Frankenstein E-Book

Mary Shelley

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Polygon Classics
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Seitenzahl: 412

Beschreibung

One of the best-known works of English literature, Frankenstein gave rise to the science-fiction and horror genres and has enthralled generations of readers since its publication in 1818. The book follows the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster: the result of his desire to create life. But his botched experiment is so grotesque that the doctor immediately regrets what he has done and abandons the monster, leaving him to fend for himself. The creature finds and confronts his maker pleading for a companion – his human right to happiness. Fearing what this may lead to, Victor refuses, causing the monster to vow to ruin any happiness in Victor's life. A tragedy and a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of ambition and creation, Mary Shelley's masterpiece is more relevant now than ever.

Leseprobe

FRANKENSTEIN

MARY SHELLEY

FRANKENSTEIN

INTRODUCTION BY

JENNI FAGAN

This edition first published in paperback in Great Britain in 2025 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

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Introduction copyright © Jenni Fagan, 2025

First published in 1818.

All rights reserved. No part of the Introduction may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 695 7

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 747 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by The Foundry, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition (1831)

Preface (by P. B. Shelley, 1818)

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

INTRODUCTION

Eleven days after the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the women’s rights advocate and philosopher, died. If this does not spark in a child a curiosity as to what makes a body hold on to the light: the ‘gnosis’ (the elusive essence of a human that renders them – alive, not just functioning approximations of bone and brain and bodily organs), then I do not know what else might.

I believe it is that moment, more than any other, that sparked a lifelong consideration of the ‘creator of all things’ – one who had such power to extinguish and no longer bring back to life any creature – in Mary Shelley.

Could there be no way of communicating with such a merciless creator that there’s a considerable outcome to such an event in a child’s life? No science to alter nature’s brutality? No strike of lightning that might alter the trajectory of permanent consequence! Of course, as an infant this is at first unknown, and she has a father to look in on her.

William Godwin, journalist and political philosopher, is one who accepts such a penance in loss, and while he may have tried to not link his daughter’s life with the loss of his wife, his strong lack of emotional connection to Mary – no matter her efforts – perhaps indicates otherwise. Godwin may have considered this situation be assuaged a touch at least by his child growing up to have an uncompromisingly brilliant mind, one that hopefully reflects his own considerations somewhat. This is absolutely what he expected.

Mary cherished all news of a mother she would never meet. She was not deterred by supposedly scandalous indiscretions. A detested stepmother sits in the wings in her later childhood and then at the table of her father for the rest of her life (Godwin married his neighbour Jane, an apparently less friendly presence who openly preferred her own children to the more wildly raised Mary). Her father was often in debt, sometimes perilously so. That constant pressure from the creator, of a creation that may destroy him (financially and later in self-esteem) was his payment for absolute devotion to the development of his own mind, to philosophy. His daughter witnessed this creator in her father, and the endless worry such diligent commitment brought financially to their family.

When Mary is fifteen she meets an admirer of her father’s philosophical theories, the twenty-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is married, although recently separated from his wife. Shelley promises to pay off her father’s debts. He idolises Godwin’s mind. Mary begins to meet Percy in secret at her mother’s grave.

The impact of their collision is unquestionable.

Soon enough the newly infatuated couple set off travelling, away from the ardent disapproval of her father. On returning to London several years later, she has already had to endure the aftermath of having lost their premature first-born daughter and the suicide of Shelley’s wife, Harriet Westbrook. I cannot imagine how the teenager marrying her new husband a short time later, already felt. Or how many times she had to consider, in the most direct and unchangeable and helpless manner, not just the meaning of existence, but also the absolute finite nature of human life. Both a life she had created and the life that had created her, gone so soon.

The young Mary, who, along with her stepsister, Clara Clairmont (or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known), joined Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Shelley for a summer in Switzerland, where a challenge was laid out by Byron that they all think up a ghost story, was no ordinary teenage girl.

Despite Mary’s not insubstantial trials, she had grown up in a household rich in thought, listening to and taking part in conversations on philosophy, literature, sciences, arts and humanities. Nobody could have had any intimation of what she was still yet to face later in life. Mary was yet to experience the loss of two more of their children, and she’d also go through the untimely death of her husband; he drowned in 1822, after his sailboat sank during a storm in Italy, a place they had hoped to make their home.

This is all before the last decade of her own life, spent unwell, eventually showing up as a brain tumour that had long been plaguing her and would see her out at fifty-three years old. The one steady relationship she did keep for the rest of her life was with her only remaining child: Percy Florence Shelley.

So, when Mary comes down for breakfast to a rainy morning in Switzerland, as it was for much of that summer – after many fretful nights in dread, where she feared she might never find anything to write about for this challenge – she walks in to the kitchen, pale, tired, dark-eyed, having tossed and turned all night with a new and irrepressible inspiration and she quietly states that she has finally thought of an idea – for a story.

All I can ever think, with rapturous glee, knowing what she is about to produce, is: yes, you have Mary Shelley; yes, you bloody well have!

It is said that Percy encouraged Mary to write, insisted she must. However, he also thought that he would be the one to decide if her work held any merit. He thought, with famous literary parents, she had to try, and that he should be the judge of those efforts.

‘I’ve had an idea, I think, finally!’

I can almost see the silhouette as Byron looks at Percy, stoking the embers of last night’s fire.

I wonder about that first pour of hot tea from a silver pot as she sits down, the crumbs on clean linen from toast, the early morning nuances of making one’s way through breakfast and the egos of men (she was a staunch supporter, editor and promoter of Percy’s work, taking great effort to publish and champion him). Of course, she would have felt cauterised in thought, unable to bring to the week’s writing any idea of worth with these already established writers’ eyes upon her, waiting to inspect what she might bring.

What is true to say of this young woman – as she smoothed down her hair, lifted off the lid from the butter – was at that age of nineteen, she had already lived, and lost, and had to challenge her own being in ways that I believe influenced her far more profoundly than any of the writers she ever met, including either of the men in the room.

Mary was a child who arrived so close before her own mother’s demise, but what did such a girl really understand of monsters? Of creators? Of the uncontrollable consequences of certain creations? I think she understood far more than most.

Perhaps there was plum jam and birdsong that morning. Was she already turning over precise visions and lines as the formations of Frankenstein began to etch themselves in her mind! All of this before history – who is also about to attend this breakfast with all the insistent voices clamouring to state that Mary and her ‘story’ can only be accurately considered in sentences if they are punctuated often and pointedly about the influences of Shelley, Bryon and of course Coleridge (a regular visitor at her childhood home), and Godwin, too, her father, who published his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), a homage to her mother that also exposed her affairs and illegitimate child.

In this introduction I shall not engage overtly with the academic readings of Mary Shelley’s influences as they are often outsourced as the main influences on her in Frankenstein, and, of course, other books do have bearing, but what I am truly interested in is Mary and her creation. The other influences interest me far less than Mary herself, and so I am going to focus on her and the world she created in Frankenstein. I acknowledge a great many academics would not be ringing the doorbell to this breakfast parlour, even when she may have just thought of the most amazing opening line. Never mind all that, they’d just bolt on through in their hundreds to tell Mary who, or why, or how, or which book had influenced her most, whose mind, whose life, whose love, whose conversation! Scarcely would they truly consider this young woman, who has already lost both her mother and a child, as someone whose real-life interest in the ‘life force’, in the ‘monster’ of ‘creation’ held roots that were solely embedded in her own heart, mind and soul in ways a great many who came waving their academic theories after her, might never comprehend.

Without Mary Shelley’s personal history and tragedies, combined with the absolute strength she exhibited in always moving forward, no matter what she faced in this life, these would not have been the obsessions she explored, and we would never have encountered her creation of Frankenstein, and certainly not one of such grotesque, humanist, delicate wonder.

I arrive humbly before this formidable writer, this exquisite largely unrivalled talent, this woman who is to become a master of the scalpel of the written word, one who was a child of limitless imagination, in many ways, to deal with her own monsters. I come to her as one who cares first for the origins of a writer, of their personal story – just as important – not some footnote to what they read before; I come slightly obsessed with the exact moments in time where circumstances meet theory, where personal reading collides with unbearable truths. I come looking for what it is in Mary Shelley that converged to create a work of such influence and utter brilliance.

It is not that she is a teenager at the time that surprises me, and it is not what impresses me; it is that she is able to distil the horrors of her own monsters, carve out from them every social theory, every scientific study, every story she was ever told or studied, and between those two different rivers of theory and real actual life – she might merge them to form a piece of art that would go on to become a definitive work of literature for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. When I think of Mary Shelley sitting at her desk creating her mad scientist and his monster, the creator in her, creating the scientist – putting life into an inert collection of limbs and bones and a head and eyes and a face – I think about the hormones leftover from what she has been through, what does she know of the cellular change that happens within the DNA of anyone who carries a child? Those chromosomes remain in a mother even if the child unbearably cannot.

Mary knows what it is to be a creator of actual life, and to question the original unknown creator of all life, to have creation removed from her so definitively that the love that she would have poured into it might have a frantic journey of its own to settle.

Still just a teenage girl (so often we see the negating just before such a description), a formidable thinker who had a governess as a child, a tutor also, who read her father’s books and discussed his ideas with him in depth – a huge privilege of an education for a girl at that time – albeit not conventional, was certainly far more than most would have received both in its wide range and encouragement that she use her own mind.

Mary says herself in a later introduction to the final text: ‘It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.’ She had also watched all the men around her live obsessed with their creations and the outcomes of such in their own lives, (of course, she acknowledged The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge as an influence, with its ability to terrify her. Mary’s father’s own ideas, her mother’s work, so many other things; she was reading Don Quixote while writing Frankenstein). But I want to come to her work as a woman, as a writer, and as one who finds that the ability to tie Mary Shelley to any other number of writers is only a footnote for me, not the main story, because it distracts me from the only thing I really do want to talk about and that is Frankenstein and the writer herself.

For it is her creation of this Gothic, wild, fascinating and curiously pertinent representation of any ‘human’ and any ‘creator’ as monster! As a being born dumb and numb and clunky and ugly and potentially murderous. For a human to exist as an approximation of parts: as a truly fallible creature!

Initially titled Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), the final revised text (1831) shows variants that, like a scientist, she revisited her creation at different times in her life. Her scalpel produces the most concise and perhaps only true version really in the end. An unusual process for a story to have had a public life through so many incarnations. Perhaps she might have wished only that it could have arrived perfectly formed?

What of the loss of her husband during the long decades or so of revisions on the text itself? So, too, the bereavement of her children who had tragically not survived? How was Mary’s focalising consideration of the life essence sharpened only by her accumulated losses? Frankenstein was somewhere for her to return again and again for a long time, in different, fractured, developing versions of herself.

The character of Elizabeth is, in earlier versions of Frankenstein, the ‘cousin’ of Victor, with some slight hue of incest, but later she becomes the daughter of a woman who died giving birth to her child. How long might it have taken Mary to be able to even think that let alone include it in this final weaving of her most famous tale? Victor and Elizabeth in the final version decide to journey, too, to Lake Como: an immortalisation of a moment where Mary and Percy were happy, hoping to one day create a home together by that lake.

Frankenstein sits in three parts. Much like her life, the main early losses: mother, husband and children. There is a development of Mary’s mind over nearly three decades before Frankenstein comes to a point of permanence, that she is willing to finally leave it alone.

Has she accepted her monster? Her creation? Mary said: ‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being substance itself.’

After a night listening to Byron and Shelley talk by the fire (about the essence of a grain of vermicelli being influenced by a scientific experiment, until it seemed to move about by itself, a long consideration about the nature of the life force), during which she remained mostly quiet, Mary went to bed, and her ghost story began. Unable to sleep, she could see a phantom in her mind. A creature laid out lifeless, and a scientist dancing around him, working out how to imbue his beloved creation with life.

What else had Mary seen in her life? On leaving with Percy, under her father’s great disapproval, they travelled to Paris with her stepsister (a fraught relationship), and through France, still tattooed with the carnage of war, they went on foot, by carriage, donkey and mule. That is how they arrived in Switzerland.

Seeing the detritus of war so closely must have continued to influence all their thoughts. That we might have a creator of life that would imbue humanity with such murderous disregard for the life source? For one another. That such destruction could and does destroy whole countries. At some point during this journey, they ran out of money and had to return, Mary pregnant, spurned by her father and penniless, with Shelley.

Harriet was still alive at this point and gave birth to Shelley’s son. Mary thought it certain Shelley was also having an affair with her stepsister Claire Clairmont who he constantly left her to go out with. He seems to have been furthering her confusion, and no doubt her consistent illness while pregnant, suggesting she have an affair with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a British barrister and writer, who she had grown close to.

She suffered visions of her baby who had passed in the night, and while severely depressed, she conceived again. While Percy had decided not only should she write, but he would judge it, she says: ‘I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband.’ Although she praises him for inciting her to work on the form. Step back all the years of scholars intent on crediting Percy as part or half author. He himself seems to have been imbued with the intent of creating infamy as a writer, and in Mary he saw one whose literary fame and heritage had been born into her. Her imagination was no more his, than her sorrow, even if he took part in trying to be a core influence.

There was also the death of her half-sister Fanny Imlay from a suicidal overdose of laudanum, a tincture of opium used as a painkiller, very close to Harriet’s suicide from drowning in the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park. How much more could a young woman go through?

In close years Percy was regularly hiding out from debtors to avoid jail; they had lost three children altogether by this point. Mary was often ill, physically, and depressed, and in grief. While living in Italy she wrote a novella Mathilda (originally titled The Fields of Fancy in its first draft), where a father becomes incestuously infatuated with his beautiful daughter; the protagonist Mathilda is punished through no fault of her own. The novel is a feminist challenge to patriarchal structures and how they impact on the lives of women.

Her life continued with challenges beyond the realms of any kind of fairness with a huge blood loss in miscarriage, and a storm precipitating a ten-day wait to find out her husband was dead. A widow before the age of twenty-five, to a man who had been married before they got together, frowned upon socially already for this, now a single mother; financially, the struggles she continued to endure would have put great pressure on her, still raising her only surviving child. Poverty and unpleasant relationships with Shelley’s family and her own, were no doubt avoided when dipping back into words, the sharpness with which she would have continued to shine upon Frankenstein, on the monstrous nature of man, only possibly serving to imbue it with further depth despite all she herself endured.

In 1830 she sold the copyright for Frankenstein for £60. In her final years she lived with her son and his wife. When she died, after a long illness at fifty-three, her son found in her desk locks of each of her children’s hair, a square of silk holding some of Percy’s ashes, and his heart.

In the 1970s her work began to be rediscovered and considered anew because readers and critics were paying more attention to women authors from the past centuries and Mary was ahead of her time. Upon its original publication the book was a success, but she struggled to pitch subsequent books to publishers who refused her often; she had to write anonymously just to earn money to provide for her son. Mary Shelley had written the first sci-fi novel in Frankenstein. I am sure she was considered far too cutting edge as a woman to make a great many publishers comfortable. Frankenstein had even been banned in South Africa in 1955 as it was considered obscene and inappropriate. She was also seen in very elite literary circles foremostly as the woman who had been Shelley’s mistress before she was his wife.

All this is so relevant to further exploration of course, but I have said so little of the actual plot of Frankenstein, who we are here to introduce, yet the book has been discussed so very many times and without all the many factors of Mary Shelley’s life, not only would the book not exist, but there could be no understanding of the very real depths of human experience this writer transcended to bring her creation to life. In her travels, those very letters from Robert Walton to his sister that encompass Part I, describing this treacherous journey on an icy sea, gently takes a traditional epistolary form and pulls in our characters: the scientist, a first glimpse of the monster in the distance on a sledge, naturally and without fanfare, just as any other adventure may encompass encountering strangers who become drawn towards each other’s journeys.

In Chapter I, the scientist as a boy tells of the arrival of an orphan girl: so sweet and beloved to all, Elizabeth who would be his sister, or cousin, bequeathed to him by his mother who says: ‘I have a pretty present for my Victor’, this young child who grows up to be a natural philosopher, telling us of his curiosity as to: ‘Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin.’

The very precariousness with which Mary had undertaken all her adult life especially bore out this fiction, and her character of Victor Frankenstein being anchored in natural philosophy and chemistry, far more so than religious doctrine or externally imposed ideologies. He is always in the position of the one who asks the questions and explores each answer unwaveringly. This is the position of writer to all subjects, if they are to be any good at all in what they do. As time goes on, his dear sweet Elizabeth is described as ‘very earnest to see the corpse’ of her murdered son, who had gone out wearing an expensive trinket of hers, immediately blaming herself and unable to be consoled.

So too the obsession begins for our Victor. Life and how it is removed. The essence and where it may go. The inconsolable infinite lack of compromise in the definitive unchanging truths of death and its consequence. ‘I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now find it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.’

How intriguing to phrase this event that is as natural as breathing, the end of life, as expected as the beginning, as a corruption yet its impact especially when it is the death of a child can only be seen as that to all those who endure such hideous loss. Victor’s slow fevers, his shunning of sociability mirror so closely the illnesses and depressions that Mary tried to transcend: ‘I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become’.

This continuation of isolation, obsession, experimentation and a futile feeling that life could be brought from nothing, from only that point can something materialise, brings forth the monster for Victor and, too, for Mary, whose journey revisiting this work continued to mirror that of her own life, of the work of a writer, a creator, a scientist, a philosopher, a devout believer in the word as a letter to this world from another place: a realm out of step with ours, but inextricably linked, to the human journey; there is a dense guilt of the living, that they should continue when those who are gone, who they loved, who meant the most to them, do not.

Our extraordinary Mary Shelley succumbs to mortality as we all must, yet her creation does not, and I would argue neither does her own life force, some of which is left permanently in an imprint of the pages you are about to read in Frankenstein. So too in the development of her monster, her muse, her companion, her world of Frankenstein; she creates what the scientist could not: eternal life. Look, there he is, awaiting patiently, while all the other characters live their lives! He waits in some ways, only for her, to open his beautiful monstrous yellow eyes, to show her there is truly an essence, separate from the bones and the flesh and the heart, and it is beyond language; it surpasses knowing. Mary Shelley returns to us the gnosis, in all its terrible, brilliance, its shocking sharpness, its divine spark, that finds in each human, for just a short time, a home.

JENNI FAGAN

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I selicit thee

From darkness to promote me?

PARADISE LOST

TO

WILLIAM GODWIN

Author of

Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c.

THESE VOLUMES

Are respectfully inscribed

BY

THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THESTANDARD NOVELS EDITION (1831)

The publishers of the Standard Novels, in selecting Frankenstein for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me. ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?’ It is true that I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print; but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connexion with my authorship alone, I can scarcely accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime during the hours given me for recreation was to ‘write stories’. Still, I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air – the indulging in waking dreams – the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator – rather doing as others had done than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye – my childhood’s companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.

I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then – but in a most commonplace style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.

After this my life became busier, and reality stood in place of fiction. My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it. At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce any thing worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter. Still I did nothing. Travelling, and the cares of a family, occupied my time; and study, in the way of reading or improving my ideas in communication with his far more cultivated mind, was all of literary employment that engaged my attention.

In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland and became the neighbours of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores; 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 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. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armour, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon’s fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapt upon the stalk. 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, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole – what to see I forget – something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their 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 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.

Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Percy, 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. They talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. 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 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. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, 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 animation would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story – my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!

Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.’ On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words. ‘It was on a dreary night of November,’ making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.

At first I thought but a few pages – of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develope the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world. From this declaration I must except the preface. As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

I will add but one word as to the alterations I have made. They are principally those of style. I have changed no portion of the story nor introduced any new ideas or circumstances. I have mended the language where it was so bald as to interfere with the interest of the narrative; and these changes occur almost exclusively in the beginning of the first volume. Throughout they are entirely confined to such parts as are mere adjuncts to the story, leaving the core and substance of it untouched.

M.W.S.

London, 15 October, 1831.

PREFACE

(BY P. B. SHELLEY, 1818)

The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it has the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops, and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.

I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece, Shakespeare in The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream, and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fictions a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.

The circumstances on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.

It is a subject also of additional interest to the author, that this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid, and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence.

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.

MARLOW

September 1817

VOLUME ONE

LETTER I

To Mrs Saville, England

St Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17–.

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There – for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators – there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle; and may regulate a thousand celestial observations, that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But, supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.

These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. This expedition has been the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole. You may remember that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good uncle Thomas’s library. My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night, and my familiarity with them increased that regret which I had felt, as a child, on learning that my father’s dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me to embark in a seafaring life.

These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment. But just at that time I inherited the fortune of my cousin, and my thoughts were turned into the channel of their earlier bent.

Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day, and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventure might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud, when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel and intreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness so valuable did he consider my services.

And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. I am about to proceed on a long and difficult voyage, the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude: I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing.