The Monsters (43 page)

Other entries echoed the thoughts and feelings of the monster she had created in
Frankenstein:
“No one seems to understand or to sympathize with me. They all seem to look on me as one without affections—without any sensibility—my
sufferings are thought a cypher —& I feel my self degraded before them.”

That isolation increased with the passing days. A letter Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne in November begins, “No one ever writes
to me. Each day, one like the other, passes on and if I were where I would that I were methinks I could not be more forgotten.
I cannot write myself, for I cannot fill the paper always with the self same complaints—or if I write them, why send them,
to cast the shadow of my misery on others.” Mary confessed to Byron, “I would, like a dormouse, roll myself in cotton at the
bottom of my cage, & never peep out.” By the end of 1822, she was writing about herself as if she were the creature of her
novel: “I am a lonely unloved thing.—Serious & absorbed—none cares to read my sorrow.”

Mary forced herself to turn her attention to practical matters. She wrote to Percy’s father, Sir Timothy, asking for an allowance
for herself and her son. Byron, as co-executor (with Peacock) of Percy’s estate, sent a letter supporting this request. Sir
Timothy was unsympathetic; he blamed Mary for breaking up his son’s first marriage to Harriet. He offered to help his grandson—but
only if he could take control of his upbringing, as Sir Timothy had already done with Percy’s first son, Charles. (Shelley’s
other child by Harriet, Ianthe, was in the custody of Harriet’s father and her sister Eliza, whom Percy had so resented. Eliza
had married a London bank clerk named Farthing Beauchamp, who had been left a fortune by an old lady on the condition that
he change his name to Beauchamp.) Mary adamantly refused to surrender her son.

Shelley’s ashes were still in the wine cellar of the English consul in Rome. The city’s Protestant cemetery had refused to
bury Shelley next to his son because there was no room, so Mary decided that William’s body should be moved. When the grave
was opened, however, it was discovered that it contained the skeleton of an adult. A ghastly mistake had been made, straight
out of a Gothic novel. William’s body was never found and a memorial tablet was erected to his memory, with no bones under
it.

Finally, on January 21, 1823, an English chaplain buried the square wooden box containing Shelley’s ashes in the New Enclosure
of the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Mary showed her growing religiosity in allowing such a service, for Percy died, as he
lived, an avowed atheist.

The next month, Trelawny, just arrived in Rome, found what he considered a prettier spot, moved Percy’s remains there, and
even secured a plot next to it for himself. At Mary’s request Trelawny put this quote from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
on the tombstone:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Trying to support herself by literary efforts, Mary was hindered by constant bouts of depression. On March 30, 1823, she wrote:
“I cannot write. Day after day I suffer the most tremendous agitation. I cannot write or read or think—there is a whirlwind
within me that shakes every nerve. I take exercise & do every thing that may prevent my body from influencing evilly my mind;
but it will not do. . . . I am a wreck.”

Her depression was not helped by living with the Hunts. Their six children—compared by Byron to a “kraal” of savages—had been
raised according to Rousseau’s principles and were unruly and undisciplined. Mary was paying nearly half the rent of the huge
house, and she was having trouble making ends meet. Byron even suggested that Mary accept Sir Timothy’s offer, requiring her
to abandon her son. (Byron himself showed he was not immune to the power of money when his wife’s mother, known as Lady Noel,
died and in her will left a large sum to Byron if he agreed to take her name. Accordingly, he began to sign himself “Noel
Byron,” although his knowing friends pointed out that this name change enabled him to use the initials “N. B.”—the same as
his idol Napoleon.)

For Mary, the only good news came from England, where
Frankenstein
was a success. Godwin, of all people, wrote Mary to express his pride. Whether he had suddenly developed paternal affection
or was angling for money that Mary didn’t have (Godwin would be forced into bankruptcy in the spring of 1825), he sounded
sincere: “Frankenstein is universally known, and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading is everywhere respected
. . . most fortunately you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind in the manner most admirably adapted
to make you a great and successful author.” Unconditional praise for his daughter from Godwin was rare indeed.

Mary’s historical novel
Valperga
had been published in February 1823 to good reviews, although some critics were disappointed, for they had wanted another
Frankenstein
. She felt it was time to go home. She left Italy on July 25, 1823, and arrived in London with Percy Florence in August. At
first they stayed with Godwin and his wife. A month later, Mary took up lodgings off Brunswick Square. For the first time
in her life she had a room of her own.

Four days after her arrival, Mary attended a theatrical adaptation of
Frankenstein
and learned that her creature had acquired a kind of celebrity. From the beginning, people saw the dramatic possibilities
in her novel, and onstage the characters took on new lives. The book’s first transformation was Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823
play
Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein,
which was staged at the English Opera House in the Strand. It introduced a new character, but one who would acquire permanent
status in the Frankenstein canon: Fritz, Victor’s bumbling assistant, who, in this version, sang a ditty to start the play.

Peake’s Victor Frankenstein demonstrated the danger of misdirected intelligence and misuse of power, just as in the novel.
He was an anguished person who turned inward and could not relate to others. Peake gave Victor a soliloquy on the nature of
life and death near the end of the first scene. “To examine the causes of life—I have had recourse to death—I have seen how
the fine form of man has been wasted and degraded—have beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life!”

Mary attended the play with her father William, half-brother William, and Jane Williams; unfortunately their reaction to the
scene in which William Frankenstein is taken and murdered by the monster was not recorded. The playwright made crucial changes
in translating the novel to the stage. Even in this very first adaptation, the monster does not speak—setting a precedent
for most of the subsequent dramatic renderings of it, including the 1931 motion picture that starred Boris Karloff. The novel’s
Arctic surroundings are ignored, as in most subsequent productions. Peake’s play is set entirely in Geneva, and ends when
an avalanche destroys both Victor and the monster.

Mary enjoyed the production in spite of the changes that had been made to her text. It was no doubt a thrill for her to see
her characters brought to life in so public a form. She wrote, “I was much amused, & it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness
in the audience.” Mary particularly liked the fact that in the program, the role of the monster (who wore blue makeup) was
represented only by a dash, showing that it had no name.

At least one London newspaper declared the stage production an “attack [on] the Christian faith” and a “burlesque [of] the
resurrection of the dead.” Handbills circulated in the streets warning people not to take their families to the play, mentioning
that “The novel itself is of a decidedly immoral tendency; it treats of a subject which in nature cannot occur.” But the moralists
were apparently ineffective; that same year another dramatic version of the novel, titled
Frankenstein: or, The Demon of Switzerland,
opened at a playhouse across the Thames. Two other London productions appeared not long afterward, and three years later,
one in Paris. Mary received no payment for these adaptations of her work, but Godwin realized that the publicity generated
by them made a new edition of the novel potentially profitable. He arranged for its publication, and for the first time Mary
Shelley was listed as the author.

Encouraged by her fame, Mary now embarked on a new life earning a living in the only way she knew how—through writing. She
also found a refuge in religion, a clear indication of her growing independence from both her father and her husband. Mary
had a solid faith in an afterlife, many times expressing her belief that she would join Shelley after death, and she looked
forward to her reunion with her “lost divinity.” She wrote, “But were it not for the steady hope I entertain of joining him
what a mockery all this would be. Without that hope I could not study or write, for fame & usefulness (except as far as regards
my child) are nullities to me.” She wrote to Jane Williams in December about their common loss. “God has still one blessing
for you & me—the hope—the belief of seeing
them
again, & may that blessing be as entirely yours as it is mine.”

Such letters were a sign that Mary felt a strong attraction to Jane Williams, even though they had been rivals for Shelley’s
affection. Mary’s letters to Jane were indeed reminiscent of those her mother wrote to Fanny Blood, but Jane did not want
that kind of relationship. She found a new love with Shelley’s old friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, whom Mary now found “queer,
unamiable and strange.” Mary watched curiously as the relationship grew between Jane and the man Shelley had wanted
her
to sleep with. In 1827, Jane entered into a common-law marriage with Hogg (she was still married to her original husband),
and gave birth to his child. It was perhaps appropriate for Hogg to take Shelley’s last love to be his own.

For her part, Mary was not yet seeking a new companion; she still lived with the ghosts of the past. “The wisest & best have
loved me,” she wrote. “The beautiful & glorious & noble have looked on me with the divine expression of love . . . those who
might have been my lovers became my friends & I grew rich—till death the reaper carried to his overstocked barns my lamented
harvest—But now I am not loved . . . Never o never more shall I love.”

As she became more involved with collecting and editing Shelley’s poems, her own work suffered—and she knew it. She wrote
in her journal for January 1824: “I was worth something then in the catalogue of beings; I could have written something—been
something. Now I am exiled from those beloved scenes. . . . I am imprisoned in a dreary town. . . . Writing has become a task—my
studies irksome—my life dreary. . . . My imagination is dead—my genius lost—my energies sleep—I am not worth the bread I eat.”

Painstakingly Mary tracked down Shelley’s poems, some of which were written on scraps of paper. Even for Mary it took hours
of patient work to decipher them. She knew that in order to rehabilitate Shelley’s reputation she would have to play down
his radicalism and stress his genius. She began the process in a preface to the collection of his poems she was planning,
turning the tables and becoming Victor Frankenstein, reassembling her dead husband in perfect form. She described Percy as
a poet who loved nature rather than as a radical atheist. “His life was spent in the contemplation of Nature, in arduous study,
or in acts of kindness and affection,” she wrote. Those who reviled Shelley misunderstood him: “His fearless enthusiasm in
the cause which he considered the most sacred upon earth, the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind, was
the chief reason why he . . . was pursued by hatred and calumny. No man was ever more devoted than he to the endeavour of
making those around him happy; no man ever possessed friends more unfeignedly attached to him.”

Percy’s unconventional ideas about marriage, which had hurt Mary so much, were never mentioned, and she described their final
days together at the Casa Magni as happy ones: “I am convinced that the two months we passed there were the happiest he had
ever known: his health even rapidly improved, and he was never better than when I last saw him, full of spirits and joy, embark
for Leghorn.”

In June 1824, Leigh Hunt and his brother John published Shelley’s
Posthumous Poems
to fine reviews. Sales were good, though hardly Byronic. Before all the copies could be sold, however, Sir Timothy tried
to extinguish his son’s name and reputation as a poet. He insisted that the book be withdrawn, going so far as to halt the
sale of the remaining 191 copies of the first printing. Sir Timothy threatened to cut off all financial aid to Mary and her
son unless she agreed not to publish anything more by or about Shelley while Sir Timothy lived. An astonished Mary wrote,
“Sir T. writhes under the fame of his incomparable son as if it were a most grievous injury done to him—& so perhaps after
all it will prove.” However, she agreed to comply with his demands, since Sir Timothy was over seventy; she assumed that by
the time she had assembled enough materials for a biography of Percy, his father would be gone. However, Sir Timothy stubbornly
lived on for twenty-one more years, during which time Mary continually chafed against the restrictions he had placed on the
spirit and the work of his dead son.

T
he day before Mary had left Genoa for England, Byron departed Italy too. His destination was his destiny: Greece, where a
war of independence against the Turks had begun in 1821. Byron had decided to join the fight; it matched his image of himself
as a romantic hero who would roam the world fanning the flames of freedom. He was not content with poetry alone; as he had
once told his wife in happier times, “All contemplative existence is bad. One should
do
something.”

Byron had been moved by Shelley’s death, for even though the younger poet felt intimidated by him, Byron admired Shelley’s
work. He had told Shelley’s cousin Tom Medwin, “Shelley has more poetry in him than any man living; and if he were not so
mystical, and would not write Utopias and set himself up as a Reformer, his right to rank as a poet, and very highly too,
could not fail of being acknowledged.” When Shelley died, Mary had turned to Byron for support and he had saved her dignity
by giving her work, not simply handouts. Ever since Geneva, Byron had trusted Mary with his own poetry, letting her transcribe
much of his masterpiece
Don Juan
. Sometimes he even wrote alternative endings to stanzas, letting Mary choose the one she liked better, and allowing her to
remove verses she thought would not pass the delicacy test of Byron’s lover, the Countess Guiccioli. Mary herself was no prude.
She had read Byron’s secret autobiography, which was reportedly scandalous, and it did not shock her.