Peter Harrington london presents FRANKENSTEIN private preview 25 september 2012 blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. … Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. … Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw [SHELLEY, Mary.] Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Presentation for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818 Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human First edition, presentation copy to Lord Byron, with the author’s endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His copy of the autograph inscription to the front flyleaf: “To Lord Byron from the Author”. An success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, unsurpassable association copy of the best known fiction of the Romantic era, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect first edition of perhaps the most evocative presentation copy conceivable in all nineteenth- animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief Frankenstein, century literature. that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the The story of the genesis of Frankenstein is well known. The stormy night in hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he June 1816 at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, during which a is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, inscribed ghost-story writing contest between Byron, the Shelleys, and Byron’s physician opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. Polidori led to the composition of Mary Shelley’s novel, has entered literary I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran in Mary history. According to Mary’s recollection in the preface to the third edition of through me … I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted Frankenstein, the contest itself was Byron’s idea: me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story, my tiresome Shelley’s unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland, and became the neighbours of Lord as I myself had been frightened that night! Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores; hand to Lord and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively Byron to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him. But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. … I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday. “We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady … The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished the uncongenial task. I busied myself to think of a story, —a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the temperament and intelligence, but he and her husband Shelley became good “I have found it! What terrified friends in Geneva. They toured the lake visiting places associated with Rousseau in La nouvelle Héloïse, and spent much time together writing and talking. me will terrify others” Legends have accrued around almost every aspect of the Byron-Shelley circle that summer. The Villa Diodati itself, overlooking Lake Geneva, was properly Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found the Villa Belrive; it was renamed by Byron after the family who then owned it. it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre Byron had been drawn to it as a literary tourist: John Milton (whose language which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had echoes throughout Frankenstein from the title page on) was supposed to have thought of a story. visited it on his trip to Italy, although the building itself was not constructed Mary Shelley’s recollection of events that had taken place fourteen years earlier until long after Milton’s death. The “wet, ungenial summer”, as Mary calls it, can be compared with the account given in Polidori’s contemporaneous diary, was an extraordinary weather event caused, unbeknownst to Europeans, by where he records that a conversation took place on the evening of 15 June 1816 the vast eruption of the volcano of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, between himself and Percy Bysshe Shelley “about principles,—whether man Indonesia, in April 1815, which had thrown a pall of volcanic ash around the was to be thought merely an instrument”. Polidori’s diary records that he, world, causing a “Year Without a Summer”. Byron, and the entire Shelley entourage dined and slept at Villa Diodati on 16 The other literary products of that ghost-story session were Byron’s fragment of June (this is assumed to be the night of the agreement to write ghost stories), a vampire novel, published as an appendix to Mazeppa, and Polidori’s The Vampyre, and that on 17 June “the ghost-stories are begun by all but me.” published at first under Byron’s name. Shelley finished nothing dating directly According to one of her recent biographers: from that evening. The fevered Gothic atmosphere of the story of the novel’s genesis is heightened by the retrospective knowledge that by 1824 all three young By lengthening the lapse of time between Byron’s proposal and her dream- invention of a plot for her ghost story from a few hours to several days, Mary men would be dead: first Polidori by his own hand, next Shelley by drowning, and Shelley inadvertently revealed the extreme anxiety she felt lest she not be able to lastly Byron of marsh fever while fighting for Greek independence. meet Byron’s expectations. (Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her The Geneva summer was ended when Mary, Percy Bysshe, and Claire left Monsters, Routledge 1988, p. 54) Switzerland in September 1816 to return to England. After taking Claire to As she mentions elsewhere in her Preface, Mary was “the daughter of two Bath to have Byron’s baby in secret, they moved to Marlow. Completed by May persons of distinguished literary celebrity”: the philosopher William Godwin 1817, the book was placed with the downwardly-mobile firm of Lackington and his equally radical wife, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died & Co., who published it on 1 January 1818 in an edition of only 500 copies. of postnatal complications resulting from Mary’s birth. In some senses, Mary Lackington’s handwritten account of expenses for printing and publishing Wollstonecraft Godwin was a literary celebrity from the moment of her birth. Frankenstein indicate that six copies were given to the author. By the time of her scandalous elopement and marriage, Mary Shelley knew that On 11 March 1818 the Shelley entourage, including Claire Clairmont and her great things were expected of her: illegitimate daughter by Byron, Clara Allegra, left England again, this time for My husband … was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of Italy.