,” he states, “being disappointed in their expectation, become thieves and sharpers; and London being an immense wilderness…affords them lurking places as well as prey” (80). This concern is also present in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which reveal the almost complete disjunction between rural poverty and urban extravagance that is the mark of much 18th century writing. In Letter three, for instance, Wollstonecraft notes of her time in Sweden, “The country is, perhaps, too thinly inhabited to produce many of that description of thieves termed footpads, or highwaymen. They are usually the spawn of great cities—the effect of the spurious desires generated by wealth, rather than the desperate struggles of poverty to escape from misery” (29). Wollstonecraft echoes Smollett’s understanding of the city as a place in which “spurious desires” are generated by “wealth” rather than “poverty.” Like Godwin’s novels St. Leon and Caleb Williams, Smollett’s text is concerned with the city’s lack of social distinction and hierarchy: “The different departments of life are jumbled together…crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption (80-81).27 London is a place filled with deceivers that mingle with the moral, mechanics that mingle with courtiers. Part of the city’s monstrosity lies in its lack of social division and abundance of

26 See Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Fielding’s Tom Jones. 27 In the Countryman’s Guide, Cooke found this to be particularly the case in gaming houses, an observation that did little to reduce their charms (73).

28 working-class individuals. This particular urban threat is one that undermines notions of class structure and separation. In addition to the city itself, the urban population is deemed menacing, what Bramble calls an “incongruous monster, called the public” (81). He goes on with relish, reflecting, “When I see a man of birth, education, and fortune, put himself on a level with the dregs of the people, mingle with low mechanics, feed with them at the same board…I cannot help despising him, as a man guilty of the vilest prostitution” (96). This menace associated with class mingling is compounded by the pervasive and infectious nature of London. Bramble’s solemn reflections hint at the genuine concerns with urban expansion developed in the 19th century. But here, Smollett’s illusions are couched in Bramble’s comic intuitions rather than, as we see in Shelley, indications of legitimate social anxieties. Throughout the novel Smollett reflects on metropolitan infection. Alluding to urban degradation of morality, Bramble notes, “I have seen some old friends, who constantly resided in this virtuous metropolis, but they are so changed in manners and disposition, that we hardly know or care for one another” (82). Literal infection is also a concern. In the city of Bath, which is regarded as a metropolis28, Bramble recounts his time in the Roman baths with particular disgust. From the bathers, to the drinking water, to the crowds, Bramble finds nothing pleasurable in the city, and fears (if exaggerated for comic effect) the threat of infection and disease. Bramble writes, “Snares are laid for our lives in every thing we eat or drink: the very air we breathe, is loaded with contagion. We cannot even sleep, without risk of infection. I say infection – This place is the rendezvous of the diseased” (76). Bramble’s description of urban contamination is here quite literal; the city is a place of disease and infection. We have seen this notion taken up by Wollstonecraft in her description of the city’s “spawn,” and what is perhaps most interesting is the oppositional comparison on the part of both writers between the rural and urban space. In both travelogues the authors express their preference for the country, citing the reanimating affects of Nature on spirit and body. Just as Wollstonecraft relates “that the most genial and humane characters I have met with in life were most alive to the sentiments inspired by tranquil country scenes” (letter XI), within Smollet’s text Bramble writes,

28 When in the city, Matthew Bramble mentions his friend Quin, whom he refers to as “as citizen of this metropolis” (208).

Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments…besides a thousand frowzy steams, which I could not analyse…Such is the atmosphere I have exchanged for the pure, elastic, animating air of the Welsh mountains – O Rus, quando te aspiciam!29 (59).

The scene Bramble describes a ball in the city, which he associates with the excesses of gluttony, consumption of luxuries, and debauch. Smollet’s text reveals a dichotomous construction of rural versus urban, the health-promoting country and the degenerative excess of the city. The infectious longing for wealth, as noted by Wollstonecraft, becomes literally embodied in the stench at Bramble’s ball. These contaminating luxuries lead to excessive desire, which, in the case of Victor Frankenstein, I will suggest ultimately results in the creation of monstrosity. As in Godwin’s St. Leon, the city is a source of contamination that becomes physically manifested. Relating his time in Bath, Bramble claims that the bathing waters do nothing to remedy the ill-health caused by urban living, writing, “even this boasted corrector cannot prevent those languid, sallow looks, that distinguish the inhabitants of London from those ruddy swains that lead a country-life” (110-111). London, and by extension, the urban space, is a site of monstrous contagion and degeneration, a diagnosis registered throughout Frankenstein. The deterioration of Frankenstein’s health in the city can be seen as part of a critical conversation regarding the infectious nature of the metropolis. Though Humphrey Clinker is a comic critique of human nature, its darker undertones anticipate the far less amused portraits of urban life in the following decades. The 1780’s inaugurated a period in London’s history characterized by fear of social revolution, large-scale demographic changes, and industrialization. Subsequently, the menaces of the city were no longer regarded with amused derision alone. Angry and unruly mobs were a common sight in London, and riots could be deadly. The Gordon Riots of 1780, which began as an anti-catholic demonstration, escalated into a five-day assault upon the city. Led by President of the Protestant Association Lord George Gordon, a mob estimated to be 50,000 strong marched to the House of Commons with a petition to repeal legislature passed to mitigate anti-Catholic laws. In his A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Late Riots

29 From the book notes: Horace, Satires, 2, 6, 60; O country house, when shall I behold you!

30 and Disturbances in the Cities, Holcroft recalls that after an unsuccessful attempt on the House of Lords on Friday, June 2nd, the mob retaliated by attacking the unfortunate council members who happened upon the assembly on Parliament Street. Lord Bathurst, the President of the Council, was “kicked violently in the legs,” while Lord Mansfield, “had the glasses of his carriage broken, and the panels beat in, and narrowly escaped with his life” (17). On departing from the House, the mob dispersed to other parts of the city, and officials believed the worst was over. But as Holcroft relates, the violence only intensified in the days that followed:

The conclusion of this evening’s disturbance may be said, to be only the beginning of these dreadful scenes of desolation which have since ensued; and which when the perpetrators are long suck into oblivion, shall be recorded as some of the most unparalleled and daring outrages history can furnish (23).

On Sunday the rioters reassembled, targeting predominately Catholic churches and neighborhoods, such as the poor Irish community of Moorfields. Over the course of the following days, rioters destroyed Catholic chapels and homes, breaking into both the New Prison at Clerkenwell and Newgate, freeing their confined comrades and setting fire to everything in their path. Recalling the events of Monday the 5th, Holcroft recalls, “All ranks of people began to be exceedingly terrified at the lawless proceedings of this day and numbers but blue cockades in their hats…on purpose to avoid personal injury and insult” (26). The blue cockade, symbol of the Protestant Association, became that week an emblem of religious intolerance and violence. On the final night of the riots, Holcroft describes the unimaginable horror of the chaos and fear in London. Noting that it is “impossible to give any adequate description of the events of Wednesday,” Holcroft chillingly reflects that, “[a] universal stupor had seized the minds of men” (31). Watching the fire engulf various parts of the city, fueled by the liquor distillery belonging to Mr. Langdale, Holcroft recalls the apocalyptic scene:

[T]he conflagration was horrible beyond description…It is easy to conceive what fury [the liquors] would add to the flames; but to form an adequate idea of the distress of the neighboring inhabitants, or indeed of the inhabitants in every part of the city, is not so easy. Men, women, and children were running up and down with beds, glasses, bundles, or whatever they wished most to preserve…in short, every thing which could impress the mind with ideas of universal anarchy, and approaching desolation,

seemed to be accumulating. Sleep and rest were things not thought of; the streets were swarming with people, and uproar, confusion, and terror reigned in every part (32-33) [sic].

The image of London as desolate and terrifying was no doubt impressed upon the minds of English writers for years to come. But the physical destruction of the city was compounded by the ideological anxieties that arose as a result of the State’s inability to maintain the peace, and by extension, to protect civil liberties. Holcroft notes that the events of Tuesday inspired fear “not only for the safety of the city, but for the constitution, for the kingdom, for property, liberty and life, and for everything that is dear to society, or to Englishmen” (26). In the aftermath of the riots, he concedes that while martial law was not rigorously enforced, “the being but an hour under the control of a Military Force, was humiliating, derogatory, and alarming” (41). The loss of civil liberties as a result of civil unrest created a philosophic dilemma centered on questions of public disturbances and government involvement. The repercussions of these events can even be located in guide literature. The Reverend Dr. John Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide that was published in 1786 differs a great deal in tone from previous publications of its kind. Rather than the narrative quality of Cooke and Randal’s work, Trusler’s Guide methodically details the judicial process accorded particular grievances. In his chapter titled “Nusances” [sic], Trusler notes, “Where a man is threatened to be beaten, or can swear that he goes in fear of his life, he may, before a justice, bind his adversary over to keep the peace” (140). In similar fashion, his chapter “On Walking London Streets” numerically lists, rather than gives a first-hand account, of pedestrian menaces, warning travelers to mind their feet when crossing the street, “lest you be crushed” (123) by a passing cart or carriage, and to “be careful not to take too much money,” as “there are thieves frequently waiting at the outskirts of town, particularly in the evening” (156). His tract goes on to list a multitude of potential grievances such as “pigeons, pigs, foul drains, privies, overflowing cisterns, rotten water-pipes, decayed vegetables thrown out in footways, obstructions in foot-ways, flowerpots dropping on people’s heads, &c” (142). As Trusler and his contemporaries indicate, the city was a place where one had to maintain constant vigilance at the risk of his or her pocket-money and person. But unlike preceding accounts, Trusler’s advocation of pedestrian diligence is distinctly more immediate, and more frightening, grounded in potential judicial remonstrations.

On July 14th of 1791, the same year Wordsworth spent four months in London, Joseph Priestley, a well-known scientist, political dissenter and Lunar Society member was forced to flee his home and laboratory as rioters looted his estate and burned it to the ground. The three days that followed became known as the Priestley, or Birmingham riots. In his An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham, Priestley indicts the government officials who fueled public intolerance against dissenters and instigated the violence, noting, “That there were instigators, as well as perpetrators, of these horrid scenes, was sufficiently evident” (34). The government’s failure to contain the riots in London is in Birmingham made more horrifying by the perpetuation of anti-dissenter attitudes and aggression. Priestley argues,

The Country does not yet sufficiently feel disgrace that has been done to it, and great numbers rather exult in our sufferings, so that we are far from thinking ourselves secure from further injuries. Many persons not only express no disapprobation of our sufferings, or of the illegal manner in which they were inflicted, but plainly enough threaten us with more outrages of the same kind” (x-xi).

The hostility and threat of physical harm to the dissenting community, particularly those involved in the cause of political, social, and religious reform, is key to understanding anxieties concerning urban menace. The threat of mob brutality resonated with Wordsworth, a revolutionary sympathizer himself, who reflects on London riots in book 7 of The Prelude:

…What say you, then,

To times, when half the city shall break out

Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?

To executions, to a street on fire,

Mobs, riots, or rejoicings? (7.671-675).

The city, characterized by its eruptions of violent passions and mob riots, is the antithesis of the Romantic aesthetic, identified by the absence of metropolitan concerns and focus on solitary commune with Nature and pastoral landscapes. In addition to the Romantic sensibilities inherited from Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Gothic sensibility of Frankenstein is moderated—and sometimes even augmented—by the socio-political

33 concerns Mary Shelley inherited from her parents and contemporaries. Indeed, the urban anxieties evident in her work, which pick up on the concerns of Caleb Williams, Hugh Trevor, and St. Leon, can even be discerned in embryonic form in the works of an even earlier novelist, Tobias Smollett. But what in the 1770s was primarily an occasion for social comedy became—in the context of the fears and anxieties generated by the French Revolution—a source of terror on a par with anything imagined by Walpole or Reeves.30 As Barbara Darby has observed in her exploration of 1790s spectacle and tragedy, “images and the plots of upheaval and insurrection connected with them were depicted overtly or mapped onto the characters and stories of history” (575). Prior to the emergence in Gothic literature of urban terrors associated with political upheaval, Smollett’s diagnosis of the city as infectious is informed by a general concern with urban sanitation, moral degeneration, and metropolitan vice, all of which play a role in the construction of Shelley’s monster, and the inspiration for Frankenstein’s workshop of horrors. There was an explosion of Gothic texts in the 1790’s concerned with the city. These texts, rife with allusions to urban monstrosity, share little of the amused diversion in Smollett. 31 Rather, in the decade following the Birmingham Riots, cultural anxieties concerning urbanity were decidedly bleaker, occupied with the terrors of revolution and political turmoil. William Blake’s “London” (1794) recalls the urban menace registered in the preceding decades, yet reveals a portrait of subjugation and despair not yet accounted for. Like Blake, Thomas Holcroft considers the dilemma of urban decay and its consequences for society. His novel Hugh Trevor (1794) tells the story of a young man’s struggle for sincerity and truth in an immoral urban environment. Unlike Matthew Bramble, the evils of the city overwhelm any of Trevor’s foreknowledge, and he quickly discovers “that men are not all as good as they might be; and…that I was not quite so wise as I had supposed myself (85).

30 One particular important event was the Birmingham Riots of 1791, which targeted religious dissenters and supporters of the French Revolution, most notably Lunar Society member and clergyman Joseph Priestley. A friend of William Godwin’s, Priestley was in correspondence with Godwin in the tumultuous years following the riots and prior to the publication of Caleb Williams. In his journal dated March 23rd, 1793 Godwin writes, “Dr. Priestley says my book contains a vast extent of ability—Monarchy and Aristocracy, to be sure, were never so painted before” (in Paul, 116). 31 Another writer famous for his satiric fiction on London is John Gay, whose Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), is an often hilarious poem detailing the woes of urban navigation.

Trevor represents the traveler, who, like Smollett’s nephew Melford, is delighted with the city despite his knowledge of its dangers. But for Holcroft, the amusements the city offers are overpowered by the corrupting nature of its vices. In his novel, even the sincerest man, armed with an understanding of the city’s vices, can fall prey to the subtle dangers of the urban space. Holcroft disrupts any romantic idealizations of the city, replacing them with an image of its sinister, malevolent underbelly. Leaving his rural home, Hugh Trevor enters his first city with great optimism, “Oh Oxford, said I, thou art the seat of the muses…I own my expectations were high” (74). Once arrived, Trevor exclaims (in a tone perhaps exaggerated for effect), “It is all that I had imagined,” said I, “and much much more! Happy city, happy people, and happy I, that am come to be one among you! Now and now only I begin to live” (75). A precursor to his London experiences, the smaller city sets the tone for Trevor’s urban adventure. Within a moment Trevor is appalled by the profanities, “vulgar oaths”, he hears in the street, and the coarse manners of the students, which elicits a choked, “The beauties of Oxford were vanished! I was awakened from the most delightful of dreams to a disgusting reality, and would have given kingdoms to have once more renewed my trance” (76). Trevor’s arrival in the city is accompanied by an initiation into urban excess and depravity. Invited to supper with his Lord and squires, Trevor is “plied to drink” (79) passing out on the hearth; he awakens feeling shameful of his participation in the “debauch” (80). Trevor’s disenchantment with the city of Oxford is only surpassed by his misadventures in London. He begins his narrative of his time in the city of London noting:

I did not, as at Oxford, expect to find its inhabitants all saints. No: I had heard much of their vices. The subtle and ingenious arts, by which they trick and prey upon each other, had been pictured to me as highly dangerous…But fore warned, said I, fore armed: and that I was not easily to be circumvented was still a part of my creed (99).

Despite his disenchantment with Oxford, and his acquaintance with London menace, Trevor imagines that the great city will not disappoint his expectations. Holcroft evokes the same exaggeration from Trevor’s earlier arrival, “Imagination conjured up a mass that was all magnificence! The world till now had to me been sleeping; here only men were alive!” (99). But as in London, Trevor is quickly disabused of his initial romance with Oxford. Spotting what he imagines might be sharpers, he is assaulted by two men who, “threw [him] flat on

35 the pavement, and hurt [him] considerably” (100). Soon after Trevor discovers that the contents of his pockets were gone. His violent induction into London and Oxford is evidence of Holcroft’s rejection of the urban landscape as a source of the amused aversion evidenced in earlier texts. Rather, the depravity that Trevor encounters reveals a growing concern with the violence and vice in the city. Holcroft’s descriptions of urban mobs in particular seem to reflect the brutality of Parisian rioters, and, more immediately, the Priestley Riots of 1791. Having mistakenly accused a stranger of stealing his handkerchief, Trevor inspires a brutal mêlée:

The man whom I had falsely accused made a violent resistance; the mob was dragging him along, rending his clothes off his back, and half-tearing him in pieces. The state of my mind was little short of frenzy. In a tone of command, I bade Belmont follow, made my way into the thickest of the croud, and furiously began to beat the people who were ill-using the prisoner; calling till I was hoarse, 'Let him alone! He is innocent! I am to blame!'

My efforts were vain. A mob has many hands but no ears. My blows were returned fifty fold. I was inveloped by one mob myself, while the poor wretch was hauled along by another. Not all my struggles could save him. I could not get free; and the man, as Belmost afterward informed me, was half drowned; after which he escaped, and nobody knew what was become of him (264-265).

Unlike in Cooke’s Countryman’s Guide or Randal’s Excursion Round London published a year later, Holcroft’s crowds pose far more danger to the urban pedestrian than the risk of being pick pocketed or being pelted with vermin.32 By the time Hugh Trevor is published in 1794, there is a distinct shift in the social consciousness regarding notions of urban menace. Darby extends this recognition of urban danger to visual and stage culture, noting that “[s]cenes of rebellious mobs, violent in their intent, were part of the visual culture of the revolutionary years, represented in paintings such as Zoffany’s Invasion of the Cellars of the Louvre (1795) and other engravings of crowds” (586). Trevor experiences numerous physical

32 After watching a public hanging, Randal’s Countyman’s Guide notes, “Upon our going away the mob began to be quarrelsome; and after that we were pelted with dead cats, rotten eggs, and all manner of vermin. Such, Frank, is the holiday manner in which your Cocknies amuse themselves” (42).

36 and psychological encounters in the city that threaten his life and wellbeing, despite his recognition of potential dangers. Holcroft demonstrates that guide literature does little to protect the pedestrian from urban menaces, as the city is far more dangerous than can be accounted for, in spite of preparation. Like his friend and fellow Jacobin Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin’s fiction reflects a distinct concern with the menace posed by the city. As Richard Lehan has noted, Godwin’s Caleb Williams “[connects] the passing of the estate with an evil emanating in the city” (37). However, though Shelley draws a number of themes from Godwin’s work, as I will demonstrate, she arrives at very different conclusions. When Caleb discovers that his master Falkland has committed a murder and allowed an innocent man to hang for it, Caleb flees Falkland’s estate, only to be pursued wherever he goes. In Godwin’s novel, the urban space, metaphorically represented by London, is everywhere that Falkland’s rural estate is not. Like his contemporary Holcroft, Godwin’s London presents a menace that clearly diverges from earlier representations of the city. Escaping Falkland’s estate, Caleb plans to go to London, noting “[t] here I believed I should be most safe from discovery, if the vengeance of Mr. Falkland should prompt him to pursue me; and I did not doubt, among the multiplied resources of the metropolis33, to find something which should suggest to me an eligible mode of disposing of my person and industry (214). Recalling Hugh Trevor, Caleb’s expectation of the city is disappointed by its grim reality. Expecting to find himself safe within the crowded London streets, he instead finds himself under constant surveillance. Having destroyed Caleb’s reputation, Falkland’s ubiquitous presence overcomes any prospect of concealment. Godwin creates an urban environment that overwhelms the possibility of a distinction between the public and the private sphere, as England’s radicals had themselves personally experienced. Exhausted from Falkland’s machinations, Caleb concedes, “Disguise was no longer of use. A numerous class of individuals, through every department, almost every house of the metropolis, would be induced to look with a suspicious eye upon every stranger, especially every solitary stranger, that fell under their

33 Metropolitan anonymity was regarded by Wordsworth with derision, noting in The Prelude, “’The face of everyone/ That passes by me is a mystery!’/ Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed/ By thoughts of what and whither” (28-31)

37 observation” (373). Caleb’s lack of ideological freedom (Hogle, The Cambridge Companion 49) and his subsequent paranoia adds another dimension to the urban Gothic, one that is revisited in St. Leon.34 Following the critical success of Caleb Williams, Godwin published St. Leon (1799), a novel that explores the psychological and demoralizing effects of the city. St. Leon is both a morality tale regarding the dangers of excessive ambition for wealth, and a Gothic tale regarding the infectious nature of urban excess. St. Leon finds domestic felicity living with his wife and children in the tranquil and secluded French countryside. It is when he brings his son to be educated in Paris that St. Leon finds himself unable to reconcile his domestic duties with his desire to obtain wealth and privilege. Godwin’s novel depicts the urban space as an initial contaminant that corrupts the character of St. Leon and leads him to disregard his familial obligations, resulting in a lifetime of abject discontentment. Situated in the company of Parisian society and exposed to the luxuries he had forgotten, St. Leon forgets his domestic duties.

The scenes of St. Leon, its fields, its walks, its woods and its streams, faded from my mind. I forgot the pleasure with which I had viewed my children sporting on the green, and the delicious, rural suppers which I had so often partaken with my wife beneath my vines and my fig-trees at the period of the setting sun. When I set out for Paris, these images had dwelt upon my mind, and saddened my fancy. At every stage I felt myself removed still further from the scene where my treasures and my affections were deposited (50).

The urban environment (as recalled in Wollstonecraft and Smollett) is associated with the contaminating luxuries that lead to excessive desire for wealth, which ultimately destroys the possibility of conjugal happiness. Godwin appears to embrace the importance of domestic affections over personal ambition. In St. Leon, he proposes that the excessive desires inspired by the urban space are both infectious and degenerative. St Leon’s fate is sealed at the gaming tables in Paris. Gaming is associated with disease and contamination, as Godwin writes of St. Leon’s fellow players, “they were in

34 For critics that have treated Caleb Williams as a Gothic text, see Vijay Mishra’s The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), and Donna Heiland’s compelling section “William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Uncanny” in her book Gothic and Gender: an Introduction (Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

38 some degree infected with the venom of gaming, their infection was not so deep as mine nor with such desperation of thought (55). After gambling away his fortune, St. Leon and his family are removed to a rural cottage in Switzerland. Though finally having achieved domestic felicity and rejuvenated health in their isolation, St. Leon becomes immune to Nature’s healing properties at the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.35 Godwin links ambitious excess with domestic deterioration and an inability to be transformed by rural solitude, an insight later developed by his daughter. St. Leon notes, “I was not formed to enjoy a scene of pastoral simplicity. Ambition still haunted me, an uneasiness” (178). Anticipating Victor Frankenstein’s inability to find peace in pastoral landscapes, St. Leon’s desire for knowledge and wealth supersedes his desire to restore domestic felicity. Questioning the family’s sudden rise to wealth, and his father’s change in character, Charles exclaims, “Oh, my father, how is your character changed and subverted” (192). The desire for wealth has forced St. Leon to engage in clandestine promises, a degradation of his once uncorrupted character. Charles recognizes his father’s extreme prosperity as infectious, noting, “It is this wealth, with whose splendor I was at first child enough to be dazzled, that has destroyed us. My fingers shall not be contaminated with an atom of it” (194). Losing his child, and later, his wife, St. Leon becomes a testament to the infectious dangers of urban vice. In his novels, Godwin constructs the city as both a place of violence and depravity, as well as infectious immoral disease. The terrors of St. Leon are, however, controlled within a broad Romantic aesthetic. The urban menace is violent and destructive, yet still manageable. Despite having orchestrated the downfall of his marriage, St. Leon manages to find a measure of domestic felicity in the marriage and happiness of his son. “I was the hero’s father!...I am happy to close my eventful and melancholy story with so pleasing a termination” (478). Though Godwin’s narrative eventually reconciles personal ambition with domestic felicity, St. Leon retains the ability to create immeasurable wealth and live forever. He finds something yet to live for, and gains virtue in the moral righteousness of his son. Unlike her father’s work, in Shelley’s rerendering of the Gothic, the infectious menaces of the urban space are uncontainable, and the sins visited upon domestic virtues are

35 An idea picked up in Frankenstein

39 irredeemable. As critics have offered, Frankenstein is a critique of Godwinian philosophy, particularly concerning the importance of domestic happiness over personal ambition and, as Sterrenburg adds, Godwin’s “utopian speculations on human immorality” (149). In Frankenstein, Shelley draws on Godwin’s preoccupation with metropolitan surveillance and isolation, developing the hints of urban terror in St. Leon. The infectious menace of the city, not fully realized in her father’s novel, becomes manifested as Shelley’s Creature. Whereas in St. Leon the horror moves from a rural to an urban environment, in Frankenstein the occasions of horror are created in the city and left to fester in the rural space. In so doing, Shelley’s novel makes manifest the Urban Gothic in respects that literary narratives of the 18th century had only alluded to.

CHAPTER 3

NATURE’S FAILURE AND THE CREATURE’S TRIUMPH

In her preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein Shelley recounts, “The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed” (4). For Mary Shelley’s fellow travelers on the lake in the summer of 1816—Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Doctor John William Polidori—the beauty of the natural space overwhelms supernatural terrors. Frankenstein is the only “ghost” story to be finished, implying that Mary Shelley’s terrors could not be overcome by Romantic rural retreat and sublime beauty. The Alps, which purge Shelley’s companions of their ghostly visions, offer no such repose for Shelley herself. Her horrors transcend the transformative qualities of the natural space, an implicit and perhaps unintentional critique of the Romantic aesthetic, and a theme endemic to her novel. But when Shelley subtitled Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus,” she, as Anne Mellor has argued, “forcefully directed our attention to the book’s critique both of the Promethean poets she knew best, Byron and Percy Shelley, and of the entire Romantic ideology as she understood it” (70). This final chapter is devoted to Shelley’s critique of the Romantic ideals implicit in her representations of Nature and domesticity, assessing the ways Frankenstein portrays the failure of Nature to either contain the menace of the creature or “humanize his soul.”36 Shelley’s novel certainly appears, in conformity with established Romantic fears of urban encroachment, to cast Nature as a site of potential refuge from the menace emanating from the city; but rather than finding solace in Nature, both Victor and the Creature are ruined, rendering the immortal ambitions of the scientist—and Romantic poet—unattainable.

36 From Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas, 36.

As I have explored in the proceeding chapters, the earliest Gothic texts explored rural landscapes as sites that communicated aesthetic horror; aging castles, decaying abbeys, and ancient manor houses were the dominant aesthetic images throughout the genre. The corruption of the weakening aristocracy, represented by the haunted castle in Otranto, or the sexually degenerate monk, symbolized by Lewis’s rural abbey, are both contained within the boundaries of their respective ideological spaces. This changed in the years between The Monk (1796) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Where Gothic specters and horrors had generally been produced–and ultimately contained by–rural venues, Shelley’s monster transgresses natural boundaries, escaping the confines of the city to spread his malevolence into the Genevan countryside; the terror that he embodies cannot be contained by the majesty of the Alps, or the wilderness of the Arctic. Shelley reveals her interest in nature and the urban space early in the novel. Victor Frankenstein advises Walton, “[L]isten to my tale. I believe that the strange incidents connected with it will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding. You will hear of powers and occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible” (17). Frankenstein’s remarks here are notable because he aims to enlarge Walton’s view of “nature,” which is distinct from the domestic virtues, spiritual elements, and supernatural forces that are generally agreed to be at the heart of Frankenstein; Victor claims that his story will expand Walton’s view of Nature itself. 37 Though it is arguable that this reference is connected to the galvanization and reanimation associated with the creation of the monster, I propose that Shelley’s wording points to another of the story’s central preoccupations, the natural and the unnatural. The reader is first introduced to this dichotomy when Victor pleads with Walton, “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier is a man who believes his native town to be the world” (486). The idyllic scenes of Victor’s childhood home are juxtaposed with the evils of the city, which becomes a symbol of ill-gotten knowledge and urban contamination.

37 See, for instance Hogle, Mellor, Halberstam, and Fred Botting’s Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.)

The Frankenstein home in Geneva is described as being on the eastern shore of a lake, “more than a league from the city” (476). Shelley takes care to clearly distinguish the domestic, rural space from the city, which is the source of Victor’s schooling and birthplace of the Creature. In his account to Walton, Victor notes that, “the evil influence, the Angel of Destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me from the moment I turned my reluctant steps from my father’s door—led me first to M. Krempe, professor of natural philosophy” (482, my emphasis). It is at the moment that the young aspiring academic leaves the rural space—one associated with domestic and moral virtue—and enters into the university city of Ingolstadt, that the “evil influence” asserts its hold. The journey from the rural, domestic space to the city marks the beginning of Victor’s excessive ambitions, what Levy has observed as Shelley’s “viewing discovery as a threat to the domestic affections” (698). Victor reflects that M.Waldon’s lecture on modern chemistry is one he could “never forget” (30), one that he ultimately reveals “decided my future destiny” (32). The professor is quoted as saying, “[T]hese philosophers…have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places…They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (30-31). Shelley constructs Victor, like Godwin’s St. Leon, as a seeker of unnatural powers and knowledge of the Natural world. Notably, Victor’s reflections additionally evoke Wordsworth’s thoughts on his journey through the Alps, “But Nature then was Sovereign in my mind,/ And mighty Forms, seizing a youthful fancy,/ Had given a charter to irregular hopes.” (6.334-336).38 In effect, Victor’s aspirations to master Nature are reminiscent of what Levine has described as “[t]he aspiration to divine creativity (akin to Romantic notions of the poet),” which, he continues, “places Victor Frankenstein in the tradition of Faustian overreachers. Frankenstein the creator is also Frankenstein the modern Prometheus, full of the great Romantic dream” (9). Implicit in Shelley’s critique of nature is also a critique of the ideology in Romantic writing, particularly Godwin’s.

38 From The Prelude

Shelley reinforces the novel’s interest in the urban space as a site of corruption upon Frankenstein’s foray into the city. Once within Ingolstadt, Frankenstein, though aware of the seasonal changes, becomes “insensible to the charms of nature” (488), forgoing the natural world for the unnatural world, his workshop. This is a clear departure from the Romantic ideal Nature—particularly in Wordsworth—that is associated with serenity and immunity from menaces. The threats associated with Victor’s surroundings and unnatural activities cannot be overcome by exposure to sublime landscapes. Victor’s separation from the rhythms of nature is central to the stirring his own unnatural desires, which become manifested in his unnatural creation. Though Shelley does not immediately identify the source of the evil, its frequent contrast to Nature suggests that it is the contagious city that poses the greatest threat. Shelley metaphorically juxtaposes the Natural, domestic space with the unnatural, urban space. 39 This dichotomy is furthered when Frankenstein leaves the city. Once returned to Nature, both his health and spirits are improved: “My health and spirits had long been restored, and they gain additional strength from the salubrious air I breathed…When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy” (50-51). The following pages describe Mont Blanc and the lake in great detail, focusing on Victor’s Romantic transport and renewed vitality. But the placid scene is soon disturbed by a violent storm, which precipitates the coming of the Creature, and reinforces the novel’s preoccupation with Nature’s failure to endow moral reconciliation: “A flash of lightening illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, the deformity of its aspect…the filthy daemon to whom I had given life” (56). The Creature is both figuratively and literally responsible for the disruption of the environment’s natural beauty. The novel’s setting is made even more remarkable when considered in light of Mary Shelley’s happy association with the Alps, and their part in her life’s most felicitous domestic periods.40 Rather than negate the Creature’s anger and destructive urges—as Shelley’s

39 The contrast between city and country was a popular topic of Romantic poets. Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge,” for instance, describes a city that has been naturalized by its comparative silence: “This City now doth, like a garment, wear/The beauty of morning; silent, bare” (296). 40 The Alps was frequently (and happily) mentioned in the Shelley’s Six Weeks Tour and Wollstonecraft’s Letters written during a short residence. Reflecting on a poem Percy write about Mont Blanc, Mary notes that it

44 literary and personal influences would be inclined to advance—the Alps serves to strengthen the Creature’s power by indicating his mastery over the most tremendous of Natural wonders. Frankenstein thus explores the terrifying potential of a horror that cannot be suppressed by Romantic aesthetics or domestic ideals. These were often closely associated in Romantic poetry, as illustrated by Wordsworth in The Prelude as the combined regenerative influence of sister Dorothy —“She in the midst of all preserved me still” (11.345)—and the presence of “Nature’s self” (349). Not surprisingly, Nature and domestic felicity are intimately connected throughout the novel, and neither is found to be supportive of ideological and moral enlightenment.41 Though a comprehensive exploration of what Levine has called “the defects of domesticity” in Frankenstein is beyond the scope of this study, it is important to note that to the end Shelley investigates the failure of Nature to inspire tranquility and overcome menace, she jointly indicts the inability if domesticity and community to rehabilitate and reform.42 The 1818 preface claims that the novel’s “chief concern” is “the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue” (4). Told entirely through the accounts of Walton, Victor, and the Creature, the three concentric narratives, as Kate Ellis convincingly argues, “are thematically linked through the joint predicament of those who have and those who have not the highly desirable experience of domestic affection. The recurrence of this theme suggests that Mary Shelley was at least as much concerned with the limitations of that affection as she was with demonstrating its amiableness” (123). Unlike Shelley’s confliction regarding domestic

was “composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe” (vi). 41 Mellor has observed a similar dynamic between domestic felicity and nature noting that, “Clerval’s relationship with nature represents one dimension of the moral and political ideology espoused in the novel…His death annihilates the possibility that Victor Frankenstein might regain a positive relationship with nature” (124). 42 Knoepflmacher has suggested that Victor’s dream is “an intrapsychic conflict that had its roots in Mary Shelley’s deprivation of a maternal model” (109), while Mellor has noted that in Frankenstein Shelley “undercuts her earlier ideology of the loving, egalitarian family. Maternal love is strikingly associated with self- destruction,” and, nodding to the differences in the 1831 edition, she concludes that “By 1831, Mary Shelley had lost faith in the possibility that a generous, loving, and nurturant response to both human and physical nature might create a world without monsters” (176).

45 affections, however, the inability of Nature to restrain excessive desires and menaces is not, in the course of the novel, redeemed by Nature’s transformative abilities. Following the winter spent watching the De Laceys, the Creature recalls being cheered by the coming of spring: “Happy, happy earth! fit habitation for gods, which, so short time before, was bleak…My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope” (92). Shelley’s language embodies the Romantic aesthetic. Nature bestows the Creature with Romantic elevation of mind, imparting tranquility in lieu of past ills against him (as Coleridge imagined of Lamb). The return of spring, a metaphor for renewal, also marks the homecoming of Safie, whose arrival resulted in “joy [taking] place of sadness in the countenance of my friends” (94). The union of the family, marked by Nature’s bounty, impresses upon the Creature a desire to join the domestic sphere—the idealized family, complete with loving, maternal figures. Having learned of the De Laceys’ history, the Creature recalls “I looked upon crime as a distant evil; benevolence and generosity were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the busy scene” (102). The Creature is temporarily rehabilitated by his exposure to Natural beauty and domestic affection. But rather than accept the Creature into their midst reformed by Romantic ideals, he is banished from the domestic circle and the possibility of domestic felicity. The spirit of Nature, failing to cement domestic affections and overcome material differences, is rendered impotent and ephemeral. At his rejection the Creature relates, “despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge” (110). As Levine notes, “The monster instinctively believes in the rhetoric of domesticity and the need for community; it is psychologically and dramatically appropriate that he should exhaust himself in the total destruction of ostensibly ideal domesticity when he discovers that he is excluded from it, and that the ideal is false” (14). Facing his second rejection (the first was Victor’s) proves to be a turning point in the novel. As Marilyn Butler has pointed out, following his confrontation with the De Laceys, the Creature “becomes masculine, combative, masterful, the emanation of the selfish ambitious side of his creator Frankenstein” (Shelley xxxiv). Banished from the De Lacey family, representative of the domestic ideal, and unable to find solace in Nature, the Creature embarks on his murderous rampage and subsequent journey to find Victor in Geneva. His narrative: “From you only could I hope for

46 succor, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred…from you I determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human form” (114), reveals the extent of his moral deterioration, having neither family nor sublime revelations to draw consolation from. Nature’s failure to overcome the menace and elevate the mind is reinforced in the Creature’s inability to find moral reconciliation in the rural space. Shelley’s insistence on this dynamic becomes almost comical as the novel progresses. The Creature relates that during his journey to Frankenstein’s home “natured decay around [him]” (114) and at the moment he feels “emotions of gentleness and pleasure,” cheered by the “loveliness of [the] sunshine and balminess of the air” (115), he is shot saving a drowning girl. Nature’s inability to contain and absolve the Creature directly leads him to commit his first murder. Having killed William, the Creature frames the innocent Justine, who is tried and hanged as a murderess. Victor himself notes that this was “the work of my thrice –accursed hands!” (512), a result of his having forsaking his family in pursuit of selfish ambitions. The infection of death, unimpeded by sublime reflection and pastoral retreats, eventually spreads to Victor’s father, Clerval, Elizabeth, and ultimately himself, in addition to the ruin of the idyllic Swiss retreat established by the De Lacey family after their initial encounter with the Creature. As an additional dimension to Shelley’s interest in the shortcomings of the Romantic aesthetic was her attention to Nature’s relationship to domestic felicity. In Elizabeth’s letter to Victor, Shelley reconnects the Romantic preoccupation with Nature and the domestic, creating a foundation for her critique. “The blue lake, and snow- clad mountains,” Elizabeth writes, “never change;--and I think our placid home, and our contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws” (495).43 The Frankenstein home is intimately tied both in Victor’s mind and the novel’s plot with pastoral scenery that evokes moral virtue and domestic serenity. Nature is a site that promotes domestic felicity, the same placidity that is alluded to in the imagery of the lake and mountains. But rather than maintain and preserve the possibility of an ideal family, Nature fails to “regulate” the “contented hearts” of Victor and the Creature. Critics, however, have largely associated Shelley’s

43 This is notably from the 1831 edition.

47 pastoral images with domestic affection and virtue. As Mellor has noted, “Mary Shelley’s grounding of moral virtue in the preservation of familial bonds…entails an aesthetic credo as well…Her novel purposefully identifies moral virtue, based on moderation, self-sacrifice, and domestic affection, with aesthetic beauty” (126). As previously noted, a key dynamic in Frankenstein is Shelley’s critique of the Romantic aesthetic. Victor’s inability to find spiritual reconciliation in “the charms of nature” is central to the novel’s overarching criticism of moral irresponsibility and excessive ambition. The laws of Nature, understood in the context of Elizabeth’s letter as pertaining to both the natural environment and human nature (chiefly that of female procreation and heterosexual companionship), are threatened by urban excess, at the heart of which is the possibility of immortality.44 45 Romantic ideology pertaining to Nature’s power is found to be deficient, and in the case of Victor Frankenstein, dangerously so. Victor’s decision to seek solace in the mountains of Switzerland rather than take responsibility for the Creature and his family yields none of the Romantic rewards in the tradition of Wordsworth or Keats. 46 Victor recounts,

The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains…My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed—‘Wondering spirits…allow me this faint happiness.’ As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man…I perceived, as the shape came nearer…that it was the wretch whom I had created (76).

As previously noted, the Creature’s appearance signals Victor’s inability to find solace in Nature. Despite Victor’s efforts to restore himself with solitary reflection in the sublime landscape, his mental deterioration worsens; and rather than parent the creature, or take his place within the Frankenstein household, Victor seeks revenge. By the novel’s conclusion, all of its primary characters, with the exception of Walton (who must live to tell the tale) meet fatal ends, made significant by their relationship to Victor and his monster. Victor, a character whose journey arguably recalls that of Reginald

44 Heterosexual companionship is in Frankenstein superseded by homosocial relationships, such those of Walton and Victor, and Victor and Clerval. 45 This, as Godwin demonstrates in St. Leon, results in, among other things, the destruction of the family. 46 In Book 1 of Endymion, for instance, Keats writes, “Nor do we merely feel these [natural] essences/ For one short hour…The passion poesy, glories infinite,/Haunt us till they become a cheering light” (1.25-30).

St. Leon, Caleb Williams, and Caliph Vathek, is distinguished from his predecessors by his physical and metaphysical deterioration as a result of urban exposure—or perhaps, urban cultivation—which is physically manifested in the Creature. Like St. Leon (a novel that, as Butler has noted, “anticipates Frankenstein’s themes of science and gender”) Frankenstein’s prolonged separation from his family while in the city leads to the deterioration of domestic ties.47 But what is for Godwin ultimately reconcilable—as evidenced in the happy marriage of St. Leon’s son and his own bitter regret—is entirely irreconcilable in Frankenstein. At the end of Godwin’s narrative, St. Leon reflects on the calamities following his time at the gambling tables in Paris and the tragedies that followed noting, “I am happy to close my eventful and melancholy story with so pleasing a termination. Whatever may have been the result of my personal experience of human life, I can never recollect the fate of Charles and Pandora without confessing exultation” (478). Despite having succumbed to the temptations of the city and forsaking his family to pursue unnatural knowledge, St. Leon finds a measure of happiness in the virtues of his son. The story closes by reminding the reader that the world “yet contains something in its stores that is worth living for” (478), suggesting that the self- interested quest for powers over nature—the opus magnum (1) of scientific pursuits—is potentially injurious but not entirely destructive. In response, Shelley’s novel reimagines St. Leon’s discovery of the philosophers’ stone as Frankenstein’s ability of reanimatation. For Shelley, the city induces unnatural, monstrous birth, characterized by the absence of the natural, maternal figure and Victor’s separation from the normalizing, domestic space.48 As Ellis points out, “Walton and Frankenstein, are both benevolent men whose exile from the domestic hearth drives them deeper and deeper into isolation. Neither, however, can see that his deprivation might have been avoided through a better understanding of the limits of the institution into which he was born” (125). Victor’s negligence of the creature, a hyperbolic reconsideration of St. Leon’s neglect of his son, Charles, results in the total destruction of the Frankenstein family and the death of Victor himself. Shelley fully realizes the threat of urban contamination and moral decay hinted at in St. Leon by refusing to restrain the creature’s malevolent reach. The Creature, speaking to Walton and his deceased maker at the novel’s

47 From the introduction of the 1818 edition. 48 See Gilbert and Gubar.

49 conclusion bids, “Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction…Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine” (191), and is subsequently “borne away by the waves”, presumed to have left to destroy himself. The novel’s finale, unlike that of previous gothic novels, is characterized by its troubling climax; Victor himself learns nothing from his experience, requesting from his deathbed that Walton pursue the creature in his stead. The creature, though grieved for his part in Victor’s death, reminds the corpse that his own agonies were greater, and flees to find death on his own terms. Unlike Victor, who dies from exposure to the elements and exhaustion, Frankenstein’s monster plans to “ascend [his] funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames” (191). This hero’s death, one not afforded Victor, interestingly points to a subversion of the traditional Gothic conclusion in which the monstrous threat is eradicated and conventional social values are upheld (ie. Heterosexual marriage, class divisions, Protestantism etc.) That neither Walton nor the reader is certain of the creature’s demise creates another ambiguity concerning the containment of the monstrosity unleashed by Frankenstein’s ambition and negligence. The open-ended conclusion (does the Creature really find wood for his funeral pyre?) further destabilizes the tidy Gothic novels of Radcliffe and even Godwin. This is a departure from the urban terrors developed in The Monk; the horrors of Frankenstein cannot be contained in the city, and ultimately, cannot be overcome even by the Gothic horror associated with nature. Indeed, the terrors of urbanity and technology associated with the industrial age are inescapable. Frankenstein’s monster traverses the farthest reaches of the natural world, overcoming the most violent and perilous environments. Frankenstein reflects, “the strange nature of the animal would elude all pursuit…Besides, of what use would be pursuit? Who could arrest a creature capable of scaling the overhanging sides of Mount Salêve? (57). Shelley sets up the creature as both immune to human assault and the destructive potential of the natural world. She takes great care to introduce and develop the threat of natural destruction and human frailty throughout the novel. Reflecting on his first encounter with electricity Frankenstein notes, “we witnessed the most violent and terrible thunder-storm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness...I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight.” He continues, going on to describe the remains of an oak tree

50 blasted by lightening, “we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld any thing so utterly destroyed” (24). The novel’s interest in Nature’s destructive powers is revisited in its climax. As Walton’s ship is threatened by treacherous seas he writes, “I am surrounded by mountains of ice, which admit of no escape, and threaten every moment to crush my vessel” (181). Shelley’s careful grooming of Frankenstein’s references to nature I think illustrates, as previously suggested, the Creature’s indestructibility and his mastery over the natural world. Even nature’s harshest environments present no threat to the monster, which speaks to the rural space’s symbolic vulnerability to urban encroachment and industrial development. These concerns became more apparent in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, demonstrating that Shelley was greatly influenced by historical anxieties with the shifting demographics of the mid 19th century. In the 13 years between editions of the text, the sanitary conditions of London had taken a dramatic turn. Though the plague didn’t return in the 18th century, there was no lack of pestilence in London’s crowded streets. Vermin and filth were a common sight in the city, and few provisions had been made for the disposal of sewage. As Michelle Allen has observed in her book Cleansing the City (2008), one of the consequences of London’s rapid growth was an extraordinary volume of human waste being dumped onto the streets, overflowing the sewers, and running into the Thames. And as Allen suggests, this high concentration of waste was “impressed [on] urban consciousness” (9). Diseases such as cholera and typhus were commonly contracted, and, in the 19th century, reached epidemic proportions. For the urban pedestrian, walking in the city was most certainly a source of anxiety, if not eminently dangerous to one’s health and wellbeing. This concern extended well into midcentury. The profusion of urban assaults upon the body came to a head in the 1850’s. The Great Stink of London occurred in the summer of 1858. The Metropolitan Commission had moved the city’s waste from the cesspools of London into the sewers, which ran directly into the river Thames. The noxious stink of that summer cannot be overstated, nor the reimagination of the Thames in the social consciousness. The sanitary crisis of the middle of the century prompted social reforms. But as Allen points out, the anxieties concerning urban living extended past the proliferation of filth and disease. “Health was really the most humble claim of sanitary reformers; at their most ambitious, reformers promised to uplift a suffering urban underclass, to moralize the population, and thus to herald

51 in a harmonious social order” (2). Contemporary critics of the current social reforms, such as John Hollingshead, discussed the reality and perception of the city in an attempt to “beat the bounds of metropolitan dirt and misery” (v). Such accounts provide a historical perspective from which to understand the direction of the textual changes in the 1831 edition of Shelley’s novel. Notably, Frankenstein’s concern with the Romantic aesthetic is emphasized. Pastoral images are more closely tied to Romantic ideology, and to the character of Elizabeth. In chapter two Shelley adds the additional thoughts, “[Elizabeth] busied herself with following the aerial creations of the poets; and the majestic and wondrous scenes with surrounded our Swiss home—the sublime shapes of the mountains…[while] I delighted in investigating their causes” (476). Elizabeth, symbolic of domestic affection and poetic virtue, is unable to restore Victor to physical and ideological rights. This is furthered in the addition to Elizabeth’s letter to Victor in Chapter V (VI) in which she writes, “The blue lake, and snow- clad mountains, they never change;--and I think our placid home, and our contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws” (495). Despite Victor’s return to his father’s home upon William’s death, the lake and mountains, fashioned to be more evocative of the Romantic aesthetic, are unable to regulate his heart according to the “immutable laws” of Nature. Shelley also takes care to reinforce Nature’s destructive potential noting of Victor’s journey to Chamounix, “The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side…spoke of a power mighty as omnipotence,” adding substantial imagery to the following chapter, including, “Nature was broken only by the brawling waves, or fall of some vast fragment…which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands” (516-517). These additions were arguably influenced by the untimely death of Percy Shelley in 1822 who drowned at sea after a violent storm. But significantly, Mary Shelley retains the descriptions of the Creature’s inhuman invulnerability to Nature, reinforcing the metaphoric threat that he presents to the Romantic Aesthetic.

REFERENCES

Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2000. Print. Allen, Michelle. Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. Print. Blake, William. “London.” English Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995. Print. Beckford, William. Vathek: An Arabian Tale. Ed. Richard Garnett. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893. Web. 9 June 2009. ___. “Vathek: An Arabian Tale”. Four Gothic Novels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print. Botting, Fred. Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Print. Byron, Lord George Gordon. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” The Works of Lord Byron: including the Suppressed Poems. A. and W. Galignani, 1828. 38-85. Web. 10 Aug 2010. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Pains of Sleep.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: WW. Norton & Company, 2000. 462-463. Print. ___. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: WW. Norton & Company, 2000. 420-22. Print. Cooke, J. The Countryman’s guide to London or Villainy Detected. London, 1775. Print. Darby, Barbara. “Spectacle and Revolution in 1790s Tragedy”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39.3 (1999): 575-596. Web. 10 Nov 2010. Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague Years. London : J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. and New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1911. Web. 9 Aug 2010. Ellis, Kate. “Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois Family.” Eds. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher. The Endurance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 123-142. Print. Fludernik, Monika. “William Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime.” ELH 68.4 (2001): 857-896. Web. 10 Oct 2010. Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Eds. Marilyn Butler and James Chandler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.

___. “Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain”. Ed. Jerrold E Hogle. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Gay, John. Trivia or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London. London, 1716. Print. Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1835. Web. 10 Oct 2010. ___. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 3rd ed. G.G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row, 1798. Web 15 July 2009. ___. Travels of St. Leon. London: Richard Bentley, 1835. Web. 10 Oct 2010. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Print. Hogle, Jerrold E. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print. ___. “Frankenstein’s Dream: An Introduction.” Romantic Libraries. Ed. Orrin Wang. Romantic Circles. 27 July 2010. Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS): College Park, MD; U of Maryland (2003) n. pag. Web. 12 May 2009. Holcroft, Thomas. Hugh Trevor. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print. ___. A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Late Riots and Disturbances in the Cities of London and Westminster and Borough of Southwark. 3rd ed. London: Fielding and Walker, 1780. Web. 16 Oct 2010. Hollingshead, John. Ragged London in 1861. London, 1861. Print. Keats, John. “Endymion.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: WW. Norton & Company, 2000. 830-33. Print. Kehler, Grace. “Gothic Pedagogy and Victorian Reform Treatises.” Victorian Studies 50. 3 (2008): 437-456. Web. 10 Oct 2010. Knoepflmacher, U.C. “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters.” Eds. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher. The Endurance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 88-122. Print. Lamb, Charles. “To William Wordsworth.” 30 January 1801. Letter LXXVI in the Letters of Charles Lamb. Ed. William Macdonald. Vol. 1. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1907. 178. Web. 15 Oct 2010. Levy, Michelle. “Discovery and the Domestic Affections in Coleridge and Shelley.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 44.4 (2004): 693-713. Web. 15 Aug 2010. Lewis, Matthew. “The Monk”. Four Gothic Novels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print. Levine, George and U.C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Print.

Levine, George. “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein.” George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher. Eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 3-30. Print. "London in the 18th century." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2010. Web. 10 Feb. 2010. Maddison , R. E. W. and Francis R. Maddison. “Joseph Priestley and the Birmingham Riots.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 12.1 (1956): 98-113. Web. 10 Nov 2010. Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988. Print. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Miner, Paul. “Blake’s London: Times and Spaces.” Studies in Romanticism 41.2 (2002): 279-319. Web. 10 Nov 2010. Moers, Ellen. “The Female Gothic.” George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher. Eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 77-87. Print. O'Byrne, Alison. “The Art of Walking in London: Representing Urban Pedestrianism in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Romanticism 14.2 (2008) 94-107. Web. 2 Nov 2009. Oerlemans, Onno. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Print. Oldman, John. The Poems of John Oldman. London: Charles Griffin and Co., 1871. Web. 2 Nov 2009. Panton, Kenneth. London: A Historical Companion. Stroud: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2001. Print. Paul, Charles K. William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876. Web. 15 May 2010. Perkins, David. ed. English Romantic Writers. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995. Print. Punter, David. “Social Relations of Gothic Fiction”. Romanticism and ideology: Studies in English writing 1765-1830. Eds. David Aers, Jonathan Cook, and David Punter. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1981. 103-117. Web. 13 Aug 2010. ___. and Glennis Byron. eds. The Gothic. Maldon: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print. Radcliffe, Anne. The Mysteries of Udolpho. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859. Web. 15 May 2010. Randal, Robert. Squire Randal’s Excursion Round London. London, 1776. Print. Rieder, John. "Patriarchal Fantasy and the Fecal Child in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its Adaptations.” Romantic Libraries. Ed. Orrin Wang. Romantic Circles. 27 July 2010.

Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS): College Park, MD; U of Maryland (2003) n. pag. Web. 12 May 2009. Shelley, Mary. “Frankenstein.” Four Gothic Novels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print. ___. Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. London: Edward Moxon, 1844. Web. 15 May 2010. ___. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text. Oxford University Press, 1993. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysse. History of a Six Week’s Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland with Letters descriptive of a sail round the lake of Geneva and the glaciers of Chamouni. London: T. Hookham, Jun., and C. and J. Ollier, 1817. Web. 15 May 2010. ___. “Mont Blanc.” Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan WU. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 722-723. Print. Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Print. Spencer. Kathleen L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH 59.1 (1992): 197-225. Web. 10 Nov 2010. Sterrenburg, Lee. “Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein.” The Endurance of Frankenstein. Eds. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 143-171. Print. Trusler, Rev. Dr. John. The London Adviser and Guide. London, 1786. Print. "United Kingdom." Encyclopædia Britannica Online., 10 Feb. 2010. Web. 7 June 2010. VanWinkle. Matthew, "Mocking Stupendous Mechanisms: Romantic Parody and Frankenstein's Dream.” Romantic Libraries. Ed. Orrin Wang. Romantic Circles. 27 July 2010. Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS): College Park, MD; U of Maryland (2003) n. pag. Web. 12 May 2009. Vlasopolos, Anca. “Frankenstein's Hidden Skeleton: The Psycho-Politics of Oppression.” Science Fiction Studies 10. 2 (1983): 125-136. Web. 15 May 2010. Walpole, Horace. “The Castle of Otranto.” Four Gothic Novels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print. ___. “Review of The Castle of Otranto.” Monthly Review 32 (February 1765): 97-9. Rpt. in The Castle of Otranto. Ed. Michael Gamer. London: Penguin Group, 2001. Print. Wilt, Judith. “Frankenstein as Mystery Play.” The Endurance of Frankenstein. Eds. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979. 31-48. Print. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. London: J. Johnson, 1796. Web. 17 Feb 2010. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude; or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. London: Edward Moxon, 1850. Web. 17 Feb 2010.

___. “The Pedlar.” Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 435-444. Print. ___. “Tintern Abbey.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: WW. Norton & Company, 2000. 235-38. Print. ___. “Upon Westminster Bridge.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: WW. Norton & Company, 2000. 296. Print.